“A great company or great ideas”
Notes from ‘Essentialism’ by Greg McKeown
“Less, but better.”
“Only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.”
“Live and work by design. Not by default.”
“The word 'Priority’ was singular up until the 1900s.”
“Have you ever felt the stress that comes from simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs:
‘I can’t do this’
and
‘I have to do this’?”
“For too long, we have overemphasized the external aspect of choices (our options) and underemphasized our internal ability to choose (our actions).
Options (things) can be taken away, while our core ability to choose (free will) cannot be.”
“Forgetting our ability to choose comes from learned helplessness.
When people believe that their efforts (at work) don’t matter, they tend to respond in one of two ways:
They check out and stop trying
They become hyperactive, having to ‘do it all’”
“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”
— John Maxwell
“Almost everything is nonessential”
— Greg McKeown
“Jim Collins, the author of the business classic ‘Good To Great’, was once told by Peter Drucker that he could either build a great company or build great ideas but not both.
Jim chose ideas.
As a result of this trade-off there are still only three full-time employees in his company, yet his ideas have reached tens of millions of people through his writing.”
