Memorable quotes
“In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”
Today, technology has lowered the barrier for others to share their opinion about what we should be focusing on. It is not just information overload; it is opinion overload.
The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities.
What if society encouraged us to reject what has been accurately described as doing things we detest, to buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like?
As poet Mary Oliver wrote: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
The overwhelming reality is: we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. As John Maxwell has written, “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”
While Southwest had made conscious, deliberate trade-offs in key strategic areas, Continental was forced to sacrifice things around the margins that weren’t part of a coherent strategy. According to Porter, “A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions.” By trying to operate by two incompatible strategies they started to undermine their ability to be competitive.
What I am suggesting is that when faced with a decision where one option prioritizes family and another prioritizes friends, health, or work, we need to be prepared to ask, “Which problem do you want?” Trade-offs are not something to be ignored or decried. They are something to be embraced and made deliberately, strategically, and thoughtfully.
If you believe being overly busy and overextended is evidence of productivity, then you probably believe that creating space to explore, think, and reflect should be kept to a minimum. Yet these very activities are the antidote to the nonessential busyness that infects so many of us. Rather than trivial diversions, they are critical to distinguishing what is actually a trivial diversion from what is truly essential.
WITHOUT GREAT SOLITUDE NO SERIOUS WORK IS POSSIBLE. —Pablo Picasso
Play stimulates the parts of the brain involved in both careful, logical reasoning and carefree, unbound exploration. Given that, it should hardly be surprising that key breakthroughs in thinking have taken place in times of play. Hallowell writes: “Columbus was at play when it dawned on him that the world was round. Newton was at play in his mind when he saw the apple tree and suddenly conceived of the force of gravity. Watson and Crick were playing with possible shapes of the DNA molecule when they stumbled upon the double helix. Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter his whole life. Mozart barely lived a waking moment when he was not at play. Einstein’s thought experiments are brilliant examples of the mind invited to play.”
Bob Fagan, a researcher who has spent fifteen years studying the behavior of grizzly bears, discovered bears who played the most tended to survive the longest.
When asked why, he said, “In a world continuously presenting unique challenges and ambiguity, play prepares these bears for a changing planet.”
Two and a half years later, Geoff was in Tanzania for a Young Global Leaders event with the World Economic Forum. One evening at an open-mic night Geoff was urged by those who knew his story to share what he had learned with the group of two hundred accomplished peers. Through great emotion, he told them that he had paid a high price to learn a simple yet essential lesson: “Protect the asset.”
The best asset we have for making a contribution to the world is ourselves. If we underinvest in ourselves, and by that I mean our minds, our bodies, and our spirits, we damage the very tool we need to make our highest contribution. One of the most common ways people—especially ambitious, successful people—damage this asset is through a lack of sleep.
Essentialists instead see sleep as necessary for operating at high levels of contribution more of the time. This is why they systematically and deliberately build sleep into their schedules so they can do more, achieve more, and explore more. By “protecting their asset” they are able to go about their daily lives with a reserve of energy, creativity, and problem-solving ability to call upon when needed.
I remember the article cited top business leaders who boasted about getting a full eight hours. I also remember Bill Clinton was quoted as saying that every major mistake he had made in his life had happened as a result of sleep deprivation. Ever since, I have tried to get eight hours a night.
The problem with being sleep-deprived is that it compromises our ability to tell the difference, and thus our precious ability to prioritize. Sleep will enhance your ability to explore, make connections, and do less but better throughout your waking hours.
Nonessentialists apply implicit or unspoken criteria to the decisions they make in both their personal and their professional lives. For example, when deciding what projects to take on at work, a Nonessentialist may operate by the implicit criterion, “If my manager asks me to do it, then I should do it.”
But over time they had become more and more indiscriminate, and eventually the company’s portfolio of projects seemed to share only the criterion that a customer had asked them to do it. As a result, the morale on the team had plummeted, and not simply because team members were overworked and overwhelmed from having taken on too much. It was also because no project ever seemed to justify itself, and there was no greater sense of purpose.
