essentialism the disciplined pursuit of less 
by greg mckeown 


Copyright © 2014 by Greg McKeown
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKeown, Greg
pages cm
1. Choice (Psychology) 2. Decision making. 3. Essentialism
BF611.M455 2014
153.8/3 2012001733
ISBN 978-0-8041-3738-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3739-3
Illustrations and jacket design by Amy Hayes Stellhorn and her team at Big Monocle in collaboration
with Maria Elias.
v3.1
DEDICATED TO
ANNA
GRACE
EVE
JACK
AND ESTHER
YOU PERSONIFY EVERYTHING
THAT IS ESSENTIAL TO ME.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. The Essentialist
Part I: Essence: What is the core mind-set of an Essentialist?
2. CHOOSE: The Invincible Power of Choice
3. DISCERN: The Unimportance of Practically Everything
4. TRADE-OFF: Which Problem Do I Want?
Part II: Explore: How can we discern the trivial many from the
vital few?
5. ESCAPE: The Perks of Being Unavailable
6. LOOK: See What Really Matters
7. PLAY: Embrace the Wisdom of Your Inner Child
8. SLEEP: Protect the Asset
9. SELECT: The Power of Extreme Criteria
Part III: Eliminate: How can we cut out the trivial many?
10. CLARIFY: One Decision That Makes a Thousand
11. DARE: The Power of a Graceful “No”
12. UNCOMMIT: Win Big by Cutting Your Losses
13. EDIT: The Invisible Art
14. LIMIT: The Freedom of Setting Boundaries
Part IV: Execute: How can we make doing the vital few things
almost effortless?
15. BUFFER: The Unfair Advantage
16. SUBTRACT: Bring Forth More by Removing Obstacles
17. PROGRESS: The Power of Small Wins
18. FLOW: The Genius of Routine
19. FOCUS: What’s Important Now?
20. BE: The Essentialist Life
Appendix
Leadership Essentials
Notes
Acknowledgments
Taking Essentialism Beyond the Page
CHAPTER 1
The Essentialist
THE WISDOM OF LIFE CONSISTS IN THE ELIMINATION OF NON-ESSENTIALS.
—Lin Yutang
Sam Elliot* is a capable executive in Silicon Valley who found himself
stretched too thin after his company was acquired by a larger,
bureaucratic business.
He was in earnest about being a good citizen in his new role so he said
yes to many requests without really thinking about it. But as a result he
would spend the whole day rushing from one meeting and conference
call to another trying to please everyone and get it all done. His stress
went up as the quality of his work went down. It was like he was
majoring in minor activities and as a result, his work became
unsatisfying for him and frustrating for the people he was trying so hard
to please.
In the midst of his frustration the company came to him and offered
him an early retirement package. But he was in his early 50s and had no
interest in completely retiring. He thought briefly about starting a
consulting company doing what he was already doing. He even thought
of selling his services back to his employer as a consultant. But none of
these options seemed that appealing. So he went to speak with a mentor
who gave him surprising advice: “Stay, but do what you would as a
consultant and nothing else. And don’t tell anyone.” In other words, his
mentor was advising him to do only those things that he deemed
essential—and ignore everything else that was asked of him.
The executive followed the advice! He made a daily commitment
towards cutting out the red tape. He began saying no.
He was tentative at first. He would evaluate requests based on the
timid criteria, “Can I actually fulfill this request, given the time and
resources I have?” If the answer was no then he would refuse the
request. He was pleasantly surprised to find that while people would at
first look a little disappointed, they seemed to respect his honesty.
Encouraged by his small wins he pushed back a bit more. Now when a
request would come in he would pause and evaluate the request against
a tougher criteria: “Is this the very most important thing I should be
doing with my time and resources right now?”
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.
Emboldened, he began to apply this selective criteria to everything,
not just direct requests. In his past life he would always volunteer for
presentations or assignments that came up last minute; now he found a
way to not sign up for them. He used to be one of the first to jump in on
an e-mail trail, but now he just stepped back and let others jump in. He
stopped attending conference calls that he only had a couple of minutes
of interest in. He stopped sitting in on the weekly update call because he
didn’t need the information. He stopped attending meetings on his
calendar if he didn’t have a direct contribution to make. He explained to
me, “Just because I was invited didn’t seem a good enough reason to
attend.”
