Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

When teams are really clear about their purpose and their individual roles, on the other hand, it is amazing what happens to team dynamics. Formal momentum accelerates, adding up to a higher cumulative contribution of the team as a whole.

powerful essential intent inspires people partially because it is concrete enough to answer the question, “How will we know when we have succeeded?” This was illustrated brilliantly to me by Professor Bill Meehan, who spent thirty years with McKinsey advising CEOs and senior leaders on strategy and now teaches a class called “The Strategic Management of Nonprofits” at the Stanford School of Business. When I took his course as a postgraduate, one of the assignments he gave us was to evaluate the vision and mission statements of nonprofit organisations. As the class reviewed more than one hundred examples, they noticed that some of the most grandiose were actually the least inspiring. For example, one had the mission to “eliminate hunger in the world,” but given that there were just five people in the organisation, the mission felt like little more than empty words. Then out of the cluttered landscape of such loose idealism came a statement we all immediately understood and were inspired by. It was from a slightly unexpected place: the actor/social entrepreneur Brad Pitt, who, appalled by the lack of progress in rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, had started an organisation called “Make It Right” with the essential intent “to build 150 affordable, green, storm-resistant homes for families living in the Lower 9th Ward.” That statement took the air out of the room. The concreteness of the objective made it real. The realness made it inspiring. It answered the ques...

Courage is grace under pressure.

Have you ever felt a tension between what you felt was right and what someone was pressuring you to do? Have you ever felt the conflict between your internal conviction and an external action? Have you ever said yes when you meant no simply to avoid conflict or friction? Have you ever felt too scared or timid to turn down an invitation or request from a boss, colleague, friend, neighbour, or family member for fear of disappointing them? If you have, you’re not alone. Navigating these moments with courage and grace is one of the most important skills to master in becoming an Essentialist – and one of the hardest.

I did not set out to write a chapter about courage. But the deeper I have looked at the subject of Essentialism the more clearly I have seen courage as key to the process of elimination. Without courage, the disciplined pursuit of less is just lip service. It is just the stuff of one more dinner party conversation. It is skin deep. Anyone can talk about the importance of focusing on the things that matter most – and many people do – but to see people who dare to live it is rare.

Stephen R. Covey, one of the most respected and widely read business thinkers of his generation, was an Essentialist. Not only did he routinely teach Essentialist principles – like “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” – to important leaders and heads of state around the world, he lived them.

when we have strong internal clarity it is almost as if we have a force field protecting us from the non-essentials coming at us from all directions.

A second reason why it is hard to choose what is essential in the moment is as simple as an innate fear of social awkwardness. The fact is, we as humans are wired to want to get along with others. After all, thousands of years ago when we all lived in tribes of hunter gatherers, our survival depended on it. And while conforming to what people in a group expect of us – what psychologists call normative conformity – is no longer a matter of life and death, the desire is still deeply ingrained in us.

When people ask us to do something, we can confuse the request with our relationship with them. Sometimes they seem so inter-connected, we forget that denying the request is not the same as denying the person. Only once we separate the decision from the relationship can we make a clear decision and then separately find the courage and compassion to communicate it.9

The more we think about what we are giving up when we say yes to someone, the easier it is to say no. 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 non-essential trap of telling ourselves we can get it all done. We can’t. A graceful “no” grows out of a clear but unstated calculation of the trade-off.

This doesn’t mean you have to be cynical about people. I don’t mean to imply people shouldn’t be trusted. I am simply saying everyone is selling something – an idea, a viewpoint, an opinion – in exchange for your time. Simply being aware of what is being sold allows us to be more deliberate in deciding whether we want to buy it.

“NO” OFTEN REQUIRES TRADING POPULARITY FOR RESPECT

A case in point is the time the graphic designer Paul Rand had the guts to say no to Steve Jobs.10 When Jobs was looking for a logo for the company NeXT, he asked Rand, whose work included the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Westinghouse, and ABC, to come up with a few options. But Rand didn’t want to come up with “a few options.” He wanted to design just one option. So Rand said: “No. I will solve your problem for you. And you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go and talk to other people. But I will solve the problem the best way I know how. And you use it or not. That’s up to you.” Not surprisingly, Rand solved the problem and created the “jewel” logo Jobs wanted, but the real lesson here is the effect Rand’s “push back” had on Jobs, who later said of Rand, “He is one of the most professional people I have ever worked with: in the sense that he had thought through all of the formal relationship between a client and a professional such as himself.” Rand took a risk when he said no. He bet a short-term popularity loss for a long-term gain in respect. And it paid off.

REMEMBER THAT A CLEAR “NO” CAN BE MORE GRACEFUL THAN A VAGUE OR NONCOMMITTAL “YES”

Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.

Sunk-cost bias is the tendency to continue to invest time, money, or energy into something we know is a losing proposition simply because we have already incurred, or sunk, a cost that cannot be recouped. But of course this can easily become a vicious cycle: the more we invest, the more determined we become to see it through and see our investment pay off. The more we invest in something, the harder it is to let go.

