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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cbfcf4a | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| ba69442 | study the brain behavior of subjects presented with both positive and negative imagery. She found that for young people, their amygdala (a center of emotion) fired with activity at both types of imagery. When she instead scanned the elderly, the amygdala fired only for the positive images. Carstensen hypothesizes that the elderly subjects had trained the prefrontal cortex to inhibit the amygdala in the presence of negative stimuli. These el.. | Cal Newport | ||
| ae0a073 | cultivating "concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.")" | Cal Newport | ||
| 6dfd728 | attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate. | Cal Newport | ||
| a70c239 | this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it's captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you're done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 51f35a8 | Don't Take Breaks from Distraction. Instead Take Breaks from Focus. | Cal Newport | ||
| e403dfe | It's as if our species has evolved into one that flourishes in depth and wallows in shallowness, becoming what we might call Homo sapiens deepensis. | Cal Newport | ||
| 5bd55d3 | The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. This idea might sound obvious once it's pointed out, but it represents a departure from how most people understand such matters. In my experience, it's common to treat undistracted concentration as a habit like flossing--something that you know how to do and know is good for you, but that you've been neglecting due to a lack of motivation. This mind-set is appealing becau.. | Cal Newport | ||
| cce3fb2 | craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love. | Cal Newport | ||
| 36fe51d | Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate | Cal Newport | ||
| bcf5548 | Deep Work Helps You Produce at an Elite Level | Cal Newport | ||
| d3c949f | law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) | Cal Newport | ||
| fc8a672 | To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8dfc93b | Alex Berger, he didn't arrive at his outstanding job by following a clear passion. Instead he carefully and persistently gathered career capital, confident that valuable skills would translate into valuable opportunities. | Cal Newport | ||
| d8ecd2a | There is, however, an important corollary to this idea: Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you'll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom. | Cal Newport | ||
| 7b834c4 | I had reached the level of expertise you would expect from someone who had played an instrument seriously for the last six years. But this is what I find fascinating: Compared to Jordan Tice's ability at this same age, I was mediocre. | Cal Newport | ||
| c792e40 | Jordan left me in the dust. I played. But he practiced. | Cal Newport | ||
| e5ce9a8 | This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle--one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field. | Cal Newport | ||
| 69ec5e2 | Thomas had followed his passion to the Zen Mountain Monastery, believing, as many do, that the key to happiness is identifying your true calling and then chasing after it with all the courage you can muster. But as Thomas experienced that late Sunday afternoon in the oak forest, this belief is frighteningly naive. | Cal Newport | ||
| d724965 | deliberate practice" to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an "activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual's performance."4 As hundreds of follow-up studies have since shown, deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields, among which are chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, .. | Cal Newport | ||
| fbb671c | Managing computer systems might not generate the daily bliss that defined Thomas's old daydreams, but as he now recognized, nothing would. A fulfilling working life is a more subtle experience than his old fantasies had allowed. | Cal Newport | ||
| ff9e4fe | returned to this paper regularly over a period of two weeks. When I was done, I had probably experienced fifteen hours total of deliberate practice-style strain, but due to its intensity it felt like much more. Fortunately, this effort led to immediate benefits. Among other things, it allowed me to understand whole swaths of related work that had previously been mysterious. The researchers who wrote this paper had enjoyed a near monopoly on.. | Cal Newport | ||
| a7445fc | Strain, I now accepted, was good. Instead of seeing this discomfort as a sensation to avoid, I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn: a sign that you're doing something right. Inspired by this insight, I accompanied a promise to do more large-scale paper deconstructions of this type with a trio of smaller habits designed to inject even more deliberate practice into my daily routine. I describe these.. | Cal Newport | ||
| f32d8fa | Here's what I respect: creating something meaningful and then presenting it to the world, | Cal Newport | ||
| 1170743 | he would spend two hours of undistracted writing time in his private office. | Cal Newport | ||
| 23cb081 | When I told Mark about Jordan, he agreed that an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music. "It trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and your connections," he explained. "Studio musicians have this adage: 'The tape doesn't lie.' Immediately after the recording comes the playback; your ability has no hiding place." | Cal Newport | ||
| 449daa9 | there's something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is "just right," and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it--and the process won't be easy." | Cal Newport | ||
| 8e0346c | I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can't ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer. | Cal Newport | ||
| d5485ac | Jordan had a name for the worries about what his friends are doing with their lives and whether his accomplishments compare favorably: "the cloud of external distractions." | Cal Newport | ||
| 938c3e5 | TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK Creativity: Ira Glass, for example, is pushing the boundaries of radio, and winning armfuls of awards in the process. Impact: From the Apple II to the iPhone, Steve Jobs has changed the way we live our lives in the digital age. Control: No one tells Al Merrick when to wake up or what to wear. He's not expected in an office from nine to five. Instead, his Channel Island Surfboards factory is located a block from.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0c9d9f9 | Slang is a foul pool at which every dunce fills his bucket, and then sets up as a fountain. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| e09d985 | Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that's both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return--this is Supply and Demand 101. | Cal Newport | ||
| c20b391 | THREE DISQUALIFIERS FOR APPLYING THE CRAFTSMAN MINDSET The job presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. The job focuses on something you think is useless or perhaps even actively bad for the world. The job forces you to work with people you really dislike. | Cal Newport | ||
| 7a0a306 | When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents," Ericsson notes." -- | Cal Newport | ||
| 181889b | 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. Beyond" | Cal Newport | ||
| a766bcd | The Second Control Trap 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. On | Cal Newport | ||
| c67ec11 | Ultimately, the success or failure of the projects pursued in this middle level helps me evolve the research mission maintained by the top level. In other words, the system as a whole is a closed feedback loop--constantly evolving toward a clearer and better supported vision for my work. Final | Cal Newport | ||
| 9400e1e | People thought I was nuts," she agreed. Leaving this start-up after it was acquired was similarly difficult. Lulu was hesitant to get into details, but the subtext was that her value was so high at this company that its new owners tried every tactic they could to keep her on board." | Cal Newport | ||
| dd4400e | Working right trumps finding the right work. He didn't need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness--he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him. I | Cal Newport | ||
| 103bb4c | So next time you start to question whether you're missing out on some dream job waiting for you to muster the courage to pursue it, conjure up a pair of images. First, recall passion-obsessed Thomas, heartbroken and sobbing on the forest floor. Then replace this with the image of the smiling, confident, value-focused man who ten years later joined me for coffee--the version of Thomas who looked at me at one point in our conversation and rem.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 7dfb0c4 | introduced the term career capital to describe these rare and valuable skills, and noted that the tricky part is figuring out how to acquire this capital. By definition, if it's rare and valuable, it's not easy to get. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8f6b970 | if you're not careful to keep pushing forward, your improvement can taper off to what the performance scientist Anders Ericsson called an "acceptable level," where you then remain stuck." | Cal Newport | ||
| 8cdabcd | I decided that focusing my attention on a bottom-up understanding of my own field's most difficult results would be a good first step toward revitalizing my career capital stores. To | Cal Newport | ||
| ae312d0 | Motivated by my research and examples such as Feynman, I decided that focusing my attention on a bottom-up understanding of my own field's most difficult results would be a good first step toward revitalizing my career capital stores. To initiate these efforts, I chose a paper that was well cited in my research niche, but that was also considered obtuse and hard to follow. The paper focused on only a single result--the analysis of an algori.. | Cal Newport |