Making It All Work is about the work you have to do to know the work you have to do when the work you have to do doesn’t tell you the work you have to do. The work you really have to do is not self-evident—it’s up to you to figure that out.

The potential double meaning of “making it all work” is also a clue to the message of this book. What if we considered everything we did as “work” instead of restricting that term to what we do for money or to what we do that’s hard?

The mind is also a terrible office. The most obvious priorities in your mental stacks tend to be whatever is latest (most recent input) and loudest (most emotionally charged content). There is a chance on a given afternoon that you will give as much mental real estate to “buy bread” as you will to “buy building.” Probably more, because you’re afrai

I want to encourage you to not lose sight of the ultimate goal here, which is to always have at your disposal everything you need to right yourself and your various enterprises consistently and to get back on course.

What we’re truly striving for is the permanence that we can count on, amid all the change and flux. And the most permanent, secure, and stable thing we can possess is a foolproof way to deal with impermanence, insecurity, and surprise.

Discussions about principles can be extremely useful if conducted at the beginning of an enterprise or project, especially if the people involved are not familiar with one another, or when it would make sense for the mode of operating together to be clarified. Such conversations are also helpful to communicate the expectations and standards of the

“What-if ” and “as-if ” scenarios are common exercises. Having a team collaboratively write a major article in some well-known national or international publication, extolling the success the team or company has achieved, as if it has already happened, always produces interesting results. Though the assignment may sound somewhat artificial, “unreal

Nature, one of the most complex environments we can experience, is actually relaxing to us, because our minds love infinite complexity and variation.

Finding oneself in any of the other three quadrants, though, is not necessarily a bad thing. Just as any high-performance vehicle frequently gets off course, the best of us often fall away from the high-control, high-perspective state.