#510: Greg McKeown How to Create Spaciousness, Move from Essentialism to Effortless, and Quiet the Mind

What I learned about gratitude was this: If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack. And if you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have.

He just said, 'It's all so simple' ... Just look at anything you're doing that's making life more complicated than it needs to be—where you're overthinking, where you're overstraining, where you're overexerting, where you're overthinking, and you may find the very thing that's going to help you move forward, it may be as simple, it may be as easy, as that.

Whatever has happened to you in life, whatever hardship, whatever pain, they pale in comparison to the power we have to choose what to do now in this next moment. And in every next moment we have a choice to take the heavier path or the lighter path.

...Even when things seem very hard, many problems can be solved by having a warm meal, hot shower, and a good night's sleep.

I've come to think of that as being these two paths: heavier path, lighter path. That you can always make something, however rough it is, worse by a response, or you can always make something a little easier by your response.

We don't have good things happen to us and therefore have good emotions ... You have positive emotion and that leads, through a process, to good things.

And that was one of my favorite parts of researching 'Effortless' was coming across a rule that Warren Buffett uses when he's hiring people ... He uses three principles: He says it's integrity, it's intelligence, and it's initiative.