Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

I had just learned a crucial lesson: certain types of effort yield higher rewards than others.

So I asked myself, “What is the most valuable result I could achieve in this job?” It turned out to be winning back customers who wanted to cancel.

So I worked hard at convincing customers not to cancel, and soon I achieved a zero rate of cancellation.

Since I was paid for each client I retained, I learned mor...

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Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield more results...

It may be an exaggeration, but it still makes the point that certain efforts produce exponentially better results than others.

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.

While non-Essentialists automatically react to the latest idea, jump on the latest opportunity, or respond to the latest e-mail, Essentialists choose to create the space to explore and ponder.

Richard S. Westfall has written: “In the age of his celebrity, Newton was asked how he had discovered the law of universal gravitation. ‘By thinking on it continually’ was the reply…. What he thought on, he thought on continually, which is to say exclusively, or nearly exclusively.”

In other words, Newton created space for intense concentration, and this uninterrupted space enabled him to explore the essential elements of the universe.

The students hammered away on their manual typewriters trying to keep up with the teacher’s pace. Then they handed in their rapidly written leads. Each attempted to summarise the who, what, where, and why as succinctly as possible: “Margaret Mead, Maynard Hutchins, and Governor Brown will address the faculty on …”; “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 recalled, “I realised 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.” Ephron added, “He taug...

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 kicking around a football – might seem like a non-essential activity. Often it is treated that way. But in fact play is essential in many ways.

First, play broadens the range of options available to us. It helps us to see possibilities we otherwise wouldn’t have seen and make connections we would otherwise not have made. It opens our minds and broadens our perspective. It helps us challenge old assumptions and makes us more receptive to untested ideas. It gives us permission to expand our own stream of consciousness and come up with new stories. Or as Albert Einstein once said: “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”

Second, play is an antidote to stress, and this is key because stress, in addition to being an enemy of productivity, can actually shut down the creative, inquisitive, exploratory parts of our brain. You know how it feels: you’re stressed about work and suddenly everything starts going wrong. You can’t find your keys, you bump into things more easily, you forget the critical report on the kitchen table. Recent findings suggest this is because stress increases the activity in the part of the brain that monitors emotions (the amyg-dala), while reducing the activity in the part responsible for cognitive function (the hippocampus)7 – the result being, simply, that we really can’t think clearly.

Third, as Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specialises in brain science, explains, play has a positive effect on the executive function of the brain. “The brain’s executive functions,” he writes, “include planning, prioritizing, scheduling, anticipating, delegating, deciding, analyzing – in short, most of the skills any executive must master in order to excel in business.”

The best asset we have for making a contribution to the world is ourselves. If we underinvest in ourselves, and by that I mean our minds, our bodies, and our spirits, we damage the very tool we need to make our highest contribution. One of the most common ways people – especially ambitious, successful people – damage this asset is through a lack of sleep.

If we let our type A instincts take over, we will, like Geoff, be swallowed up whole. We will burn out too early. We need to be as strategic with ourselves as we are with our careers and our businesses. We need to pace ourselves, nurture ourselves, and give ourselves fuel to explore, thrive, and perform.

hours. I also remember Bill Clinton was quoted as saying that every major mistake he had made in his life had happened as a result of sleep deprivation. Ever since, I have tried to get eight hours a night.

In K. Anders Ericsson’s famous study of violinists, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell as “the 10,000-Hour Rule,” Anders found that the best violinists spent more time practising than the merely good students.

the second most important factor differentiating the best violinists from the good violinists was actually sleep. The best violinists slept an average of 8.6 hours in every twenty-four-hour period: about an hour longer than average. Over the period of a week they also spent an average of 2.8 hours napping in the afternoon: about two hours longer than the average. Sleep, the authors of the study concluded, allowed these top performers to regenerate so that they could practise with greater concentration. So yes, while they practised more, they also got more out of those hours of practise because they were better rested.

Sleep will enhance your ability to explore, make connections, and do less but better throughout your waking hours.

You can think of this as the 90 Per Cent Rule, and it’s one you can apply to just about every decision or dilemma. As you evaluate an option, think about the single most important criterion for that decision, and then simply give the option a score between 0 and 100. If you rate it any lower than 90 per cent, then automatically change the rating to 0 and simply reject it. This way you avoid getting caught up in indecision, or worse, getting stuck with the 60s or 70s. Think about how you’d feel if you scored a 65 on some test. Why would you deliberately choose to feel that way about an important choice in your life?

Being selective when deciding what opportunities to go after is one thing, but it can get even harder when opportunities come to us. We get a job offer we didn’t expect. A side project comes along that isn’t really what we do, but it is easy cash. Someone asks us to help out with something we love doing, but it is unpaid work. An acquaintance has a time share available in a less-than-ideal location but at a discounted rate. What do we do?

By focusing on work no one else was doing, they could create the knowledge, tools, and expertise to become the premier company in the world at presentations. But to achieve this they would have to say no to everything else. Even in bad economic times. Even when paid work was offered to them. It was the price for becoming distinct. In other words, they would have to be more selective in the work they took on, so they could channel all their energies towards excelling in the area that had become their speciality.

But anyone who wears glasses knows there is a big difference between pretty clear and really clear! The same seems true with individuals’ professional strategy. When I ask people, “What do you really want out of your career over the next five years?” I am still taken aback by how few people can answer the question.

For one, there is a heavy price just in terms of human dynamics. The fact is, motivation and cooperation deteriorate when there is a lack of purpose. You can train leaders in communication and teamwork and conduct 360 feedback reports until you are blue in the face, but if a team does not have clarity of goals and roles, problems will fester and multiply.

When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive.

