Essentialism

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• If he couldn’t answer a definitive yes, then he would refuse the request. And once again to his delight, while his colleagues might initially seem disappointed, they soon began to respect him more for his refusal, not less.
  • Story: executive who got more respect, not less, for saying no.
• Instead of making just a millimeter of progress in a million directions he began to generate tremendous momentum towards accomplishing the things that were truly vital.
• Essentialism: only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.
• Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Have you ever felt both overworked and underutilized? Have you ever found yourself majoring in minor activities? Do you ever feel busy but not productive? Like you’re always in motion, but never getting anywhere? If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the way of the Essentialist.
• player
  • Story: designed the record player as a minimalist product. Why? Because people wanted it as a part of their house, not a focal point.
• The way of the Essentialist isn’t about setting New Year’s resolutions to say “no” more, or about pruning your in-box, or about mastering some new strategy in time management. It is about pausing constantly to ask, “Am I investing in the right activities?”
• Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.
  • Understanding why youre doing what youre doing.
• The difference between the way of the Essentialist and the way of the Nonessentialist can be seen in the figure opposite. In both images the same amount of effort is exerted. In the image on the left, the energy is divided into many different activities. The result is that we have the unfulfilling experience of making a millimeter of progress in a million directions. In the image on the right, the energy is given to fewer activities. The result is that by investing in fewer things we have the satisfying experience of making significant progress in the things that matter most.
• In many cases we can learn to make one-time decisions that make a thousand future decisions so we don’t exhaust ourselves asking the same questions again and again.
• The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.
• The Model Nonessentialist Essentialist Thinks ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE “I have to.” “It’s all important.” “How can I fit it all in?” LESS BUT BETTER “I choose to.” “Only a few things really matter.” “What are the trade-offs?” Does THE UNDISCIPLINED PURSUIT OF MORE Reacts to what’s most pressing Says “yes” to people without really thinking Tries to force execution at the last moment THE DISCIPLINED PURSUIT OF LESS Pauses to discern what really matters Says “no” to everything except the essential Removes obstacles to make execution easy Gets LIVES A LIFE THAT DOES NOT SATISFY Takes on too much, and work suffers Feels out of control Is unsure of whether the right things got done Feels overwhelmed and exhausted LIVES A LIFE THAT REALLY MATTERS Chooses carefully in order to do great work Feels in control Gets the right things done Experiences joy in the journey
• As it turned out, exactly nothing came of the client meeting. But even if it had, surely I would have made a fool’s bargain. In trying to keep everyone happy I had sacrificed what mattered most.
  • Story: leaving his wife and new born baby for a client meeting and not getting any benefit
• “Why is it,” I wonder, “that we have so much more ability inside of us than we often choose to utilize?” And “How can we make the choices that allow us to tap into more of the potential inside ourselves, and in people everywhere?”
• PHASE 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it enables us to succeed at our endeavor. PHASE 2: When we have success, we gain a reputation as a “go to” person. We become “good old [insert name],” who is always there when you need him, and we are presented with increased options and opportunities. PHASE 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, which is actually code for demands upon our time and energies, it leads to diffused efforts. We get spread thinner and thinner. PHASE 4: We become distracted from what would otherwise be our highest level of contribution. The effect of our success has been to undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.
• As Peter Drucker said, “In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”
• The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things. People and companies routinely try to do just that. One leader told me of his experience in a company that talked of “Pri-1, Pri-2, Pri-3, Pri-4, and Pri-5.” This gave the impression of many things being the priority but actually meant nothing was.
  • Story: having multiple priorities is illogical
• Instead of asking, “Is there a chance I will wear this someday in the future?” you ask more disciplined, tough questions: “Do I love this?” and “Do I look great in it?” and “Do I wear this often?” If the answer is no, then you know it is a candidate for elimination. In your personal or professional life, the equivalent of asking yourself which clothes you love is asking yourself, “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution toward my goal?”
