Cal Newport Quotes

Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it's captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you're done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, "Shutdown complete"). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it's safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.

The things that make a great job great...are rare and valuable. If you want them in your working life, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return In other words, you need to be good at something before you can expect to get a good job.

Who could justify trading a lifetime of stress and backbreaking labor for better blinds? Is a nicer-looking window treatment really worth so much of your life?

But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marking coup: convincing our culture that if you don't use their products you might miss out.

When I began reflecting on this law, I saw that it applied again and again to examples of people successfully acquiring more control in their careers. To understand this, notice that the definition of "willing to pay" varies. In some cases, it literally means customers paying you money for a product or a service. But it can also mean getting approved for a loan, receiving an outside investment, or, more commonly, convincing an employer to either hire you or keep writing you paychecks. Once you adopt this flexible definition of "pay for it," this law starts popping up all over. Consider,

(As Nietzsche said: "It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.")

A job...is a way to pay the bills, a career is a path towards increasingly better work, and a calling is work that's an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity.

With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners - in this case, the venture investors - is without precedent. It's no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, "Everyone wants my job.

As I'll explain, mission is one of these desirable traits, and like any such desirable trait, it too requires that you first build career capital - a mission launched without this expertise is likely doomed to sputter and die. But capital alone is not enough to make a mission a reality. Plenty of people are good at what they do but haven't reoriented their career in a compelling direction. Accordingly, I will go on to explore a pair of advanced tactics that also play an important role in making the leap from a good idea for a mission to actually making that mission a reality. In the chapters ahead, you'll learn the value of systematically experimenting with different proto-missions to seek out a direction worth pursuing. You'll also learn the necessity of deploying a marketing mindset in the search for your focus. In other words, missions are a powerful trait to introduce into your working life, but they're also fickle, requiring careful coaxing to make them a reality. This

Pushing past what is comfortable, however is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback - even if it destroys what you thought was good.

The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase.

If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless - which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you're producing is mediocre, then you're in trouble, as it's too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you're a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you're capable of producing - a task that requires depth.

Telling someone to "follow their passion" is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

Pardis Sabeti thought small by focusing patiently for years on a narrow niche (the genetics of diseases in Africa), but then acting big once she acquired enough capital to identify a mission (using computational genetics to help understand and fight ancient diseases). Sarah and Jane, by contrast, reversed this order. They started by thinking big, looking for a world-changing mission, but without capital they could only match this big thinking with small, ineffectual acts. The art of mission, we can conclude, asks us to suppress the most grandiose of our work instincts and instead adopt the patience - the style of patience observed with Pardis Sabeti - required to get this ordering correct.

Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you're aiming to be valuable.

Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.

As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: "Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don't, you'll never find time for the life-changing big things.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love - is the sum of what you focus on.

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

Do some good in the world for no other reason than wanting to be part of the solution.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Face-to-face conversation is the most human--and humanizing--thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It's where we develop the capacity for empathy. It's where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.

Irrespective of what type of work you do, the craftsman mindset is crucial for building a career you love. Before

Rule #4 is entitled "Think Small, Act Big." It's in this understanding of career capital and its role in mission that we get our explanation for this title. Advancing to the cutting edge in a field is an act of "small" thinking, requiring you to focus on a narrow collection of subjects for a potentially long time. Once you get to the cutting edge, however, and discover a mission in the adjacent possible, you must go after it with zeal: a "big" action. Pardis

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it - and the process won't be easy.

Start small and start immediately.

he came to realize a simple truth: Working right trumps finding the right work. He didn't need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness - he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him.

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It's a zero-sum game.

All it takes is an ideology seductive enough to convince you to discard common sense.

If you can't learn, you can't thrive.

We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren't that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradict this understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.

It's just that we don't know what that passion is. If you ask someone, they'll tell you what they think they're passionate about, but they probably have it wrong." In other words, she believes that having passion for your work is vital, but she also believes that it's a fool's errand to try to figure out in advance what work will lead to this passion.