Top 180 Greg McKeown Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 4

151. “Do not do more today than you can completely recover from today. Do not do more this week than you can completely recover from this week.”

— Greg McKeown

152. “When we start small and reward progress, we end up achieving more than when we set big, lofty, and often impossible goals. And as a bonus, the act of positively reinforcing our successes allows us to reap more enjoyment and satisfaction out of the process.”

— Greg McKeown

153. “In order to succeed at something, you have to get it done.”

— Greg McKeown

154. “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.”

— Greg McKeown

155. “Essentialist leaders speak succinctly, opting for restraint in their communication to keep the team focused.”

— Greg McKeown

156. “To see others more clearly, set aside your opinions, advice, and judgment, and put their truth above your own.”

— Greg McKeown

157. “Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work,” they said. 5.”

— Greg McKeown

158. “There is no such thing as an effortless relationship. But there are ways we can make it easier to keep a relationship strong. We don’t need to agree with the other person on everything. But we do need to be present with them, to really notice them, to give them our full attention – maybe not always, but as frequently as we can.”

— Greg McKeown

159. “What is the Effortless State? The Effortless State is an experience many of us have had when we are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely aware, alert, present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in this moment. You are able to focus on what matters most with ease.”

— Greg McKeown

160. “Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

— Greg McKeown

161. “Have you ever found that the more you complain – and the more you read and hear other people complain – the easier it is to find things to complain about? On the other hand, have you ever found that the more grateful you are, the more you have to be grateful for?”

— Greg McKeown

162. “Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance. Economists call this the law of diminishing returns:.”

— Greg McKeown

163. “A non-Essentialist approaches every trade-off by asking, “How can I do both?” Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating question, “Which problem do I want?” An Essentialist makes trade-offs deliberately. She acts for herself rather than waiting to be acted upon. As economist Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

— Greg McKeown

164. “As Parker Palmer, an expert in the Clearness Committee process, has written, “Each of us has an inner teacher, a voice of truth, that offers the guidance and power we need to deal with our problems.” The intent of the exercise is to help people amplify this inner voice and gain clarity on how to move forward.”

— Greg McKeown

165. “If you try to teach people everything about everything, you run the risk of teaching them nothing. You will achieve residual results faster if you clearly identify – then simplify – the most important messages you want to teach others to teach.”

— Greg McKeown

166. “As someone once said to me, the faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.”

— Greg McKeown

167. “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 start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I want to solve?”

— Greg McKeown

168. “Perfectionism makes essential projects hard to start, self-doubt makes them hard to finish, and trying to do too much, too fast, makes it hard to sustain momentum.”

— Greg McKeown

169. “Getting more sleep may be the single greatest gift we can give our bodies, our minds, and even, it turns out, our bottom lines.”

— Greg McKeown

170. “What if, rather than fighting our preprogrammed instinct to seek the easiest path, we could embrace it, even use it to our advantage? What if, instead of asking, “How can I tackle this really hard but essential project?,” we simply inverted the question and asked, “What if this essential project could be made easy?”

— Greg McKeown

171. “Listening isn’t hard; it’s stopping our mind from wandering that’s hard. Being in the moment isn’t hard; not thinking about the past and future all the time is hard. It’s not the noticing itself that’s hard. It’s ignoring all the noise in our environment that is hard.”

— Greg McKeown

172. “Reading a book is among the most high-leverage activities on earth.”

— Greg McKeown

173. “One study found that by training our attentional muscles we can improve our processing of complex information moving at great speed.”

— Greg McKeown

174. “Overachievers tend to struggle with the notion of starting with rubbish; they hold themselves to a high standard of perfection at every stage in the process. But the standard to which they hold themselves is neither realistic nor productive.”

— Greg McKeown

175. “Life doesn’t have to be as hard and complicated as we make it. Each of us has – as Robert Frost wrote – “Promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.” No matter what challenges, obstacles or hardships we encounter along the way, we can always look for the easier, simpler path.”

— Greg McKeown

176. “Simplicity – the art of maximizing the steps not taken – is essential.”

— Greg McKeown

177. “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

178. “To avoid diminishing returns on your time and effort, establish clear conditions for what “done” looks like, get there, then stop.”

— Greg McKeown

179. “He teaches his language students to imagine they have a bag full of one thousand beads. Every time they make a mistake talking to someone else in the language they take out one bead. When the bag is empty they will have achieved level 1 mastery. The faster they make those mistakes, the faster they will progress.”

— Greg McKeown

180. “However, not pushing back costs more: our ability to choose what is most essential in life. For Jin-Yung and Clay, respect in the workplace and time for God and family were most important, so these were the things they deliberately and strategically chose to prioritise. After all, if you don’t set boundaries – there won’t be any. Or even worse, there will be boundaries, but they’ll be set by default – or by another person – instead of by design.”

— Greg McKeown

181. “If you want to make something hard, indeed truly impossible, to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible.”

— Greg McKeown

182. “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, something or someone else will step in to choose for us.”

— Greg McKeown

183. “Each of us has an inner teacher, a voice of truth, that offers the guidance and power we need to deal with our problems.”

— Greg McKeown

184. “After four weeks Wise’s deep sleep shot up to almost two hours a night, an 800 percent increase. His uninterrupted sleep went up 20 percent. He felt sharper, more creative, and more present.”

— Greg McKeown

185. “Zen, the Reason of Unreason; The Wisdom of Confucius; the Torah; the Holy Bible; Tao, to Know and Not Be Knowing; The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation; As a Man Thinketh; The Essential Gandhi; Walden, or, Life in the Woods; the Book of Mormon; The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and the Upanishads. There.”

— Greg McKeown

186. “Holding back when you still have steam in you might seem like a counterintuitive approach to getting important things done, but in fact, this kind of restraint is key to breakthrough productivity.”

— Greg McKeown

187. “Producing a great result is good. Producing a great result with ease is better. Producing a great result with ease again and again is best.”

— Greg McKeown

188. “We are conditioned over the course of our lifetimes to believe that in order to overachieve we must also overdo. As a result, we make things harder for ourselves than they need to be.”

— Greg McKeown

189. “Instead of forcing execution, Essentialists invest the time they have saved into creating a system for removing obstacles and making execution as easy as possible.”

— Greg McKeown

190. “Gaining unique knowledge takes time, dedication, and effort. But invest in it once, and you’ll attract opportunities for the rest of your life.”

— Greg McKeown

191. “Why would we simply endure essential activities when we can enjoy them instead?”

— Greg McKeown

192. “Strangely, some of us respond to feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by vowing to work even harder and longer. It doesn’t help that our culture glorifies burnout as a measure of success and self-worth. The implicit message is that if we aren’t perpetually exhausted, we must not be doing enough. That great things are reserved for those who bleed, for those who almost break. Crushing volume is somehow now the goal. Burnout is not a badge of honor.”

— Greg McKeown

193. “Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing them in the right way.”

— Greg McKeown

194. “Whether it’s “miles per day” or “words per day” or “hours per day,” there are few better ways to achieve effortless pace than to set an upper bound.”

— Greg McKeown

195. “People who sleep less than seven hours a night are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, asthma, arthritis, depression, and diabetes and are almost eight times more likely to be overweight.”

— Greg McKeown

196. “So if the stigma of sleep still exists in your workplace, consider developing an initiative at work to explicitly encourage sleep. If that sounds radical, consider how the many benefits of sleep – greater creativity, enhanced productivity, even lower health care costs – have the potential to directly affect the bottom line. With.”

— Greg McKeown

197. “The best surgeon is not the one who makes the most incisions;.”

— Greg McKeown

198. “What job have I hired this grudge to do?”

— Greg McKeown

199. “Wise took some simple steps. He went to bed at the same time every night, turned off digital devices an hour before bed, and before turning in, took a hot shower. He then tracked his sleep on his smartwatch for a month. He noted his heart rate, time in bed, time asleep, quality of sleep, and percentage of deep sleep.”

— Greg McKeown