Four Thousand Weeks

What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.

Mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future.

The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.

The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever.

In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.

You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one—which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.

If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.