Quotes from Cal newport

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts. Notice

Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You're In For the sake of clarity, I will introduce some new terminology. When you are acquiring career capital in a field, you can imagine that you are acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it.

Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, "the superpower of the 21st century.

The "great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day," he elaborates, is that even though he doesn't particularly enjoy his work (seeing it as something to "get through"), "he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as 'the day,' to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.

Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in The Intellectual Life, "Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure." Ericsson couldn't have said it better.)

this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they're ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place:

I get an extra 20 IQ points from being in that office,

2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

the crucial step in programming is not the actual act of mechanically typing commands into a computer, but instead crafting the underlying solution that is then translated into code.

Acuity, ScheduleOnce, Calendly, and, of course, x.ai (to name a few examples among many)

In such a culture, 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.

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life unpleasantly stale.

A job...is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path towards increasingly better work, and a calling is work that's an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.

now checks AllSides.com once a day—a news site that covers the top stories, but for each story it neutrally links to three articles: one from a source associated with the political left, one from the right, and one from the

Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it's not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives.

for the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.

In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it's tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching.

a better objective for support units would be the following: to effectively fulfill their administrative duties with as small an impact as possible on the specialists' main work obligations. If taken seriously this metric might mean a given support unit needs to make its own work less efficient to better serve the organization.

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you

You have to get good before you can expect good work. As

the months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to earn him quick cash.

In Ericsson's seminal 1993 paper on the topic, titled "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual's capacity for cognitively demanding work. Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.

written summary of the call was sent to the client. Sean's