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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0aebe82 | if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. This | Cal Newport | ||
| a129cc4 | Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you'll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need. | Cal Newport | ||
| c15eacc | I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1e6c00f | We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I'm arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. "The truth,.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2edaa7b | If your specialty is new--as mine is--and they can't therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, you're going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as there's no one out there to validate your stature. | Cal Newport | ||
| ec0ead6 | You've got to find what you love.... [T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. | Cal Newport | ||
| fce90bf | The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox--responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive (more on this soon). If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you'd be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what y.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 140fbbd | I want to spend time on what's important, instead of what's immediate, | Cal Newport | ||
| f26658f | To summarize, I've presented two different ways people think about their working life. 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. As I concluded after meeting Jordan Tice, there's something libe.. | Cal Newport | ||
| c29d076 | The superstar effect, in other words, has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted thirty years ago. An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors. | Cal Newport | ||
| f2edfd7 | Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion's glow." | Cal Newport | ||
| e370559 | simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable. | Cal Newport | ||
| ba065b6 | As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today's economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people. When else in history could such a small amount of labor be involved in such a large amount of value? | Cal Newport | ||
| 5a134c2 | Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your "converging rays of attention" to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration." | Cal Newport | ||
| ca5b78f | With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners--in this case, the venture investors--is without precedent. It's no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, "Everyone wants my job." | Cal Newport | ||
| 0bd1edf | Also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: "Thoughts?" These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 256dff4 | Any pursuit--be it physical or cognitive--that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9a20870 | Knowledge workers, I'm arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value. | Cal Newport | ||
| 5491626 | These interviews emphasize an important point: Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion. This observation may come as a surprise for those of us who have long basked in the glow of the passion hypothesis. It wouldn't, however, surprise the many scientists who have studied questions of workplace satisfaction using rigorous peer-reviewed research. They've been dis.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 140620a | now checks AllSides.com once a day--a news site that covers the top stories, but for each story it neutrally links to three articles: one from a source associated with the political left, one from the right, and one from the | Cal Newport | ||
| 5a8927f | The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. | Cal Newport | ||
| e4ae999 | These sites are especially harmful after the workday is over, where the freedom in your schedule enables them to become central to your leisure time. If you're waiting in line, or waiting for the plot to pick up in a TV show, or waiting to finish eating a meal, they provide a cognitive crutch to ensure you eliminate any chance of boredom. As I argued in Rule #2, however, such behavior is dangerous, as it weakens your mind's general ability .. | Cal Newport | ||
| d29ebec | First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3872b5b | No one owes you a great career, it argues; you | Cal Newport | ||
| c60a526 | the months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to earn him quick cash. | Cal Newport | ||
| 84127c7 | You're either remarkable or invisible," says Seth Godin in his 2002 bestseller, Purple Cow.1 As he elaborated in a Fast Company manifesto he published on the subject: "The world is full of boring stuff--brown cows--which is why so few people pay attention.... A purple cow... now that would stand out. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing."2 When Giles read Godin's book, he had an epiphany: For his mission to buil.. | Cal Newport | ||
| ec40c82 | The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it's also dangerous. 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." | Cal Newport | ||
| 5e1c1fb | Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value--not as sources of value themselves. They don't accept the idea that offering some small benefit is justification for allowing an attention-gobbling service into their lives, and are instead interested in applying new technology in highly selective and intentional ways that yield big wins. Just as important: they're comfortable missing out on ev.. | Cal Newport | ||
| a30d01c | Here's a case where someone successfully followed their passion," they say, "therefore 'follow your passion' must be good advice." This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective." | Cal Newport | ||
| 77b74a2 | If you go after more control in your working life without a rare and valuable skill to offer in return, you're likely pursuing a mirage. | Cal Newport | ||
| 00cdaed | Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You're In For the sake of clarity, I will introduce some new terminology. When you are acquiring career capital in a field, you can imagine that you are acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing f.. | Cal Newport | ||
| fa3f258 | was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| 7428d42 | because for him to do nothing was to undermine his own dignity. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| bfc8588 | If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That's how he saw it, how he'd always seen things. | Colson Whitehead | ||
| de96818 | it trains the kid in question to determine when people in the corner of his eye are talking about him and when they are not, a useful skill in later life when sorting out bona-fide persecution from perceived persecution, the this-is-actually-happening from the mere paranoid manifestation | persecution race-in-america | Colson Whitehead | |
| 089bd8d | if you memorize three hundred Tang poems, you might be able to write a little. | Qiu Xiaolong | ||
| 05ac064 | country without reporting it | Robert Crais | ||
| d9461fe | was an | Robert Crais | ||
| f66019c | Poitras came | Robert Crais | ||
| b047f49 | The Men's Central Jail is an anonymous building behind Central Station, less than ten minutes from the Criminal Courts Building in downtown L.A. I parked in a neat, modern underground parking structure, then walked up steps to a very nice plaza. Nicely dressed people were sipping lattes and strolling about the plaza, and no one seemed to mind that the plaza adjoined a place housing felons and gangbangers and the wild men of an otherwise civ.. | Robert Crais | ||
| c0e8e0a | LARKIN WATCHED Pike leaving, and in the moment he stepped outside, he was framed in the open door of their Echo Park house like a picture in a magazine, frozen in time and space. A big man, but not a giant. More average in size than not. With the sleeves covering his arms, and his face turned away, he seemed heartbreakingly normal, which made her love him even more. A superman risked nothing, but an average man risked everything. | Robert Crais | ||
| 0e04cac | Kyle was my friend. You have to take care of your friends. | Robert Crais | ||
| b0bb3fa | There is a machine-like quality to Joe, as if he had tuned his body the way he might tune his Jeep, and, as the Jeep was perfectly tuned, so was his body. It was easy to imagine him doing a thousand pushups or running a hundred miles, as if his body were an instrument of his mind, as if his mind were a well of limitless resource and unimaginable strength. If the mind said start, the body would start. When the mind said stop, the body would .. | Robert Crais | ||
| 9372967 | The buzz cut and his friend came over. "You are coming with us." The buzz cut spoke the words with a careful, starched pronunciation that made me think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, only the accent was Russian. "Sez who?" I can slay 'em with these comebacks." | Robert Crais |