Top 200 Cal Newport Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Cal Newport

52. “To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career.”

— Cal Newport

53. “At the end of every week he prints his numbers to see how well he achieved this goal, and then uses this feedback to guide himself in the week ahead.”

— Cal Newport

54. “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

55. “If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.”

— Cal Newport

56. “If your goal is to love what you do, you must first build up “career capital” by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the traits that define great work.”

— Cal Newport

57. “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.”

— Cal Newport

58. “A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work.”

— Cal Newport

59. “I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. Knuth.”

— Cal Newport

60. “Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those like us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action.”

— Cal Newport

61. “You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.”

— Cal Newport

62. “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.”

— Cal Newport

63. “Any pursuit – be it physical or cognitive – that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.”

— Cal Newport

64. “The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value.”

— Cal Newport

65. “With these rough categorizations established, the strategy works as follows: Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times. I suggest that you keep a notepad near your computer at work. On this pad, record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet. Until you arrive at that time, absolutely no network connectivity is allowed – no matter how tempting.”

— Cal Newport

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

— Cal Newport

67. “Knowledge workers, I’m arguing, are tending toward increasingly visible busyness because they lack a better way to demonstrate their value.”

— Cal Newport

68. “Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics.”

— Cal Newport

69. “Professorial E-mail Sorting: Do not reply to an e-mail message if any of the following applies: It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response. It’s not a question or proposal that interests you. Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.”

— Cal Newport

70. “Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”

— Cal Newport

71. “Rosen explains as follows: “Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” In other words, talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you’re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone’s q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best.”

— Cal Newport

72. “Se tan bueno que no puedan ignorarte.”

— Cal Newport

73. “The premise of this chapter is that by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.”

— Cal Newport

74. “Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward – even.”

— Cal Newport

75. “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 life, therefore, you must first get to the cutting edge – the only place where these missions become visible. This.”

— Cal Newport

76. “Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.”

— Cal Newport

77. “You can’t, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.”

— Cal Newport

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

— Cal Newport

79. “The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous. 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.”

— Cal Newport

80. “Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”

— Cal Newport

81. “What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change – not rest, except in sleep.”

— Cal Newport

82. “Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it.”

— Cal Newport

83. “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.”

— Cal Newport

84. “This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle – one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.”

— Cal Newport

85. “You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.”

— Cal Newport

86. “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 Luddism and boredom, and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future.”

— Cal Newport

87. “Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours – but rarely more.”

— Cal Newport

88. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.”

— Cal Newport

89. “To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances. The.”

— Cal Newport

90. “There is a middle ground, and if you’re interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.”

— Cal Newport

91. “Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you’ll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.”

— Cal Newport

92. “The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. This.”

— Cal Newport

93. “If you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.”

— Cal Newport

94. “In Ericsson’s seminal 1993 paper on the topic, titled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” he dedicates a section to reviewing what the research literature reveals about an individual’s capacity for cognitively demanding work. Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours – but rarely more.”

— Cal Newport

95. “Without this patient willingness to reject shiny new pursuits, you’ll derail your efforts before you acquire the capital you need.”

— Cal Newport

96. “The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.”

— Cal Newport

97. “In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it’s tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do – whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching.”

— Cal Newport

98. “We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity.”

— Cal Newport

99. “Here’s a case where someone successfully followed their passion,” they say, “therefore ‘follow your passion’ must be good advice.” This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective.”

— Cal Newport

100. “Why bother hiring a hotshot if the bulk of their time is spent doing administrative work?”

— Cal Newport