Quotes from Cal newport

The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit.

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

But the relevant follow-up question is whether browsing Instagram photos is the best way to support this value. On some reflection, the answer is probably no. Something as simple as actually calling this cousin once a month or would probably prove significantly more effective in maintaining this bond.

The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

This provides another general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don't produce, you won't thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance." Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

cultivating "concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.")

There are many ways to discover that you're not valuable in our economy. For Jason Benn the lesson was made clear when he realized, not long after taking a job as a financial consultant, that the vast majority of his work responsibilities could be automated by a "kludged together" Excel script.

Let's assume you're a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you'll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better.

In my work on this topic, I've become convinced that 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.

craft-centric." Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. This is a different way of thinking about work, but once you embrace it, the changes to your career trajectory can be profound.

One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.

the importance of ability. The things that make a great job great, I discovered, are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return. In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect a good job.

To embrace news media from a mind-set of slowness requires first and foremost that you focus only on the highest-quality sources. Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that's possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it.

We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that's not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention," explained Roediger in a New York Times blog post (emphasis mine). The ability in question is called "attentional control," and it measures the subjects' ability to maintain their focus on essential information.

A digital adviser named Ilona, for example, set up a regular schedule for calling & texting her friends - which supported her most serious relationships at the cost of some of the more lightweight touches many have come to expect. "In the end, I just accepted the fact that I would miss some vents in their lives, but that this was worthwhile for the mental energy it would save me to not be on social media.

attention restoration theory (ART), which claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.

We should not, therefore, expect the bottom-line impact of depth-destroying behaviors to be easily detected.

Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply

something more fundamental to human flourishing: the sense of meaning that comes from acting with intention.

The idle mind is the devil's workshop

build your working life around the experience of flow

The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you've become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.