Quotes from Cal newport

Every example below is something that either I or someone I know was able to learn and execute in a single weekend. Changing your own car oil Installing a new ceiling-mounted light fixture Learning the basics of a new technique on an instrument you already play (e.g., a guitar player learning Travis picking) Figuring out how to precisely calibrate the tone arm on your turntable Building a custom headboard from high-quality lumber Starting a garden plot

Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, it's easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalists would argue that this perception is backward: what's extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens.

Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that's the least bit interesting or valuable.

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 to thrive as auto mechanics.

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.

to your work, then he will close the deal. To

Control that's acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we've painstakingly adapted over millennia.

We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We're instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a (dare I say, brave) new world.

But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don't use their products you might miss out.

Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves.

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase," he says.

Jordan left me in the dust. I played. But he practiced.

Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance

The First Control Trap In which I introduce the first control trap, which warns that it's dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. Jane's

When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.

A now voluminous line of inquiry, initiated in a series of pioneering papers also written by Roy Baumeister, has established the following important (and at the time, unexpected) truth about willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

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.

Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

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.

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.

Driven by this insight, while my classmates contemplated their true calling, I went seeking opportunities to master rare skills that would yield big rewards.

The alternative, to not embrace all things Internet, is, as Postman would say, "invisible and therefore irrelevant.

they joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table.