The Sydcast is all about intimate and informative conversations with fascinating people you may not know. Until now. Because everyone has a story.
Listen in as Syd talks to entrepreneurs, community leaders, professional athletes, politicians, academics, authors, musicians, and many more about who they are and how they got there.
Sydney Finkelstein is an award winning professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and a best-selling author of Superbosses and 25 other books. He’s written for the Harvard Business Review, the BBC, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and more academic journals than you’d care to know about. He spends his time asking questions, and sometimes, even answering them.
Episode Summary
Have you ever wondered how some people seem to have their entire lives in order? They have probably read the works of Cal Newport and learned how to work smarter, not harder by employing deliberate practice theory and avoiding the hyper-active hive mind to work less and relax more. Learn how to up your focus game and find passion in your work, in this episode of The Sydcast.
Syd Finkelstein
Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Masters degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.
Cal Newport
Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. In addition to researching cutting edge technology, he also writes about the impact of these innovations on our culture. Newport is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Digital Minimalism, which argues that we should be much more selective about the technologies we adopt in our personal lives, and Deep Work, which argues that focus is the new I.Q. in the modern workplace.
Newport’s work has been published in over 25 languages and has been featured in many major publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Economist. He regularly writes articles on these topics for a variety of outlets, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and his long-running blog Study Hacks, which receives over 3 million visits a year. He’s also a frequent guest on NPR.
Insights from this episode:
- Secret of how he was able to write and publish a book on student success while being a successful student at Dartmouth University.
- Benefits from creating and employing a structured system, including time control and knowledge work, to achieve your goals.
- How to succeed in problem solving by using focused thought and repetition.
- Details on deliberate practice theory and the impact it can have on your workflow.
- How the advice “follow your passion” is detrimental and simplistic and what really motivates people to perform well.
- Secrets to what really makes employees love their work and how to achieve that in the job marketplace.
- Benefits of cultivating and prioritizing concentration over productivity in the workplace to gain competitive advantage.
- How to get a higher return on your cognitive capital.
Quotes from the show:
- “I had this insight that the very top 1% [of students] seemed to be working a lot less than the 5% below that are grinding through [studying] in the library and the secret seemed to be that they cared a lot about process.” – Cal Newport
- “To get to the very highest level, you have to get very structured, but once you get very structured the work requirement falls.” – Cal Newport
- “There’s almost no formal academic thinking on productivity maximization and knowledge work.” – Cal Newport
- “Most of us think we’re experts at what we are doing.” – Syd Finkelstein
- On gaining perspective on a problem: “When you go for a walk, you let things percolate, you let the brain do its work, and you don’t worry about it.” – Syd Finkelstein
- On how to reach mastery in complex things: “You have to practice in ways that are designed to stretch you past where you are comfortable; you have to put in the hours.” – Cal Newport
- On deliberate practice theory: “It’s not enough to just know a lot about something, it’s not enough just to do something a lot, you have to actually practice in a way that makes you better.” – Cal Newport
- On the “follow your passion” job advice: “Follow the goal of ending up passionate about your work.” – Cal Newport
- “Passion is not the independent variable, it is the dependent variable; it’s what you’re trying to get to, you don’t start with that [passion].” – Syd Finkelstein
- “There’s this myth when people think about skill development that you have to have, in advance, a sufficient store of passion for the pursuit to last you through this really long process of hard work to get really good at something, but the reality is that it’s a feedback loop.” – Cal Newport
- On how to have a productive organization in the virtual world: “You have to separate tools from workflow; I think this is the fundamental issue.” – Cal Newport
Stay Connected:
Syd Finkelstein
Website: http://thesydcast.com
LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein
Twitter: @sydfinkelstein
Facebook: The Sydcast
Instagram: The Sydcast
Cal Newport
LinkedIn: Cal Newport
Website: calnewport.com
Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.
This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry (www.podcastlaundry.com)
