“People ask me how I funded my business,” he said. “I tell them first I sold one CD, which gave me enough… — Cal Newport Business Copy Share Image
“The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number… — Cal Newport Goals Copy Share Image
“You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a… — Cal Newport Depleted Copy Share Image
“the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”… — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
“just because you really want to organize your work around a mission doesn’t mean that you can easily make it happen.” — Cal Newport Goals Copy Share Image
“as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a… — Cal Newport Knowledge workers Copy Share Image
“To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.” — Cal Newport Life Copy Share Image
“Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled… — Cal Newport Passion Copy Share Image
“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our… — Cal Newport Life Copy Share Image
“the pool of individuals to whom the monastic philosophy applies is limited—and that’s okay. If you’re outside this pool, its radical simplicity… — Cal Newport Philosophy Copy Share Image
“When I told Mark about Jordan, he agreed that an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule… — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
“Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs… — Cal Newport Postman Copy Share Image
“A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic… — Cal Newport Communication Copy Share Image
“The professors at MIT—some of the most innovative technologists in the world—wanted nothing to do with an open-office-style workspace. They instead demanded… — Cal Newport Architecture Copy Share Image
“if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity—the state in which real breakthroughs occur. This is… — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
“argue that his approach to batching helps explain this paradox. In particular, by consolidating his work into intense and uninterrupted pulses, he’s… — Cal Newport Habits Copy Share Image
“In 2013, for example, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the… — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
“TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK Creativity: Ira Glass, for example, is pushing the boundaries of radio, and winning armfuls of awards in… — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
“Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills… — Cal Newport Cutting edge Copy Share Image
“Here’s the routine: Once a week I require myself to summarize in my “bible” a paper I think might be relevant to… — Cal Newport Deliberate practice Copy Share Image
“Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less orthodox productivity strategies: To do real good physics work,… — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
“In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph’s critique is driven by the mistaken idea… — Cal Newport Habits Copy Share Image
“it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of… — Cal Newport Change Copy Share Image
“Consider consultant Clay Herbert, who is an expert in running crowd-funding campaigns for technology start-ups: a specialty that attracts a lot of… — Cal Newport Asking for help Copy Share Image
“At the end of every week he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal, and then uses this… — Cal Newport Goals Copy Share Image
“Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.” — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
“Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, “oh, that’s… — Cal Newport Beauty Copy Share Image
“Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not… — Cal Newport Assembly line Copy Share Image
“background-research process, which combines exposure to potentially relevant material with free-form re-combination of ideas, comes straight out of Steven Johnson’s book, Where… — Cal Newport Books Copy Share Image
“without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters.” — Cal Newport Accountability Copy Share Image
“if you’re not putting in the effort to become, as Steve Martin put it, “so good they can’t ignore you,” you’re not… — Cal Newport Hard work Copy Share Image
“The art of mission, we can conclude, asks us to suppress the most grandiose of our work instincts and instead adopt the… — Cal Newport Art Copy Share Image
“The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the… — Cal Newport Courage Copy Share Image
“when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck… — Cal Newport Focus Copy Share Image
“general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or… — Cal Newport Economics Copy Share Image
“Second, even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so.” — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
“when you do have enough capital to successfully make a shift toward more control. It’s at this point that you’re most likely… — Cal Newport Control Copy Share Image
“If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you’ve found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot… — Cal Newport Copy Share Image
“Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term “stretch” for describing what deliberate practice feels like,” — Cal Newport Deliberate Copy Share Image
“If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find… — Cal Newport Mentorship Copy Share Image
