Quotes from Cal newport

It's not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that's how they make their money.

It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.

It's just that we don't know what that passion is. If you ask someone, they'll tell you what they think they're passionate about, but they probably have it wrong." In other words, she believes that having passion for your work is vital, but she also believes that it's a fool's errand to try to figure out in advance what work will lead to this passion.

fighting desires—over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions—unless, that is, you're smart about your habits.

Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. Before

The pianist Glenn Gould once proposed a mathematical formula for this cycle, telling a journalist: "I've always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what that X represents I don't really know . . . but it's a substantial ratio.

Pete is an example of someone who is handy, in the sense that he's comfortable picking up a new handy physical skill when needed. [...] If you lived in a rural area, for example, you had to be comfortable fixing & building things - there was no Amazon Prime to deliver a replacement or Yelp-approved contractor to stop by with his tools.

En de?erli anlar, genellikle ki?inin zor ve mühim bir i?i ba?armak için harcad??? istemli çaba esnas?nda bedeninin ve zihninin s?n?rlar?n? zorlamas?ndan do?ar. Csikszentmihalyi bu zihinsel durumu ak?? [flow] olarak adland?rd?. Bu bulgu, istirahatin insan? mutlu yapt??? yönündeki genel geçer kabule de ayk?r?yd? ayn? zamanda.

Knowledge workers, I'm arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value. Let's give this tendency a name. Busyness as Proxy for Productivity:

there's something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is "just right," and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won't be easy.

little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It's a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn't exist before). It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback.

For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to "spend more time working deeply" doesn't spark a lot of enthusiasm. To instead have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.

you have duties during the declutter beyond following your technology rules. For this process to succeed, you must also spend this period trying to rediscover what's important to you and what you enjoy outside the world of the always-on, shiny digital.

This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

manifesto titled "A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention.

this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

I am suggesting that you put aside the question of whether your job is your true passion, and instead turn your focus toward becoming so good they can't ignore you. That is, regardless of what you do for a living, approach your work like a true performer.

In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what's meaningful and what's not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. "The Enlightenment's metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life," Dreyfus and Kelly worry; "it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.

Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done.

To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

To concentrate requires what ART calls directed attention. This resource is finite: If you exhaust it, you'll struggle to concentrate. (For

When the technology executive Daniel Clough decided to dumb down his phone experience, he didn't trash his iPhone but instead put it in the kitchen cupboard. He likes to use it when exercising so that he can listen to music and run his Nike+ fitness tracking app.

Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it's instead like a muscle that tires. This is why the subjects in the Hofmann and Baumeister study had such a hard time fighting desires—over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to you, regardless of your intentions—unless, that is, you're smart about your habits.

Martin's axiom, however, I dashed off a blog post that introduced his idea to my readers.5 "Sure,