Cal Newport Quotes

“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”

“Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.”

“Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants.”

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

“If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.”

“If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.”

“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.”

“Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it.”

“Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”

“To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.”

“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.”

“What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life.”

“Do some good in the world for no other reason than wanting to be part of the solution.”

“Start small and start immediately.”

“Do what Steve Jobs did, not what he said. 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.”

“Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…”

“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?”).”

“If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an 'acceptable level'.”

“No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy.”

“Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”

“Spend time on what’s important, instead of what’s immediate.”

“The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition.”

“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.”

“The important thing about little bets is that they’re bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps.”

“The three traits that make people love their work are impact, creativity, and control.”

“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.”