“ This strategy suggests the following: To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously. Th… Cal Newport
“ These directly measurable costs, however, were the easy part of his decision. It was instead the opportunity costs that required more attention. As he elaborated: If I make hay all summer, I can’t be… Cal Newport
“ There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It’s… Cal Newport
“ The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Ludd… Cal Newport
“ The constant exposure to their friends’ carefully curated portrayals of their lives generates feelings of inadequacy—especially during periods when they’re already feeling low—and for teenagers, it pr… Cal Newport
“ The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. 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 it represents a departure from how most people understand such matters. I… Cal Newport
“ Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World, he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. It does not make them illegal. It does not make th… Cal Newport
“ Summary of Rule #3 Rules #1 and #2 laid the foundation for my new thinking on how people end up loving what they do. Rule #1 dismissed the passion hypothesis, which says that you have to first figure… Cal Newport
“ Others, such as Alan Lightman, or Erez Lieberman, who earned fame by the age of thirty-one through his combination of mathematics and cultural studies, or Esther Duflo, who won a MacArthur Genius Gran… Cal Newport
“ Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikszentmihalyi’s ESM studies reveal that most peopl… Cal Newport
“ Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubicle dweller’s obsessive e-mail–checking habit—for what is this beh… Cal Newport
“ Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further im… Cal Newport
“ It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. Cal Newport
“ In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but a… Cal Newport
“ Here’s Kreider’s explanation: Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental afflictio… Cal Newport
“ Gallagher’s writing emphasizes that the content of what we focus on matters. If we give rapt attention to important things, and therefore also ignore shallow negative things, we’ll experience our work… Cal Newport
“ Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things. Cal Newport
