Cal Newport is a guide, a visionary, a role model to me and millions of others on living an intentional and productive life amidst our noisy, scatterbrained, tech-drenched world.
He’s an MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of 10 books which have collectively sold over 2 million copies including ‘Deep Work,’ ‘Digital Minimalism,’ and his latest bestseller, ‘Slow Productivity.’
“I sometimes joke that my entire career is built on giving two-word terms to things everyone thinks and knows,” Cal says, but the truth is he’s doing a lot more than that.
Take ‘Slow Productivity.’
He’s boiled this new phrase down into three principles: 1) Do fewer things, 2) Work at a natural pace, and 3) Obsess over quality.
Sounds simple, right? Trite, even! But that’s when you raise your head and realize the world is conspiring against you doing any of these. Doesn’t our world today reward… doing *more* things, working at an *unnatural* pace, and obsessing over *quantity*?
There’s a reason Cal has no social media apps on his phone. Why he has no social media accounts at all…and never has! With his books, and his wonderful podcast ‘Deep Questions,’ he is focused on helping us find our way as we navigate ever-changing technology and work patterns that increasingly feel at odds with our shared quest of living intentional lives.
Cal has a giant mind and it was on full display in this chat as we discuss: how Cal measures success, the neuroscience of reading, Denis Villeneuve, the relationship between rest and work, the ideal age for unrestricted Internet access, The Washington Nationals, leetspeak and productivity pr0n, the role of books today and their future, Andrew Huberman, positive reinforcement theory, Jonathan Haidt and ‘The Anxious Generation,’ technology boundaries for children, and much, much more…
Let’s turn the page to Chapter 135 now…
Chapter 135: Cal Newport severs cell subservience to steep slow success
View full transcript here
CONNECT with CAL NEWPORT
CAL’S 3 Books
First book (26:35)
Second book (1:17:53)
Third book (1:49:09)
Word Of The Chapter
Quotes
"Books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“When is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“I think young people have been given this idea—this comes out of the social media companies themselves—that you can just be vulnerable and visible and open, that that’ll just alchemize into being really valuable. That's not the way it works. You still need craft. You still need to do something.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“If you have a term that people aggressively agree with, and then begin riffing on hearing nothing but the term, you're probably hitting on something." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“I sometimes joke that my whole career is built on giving two-word terms to things that everyone thinks and knows.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“Books are the only mind reading of any sort of great bandwidth. I can take years of thinking and transport that to your brain by giving you this artifact of information captured with characters that I'm handing off to you. I think this is why books have been durable through so many different media revolutions. It's hard to replicate what you get out of that.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“What I grew up with being around these books is that feeling of advice book, that feeling of suddenly your internal schema of understanding the world shifts in a way, where new opportunities for you that are very exciting emerge that just feel so good. And it's such a high, and you can induce that with paper.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“We're not evolved to read. We have to hijack parts of our brain that were evolved to do other things, we have to hijack them and basically force them to do this very unnatural thing. But once we do, it works so synergistically with us, like a cultural discovery accident." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“You can have a system for how you do things, and that system can make things better, and you can let the system take on a lot of the work.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“Systems can’t get you all the way to impact. Systems can’t get you to the meaningful life. Systems can help save energy.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“Once we all got connected to digital devices in the office the amount of work on our plate and the speed and velocity at which it came at us just exploded.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“To me phone is a misnomer. It's unrestricted internet access -- that’s the danger” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“We used to worry like, 'What if our three-year-old sees too much Sesame Street?' That's not the concern now. Now the concern is the 13-year-old with the iPad in their room and if you try to take it away they’re going to have an aneurysm." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“I think people misunderstand 'Walden'. They think it’s a nature book. It’s not a nature book. What 'Walden' really was was an incredibly erudite self-help book.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“[Walden] really inspired me to consider radical ideas as the foundation of writing” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“I love that feeling of destabilizing something you took for granted and when you destabilize it it opens up all these alternatives and new opportunities for you” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“I wish more people were less afraid.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“Friday after I’m done with work until Sunday I try not to do any work, any email, any looking at content meant to get you excited. It’s family time, it’s reading time, it’s go on adventures time." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
“If you’re writing a book the thing that matters is writing the book that delights you. That’s your best chance of changing minds and making an impact.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast
