Quotes from Cal newport

Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Writing a letter to yourself is an excellent mechanism for generating exactly this type of solitude. It not only frees you from outside inputs but also provides a conceptual scaffolding on which to sort and organize your thinking. Not surprisingly, I'm not the only person to discover this particular solitude hack.

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. Let's

Kirk's path to American Treasures was incremental. He didn't decide out of nowhere that he wanted to host a television show and then work backward to make that dream a reality. Instead, he worked forward from his original mission—to popularize archaeology—with a series of small, almost tentative steps.

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.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech. Deep work is exiled in favor of more distracting high-tech behaviors, like the professional use of social media, not because the former is empirically inferior to the latter.

In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

Thurston struck up conversations with strangers. He enjoyed food without Instagramming the experience.

By contrast, if you're trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you're firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.

Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

On reflection, this makes sense. If you have many years' experience, then you've had time to get better at what you do and develop a feeling of efficacy. It also gives you time to develop strong relationships with your coworkers and to see many examples of your work benefiting others.

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.

you can allow time-sensitive communication into your offline blocks (e.g., texting with a friend to agree on where you'll meet for dinner), as well as time-sensitive information retrieval (e.g., looking up the location of the restaurant on your phone).

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted "Think Weeks" twice a year, during which he would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big thoughts.

introduced the term career capital to describe these rare and valuable skills, and noted that the tricky part is figuring out how to acquire this capital. By definition, if it's rare and valuable, it's not easy to get.

When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you'll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.

resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

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.

Thoreau's new economics was developed in an industrial age, but his basic insights apply just as well to our current digital context.

At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you'll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. If you need more time, then extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free to encounter Kreider's buttercups, stink bugs, and stars.

network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.

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

I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can't stand tourist attractions, don't sit on the beach unless there's a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don't care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. . . . Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.