Top 40 Merlin Mann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m a project manager, not a magician. Magicians have way cooler hats.”

— Merlin Mann

Featured in: Silly Quotes, Sarcastic Quotes, Funny Office Quotes

2. “Priorities Are Like Arms; If You Think You Have More Than A Couple, You’re Either Lying Or Crazy.”

— Merlin Mann

3. “Workflow is understanding your job, understanding your tools, and then not thinking about it any more.”

— Merlin Mann

4. “Everything takes more time than you thought, everything costs more money than you thought, and almost everything turns out not quite as cool as you expected.”

— Merlin Mann

5. “Feeling creative produces great work in approximately the same way that “feeling like a doctor” makes you a gifted thoracic surgeon.”

— Merlin Mann

6. “Creative work only seems like a magic trick to people who don’t understand that it’s ultimately still work.”

— Merlin Mann

7. “Although your time and attention are finite, the demands on your time and attention are infinite.”

— Merlin Mann

8. “Never let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants can be in the parade.”

— Merlin Mann

9. “When you die, no one’s going to remember what iPhone you had.”

— Merlin Mann

10. “Creative work, summarized: In the time you set aside each day to work your ass off, ignore anything that makes you consider stopping.”

— Merlin Mann

11. “The mindless junk of your past crowds out opportunities and sets pointless limitations. Move out the junk, and you create room for the rest of your life. Ultimately, it’s not just a question of tidying your house; it’s a question of liberating your heart.”

— Merlin Mann

12. “You got to be careful to not get too comfortable with incremental improvement. I think sometimes you just got to jump off a ledge.”

— Merlin Mann

13. “Stop. I’m not going to take any more input until I’ve made something with what I got.”

— Merlin Mann

14. “People with tiny glasses and costly shoes can always find a couple of hours to explain how you did it all wrong.”

— Merlin Mann

15. “A lot of the best work I’ve ever done started out as something completely different because I gave myself permission to have space around my time and expectations.”

— Merlin Mann

16. “People either make things or they don’t. Inspiration is a poster.”

— Merlin Mann

17. “Don’t just play with your phone: go out and produce something.”

— Merlin Mann

18. “Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.”

— Merlin Mann

19. “A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority.”

— Merlin Mann

20. “Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement.”

— Merlin Mann

21. “If you want to make a chili, you’re going to break some cows.”

— Merlin Mann

22. “All self-help is Buddhism with a service mark.”

— Merlin Mann

23. “It’s just that it’s mind-boggling to me how many people I encounter every day who are struggling to subsist on a diet of bad advice about fake solutions to nonexistent problems.”

— Merlin Mann

24. “Come back, paragraphs. America needs you.”

— Merlin Mann

25. “Being consistent is WAY less interesting than being yourself. And if you’re not interesting? Good luck with your Big Consistency Project.”

— Merlin Mann

26. “Typing in all lowercase is popular among young people, SMS users, and anyone who feels literacy has become too time-consuming.”

— Merlin Mann

27. “Thinking can really be the enemy of action, and thinking can be the enemy of reality.”

— Merlin Mann

28. “Personally, it’s changed my game – it’s how I think now. Can’t imagine writing more than a paragraph in anything that doesn’t do MMD.”

— Merlin Mann

29. “People will always despise you if you end up doing less stupid BS than they choose to suffer.”

— Merlin Mann

30. “Make the time to be scared of more interesting things.”

— Merlin Mann

31. “Getting organized just means you’ve glued handles onto the various stuff in your life – you’ll still need to pick it up and carry it around from time to time.”

— Merlin Mann

32. “Distractions have never prevented a Writing Writer Who Writes from writing; distractions are an excuse proffered by Non-Writing Non-Writers Who are Not-Writing for why they are not writing.”

— Merlin Mann

33. “I think all of the best nonfiction that has ever been made comes from the result of someone who can’t stop thinking about a certain topic – a very specific aspect of a certain topic in some cases. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it.”

— Merlin Mann

34. “Go a little easier on yourself, and in so doing, be prepared to make and do things that might seem silly at first. Just keep moving: don’t ruminate and stare at the wall. Don’t just play with your phone: go out and produce something.”

— Merlin Mann

35. “Everything you agree to do is other things you can’t do.”

— Merlin Mann

36. “Small Changes Stick.”

— Merlin Mann

37. “By my reckoning, I only need about 200 more takeout coffee cups to complete my bitterly ironic mosaic of Al Gore.”

— Merlin Mann

38. “If you need to appear on an internet list to know whether you’re someone’s friend, you may have problems a computer can’t solve.”

— Merlin Mann

39. “Like tornadoes and cold sores, good work happens with total disregard to whether I’m ‘into it.’”

— Merlin Mann

40. “Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.”

— Merlin Mann

41. “My narrative is that I’ve never known what’s coming next-I still don’t. I fell down the right set of stairs and have been surrounded by people who have picked me up and said, “Let’s try this again.” It’s been one anxious block of uncertainty after another.”

— Merlin Mann