Quotes from Cal newport

In which I argue that a mission chosen before you have relevant career capital is not likely to be sustainable. Mission

tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it.

If you are working on a computer science programming assignment, schedule yourself to finish a week early so you can add a host of extra bells and whistles.

Other interviews in the archive promote this same idea that it's hard to predict in advance what you'll eventually grow to love.

You're either remarkable or invisible," says

Mike, who is competitive by nature, tackled the project with intensity, driven by the belief that the better he did now, the better his options would be later.

Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller's obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that's more mentally demanding? As

what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive.

The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?

Therefore, if you're in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone's q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the superstars still win the bulk of the market. In the 1980s, when Rosen studied this

When you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don't like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness.

conversation is what counts—don't be distracted from this reality by the shiny stuff on your screen.

Overall, Pardis's most important commitment was to patience. She didn't try to force a direction for her working life, but instead built up her career capital and kept her eyes open for the interesting directions she knew this process would uncover.

Outsourcing your autonomy to an attention economy conglomerate—as you do when you mindlessly sign up for whatever new hot service emerges from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist class—is the opposite of freedom, and will likely degrade your individuality

Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. "The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase," he says.

solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.

deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction,

If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you'd be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is hard. Consider, for example, David Allen's Getting Things Done task-management methodology, which is a well-respected system for intelligently managing competing workplace obligations.

if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

The thesis of this final chapter in part one therefore is that "a deep life is not just economically lucrative but also a life well lived

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.

These directly measurable costs, however, were the easy part of his decision. It was instead the "opportunity costs" that required more attention. As he elaborated: "If I make hay all summer, I can't be doing something else.

other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, increasing the values of these jobs." In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive.

The first is that most of these technologies are still relatively new. Because of this reality, their role in your life can still seem novel and fun, obscuring more serious questions about the specific value they're providing.