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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Greg McKeown
Read between
January 24 - February 2, 2022
simply lower the bar to start.
By embracing imperfection, by having the courage to be rubbish, we can begin.
The costs of this boom-and-bust approach to getting important projects done is too high: we feel exhausted on the days we sprint hard, drained and demoralized on the days we don’t,
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.
“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast”—meaning, when you go slow, things are smoother, and when things are smooth, you can move faster.
Accept that work and play can co-exist.
Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow.
Start with a ten-minute microburst of focused activity to boost motivation and energy.
Fail cheaply: make learning-sized mistakes.
Linear results are limited: they can never exceed the amount of effort exerted.
Residual results are completely different. With residual results you exert effort once and reap the benefits again and again.
You understand first principles deeply and then can easily apply them again and again.
You establish a habit once, but then it serves you for a lifetime.
First principles are like the building blocks of knowledge: once you understand them correctly you can apply them hundreds of times.
A person who understands how to make a decision can make decisions forever.
when we have the solid fundamentals of knowledge, we have somewhere to hang the additional information we learn.
the best new ideas usually come from combining existing knowledge in one field with an “intrusion of unusual combinations” from other disciplines.
Reading a book is among the most high-leverage activities on earth.
Use the Lindy Effect. This law states that the life expectancy of a book is proportional to its current age—meaning, the older a book is, the higher the likelihood that it will survive into the future. So prioritize reading books that have lasted a long time.
Read to Absorb (Rather Than to Check a Box).
absorbing yourself fully in a book changes who you are, just as if you had lived the experience yourself.
Distill to Understand. When I finish reading a book, I like to take ten minutes to summarize what I learned from it on a single page in my own words.
Whenever we want a far-reaching impact, teaching others to teach can be a high-leverage strategy.
Stories have the power to turn any audience into a roomful of teachers.
When You Learn to Teach, You Teach Yourself to Learn
If you try to teach people everything about everything, you run the risk of teaching them nothing.
The beauty of the checklist is that the thinking has been done ahead of time. It’s been taken out of the equation. Or rather, it has been baked into the equation.
Schedule your annual physical as a recurring appointment on the same day each year, and your dentist appointments on the same day every six months.
Have a percentage of your paycheck automatically deposited in savings each month.
Schedule a weekly meeting to review your finances as a family, and annual meetings with a financial adviser.
Consider taking the high-tech, low-effort path for the essential, and the low-tech, high-effort path for the nonessential.
Warren Buffett uses three criteria for determining who is trustworthy enough to hire or to do business with. He looks for people with integrity, intelligence, and initiative, though he adds that without the first, the other two can backfire.
low-trust relationship structures generally happen by default rather than by design.
When we’re merely managing a problem, we’re hacking at the branches. To prevent the problem before it even arises, we should strike at the root.
The sooner you identify a problem, the more likely you are to avert a dangerous situation.”
Mistakes are dominoes: they have a cascading effect. When we strike at the root by catching our mistakes before they can do any damage, we don’t just prevent that first domino from toppling, we prevent the entire chain reaction.
“How am I making this harder than it needs to be?”
Train your brain to focus on the important and ignore the irrelevant.
If your job is to keep the fires burning for an indefinite period of time, you can’t throw all the fuel on the flames at the beginning.
