Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

“Is this the very most important thing I should be doing with my time and resources right now?”

only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.

What about you? How many times have you reacted to a request by saying yes without really thinking about it?

Weniger aber besser.

Less but better.

The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better.

Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.

we can learn to make one-time decisions that make a thousand future decisions so we don’t exhaust ourselves asking the same questions again and again.

The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.

If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.

the pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure.

“the undisciplined pursuit of more” was a key reason for failure.

So eliminating the nonessentials isn’t just about mental discipline. It’s about the emotional discipline necessary to say no to social pressure.

“I choose to,” “Only a few things really matter,” and “I can do anything but not everything.”

IT IS THE ABILITY TO CHOOSE WHICH MAKES US HUMAN. —Madeleine L’Engle

The ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away—it can only be forgotten.

isn’t working hard evidence of one’s belief in one’s importance and value?

“My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

“Warren decided early in his career it would be impossible for him to make hundreds of right investment decisions, so he decided that he would invest only in the businesses that he was absolutely sure of, and then bet heavily on them. He owes 90% of his wealth to just ten investments.

Imagine you could go back to 1972 and invest a dollar in each company in the S&P 500. Which company would provide the largest return on your investment by 2002? Would it be GE? IBM? Intel? According to Money magazine and the analysis they initiated from Ned Davis Research, the answer is none of the above.1 The correct answer is Southwest Airlines. This is startling because the airline industry is notoriously bad at generating profits. Yet Southwest, led by Herb Kelleher, has consistently, year after year, produced amazing financial results.

“You have to look at every opportunity and say, ‘Well, no…I’m sorry. We’re not going to do a thousand different things that really won’t contribute much to the end result we are trying to achieve.’ ”

It is easy to see why it’s so tempting to deny the reality of trade-offs.

Obviously, when faced with the choice between two things we want, the preferred answer is yes to both. But as much as we’d like to, we simply cannot have it all.

One of the things he told us was that he and his wife had decided not to be a part of any clubs.

they made the trade-off to spend that time with their children. Over the years their children had become their best friends—well

Nonessentialist Essentialist Is too busy doing to think about life Creates space to escape and explore life

In order to have focus we need to escape to focus.

An Essentialist focuses the way our eyes focus; not by fixating on something but by constantly adjusting and adapting to the field of vision.

Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, for example, schedules up to two hours of blank space on his calendar every day. He divides them into thirty-minute increments, yet he schedules nothing.

WHERE IS THE KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE LOST IN INFORMATION? —T. S. Eliot

the faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.

A LITTLE NONSENSE NOW AND THEN, IS CHERISHED BY THE WISEST MEN. —Roald Dahl

“We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies….Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”

Play, which I would define as anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than as a means to an end—whether it’s flying a kite or listening to music or throwing around a baseball—might

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.”

stress increases the activity in the part of the brain that monitors emotions (the amygdala), while reducing the activity in the part responsible for cognitive function (the hippocampus)7—the result being, simply, that we really can’t think clearly.

the second most important factor differentiating the best violinists from the good violinists was actually sleep. The best violinists slept an average of 8.6 hours in every twenty-four-hour period: about an hour longer than the average American. Over the period of a week they also spent an average of 2.8 hours of napping in the afternoon: about two hours longer than the average. Sleep, the authors of the study concluded, allowed these top performers to regenerate so that they could practice with greater concentration.

sleep deprivation undermines high performance.

even a single REM—or rapid eye movement—cycle enhanced the integration of unassociated information.

In a piece called “No More Yes. It’s Either HELL YEAH! Or No,” the popular TED speaker Derek Sivers describes a simple technique for becoming more selective in the choices we make. The key is to put the decision to an extreme test: if we feel total and utter conviction to do something, then we say yes, Derek-style. Anything less gets a thumbs down. Or as a leader at Twitter once put it to me, “If the answer isn’t a definite yes then it should be a no.”

When he wasn’t blown away by any of the candidates he interviewed for a job, he said no to all of them.

As you evaluate an option, think about the single most important criterion for that decision, and then simply give the option a score between 0 and 100. If you rate it any lower than 90 percent, then automatically change the rating to 0 and simply reject it.

They begin with the basic assumption that they would rather be understaffed than hire the wrong person quickly.

motivation and cooperation deteriorate when there is a lack of purpose. You can train leaders on communication and teamwork and conduct 360 feedback reports until you are blue in the face, but if a team does not have clarity of goals and roles, problems will fester and multiply.

unclear about how to win, and as a result they make up their own game and their own rules as they vie for the manager’s favor. Instead of focusing their time and energies on making a high level of contribution, they put all their effort into games like attempting to look better than their peers, demonstrating their self-importance, and echoing their manager’s every idea or sentiment. These kinds of activities are not only nonessential but damaging and counterproductive.

When we are unclear about our real purpose in life—in other words, when we don’t have a clear sense of our goals, our aspirations, and our values—we make up our own social games. We waste time and energies on trying to look good in comparison to other people. We overvalue nonessentials like a nicer car or house, or even intangibles like the

number of our followers on Twitter or the way we look in our Facebook photos. As a result, we neglect activities that are truly essential, like spending time with our loved ones, or n...

“If we could be truly excellent at only one thing, what would it be?”

They distract us from the reality of the fact that either we can say no and regret it for a few minutes, or we can say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months, or even years.

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.”