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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bc72262 | When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level. At the same time, don't lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us. | Cal Newport | ||
| 25c41c5 | 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 | ||
| 7d9686a | Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that 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. This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experience of life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstance.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 4eae410 | We can now step back and use Gallagher's grand theory to better understand the role of deep work in cultivating a good life. This theory tells us that your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to, so consider for a moment the type of mental world constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors. There's a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work--whether you're Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 60b7a72 | Among many breakthroughs, Csikszentmihalyi's work with ESM helped validate a theory he had been developing over the preceding decade: "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 (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). At the time, this finding pushed back again.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 8bdb8f5 | The task of a craftsman, they conclude, "is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there." This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning." | Cal Newport | ||
| b727356 | the lobby pay phone, and called her. She answered on the second ring. | Robert Crais | ||
| 13ad5e4 | The Burbank Studios in beautiful downtown Burbank. | Robert Crais | ||
| 0452f8b | The Pragmatic Programmer, a well-regarded book in the computer programming field, makes this connection between code and old-style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval quarry worker's creed in its preface: "We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals." The book then elaborates that computer programmers must see their work in the same way: Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for indi.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 652b7a8 | The point of providing these details is to emphasize that 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. | Cal Newport | ||
| 86c7aa2 | minimize the shallow in my life | Cal Newport | ||
| e8fa7d8 | By taking the time consumed by low-impact activities--like finding old friends on Facebook--and reinvesting in high-impact activities--like taking a good friend out to lunch--you end up more successful in your goal. | Cal Newport | ||
| 777dfa1 | If you're wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram--you're not really walking, and therefore you're not going to experience this practice's greatest benefits | Cal Newport | ||
| 2b7033c | in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features. | Cal Newport | ||
| d01c673 | two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you'll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval. | Cal Newport | ||
| 81de1f2 | We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9c18aa0 | To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation. | Cal Newport | ||
| 76eacc7 | Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that "we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." | Cal Newport | ||
| 5c980a7 | We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness." #" | Cal Newport | ||
| 5e534e7 | when walking through nature, you're freed from having to direct your attention, as there are few challenges to navigate (like crowded street crossings), and experience enough interesting stimuli to keep your mind sufficiently occupied to avoid | Cal Newport | ||
| 5394555 | Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences--wherever you happen to | Cal Newport | ||
| 309dd70 | And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth." | Cal Newport | ||
| b612e5a | Anthony Storr helped correct this omission with his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self. | Cal Newport | ||
| c8aa776 | All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal" | Cal Newport | ||
| f6e70f0 | what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9304a58 | 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.. | Cal Newport | ||
| 37fb17e | I get an extra 20 IQ points from being in that office, | Cal Newport | ||
| 8f0a82d | running is cheaper than therapy. | Cal Newport | ||
| d8572f6 | I do all my work by hand and use tools that multiply my force without limiting my creativity or interaction with the material, | Cal Newport | ||
| 8b30262 | shoulder cast climbed | Robert Crais | ||
| 83ba11c | Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted | Cal Newport | ||
| 929baf1 | Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences--wherever you happen to be. | Cal Newport | ||
| 87db1b1 | Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius. | Cal Newport | ||
| 127e0a7 | If you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. | Cal Newport | ||
| e53f251 | Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?" Cooper asks. "They are programming people," | Cal Newport | ||
| 87dd1c0 | These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction | Cal Newport | ||
| 943b2ee | A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it's not a philosophical statement--it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. | Cal Newport | ||
| 713f664 | In July, Thoreau moved into the cabin where he then lived for the next two years. In the book Walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." | Cal Newport | ||
| 7dda7b9 | The average Facebook user, by contrast, spends around 350 minutes per week on this company's services | Cal Newport | ||
| 8dbb419 | It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. | Cal Newport | ||
| a74f79d | Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward the former. | Cal Newport | ||
| 9683462 | tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it. | Cal Newport | ||
| 6124267 | 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. Therefore, if you're in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone's q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small .. | Cal Newport | ||
| 2ec2086 | the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped. | Cal Newport |