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.”