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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4cbca3d | Gallagher's writing emphasizes that the content of what we focus on matters. If we give rapt attention to important things, and therefore also ignore shallow negative things, we'll experience our working life as more important and positive. Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow, by contrast, is mostly agnostic to the content of our attention. Though he would likely agree with the research cited by Gallagher, his theory notes that the feeling of.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 74831ab | background-research process, which combines exposure to potentially relevant material with free-form re-combination of ideas, comes straight out of Steven Johnson's book, Where Good Ideas Come From, | Cal Newport | ||
| b610bf6 | deep work. If you haven't mastered this foundational skill, you'll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level. | Cal Newport | ||
| 24e79df | Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea." This advice comes from Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and professor of moral philosophy, who during the early part of the twentieth century penned a slim but influential volume titled The Intellectual Life. Sertillanges wrote the book a.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0715a9b | Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in The Intellectual Life, "Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure." Ericsson couldn't have said it better.)" -- | Cal Newport | ||
| 60c85b3 | using money as a "neutral indicator of value"--a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it's a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control. This holds whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new role within an established company. Unless people are willing to pay you, it's not an idea you'r.. | Cal Newport | ||
| b9c8dc5 | Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn't glamorous. But this doesn't matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship--not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don't need a rarified job; you need instea.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9203619 | focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.) During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he'll often put an out-of-office auto-responder on his e-mail so correspondents will know not to expect a response. "It sometimes confuses.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9190dcb | argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he's leveraging the following law of productivity: High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus) If you believe this formula, then Grant's habits make sense: By maximizing his intensity when he works, he maximizes the results he produces per unit of time spent working. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3aa58ee | Stephenson sees two mutually exclusive options: He can write good novels at a regular rate, or he can answer a lot of individual e-mails and attend conferences, and as a result produce lower-quality novels at a slower rate. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1a1fea9 | big trends in business today actively decrease people's ability to perform deep work, even though the benefits promised by these trends (e.g., increased serendipity, faster responses to requests, and more exposure) are arguably dwarfed by the benefits that flow from a commitment to deep work (e.g., the ability to learn hard things fast and produce at an elite level). | Cal Newport | ||
| 5718eea | The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate). | Cal Newport | ||
| ab9ef77 | Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term "stretch" for describing what deliberate practice feels like," | Cal Newport | ||
| 2b18485 | There's a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work--whether you're Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher's theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance. | Cal Newport | ||
| 5636e2e | We instead find ourselves in distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be neglected and meetings are incessant--a setting where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest e-mail than produce the best possible results. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8655278 | To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don't waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment. | Cal Newport | ||
| d14b4ed | To work deeply is a big deal and should not be an activity undertaken lightly. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9549b61 | when paying more than $1,000 a day to write the chapter in a suite of an old hotel down the street from a Hogwarts-style castle, mustering the energy to begin and sustain this work is easier than if you were instead in a distracting home office. | Cal Newport | ||
| 63322c5 | The MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures. In his case, he retreats each summer to a "tiny island" in Maine to think deeply and recharge. At least as of 2000, when he described this gesture in an interview, the island not only lacked Internet, but didn't even have phone service. As he then justified: "It's really about two and a half months that I'll feel like I can recover some silence in my l.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8c92019 | Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way--arriving back in the States only thirty hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand. "The trip cost $4,000 and was worth every penny," he explai.. | Cal Newport | ||
| e707809 | it's not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unl.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 53ef45f | According to Johnson, access to new ideas and to the "liquid networks" that facilitate their mixing and matching often provides the catalyst for breakthrough new ideas." | Cal Newport | ||
| 9415b89 | In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these "winner-take-all" markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent--labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas--as a factor with "imperfect substitution," which Rosen explains as follows: "Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, talent is not a commo.. | Cal Newport | ||
| d92bbd4 | As Derek explained to me, he started by pursuing music at night and on the weekend. "I didn't quit my day job until I was making more money with my music." | Cal Newport | ||
| e77bfae | Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important | Cal Newport | ||
| d00e54a | In addition to executives, we can also include, for example, certain types of salesmen and lobbyists, for whom constant connection is their most valued currency. | Cal Newport | ||
| 5f5b09a | Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures | Cal Newport | ||
| 7aeaee4 | Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard | Cal Newport | ||
| ebd13e4 | Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible. He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital, and then jump at whatever opportunity seemed most promising. | Cal Newport | ||
| be35e1a | People play differently when they're keeping score," the 4DX authors explain." | Cal Newport | ||
| de76e33 | Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World," he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. "It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant." | Cal Newport | ||
| 4d00ab0 | Control that's acquired without career capital is not sustainable. | Cal Newport | ||
| 36d45f6 | After running my tough experiment [with cancer]... I have a plan for living the rest of my life," Gallagher concludes in her book. "I'll choose my targets with care... then give them my rapt attention. In short, I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is." We'd be wise to follow her lead." | Cal Newport | ||
| 39bcfee | There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration--that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where... but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. | Cal Newport | ||
| c8bd68f | Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big. | Cal Newport | ||
| 743bd01 | 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." | Cal Newport | ||
| 853aa4d | A job, in Wrzesniewski's formulation, is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path toward increasingly better work, and a calling is work that's an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity. | Cal Newport | ||
| e8194ee | It's worth taking the time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life. It's helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider what at first seems to be an unresolvable conflict. | Cal Newport | ||
| c7c56c6 | Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting--creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to call for an end to the "tyranny of the open-plan office." And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly... | Cal Newport | ||
| 8a25a7a | The theory of serendipitous creativity, in other words, seems well justified by the historical record. The transistor, we can argue with some confidence, probably required Bell Labs and its ability to put solid-state physicists, quantum theorists, and world-class experimentalists in one building where they could serendipitously encounter one another and learn from their varied expertise. This was an invention unlikely to come from a lone sc.. | Cal Newport | ||
| c2195ff | Stop focusing on these little details," it told me. "Focus instead on becoming better." | Cal Newport | ||
| daeaf25 | fighting desires--over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions--unless, that is, you're smart about your habits. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1b9b4d3 | general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don't produce, you won't thrive--no matter how skilled or talented you are. | Cal Newport | ||
| 1e59ea5 | when a branch of psychology, sometimes called performance psychology, began to systematically explore what separates experts (in many different fields) from everyone else. In the early 1990s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, pulled together these strands into a single coherent answer, consistent with the growing research literature, that he gave a punchy name: deliberate practice. | Cal Newport |