Selected Quotes & Ideas from the Book

The Imperfect Life

• Imperfectionism = "A freeing and energizing outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren't obstacles to a meaningful existence, which you must spend your days struggling to overcome, en route to some imaginary point when you'll finally get to feel fulfilled"
• "One main tenet of imperfectionism is that the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be 'out of the way,' so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now."
• "Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity." -Andrew Wilkinson (entrepreneur and investor) <- Don't be like that!
• "Confronting your non-negotiable limitations means accepting that life entails tough choices and sacrifices...When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that's when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count."
• "Embracing your limitations isn't a matter of settling for less in life."

Take Imperfect Action

• "Operate on the assumption that somewhere, in the confusing morass of your work or your life, lurks at least one decision you could make, right now, in order to get unstuck and get moving."
• "You might argue that making a decision is the defining act of the limit-embracing life."
• "There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer's estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged." -Annie Dillard
• "One more paradoxical truth about control: often, the way to have the best ideas, and to produce the best work, is to develop an ability to forget entirely about trying to control the quality of your output. And the easiest way to do that is to focus on quantity instead."
• "The signature behavior of the striver-towards-sanity is 'clearing the decks': trying to deal with all the minor tasks tugging at your attention in an effort to arrive at the point when you finally expect to have large stretches of time to focus on what you care about. The trouble with clearing the decks, as we've seen, is that the supply of things to fill the decks is to all intents and purposes limitless. So a commitment to clearing the decks leads inexorably to a life spent unendingly clearing the decks."
• "Even thirty minutes spent Actually Doing the Thing today are more valuable than hundreds of purely hypothetical hours in the future."

Too Much Information

• "By 1999, researchers estimated, the quantity of data generated worldwide came to at least 1.5 billion gigabytes. The 2024 estimate is 147 trillion gigabytes. Much of it isn't in the form of published content, of course, but plenty is—and by comparison, according to one amateur back-of-the-envelope calculation, the entire Library of Alexandria contained around 12 gigabytes."
• By the mid-2000s, "it was already obvious that the internet was going to exponentially exacerbate the problem of there being far too much to read."
• "The challenge isn't to locate a few needles of relevance in a haystack of dross. The challenge, in the words of the technology critic Nicholas Carr, is figuring out how to deal, day in and day out, with 'haystack-sized piles of needles.'"
• One helpful piece of advice: "Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by."
• "Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow."