Merlin Mann Quotes

25 quotes in 381 categories

• 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.
• Although your time and attention are finite, the demands on your time and attention are infinite.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.
• 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.
• People either make things or they don't. Inspiration is a poster.
• A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it's necessarily not a priority.
• 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…
• Creative work, summarized: In the time you set aside each day to work your ass off, ignore anything that makes you consider stopping.
• Stop. I’m not going to take any more input until I’ve made something with what I got.
• 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.
• 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.
• You got to be careful to not get too comfortable with incremental improvement. I think sometimes you just got to jump off a ledge.
• Thinking can really be the enemy of action, and thinking can be the enemy of reality.
• Workflow is understanding your job, understanding your tools, and then not thinking about it any more.
• Like tornadoes and cold sores, good work happens with total disregard to whether I'm 'into it.'

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