Greg McKeown Quotes

As Parker Palmer, an expert in the Clearness Committee process, has written, “Each of us has an inner teacher, a voice of truth, that offers the guidance and power we need to deal with our problems.” The intent of the exercise is to help people amplify this inner voice and gain clarity on how to move forward.

Holding back when you still have steam in you might seem like a counterintuitive approach to getting important things done, but in fact, this kind of restraint is key to breakthrough productivity.

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.

You don’t have to be overwhelmed by essential projects. Often, when you name the first obvious step, you avoid spending too much mental energy thinking about the fifth, seventh, or twenty-third steps. It doesn’t matter if your project involves ten steps or a thousand. When you adopt this strategy, all you have to focus on is the very first step.

As someone once said to me, the faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.

Weniger aber besser.

As often happens to driven, ambitious people, his earlier success had distracted him from his clarity of purpose.

When we are unclear about our real purpose in life – in other words, when we don’t have a clear sense of our goals, our aspirations, and our values – we make up our own social games. We waste time and energies on trying to look good in comparison to other people. We overvalue non-essentials like a nicer car or house, or even intangibles like the number of our followers on Twitter or the way we look in our Facebook photos. As a result, we neglect activities that are truly essential, like spending time with our loved ones, or nurturing our spirit, or taking care of our health.

There is tremendous freedom in learning that we can eliminate the nonessentials, that we are no longer controlled by other people’s agendas,

Essentialist leaders speak succinctly, opting for restraint in their communication to keep the team focused.

Non-Essentialists apply implicit or unspoken criteria to the decisions they make in both their personal and their professional lives. For example, when deciding what projects to take on at work, a non-Essentialist may operate by the implicit criterion, “If my manager asks me to do it, then I should do it.” Or even more broadly, “If someone asks me to do something, I should try to do it.” Or

There is no mastery without mistakes, and there is no learning later without the courage to be rubbish.

Jack Dorsey is best known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. His Essentialist approach to management is a relatively rare one. At a dinner I attended recently where he spoke, he said he thinks of the role of CEO as being the chief editor of the company. At another event at Stanford University he explained further: “By editorial I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing. But there [are] only one or two that are important. And all of these ideas … and inputs from engineers, support people, designers are going to constantly flood what we should be doing…. As an editor I am constantly taking these inputs and deciding the one, or intersection of a few, that make sense for what we are doing.”3 An editor is not merely someone who says no to things. A three-year-old can do that. Nor does an editor simply eliminate; in fact, in a way, an editor actually adds. What I mean is that a good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters.

Break down essential work into three sessions of no more than ninety minutes each.

It is not just the number of choices that has increased exponentially, it is also the strength and number of outside influences on our decisions that has increased. While much has been said and written about how hyperconnected we now are and how distracting this information overload can be, the larger issue is how our connectedness has increased the strength of social pressure. Today, technology has lowered the barrier for others to share their opinion about what we should be focusing on.
It is not just information overload; it is opinion overload.