• Essentialism is about creating a system for handling the closet of our lives. This is not a process you undertake once a year, once a month, or even once a week, like organizing your closet. It is a discipline you apply each and every time you are faced with a decision about whether to say yes or whether to politely decline. It’s a method for making the tough trade-off between lots of good things and a few really great things. It’s about learning how to do less but better so you can achieve the highest possible return on every precious moment of your life.
• “What do I feel deeply inspired by?” and “What am I particularly talented at?” and “What meets a significant need in the world?”
• What if schools eliminated busywork and replaced it with important projects that made a difference to the whole community? What if all students had time to think about their highest contribution to their future so that when they left high school they were not just starting on the race to nowhere?
• What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?
• “If you could do only one thing with your life right now, what would you 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.
• There is evidence that humans learn helplessness in much the same way. One example I heard is that of a child who struggles early on with mathematics. He tries and tries but never gets any better, so eventually he gives up. He believes nothing he does will matter. I have observed learned helplessness in many organizations I have worked with. When people believe that their efforts at work don’t matter, they tend to respond in one of two ways. Sometimes they check out and stop trying, like the mathematically challenged child. The other response is less obvious at first. They do the opposite. They become hyperactive. They accept every opportunity presented. They throw themselves into every assignment. They tackle every challenge with gusto. They try to do it all. This behavior does not necessarily look like learned helplessness at first glance. After all, isn’t working hard evidence of one’s belief in one’s importance and value? Yet on closer examination we can see this compulsion to do more is a smokescreen. These people don’t believe they have a choice in what opportunity, assignment, or challenge to take on. They believe they “have to do it all.”
  • Learned helplessness
• Nonessentialist Essentialist “I have to.” Forfeits the right to choose “I choose to.” Exercises the power of choice
• Are there ways we can be a bit like Boxer? Do setbacks often only strengthen our resolve to work longer and harder? Do we sometimes respond to every challenge with “Yes, I can take this on as well”? After all, we have been taught from a young age that hard work is key to producing results, and many of us have been amply rewarded for our productivity and our ability to muscle through every task or challenge the world throws at us. Yet, for capable people who are already working hard, are there limits to the value of hard work? Is there a point at which doing more does not produce more? Is there a point at which doing less (but thinking more) will actually produce better outcomes?
• Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channeled toward improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3
  • Tool: pareto principle
• Distinguishing the “trivial many” from the “vital few” can be applied to every kind of human endeavor large or small and has been done so persuasively by Richard Koch, author of several books on how to apply the Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule) to everyday life.
• Think of Warren Buffett, who has famously said, “Our investment philosophy borders on lethargy.”5 What he means is that he and his firm make relatively few investments and keep them for a long time. In The Tao of Warren Buffett, Mary Buffett and David Clark explain: “Warren decided early in his career it would be impossible for him to make hundreds of right investment decisions, so he decided that he would invest only in the businesses that he was absolutely sure of, and then bet heavily on them. He owes 90% of his wealth to just ten investments. Sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do.”6 In short, he makes big bets on the essential few investment opportunities and says no to the many merely good ones.
  • Story: buffets success is driven by 10 investments
• The overwhelming reality is: we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.
• We discover how even the many good opportunities we pursue are often far less valuable than the few truly great ones. Once we understand this, we start scanning our environment for those vital few and eagerly eliminate the trivial many. Only then can we say no to good opportunities and say yes to truly great ones.
• 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.
  • Like the Lucky 7 where the upfront time pays off
• Nonessentialist Essentialist Thinks almost everything is essential Views opportunities as basically equal Thinks almost everything is nonessential Distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many
• I once attended an event where Herb was interviewed about his business strategy.2 It was a great talk in many ways, but when he began to talk about how deliberate he was about the trade-offs he had made at Southwest, my ears perked up. Rather than try to fly to every destination, they had deliberately chosen to offer only point-to-point flights. Instead of jacking up prices to cover the cost of meals, he decided they would serve none. Instead of assigning seats in advance, they would let people choose them as they got on the plane. Instead of upselling their passengers on glitzy first-class service, they offered only coach. These trade-offs weren’t made by default but by design. Each and every one was made as part of a deliberate strategy to keep costs down. Did he run the risk of alienating customers who wanted the broader range of destinations, the choice to purchase overpriced meals, and so forth? Yes, but Kelleher was totally clear about what the company was—a low-cost airline—and what they were not. And his trade-offs reflected as much.
  • Story: Southwest airlines intense simplicity; also in Good to Great i think
• It was an example of his Essentialist thinking at work when he said: “You have to look at every opportunity and say, ‘Well, no … I’m sorry. We’re not going to do a thousand different things that really won’t contribute much to the end result we are trying to achieve.’ ”
• 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.
  • You cant copy committment half-heartedly
• Trade-offs are real, in both our personal and our professional lives, and until we accept that reality we’ll be doomed to be just like Continental—stuck in a “straddled strategy” that forces us to make sacrifices on the margins by default that we might not have made by design.
  • Tradeoffs
• Customers are first; shareholders are last.
  • Story: J and J made their customers whole bscause of a guiding principle
• She insisted on naming eighteen “top priority” projects. I insisted that she choose five. She took her list back to her team, and two weeks later they returned with a list she had managed to shorten—by one single project! (I always wondered what it was about that one lone project that didn’t make the cut.) 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.
  • Having multiple priorities waters down your execution
• They said, “We had him try out a lot of different things, but as soon as it became clear an activity was not going to be his ‘big thing’ we discussed it and took him out of it.” The point here is not that all parents should want their children to go to Harvard. The point is that these Essentialist parents had consciously decided their goal was for their son to go to Harvard and understood that that success required making strategic trade-offs.
  • The parents who helped their kid make tradeoffs
• 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?”
• Nonessentialist Essentialist Thinks, “I can do both.” Asks, “How can I do it all?” Asks, “What is the trade-off I want to make?” Asks, “What can I go big on?”
• “Imagine a four-burner stove,” she instructs the members of the party. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. In order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.” Of course, this was tongue-in-cheek; I am not here to suggest that living the way of the Essentialist requires us to decide between our families and our health and our work. What I am suggesting is that when faced with a decision where one option prioritizes family and another prioritizes friends, health, or work, we need to be prepared to ask, “Which problem do you want?”
  • Makimg choices between the big things you want to accomplish
• One paradox of Essentialism is that Essentialists actually explore more options than their Nonessentialist counterparts. Nonessentialists get excited by virtually everything and thus react to everything. But because they are so busy pursuing every opportunity and idea they actually explore less.
• 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.
• WITHOUT GREAT SOLITUDE NO SERIOUS WORK IS POSSIBLE. —Pablo Picasso
• He does this because he knows his people can’t figure out what is essential if they’re constantly on call. They need space to figure out what really matters. He wrote: “I think it’s critical to set aside time to take a breath, look around, and think. You need that level of clarity in order to innovate and grow.” Furthermore, he uses the meeting as a litmus test to alert him if employees are spending too much time on the nonessential: “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.
  • Story: everyone takes the first Monday of the month and unplugs to be thoughtful
• Nonessentialist Essentialist Is too busy doing to think about life Creates space to escape and explore life
• Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft in their book Make Space,
• One executive I know is intelligent and driven but constantly distracted. At any given time he will have Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, and multiple IM conversations going at once. In an effort to create a distraction-free space, he once tried having his executive assistant pull all of the Internet cables on his computer. But he still found too many ways to get online. So, when he was struggling to complete a particularly big project, he resorted to a desperate measure. He gave his phone away and went to a motel with no Internet access. After eight weeks of almost solitary confinement, he was able to get the project done.
  • Story: extreme lengths to find an opportunity for focus
• 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.”3 In other words, Newton created space for intense concentration, and this uninterrupted space enabled him to explore the essential elements of the universe.
• Inspired by Newton, I took a similar, if perhaps less extreme, approach to writing this book. I blocked off eight hours a day to write: from 5:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., five days a week. The basic rule was no e-mail, no calls, no appointments, and no interruptions until after 1:00 P.M. I didn’t always achieve it, but the discipline made a big difference. I set my e-mail bounceback to explain that I was in “monk mode” until after the book was complete. It is difficult to overstate how much freedom I found in this approach. By creating space to explore, think, and write, I not only got my book done faster but gained control over how I spent the rest of my time.
  • Zero imterruption writing. “Monk mode.”
• Here’s another paradox for you: the faster and busier things get, the more we need to build thinking time into our schedule. And the noisier things get, the more we need to build quiet reflection spaces in which we can truly focus.
• Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, for example, schedules up to two hours of blank space on his calendar every day. He divides them into thirty-minute increments, yet he schedules nothing. It is a simple practice he developed when back-to-back meetings left him with little time to process what was going on around him.4 At first it felt like an indulgence, a waste of time. But eventually he found it to be his single most valuable productivity tool. 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.
• We can take further inspiration from the example of CEO Bill Gates, who regularly (and famously) takes a regular week off from his daily duties at Microsoft simply to think and read.
• In other words, twice a year, during the busiest and most frenetic time in the company’s history, he still created time and space to seclude himself for a week and do nothing but read articles (his record is 112) and books, study technology, and think about the bigger picture. Today he still takes the time away from the daily distractions of running his foundation to simply think.
  • Story: the importance of taking time to read and think no matter how busy you are
• Simms began by presenting the facts of the story: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.” 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 summarize 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 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.” Ephron added, “He taught me something that works just as well in life as it does in journalism.”
  • story: the lead of a story is the essence
• In other words, the nose gear didn’t cause the disaster. The crew’s losing sight of the bigger problem—the altitude of the plane—did.
  • Story: flight crashing due to losing sight of whats important
• Someone at lunch thought at first that he was not paying attention to the banter at the table. But he was listening. He was taking in the whole conversation at the table. He was simply filtering out everything other than those things that really grabbed his attention. Then he tried to connect the dots by asking lots of questions only about what had just piqued his interest.
  • Story: the journalist who didnt seem to be listening
• Nonessentialist Essentialist Pays attention to the loudest voice Hears everything being said Is overwhelmed by all the information Pays attention to the signal in the noise Hears what is not being said Scans to find the essence of the information
• As someone once said to me, the faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.
  • The importance of keeping a journal
• They went to Nepal to see the challenge firsthand. That’s when they discovered 80 percent of babies were born at home, not in the hospital, in rural villages with no electricity. Thus the team’s real challenge, it suddenly became clear, was to create something that did not require electricity at all.
  • Story: taking the time to understand the constraints of the problem you’re actually solving
• Mariam Semaan is an award-winning journalist from Lebanon. She recently completed a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, where she specialized in media innovation and design thinking. I asked her to share the secret tips of her trade based on her years of experience capturing the real story amid all of the surface noise. Her reaction was encouraging: she said finding the lead and spotting the essential information are skills that can be acquired. She said, you need knowledge. Getting to the essence of a story takes a deep understanding of the topic, its context, its fit into the bigger picture, and its relationship to different fields. So she would read all the related news and try to spot the one piece of information that all others had missed or hadn’t focused enough on. “My goal,” she said, “was to understand the ‘spiderweb’ of the story because that is what allowed me to spot any ‘abnormal’ or ‘unusual’ detail or behavior that didn’t quite fit into the natural course of the story.”
  • Story: the journalist who worked to understand the web of interrelated details
• They waded through all the ideas and opinions that had been haphazardly thrown out, listening for the hidden themes and big ideas that connected them. Then, finally, they moved from a state of motion sickness to momentum. They settled on a plan of action, made the necessary decisions, and divided up responsibilities. Elay’s team won by a landslide.
  • The story of the time that wasnt really addressing the question they were trying to answer
• Sir Ken Robinson, who has made the study of creativity in schools his life’s work, has observed that instead of fueling creativity through play, schools can actually kill it: “We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.… Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”2 In this he is correct.
  • Schools are built to kill creativity
• 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. Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, has studied what are called the play histories of some six thousand individuals and has concluded that 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.”
  • The necessity of play
• Nonessentialist Essentialist Thinks play is trivial Thinks play is an unproductive waste of time Knows play is essential Knows play sparks exploration
• Play expands our minds in ways that allow us to explore: to germinate new ideas or see old ideas in a new light. It makes us more inquisitive, more attuned to novelty, more engaged.
• 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.
• Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes 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.”8 Play stimulates the parts of the brain involved in both careful, logical reasoning and carefree, unbound exploration. Given that, it should hardly be surprising that key breakthroughs in thinking have taken place in times of play. Hallowell writes: “Columbus was at play when it dawned on him that the world was round. Newton was at play in his mind when he saw the apple tree and suddenly conceived of the force of gravity. Watson and Crick were playing with possible shapes of the DNA molecule when they stumbled upon the double helix. Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter his whole life. Mozart barely lived a waking moment when he was not at play.
• Some innovative companies are finally waking up to the essential value of play. The CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, promotes play through comedy; he instigated an improv class at the company. As a former stand-up comedian, he knows that improv forces people to stretch their minds and think more flexibly, unconventionally, and creatively.
  • Improv is a tool to enforce the principle of creativity and play
• Through great emotion, he told them that he had paid a high price to learn a simple yet essential lesson: “Protect the asset.”
  • Story: the man who had to leave the company he founded and change his entire life around because he had neglected his health
• 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.
• Nonessentialist Essentialist THINKS: One hour less of sleep equals one more hour of productivity. Sleep is for failures. Sleep is a luxury. Sleep breeds laziness. Sleep gets in the way of “doing it all.” KNOWS: One hour more of sleep equals several more hours of much higher productivity. Sleep is for high performers. Sleep is a priority. Sleep breeds creativity. Sleep enables the highest levels of mental contribution.
• In K. Anders Ericsson’s famous study of violinists, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as “the 10,000-Hour Rule,” Anders found that the best violinists spent more time practicing than the merely good students.1 His finding supports Essentialist logic by showing that mastery takes focused and deliberate effort, and indeed it’s encouraging to learn that excellence is within our sphere of influence rather than a blessing bestowed only on the most naturally gifted.
  • Sphere of influence
• Sleep, the authors of the study concluded, allowed these top performers to regenerate so that they could practice with greater concentration. So yes, while they practiced more, they also got more out of those hours of practice because they were better rested.
• In a piece called “No More Yes. It’s Either HELL YEAH! Or No,” the popular TED speaker Derek Sivers describes a simple technique for becoming more selective in the choices we make. The key is to put the decision to an extreme test: if we feel total and utter conviction to do something, then we say yes, Derek-style. Anything less gets a thumbs down.
• You can think of this as the 90 Percent 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 percent, then automatically change the rating to 0 and simply reject it.
• What’s more, assigning simple numerical values to our options forces us to make decisions consciously, logically, and rationally, rather than impulsively or emotionally. Yes, it takes discipline to apply tough criteria. But failing to do so carries a high cost.
• For example, when deciding what projects to take on at work, a Nonessentialist may operate by the implicit criterion, “If my manager asks me to do it, then I should do it.” Or even more broadly, “If someone asks me to do something, I should try to do it.” Or still more broadly, “If other people in the company are doing it, I should be doing it.” In
• Nonessentialist Essentialist Says yes to almost every request or opportunity Uses broad, implicit criteria like “If someone I know is doing it, I should do it.” Says yes to only the top 10 percent of opportunities Uses narrow, explicit criteria like “Is this exactly what I am looking for?”
• Vitsoe
  • Story about the shelf company who wont hire anyone unless theyre a perfect fit
• Box CEO Aaron Levie has a similar criterion for hiring. He simply asks if the person is someone he’d want to work with every day. “One of the ways we think about this is,” he says, “could this person have been one of the founding members of the team?” If the answer is yes, he knows he’s found someone who will fit right in.
• 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 toward excelling in the area that had become their specialty.
• process
  • Tool: extreme criteria for filtering your options
• If we search for “a good career opportunity,” our brain will serve up scores of pages to explore and work through. Instead, why not conduct an advanced search and ask three questions: “What am I deeply passionate about?” and “What taps my talent?” and “What meets a significant need in the world?” Naturally there won’t be as many pages to view, but that is the point of the exercise. We aren’t looking for a plethora of good things to do. We are looking for the one where we can make our absolutely highest point of contribution.
  • Limit the search as much as you limit results
• Enric is one of those relatively rare examples of someone who is doing work that he loves, that taps his talent, and that serves an important need in the world. His main objective is to help create the equivalent of national parks to protect the last pristine places in the ocean—a truly essential contribution.
  • Story: progressing from academia to policy to exploring in order to be doing exactly what he loves
• In other words, it’s not enough to simply determine which activities and efforts don’t make the best possible contribution; you still have to actively eliminate those that do not.
• If you’re not quite ready to part with that metaphorical blazer, ask the killer question: “If I didn’t already own this, how much would I spend to buy it?” Likewise, in your life, the killer question when deciding what activities to eliminate is: “If I didn’t have this opportunity, what would I be willing to do to acquire it?”
• So once you have sufficiently explored your options, the question you should be asking yourself is not: “What, of my list of competing priorities, should I say yes to?” Instead, ask the essential question: “What will I say no to?” This is the question that will uncover your true priorities.
• 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 on 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.
• Essential Intent 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.
• In the top left quadrant, we have vision and mission statements like “We want to change the world”: statements that sound inspirational but are so general they are almost entirely ignored. In the bottom left quadrant, we have a set of vague, general values—like “innovation,” “leadership,” and “teamwork”—but these are typically too bland and generic to inspire any passion. In the bottom right quadrant, we have shorter-term quarterly objectives we pay attention to, like “Increase profits 5 percent over last year’s results”; these shorter-term tactics may be concrete enough to get our attention, but they often lack inspiration. 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.
  • Tool: matrix of essential intent
• “To get everyone in the U.K. online by the end of 2012.”
  • Story: digital champion, an example of clear and essential intent
• When developing statements of purpose—for your company, your team, or even yourself—there is a tendency to start obsessing about trivial stylistic details, like “Should we use this word or that word?” But this makes it all too easy to slip into meaningless clichés and buzzwords that lead to vague, meaningless statements like the ones I cited at the beginning of the chapter. An essential intent doesn’t have to be elegantly crafted; it’s the substance, not the style that counts. Instead, ask the more essential question that will inform every future decision you will ever make: “If we could be truly excellent at only one thing, what would it be?”
  • It is the concrete intent, not the words, that matter in a mission statment.
• 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.
• “But not tonight. Cynthia and I have a special date planned, don’t we?”
  • Story: the daddy daughter date that was more important than anything else
• Peter Drucker, in my view the father of modern management thinking, was also a master of the art of the graceful no. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian professor most well known for his work on “flow,” reached out to interview a series of creative individuals for a book he was writing on creativity, Drucker’s response was interesting enough to Mihaly that he quoted it verbatim: “I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February 14th—for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I have learned much from it. But, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative—I don’t know what that means.… I just keep on plodding.… I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours—productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.”
  • The greatest response i have ever seen
• 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 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.
  • Story: i will solve your problem for you and you can use it or not
• Then one day one of her mentors came to her and told her that she had to learn to jettison the people and things of her life that just didn’t matter, and that doing so would allow her to put 100 percent of her energy into the things that had meaning for her.
• Typically, when accountants allocate a budget they use last year’s budget as the baseline for the next year’s projection. But with zero-based budgeting, they use zero as the baseline. In other words, every item in the proposed budget must be justified from scratch. While this takes more effort it has many advantages: it efficiently allocates resources on the basis of needs rather than history, it detects exaggerated budget requests, it draws attention to obsolete operations, and it encourages people to be clearer in their purpose and how their expenses align to that project.
  • Tool: zero based budgeting
• Every use of time, energy, or resources has to justify itself anew. If it no longer fits, eliminate it altogether.
• In a reverse pilot you test whether removing an initiative or activity will have any negative consequences.
  • Tool: reverse pilot
• Jack Dorsey is best known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. His Essentialist approach to management is a relatively rare one. At a dinner I attended recently where he spoke, he said he thinks of the role of CEO as being the chief editor of the company. At another event at Stanford he explained further: “By editorial I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing. But there [are] only one or two that are important. And all of these ideas … and inputs from engineers, support people, designers are going to constantly flood what we should be doing.… As an editor I am constantly taking these inputs and deciding the one, or intersection of a few, that make sense for what we are doing.”
• Or, as one book editor put it: “My job is to make life as effortless as possible for the reader. The goal is to help the reader have the clearest possible understanding of the most important message or takeaway.”
• Everything does double or triple duty; in other words, everything makes a greater contribution to apartment life. This design turned out to be so innovative that he turned it into a business devoted to the art of getting more out of less space. He named it, appropriately, LifeEdited.com.
• 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.
• Nonessentialist Essentialist Thinks if you have limits you will be limited Sees boundaries as constraining Exerts effort attempting the direct “no” Knows that if you have limits you will become limitless Sees boundaries as liberating Sets rules in advance that eliminate the need for the direct “no”
• The author Henry Cloud tells a story about just this kind of situation in his book Boundaries. Once, the parents of a twenty-five-year-old man came to see him. They wanted him to “fix” their son. He asked them why they had come without their son, and they said, “Well, he doesn’t think he has a problem.” After listening to their story Henry concluded, to their surprise: “I think your son is right. He doesn’t have a problem.… You do.… You pay, you fret, you worry, you plan, you exert energy to keep him going. He doesn’t have a problem because you have taken it from him.”
  • Parenting
• GIVE ME SIX HOURS TO CHOP DOWN A TREE AND I WILL SPEND THE FIRST FOUR SHARPENING THE AXE. —Attributed to Abraham Lincoln
• Nonessentialist Essentialist Assumes the best-case scenario will happen Forces execution at the last minute Builds in a buffer for unexpected events Practices extreme and early preparation
• 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.
• Of the variety of explanations for why we underestimate the amount of time something will take, I believe social pressure is the most interesting. One study found that if people estimated anonymously how long it would take to complete a task they were no longer guilty of the planning fallacy.9 This implies that often we actually know we can’t do things in a given time frame, but we don’t want to admit it to someone.
• Any improvement with Herbie, however small, will improve the pace of the whole team immediately.
  • Story: we ca see significant improvements if we remove constraints; putting the slowest hiker at the front
• 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.
• Instead of just jumping into the project, take a few minutes to think. Ask yourself, “What are all the obstacles standing between me and getting this done?” and “What is keeping me from completing this?” Make a list of these obstacles.
• Out of these questions came the novel idea for Positive Tickets, a program whereby police, instead of focusing on catching young people perpetrating crimes, would focus on catching youth doing something good—something
• 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.
• So we introduced a token system.9 The children were given ten tokens at the beginning of the week. These could each be traded in for either thirty minutes of screen time or fifty cents at the end of the week, adding up to $5 or five hours of screen time a week. If a child read a book for thirty minutes, he or she would earn an additional token, which could also be traded in for screen time or for money. The results were incredible: overnight, screen time went down 90 percent, reading went up by the same amount, and the overall effort we had to put into policing the system went way, way down. In other words, nonessential activity dramatically decreased and essential activity dramatically increased. Once a small amount of initial effort was invested to set up the system, it worked without friction.
  • Story: using token systems to create positive momentum
• Similarly, we can adopt a method of “minimal viable progress.” We can ask ourselves, “What is the smallest amount of progress that will be useful and valuable to the essential task we are trying to get done?”
• For example, when I was still in the exploratory mode of the book, before I’d even begun to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), I would share a short idea (my minimal viable product) on Twitter. If it seemed to resonate with people there, I would write a blog piece on Harvard Business Review. Through this iterative process, which required very little effort, I was able to find where there seemed to be a connection between what I was thinking and what seemed to have the highest relevancy in other people’s lives.
• When asked about the routine, Bowman said: “If you were to ask Michael what’s going on in his head before competition, he would say he’s not really thinking about anything. He’s just following the program. But that’s not right. It’s more like his habits have taken over. When the race arrives, he’s more than halfway through his plan and he’s been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.”
  • Story: Michael Phelps routine
• Nonessentialist Essentialist Tries to execute the essentials by force Allows nonessentials to be the default Designs a routine that enshrines what is essential, making execution almost effortless
• 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.
• Our ability to execute the essential improves with practice, just like any other ability. Think about the first time you had to perform a certain critical function at work. At first you felt like a novice. You probably felt unsure and awkward. The effort to focus drained your willpower. Decision fatigue set in. You were probably easily distracted. This is perfectly normal. But once you performed the function over and over, you gained confidence. You were no longer sidetracked. You were able to perform the function better and faster, and with less concentration and effort. This power of a routine grows out of our brain’s ability to take over entirely until the process becomes fully unconscious.
• In an interview about his book The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg said “in the last 15 years, as we’ve learned how habits work and how they can be changed, scientists have explained that every habit is made up of a cue, a routine, and a reward. The cue is a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine—the behavior itself—which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular habit is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop—cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward—becomes more automatic as the cue and reward become neurologically intertwined.”
• It would be unfortunate to become so taken with the genius of routine that we’d be tempted to try to overhaul multiple routines at the same time. But as we learned in the last chapter, to get big results we must start small. So start with one change in your daily or weekly routine and then build on your progress from there.
• What we can’t do is concentrate on two things at the same time. When I talk about being present, I’m not talking about doing only one thing at a time. I’m talking about being focused on one thing at a time. Multitasking itself is not the enemy of Essentialism; pretending we can “multifocus” is.
• 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.
• So now, as he gets to the door of his house, he applies what he calls “the pause that refreshes.” This technique is easy. He stops for just a moment. He closes his eyes. He breathes in and out once: deeply and slowly. As he exhales, he lets the work issues fall away. This allows him to walk through the front door to his family with more singleness of purpose. It supports the sentiment attributed to Lao Tzu: “In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.”
• There are two ways of thinking about Essentialism. The first is to think of it as something you do occasionally. The second is to think of it as something you are. In the former, Essentialism is one more thing to add to your already overstuffed life. In the latter, it is a different way—a simpler way—of doing everything. It becomes a lifestyle. It becomes an all-encompassing approach to living and leading. It becomes the essence of who we are.
• NEVER DOUBT THAT A SMALL GROUP OF THOUGHTFUL, COMMITTED CITIZENS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD; INDEED, IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT EVER HAS. —Margaret Mead
• The iconoclastic entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel took “less but better” to an unorthodox level when he insisted that PayPal employees select one single priority in their role—and focus on that exclusively. As PayPal executive Keith Rabois recalls: “Peter required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative. Even our annual review forms in 2001 required each employee to identify their single most valuable contribution to the company.”2 The result was the employees were empowered to do anything within the confines of that clearly defined role that they felt would make a high level of contribution to the shared mission of the company.
• By taking the time to get clear about the one thing that is really required, the Essentialist leader makes follow-up so easy and frictionless that it actually happens. By checking in with people frequently to reward small wins and help people remove obstacles, he bolsters the team’s motivation and focus and enables them to make more meaningful progress