Quotes from Cal newport

Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.

If you don't produce, you won't thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset ("what can the world offer me?") and instead adopt the craftsman mindset ("what can I offer the world?").

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they're friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they're just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let's face it, checking your "likes" is the new smoking.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: "Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don't, you'll never find time for the life-changing big things.

Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.

To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable.

Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

If you can't learn, you can't thrive.

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 and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

Do some good in the world for no other reason than wanting to be part of the solution.

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. On reflection, this makes sense.

The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.

Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won't be easy.

Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. There

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.

Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.

As Nietzsche said: "It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.")

If you're not uncomfortable, then you're probably stuck at an "acceptable level.