Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

when we surrender our ability to choose, something or someone else will step in to choose for us.

Our options may be things, but a choice—a choice is an action. It is not just something we have but something we do. This experience brought me to the liberating realization that while we may not always have control over our options, we always have control over how we choose among them.

Options (things) can be taken away, while our core ability to choose (free will) cannot be.

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

Yet choice is at the very core of what it means to be an Essentialist. To become an Essentialist requires a heightened awareness of our ability to choose. We need to recognize it as an invincible power within us, existing separate and distinct from any other thing, person, or force. William James once wrote, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”2 That is why the first and most crucial skill you will learn on this journey is to develop your ability to choose choice, in every area of your life.

The Essentialist doesn’t just recognize the power of choice, he celebrates it. The Essentialist knows that when we surrender our right to choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit permission to choose for us.

MOST OF WHAT EXISTS IN THE UNIVERSE—OUR ACTIONS, AND ALL OTHER FORCES, RESOURCES, AND IDEAS—HAS LITTLE VALUE AND YIELDS LITTLE RESULT; ON THE OTHER HAND, A FEW THINGS WORK FANTASTICALLY WELL AND HAVE TREMENDOUS IMPACT.

certain types of effort yield higher rewards than others.

His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems.

In The Tao of Warren Buffett, Mary Buffett and David Clark explain: “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. Sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do.”6 In short, he makes big bets on the essential few investment opportunities and says no to the many merely good ones.7

“The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1,000X but by 10,000X.”

“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”9

This is why an Essentialist takes the time to explore all his options. The extra investment is justified because some things are so much more important that they repay the effort invested in finding those things tenfold. An Essentialist, in other words, discerns more so he can do less.

“A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions.”3 By trying to operate by two incompatible strategies they started to undermine their ability to be competitive.

we can either make the hard choices for ourselves or allow others—whether our colleagues, our boss, or our customers—to decide for us.

We can try to avoid the reality of trade-offs, but we can’t escape them.

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

either build a great company or build great ideas but not both.

“We had him try out a lot of different things, but as soon as it became clear an activity was not going to be his ‘big thing’ we discussed it and took him out of it.”

“Imagine a four-burner stove,” she instructs the members of the party. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. In order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”

Because Essentialists will commit and “go big” on only the vital few ideas or activities, they explore more options at first to ensure they pick the right one later.

To discern what is truly essential we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make.

Essentialists spend as much time as possible exploring, listening, debating, questioning, and thinking. But their exploration is not an end in itself. The purpose of the exploration is to discern the vital few from the trivial many.

WITHOUT GREAT SOLITUDE NO SERIOUS WORK IS POSSIBLE.

“I think it’s critical to set aside time to take a breath, look around, and think. You need that level of clarity in order to innovate and grow.”

of too much going on, that tells me either we’re doing something inefficiently or we need to hire more people.” If his people are too busy to think, then they’re too busy, period.

We need space to escape in order to discern the essential few from the trivial many. Unfortunately, in our time-starved era we don’t get that space by default—only by design.

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

When I say focus, I don’t mean simply picking a question or possibility and thinking about it obsessively. I mean creating the space to explore one hundred questions and possibilities. An Essentialist focuses the way our eyes focus; not by fixating on something but by constantly adjusting and adapting to the field of vision.

He knew that making his highest point of contribution on a task required that he create the space for unencumbered thought.

Inspired by Newton, I took a similar, if perhaps less extreme, approach to writing this book. I blocked off eight hours a day to write: from 5:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., five days a week. The basic rule was no e-mail, no calls, no appointments, and no interruptions until after 1:00 P.M. I didn’t always achieve it, but the discipline made a big difference. I set my e-mail bounceback to explain that I was in “monk mode” until after the book was complete. It is difficult to overstate how much freedom I found in this approach. By creating space to explore, think, and write, I not only got my book done faster but gained control over how I spent the rest of my time.

when did you last take time out of your busy day simply to sit and think? I don’t mean the five minutes during your morning commute you spent composing the day’s to-do list, or the meeting you spent zoned out reflecting on how to approach another project you were working on. I’m talking about deliberately setting aside distraction-free time in a distraction-free space to do absolutely nothing other than think.

the faster and busier things get, the more we need to build thinking time into our schedule. And the noisier things get, the more we need to build quiet reflection spaces in which we can truly focus.

“Think Week.”

My preference is for inspirational literature, though such a choice is a personal one. But for the interested, here are some to consider: Zen, the Reason of Unreason; The Wisdom of Confucius; the Torah; the Holy Bible; Tao, to Know and Not Be Knowing; The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation; As a Man Thinketh; The Essential Gandhi; Walden, or, Life in the Woods; the Book of Mormon; The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and the Upanishads. There are a myriad of options. Just make sure to select something that was written before our hyperconnected era and yet seems timeless. Such writings can challenge our assumptions about what really matters. Whether you can invest two hours a day, two weeks a year, or even just five minutes every morning, it is important to make space to escape in your busy life.

WHERE IS THE KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE LOST IN INFORMATION?

In every set of facts, something essential is hidden. And a good journalist knows that finding it involves exploring those pieces of information and figuring out the relationships between them (and my undergraduate degree was in journalism, so I take this seriously). It means making those relationships and connections explicit. It means constructing the whole from the sum of its parts and understanding how these different pieces come together to matter to anyone. The best journalists do not simply relay information. Their value is in discovering what really matters to people.

you’ll also connect them to see the trends. Instead of just reacting to the facts, you’ll be able to focus on the larger issues that really matter.

The best journalists, as Friedman shared later with me, listen for what others do not hear.

Essentialists are powerful observers and listeners. Knowing that the reality of trade-offs means they can’t possibly pay attention to everything, they listen deliberately for what is not being explicitly stated. They read between the lines.

Nonessentialists listen too. But they listen while preparing to say something. They get distracted by extraneous noise. They hyperfocus on inconsequential details. They hear the loudest voice but they get the wrong message.

In the chaos of the modern workplace, with so many loud voices all around us pulling us in many directions, it is more important now than ever that we learn to resist the siren song of distraction and keep our eyes and ears peeled for the headlines.

the faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.

For the last ten years now I have kept a journal, using a counterintuitive yet effective method. It is simply this: I write less than I feel like writing. Typically, when people start to keep a journal they write pages the first day. Then by the second day the prospect of writing so much is daunting, and they procrastinate or abandon the exercise. So apply the principle of “less but better” to your journal. Restrain yourself from writing more until daily journaling has become a habit.

design thinking.

she said finding the lead and spotting the essential information are skills that can be acquired. She said, you need knowledge. Getting to the essence of a story takes a deep understanding of the topic, its context, its fit into the bigger picture, and its relationship to different fields. So she would read all the related news and try to spot the one piece of information that all others had missed or hadn’t focused enough on. “My goal,” she said, “was to understand the ‘spiderweb’ of the story because that is what allowed me to spot any ‘abnormal’ or ‘unusual’ detail or behavior that didn’t quite fit into the natural course of the story.”

It’s crucial, Mariam says, to seek “a different perspective on a given story, one that would shed the light on the topic in a fresh, different or thought-provoking way.” One trick she uses is role play: she puts herself in the shoes of all the main players in a story in order to better understand their motives, reasoning, and points of view.

Embrace the Wisdom of Your Inner Child

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

The word school is derived from the Greek word schole, meaning “leisure.” Yet our modern school system, born in the Industrial Revolution, has removed the leisure—and much of the pleasure—out of learning. Sir Ken Robinson, who has made the study of creativity in schools his life’s work, has observed that instead of fueling creativity through play, schools can actually kill it: “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.”2 In this he is correct.