I have noticed two common patterns that typically emerge when teams lack clarity of purpose.

To understand what an essential intent is, we may be best served by first establishing what it is not.2 At the risk of using a consulting cliché, we can explore this using a two-by-two matrix.

An essential intent, on the other hand, is both inspirational and concrete, both meaningful and measurable. Done right, an essential intent is one decision that settles one thousand later decisions. It’s like deciding you’re going to become a doctor instead of a lawyer. One strategic choice eliminates a universe of other options

and maps a course for the next five, ten, or even twenty years of your life. Once the big decision is made, all subsequent decisions come into better focus.

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.

Saying no is its own leadership capability. It is not just a peripheral skill. As with any ability, we start with limited experience. We are novices at “no.” Then we learn a couple of basic techniques. We make mistakes. We learn from them. We develop more skills. We keep practising. After a while we have a whole repertoire available at our disposal, and in time we have gained mastery of a type of social art form. We can handle almost any request from almost anybody with grace and dignity.

it’s true that “uncommitting” can be harder than simply not committing in the first place. We feel guilty saying no to something or someone we have already committed to, and let’s face it, no one likes going back on their word. Yet learning how to do so – in ways that will garner you respect for your courage, focus, and discipline – is crucial to becoming an Essentialist.

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.

Likewise, in life, disciplined editing can help add to your level of contribution. It increases your ability to focus on and give energy to the things that really matter. It lends the most meaningful relationships and activities more space to blossom.

An editor’s job is not just to cut or condense but also to make something right. It can be a change as minor as a grammar correction or as involved as fixing the flaws in an argument. To do this well, an editor must have a clear sense of the overarching purpose of the work he or she is editing. As Michael Kahn explains, he doesn’t always do what Spielberg tells him to do; instead, he does what he thinks Spielberg really wants. Understanding the overarching intent allows him to make the corrections that even Spielberg himself might not be able to verbalise.

A non-Essentialist views editing as a discrete task to be performed only when things become overwhelming. But waiting too long to edit will force us to make major cuts not always of our choosing. Editing our time and activities continuously allows us to make more minor but deliberate adjustments along the way. Becoming an Essentialist means making cutting, condensing, and correcting a natural part of our daily routine – making editing a natural cadence in our lives.

With practice, enforcing your limits will become easier and easier.

The reality is that we live in an unpredictable world. Even apart from extreme events such as famines, we face the unexpected constantly. We do not know whether the traffic will be clear or congested. We do not know if our flight will be delayed or cancelled. We do not know if we’ll slip on an icy pavement tomorrow and break our wrist. Similarly, in the workplace we do not know if a supplier will be late, or a colleague will drop the ball, or a client will change his or her directions at the eleventh hour, and so on. The only thing we can expect (with any great certainty) is the unexpected. Therefore, we can either wait for the moment and react to it or we can prepare. We can create a buffer.

The way of the Essentialist is different. The Essentialist looks ahead. She plans. She prepares for different contingencies. She expects the unexpected. She creates a buffer to prepare for the unforeseen, thus giving herself some wiggle room when things come up, as they inevitably do.

The importance of extreme preparedness holds true for us in business. In fact, this example is used by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen to demonstrate why some companies have thrived under extreme and difficult circumstances while others have not. In filtering out 7 companies from 20,400, the authors found that the ones that executed most successfully did not have any better ability to predict the future than their less successful counterparts. Instead, they were the ones who acknowledged they could not predict the unexpected and therefore prepared better.

When Erwann works with national governments to create their risk management strategies, he suggests they start by asking five questions: (1) What risks do we face and where? (2) What assets and populations are exposed and to what degree? (3) How vulnerable are they? (4) What financial burden do these risks place on individuals, businesses, and the government budget? and (5) How best can we invest to reduce risks and strengthen economic and social resilience?11

We can apply these five questions to our own attempts at building buffers. Think of the most important project you are trying to get done at work or at home. Then ask the following five questions: (1) What risks do you face on this project? (2) What is the worst-case scenario? (3) What would the social effects of this be? (4) What would the financial impact of this be? and (5) How can you invest to reduce risks or strengthen financial or social resilience? Your answer to that fifth and crucial question will point you to buffers – perhaps adding another 20 per cent to the project’s budget, or getting a PR person on board to handle any potential negative press, or calling a board meeting to manage shareholder expectations – that you can create to safeguard you against unknowable events.

Essentialists accept the reality that we can never fully anticipate or prepare for every scenario or eventuality; the future is simply too unpredictable. Instead, they build in buffer...

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. As Alex is trying to make sense of what he is being taught, he goes on a hike with his son and some other friends. As the Scout leader, it’s his responsibility to get all of the boys to the campsite before the sun sets. But as anyone who has been on such a hike knows, getting a group of young boys to keep up a pace is more difficult than it sounds, and Alex soon runs into a problem: some of the Scouts go really fast and others go really slow. One boy in particular, Herbie, is the slowest of all. The result is that the gap between the hikers at the front of the line and Herbie, the straggler, grows to be miles long. At first Alex tries to manage the problem by getting the group at the front to stop and wait for the others to catch up. This keeps the group together for a time, but the moment they start walking again the same gap begins to form all over again. So Alex decides to try a different a...

In a moment of insight, Alex sees how this approach could also be applied to turning around his production plant. Instead of trying to improve every aspect of the facility he needs to identify the “Herbie”: the part of the process that is slower relative to every other part of the plant. He does this by finding which machine has the biggest queue of materials waiting behind it and finds a way to increase its efficiency. This in turn improves the next “slowest hiker’s” efficiency, and so on, until the productivity of the whole plant begins to improve.