100 Cal Newport Quotes

Looking for the famous Cal Newport Quotes and Sayings? Here are best Cal Newport Quotes from his books “Deep Work”, “Digital Minimalism”, “A World Without Email” and “Slow Productivity“.

Cal Newport Quotes

1. “Action is the ultimate form of mastery.” – Cal Newport

2. “Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.” – Cal Newport

3. “Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.” – Cal Newport

4. “The ability to concentrate is a skill that must be trained.” – Cal Newport
5. “To succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.” – Cal Newport
6. “The key to unlocking productive deep work is to make peace with boredom.” – Cal Newport
7. “The ability to focus is becoming the scarcest commodity of the 21st century.” – Cal Newport
8. “An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts.” – Cal Newport
9. “Incessant clicking and scrolling generates a background hum of anxiety.” – Cal Newport
10. “Humans are not wired to be constantly wired.” – Cal Newport
11. “Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it.” – Cal Newport
12. “A deep life is a good life.” – Cal Newport
13. “Distraction remains a destroyer of depth.” – Cal Newport
14. “The more time you spend “connecting”on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become.” – Cal Newport
15. “The ability to effectively manage one’s attention and time is becoming increasingly valuable in a world with an ever-growing number of distractions.” – Cal Newport
16. “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love – is the sum of what you focus on.” – Cal Newport
17. “We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity.” – Cal Newport
18. “Network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.” – Cal Newport
19. “Is Silicon Valley programming apps or are they programming people?” – Cal Newport
20. “You can’t build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.” – Cal Newport
21. “Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.” – Cal Newport
22. “How tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.” – Cal Newport
23. “Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the Internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.” – Cal Newport
24. “The most productive people don’t let themselves be distracted by email, text messages, or social media notifications.” – Cal Newport
25. “Checking your “likes” is the new smoking.” – Cal Newport
26. “Social media’s a double-edged sword. It can be great in moderation, but it can be toxic if it takes over too much of your life.” – Cal Newport
27. “In many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.” – Cal Newport
28. “Spend some time away from your phone most days. This time could take many forms, from a quick morning errand to a full evening out, depending on your comfort level.” – Cal Newport
29. “The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children.” – Cal Newport
30. “No one ever changed the world, created a new industry, or amassed a fortune due to their fast email response time.” – Cal Newport
31. “If aimed carefully, your attention can bring you great meaning and satisfaction. At the same time, however, hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested into companies whose sole purpose is to hijack as much of your attention as possible and push it toward targets optimized to create value for a small number of people in Northern California.” – Cal Newport
32. “To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I’m arguing, is a transformative experience.” – Cal Newport
33. “This is my main concern with large attention economy conglomerates like Twitter and Facebook: it’s not that they’re worthless, but instead it’s the fact that they’re engineered to be as addictive as possible.” – Cal Newport
34. “We’re not evolved for digital life, which is why binges of online activities often leave us in a confused state of strung out exhaustion.” – Cal Newport
35. “I’m yet to meet someone who feels exhilarated after an evening of trawling clickbait.” – Cal Newport
36. “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
37. “The hot new technologies that emerged in the past decade or so are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions, leading people to use them much more than they think is useful or healthy.” – Cal Newport
38. “Don’t use the Internet because you can, use it only when you have a good reason.” – Cal Newport
39. “To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.” – Cal Newport
40. “Attention is scarce and fragile.” – Cal Newport
41. “The ability to focus without distraction is a superpower in the age of distraction.” – Cal Newport
42. “Focus on activities that are both meaningful and valuable, even if they’re not what everyone else is doing.” – Cal Newport
43. “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.” – Cal Newport
44. “The key to unlocking deep work is to create systems and routines that make it easy for you to focus without distraction.” – Cal Newport
45. “The ability to focus deeply on a task is becoming increasingly rare, and increasingly valuable in our economy.” – Cal Newport
46. “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love – is the sum of what you focus on.” – Cal Newport
47. “What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore — plays in defining the quality of our life.” – Cal Newport
