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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 974c5e5 | the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain. | Cal Newport | ||
| d6ffdae | The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase, | Cal Newport | ||
| 5e044ad | The difference in our abilities by the age of eighteen had less to do with the number of hours we practiced--though he probably racked up more total practice hours than I did, we weren't all that far apart--and more to do with what we did with those hours. | Cal Newport | ||
| c38db01 | In Wrzesniewski's research, the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do. | Cal Newport | ||
| e271776 | Conclusion #3: Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery | Cal Newport | ||
| 9005a72 | Driven by this insight, while my classmates contemplated their true calling, I went seeking opportunities to master rare skills that would yield big rewards. | Cal Newport | ||
| 347bd80 | Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is arguably the best understanding science currently has for why some pursuits get our engines running while others leave us cold.8 SDT tells us that motivation, in the workplace or elsewhere, requires that you fulfill three basic psychological needs--factors described as the "nutriments" required to feel intrinsically motivated for your work: Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, .. | Cal Newport | ||
| a506aab | Here was my first lesson: This type of skill development is hard. When I got to the first tricky gap in the paper's main proof argument, I faced immediate internal resistance. It was as if my mind realized the effort I was about to ask it to expend, and in response it unleashed a wave of neuronal protest, distant at first, but then as I persisted increasingly tremendous, crashing over my concentration with mounting intensity. To combat this.. | Cal Newport | ||
| b6c57f3 | You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? | Cal Newport | ||
| c7870ca | Here's the routine: Once a week I require myself to summarize in my "bible" a paper I think might be relevant to my research. This summary must include a description of the result, how it compares to previous work, and the main strategies used to obtain it. These summaries are less involved than the step-by-step deconstruction I did on my original test-case paper--which is what allows me to do them on a weekly basis--but they still induce t.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6dcabc0 | working right trumps finding the right work. | Cal Newport | ||
| c8d8dd4 | It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence. | Cal Newport | ||
| b6b0d32 | 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." | Cal Newport | ||
| 1add521 | the end of each of these brainstorming sessions I require myself to formally record the results, by hand, on a dated page. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3d910e8 | The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it. | Cal Newport | ||
| 0d3b8ab | craft-centric." Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. This is a different way of thinking about work, but once you embrace it, the changes to your career trajectory can be profound." | Cal Newport | ||
| d93b9b6 | taking on projects that were beyond his current comfort zone; | Cal Newport | ||
| c3c3dd3 | dedication to stretching his ability, guided by feedback. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8b1d96a | At the end of every week he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal, and then uses this feedback to guide himself in the week ahead. | Cal Newport | ||
| 26a211b | little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It's a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn't exist before). It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback. | Cal Newport | ||
| 972961b | without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8fd7103 | Overall, Pardis's most important commitment was to patience. She didn't try to force a direction for her working life, but instead built up her career capital and kept her eyes open for the interesting directions she knew this process would uncover. | Cal Newport | ||
| 29b329f | The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase. | Cal Newport | ||
| a9425c5 | Databases of this type are interrogated in a language called SQL. You send them commands like the one shown here to interact with their stored information. Understanding how to manipulate these databases is subtle. The example command, for example, creates a "view": a virtual database table that pulls together data from multiple existing tables, and that can then be addressed by the SQL commands like a standard table. When to create views a.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 86c8c7c | Indeed, if you study the lives of other influential figures from both distant and recent history, you'll find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme. | Cal Newport | ||
| bc838f6 | constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. | Cal Newport | ||
| 37aeb39 | By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work. | Cal Newport | ||
| c4e1ecd | A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous, | Cal Newport | ||
| 5fc1a89 | He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn't mince words in warning against it. "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 | ||
| ca13def | The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. | Cal Newport | ||
| 27c3d74 | The complex reality of the technologies that real companies leverage to get ahead emphasizes the absurdity of the now common idea that exposure to simplistic, consumer-facing products--especially in schools--somehow prepares people to succeed in a high-tech economy. Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them .. | Cal Newport | ||
| a804e24 | What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change--not rest, except in sleep. | Cal Newport | ||
| c55a751 | if you're not putting in the effort to become, as Steve Martin put it, "so good they can't ignore you," you're not likely to end up loving your work--regardless of whether or not you believe it's your true calling." | Cal Newport | ||
| 1a5cacf | if it's rare and valuable, it's not easy to get. This insight brought me into the world of performance science, where I encountered the concept of deliberate practice--a method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you're comfortable. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2daf937 | musicians, athletes, and chess players, among others, know all about deliberate practice, but knowledge workers do not. Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller's obsessive e-mail-checking habit--for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that's more mentally demanding? | Cal Newport | ||
| 9aa9729 | 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| d91a064 | I keep a tally of the total number of hours I've spent that month in a state of deliberate practice. | Cal Newport | ||
| 97b0e23 | My professional situation now couldn't be more perfect," Scott reports. "I chose to pursue the career I knew in my heart I was passionate about: politics.... I love my office, my friends... even my boss." The glamorous promises of the passion hypothesis, however, led Scott to question whether his perfect job was perfect enough. "It's not fulfilling," he worries when reflecting on the fact that his job, like all jobs, includes difficult resp.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 747cd3d | You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. | Cal Newport | ||
| cdbdab1 | The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow" | Cal Newport | ||
| a5f5e4d | the message at the core of this book: Working right trumps finding the right work--it's a simple idea, but it's also incredibly subversive, as it overturns decades of folk career advice all focused on the mystical value of passion. It wrenches us away from our daydreams of an overnight transformation into instant job bliss and provides instead a more sober way toward fulfillment. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8aa2157 | To be great at something is to be well myelinated. | Cal Newport | ||
| 3db4e9e | In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, "Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?," Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking--trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously--on performance, but that in the modern knowledge work office, once you got to a high enough level, it was more common to find people working on multipl.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 389c502 | 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. | Cal Newport |