It felt self-indulgent at first. But by being selective he bought himself
space, and in that space he found creative freedom. He could
concentrate his efforts on one project at a time. He could plan
thoroughly. He could anticipate roadblocks and start to remove
obstacles. Instead of spinning his wheels trying to get everything done,
he could get the right things done. His newfound commitment to doing
only the things that were truly important—and eliminating everything
else—restored the quality of his work. 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.
He continued this for several months. He immediately found that he
not only got more of his day back at work, in the evenings he got even
more time back at home. He said, “I got back my family life! I can go
home at a decent time.” Now instead of being a slave to his phone he
shuts it down. He goes to the gym. He goes out to eat with his wife.
To his great surprise, there were no negative repercussions to his
experiment. His manager didn’t chastise him. His colleagues didn’t
resent him. Quite the opposite; because he was left only with projects
that were meaningful to him and actually valuable to the company, they
began to respect and value his work more than ever. His work became
fulfilling again. His performance ratings went up. He ended up with one
of the largest bonuses of his career!
In this example is the basic value proposition of 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.
What about you? How many times have you reacted to a request by
saying yes without really thinking about it? How many times have you
resented committing to do something and wondered, “Why did I sign up
for this?” How often do you say yes simply to please? Or to avoid
trouble? Or because “yes” had just become your default response?
Now let me ask you this: 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.
The Way of the Essentialist
Dieter Rams was the lead designer at Braun for many years. He is driven
by the idea that almost everything is noise. He believes very few things
are essential. His job is to filter through that noise until he gets to the
essence. For example, as a young twenty-four-year-old at the company
he was asked to collaborate on a record player. The norm at the time
was to cover the turntable in a solid wooden lid or even to incorporate
the player into a piece of living room furniture. Instead, he and his team
removed the clutter and designed a player with a clear plastic cover on
the top and nothing more. It was the first time such a design had been
used, and it was so revolutionary people worried it might bankrupt the
company because nobody would buy it. It took courage, as it always
does, to eliminate the nonessential. By the sixties this aesthetic started to
gain traction. In time it became the design every other record player
followed.
Dieter’s design criteria can be summarized by a characteristically
succinct principle, captured in just three German words: Weniger aber
besser. The English translation is: Less but better. A more fitting definition
of Essentialism would be hard to come by.
The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better. It
doesn’t mean occasionally giving a nod to the principle. It means
pursuing it in a disciplined way.
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?” There are far more activities
and opportunities in the world than we have time and resources to
invest in. And although many of them may be good, or even very good,
the fact is that most are trivial and few are vital. The way of the
Essentialist involves learning to tell the difference—learning to filter
through all those options and selecting only those that are truly
essential.
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.
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. The way of the Essentialist rejects the idea that we can fit it
all in. Instead it requires us to grapple with real trade-offs and make
tough decisions. 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?”
THE UNDISCIPLINED THE DISCIPLINED
Does
PURSUIT OF MORE
Reacts to what’s most
pressing
Says “yes” to people without
really thinking
Tries to force execution at
the last moment
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
The way of the Essentialist is the path to being in control of our own
choices. It is a path to new levels of success and meaning. It is the path
on which we enjoy the journey, not just the destination. Despite all these
benefits, however, there are too many forces conspiring to keep us from
applying the disciplined pursuit of less but better, which may be why so
many end up on the misdirected path of the Nonessentialist.
The Way of the Nonessentialist
On a bright, winter day in California I visited my wife, Anna, in the
hospital. Even in the hospital Anna was radiant. But I also knew she was
exhausted. It was the day after our precious daughter was born, healthy
and happy at 7 pounds, 3 ounces.1
Yet what should have been one of the happiest, most serene days of
my life was actually filled with tension. Even as my beautiful new baby
lay in my wife’s tired arms, I was on the phone and on e-mail with work,
and I was feeling pressure to go to a client meeting. My colleague had
written, “Friday between 1–2 would be a bad time to have a baby
because I need you to come be at this meeting with X.” It was now
Friday and though I was pretty certain (or at least I hoped) the e-mail
had been written in jest, I still felt pressure to attend.
