Cal Newport

Cal Newport argues that a book is already the optimal summary of what an expert knows. A nonfiction author who could fill something like a hundred thousand pages instead cuts a path through that knowledge, with editors, so the reader comes out changed. Summarizing the book again misses the point. Skipping a ninety-minute film for four clips and a one-paragraph summary is the same trade. It is easy, and it delivers none of the benefit.

The strain of reading is how the benefit arrives. That hardness is the feeling of your picture of the world and of yourself being rebuilt, the way an athlete's burn is the feeling of getting stronger. Writing works the same way. Grappling with a blank page, ev

Cal Newport describes Harvard Hum 10 from Pamela Paul's Wall Street Journal article, "The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take." It is a freshman humanities course. Students read a hefty book a week and write regular essays. There is no pass-fail option. Digital devices are banned, and attendance is taken in every lecture.

The course looks like the kind of class that students who struggle to finish books would avoid. At Harvard it is a hit. Paul calls it the surprise hit of Harvard's academic lineup. Applicants write an essay to try to get in. In the most recent semester, over 180 students applied for only 90 slots.

That full class is the clue. A requirement to read a

Cal Newport says early social media left people lonelier the more they used it. A comment on a post, or the early Facebook poke button that left a note saying you had been there, created a feeling of socializing with more people than ever. The feeling was attractive because people are social beings.

Social psychologists looked closer and found the activity did not make people happier. The deep parts of the brain that care about social connection did not treat digital screens as real socializing. A real connection requires sacrificing non-trivial time and attention for another person and seeing the same effort come back. Early social media gave an easy, low-friction simulation of being very

Kurt Steiner dedicated his life to rock skipping. Sean Williams had a hard time tracking him down because he does not have a cell phone, barely is on the internet, and was hiding out in a cabin. Building that simple pursuit around a skill he is trying to master helped with mental health issues and gave his mental life stability he otherwise lacked.

You do not do any daily structured daily writing. You do not do daily pages, and you do not keep a diary or a regular journal, because it seems like one more thing. At the moment that is not something you are doing. A mole skin captures ideas about life in general, values structure, and deep life.

Reading Bennett shows that no one knew what to do with this new mode of work. Lawyers made up the upper middle class, with townhouses in London and access to some of the same clubs as the upper class living off inherited wealth. There was not much of a middle class, then artisans and shopkeepers, then the lower class, until the late 19th century brought a middle class.

Take a 30 day break from optional digital technologies and aggressively experiment to find activities that fit your life and offer a real source of meaning and value. After the 30 days, bring a technology back only with a reason and rules, because youtube is just a crutch when you are tired and bored.

Input from another mind means linguistic input, such as reading something or hearing someone talking or seeing someone talking, which fires up social circuits and ends solitude. You can get lost in a song and still count that as solitude, but it should not be your only type of solitude.

He really thinks 50% plus of his friends at Dartmouth went to Harvard law school. He had not realized they came from parents who had professional jobs, and that the point of a school like that was to get onto the track for well paying professional jobs.

They moved to Tofino on the pacific coast of the large rural Vancouver island, off the west coast of british Columbia. Tofino had really good surf breaks and the best surfing in Canada, and it was far enough off the beaten path that you could buy some land without having to spend that much money.

Use three properties of a job, income, location, and work type, to support the big vision. Income is how much income it generates. Location is where you're living. Work type covers the content of what you're doing, the flexibility, and the number of hours you're actually working.

Follow your passion is the phrase for the idea that your work can be your primary source of meaning. The 2012 book So good, they can't ignore you documents its first appearances in the late 19 eighties, and in the 19 nineties follow your passion becomes a good piece of career advice.

The 1960s produced the first backlash to the 1950s, the counterculture backlash, seen in the beat movement and then the Hippie movement. Work is now conceived as an obstacle to meaning. The baby boom generation had enough of working at IBM for a whole life as the source of civic meaning.

Listen to your anxiety.

What I really need to do is make the first half of friday's and Wednesday afternoons really need to be, you know, lock in, go to the library work on the research paper. I think it's the only way I'm gonna get all this together in time by this deadline at the end of the semester. That's a great use of the quarterly plan. So it's not just what you're going to work on. But figuring out how that work would happen and this this this is decisions that you actually have to think through. It's not automatic.