“ Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term stretch for describing what deliberate practice feels like, Cal Newport
“ David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: [Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants. Cal Newport
“ Databases of this type are interrogated in a language called SQL. You send them commands like the one shown here to interact with their stored information. Understanding how to manipulate these databa… Cal Newport
“ Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four disciplines (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully… Cal Newport
“ But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their wor… Cal Newport
“ Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away… Cal Newport
“ Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, oh, that’s well written code. It’s much like as if you were writing a poem. Cal Newport
“ Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101. Cal Newport
“ Bad courses, with incompatible professors and unreasonable requirements, are the key to developing an ulcer. Cal Newport
“ Anthony Storr helped correct this omission with his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self. Cal Newport
“ And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically—his website offers no e-m… Cal Newport
“ An even more extreme example of a onetime grand gesture yielding results is a story involving Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and social media pioneer. As a popular speaker, Shankman spends much of hi… Cal Newport
“ An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too. Cal Newport
“ All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, Blaise Pascal Cal Newport
“ A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough—it’s an innovation waiting to be discovered in the adjacent possible of your field. If you want to identify a mission for your working lif… Cal Newport
“ A Brief Mission Intermission Let’s take a moment to pull together what we’ve learned so far about mission. In the last chapter, I used Pardis Sabeti’s story to emphasize that you need career capital b… Cal Newport
“ A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a… Cal Newport
“ Without these accountability tools, I tended to procrastinate on this work, turning my attention to more urgent but less important matters. Cal Newport
“ The technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped. Cal Newport