Instinctively, I knew what to do. It was clearly a time to be there for
my wife and newborn child. So when asked whether I planned to attend
the meeting, I said with all the conviction I could muster …
“Yes.”
To my shame, while my wife lay in the hospital with our hours-old
baby, I went to the meeting. Afterward, my colleague said, “The client
will respect you for making the decision to be here.” But the look on the
clients’ faces did not evince respect. Instead, they mirrored how I felt.
What was I doing there? I had said “yes” simply to please, and in doing so
I had hurt my family, my integrity, and even the client relationship.
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.
On reflection I discovered this important lesson:
If you don’t prioritize your life,
someone else will.
That experience gave me renewed interest—read, inexhaustible
obsession—in understanding why otherwise intelligent people make the
choices they make in their personal and professional lives. “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?”
My mission to shed light on these questions had already led me to quit
law school in England and travel, eventually, to California to do my
graduate work at Stanford. It had led me to spend more than two years
collaborating on a book, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone
Smarter. And it went on to inspire me to start a strategy and leadership
company in Silicon Valley, where I now work with some of the most
capable people in some of the most interesting companies in the world,
helping to set them on the path of the Essentialist.
In my work I have seen people all over the world who are consumed
and overwhelmed by the pressures all around them. I have coached
“successful” people in the quiet pain of trying desperately to do
everything, perfectly, now. I have seen people trapped by controlling
managers and unaware that they do not “have to” do all the thankless
busywork they are asked to do. And I have worked tirelessly to
understand why so many bright, smart, capable individuals remain
snared in the death grip of the nonessential.
What I have found has surprised me.
I worked with one particularly driven executive who got into
technology at a young age and loved it. He was quickly rewarded for his
knowledge and passion with more and more opportunities. Eager to
build on his success, he continued to read as much as he could and
pursue all he could with gusto and enthusiasm. By the time I met him he
was hyperactive, trying to learn it all and do it all. He seemed to find a
new obsession every day, sometimes every hour. And in the process, he
lost his ability to discern the vital few from the trivial many. Everything
was important. As a result he was stretched thinner and thinner. He was
making a millimeter of progress in a million directions. He was
overworked and underutilized. That’s when I sketched out for him the
image on the left in the figure on this page.
He stared at it for the longest time in uncharacteristic silence. Then he
said, with more than a hint of emotion, “That is the story of my life!”
Then I sketched the image on the right. “What would happen if we could
figure out the one thing you could do that would make the highest
contribution?” I asked him. He responded sincerely: “That is the
question.”
As it turns out, many intelligent, ambitious people have perfectly
legitimate reasons to have trouble answering this question. One reason is
that in our society we are punished for good behavior (saying no) and
rewarded for bad behavior (saying yes). The former is often awkward in
the moment, and the latter is often celebrated in the moment. It leads to
what I call “the paradox of success,”2 which can be summed up in four
predictable phases:
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.
Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, the pursuit of
success can be a catalyst for failure. Put another way, success can distract
us from focusing on the essential things that produce success in the first
place.
We can see this everywhere around us. In his book How the Mighty
Fall, Jim Collins explores what went wrong in companies that were once
darlings of Wall Street but later collapsed.3 He finds that for many,
falling into “the undisciplined pursuit of more” was a key reason for
failure. This is true for companies and it is true for the people who work
in them. But why?
Why Nonessentialism Is Everywhere
Several trends have combined to create a perfect Nonessentialist storm.
Consider the following.
TOO MANY CHOICES
We have all observed the exponential increase in choices over the last
decade. Yet even in the midst of it, and perhaps because of it, we have
lost sight of the most important ones.
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.”4
We are unprepared in part because, for the first time, the
preponderance of choice has overwhelmed our ability to manage it. We
have lost our ability to filter what is important and what isn’t.
Psychologists call this “decision fatigue”: the more choices we are forced
to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.5
TOO MUCH SOCIAL PRESSURE
It is not just the number of choices that has increased exponentially, it is
also the strength and number of outside influences on our decisions that
has increased. While much has been said and written about how
hyperconnected we now are and how distracting this information
overload can be, the larger issue is how our connectedness has increased
the strength of social pressure. Today, technology has lowered the
barrier for others to share their opinion about what we should be
focusing on. It is not just information overload; it is opinion overload.
