Top 200 Cal Newport Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.”

— Cal Newport

152. “A clean break is best. In.”

— Cal Newport

153. “The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: “Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.”

— Cal Newport

154. “If you’re wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram – you’re not really walking, and therefore you’re not going to experience this practice’s greatest benefits.”

— Cal Newport

155. “Sertillanges argues that to advance your understanding of your field you must tackle the relevant topics systematically, allowing your “converging rays of attention” to uncover the truth latent in each. In other words, he teaches: To learn requires intense concentration.”

— Cal Newport

156. “You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your.”

— Cal Newport

157. “Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: “to do real good physics work.”

— Cal Newport

158. “We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.”

— Cal Newport

159. “To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.”

— Cal Newport

160. “We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic.”

— Cal Newport

161. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” explains Matthew Crawford.”

— Cal Newport

162. “The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.”

— Cal Newport

163. “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?”

— Cal Newport

164. “If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers.”

— Cal Newport

165. “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.”

— Cal Newport

166. “Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.”

— Cal Newport

167. “If your specialty is new – as mine is – and they can’t therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, you’re going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as there’s no one out there to validate your stature.”

— Cal Newport

168. “I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared.”

— Cal Newport

169. “It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude. We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether.”

— Cal Newport

170. “What’s making us uncomfortable... is this feeling of losing control – a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.”

— Cal Newport

171. “This is what you should experience in your own pursuit of “good.” If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.”

— Cal Newport

172. “First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness.”

— Cal Newport

173. “If you spend too much time focusing on whether or not you’ve found your true calling, the question will be rendered moot when you find yourself out of work.”

— Cal Newport

174. “To reestablish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation.”

— Cal Newport

175. “The superstar effect, in other words, has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted thirty years ago. An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors.”

— Cal Newport

176. “You have to get good before you can expect good work. As.”

— Cal Newport

177. “Once you’ve identified these goals, list for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal. These activities should be specific enough to allow you to clearly picture doing them. On the other hand, they should be general enough.”

— Cal Newport

178. “No one owes you a great career, it argues; you.”

— Cal Newport

179. “A better strategy for shifting other’s expectations about your work is to consistently deliver what you promise instead of consistently explaining how you’re working.”

— Cal Newport

180. “All the people I ever admired and respected led balanced lives – studying hard, partying hard, as well as being involved in activities and getting a decent amount of sleep each night. I really think this is the only logically defensible way of doing things.” Chris, a straight-A college student.”

— Cal Newport

181. “How do people end up loving what they do?”

— Cal Newport

182. “Whether you’re a writer, marketer, consultant, or lawyer: Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.”

— Cal Newport

183. “To do it right, it is the most complicated thing I know how to make,” Furrer explains. “And it’s that challenge that drives me. I don’t need a sword. But I have to make them.”

— Cal Newport

184. “Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said.”

— Cal Newport

185. “As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today’s economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people. When else in history could such a small amount of labor be involved in such a large amount of value?”

— Cal Newport

186. “In this second part, I introduce a framework I call attention capital theory that argues for creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while minimizing unnecessary miseries. This.”

— Cal Newport

187. “The more time you spend “connecting” on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become.”

— Cal Newport

188. “If you go after more control in your working life without a rare and valuable skill to offer in return, you’re likely pursuing a mirage.”

— Cal Newport

189. “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.”

— Cal Newport

190. “There’s a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work – whether you’re Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher’s theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance.”

— Cal Newport

191. “By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.”

— Cal Newport

192. “When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.”

— Cal Newport

193. “In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s not commonplace; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard – the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives. The.”

— Cal Newport

194. “Twitter is crack for media addicts.”

— Cal Newport

195. “A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.”

— Cal Newport

196. “We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction.”

— Cal Newport

197. “Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences – wherever you happen to be.”

— Cal Newport

198. “When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.”

— Cal Newport

199. “Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.”

— Cal Newport

200. “It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.”

— Cal Newport