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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cadf12d | The Law of Remarkability For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking. Once | Cal Newport | ||
| eae502c | he came to realize a simple truth: 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 92f66b0 | Chee was clearly mystified and impressed at the vagaries of the federal system. | Robert Crais | ||
| 1f9b008 | What interests me about Charness's study, however, is that it moves beyond the 10,000-hour rule by asking not just how long people worked, but also what type of work they did. In more detail, they studied players who had all spent roughly the same amount of time--around 10,000 hours--playing chess. Some of these players had become grand masters while others remained at an intermediate level. Both groups had practiced the same amount of time.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 081b16d | intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* 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. This | Cal Newport | ||
| f5d4c7a | To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To | Cal Newport | ||
| e7815ff | You don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work. | Cal Newport | ||
| 142d901 | 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 "mental wrecks" in Nass's research, it's not ready for deep work--even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration." | Cal Newport | ||
| afd3a5b | The connection between deep work and flow should be clear: Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity--all of which also describe deep work). | Cal Newport | ||
| 03b1160 | The goal of the machine," David explained, "is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing--creating work that's at the absolute extent of their personal abilities." It" | Cal Newport | ||
| 3dcf01c | 1) Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day; (2) next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar; and (3) then take a couple of minutes to plan your day. | Cal Newport | ||
| b5e4ff5 | to your work, then he will close the deal. To | Cal Newport | ||
| 48c39d9 | Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. This mind-set provides another explanation for the popularity of many depth-destroying behaviors. If you send and answer e-mails at all hours, if you schedule and attend meetings constantly.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4f30316 | Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. Let's | Cal Newport | ||
| a20c04a | Thurston struck up conversations with strangers. He enjoyed food without Instagramming the experience. | Cal Newport | ||
| 97a993d | Personal Goal: To maintain close and rewarding friendships with a group of people who are important to me. Key Activities Supporting This Goal: 1. Regularly take the time for meaningful connection with those who are most important to me (e.g., a long talk, a meal, joint activity). 2. Give of myself to those who are most important to me (e.g., making nontrivial sacrifices that improve their lives). Not | Cal Newport | ||
| 2482463 | Bad courses, with incompatible professors and unreasonable requirements, are the key to developing an ulcer. | Cal Newport | ||
| 29b4da3 | oracular | Cal Newport | ||
| 09e7241 | I'll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset. My | Cal Newport | ||
| 55a7070 | Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. Before | Cal Newport | ||
| e76ece5 | If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless--which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you're producing is mediocre, then you're in trouble, as it's too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you're a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to o.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2a343d6 | Consider consultant Clay Herbert, who is an expert in running crowd-funding campaigns for technology start-ups: a specialty that attracts a lot of correspondents hoping to glean some helpful advice. As a Forbes.com article on sender filters reports, "At some point, the number of people reaching out exceeded [Herbert's] capacity, so he created filters that put the onus on the person asking for help." Though he started from a similar motivati.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9395943 | Not long into his 2010 TED talk on creativity and leadership, Derek Sivers plays a video clip of a crowd at an outdoor concert. A young man without a shirt starts dancing by himself. The audience members seated nearby look on curiously. "A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous," Derek says. Soon, however, a second young man joins the first and starts dancing. "Now comes the first follower with a crucial role ... the first.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8b2a5ae | skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2b8cbde | These services aren't necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They're just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers. They can be fun, but in the scheme of your life and what you want to accomplish, they're a lightweight whimsy, one unimportant distraction among many threat.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6618916 | dialectical | Cal Newport | ||
| 84bd737 | High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) | Cal Newport | ||
| 357724a | differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain. | Cal Newport | ||
| 624930c | Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance | Cal Newport | ||
| d286c8d | Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There's a premium to being the best." | Cal Newport | ||
| 9d426bf | Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3d14adf | the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience. | Cal Newport | ||
| b131c3c | If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier--at least, in the moment. If you couldn't count on this quick response time, you'd instead have to do more advance planning for your work, be more organized, and be prepared to put things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting for what you requeste.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9d48f4e | If you're a recent college graduate in an entry-level job, for example, you're much more likely to hear "go change the water cooler" than you are "go change the world." | Cal Newport | ||
| 7119410 | This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experience of life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren't that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartmen.. | psychology | Cal Newport | |
| a628f68 | In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative--constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. | Cal Newport | ||
| 776b940 | As Ericsson explains, "Most individuals who start as active professionals... change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work... is a poor predictor of attained performance." Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond whi.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 868df82 | 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. We can find evidence for this claim in the research of Clifford Nass, the late Stanfo.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0fbc6cc | consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They're easier. | Cal Newport | ||
| c0f5154 | In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed, than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semiconscious and unstructured Web surfing. | Cal Newport | ||
| 825ba1c | If you don't produce, you won't thrive--no matter how skilled or talented you are. Having | Cal Newport | ||
| cae7818 | 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. Fulfilling his dream to become a full-time Zen practitioner did not magically make his life wonderful. As Thomas discovered, the.. | Cal Newport | ||
| b672fc3 | In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1687292 | Don't follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, "so good that they can't ignore you." To" | Cal Newport |