THE IDEA THAT “YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL”
The idea that we can have it all and do it all is not new. This myth has
been peddled for so long, I believe virtually everyone alive today is
infected with it. It is sold in advertising. It is championed in
corporations. It is embedded in job descriptions that provide huge lists of
required skills and experience as standard. It is embedded in university
applications that require dozens of extracurricular activities.
What is new is how especially damaging this myth is today, in a time
when choice and expectations have increased exponentially. It results in
stressed people trying to cram yet more activities into their already
overscheduled lives. It creates corporate environments that talk about
work/life balance but still expect their employees to be on their smart
phones 24/7/365. It leads to staff meetings where as many as ten “top
priorities” are discussed with no sense of irony at all.
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.
But when we try to do it all and have it all, we find ourselves making
trade-offs at the margins that we would never take on as our intentional
strategy. When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to
focus our energies and time, other people—our bosses, our colleagues,
our clients, and even our families—will choose for us, and before long
we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important. We
can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas
to control our lives.
Once an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware, who cared for people
in the last twelve weeks of their lives, recorded their most often
discussed regrets. At the top of the list: “I wish I’d had the courage to
live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”6
This requires, not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully,
deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials, and not just
getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but cutting out some really good
opportunities as well.7 Instead of reacting to the social pressures pulling
you to go in a million directions, you will learn a way to reduce,
simplify, and focus on what is absolutely essential by eliminating
everything else.
You can think of this book doing for your life and career what a
professional organizer can do for your closet. Think about what happens
to your closet when you never organize it. Does it stay neat and tidy
with just those few outfits you love to wear hanging on the rack? Of
course not. When you make no conscious effort to keep it organized, the
closet becomes cluttered and stuffed with clothes you rarely wear. Every
so often it gets so out of control you try and purge the closet. But unless
you have a disciplined system you’ll either end up with as many clothes
as you started with because you can’t decide which to give away; end up
with regrets because you accidentally gave away clothes you do wear
and did want to keep; or end up with a pile of clothes you don’t want to
keep but never actually get rid of because you’re not quite sure where to
take them or what to do with them.
In the same way that our closets get cluttered as clothes we never
wear accumulate, so do our lives get cluttered as well-intended
commitments and activities we’ve said yes to pile up. Most of these
efforts didn’t come with an expiration date. Unless we have a system for
purging them, once adopted, they live on in perpetuity.
Here’s how an Essentialist would approach that closet.
1. EXPLORE AND EVALUATE
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?” Part One of
this book will help you figure out what those activities are.
2. ELIMINATE
Let’s say you have your clothes divided into piles of “must keep” and
“probably should get rid of.” But are you really ready to stuff the
“probably should get rid of” pile in a bag and send it off? After all, there
is still a feeling of sunk-cost bias: studies have found that we tend to
value things we already own more highly than they are worth and thus
that we find them more difficult to get rid of. If you’re not quite there,
ask the killer question: “If I didn’t already own this, how much would I
spend to buy it?” This usually does the trick.
In other words, it’s not enough to simply determine which activities
and efforts don’t make the highest possible contribution; you still have to
actively eliminate those that do not. Part Two of this book will show you
how to eliminate the nonessentials, and not only that, how do it in a way
that garners you respect from colleagues, bosses, clients, and peers.
3. EXECUTE
If you want your closet to stay tidy, you need a regular routine for
organizing it. You need one large bag for items you need to throw away
and a very small pile for items you want to keep. You need to know the
dropoff location and hours of your local thrift store. You need to have a
scheduled time to go there.
In other words, once you’ve figured out which activities and efforts to
keep—the ones that make your highest level of contribution—you need
a system to make executing your intentions as effortless as possible. In
this book you’ll learn to create a process that makes getting the essential
things done as effortless as possible.
