Counterpoint: I really hated this book, which padded some really obvious advice (better to focus and be productive than waste time) with anecdotes and some vague, unsubstantiated predictions about the future of work.
Cal Newport is a classic example of modern "authors" who take 20 of their most popular blogposts and combine them into a barely-coherent rambling mess and publish it. Then they appear on Joe Rogan, Rich Roll, Tim Ferriss and every other podcast they can manage, and talk at length about 'paradigm-shifts' and other nonsense. On their website, they beg you to subscribe to their newsletter. They might start their _own_ shitty podcast. Through it all, very little in the way of insight is provided, and the little that exists is padded to within an inch of its life in the name of weekly 'content'.
Ryan Holiday, Seth Godin, Mark Manson, Tim Ferriss himself are other perpetrators of this stuff and I fucking hate all of it. The internet is shittier because of this trend, and has caused me to largely forego reading things on it.
To the OP, if you want a good book on attention, Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' is my recommendation. It is written with clarity and vision. He gets to the heart of the matter by focussing on two things: neuroplasticity and 'how the medium is the message'. His argument is presented logically, cogently and convincingly.
Ryan Holiday's debut book was called Trust Me, I'm Lying and it pretty much outlines his early internet marketing career and all the nutty tactics they used. He's very blunt and the stories he tells should be required reading. I respect him for being honest.
He doesn't address the weird Timarkothy Newmanson metamorphosis into esoteric actualization guru that coincidentally seems to occur to all of these guys once their hack-the-system-to-print-money tactics stop working, but you don't need that outlined. It's the only book from these guys I can stomach.
I also respect people more when they succeed at their full time job and then talk about how they did it, rather than full-time hucksters.
My problem with Cal, I guess, is how he writes. He's not an author, but a 'blog writer', and comes across as such in his books. Also, his insipid academic style is painfully dry, lacks flair, and contains no grander story beyond the literal. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep is another example of a book offering good advice, but written by an untrained author.
For me, when I pick up a 'book', as opposed to reading a blog article, I want the author to have spent a while meditating on a point, and to have uncovered some small portion of the universe. That magic is lacking in Cal Newport's writing.
> Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep is another example of a book offering good advice
There were actually several people challenging the claims made by Matthew walker, probably the most exhaustive of them is Alexey Guzey's critique of 'Why we sleep'[0]. The general point is that he takes scientific evidence and then incorrectly infers from it conclusions that fit his narrative.
You can buy their ideas without buying their books. Ocasionally I read their blog posts and I get the gist of their ideas. Most are not new but they are well packed and ready to consume. There is a lot of value on that also.
I didn't hate it, I thought the core thesis was really valuable. But I agree there is a giant problem with almost any "self-help" book - you can deliver the pitch in one coffee meeting but you want to be able to sell books so you pad it out.
