Ben > Ben's Quotes

“The key to creating flow is balancing the challenge of a task with your skill level.”
― Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

“for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone.37 Now what that X represents I don’t really know … but it’s a substantial ratio.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

“connection is downgraded to a logistical role. This form of interaction now has two goals: to help set up and arrange conversation, or to efficiently transfer practical information (e.g., a meeting location or time for an upcoming event). Connection is no longer an alternative to conversation; it’s instead its supporter.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

“What makes general-purpose computing powerful is that you don’t need separate devices for separate uses, not that it allows you to do multiple things at the same time. The”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

“I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior:”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“He began with a clear baseline—in his case, that soil health is of fundamental importance to his professional success—and then built off this foundation toward a final call on whether to use a particular tool.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“even though we’re not capable of spending a full day in a state of blissful depth, this reality shouldn’t reduce the urgency of reducing shallow work, as the typical knowledge workday is more easily fragmented than many suspect.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Struggling to hold on to information and then recall it had helped the group distracted by math problems transfer the information from short-term to long-term memory.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“it is difficult to accept that the best learning road is slow, and that doing poorly now is essential for better performance later. It is so deeply counterintuitive that it fools the learners themselves,”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement,” the economists wrote, “on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the expert, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies. It requires a mindset switch from narrow to broad.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World