1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
5645
5646
5647
5648
5649
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d01f69b | An even more extreme example of a onetime grand gesture yielding results is a story involving Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and social media pioneer. As a popular speaker, Shankman spends much of his time flying. He eventually realized that thirty thousand feet was an ideal environment for him to focus. As he explained in a blog post, "Locked in a seat with nothing in front of me, nothing to distract me, nothing to set off my 'Ooh! Shiny!.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 581ea12 | The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there's a magic "right" job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they'll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt. We" | Cal Newport | ||
| 89c072a | Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant--even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallagher summarizes: "Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love--is the sum of what you focus on." In" | Cal Newport | ||
| 84c7761 | Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it's high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it's good. Case closed. | Cal Newport | ||
| c2ca342 | Five years of reporting on attention have confirmed some home truths," Gallagher reports. "[Among them is the notion that] 'the idle mind is the devil's workshop'... when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what's right." | Cal Newport | ||
| 94ce07d | Mike's goal with his spreadsheet is to become more "intentional" about how his workday unfolds. "The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to e-mail the whole day," he explained. "But that is not the most strategic way to spend your time." | Cal Newport | ||
| c0b5be3 | In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.2 | Cal Newport | ||
| 0d36647 | In Morozov's critique, we've made "the Internet" synonymous with the revolutionary future of business and government. To make your company more like "the Internet" is to be with the times, and to ignore these trends is to be the proverbial buggy-whip maker in an automotive age. 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 .. | Cal Newport | ||
| e15f9c8 | capital. | Cal Newport | ||
| 76723a1 | In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital. To | Cal Newport | ||
| b0852b6 | The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. This | Cal Newport | ||
| 20320d8 | Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it's not the answer they wanted to hear," Martin said. "What they want to hear is 'Here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script,'... but I always say, 'Be so good they can't ignore you.' " In" | Cal Newport | ||
| bb064d2 | If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind. | Cal Newport | ||
| 42ec314 | It's just that we don't know what that passion is. If you ask someone, they'll tell you what they think they're passionate about, but they probably have it wrong." In other words, she believes that having passion for your work is vital, but she also believes that it's a fool's errand to try to figure out in advance what work will lead to this passion." | Cal Newport | ||
| 33cbefa | Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them. There's no reason why knowledge workers cannot do the same when it comes to the Internet--the fact that the skilled labor here now involves digital bits doesn't change this reality. | Cal Newport | ||
| affe0c5 | The Innovators, Isaacson later | Cal Newport | ||
| 9431210 | A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker's time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8c1cf24 | 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 .. | Cal Newport | ||
| 67765e5 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| b9ac318 | 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'.. | Cal Newport | ||
| b83e454 | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| a1de7d3 | When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice. | Cal Newport | ||
| c52ef9a | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| c0cfc0d | network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused. | Cal Newport | ||
| 7861100 | Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your | Cal Newport | ||
| 7b71eca | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0aece33 | 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 | ||
| 4f6e235 | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| d518b1a | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| b17a663 | To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback. | Cal Newport | ||
| f480665 | if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better. | Cal Newport | ||
| 352b594 | 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 | ||
| 759b1a8 | Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. | Cal Newport | ||
| 5151363 | 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 .. | Cal Newport | ||
| ff9485e | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| a9c0aac | Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0bce0ca | Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren't dreaming of taking over the world. | Cal Newport | ||
| 7c2026d | We have an information economy that's dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8801042 | Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work. | Cal Newport | ||
| ffd77aa | just because you really want to organize your work around a mission doesn't mean that you can easily make it happen. | Cal Newport | ||
| af136a4 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 165eabd | focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback. | Cal Newport | ||
| 480932b | 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," | Cal Newport | ||
| b8fadf3 | 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. | Cal Newport |