48. “Do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality.” – Cal Newport
49. “Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.” – Cal Newport
50. “This is a basic 80/20 analysis: doing less, but focusing on higher quality, can generate more total value.” – Cal Newport
51. “Minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.” – Cal Newport
52. “The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.” – Cal Newport
53. “Real success today comes from deep work, from intense, valuable, creative effort that moves the needle.” – Cal Newport
54. “The goal of deep work isn’t just to finish a task quickly, but to produce high-quality results.” – Cal Newport
55. “There’s an administrative overhead that comes along with saying ‘yes’ to something: emails, standing meetings every Wednesday… If you say ‘yes’ to too many things, this overhead tax begins to pile up.” – Cal Newport
56. “You can’t be busy and frenetic and bouncing off the walls with 100 projects if you’re obsessed about doing something really well.” – Cal Newport
57. “To have a mission is to have a unifying focus for your career.” – Cal Newport
58. “To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.” – Cal Newport
59. “Busyness doesn’t produce high value.” – Cal Newport
60. “High-quality work produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus).” – Cal Newport
61. “Slow productivity produces good stuff. It doesn’t just make the workers happier.” – Cal Newport
62. “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
63. “Slow productivity is my attempt at creating a sophisticated ethic of doing work that you’re actually proud of… that’s important… that’s meaningful.” – Cal Newport
64. “The central goal of slow productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level.” – Cal Newport
65. “Working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity.” – Cal Newport
66. “Focus on the wildly important.” – Cal Newport
67. “Two core abilities for thriving in the new economy. 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.” – Cal Newport
68. “Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.” – Cal Newport
69. “The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase.” – Cal Newport
70. “To remain valuable in our economy you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.” – Cal Newport
71. “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.” – Cal Newport
72. “If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive — no matter how skilled or talented you are.” – Cal Newport
73. “If you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably stuck at an “acceptable level”.” – Cal Newport
74. “When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.” – Cal Newport
75. “Thoreau once wrote: I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” – Cal Newport
76. “We need solitude to thrive as human beings, and in recent years, without even realizing it, we’ve been systematically reducing this crucial ingredient from our lives.” – Cal Newport
77. “Trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.” – Cal Newport
78. “Regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being.” – Cal Newport
79. “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
80. “Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.” – Cal Newport
81. “When you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships.” – Cal Newport
82. “Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences — wherever you happen to be.” – Cal Newport
83. “Three crucial benefits provided by solitude: new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others.” – Cal Newport
84. “Give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.” – Cal Newport
85. “There’s nothing wrong with connectivity, but if you don’t balance it with regular doses of solitude, its benefits will diminish.” – Cal Newport
86. “For the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.” – Cal Newport
87. “I don’t work after five thirty P.M.” – Cal Newport
88. “Schedule shut down, complete.” – Cal Newport
89. “Be disciple of depth in shallow world.” – Cal Newport
90. “You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.” – Cal Newport
91. “Variations in intensity are completely compatible with killing it, with producing great stuff.” – Cal Newport
92. “The most valuable form of mastery isn’t knowledge but the ability to think and work independently.” – Cal Newport
93. “There’s value in taking time away from work to reflect on what you’ve done, to assess what you’ve learned, and to plan for the future.” – Cal Newport
94. “We’re good, as humans, to committing to things that are positive. That’s very motivating for us. We’re bad at trying to avoid things that are negative.” – Cal Newport
95. “The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition.” – Cal Newport
96. “The ability to concentrate without distraction is becoming increasingly valuable in our world of digital overload.” – Cal Newport
97. “The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.” – Cal Newport
98. “Humans, deep down, are craftsmen. We find great satisfaction in creating something valuable that didn’t exist before.” – Cal Newport
99. “Do some good in the world for no other reason than wanting to be part of the solution.” – Cal Newport
100. “You can’t expect to make real progress without accepting that you’ll need to invest significant effort and time.” – Cal Newport