Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer gathered anonymous diary entries from hundreds of people and covering thousands of workdays. On the basis of these hundreds of thousands of reflections, Amabile and Kramer concluded that “everyday progress – even a small win” can make all the difference in how people feel and perform. “Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work,” they said.

“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.”

In the summer of 1971, Zimbardo took healthy Stanford students, assigned them roles as either “guards” or “inmates,” and locked them in a makeshift “prison” in the basement of Stanford University. In just days, the “prisoners” began to demonstrate symptoms of depression and extreme stress, while the “guards” began to act cruel and sadistic (the experiment was ended early, for obvious reasons). The point is that simply being treated like prisoners and guards had, over the course of just a few days, created a momentum that caused the subjects to act like prisoners and guards. The Stanford prison experiment is legendary, and much has been written about its many implications. But what I wondered was this: If simply being treated in a certain way conditioned these Stanford students gradually to adopt these negative behaviours, could the same kind of conditioning work for more positive behaviour too?

Indeed, today Zimbardo is attempting a grand social experiment along those lines called the “Heroic Imagination Project.”8 The logic is to increase the odds of people operating with courage by teaching them the principles of heroism. By encouraging and rewarding heroic acts, Zimbardo believes, we can consciously and deliberately create a system where heroic acts eventually become natural and effortless.

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

distractions will over-power us.

There is a huge body of scientific research to explain the mechanism by which routine enables difficult things to become easy. One simplified explanation is that as we repeatedly do a certain task the neurons, or nerve cells, make new connections through communication gateways called “synapses.” With repetition, the connections strengthen and it becomes easier for the brain to activate them. For example, when you learn a new word it takes several repetitions at various intervals for the word to be mastered. To recall the word later you will need to activate the same synapses until eventually you know the word without consciously thinking about it.4

There is another cognitive advantage to routine as well. Once the mental work shifts to the basal ganglia, mental space is freed up to concentrate on something new. This allows us to autopilot the execution of one essential activity while simultaneously actively engaging in another, without sacrificing our level of focus or contribution. “In fact, the brain starts working less and less,” says Charles Duhigg, author of the book The Power of Habit. “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.”

Non-Essentialists tend to be so preoccupied with past successes and failures, as well as future challenges and opportunities, that they miss the present moment. They become distracted. Unfocused. They aren’t really there. The way of the Essentialist is to tune into the present. To experience life in kairos, not just chronos. To focus on the things that are truly important – not yesterday or tomorrow, but right now.

When faced with so many tasks and obligations that you can’t figure out which to tackle first, stop. Take a deep breath. Get present in the moment and ask yourself what is most important this very second – not what’s most important tomorrow or even an hour from now. If you’re not sure, make a list of everything vying for your attention and cross off anything that is not important right now.

Getting the future out of your head enables you to more fully focus on “what is important now.”

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

As you continue to clear out the wardrobe of your life, you will experience a reordering of what really matters. Life will become less about efficiently crossing off what was on your to-do list or rushing through everything on your schedule and more about changing what you put on there in the first place. Every day it becomes more clear than the day before how the essential things are so much more important than the next most important thing in line.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner sees “fewer things done better” as the most powerful mechanism for leadership. When he took the reins of the company he could easily have adopted the standard operating procedure of most Silicon Valley start-ups and tried to pursue everything. Instead, he said no to really good opportunities in order to pursue only the very best ones. He uses the acronym FCS (a.k.a. FOCUS) to teach his philosophy to his employees. The letters stand for “Fewer things done better,” “Communicating the right information to the right people at the right time,” and “Speed and quality of decision making.” Indeed, this is what it means to lead essentially.

I have since gathered data from more than five hundred individuals about their experience on more than one thousand teams. I asked them to answer a series of questions about a time when they had worked on a unified team, what the experience was like, what role their manager played, and what the end result was. Then I got them to contrast this with a time when they had been on a disunified team and what that was like, what role their manager played, and how it affected the end result. The results of this research were startling: when there was a high level of clarity of purpose, the team and the people in 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.

“Clarity equals success.”

Life in teams today is fast and full of opportunity. When teams are unified, the abundance of opportunity can be a good thing. But when teams lack clarity of purpose, it becomes difficult if not impossible to discern which of these myriad opportunities are truly vital. The unintended consequence is that non-Essentialist managers try to get their teams to pursue too many things – and try to do too many things themselves as well – and the team plateaus in its progress.

DEBATE UNTIL YOU HAVE ESTABLISHED A REALLY CLEAR (NOT PRETTY CLEAR) ESSENTIAL INTENT

The non-Essentialist disempowers people by allowing ambiguity over who is doing what. Often this is justified in the name of wanting to be a flexible or agile team. But what is actually created is a counterfeit agility. When people don’t know what they are really responsible for and how they will be judged on their performance, when decisions either are or appear to be capricious, and when roles are ill-defined, it isn’t long before people either give up or, worse, become obsessed with trying to look busy and therefore important instead of actually getting any real work done.

Experienced