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Ah, Cal Newport. Another BS self-help sales person.
by muldoc 4y ago
Ah, Cal Newport. Another BS self-help sales person.
- emptyparadise 4y agonever trust anyone who writes notes on taking notes
- ParetoOptimal 4y agoI agree that without use in practice outside of "notes on notes" you are almost certainly improving the wrong things. However without reflection that may include notes on notes, you are doomed to the suboptimal or even counter-productive.
- nunodonato 4y agoCurious about that opinion. I find your comment rather negative and, slightly, toxic, but I'll bite. Care to share why you have that opinion about him? I've read three of his books, and although not all are "great", there's always some interesting thoughts about what he shares. I also like that he really gets people to develop a sense to actually think and work deeply, and move away from shallow and unsatisfactory busyness. His newsletter and now his podcast are excellent ways for people to ask questions and get suggestions and help for free. He has a bit of a big ego, but I wouldn't use that to call him "another BS self-help sales person".
- Bakary 4y agoCal Newport is probably one of the "best" salesmen in the space because he has an actual non-meme job and seems to have more good faith than most others. But at the end of the day, his actionable material can be easily compressed into maybe three blog posts. Even if he had good intentions at the start, he still got caught up in the nonfiction sales logic. Teaching productivity is not like teaching mathematics or philosophy. There is a limited range of things to learn and apply, and the core ideas are concise but difficult to put in practice. A good teacher in that space would essentially be able to impart their wisdom in maybe two hours, at which point the success of the teaching would lie in the student actually following what they were told. An ongoing productivity podcast or book series flies in the face of this. The mere act of commercializing productivity dooms the entire edifice. If the student is still on episode #23, the sales has succeeded but the teaching has failed.
- nunodonato 4y agoI'm pretty sure he would be able to impart all his "wisdom" in 2 hrs. But, like you said, it can be difficult to put in practice. That's why a question and answer format is helpful for many people. Sometimes its really hard to pick up a seemingly easy idea and apply it to your own life. Having help from someone who has seen it applied in many different ways, and dealt with the usual problems, is really helpful. That's what he does with his podcast. Not really selling anything there, besides occasionally mentioning his books where some concepts are expanded. I honestly don't get the hate.
- Bakary 4y agoIt makes more sense to see it as frustration about the space that is then applied to individual authors. Hating on Newport is rather pointless; it will not affect his life or yield useful ideas. What's happening is that people are growing tired of the whole hustle/newsletter/productivity fetish/repackaged stoicism atmosphere that permeates the internet, and are directing their frustration poorly. There is something deeply sterile about the throbbing mass of podcasts and blog posts that revolve around these topics, but there rarely is a precise target to focus on or even a useful way to voice the accompanying frustration.
- Apocryphon 4y agoI will never forgive Cal Newport nor HN for the hype around Deep Work. What an ironically vacuous book stuffed with filler anecdotes about modern day blacksmiths and card deck memorization, completely in contradiction to the very ethos of focused deep work. It should’ve been a nice long blog article but he wanted to write a NYT bestseller so I wasted time and money reading it.
- muldoc 4y agoSame. Bought his book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck" and threw it away in disgust a few pages in. Good thing is, now immediately anybody is referencing him I know they are full of sht.
- nojito 4y agoHe's one of the few self-help promoters who actually still has a real job and yet stays productive. Everybody else has turned hocking productivity advice into lucrative careers.