Cal Newport

Remember: ‘Work hard, play hard’ is always better than ‘Work kind of hard, play kind of hard.’

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

There are many, many different ways to study (and rote review is not one of the better ones). Once you reject the idea that all studying is equal, and instead make the crucial connection that studying is like any other skill—and as with any skill, can be done well or done poorly— then the premise of this book starts to make sense.

‘Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,’ Martin said. ‘What they want to hear is, ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’ ... but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’

It’s a mistake to think of the digital declutter as only a detox experience. The goal is not to simply give yourself a break from technology, but to instead spark a permanent transformation of your digital life. The detoxing is merely a step that supports this transformation.

Smart students avoid these issues by working constantly on assignments, in small chunks, every day.

Learning a large quantity of material from scratch during the review process is a mistake made by average students—and you should avoid this.

Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, ‘the superpower of the 21st century.’

An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits.

A natural conclusion of this reality is that we should treat with great care any new technology that threatens to disrupt the ways in which we connect and communicate with others. When you mess with something so central to the success of our species, it’s easy to create problems.

Don’t take breaks from distraction. Instead take breaks from focus.

Erecting barriers against the existential is not new—before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions—but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.

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.

Working right trumps finding the right work.

Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s instead a skill that has great value today.

You’ve learned two crucial insights: (1) Brute force study habits are incredibly inefficient; and (2) It is possible to come up with techniques that work much better and require much less time. ... You are now prepared ... to begin scoring top grades without sacrificing your health, happiness, or social life.

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

Declaring freedom from your smartphone is probably the most serious step you can take toward embracing the attention resistance. This follows because smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy.

Earlier, I cited extensive research that supports the claim that the human brain has evolved to process the flood of information generated by face-to-face interactions. To replace this rich flow with a single bit [of clicking ‘Like’]is the ultimate insult to our social processing machinery. To say it’s like driving a Ferrari under the speed limit is an understatement; the better simile is towing a Ferrari behind a mule.

My question was clear: How do people end up loving what they do? And I needed an answer. This book documents what I discovered in my search.

Another deliberate-practice routine was the introduction of my hour tally... The sheet has a row for each month on which I keep a tally of the total number of hours I’ve spent that month in a state of deliberate practice.

If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (‘what can the world offer me?’) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (‘what can I offer the world?’)

Strain, I now accepted, was good. Instead of seeing this discomfort as a sensation to avoid, I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn: a sign that you’re doing something right.

I propose an alternative to the Internet Sabbath. Instead of scheduling the occasional break *from distraction* so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break *from focus* to give in to distraction.

Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again—there’s no way to win a Pulitzer Prize or conceive a grand theory without pushing your brain to the limit.

To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can easily be reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you *permanently* reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

The Law of Financial Viability: 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.

Embrace the quiz-and-recall method. It’s the single most efficient way to study.

Much in the same way that the ‘innovation’ of highly processed foods in the mid-twentieth century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools—a sort of social fast food—are proving to be similarly worrisome.

Regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career.

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.