Of course, our lives aren’t static like the clothes in our closet. Our
clothes stay where they are once we leave them in the morning (unless
we have teenagers!). But in the closet of our lives, new clothes—new
demands on our time—are coming at us constantly. Imagine if every
time you opened the doors to your closet you found that people had
been shoving their clothes in there—if every day you cleaned it out in
the morning and then by afternoon found it already stuffed to the brim.
Unfortunately, most of our lives are much like this. How many times
have you started your workday with a schedule and by 10:00 A.M. you
were already completely off track or behind? Or how many times have
you written a “to do” list in the morning but then found that by 5:00 P.M.
the list was even longer? How many times have you looked forward to a
quiet weekend at home with the family then found that by Saturday
morning you were inundated with errands and play dates and
unforeseen calamities? But here’s the good news: there is a way out.
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.
This book will show you how to live a life true to yourself, not the life
others expect from you. It will teach you a method for being more
efficient, productive, and effective in both personal and professional
realms. It will teach you a systematic way to discern what is important,
eliminate what is not, and make doing the essential as effortless as
possible. In short, it will teach you how to apply the disciplined pursuit
of less to every area of your life. Here’s how.
Road Map
There are four parts to the book. The first outlines the core mind-set of
an Essentialist. The next three turn the mind-set into a systematic
process for the disciplined pursuit of less, one you can use in any
situation or endeavor you encounter. A description of each part of the
book is below.
ESSENCE: WHAT IS THE CORE MIND-SET OF AN ESSENTIALIST?
This part of the book outlines the three realities without which
Essentialist thinking would be neither relevant nor possible. One chapter
is devoted to each of these in turn.
1. Individual choice: We can choose how to spend our energy and time.
Without choice, there is no point in talking about trade-offs.
2. The prevalence of noise: Almost everything is noise, and a very few
things are exceptionally valuable. This is the justification for taking time to
figure out what is most important. Because some things are so much
more important, the effort in finding those things is worth it.
3. The reality of trade-offs: We can’t have it all or do it all. If we could,
there would be no reason to evaluate or eliminate options. Once we
accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, “How can I make it all
work?” and start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I
want to solve?”
Only when we understand these realities can we begin to think like an
Essentialist. Indeed, once we fully accept and understand them, much of
the method in the coming sections of the book becomes natural and
instinctive. That method consists of the following three simple steps.
STEP 1. EXPLORE:
DISCERNING THE TRIVIAL MANY FROM THE VITAL FEW
One paradox of Essentialism is that Essentialists actually explore more
options than their Nonessentialist counterparts. Whereas Nonessentialists
commit to everything or virtually everything without actually exploring,
Essentialists systematically explore and evaluate a broad set of options
before committing to any. Because they will commit and “go big” on one
or two ideas or activities, they deliberately explore more options at first
to ensure that they pick the right one later.
By applying tougher criteria we can tap into our brain’s sophisticated
search engine.8 If we search for “a good opportunity,” then we will find
scores of pages for us to think about and work through. Instead, we can
conduct an advanced search and ask three questions: “What do I feel
deeply inspired by?” and “What am I particularly talented at?” and
“What meets a significant need in the world?” Naturally there won’t be
as many pages to view, but this is the point of the exercise. We aren’t
looking for a plethora of good things to do. We are looking for our
highest level of contribution: the right thing the right way at the right
time.
Essentialists spend as much time as possible exploring, listening,
debating, questioning, and thinking. But their exploration is not an end
in itself. The purpose of the exploration is to discern the vital few from
the trivial many.
STEP 2. ELIMINATE:
CUTTING OUT THE TRIVIAL MANY
Many of us say yes to things because we are eager to please and make a
difference. Yet the key to making our highest contribution may well be
saying no. As Peter Drucker said, “People are effective because they say
‘no,’ because they say, ‘this isn’t for me.’ ”9
To eliminate nonessentials means saying no to someone. Often. It
means pushing against social expectations. To do it well takes courage
and compassion. So eliminating the nonessentials isn’t just about mental
discipline. It’s about the emotional discipline necessary to say no to social
pressure. In this section of the book, we will address this challenging
dynamic.
