Quotes from Cal newport

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.

Richard II's famous lament: "I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?"18

When he ran a review of his team's Slack usage, he found that the most popular feature was a plug-in that inserts animated GIFs into the chat conversations.

There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc'ing everybody, like 'Look at all the work I'm doing.' It's annoying

Stop focusing on these little details," it told me. "Focus instead on becoming better.

How do people end up loving what they do?

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don't cultivate this ability, you're likely to fall behind as technology advances.

Here's what I respect: creating something meaningful and then presenting it to the world,

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.

This same trend holds for the growing number of fields where technology makes productive remote work possible—consulting, marketing, writing, design, and so on. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.

As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant, ad hoc messaging, our Paleolithic brain will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.

Twitter is crack for media addicts.

As a 2018 article from the MIT Sloan Management Review explains: "The 'keep everybody busy' theory remains alive and well . . . in knowledge work."39 (The article elaborates that the manufacturing sector, by contrast, figured out in the 1980s that relentless busyness was not an optimal way to run things.)

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that's both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution,

The superstar effect, in other words, has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted thirty years ago. An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

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

You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.

As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today's economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people. When else in history could such a small amount of labor be involved in such a large amount of value?

Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your "converging rays of attention" to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration.

With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners—in this case, the venture investors—is without precedent. It's no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, "Everyone wants my job.

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.