Greg McKeown Quotes

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.

the first and most crucial skill you will learn on this journey is to develop your ability to choose choice, in every area of your life.

Essentialists systematically explore and evaluate a broad set of options before committing to any.

An Essentialist has the courage and confidence to admit his or her mistakes and uncommit, no matter the sunk costs.

that play is trivial. Play is a waste of time. Play is unnecessary. Play is childish. Unfortunately, many of these negative messages come from the very place where imaginative play should be most encouraged, not stifled. The word school is derived from the Greek word schole, meaning “leisure.” Yet our modern school system, born in the Industrial Revolution, has removed the leisure — and much of the pleasure — out of learning. Sir Ken Robinson, who has made the study of creativity in schools his life’s work, has observed that instead of fueling creativity through play, schools can actually kill it: “We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.… Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”2 In this he is correct.

Life will become less about efficiently crossing off what was on your to-do list or rushing through everything on your schedule and more about changing what you put on there in the first place.

motivation and cooperation deteriorate when there is a lack of purpose.

The key is to start small, encourage progress, and celebrate small wins.

Being vague is not the same as being graceful, and delaying the eventual “no” will only make it that much harder — and the recipient that much more resentful.

It is about pausing constantly to ask, “Am I investing in the right activities?

Psychologists call this “decision fatigue”: the more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.

Only when we admit we have made a mistake in committing to something can we make a mistake a part of our past. When we remain in denial, on the other hand, we continue to circle pointlessly. There should be no shame in admitting to a mistake; after all, we really are only admitting that we are now wiser than we once were.

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.

How will we know when we have succeeded?

essential work can be enjoyable once we put aside the Puritan notion that anything worth doing must entail backbreaking effort.