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They say yes automatically, without thinking, often in pursuit of the rush one gets from having pleased someone.
everyone is selling something—an idea, a viewpoint, an opinion—in exchange for your time.
it shows people that our time is highly valuable. It distinguishes the professional from the amateur.
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.
Being vague is not the same as being graceful, and delaying the eventual “no” will only make it that much harder—and the recipient that much more resentful.
“Let me check my calendar and get back to you.”
Say, “Yes. What should I deprioritize?” Saying no to a senior leader at work is almost unthinkable, even laughable, for many people. However, when saying yes is going to compromise your ability to make the highest level of contribution to your work, it is also your obligation. In this case it is not only reasonable to say no, it is essential. One effective way to do that is to remind your superiors what you would be neglecting if you said yes and force them to grapple with the trade-off.
Use the words “You are welcome to X. I am willing to Y.”
“We need to learn the slow ‘yes’ and the quick ‘no.’ ”
Only when we admit we have made a mistake in committing to something can we make a mistake a part of our past.
“To write is human, to edit is divine.”6
DON’T ROB PEOPLE OF THEIR PROBLEMS
But when people make their problem our problem, we aren’t helping them; we’re enabling them.
Once, the parents of a twenty-five-year-old man came to see him. They wanted him to “fix” their son. He asked them why they had come without their son, and they said, “Well, he doesn’t think he has a problem.” After listening to their story Henry concluded, to their surprise: “I think your son is right. He doesn’t have a problem….You do….You pay, you fret, you worry, you plan, you exert energy to keep him going. He doesn’t have a problem because you have taken it from him.”
Whoever it is that’s trying to siphon off your time and energies for their own purpose, the only solution is to put up fences. And not at the moment the request is made—you need to put up your fences well in advance, clearly demarcating what’s off limits so you can head off time wasters and boundary pushers at the pass.
school located next to a busy road. At first the children played only on a small swath of the playground, close to the building where the grown-ups could keep their eyes on them. But then someone constructed a fence around the playground. Now the children were able to play anywhere and everywhere on the playground. Their freedom, in effect, more than doubled.4
TO ATTAIN KNOWLEDGE ADD THINGS EVERY DAY. TO ATTAIN WISDOM SUBTRACT THINGS EVERY DAY.
theoretical work, for which the end goal is truth.
second is practical work, where the objective is action.
poietical...
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“bringing-forth.”
EVERY DAY DO SOMETHING THAT WILL INCH YOU CLOSER TO A BETTER TOMORROW.
two primary internal motivators for people are achievement and recognition for achievement.
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.”
If simply being treated in a certain way conditioned these Stanford students to gradually adopt these negative behaviors, could the same kind of conditioning work for more positive behavior too?
token system.9 The children were given ten tokens at the beginning of the week. These could each be traded in for either thirty minutes of screen time or fifty cents at the end of the week, adding up to $5 or five hours of screen time a week. If a child read a book for thirty minutes, he or she would earn an additional token, which could also be traded in for screen time or for money. The results were incredible: overnight, screen time went down 90 percent, reading went up by the same amount, and the overall effort we had to put into policing the system went way, way down.
“Done is better than perfect.”
“minimal viable product.”11 The idea is, “What is the simplest possible product that will be useful and valuable to the intended customer?”
There are two opposing ways to approach an important goal or deadline. You can start early and small or start late and big.
Take a goal or deadline you have coming up and ask yourself, “What is the minimal amount I could do right now to prepare?”
ROUTINE, IN AN INTELLIGENT MAN, IS A SIGN OF AMBITION.
The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.”
The Essentialist designs a routine that makes achieving what you have identified as essential the default position. Yes, in some instances an Essentialist still has to work hard, but with the right routine in place each effort yields exponentially greater results.
Once the mental work shifts to the basal ganglia, mental space is freed up to concentrate on something new.
“The brain can almost completely shut down….And this is a real advantage, because it means you have all of this mental activity you can devote to something else.”5
40 percent of our choices are deeply unconscious.7 We don’t think about them in the usual sense. There is both danger and opportunity in this. The opportunity is that we can develop new abilities that eventually become instinctive. The danger is that we may develop routines that are counterproductive.
In an interview about his book The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg said “in the last 15 years, as we’ve learned how habits work and how they can be changed, scientists have explained that every habit is made up of a cue, a routine, and a reward. The cue is a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine—the behavior itself—which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular habit is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop—cue, routine, reward; cue,
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to get big results we must start small. So start with one change in your daily or weekly routine and then build on your progress from there. I don’t want to imply that any of this is easy. Many of our nonessential routines are deep and emotional. They have been formed in the furnace of some strong emotions. The idea that we can just snap our fingers and replace them with a new one is naive. Learning essential new skills is never easy. But once we master them and make them automatic we have won an enormous victory, because the skill remains with us for the rest of our lives.
LIFE IS AVAILABLE ONLY IN THE PRESENT MOMENT. IF YOU ABANDON THE PRESENT MOMENT YOU CANNOT LIVE THE MOMENTS OF YOUR DAILY LIFE DEEPLY.
“In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.”
“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day;…so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real”).
NEVER DOUBT THAT A SMALL GROUP OF THOUGHTFUL, COMMITTED CITIZENS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD; INDEED, IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT EVER HAS.
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. As one senior vice president succinctly summarized it when she looked at the results gathered from her extended team: “Clarity equals success.”
The Nonessentialist leader is not great on accountability. A primary and somewhat obvious reason is that the more items one pursues, the harder it is to follow up on all of them. In fact, a Nonessentialist leader may unintentionally train his people to expect no follow-up at all. In turn, the members of the team soon learn that there are no repercussions for failing, cutting corners, or prioritizing what is easy over what is important. They learn that each objective pronounced by the leader will be emphasized only for a moment before giving way to something else of momentary interest.
