Greg McKeown Quotes

Getting to the essence of a story takes a deep understanding of the topic, its context, its fit into the bigger picture, and its relationship to different fields.

CHECK IN OFTEN TO ENSURE MEANINGFUL PROGRESS The Nonessentialist leader is not great on accountability. A primary and somewhat obvious reason is that the more items one pursues, the harder it is to follow up on all of them. In fact, a Nonessentialist leader may unintentionally train his people to expect no follow-up at all. In turn, the members of the team soon learn that there are no repercussions for failing, cutting corners, or prioritizing what is easy over what is important. They learn that each objective pronounced by the leader will be emphasized only for a moment before giving way to something else of momentary interest.

The Latin root of the word decision — cis or cid — literally means “to cut” or “to kill.

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

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.

STRATEGY Nonessentialist Pursues a straddled strategy where everything is a priority. Essentialist Defines an essential intent by answering the question, “If we could only do one thing, what would it be?” Eliminates the nonessential distractions.

Stephen R. Covey, one of the most respected and widely read business thinkers of his generation, was an Essentialist. Not only did he routinely teach Essentialist principles – like “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” – to important leaders and heads of state around the world, he lived them.

A second reason why it is hard to choose what is essential in the moment is as simple as an innate fear of social awkwardness. The fact is, we as humans are wired to want to get along with others. After all, thousands of years ago when we all lived in tribes of hunter gatherers, our survival depended on it. And while conforming to what people in a group expect of us – what psychologists call normative conformity – is no longer a matter of life and death, the desire is still deeply ingrained in us.7 This is why, whether it’s an old friend who invites you to dinner or a boss who asks you to take on an important and high-profile project, or a neighbour who begs you to help with the school cake sale, the very thought of saying no literally brings us physical discomfort. We feel guilty. We don’t want to let someone down. We are worried about damaging the relationship. But these emotions muddle our clarity. They distract us from the reality of the fact that either we can say no and regret it for a few minutes, or we can say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months, or even years.

Albert Einstein once said: “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”6

Jim Collins explores what went wrong in companies that were once darlings of Wall Street but later collapsed.3 He finds that for many, falling into “the undisciplined pursuit of more” was a key reason for failure.

There is a difference between losing and being beaten. Being beaten means they are better than you. They are faster, stronger, and more talented.” To Larry, losing means something else. It means you lost focus. It means you didn’t concentrate on what was essential. It is all based on a simple but powerful idea: to operate at your highest level of contribution requires that you deliberately tune in to what is important in the here and now.

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 ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away — it can only be forgotten.

He teaches his language students to imagine they have a bag full of one thousand beads. Every time they make a mistake talking to someone else in the language they take out one bead. When the bag is empty they will have achieved level 1 mastery. The faster they make those mistakes, the faster they will progress.

Instead of making just a millimeter of progress in a million directions he began to generate tremendous momentum towards accomplishing the things that were truly vital.