Given the reality of trade-offs, we can’t choose to do everything. The
real question is not how can we do it all, it is who will get to choose
what we do and don’t do. Remember, when we forfeit our right to
choose, someone else will choose for us. So we can either deliberately
choose what not to do or allow ourselves to be pulled in directions we
don’t want to go.
This section offers a method for eliminating the nonessentials, thus
earning us the time necessary to achieve what is essential. Only then can
we build a platform to make execution as effortless as possible: the
subject of step 3.
STEP 3. EXECUTE:
REMOVING OBSTACLES AND MAKING EXECUTION EFFORTLESS
Whether our goal is to complete a project at work, reach the next step in
our career, or plan a birthday party for our spouse, we tend to think of
the process of execution as something hard and full of friction,
something we need to force to “make happen.” But the Essentialist
approach is different. Instead of forcing execution, Essentialists invest
the time they have saved into creating a system for removing obstacles
and making execution as easy as possible.
These three elements—explore, eliminate, execute—are not separate
events as much as a cyclical process. And when we apply them
consistently we are able to reap greater and greater benefits.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
As a quote attributed to Victor Hugo, the French dramatist and novelist,
puts it, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
“Less but better” is a principle whose time has come.
Everything changes when we give ourselves permission to be more
selective in what we choose to do. At once, we hold the key to unlock
the next level of achievement in our lives. There is tremendous freedom
in learning that we can eliminate the nonessentials, that we are no
longer controlled by other people’s agendas, and that we get to choose.
With that invincible power we can discover our highest point of
contribution, not just to our lives or careers, but to 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?10
What if businesses eliminated meaningless meetings and replaced
them with space for people to think and work on their most important
projects? What if employees pushed back against time-wasting e-mail
chains, purposeless projects, and unproductive meetings so they could be
utilized at their highest level of contribution to their companies and in
their careers?
What if society stopped telling us to buy more stuff and instead
allowed us to create more space to breathe and think? What if society
encouraged us to reject what has been accurately described as doing
things we detest, to buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t
have, to impress people we don’t like?11
What if we stopped being oversold the value of having more and being
undersold the value of having less?
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?
What if the whole world shifted from the undisciplined pursuit of
more to the disciplined pursuit of less … only better?
I have a vision of people everywhere having the courage to live a life
true to themselves instead of the life others expect of them.
I have a vision of everyone—children, students, mothers, fathers,
employees, managers, executives, world leaders—learning to better tap
into more of their intelligence, capability, resourcefulness, and initiative
to live more meaningful lives. I have a vision of all these people
courageously doing what they came here on this earth to do. I have a
vision of starting a conversation that becomes a movement.
To harness the courage we need to get on the right path, it pays to
reflect on how short life really is and what we want to accomplish in the
little time we have left. As poet Mary Oliver wrote: “Tell me, what is it
you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”12
I challenge you to pause more to ask yourself that question.
I challenge you here and now to make a commitment to make room to
enjoy the essential. Do you think for one second you will regret such a
decision? Is it at all likely you will wake up one day and say, “I wish I
had been less true to myself and had done all the nonessential things
others expected of me”?
I challenge you to let me help you to create a system that “unfairly”
tips the scales in favor of the essential few over the trivial many.
I challenge you to invest in becoming more of an Essentialist. This
book is not about going back to some simpler time. It’s not about
eschewing e-mail or disconnecting from the Web or living like a hermit.
That would be backwards movement. It is about applying the principles
of “less but better” to how we live our lives now and in the future. That
is innovation.
So my challenge to you is to be wiser than I was on the day of my
daughter’s birth. I have great confidence in the good that can come from
such a decision. Just imagine what would happen to our world if every
person on the planet eliminated one good but nonessential activity and
replaced it with something truly essential.
Years from now (hopefully many), when you are at the end of your
life, you may still have regrets. But seeking the way of the Essentialist is
unlikely to be one of them. What would you trade then to be back here
now for one chance—this chance—to be true to yourself? On that day,
what will you hope you decided to do on this one?
If you are ready to look inside yourself for the answer to this question,
then you are ready to set out on the path of the Essentialist. Let us
embark on it together.
* Name has been changed.

ESSENCE
What Is the Core Logic of an Essentialist?
