1.“If you’re going to avoid mediocrity in any area of your life, expect to pay a price.”
2.“Balance is actually an illusion. You ebb and flow—just be wherever you are. Don’t be six places at once in your brain. Put your phone up. Be present.”
3.“If we don’t feel like we’re part of something important, what’s the point? If it’s just a paycheck, then what have you reduced your life to?”
4.“Lack of time is actually a lack of priorities. If you don’t have time, the truth is, you don’t have priorities. Think harder, don’t work harder.”
5.“We are too busy to be content. (Which is crazy, since the reason we kill ourselves today is because we think it will make us content tomorrow.)”
6.“‘I don’t have time,’ often means ‘It’s not a priority’ . . . We have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there.”
7.“Taking care of your family, your health, your relationships and your spirit is not a selfish act. It’s a sustaining one.”
8.“Margin is the space between my load and my limits . . . Having margin is having some breathing room in your life . . . and you need margin in every area of your life.”
9.“You are doing enough. You don’t need to do more to be worthy . . . to prove that you are deserving. You don’t need to do anything to be more worthy.”
10.“Social connection is the greatest predictor of long-term happiness, but we can’t create that with phones in our faces.”
11.“Rather than waking up and saying, ‘Hey, whatever life throws at me.’ No. It’s what I throw at life. You wake up believing that you have a mission. Believing that it’s possible. You be the aggressor.”
12.“It’s crucial that your daily actions match your goals. Small significant daily actions build momentum over time and establish a legacy you can be proud of.”
13.“Be a bush, if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be the sun, be a star. It isn’t by size that you win or you fail. Be the best of whatever you are.
14.“True commitment to work-life balance is giving people permission to take other priorities as seriously as their jobs. In burnout cultures, people are expected to drop everything for work. In healthy cultures, people are encouraged to protect time for family, health, and leisure.”
15.“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. It’s not real. It’s a myth. It doesn’t exist. There are seasons . . . Sometimes you wear a coat because it’s winter. Other times you wear shorts because it’s summer. Same thing when it comes to your life . . . You gear up for different seasons.”
16.“Focusing on the good isn’t just about overcoming our inner grump to see the glass half full. It’s about opening our minds to the ideas and opportunities that will help us be more productive, effective, and successful at work and in life.”
17.“One day I hope my kids look back at my life and say, ‘My mother wasn’t a quitter. She knew tired well. She danced with defeat, but she kept swinging back with hope. Sometimes the punches were strong. Other moments they barely landed, but she knew how to take a deep rest, exhale the tension, and swing again.’”
18.“Are you close to quitting? Please don’t do it. Are you discouraged as a parent? Hang in there. Are you weary with doing good? Do just a little more. Are you pessimistic about your job? Roll up your sleeves and go at it again . . . Remember, a finisher is not one with no wounds or weariness. Quite to the contrary, he, like the boxer, is scarred and bloody.”
19.“Balance is a really tricky word, because I don’t think there’s such a thing. There’s just time. There’s just where you are and what you do. And it doesn’t make sense for me to have to spend time on something that feels like a sacrifice. I try to do things that are part of the big thing. You get to pick what your big thing is gonna be.”
20.“God is not hurried along in the Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own novel. He has infinite attention to spare for each one of us . . . You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created.”
21.“We don’t build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want and then time saves itself . . . Time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it.”
22.“I like to have a have a hard stop to the day . . . It forces me to do three things. Number one: It forces me to say no to things I shouldn’t be doing anyway. The second thing is: It forces me to make faster decisions . . . The third thing it does is: It forces me to delegate to other people.”
23.“The people who complain about work-life balance, well one of the reasons they say that is because work sucks the life out of them, and it’s a grind, but they do it because they need the money to live the lifestyle. Well, maybe they should change their lifestyle so they could have work that makes them feel alive. Because then they wouldn’t need to worry about ‘work-life balance,’ because then they would just have life.”