|
9e72788
|
cuando tratamos de hacerlo todo y tenerlo todo, nos encontramos haciendo concesiones en los margenes que nunca asumiriamos como nuestra estrategia intencional.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
a82f160
|
Removing obstacles does not have to be hard or take a superhuman effort. Instead, we can start small.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
b7c2793
|
It was like he was majoring in minor activities and
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
bac08ff
|
With repetition the routine is mastered and the activity becomes second nature.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
9eae7e4
|
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, is one of them. He says: "I'm more alert and I think more clearly. I just feel so much better all day long if I've had eight hours."
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
5e99ff7
|
The right "no" spoken at the right time can change the course of history."
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
fac1b0f
|
An Essentialist focuses the way our eyes focus; not by fixating on something but by constantly adjusting and adapting to the field of vision.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
213f3b6
|
tendency to undervalue things that aren't ours and to overvalue things because we already own them.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
ec7ee29
|
Imagine a neighbour who never waters his lawn. But whenever you turn on your sprinkler system, the water falls on his lawn. Your grass is turning brown and dying, but Bill looks down at his green grass and thinks to himself, "My garden is doing fine." Thus everyone loses: your efforts have been wasted, and Bill never develops the habit of watering his own lawn. The solution? As Cloud puts it, "You need some fences to keep his problems out o..
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
5409e54
|
It creates corporate environments that talk about work/life balance but still expect their employees to be on their smart phones 24/7/365.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
ee0c5b1
|
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 pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
25fcea0
|
Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
5690355
|
In every set of facts, something essential is hidden. And a good journalist knows that finding it involves exploring those pieces of information and figuring out the relationships between them (and my undergraduate degree was in journalism, so I take this seriously). It means making those relationships and connections explicit. It means constructing the whole from the sum of its parts and understanding how these different pieces come togeth..
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
50f297e
|
If you could do only one thing with your life right now, what would you do?
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
a5ab8e8
|
the authors found that the ones that executed most successfully did not have any better ability to predict the future than their less successful counterparts. Instead, they were the ones who acknowledged they could not predict the unexpected and therefore prepared better.5
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
e6257fe
|
poet Mary Oliver wrote: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?"
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
b6c9fea
|
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."
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
e1da547
|
One way to protect against this is simply to add a 50 per cent buffer to the amount of time we estimate it will take to complete a task or project (if 50 per cent seems overly generous, consider how frequently things actually do take us 50 per cent longer than expected). So if you have an hour set aside for a conference call, block off an additional thirty minutes. If you've estimated it will take ten minutes to get your son to football pra..
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
e6fad36
|
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: overnight, screen time went down 90 per ce..
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
79b9780
|
Can you remember what it was like to be bored? It doesn't happen anymore." He"
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
f562a6b
|
Warren decided early in his career it would be impossible for him to make hundreds of right investment decisions, so he decided that he would invest only in the businesses that he was absolutely sure of, and then bet heavily on them. He owes 90% of his wealth to just ten investments. Sometimes what you don't do is just as important as what you do.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
def33e0
|
ignoring the reality of trade-offs is a terrible strategy for organizations. It turns out to be a terrible strategy for people as well.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
bd7c771
|
For example, Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in jail becoming an Essentialist. When he was thrown in jail in 1962 he had almost everything taken from him: his home, his reputation, his pride, and of course his freedom. He chose to use those twenty-seven years to focus on what was really essential and eliminate everything else--including his own resentment. He made it his essential intent to eliminate apartheid in South Africa and in..
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
73cac98
|
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
111bae9
|
Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, the pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
8fe3a04
|
The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
8eb05fa
|
In just one example of many, Rosa Parks's quiet but resolute refusal to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus at exactly the right moment coalesced into forces that propelled the civil rights movement. As Parks recalls, "When [the bus driver] saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, 'No, I'm not.' "1 Contrary to popular belief, her courageous "no" did not grow out of a particularly assertive tendency ..
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
f6e0920
|
Most creative individuals find out early what their best rhythms are for sleeping, eating, and working, and abide by them even when it is tempting to do otherwise," Mihaly says. "They wear clothes that are comfortable, they interact only with people they find congenial, they do only things they think are important."
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
864ad91
|
As a quote attributed to Victor Hugo, the French dramatist and novelist, puts it, "Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
6bb0739
|
the pause that refreshes." This technique is easy. He stops for just a moment. He closes his eyes. He breathes in and out once: deeply and slowly. As he exhales, he lets the work issues fall away. This allows him to walk through the front door to his family with more singleness of purpose."
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
15168de
|
Our options may be things, but a choice--a choice is an action. It is not just something we have but something we do.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
4207b92
|
Think of Sir Isaac Newton. He spent two years working on what became Principia Mathematica, his famous writings on universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. This period of almost solitary confinement proved critical in what became a true breakthrough that shaped scientific thinking for the next three hundred years.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
cf5b90a
|
wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
c03f322
|
Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, has studied what are called the play histories of some six thousand individuals and has concluded that play has the power to significantly improve everything from personal health to relationships to education to organizations' ability to innovate. "Play," he says, "leads to brain plasticity, adaptability, and creativity." As he succinctly puts it, "Nothing fires up the brain like..
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
fc43e22
|
One leader at Twitter once asked me: "Can you remember what it was like to be bored? It doesn't happen anymore."
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
9999c9f
|
WHERE IS THE KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE LOST IN INFORMATION? --T. S. Eliot
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
017a427
|
The idea that we can have it all and do it all is not new. This myth has been peddled for so long, I believe virtually everyone alive today is infected with
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
2da13a7
|
Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, for example, schedules up to two hours of blank space on his calendar every day. He divides them into thirty-minute increments, yet he schedules nothing. It is a simple practice he developed when back-to-back meetings left him with little time to process what was going on around him.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
9a9cf73
|
For the first time--literally--substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
4d10d48
|
As economist Thomas Sowell wrote: "There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
78b084d
|
but Kelleher was totally clear about what the company was--a low-cost airline--and what they were not. And his trade-offs reflected as much.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
80b60b6
|
To discern what is truly essential we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make.
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
71cf089
|
William James once wrote, "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |
|
7c28b30
|
According to Porter, "A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions."3"
|
|
|
Greg McKeown |