Goodreadspredictiverecords > Goodreadspredictiverecords's Quotes

“Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To 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

“the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do. On reflection, this makes sense.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradict this understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. There”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.”
― 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.”)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It's a zero-sum game.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands….”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level.”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

“To be clear, conversation-centric communication requires sacrifices. If you adopt this philosophy, you’ll almost certainly reduce the number of people with whom you have an active relationship. Real conversation takes time, and the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow, retweet, “like,” and occasionally leave a comment for on social media, or ping with the occasional text. Once you no longer count the latter activities as meaningful interaction, your social circle will seem at first to contract.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Where we want to be cautious . . . is when the sound of a voice or a cup of coffee with a friend is replaced with ‘likes’ on a post.”
― Holly Shakya, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”
― J.K. Rowling

“We’re right 50.75 percent of the time . . . but we’re 100 percent right 50.75 percent of the time,” Mercer told a friend. “You can make billions that way.”
― Gregory Zuckerman, The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb