The justification for slowing down and becoming more deliberate, becoming more focused is single and its this:
If you really believe that a few things are exceptionally valuable and most other things are noise then you will automatically — naturally start to change your behavior. It’s about what matters most to you life. It’s not just about less, it’s about essential things, essential relationships, essential living. Most of the stuff that’s going on is not vital, it’s a trivial many verses to find a few.
— Greg McKeown
We sometimes forget that we have a choice. We make decisions impulsively, say yes before we think it through and burden ourselves with commitment. The end result: We feel overworked, overwhelmed, and stretched too thin.
Greg McKeown is the author of the New York Times best selling book called “Essentialism”. The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. In the book itself Greg describes an approach similar to minimalism that gets us to take stock of our lives and ask the right questions about where we’re spending our time, energy and effort.
He first started thinking about these ideas when he noticed that his priorities in life had shifted seemingly without his control.
The idea of heightened awareness of what the priority is and making sure we aren’t busy pursuing lots of things but that we are creating space to actually pause and discern and make sure that we’re sleeping enough so that our discernment is intact so that we can keep on figuring out what is the most important contribution I can make.
— Greg Mckeown
Seeking Essentiality
Finding what is essential to our lives is becoming more and more difficult as our world has become distracting. The tools that we used to be more productive can just as easily be used to pacify us. And when we travel with them 24/7 bringing them into bed with us, the truly important things can get lost with the non-essential. In many ways this behavior is encouraged.
Busyness has become a badge of honour. It has become our way of life. And most times we can’t make out what’s essential to our life and what’s not due to the amount of busyness that we have daily. It’s an epidemic of sorts. We know we’re busy but we don’t act or do anything about it. Instead we simply live with it and get by, instead of focusing on the important tasks of that will move us forward.
Essence— What is the Core Mind-set of an Essentialist?
Choice is a central theme in Essentialism. Assessing your current reality and making hard choices so you are “…living by design, not by default.” McKeown defines it as “The more success you get, the more distracted and unsuccessful you are.”
He boils the problem down to three issues:
• too many choices
• too much social pressure
• the idea that “you can have it all”
We want more, but we are poorly prepared to accept it when we get it. So we work harder, run faster, sleep less, and complain more. Our “pursuit of success can be the catalyst for [our] failure.”
Explore — How can we discern the trivial many from the vital few?
The classic Eastern philosophy advice ‘do less to get more’ often falls deafly on our To-Do list mindset. We often blindly assume crossing more tasks off our list moves us forward. The opposite is true. Time to reflect and think is “critical to distinguishing what is actually a trivial diversion from what is truly essential.”
McKeown gives the example of the CEO who has all his 50 staff book off a full no-phone, no-email day for focus and planning. And Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, who schedules two hours of blank space on his calendar every day.
“Being a journalist of your own life will force you to stop hyper-focusing on all the minor details and see the bigger picture”.
Three suggestions for exploring Essentialism that spoke vast interest were:
1. Get more sleep.
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the “10,000 hour rule” that separated the best performers (like the Beatles and violin virtuosos) from the just “good.” The lesser known distinction is that the best also slept the most (the best violinists slept on average 8.6 hrs — an hour more than their American counterparts).
2. Be more ruthless saying no.
In the words of CD Baby founder and popular TED talk presenter, Derek Sivers, your decisions should be “Either HELL YEAH! Or No.
3. Employ the 90% rule.
“Think of 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 percent, then automatically change the rating to 0 and simply reject it.”
4. Eliminate — how can we cut out the trivial many?
McEeown’s third phase toward Essentialism is to eliminate the trivial, starting with possessions. He recommends when it comes to ‘keep it’ or ‘toss it’ you ask this dealbreaker question: ‘If I didn’t already own this, how much would I spend to buy it?’ I know for clothes I haven’t worn in months the answer would be ‘not much.’
The process of elimination also starts with getting clarity. “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.”
Next is daring to say ‘no.’ For this he gives the endearing story of the late Stephen Covey turning down a client’s dinner date offer in order to keep a promised date with his daughter, Cynthia. “People are effective because they know how to say no.” (Peter Drucker).
Like the Concorde jet that kept operating, despite staggering financial costs, or you sitting through a stinker of a movie, or (even worse) staying in a toxic relationship, a weird sunk-cost bias twists our thinking to what we have invested in. In psychology, it’s known as as the endowment effect — we put more value on something we own. As McKeown puts it: “No one in the world has ever washed a rental car.”
Psychologist and Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman discovered students on campus trying to sell a coffee cup they owned would value it at least 100% more ($5.25 versus $2.25), than those who were simply trying to sell a cup.
“My favourite strategy for eliminating is coined ‘reverse pilot’, by Daniel Shapero, a director from LinkedIn. Essentially, you remove something and see if it’s missed (like your newsletter, a regular Tuesday meeting nobody seems to enjoy, or summary report nobody reads).”
Execute — How can we make doing the vital few things almost Effortless?
After essence, exploration, and eliminatation, comes learning how to execute as an Essentialist on what is most important.
One hundred years ago the world read (albeit with the transcontinental news delay of the day) of the fatal outcome of the bumbling, and not-so-slightly arrogant Robert Falcon Scott and the seemingly effortless conquest of the South Pole by Roald Amundsen. Amundsen was a master at what McKeown calls: extreme preparation.
Start with your estimates of time needed. Kahneman discovered that students regularly underestimated time needed to complete their senior thesis to the tune of 25%-100% (on average they estimated 27 to 48 days, depending on how well their work went. The reality on average was 55 days — only 30% completed the task in the time they estimated.)
“Curiously, people will admit to having a tendency to underestimate while simultaneously believing their current estimates are accurate.” In spirit of executing like an Essentialist, McKeown recommends the kind of successful habits that “make execution almost effortless.”
Like Michael Phelps famous pre-race routine, or a weekly planning, successful habits reduce your mental workload and, according to best-selling author of The Power of Habits, Charles Duhigg “means you have all this mental activity you can devote to something else.”