3Individuals are equally vulnerable to sunk-cost bias. It explains why we’ll continue to sit through a terrible movie because we’ve already paid the price of a ticket. It explains why we continue to pour money into a home renovation that never seems to near completion. It explains why we’ll continue to wait for a bus or a subway train that never comes instead of hailing a cab, and it explains why we invest in toxic relationships even when our efforts only make things worse. Examples like this abound; consider the somewhat bizarre story of an American named Henry Gribbohm, who recently spent his entire life savings, $2,600 in total, at a carnival game trying to win an Xbox. The more he spent, the more determined he became to win. Henry said, “You just get caught up in the whole ‘I’ve got to win my money back,’ but it didn’t turn out that way.”4 The more he invested in trying to win this utterly non-essential item, the harder it was for him to walk away. Have you ever continued to invest time or effort in a non-essential project instead of cutting your losses? Have you ever continued to pour money into an investment that wasn’t panning out instead of walking away? Have you ever kept plodding down a dead end because you could not admit, “I shouldn’t have pursued this direction in the first place”? Ever been stuck in a cycle of “throwing good money after bad”? A non-Essentialist can’t break free of traps like these. An Essentialist has the courage and confidence to admit his o...

Avoiding Commitment Traps BEWARE OF THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT A sense of ownership is a powerful thing. As the saying goes, nobody in the history of the world has washed their hire 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.

PRETEND YOU DON’T OWN IT YET Tom Stafford describes a simple antidote to the endowment effect. 6 Instead of asking, “How much do I value this item?” we should ask, “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” We can do the same for opportunities and commitment. Don’t ask, “How will I feel if I miss out on this opportunity?” but rather, “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?” Similarly, we can ask, “If I wasn’t already involved in this project, how hard would I work to get on it?”7

There should be no shame in admitting to a mistake; after all, we really are only admitting that we are now wiser than we once were.

TO FIGHT THIS FEAR, RUN A REVERSE PILOT One of the ideas that has grown popular in business circles in recent years is “prototyping.” Building a prototype, or large-scale model, allows companies to test-run an idea or product without making a huge investment up front. Exactly the same idea can be used in reverse to eliminate non-essentials in a relatively low-risk way, by running what Daniel Shapero, a director at LinkedIn, calls a “reverse pilot.”10 In a reverse pilot you test whether removing an initiative or activity will have any negative consequences. For example, when an executive I work with took on a new senior role in the company, he inherited a process his predecessor had gone to a huge effort to implement: a huge, highly visual report on a myriad of subjects produced for the other executives each week. It consumed enormous energy from his team, and he hypothesised that it was not adding a great deal of value to the company. So to test his hypothesis he ran a reverse pilot. He simply stopped publishing the report and waited to see what the response would be. What he found was that no one seemed to miss it; after several weeks nobody had even mentioned the report. As a result, he concluded that the report was not essential to the business and could be eliminated.

An editor is not merely someone who says no to things. A three-year-old can do that. Nor does an editor simply eliminate; in fact, in a way, an editor actually adds. What I mean is that a good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters.

It is a matter of record that well-edited movies and books are easy on the eye and the brain.

When making decisions, deciding to cut options can be terrifying – but the truth is, it is the very essence of decision making. 5In fact: The Latin root of the word decision – cis or cid – literally means “to cut” or “to kill.”

making the choice to eliminate something good can be painful. But eventually, every cut produces joy – maybe not in the moment but afterwards, when we realise that every additional moment we have gained can be spent on something better. That may be one reason why Stephen King has written, “To write is human, to edit is divine.”6

But to be clear, condensing doesn’t mean doing more at once, it simply means less waste. It means lowering the ratio of words to ideas, square feet to usefulness, or effort to results. Thus to apply the principle of condensing to our lives we need to shift the ratio of activity to meaning. We need to eliminate multiple meaningless activities and replace them with one very meaningful activity.

The best surgeon is not the one who makes the most incisions; similarly, the best editors can sometimes be the least intrusive, the most restrained.

Becoming an editor in our lives also includes knowing when to show restraint. One way we can do this is by editing our tendency to step in. When we are added onto an e-mail thread, for example, we can resist our usual temptation to be the first to “reply all”. When sitting in a meeting, we can resist the urge to add our two cents. We can wait. We can observe. We can see how things develop. Doing less is not just a powerful Essentialist strategy, it’s a powerful editorial one as well.

Becoming an Essentialist means making cutting, condensing, and correcting a natural part of our daily routine – making editing a natural cadence in our lives.

Boundaries are a little like the walls of a sandcastle. The second we let one fall over, the rest of them come crashing down.

It’s true that boundaries can come at a high price. However, not pushing back costs more:

Non-Essentialists tend to think of boundaries as constraints or limits, things that get in the way of their hyperproductive life.

We all have some people in our lives who tend to be higher maintenance for us than others. These are the people who make their problem our problem. They distract us from our purpose. They care only about their own agendas, and if we let them they prevent us from making our highest level of contribution by siphoning our time and energy off to activities that are essential to them, rather than those that are essential to us.

