Cal Newport

“If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the…

— Cal Newport

“some might respond that their knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job’s subject is much…

— Cal Newport

“We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way…

— Cal Newport

“People ask me how I funded my business,” he said. “I tell them first I sold one CD, which gave me enough…

— Cal Newport

“as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a…

— Cal Newport

“The MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures. In his case, he retreats each summer to a “tiny…

— Cal Newport

“Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your “converging rays of…

— Cal Newport

“Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an…

— Cal Newport

“The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. This idea might sound obvious once it’s pointed out, but…

— Cal Newport

“I’ll call this output-centric approach to work the craftsman mindset. My”

— Cal Newport

“Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard…

— Cal Newport

“there’s something liberating about the craftsman mindset: It asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is “just right,”…

— Cal Newport

“If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find…

— Cal Newport

“Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among…

— Cal Newport

“Start small and start immediately.”

— Cal Newport

“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

“A deep life is a good life.”

— Cal Newport

“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

“fighting desires—over time these distractions drained their finite pool of willpower until they could no longer resist. The same will happen to…

— Cal Newport

“The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: “Twitter…

— Cal Newport

“David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”

— Cal Newport

“The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow,” Dewane explains. He imagines a…

— Cal Newport

“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

“If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the…

— Cal Newport

“Here was my first lesson: This type of skill development is hard. When I got to the first tricky gap in the…

— Cal Newport