Merlin Mann Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn't take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that's taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can't handle that one tiny thing.

Make the time to be scared of more interesting things.

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.

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

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

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

I'm a project manager, not a magician. Magicians have way cooler hats.

Everything you agree to do is other things you can't do

You're gonna die. You're gonna die. And nobody's gonna care which version of the iPhone you used to make something on Twitter, or to go and post about your bowel movement on Facebook. And I'm not even talking about legacy; I'm talking about the fact that I personally feel most alive when I'm making something, and I feel least alive when I'm being led around by some obnoxious use of my attention that I wasn't aware of. To me, that's the thing. You can buy the jogging shoes and you can buy the Runner's World, but until you put them on and walk out the door every day, you're just a fat man.

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

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

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.

Before you sweat the logistics of focus: first, care. Care intensely.... Obsessing over the slipperiness of focus, bemoaning the volume of those devil "distractions," and constantly reassessing which shiny new "system" might make your life suddenly seem more sensible - these are all terrifically useful warning flares that you may be suffering from a deeper, more fundamental problem.... Know in your heart that what you're making or doing matters... First, care. Then, as you'll happily and unavoidably discover, all that "focus" business has a peculiar way of taking care of itself.

Trying to talk somebody out of the stuff that they enjoy in life is like trying to talk them out of their faith or their sexuality. It’s a pointless exercise that can never be anything but acrimonious and will only highlight unnecessary amounts of difference about things that ultimately don’t really matter. Buy the steak you like, worship the god you love, neck with the people that you treasure and don’t worry about the numbers.

When you die, no one's going to remember what iPhone you had.

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.

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