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science shows that even a nap can increase creativity. In
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Greg McKeown |
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A sense of ownership is a powerful thing. As the saying goes, nobody in the history of the world has washed their rental car! This is because of something called "the endowment effect," our tendency to undervalue things that aren't ours and to overvalue things because we already own them."
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Greg McKeown |
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The tendency to continue doing something simply because we have always done it is sometimes called the "status quo bias." I"
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Greg McKeown |
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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.
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Greg McKeown |
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To embrace the essence of Essentialism requires we replace these false assumptions with three core truths: "I choose to," "Only a few things really matter," and "I can do anything but not everything." These simple truths awaken us from our nonessential stupor. They free us to pursue what really matters. They enable us to live at our highest level of contribution."
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Greg McKeown |
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I must apologize: if I had more time I would have written a shorter letter." It"
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Greg McKeown |
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Editing our time and activities continuously allows us to make more minor but deliberate adjustments along the way. Becoming an Essentialist means making cutting, condensing, and correcting a natural part of our daily routine--making editing a natural cadence in our lives.
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Greg McKeown |
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It was a classic "straddled strategy" of attempting to invest in everything at once. The result was that while I was not entirely failing in any pursuit I was not entirely succeeding at any either. I soon began to wonder just what was so great about all these open options."
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Greg McKeown |
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Innovator's Dilemma, was
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Greg McKeown |
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ask three questions: "What am I deeply passionate about?" and "What taps my talent?" and "What meets a significant need in the world?" Naturally"
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Greg McKeown |
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HALF OF THE TROUBLES OF THIS LIFE CAN BE TRACED TO SAYING YES TOO QUICKLY AND NOT SAYING NO SOON ENOUGH. --Josh Billings
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Greg McKeown |
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Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. And
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Greg McKeown |
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Yet on closer examination we can see this compulsion to do more is a smokescreen. These people don't believe they have a choice in what opportunity, assignment, or challenge to take on. They believe they "have to do it all."
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Greg McKeown |
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How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins explores
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Greg McKeown |
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we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.
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Greg McKeown |
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There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."7"
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Greg McKeown |
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When I need a reminder of this I think of a story. It is about a man whose three-year-old daughter died. In his grief he put together a video of her short little life. But as he went through all of his home videos he realized something was missing. He had taken video of every outing they had gone on and every trip they had taken. He had lots of footage--that wasn't the problem. But then he realized that while he had plenty of footage of the..
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Greg McKeown |
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The Nonessentialist tends to always assume a best-case scenario.
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Greg McKeown |
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scientists have explained that every habit is made up of a cue, a routine, and a reward. The
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Greg McKeown |
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For some reason there is a false association with the word focus. As with choice, people tend to think of focus as a thing. Yes, focus is something we have. But focus is also something we do.
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Greg McKeown |
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So we introduced a token system.9 The children were given ten tokens at the beginning of the week. These could each be traded in for either thirty minutes of screen time or fifty cents at the end of the week, adding up to $5 or five hours of screen time a week. If a child read a book for thirty minutes, he or she would earn an additional token, which could also be traded in for screen time or for money. The results were incredible: overnigh..
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Greg McKeown |
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A colleague in New York uses a simple hack: whenever she schedules a meeting or phone call, she takes exactly fifteen seconds to type up the main objectives for that meeting, so on the morning of the meeting when she sits down to prepare talking points she can refer to them.
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Greg McKeown |
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kairos is qualitative.
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Greg McKeown |
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I have since gathered data from more than five hundred individuals about their experience on more than one thousand teams. I asked them to answer a series of questions about a time when they had worked on a unified team, what the experience was like, what role their manager played, and what the end result was. Then I had them contrast this with a time when they had been on a disunified team and what that was like, what role their manager pl..
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Greg McKeown |
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every second spent worrying about a past or future moment distracts us from what is important in the here and now.
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Greg McKeown |
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As John Lasseter, the chief creative officer at Pixar and now Disney, said, "We don't actually finish our films, we release them."
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Greg McKeown |
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if we just say yes because it is an easy reward, we run the risk of having to later say no to a more meaningful one.
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Greg McKeown |
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If we could be truly excellent at only one thing, what would it be?
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Greg McKeown |
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the "planning fallacy."6 This term, coined by Daniel Kahneman in 1979, refers to people's tendency to underestimate how long a task will take, even when they have actually done the task before"
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Greg McKeown |
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The point is to say no to the nonessentials so we can say yes to the things that really matter. It is to say no--frequently and gracefully--to everything but what is truly vital.
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Greg McKeown |
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Up to that point I had always known logically that I could choose not to study law. But emotionally it had never been an option. That's when I realized that in sacrificing my power to choose I had made a choice--a bad one. By refusing to choose "not law school," I had chosen law school--not because I actually or actively wanted to be there, but by default. I think that's when I first realized that when we surrender our ability to choose, so..
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Greg McKeown |
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As poet Mary Oliver wrote: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?"
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Greg McKeown |
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For too long, we have overemphasized the external aspect of choices (our options) and underemphasized our internal ability to choose (our actions). This is more than semantics. Think
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Greg McKeown |
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MAKE YOUR PEACE WITH THE FACT THAT SAYING "NO" OFTEN REQUIRES TRADING POPULARITY FOR RESPECT"
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Greg McKeown |
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By definition, applying highly selective criteria is a trade-off; sometimes you will have to turn down a seemingly very good option and have faith that the perfect option will soon come along. Sometimes it will, and sometimes it won't, but the point is that the very act of applying selective criteria forces you to choose which perfect option to wait for, rather than letting other people, or the universe, choose for you. Like any Essentialis..
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Greg McKeown |
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But undergirding their highly selective screening process is more than a gut reaction (although that matters too). What may seem like a capricious decision is really the result of a disciplined and continuous approach to figure out what works and what doesn't.
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Greg McKeown |
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What if we stopped being oversold the value of having more and being undersold the value of having less?
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Greg McKeown |
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Less but better" is"
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Greg McKeown |
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solo cuando te das permiso de dejar de hacerlo todo, de dejar de decirles que si a todos, puedes hacer tu mayor contribucion a las cosas que realmente importan.
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Greg McKeown |
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Our investment philosophy borders on lethargy.
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Greg McKeown |
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John Maxwell has written, "You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything."9"
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Greg McKeown |
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discern the vital few from the trivial many.
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Greg McKeown |
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The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically,
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Greg McKeown |
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Why, he asked, do all of our policing efforts have to be so reactive, so negative, and so after the fact? What if, instead of just focusing on catching criminals--and serving up ever harsher punishments--after they committed the crime, the police devoted significant resources and effort to eliminating criminal behavior before it happens? To quote Tony Blair, what if they could be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of crime?3 Out of..
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Greg McKeown |