Top 43 Quotes & Sayings by Merlin Mann

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

Creative work only seems like a magic trick to people who don't understand that it's ultimately still work.

By my reckoning, I only need about 200 more takeout coffee cups to complete my bitterly ironic mosaic of Al Gore.

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.

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

Don't just play with your phone: go out and produce something.

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

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

Come back, paragraphs. America needs you.

A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it's necessarily not a priority.

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

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.

Being consistent is way less interesting than being yourself. And if you're not interesting? Good luck with your Big Consistency Project.

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.

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.

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.

Make the time to be scared of more interesting things.

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

People either make things or they don't. Inspiration is a poster.

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.

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

Thing is: the internet's made of IP addresses, opinions, and assholes. It's what's there. That's the basic equipment.

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

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.

If you want to make a chili, you're going to break some cows.

I think all of the best nonfiction that has ever been made comes from the result of someone who can't stop thinking about a certain topic - a very specific aspect of a certain topic in some cases. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it.

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

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

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

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.

My narrative is that I've never known what's coming next-I still don't. I fell down the right set of stairs and have been surrounded by people who have picked me up and said, “Let's try this again.” It's been one anxious block of uncertainty after another.

Creative work, summarized: In the time you set aside each day to work your ass off, ignore anything that makes you consider stopping.

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

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.

Like tornadoes and cold sores, good work happens with total disregard to whether I'm 'into it.'

Typing in all lowercase is popular among young people, SMS users, and anyone who feels literacy has become too time-consuming.

All self-help is Buddhism with a service mark

Distractions have never prevented a Writing Writer Who Writes from writing; distractions are an excuse proffered by Non-Writing Non-Writers Who are Not-Writing for why they are not writing.

Before you sweat the logistics of focus: ?rst, 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 ?ares 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.

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

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.

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.

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