Quotes from Cal newport

In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it's not commonplace; it's instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard—the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives. The

Examples similar to those given above are voluminous and point to a clear conclusion: regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being. It's more urgent now than ever that we recognize this fact, because, as I'll argue next, for the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.

To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.

Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that "we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

We didn't sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.

In 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. To

The more time you spend "connecting" on these services, the more isolated you're likely to become.

Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.

This magician's trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau's "new economics," a theory that builds on the following axiom, which 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.

The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Luddism and boredom, and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future.

Be disciple of depth in shallow world.

If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.

the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized.

to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn't mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it's sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy. Work

The key here isn't to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marking coup: convincing our culture that if you don't use their products you might miss out.

There is a middle ground, and if you're interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.

The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish." They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of "wildly important goals." This

The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.

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