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Once you've identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them. On the other hand, they should be general enough that they're not tied to a onetime outcome. For example, "do better research" is too general (what does it look like to be "doing better research"?), while "finish paper on broadcast ..
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Cal Newport |
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To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And because these technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.
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Cal Newport |
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As Fried expands: Very few people work even 8 hours a day. You're lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeate the typical workday. Fewer official working hours helps squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that'..
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Cal Newport |
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Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it's hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life--say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives--is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the "m..
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Cal Newport |
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When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.
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Cal Newport |
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In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.
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Cal Newport |
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network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.
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Cal Newport |
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7861100
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Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your
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Cal Newport |
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The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you've become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.
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Cal Newport |
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Telling someone to "follow their passion" is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst."
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Cal Newport |
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I like the term "stretch" for describing what deliberate practice feels like, as it matches my own experience with the activity. When I'm learning a new mathematical technique--a classic case of deliberate practice--the uncomfortable sensation in my head is best approximated as a physical strain, as if my neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations. As any mathematician will admit, this stretching feels much different than app..
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Cal Newport |
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d518b1a
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I shared the details of Steve Jobs's story, because when it comes to finding fulfilling work, the details matter. If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center's most popular teachers. But he didn't follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break--a "small..
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Cal Newport |
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To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.
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Cal Newport |
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if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.
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Cal Newport |
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The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.
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Cal Newport |
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Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.
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Cal Newport |
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In the movies there's this idea that you should just go for your dream," Glass tells them. "But I don't believe that. Things happen in stages." Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. "The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase," he says. Noticing the stricken ..
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Cal Newport |
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In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what's meaningful and what's not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism.
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Cal Newport |
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Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time.
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Cal Newport |
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Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren't dreaming of taking over the world.
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Cal Newport |
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We have an information economy that's dependent on complex systems that change rapidly.
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Cal Newport |
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Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work.
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Cal Newport |
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just because you really want to organize your work around a mission doesn't mean that you can easily make it happen.
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Cal Newport |
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Process-centric e-mails might not seem natural at first. For one thing, they require that you spend more time thinking about your messages before you compose them. In the moment, this might seem like you're spending more time on e-mail. But the important point to remember is that the extra two to three minutes you spend at this point will save you many more minutes reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later.
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Cal Newport |
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focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.
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Cal Newport |
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Glass emphasizes the importance of the hard work required to develop skill. "All of us who do creative work... you get into this thing, and there's like a 'gap.' What you're making isn't so good, okay?... It's trying to be good but... it's just not that great," he explained in an interview about his career.1 "The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase,"
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Cal Newport |
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b8fadf3
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the importance of ability. The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.
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Cal Newport |
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8429a7b
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Csikszentmihalyi even goes so far as to argue that modern companies should embrace this reality, suggesting that "jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities."
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Cal Newport |
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c86c53a
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Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, identifying a compelling mission once you get to the cutting edge can be seen as investing your career capital to acquire a desirable trait in your career. In other words, mission is yet another example of career capital theory in action. If you want a missi..
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Cal Newport |
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eba03ed
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Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikszentmihalyi's ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong: Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate ..
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Cal Newport |
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What struck me about Pardis's story is how remarkably late it was in her training before she identified the mission that now defines her career. This lateness is best represented by her decision to still attend--and finish!--medical school even though she was working on PhD research that was starting to attract notice. These are not the actions of someone who is certain of her destiny from day one. This certainty didn't come until later, ar..
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Cal Newport |
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True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe a lifestyle, not a series of steps that automatically spit out a mission when complete..
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Cal Newport |
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Every week, I expose myself to something new about my field. I can read a paper, attend a talk, or schedule a meeting. To ensure that I really understand the new idea, I require myself to add a summary, in my own words, to my growing "research bible"
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Cal Newport |
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2ac6d98
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regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you'll build a compelling career.
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Cal Newport |
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You're either remarkable or invisible," says"
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Cal Newport |
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RULE #1 Don't Follow Your Passion
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Cal Newport |
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People ask me how I funded my business," he said. "I tell them first I sold one CD, which gave me enough money to sell two." It grew from there." --
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Cal Newport |
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0fc871b
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Knuth goes on to acknowledge that he doesn't intend to cut himself off completely from the world. He notes that writing his books requires communication with thousands of people and that he wants to be responsive to questions and comments. His solution? He provides an address--a postal mailing address. He says that his administrative assistant will sort through any letters arriving at that address and put aside those that she thinks are rel..
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Cal Newport |
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67a8f52
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many software companies now deploy the Scrum project management methodology, which replaces a lot of this ad hoc messaging with regular, highly structured, and ruthlessly efficient status meetings (often held standing up to minimize the urge to bloviate).
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Cal Newport |
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The art of mission, we can conclude, asks us to suppress the most grandiose of our work instincts and instead adopt the patience
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Cal Newport |
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the pool of individuals to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited--and that's okay. If you're outside this pool, its radical simplicity shouldn't evince too much envy. On the other hand, if you're inside this pool--someone whose contribution to the world is discrete, clear, and individualized*--then you should give this philosophy serious consideration, as it might be the deciding factor between an average career and one that will ..
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Cal Newport |
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To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work.
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Cal Newport |
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a26bbed
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Does it really help your work to be constantly connected? To do so, she did something extreme: She forced each member of the team to take one day out of the workweek completely off--no connectivity to anyone inside or outside the company. "At first, the team resisted the experiment," she recalled about one of the trials. "The partner in charge, who had been very supportive of the basic idea, was suddenly nervous about having to tell her cli..
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Cal Newport |
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97a81d3
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as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency--even if most haven't yet recognized this reality.
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Cal Newport |