The way of the Essentialist is to tune into the present. To experience life in kairos, not just chronos. To focus on the things that are truly important—not yesterday or tomorrow, but right now.
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...
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
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...
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 simp...
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...
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 worke...
How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins explores
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
By editorial I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing. But there [are] only one or two that are important. And all of these ideas … and inputs from engineers, support people, designers are...
BEWARE THE BARRENNESS OF A BUSY LIFE. —Socrates
As John Lasseter, the chief creative officer at Pixar and now Disney, said, We don’t actually finish our films, we release them.
According to the power law theory, certain efforts actually produce exponentially more results than others. For example, as Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer for Microsoft, has said...
A woman named Cynthia once told me a story about the time her father had made plans to take her on a night out in San Francisco. Twelve-year-old Cynthia and her father had been planning the date for m...
606 Universal Shelving System. Why?
We can reduce the friction of executing the essential in our work and lives simply by creating a buffer.
Book Boundaries. Once,
When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many. When
We do a similar thing in our personal lives as well. When we are unclear about our real purpose in life – in other words, when we don’t have a clear sense of our goals, our aspirations, and our values...
We can’t have it all or do it all. If we could, there would be no reason to evaluate or eliminate options. Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, How can I make it all work? and star...