…finding the discipline to say no to opportunities—often very good opportunities—that come your way in work and life is infinitely harder than throwing out old clothes in your closet. But find it you must, because remember that anytime you fail to say “no” to a nonessential, you are really saying yes by default.
“What, of my list of competing priorities, should I say yes to?” Instead, ask the essential question: “What will I say no to?”
For one, there is a heavy price just in terms of human dynamics. The fact is, motivation and cooperation deteriorate when there is a lack of purpose. When the team lacks understanding of what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive.
In the same way, when individuals are involved in too many disparate activities—even good activities—they can fail to achieve their essential mission. One reason for this is that the activities don’t work in concert, so they don’t add up into a meaningful whole.
Creating an essential intent is hard. It takes courage, insight, and foresight to see which activities and efforts will add up to your single highest point of contribution. It takes asking tough questions, making real trade-offs, and exercising serious discipline to cut out the competing priorities that distract us from our true intention. Yet it is worth the effort because only with real clarity of purpose can people, teams, and organizations.
Peter Drucker, in my view the father of modern management thinking, was also a master of the art of the graceful no. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian professor most well known for his work on “flow,” reached out to interview a series of creative individuals for a book he was writing on creativity, Drucker’s response was interesting enough to Mihaly that he quoted it verbatim: “I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February 14th—for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I have learned much from it. But, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative—I don’t know what that means.… I just keep on plodding.… I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours—productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.”
If we have no clear sense of the opportunity cost—in other words, the value of what we are giving up—then it is especially easy to fall into the nonessential trap of telling ourselves we can get it all done.
Essentialists accept they cannot be popular with everyone all of the time. Yes, saying no respectfully, reasonably, and gracefully can come at a short-term social cost. But part of living the way of the Essentialist is realizing respect is far more valuable than popularity in the long run.
Then one day one of her mentors came to her and told her that she had to learn to jettison the people and things of her life that just didn’t matter, and that doing so would allow her to put 100 percent of her energy into the things that had meaning for her. That advice liberated her. Now she is able to pick and choose. With practice, politely declining an invitation has become easy for her. Kay explains: “I say no very easily because I know what is important to me.
Tom Friel, the former CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, once said to me, “We need to learn the slow ‘yes’ and the quick ‘no.’ ”
HALF OF THE TROUBLES OF THIS LIFE CAN BE TRACED TO SAYING YES TOO QUICKLY AND NOT SAYING NO SOON ENOUGH.
An Essentialist has the courage and confidence to admit his or her mistakes and uncommit, no matter the sunk costs. We feel guilty saying no to something or someone we have already committed to, and let’s face it, no one likes going back on their word. Yet learning how to do so—in ways that will garner you respect for your courage, focus, and discipline—is crucial to becoming an Essentialist.
As the saying goes, nobody in the history of the world has washed their rental car! This is because of something called “the endowment effect,” our tendency to undervalue things that aren’t ours and to overvalue things because we already own them.
I once wasted months of effort trying to force a project that just wasn’t working out. Looking back, the more I put into it the worse things became. But my irrational response was to invest still more. I thought, “I can make this work!” I did not want to accept I had been wasting my effort.
Becoming an Essentialist means making cutting, condensing, and correcting a natural part of our daily routine—making editing a natural cadence in our lives.
The way of the Essentialist is different. The Essentialist looks ahead. She plans. She prepares for different contingencies. She expects the unexpected. She creates a buffer to prepare for the unforeseen, thus giving herself some wiggle room when things come up, as they inevitably do.
These days the pace of our lives is only getting faster and faster. It is as if we are driving one inch behind another car at one hundred miles an hour. If that driver makes even the tiniest unexpected move—if he slows down even a little, or swerves even the smallest bit—we’ll ram right into him. There is no room for error. As a result, execution is often highly stressful, frustrating, and forced. Here are a few tips for keeping your work—and sanity—from swerving off the road by creating a buffer.
Essentialists accept the reality that we can never fully anticipate or prepare for every scenario or eventuality; the future is simply too unpredictable. Instead, they build in buffers to reduce the friction caused by the unexpected.
