Priorities Quotes

"The most important decision you make is what to work on."

"Prioritize the long term. Most people are too focused on the next week; the real gains come from the next decade."

"You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war."

"It is better to first get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats, and then figure out where to drive. p. 41."

"The Minimum Effective Dose (MED) is the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome."

"It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all. p. 119"

"Prioritize markets where the customers are desperate for a solution."

"[A]nything that is held only in "psychic RAM" will take up either more or less attention than it actually deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up. Ch. 11"

"Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building a sound education."

"Waste is the enemy of all progress; we must prioritize its elimination."

"Don't get hung up on your views of how things 'should' be because you will miss out on learning how they really are."

"You can't prioritize everything; if you have three priorities, you have none."

"Don't let the urgent crowd out the important."

"The goal is to find the highest-leverage thing you can do and then do it with everything you've got."

"Great men are meteors designed to burn so that earth may be lighted."

"I prefer to invest in companies where I can move the needle by making a few phone calls or sending a few emails."

"[T]he basic decisions are... about aims... what is desirable... the greater good or the lesser evil in the case of conflicting aims... what sacrifice we are willing to make for a certain achievement, and at what point the sacrifice outweighs the advantages. p. 120"

"The first rule of a happy life is low expectations."

"Your calendar should reflect your values. If it doesn't, change your calendar."

"When you "have to get organized," you're probably not appropriately invested yet in what you need to get organized for."

"Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear."

"The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well."

"To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what's true."

"If you are going to eat a shit sandwich, don't nibble. Do the hard thing first."

"The most important thing to do is to get the product right."

"Prioritize speed. In a startup, speed is one of your few advantages over larger competitors."

"One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent."

"The best entrepreneurs I know aren't risk-takers. They're risk-mitigators."

"Rationality is of the highest priority. You must see the world as it is, not as you wish it to be."

"The most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing."

"Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart."

"The man who starts out simply with the idea of getting rich won't succeed; you must have a larger ambition."

"If you can’t do it, find someone who can."