Deep Work Quotes

“the deep work novice. As I established in the opening to this rule, the ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires a sense of confidence in your abilities—a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed. This type of conviction is typically built on a foundation of existing professional accomplishment. Isaacson,”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we’re now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: “Thoughts?” These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction. So”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A clean break is best. In”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Regardless of where you work, be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“contributions”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Our technologies are racing ahead but many of our skills and organizations are lagging behind.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“A side effect of memory training, in other words, is an improvement in your general ability to concentrate.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To learn requires intense concentration. This idea turns out to be ahead of its time. In reflecting on the life of the mind in the 1920s, Sertillanges uncovered a fact about mastering cognitively demanding tasks that would take academia another seven decades to formalize. This task of formalization began in earnest in the 1970s, when a branch of psychology, sometimes called performance psychology, began to systematically explore what separates experts (in many different fields) from everyone else. In the early 1990s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, pulled together these strands into a single coherent answer, consistent with the growing research literature, that he gave a punchy name: deliberate practice. Ericsson opens his seminal paper on the topic with a powerful claim: “We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable… Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals. - Medieval Quarry Worker's Creed”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Paperback By Cal Newport

“Damoclean cap”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Part of what fueled social media’s rapid ascent, I contend, is its ability to short-circuit this connection between the hard work of producing real value and the positive reward of having people pay attention to you.”
― 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”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“(As Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”) This”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. 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

“The world used to be, in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things,” Dreyfus and Kelly explain early in the book. “The shining things now seem far away.” What happened between then and now? The short answer, the authors argue, is Descartes. From Descartes’s”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“When measured empirically, people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected. And as the ESM studies confirmed, the more such flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject’s life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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. Even”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“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.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Benn is a smart guy. He graduated from an elite college (the University of Virginia) with a degree in economics, and like many in his situation he had ambitions for his career.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“These subsequent titles include William Powers’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail, and Alex Soojung-Kin Pang’s The Distraction Addiction—all of which agree, more or less, that network tools are distracting us from work”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you instead remain one of the many for whom depth is uncomfortable and distraction ubiquitous, you shouldn’t expect these systems and skills to come easily to you.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow—e-mail, social media, Web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World