Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

But a choice is not a thing. 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.

For too long, we have overemphasized the external aspect of choices (our options) and underemphasized our internal ability to choose (our actions). This is more than semantics.

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

I’ll be the first to admit that choices are hard. By definition they involve saying no to something or several somethings, and that can feel like a loss.

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.

William James once wrote, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

Suddenly, the ratio of hours to pounds changed from 1:1 to 1:6. I had just learned a crucial lesson: certain types of effort yield higher rewards than others.

Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing more…and more and more.

The overwhelming reality is: we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.

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.

In the simplest terms, straddling means keeping your existing strategy intact while simultaneously also trying to adopt the strategy of a competitor.

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.

The moral of the story: ignoring the reality of trade-offs is a terrible strategy for organizations.

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

By refusing to make trade-offs, she ended up spreading five projects’ worth of time and effort across seventeen projects. Unsurprisingly, she did not get the results she wanted. Her logic had been: We can do it all. Obviously not.

A Nonessentialist approaches every trade-off by asking, “How can I do both?” Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating question, “Which problem do I want?”

An Essentialist makes trade-offs deliberately. She acts for herself rather than waiting to be acted upon.

“There are no solutions. There are onl...

Essentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. Instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” they ask, “What do I want to go big on?”

Trade-offs are not something to be ignored or decried. They are something to be embraced and made deliberately, strategically, and thoughtfully.

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.

“If somebody can’t make the meeting because 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.

As with choice, people tend to think of focus as a thing. Yes, focus is something we have. But focus is also something we do.

No matter how busy you think you are, you can carve time and space to think out of your workday. Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, for example, schedules up to two hours

He sees it as the primary way he can ensure he is in charge of his own day, instead of being at the mercy of it.

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.

“Next Thursday, the high school faculty will…” Simms reviewed the students’ leads and put them aside. He then informed them that they were all wrong. The lead to the story, he said, was “There will be no school Thursday.”

“In that instant,” Ephron recalls, “I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.”

In every set of facts, something essential is hidden.

The best journalists do not simply relay information. Their value is in discovering what really matters to people.

We know instinctively that we cannot explore every single piece of information we encounter in our lives.

Discerning what is essential to explore requires us to be disciplined in how we scan and filter all the competing and conflicting facts, options, and opinions constantly vying for our attention.

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

Essentialists are powerful observers and listeners.

Nonessentialists listen too. But they listen while preparing to say something. They get distracted by extraneous noise. They hyperfocus on inconsequential details.

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.

As someone once said to me, 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.

So apply the principle of “less but better” to your journal. Restrain yourself from writing more until daily journaling has become a habit.

I had to ask the team to stop. “What question are you trying to answer?” I asked them. Everyone paused awkwardly. Nobody had a response.

But then as we get older something happens. We are introduced to the idea that play is trivial.

Unfortunately, many of these negative messages come from the very place where imaginative play should be most encouraged, not stifled.

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 seem like a nonessential activity. Often it is treated that way. But in fact play is essential in many ways.

play has the power to significantly improve everything from personal health to relationships to education to organizations’ ability to innovate.

“Play,” he says, “leads to brain plasticity, adaptability, and creativity.” As he succinctly puts it, “Nothing fires up the brain like play.”

When we play, we are engaged in the purest expression of our humanity, the truest expression of our individuality.