Quotes from Cal newport

Lincoln's time alone with his thoughts played a crucial role in his ability to navigate a demanding wartime presidency. We can therefore say, with only mild hyperbole, that in a certain sense, solitude helped save the nation.

There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them.

You must be careful to choose a philosophy that fits your specific circumstances, as a mismatch here can derail your deep work habit before it has a chance to solidify.

Each of the habits describes an ongoing behavior rule. They're not dedicated to a particular objective, but instead are designed to maintain a background commitment to regular high-quality leisure in the planner's life.

the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped.

RULE #1 Don't Follow Your Passion

When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done.

Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they're pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well.

It's not about usefulness, it's about autonomy.

I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules," he said. "Do what people are willing to pay for.

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. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can't ignore you.

when a branch of psychology, sometimes called performance psychology, began to systematically explore what separates experts (in many different fields) from everyone else. In the early 1990s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, pulled together these strands into a single coherent answer, consistent with the growing research literature, that he gave a punchy name: deliberate practice.

You "like" my status update and I'll "like" yours. This agreement gives everyone a simulacrum of importance without requiring much effort in return.

By taking the time consumed by low-impact activities—like finding old friends on Facebook—and reinvesting in high-impact activities—like taking a good friend out to lunch—you end up more successful in your goal.

If your goal is to love what you do, I discovered, "follow you passion" can be bad advice. It's more important to become good at something rare and valuable, and then invest the career capital this generates into the type of traits that make a job great. The traits of control and mission are two good places to start.

After a bad or disrupting occurrence in your life, Fredrickson's research shows, what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward. These simple choices can provide a "reset button" to your emotions.

Others, such as Alan Lightman, or Erez Lieberman, who earned fame by the age of thirty-one through his combination of mathematics and cultural studies, or Esther Duflo, who won a MacArthur "Genius Grant" for her work evaluating anti-poverty programs, didn't make the cut for the book, but still weigh heavily on my thinking about how to best shape my own career. It

Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you're aiming to be valuable.

Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item

Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea." This advice comes from Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and professor of moral philosophy, who during the early part of the twentieth century penned a slim but influential volume titled The Intellectual Life.

Conclusion #1: Career Passions Are Rare

the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.

But this doesn't matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don't need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

In other words, this strategy suggests that when it comes to your relaxation, don't default to whatever catches your attention at the moment, but instead dedicate some advance thinking to the question of how you want to spend your "day within a day.