DON’T ROB PEOPLE OF THEIR PROBLEMS I am not saying we should never help people. We should serve, and love, and make a difference in the lives of others, of course. But when people make their problem our problem, we aren’t helping them; we’re enabling them. Once we take their problem for them, all we’re doing is taking away their ability to solve it.

BOUNDARIES ARE A SOURCE OF LIBERATION This truth is demonstrated elegantly by the story of a 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 in the playground. Their freedom, in effect, more than doubled.4 Similarly, when we don’t set clear boundaries in our lives we can end up imprisoned by the limits others have set for us. When we have clear boundaries, on the other hand, we are free to select from the whole area – or the whole range of options – that we have deliberately chosen to explore.

A “buffer” can be defined literally as something that prevents two things from coming into contact and harming each other. For example, a “buffer zone” at the periphery of a protected environmental area is an area of land that is used to create extra space between that area and any potential threats that might infiltrate it.

The way of the Essentialist, on the other hand, is to use the good times to create a buffer for the bad.

The value of extreme preparation on a grander scale can be seen in the story of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott in their race to be the first people in modern history to reach the South Pole. Both men had exactly the same objective. But their approaches differed.4 Amundsen prepared for anything and everything that could possibly go wrong; Scott hoped for the best-case scenario. He brought just one thermometer for the trip and was furious when it broke. Amundsen brought four thermometers. Scott stored one ton of food for his seventeen men. Amundsen stored three tons. Scott stashed supplies for the return journey in one spot marked with a single flag, meaning that if he went even a fraction off course his team could miss it. Amundsen, by contrast, planted twenty markers, miles apart, to ensure that his team would see them. Roald Amundsen prepared diligently and read obsessively for his journey, whereas Robert Falcon Scott did the bare minimum.

While Amundsen deliberately built slack and buffers into his plan, Scott hoped for the ideal circumstances. While Scott’s men suffered from fatigue, hunger, and frostbite, Amundsen’s team’s journey was relatively (under the circumstances) frictionless. Amundsen successfully made the journey. Scott and his team tragically died.

To attain knowledge add things every day. To attain wisdom subtract things every day.

In the business parable The Goal, Alex Rogo is a fictional character who is overwhelmed by the responsibility of turning around a failing production plant within three months.1 At first he does not see how this is possible. Then he is mentored by a professor who tells him he can make incredible progress in a short time if only he can find the plant’s “constraints.” Constraints, he is told, are the obstacles holding the whole system back. Even if he improves everything else in the plant, his mentor tells him, if he doesn’t address the constraints the plant will not materially improve.

The question is this: What is the “slowest hiker” in your job or your life? What is the obstacle that is keeping you back from achieving what really matters to you? By systematically identifying and removing this “constraint” you’ll be able to significantly reduce the friction keeping you from executing what is essential.

A non-Essentialist approaches execution in a reactive, haphazard manner. Because the non-Essentialist is always reacting to crises rather than anticipating them, he is forced to apply quick-fix solutions: the equivalent to plugging his finger into the hole of a leaking dam and hoping the whole thing doesn’t burst. Being good with a hammer, the non-Essentialist thinks everything is a nail. Thus he applies more and more pressure, but this ends up only adding more friction and frustration. Indeed, in some situations the harder you push on someone the harder he or she will push back.

Essentialists don’t default to Band-Aid solutions. Instead of looking for the most obvious or immediate obstacles, they look for the ones slowing down progress. They ask, “What is getting in the way of achieving what is essential?” While the non-Essentialist 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 maximise your results.

The “slowest hiker” could even be another person – whether it’s a boss who won’t give the green light on a project, the finance department who won’t approve the budget, or a client who won’t sign on the dotted line. To reduce the friction with another person, apply the “catch more flies with honey” approach. Send him an e-mail, but instead of asking if he has done the work for you (which obviously he hasn’t), go and see him. Ask him, “What obstacles or bottlenecks are holding you back from achieving X, and how can I help remove these?” Instead of pestering him, offer sincerely to support him. You will get a warmer reply than you would by just e-mailing him another demand.

Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow.

The way of the Essentialist is different. Instead of trying to accomplish it all – and all at once – and flaring out, the Essentialist starts small and celebrates progress. Instead of going for the big, flashy wins that don’t really matter, the Essentialist pursues small and simple wins in areas that are essential.

By catching and rewarding people in the midst of “small wins,” Ward Clapham’s approach tapped into the power of celebrating progress. In one moving example, a police officer pulled over a teenager who had saved a girl from being hit by a car, gave him a Positive Ticket, and said: “You did a great thing today. You can make a difference.” The boy went home and put the Positive Ticket on his wall. After a few weeks his foster mother asked him whether he was going to cash it in. To her surprise he said he never would. An adult had told him he could be somebody, and that was worth more than free pizza or bowling. Multiply that type of positive interaction by forty thousand times a year for ten years and you can sense why it started to make a difference. Each time a young person was recognised and commended for doing something good, he or she was that much more motivated to continue doing good until, eventually, doing good became natural and effortless.

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.

In his 1968 Harvard Business Review article entitled “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” among the most popular Harvard Business Review articles of all time, Frederick Herzberg reveals research showing that the two primary internal motivators for people are achievement and recognition for achievement.