#568: Cal Newport The Eternal Pursuit of Craftsmanship, the Deep Life, Slow Productivity, and a 30-Day Digital Minimalism Challenge

Don't be afraid of ideas or worldviews or approaches or philosophies that seem different than what you believe in. You're not going to get tricked out of your conviction... You actually strengthen your understanding of the world and, therefore, strengthen your own convictions by encountering other ideas that are well formed.

For me, a day off is a day where I have full autonomy over what I do. The blank calendar day, to me, is one of the more glorious sights.

[Steve Marin] says 'My advice, instead, is be so good they can't ignore you. If you do that, lots of other good things will come.'

The deep life is a term for one of these things—we all know it when we see it; we just haven't really been approaching it systematically. It's when you see someone living a life in such a way that it resonates; it feels authentic and interesting and resilient—that they're not the type of person who's going to look back at the end of their life and say, what did I do?

In order to get the deliberate practice aspect of skill acquisition applied to writing, like you want to get better at writing fast, you have to be writing for editing and you have to be writing in the context of acceptance and rejections.

I'm a big believer in what I call rooted productivity. There has to be somewhere—I call it the root document—that says these are the core big picture systems that I execute in my life, and therefore, the only commitment I really have to make is that I will follow this root document.

My emerging concept of slow productivity says shift that scale up to years, months and years. I want to maximize the amount of meaningful stuff I get done in the next five years.

When you're just focusing on maximizing what you can do in the scale of days or weeks, it diverts the sustained application of energy and attention needed to actually do the things that move the needle or that you're proud of.

If you're going to live a deep life, the ultimate original commitment is 'I'm going to commit to discipline in the sense of things I am going to do on a regular basis because they matter, even if I don't feel like it.' That is the biggest binary zero-to-one flip that happens in crafting a life.

We need to slow the hell down, figure out what we really want to do, do these things at a reasonable pace, slow productivity, not fast, and face the hard stuff, and make the good stuff better.

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.

I think everyone who runs their own business who's entrepreneurial where you have some flexibility, I think you should integrate seasonality into what you do.