Top 200 Cal Newport Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance – arguably the most valuable substance we possess – and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time.”

— Cal Newport

102. “The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.”

— Cal Newport

103. “Be disciple of depth in shallow world.”

— Cal Newport

104. “If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line – forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.”

— Cal Newport

105. “Recall our XP case study, where Greg Woodward noted that a lot of developers dislike the extreme environment and end up leaving after a few weeks. The aspect that most distresses them? The transparency. You’re either producing good code, or you’re obviously not. Some are simply not comfortable with this blunt assessment of what they’re actually accomplishing.”

— Cal Newport

106. “For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life unpleasantly stale.”

— Cal Newport

107. “You’re instead waging a David and Goliath battle against institutions that are both impossibly rich and intent on using this wealth to stop you from winning.”

— Cal Newport

108. “Examples similar to those given above are voluminous and point to a clear conclusion: regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being. It’s more urgent now than ever that we recognize this fact, because, as I’ll argue next, for the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.”

— Cal Newport

109. “In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.”

— Cal Newport

110. “In the end, he settled on posting one picture every week of whatever personal art project he happens to be working on. “It’s a great way for me to have a visual archive of my projects,” he explained. He also follows only a small number of accounts, all of which belong to artists whose work inspires him – making the experience of checking his feed both fast and meaningful.”

— Cal Newport

111. “All things being equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent communication are superior to those that instead amplify it. When you’re at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation, you shouldn’t feel like each moment away from work is a moment in which you’re accumulating deeper communication debt.”

— Cal Newport

112. “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

113. “As I argued, when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it’s not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind.”

— Cal Newport

114. “Philip Morris just wanted your lungs,” Maher concludes. “The App Store wants your soul.”

— Cal Newport

115. “He disabled notifications for 112 different apps on his iPhone. “It’s relatively easy to retake control,” he optimistically concludes.”

— Cal Newport

116. “None of these students was interested in achieving solely for achieving’s sake; rather, they had a natural hunger for intellectual challenge and a flair for transforming their personal interests into exciting projects.”

— Cal Newport

117. “The idea that it’s valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade or so – the detritus of overexuberant network scientists spilling inappropriately into the social sphere.”

— Cal Newport

118. “A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services. The hyperactive hive mind workflow has become ubiquitous in the knowledge sector.”

— Cal Newport

119. “What we know at this point,” Shakya told NPR, “is that we have evidence that replacing your real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being.”

— Cal Newport

120. “By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they’re losing control to their screens.”

— Cal Newport

121. “Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle.”

— Cal Newport

122. “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. I.”

— Cal Newport

123. “While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.”

— Cal Newport

124. “You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.”

— Cal Newport

125. “One study estimates that by 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.2 A software company called RescueTime recently measured this behavior directly using time-tracking software and calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.3 A.”

— Cal Newport

126. “Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even if it’s more harmful in the long term – so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend’s new baby instead of stopping by to visit.”

— Cal Newport

127. “Optimize processes, he urged, not people.”

— Cal Newport

128. “When he ran a review of his team’s Slack usage, he found that the most popular feature was a plug-in that inserts animated GIFs into the chat conversations.”

— Cal Newport

129. “For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.”

— Cal Newport

130. “Basic control over your schedule breeds balance.”

— Cal Newport

131. “As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.”

— Cal Newport

132. “The key lesson I want to extract from Marshall’s story is that management is about more than responsiveness. Indeed, as detailed earlier in this chapter, a dedication to responsiveness will likely degrade your ability to make smart decisions and plan for future challenges.”

— Cal Newport

133. “As Harris argues, these companies didn’t invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto-tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network’s usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could significantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users.”

— Cal Newport

134. “I’m usually facing someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem.” His solution is simpler: “Go talk to them.”

— Cal Newport

135. “There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc’ing everybody, like ‘Look at all the work I’m doing.’ It’s annoying.”

— Cal Newport

136. “This same trend holds for the growing number of fields where technology makes productive remote work possible – consulting, marketing, writing, design, and so on. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.”

— Cal Newport

137. “Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.”

— Cal Newport

138. “As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant, ad hoc messaging, our Paleolithic brain will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.”

— Cal Newport

139. “The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.”

— Cal Newport

140. “These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes.”

— Cal Newport

141. “For many, the core question of “is this the best way to use technology to support this value?” leads them to carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.”

— Cal Newport

142. “The world without email referenced in the title of this book, therefore, is not a place in which protocols like SMTP and POP3 are banished. It is, however, a place where you spend most of your day actually working on hard things instead of talking about this work, or endlessly bouncing small tasks back and forth in messages.”

— Cal Newport

143. “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.”

— Cal Newport

144. “Step 1: Decide What Capital Market You’re In For the sake of clarity, I will introduce some new terminology. When you are acquiring career capital in a field, you can imagine that you are acquiring this capital in a specific type of career capital market. There are two types of these markets: winner-take-all and auction. In a winner-take-all market, there is only one type of career capital available, and lots of different people competing for it.”

— Cal Newport

145. “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”

— Cal Newport

146. “Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.”

— Cal Newport

147. “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.”

— Cal Newport

148. “The important thing about little bets is that they’re bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This.”

— Cal Newport

149. “Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, identifying a compelling mission once you get to the cutting edge can be seen as investing your career capital to acquire a desirable trait in your career. In other words, mission is yet another example of career capital theory in action. If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital.”

— Cal Newport

150. “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