Greg McKeown Quotes

However, not pushing back costs more: our ability to choose what is most essential in life. For Jin-Yung and Clay, respect in the workplace and time for God and family were most important, so these were the things they deliberately and strategically chose to prioritise. After all, if you don’t set boundaries – there won’t be any. Or even worse, there will be boundaries, but they’ll be set by default – or by another person – instead of by design.

What if, rather than fighting our preprogrammed instinct to seek the easiest path, we could embrace it, even use it to our advantage? What if, instead of asking, “How can I tackle this really hard but essential project?,” we simply inverted the question and asked, “What if this essential project could be made easy?

To develop meaningful and mature relationships at work or at home we need to develop two filters. The first filter protects you from other people. The second filter protects other people from you.

while there are clearly people who can survive on fewer hours of sleep, I’ve found that most of them are just so used to being tired they have forgotten what it really feels like to be fully rested.

If you believe being overly busy and overextended is evidence of productivity, then you probably believe that creating space to explore, think, and reflect should be kept to a minimum. Yet these very activities are the antidote to the nonessential busyness that infects so many of us. Rather than trivial diversions, they are critical to distinguishing what is actually a trivial diversion from what is truly essential.

Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 per cent of our efforts produce 80 per cent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channelled towards improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3

The point I wish to emphasize is not an economic one, but a human one: if you try to say too many things, you don’t say anything at all.

We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people's agendas to control our lives.

You can do anything but not everything

To eliminate non-essentials means saying no to someone. Often. It means pushing against social expectations. To do it well takes courage and compassion. So eliminating the non-essentials isn’t just about mental discipline. It’s about the emotional discipline necessary to say no to social pressure.

These executives are quoted in an article called “Sleep Is the New Status Symbol for Successful Entrepreneurs.”4 Nancy Jeffrey of the Wall Street Journal writes: “It’s official. Sleep, that rare commodity in stressed-out America, is the new status symbol.

We can use our energies to set up a system that makes execution of goodness easy, or we can resign ourselves to a system that actually makes it harder to do what is good.

Clarity equals success.

Essentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. Instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” they ask, “What do I want to go big on?

The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better. It doesn’t mean occasionally giving a nod to the principle. It means pursuing it in a disciplined way.