Cal Newport
Podcasts
Episodes
Notes
Deep Questions with Cal Newport · Ep. 218: Work vs. Meaning
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What Happened When Kurt Steiner Dedicated His Life to Rock Skipping?
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.
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Why Do You Skip a Daily Journal?
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.
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Why Did No One Know What to Do With the New Middle-class Mode of Work?
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.
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How Do You Stop Using YouTube as a Crutch After Work?
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.
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Why Does Getting Lost in a Song Still Count as Solitude?
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.
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What Happened When Friends at Dartmouth Chose Their Careers?
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.
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What Happened When They Moved to Tofino to Escape the Rat Race?
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.
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How Do You Connect a Life Vision to a Specific Job?
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.
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Why Does Follow Your Passion Become Career Advice?
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.
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Why Does the 1960s Backlash Reject a Lifelong Corporate Job?
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.
Deep Questions with Cal Newport · Ep. 208: To-Do Lists Are Inhumane
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How to Organize a Quarterly Plan Such That It Helps Achieve Your Goals
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.