Basic value proposition of essentialism: 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
To summarize essentialism: less but better
Philosophy about making wisest possible investment of time and enerfy to operate at highest point of contribution
If you don’t prioritize your own life, someone else will
Paradox of success: as we become good at one thing, people start to think that we are good at other things and come to us. Thus, we become distracted and do not pull our weight as we should
Why is nonessentialism everywhere:
– Too many choices: we get decision fatigue and the quality of our decisions takes a dive
– Too much social pressure: with a larger and stronger network, this often causes us to lose focus and become easily influenced
– Myth that you can ‘do it all’: causes us to make tradeoffs between priorities that leads to a worse quality of life
How to choose what to focus on:
1. Explore and evaluate: ask “will this activity make the highest possible contribution toward my goal?“
2. Eliminate
3. Execute: need to have a system to make elimination as easy as possible
Essence
Choose
– You always have choice, no mattter what. The ability to choose cannot be taken away
– We have forgotten our ability to choose, much like learned helplessness. We become a function of other’s choices or past choices
Discern
– Focus in on the most important, i.e. the thing that yields the most with the least time spent
– Think of Pareto Principle, Law of Vital Few, or Power Law
– Important to explore all options first before comitting
Trade-off
– Ex: Southwest Airline —> focused everything on making Southwest the most low-cost airline (no meals, only coach, only select destinations)
– Don’t straddle (i.e. focus on multiple things): will lead to both not working out
– Need to accept and evaluate trade offs
– When options come, ask yourself: which problem do I want
Explore:
– Essentialists able to explore many options because they give themselves the freedom to think, listen, play, sleep and select, which seem like trivialities in our busy world
Escape:
– We need space to to escape to discern the essential few from the trivial many
– We need to escape to focus. Focus in this sense to explore many questions and possibilities, just like our eyes focus by constantly adjusting and changing the field of view
– We need to find time to think
Look:
– Keep your eyes and ears peeled for the most essential things
– Keep a journal to reflect on things and eventually look back on it to capture the major changes that are happening in our lives
– Go into the field and understand what is the most essential problem (ex: creating incubators for babies for third world countries —> going into field, you realize that the problem is to make an incubator WITHOUT electricity)
– Understand everything about topic
– Understand and clarify the questions that you are facing
Play:
– Play is essential when exploring ideas
– Vital driver to creativity and exploration
Sleep:
– Protect the most important asset - ourselves - by sleeping!
– Sleep is essential for driving peak performance
Select:
– Master the 90% rule: if you rank the decision from 1 to 100, only the top 10% stay. Everything else can go
– Removes other priorities
– Should use narrow and explicit criteria
– If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no
– If opportunities come to you, you still have to be selective about it:
– Use the following framework: write down three minimum criteria and three ideal criteria. For the opportunity to pass, it has to pass all three minimum and 2 of the three ideal criteria
Eliminate:
– Out of your whole list of priorities, think: Which ones will I say no to if they are conflicting. This often gives us a good idea of our priorities
Clarify:
– Clarity of purpose often distinguishes the most successful people from the rest
– Clarity of goals empowers teams to perform extremely well; otherwise, there is general confusion
– When teams lack purpose, there are 2 patterns that emerge:
– Politics: When people don’t know what teh end game is, they are unclear bout how to win, so they make their own games and rules. The same thing happens in our personal lives: we start to compete with each other and invest in materialism
– It’s all good: People start to work on their own stuff with no overarching strategy or goal
– Essential intent: this is an inspirational yet concrete and can determine all your decision for the next 10-20 years
– Don’t look at the words and try to wordsmith, think about how will you know that you have succeeded
– Good essential intents: “Get everyone in UK online by 2012”, “Build 150 affordable, green, storm-resistant homes for families living in Lower 9th Ward”
Dare:
– You must have the courage to say no to things that do not line up with your goals and aspirations
– Internal clarity of what you want will help you
– We don’t like to say no because of our innate fear of social awkwardness
– How to say no gracefully:
– Seperate the decision from the relationship with the person who is asking. Denying the decision is not the same as denying the person
– You don’t have to use the word no
– Focus on the trade-off: think of what you are giving up
– Everyone is selling something: think about it in a buying perspective —> is the idea/opinion worth buying?
– Remind yourself that no often trades popularity with respect
– A clear no is better than a vague/noncomittal yes
– No repertoire:
– The awkward pause: give 3 seconds to deliver your final verdict
– Soft no: use the “no, but…” to gracefully decline
– Ask for more time
– Email bouncebacks
– If senior person is asking, ask “What can I deprioritize?” or “I want to do a great job on this project, but given all the commitments that I have, I will not be able to do a job that I would be proud of. Is there anything you would recommend?”
– Say it with humour
– You are welcome to X. I am willing to Y: Ex: “You are welcome to borrow the cR. I am willing to make sure the keys are here for you”. Super subtle
– I can’t do it, but X might be interested
Play:
– Play is essential when exploring ideas
– Vital driver to creativity and exploration
Sleep:
– Protect the most important asset - ourselves - by sleeping!
– Sleep is essential for driving peak performance
Select:
– Master the 90% rule: if you rank the decision from 1 to 100, only the top 10% stay. Everything else can go
– Removes other priorities
– Should use narrow and explicit criteria
– If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no
– If opportunities come to you, you still have to be selective about it:
– Use the following framework: write down three minimum criteria and three ideal criteria. For the opportunity to pass, it has to pass all three minimum and 2 of the three ideal criteria
Uncommit:
– Sunk-cost bias: tendency to continue to invest into something which is a losing proposition simply because we have already sunk a cost that cannot be recouped (ex: Concorde)
– Be able to admit to mistakes and uncommit, regardless of the sunk costs
– Think: “If I weren’t already invested in this project, how much would I invest in it now?”
– Think: “What else could i do with this time or money if I pulled the plug now?”
– Avoiding commitment traps:
– Endowment efffect: tendency to undervalue things that aren’t ours and overvalue things because we already own them. The question becomes how do you uncommit out of an activity that you feel you own?
– Pretend that you don’t own it: ask “if I didn’t own/invest in it, how much would I invest/sacrifice…”
– Get over fear of waste
– Admit failure to begin success
– Stop trying to force a fit
– Get a neutral second opinion:
– Beware the status quo bias: tendency to do something because we already did it
– Apply zero-based budgeting: create a plan from scratch such that you have to justify everything from the ground-up rather than rely on the past
– Stop making casual commitments
– Pause before you speak so you can ask yourself: Is this essential?
– Get over the fear of missing out:
– Run a reverse pilot: don’t do the activity and observe the negative consequences. If there are none, then that is sufficient justification for eliminating that activity
Edit:
– Editor: someone that says no to things, deliberate subtraction
– Disciplined editing makes you focus and gives energy to things that really matter
– Ask yourself: is this activity making things better? Understand the tradeoffs
– 4 simple principles for editing life:
– Cut out options: remember, the root word of “decision” is “cis” - to cut
– Condense: eliminate meaningless activities
– Correct: have a clear sense of the overaching purpose and make corrections
– Edit less
Limit:
– We often have blurred the boundaries between our work and personal lives because of the influence of technology
– Boundaries are like the walls of a sandcastle: as soon as we allow one of them to fall, all of them fall
– Pushing back has costs,