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It was tentativeness, not boldness, that transformed Pardis's general mission into a specific success.
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Cal Newport |
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Little Bets, and it was written by a former venture capitalist named Peter Sims.
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Cal Newport |
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the journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment's notice, as is required by the deadline-driven nature of their profession.
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Cal Newport |
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David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: "[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants."
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Cal Newport |
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Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say, 'Wow, you got tenure early; what's your secret?' I said, 'It's pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at ten o'clock and I'll tell you.
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Cal Newport |
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The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?
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Cal Newport |
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Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you're aiming to be valuable.
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money
success
value
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Cal Newport |
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14ff9e9
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Though Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels.
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Cal Newport |
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you visit Knuth's website at Stanford with the intention of finding his e-mail address, you'll instead discover the following note: I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be o..
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Cal Newport |
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when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow--a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.
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Cal Newport |
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People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task," and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance."
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Cal Newport |
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To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It's better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.
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Cal Newport |
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Stephenson summarizes his communication policy as follows: Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested not to do so, and warned that I don't answer e-mail... lest [my communication policy's] key message get lost in the verbiage, I will put it here succinctly: All of my time and attention are spoken for--several times over. Please do not ask for them. To further justify this policy, Stephenson wrote an essay ti..
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Cal Newport |
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E-mail inboxes, in theory, can distract you only when you choose to open them, whereas instant messenger systems are meant to be always active--magnifying the impact of interruption
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Cal Newport |
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As Cochran recalls in a blog post he wrote about his experiment for the Harvard Business Review, these simple statistics got him thinking about the rest of his company. Just how much time were employees of Atlantic Media spending moving around information instead of focusing on the specialized tasks they were hired to perform? Determined to answer this question, Cochran gathered company-wide statistics on e-mails sent per day and the averag..
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Cal Newport |
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da1f0a4
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The Principle of Least Resistance: 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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In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn't sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for not spending more time checking e-mail (one of the pr..
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Cal Newport |
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Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that's often at odds with busyness, not supported by it.
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Cal Newport |
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If you want to observe the power of control up close in the workplace, look toward companies embracing a radical new philosophy called Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short). In a ROWE company, all that matters is your results. When you show up to work and when you leave, when you take vacations, and how often you check e-mail are all irrelevant. They leave it to the employee to figure out whatever works best for getting the im..
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Cal Newport |
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We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We're instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a (dare I say, brave) new world.
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Cal Newport |
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9db5fae
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When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.
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Cal Newport |
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By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind's instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.
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Cal Newport |
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4cbca3d
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Gallagher's writing emphasizes that the content of what we focus on matters. If we give rapt attention to important things, and therefore also ignore shallow negative things, we'll experience our working life as more important and positive. Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow, by contrast, is mostly agnostic to the content of our attention. Though he would likely agree with the research cited by Gallagher, his theory notes that the feeling of..
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Cal Newport |
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background-research process, which combines exposure to potentially relevant material with free-form re-combination of ideas, comes straight out of Steven Johnson's book, Where Good Ideas Come From,
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Cal Newport |
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deep work. If you haven't mastered this foundational skill, you'll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level.
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Cal Newport |
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Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea." This advice comes from Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and professor of moral philosophy, who during the early part of the twentieth century penned a slim but influential volume titled The Intellectual Life. Sertillanges wrote the book a..
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Cal Newport |
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Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in The Intellectual Life, "Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure." Ericsson couldn't have said it better.)" --
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Cal Newport |
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using money as a "neutral indicator of value"--a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it's a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control. This holds whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new role within an established company. Unless people are willing to pay you, it's not an idea you'r..
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Cal Newport |
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Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn't glamorous. But this doesn't matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship--not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don't need a rarified job; you need instea..
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Cal Newport |
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focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.) During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he'll often put an out-of-office auto-responder on his e-mail so correspondents will know not to expect a response. "It sometimes confuses..
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Cal Newport |
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9190dcb
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argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he's leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) If you believe this formula, then Grant's habits make sense: By maximizing his intensity when he works, he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working.
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Cal Newport |
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Stephenson sees two mutually exclusive options: He can write good novels at a regular rate, or he can answer a lot of individual e-mails and attend conferences, and as a result produce lower-quality novels at a slower rate.
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Cal Newport |
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1a1fea9
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big trends in business today actively decrease people's ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level).
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Cal Newport |
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5718eea
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The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).
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Cal Newport |
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Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term "stretch" for describing what deliberate practice feels like,"
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Cal Newport |
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There's a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work--whether you're Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher's theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.
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Cal Newport |
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5636e2e
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We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant--a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail than produce the best possible results.
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Cal Newport |
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8655278
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To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don't waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.
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Cal Newport |
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d14b4ed
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To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly.
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Cal Newport |
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when paying more than $1,000 a day to write the chapter in a suite of an old hotel down the street from a Hogwarts-style castle, mustering the energy to begin and sustain this work is easier than if you were instead in a distracting home office.
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Cal Newport |
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The MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures. In his case, he retreats each summer to a "tiny island" in Maine to think deeply and recharge. At least as of 2000, when he described this gesture in an interview, the island not only lacked Internet, but didn't even have phone service. As he then justified: "It's really about two and a half months that I'll feel like I can recover some silence in my l..
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Cal Newport |
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Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way--arriving back in the States only thirty hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand. "The trip cost $4,000 and was worth every penny," he explai..
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Cal Newport |
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e707809
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it's not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unl..
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Cal Newport |
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According to Johnson, access to new ideas and to the "liquid networks" that facilitate their mixing and matching often provides the catalyst for breakthrough new ideas."
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Cal Newport |