Quotes About Quality

The best storytellers eliminate photographs before they even begin shooting. They pre-edit. They determine what isn't worth their effort to free up their time for the things that may prove to be remarkable.

Friends should be like books, few, but hand-selected.

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Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

minimalists don't mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

Rosen explains as follows: "Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There's a premium to being the best. 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.

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

The premise of this chapter is that by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.

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

philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Her curiosity piqued, Gallagher set out to better understand the role that attention—that is, what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life. After five years of science reporting, she came away convinced that she was witness to a "grand unified theory" of the mind:

Stephenson sees two mutually exclusive options: He can write good novels at a regular rate, or he can answer a lot of individual e-mails and attend conferences, and as a result produce lower-quality novels at a slower rate.

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you're capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

le distrazioni digitali di bassa qualità rivestono un ruolo importante nella vita delle persone, più di quanto queste immaginino

Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance

Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance." In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There's a premium to being the best.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech. Deep work is exiled in favor of more distracting high-tech behaviors, like the professional use of social media, not because the former is empirically inferior to the latter.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.

To embrace news media from a mind-set of slowness requires first and foremost that you focus only on the highest-quality sources. Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that's possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it.

It's worth taking the time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life. It's helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider what at first seems to be an unresolvable conflict.

I culled my list of friends down to just meaningful relationships.

I'll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset. My