Greg McKeown Quotes

the pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure. Put another way, success can distract us from focusing on the essential things that produce success in the first place.

If we could be truly excellent at only one thing, what would it be?” ASK,

The reality is, saying yes to any opportunity by definition requires saying no to several others.

Why are adults so much more vulnerable to the sunk-cost bias than young children? The answer, he believes, is a lifetime of exposure to the “Don’t waste” rule, so that by the time we are adults we are trained to avoid appearing wasteful, even to ourselves.8 “Abandoning a project that you’ve invested a lot in feels like you’ve wasted everything, and waste is something we’re told to avoid,” Arkes said.9

When I ask executives to identify their boundaries they can rarely do it. They know they have some, but they cannot put them into words. The simple reality is, if you can’t articulate these to yourself and others, it may be unrealistic to expect other people to respect them or even figure them out.

Whether it’s “miles per day” or “words per day” or “hours per day,” there are few better ways to achieve effortless pace than to set an upper bound.

If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less. Not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials.

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.

Quando uma estratégia é tão complexa que cada passo é como empurrar uma pedra morro acima, faça uma pausa. Inverta o raciocínio. Pergunte: “Qual é o jeito mais simples de obter esse resultado?

Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better.

Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work,” they said. 5

It would have been easy to think of the jobs in terms of that ratio between time and reward. But I knew what really counted was the relationship between time and results.

Simply having an understanding up front about what we were really trying to achieve and what our boundaries were kept us from wasting each other’s time, saddling each other with burdensome requests, and distracting each other from the things that were essential to us. As a result, we were each able to make our highest level of contribution on the project – and we got along famously, despite our differences, throughout the process. With practice, enforcing your limits will become easier and easier.

In that instant,” Ephron recalls, “I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” Ephron added, “He taught me something that works just as well in life as it does in journalism.

Many capable people are kept from getting to the next level of contribution because they can’t let go of the belief that everything is important.