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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8429a7b | Csikszentmihalyi even goes so far as to argue that modern companies should embrace this reality, suggesting that "jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities." | Cal Newport | ||
| c86c53a | Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, identifying a compelling mission once you get to the cutting edge can be seen as investing your career capital to acquire a desirable trait in your career. In other words, mission is yet another example of career capital theory in action. If you want a missi.. | Cal Newport | ||
| eba03ed | Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikszentmihalyi's ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong: Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate .. | Cal Newport | ||
| 50c6dc3 | What struck me about Pardis's story is how remarkably late it was in her training before she identified the mission that now defines her career. This lateness is best represented by her decision to still attend--and finish!--medical school even though she was working on PhD research that was starting to attract notice. These are not the actions of someone who is certain of her destiny from day one. This certainty didn't come until later, ar.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 672cd5f | True missions, it turns out, require two things. First you need career capital, which requires patience. Second, you need to be ceaselessly scanning your always-changing view of the adjacent possible in your field, looking for the next big idea. This requires a dedication to brainstorming and exposure to new ideas. Combined, these two commitments describe a lifestyle, not a series of steps that automatically spit out a mission when complete.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 190044e | Every week, I expose myself to something new about my field. I can read a paper, attend a talk, or schedule a meeting. To ensure that I really understand the new idea, I require myself to add a summary, in my own words, to my growing "research bible" | Cal Newport | ||
| 2ac6d98 | regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you'll build a compelling career. | Cal Newport | ||
| 75c76d9 | You're either remarkable or invisible," says" | Cal Newport | ||
| 110e47f | RULE #1 Don't Follow Your Passion | Cal Newport | ||
| 6daf343 | People ask me how I funded my business," he said. "I tell them first I sold one CD, which gave me enough money to sell two." It grew from there." -- | Cal Newport | ||
| 0fc871b | Knuth goes on to acknowledge that he doesn't intend to cut himself off completely from the world. He notes that writing his books requires communication with thousands of people and that he wants to be responsive to questions and comments. His solution? He provides an address--a postal mailing address. He says that his administrative assistant will sort through any letters arriving at that address and put aside those that she thinks are rel.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 67a8f52 | many software companies now deploy the Scrum project management methodology, which replaces a lot of this ad hoc messaging with regular, highly structured, and ruthlessly efficient status meetings (often held standing up to minimize the urge to bloviate). | Cal Newport | ||
| 095eb59 | The art of mission, we can conclude, asks us to suppress the most grandiose of our work instincts and instead adopt the patience | Cal Newport | ||
| 386f7cf | the pool of individuals to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited--and that's okay. If you're outside this pool, its radical simplicity shouldn't evince too much envy. On the other hand, if you're inside this pool--someone whose contribution to the world is discrete, clear, and individualized*--then you should give this philosophy serious consideration, as it might be the deciding factor between an average career and one that will .. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1842f17 | To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. | Cal Newport | ||
| a5233ac | He said, "Have you heard of two bank hitters named Marchenko and Parsons?" Holman watched her stiffen and knew she was finally interested. Now she wasn't just being nice or killing time until she could jump up and run. She took off her sunglasses. He saw that the skin around her eyes had grown papery. She had changed a lot since he had last seen her, but something beyond her appearance was different that he couldn't quite place. She" | Robert Crais | ||
| b78c16a | Happiness is lost by criticizing it; sorrow by accepting it. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 9d5aa00 | To the eye of failure success is an accident. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| a26bbed | Does it really help your work to be constantly connected? To do so, she did something extreme: She forced each member of the team to take one day out of the workweek completely off--no connectivity to anyone inside or outside the company. "At first, the team resisted the experiment," she recalled about one of the trials. "The partner in charge, who had been very supportive of the basic idea, was suddenly nervous about having to tell her cli.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 97a81d3 | as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency--even if most haven't yet recognized this reality. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2b7770c | Outside of these deep sessions, Grant remained famously open and accessible. In some sense, he had to be: His 2013 bestseller, Give and Take, promotes the practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of something in return, as a key strategy in professional advancement. | Cal Newport | ||
| 399cac6 | study by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow. In this study, a group of management consultants were asked to disconnect for a full day each workweek. The consultants were afraid the client would rebel. It turned out that the client didn't care. As Jung, Grant, and Perlow's subjects discovered, people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these st.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 895980d | Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less orthodox productivity strategies: To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time... it needs a lot of concentration... if you have a job administrating anything, you don't have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I'm irresponsible. I'm actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don't do anything. If anyone.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 57a7a36 | 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 | ||
| a9916b4 | The alternative, to not embrace all things Internet, is, as Postman would say, "invisible and therefore irrelevant." | Cal Newport | ||
| 74df734 | Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech. Deep work is exiled in favor of more distracting high-tech behaviors, like the professional use of social media, not because the former is empirically inferior to the.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 947b672 | This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts--communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently. For our purposes, it provides a specific example of a general approach to integrating depth into your life: the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8c47c2c | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| ae63192 | The professors at MIT--some of the most innovative technologists in the world--wanted nothing to do with an open-office-style workspace. They instead demanded the ability to close themselves off. This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4b91305 | To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction. | Cal Newport | ||
| ec32dce | The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way. | Cal Newport | ||
| b41b664 | If you're struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2a981fe | He went out the front door. The sun was blinding after being in the dim house. He walked back to Perry's car, feeling like a boat without a rudder, trapped in a current. He had no place to go and no idea what to do. | Robert Crais | ||
| de671a8 | what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive. The first component is of particular importance to our discussion, as it emphasizes that deliberate practice .. | Cal Newport | ||
| cfd3d49 | Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship... One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today's civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2e2e19a | Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it's reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so. | Cal Newport | ||
| b6b3a92 | I follow a rule with my life that if something is scary, do it. I've lived everywhere in America, and for me, a big scary thing was living outside the country. | Cal Newport | ||
| d5a9b44 | Open offices, for example, might create more opportunities for collaboration,* but they do so at the cost of "massive distraction," to quote the results of experiments conducted for a British TV special titled The Secret Life of Office Buildings. "If you are just getting into some work and a phone goes off in the background, it ruins what you are concentrating on," said the neuroscientist who ran the experiments for the show. "Even though y.. | Cal Newport | ||
| ac0e79c | the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count. | Cal Newport | ||
| d783aa8 | Here's Kreider's explanation: Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets... it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6eb6f00 | Deep work should be a priority in today's business climate. But it's not. I've just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to "the Internet," then it's good--r.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8a15cb1 | In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph's critique is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan. This type of scheduling, however, isn't about constraint--it's instead about thoughtfulness. It's a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: "What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 20ff055 | It's natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it's undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter. | Cal Newport | ||
| c39dc76 | So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand... they're pretty much mental wrecks. | Cal Newport |