Healthy skepticism is often the best way to glean the value of what’s being presented—challenge it; prove it wrong, if you can. That creates engagement, which is the key to understanding.
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Reacting is automatic, but thinking is not.
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[R]esults have to be clearly specified, if productivity is to be achieved.
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This consistent, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.
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It’s a waste of time and energy to keep thinking about something that you make no progress on. And it only adds to your anxiety about what you should be doing and aren’t.
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Thought is useful when it motivates action and a hindrance when it substitutes for action.
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Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now.
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It is better to be wrong than to be vague.
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Often the only way to make a hard decision is to come back to the purpose of what you’re doing.
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If you’re not sure why you’re doing something, you can never do enough of it.
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Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.
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The primary criteria must be inclusion and expansion, not constriction and contraction.
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The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
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You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day’s commitments, which should be noticeable at a glance while you’re on the run.
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Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
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When is a problem a project? Always. When you assess something as a problem instead of as something to simply be accepted as the way things are, you are assuming there is a potential resolution.
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The right amount of complexity is whatever creates optimal simplicity.
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We’re likely to seize opportunities when they arise if we’ve already identified and captured them as a possibility.
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Many times you’ll want some sort of checklist to help you maintain a focus until you’re more familiar with what you’re doing.
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Your ability to deal with surprise is your competitive edge, and a key to sanity and sustainability in your lifestyle.
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If your boat is sinking, you really don’t care in which direction it’s pointed!
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If you’re not totally sure what your job is, it will always feel overwhelming.
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How do I know what I think, until I hear what I say?
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The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn’t come from having too much to do; it’s the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself.
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It appears that the nervous system can’t tell the difference between a well-imagined thought and reality.
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I am an old man, and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
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And unfortunately, when we numb ourselves, we can’t do it selectively—the source of inspiration and enthusiasm and personal energy also seems to get numbed.
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Complaining is a sign that someone isn’t willing to risk moving on a changeable situation, or won’t consider the immutable circumstance in his or her plans. This is a temporary and hollow form of self-validation.
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A vision without a task is but a dream; a task without a vision is but drudgery; a vision and a task is the hope of the world.
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Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.
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If the challenge exceeds your requisite skill level, you will experience anxiety, and if your skills exceed the challenge, you will most likely feel bored during the activity.
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As cognitive scientists have validated, your mind is terrible at recalling things out of the blue, but it is fantastic at doing creative thinking about what it has directly in front of it to evaluate.