While the Nonessentialist is busy applying more and more pressure and piling on more and more solutions, the Essentialist simply makes a one-time investment in removing obstacles. This approach goes beyond just solving problems; it’s a method of reducing your efforts to maximize your results.
Essentialist Starts with a big goal and gets small results Goes for the flashiest wins Starts small and gets big results Celebrates small acts of progress.. By catching and rewarding people in the midst of “small wins,” Ward Clapham’s approach tapped into the power of celebrating progress. Research has shown that of all forms of human motivation the most effective one is progress. Why? Because a small, concrete win creates momentum and affirms our faith in our further success.
“Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.”
As former Stanford professor and educator Henry B. Eyring has written, “My experience has taught me this about how people and organizations improve: the best place to look is for small changes we could make in the things we do often. There is power in steadiness and repetition.”
When we start small and reward progress, we end up achieving more than when we set big, lofty, and often impossible goals. And as a bonus, the act of positively reinforcing our successes allows us to reap more enjoyment and satisfaction out of the process.
Essentialist Tries to execute the essentials by force Allows nonessentials to be the default Designs a routine that enshrines what is essential, making execution almost effortless Makes the essential the default position
He wakes up at 5:30 A.M. every single morning, including Saturday and Sunday (as he’s done for more than fifty years). He then exercises for an hour. He eats breakfast at 7:30 A.M. and arrives at work at 8:15 A.M. Dinner is at 6:30 P.M. with his family. Bedtime is 10:00 P.M. But what really enables Ray to operate at his highest level of contribution is that throughout the day, his routine is governed by a single rule: “Focus on the hardest thing first.” After all, as Ray said to me: “We already have too much to think about. Why not eliminate some of them by establishing a routine?”
It’s natural and human to obsess over past mistakes or feel stress about what may be ahead of us. Yet every second spent worrying about a past or future moment distracts us from what is important in the here and now.
Essentialists live their whole lives in this manner. And because they do, they can apply their full energy to the job at hand. They don’t diffuse their efforts with distractions. They know that execution is easy if you work hard at it and hard if you work easy at it.
What we can’t do is concentrate on two things at the same time. When I talk about being present, I’m not talking about doing only one thing at a time. I’m talking about being focused on one thing at a time. Multitasking itself is not the enemy of Essentialism; pretending we can “multifocus” is.
Living fully as an Essentialist isn’t always easy. In many ways, I still struggle with it myself. I still instinctively want to please people when they ask me to do something, even something I know is Nonessential. When presented with opportunities—especially good opportunities—I still fall into thinking, “I can do both” when I really can’t.
Still, over time I have found it gets easier and easier. Saying no feels less uncomfortable. Decisions get much clearer. Eliminating the Nonessentials becomes more natural and instinctive. I feel greater control of my choices, to the point that my life is different.
As the Dalai Lama, another true Essentialist, has said: “If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness.”
The first is the exquisitely important role of my family in my life. At the very, very end, everything else will fade into insignificance by comparison. The second is the pathetically tiny amount of time we have left of our lives.
The life of an Essentialist is a life lived without regret. If you have correctly identified what really matters, if you invest your time and energy in it, then it is difficult to regret the choices you make. You become proud of the life you have chosen to live.
The results of this research were startling: when there was a high level of clarity of purpose, the teams and the people on it overwhelmingly thrived. When there was a serious lack of clarity about what the team stood for and what their goals and roles were, people experienced confusion, stress, frustration, and ultimately failure.
The unintended consequence is that Nonessentialist managers try to have their teams pursue too many things—and try to do too many things themselves as well—and the team plateaus in its progress.
An Essentialist understands that clarity is the key to empowerment. He doesn’t allow roles to be general and vague. He ensures that everyone on the team is really clear about what they are expected to contribute and what everyone else is contributing.
Out of all virtues simplicity is my most favorite virtue. So much so that I tend to believe that simplicity can solve most of the problems, personal as well as the world problems. If the life approach is simple one need not lie so frequently, nor quarrel nor steal, nor envy, anger, abuse, kill. Everyone will have enough and plenty so need not hoard, speculate, gamble, hate. When character is beautiful, you are beautiful. That is the beauty of simplicity.