Cal Newport

speaker

1,088 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Cal Newport’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Liz Moody Podcast · How To Work Less This Summer (And Still Get MORE Done) · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

And it's easy, I think, to fall into the mindset of my boss is just a mustache twirler who just likes to exploit me and will fire me at a moment's notice.

The opposite begins to happen.

as you get good.

Your boss is sweating in the back room of like, how would we ever replace Liz?

It's really hard to hire people.

People are weird.

You hire them and then it's like, oh, they're wearing their Star Trek costume to work.

People are weird.

It's really hard.

So you have to recognize if I'm good, people are desperate to keep me.

You have a lot more leverage than you think.

But yeah, you do have to get good first.

If it's just like checking boxes and I'm entirely starting with the attitude of

just the fact I have to do this work I don't feel fully comfortable with, and why do I even have to have a job, and I'm looking for all the ways that this job is doing things I don't like, the version of yourself 10 years from now is going to be really upset at the version of you now, because your life 10 years from now could be really cool and flexible and engaging and impactful and meaningful, but it requires that right now you focus on, well, what can I do here that's going to be really useful?

How can I get good?

How can I make my boss really worried about losing

And it's important to emphasize that we don't think about taste enough.

So that's the term I use in the book is your taste is your ability to discern what good means.

And I make this point, we don't think enough about how do you actually develop your sense of taste.

We just sort of assume, you know what good is.

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