Quotes from Cal newport

Conclusion #3: Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your

How to study wisely: (1) don't skip classes; (2) study early in the day; (3) study in isolation; (4) keep your energy levels high; (5) actively recall the material and quiz yourself until you're completely satisfied.

Once you're wired for distraction, you crave it.

To succeed with digital minimalism, you have to confront this rebalancing between conversation & connection in a way that makes sense to you.

If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you've found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work.

Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.

Our sociality is simply far too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages & emojis. Any digital minimalist must confront this reality & manage his or her relationship with these tools accordingly. [...] The key is the intention behind what you decide, not necessarily its details.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. Let's

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. Deep

she was witness to a "grand unified theory" of the mind: Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.

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.

If your specialty is new—as mine is—and they can't therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, you're going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as there's no one out there to validate your stature.

In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.

The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. By doing so, this principle drives us toward shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth.

Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: It's ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. It's not a question or proposal that interests you. Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn't.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.

we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist. Bad

recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past: A deep life is a good life.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on." In

My author website doesn't provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn't own my first smartphone until 2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum—"you have to have a phone that works before our son is born").

What's making us uncomfortable...is this feeling of losing control - a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child's bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.

The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. This

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. When