Cal Newport

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The hour I should have stopped was the hour I kept going.

I know the exact moment. Somewhere over the Atlantic, deep into a transatlantic flight, a hundred-and-eighty-seven pages into a draft that had started as exhilaration and curdled into something mechanical. The ideas had stopped arriving. The sentences were getting longer without getting better. I was not writing because the book needed it. I was writing because I could not stop.

I describe that moment in The Orange Pill. What I did not have, at the time, was the vocabulary to diagnose it. I knew something was wrong. I could feel the difference between the sessions where real thinking happened and the sessions where I was just moving words around at high speed. But I could not