Essentialism is not a way to do one more thing; it is a different way of
doing everything. It is a way of thinking. But internalizing this way of
thinking is not a neutral challenge. This is because certain ideas—and
people peddling those ideas—constantly pull us toward the logic of
Nonessentialism. There are three chapters in this part of the book. Each
takes on a fallacy of Nonessentialism and replaces it with a truth of
Essentialism.
There are three deeply entrenched assumptions we must conquer to
live the way of the Essentialist: “I have to,” “It’s all important,” and “I
can do both.” Like mythological sirens, these assumptions are as
dangerous as they are seductive. They draw us in and drown us in
shallow waters.
To embrace the essence of Essentialism requires we replace these false
assumptions with three core truths: “I choose to,” “Only a few things
really matter,” and “I can do anything but not everything.” These simple
truths awaken us from our nonessential stupor. They free us to pursue
what really matters. They enable us to live at our highest level of
contribution.
As we rid ourselves of the nonsense of Nonessentialism and replace it
with the core logic of Essentialism, the way of the Essentialist becomes
natural and instinctive.
CHAPTER 2
CHOOSE
The Invincible Power of Choice
IT IS THE ABILITY TO CHOOSE WHICH MAKES US HUMAN.
—Madeleine L’Engle
I stared, wide-eyed, at the piece of paper in my hands. I was sitting in
the foyer of a high-rise office building. It was dusk, and the last few
people were trickling out for the evening. The piece of paper, covered
with scribbled words and arrows, was the result of a twenty-minute
spontaneous brainstorm about what I currently wanted to be doing with
my life. As I looked at the paper I was mostly struck by what wasn’t on it
—law school was not on the list. This got my attention because I was
halfway through my first year at law school in England.
I had applied to study law because of repeated advice to “keep your
options open.” Once I got out, I could practice law. I could write about
law. I could teach law. Or I could consult on the law. The world would
be my oyster, or so the argument went. Yet from almost the first moment
I started studying law, instead of choosing between these pursuits I had
simply tried to fit them all in. I would study my law books at all hours
all day and read the great management thinkers in the evenings. In spare
moments, I would write. It was a classic “straddled strategy” of
attempting to invest in everything at once. The result was that while I
was not entirely failing in any pursuit I was not entirely succeeding at
any either. I soon began to wonder just what was so great about all these
open options.
In the middle of all this existential confusion I received a call from a
friend in the United States inviting me to his wedding. He had already
bought and sent the tickets! So I gratefully accepted his invitation and
left England for an unexpected adventure.
While in the United States I took every opportunity to meet with
teachers and writers. One such meeting was with an executive for a
nonprofit educational group. As I was leaving his office, he mentioned in
passing, “If you decide to stay in America, you should come and join us
on a consultation committee.”
His passing comment had a curious force about it. It wasn’t his specific
question. It was the assumption he made that I had a choice: “If you
decide to stay …” He saw it as a real option. This got me thinking.
I left his office and took the elevator down to the lobby. I took a single
sheet of paper from someone’s desk and sat in the lobby and attempted
to answer the question: “If you could do only one thing with your life
right now, what would you do?”
The result was that piece of paper on which law school, as I have
indicated, was not written.
Up to that point I had always known logically that I could choose not
to study law. But emotionally it had never been an option. That’s when I
realized that in sacrificing my power to choose I had made a choice—a
bad one. By refusing to choose “not law school,” I had chosen law school
—not because I actually or actively wanted to be there, but by default. I
think that’s when I first realized that when we surrender our ability to
choose, something or someone else will step in to choose for us.
A few weeks later, I officially quit law school. I left England and
moved to America to start down the path of becoming an author and a
teacher. You’re reading this now because of that choice.
Yet, for all the impact this specific choice has had on the trajectory of
my life, I value the way it changed my view about choices even more.
We often think of choice as a thing. But a choice is not a thing. Our
options may be things, but a choice—a choice is an action. It is not just
something we have but something we 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.
Have you ever felt stuck because you believed you did not really have
a choice? Have you ever felt the stress that comes from simultaneously
holding two contradictory beliefs: “I can’t do this” and “I have to do
this”? Have you ever given up your power to choose bit by bit until you
allowed yourself to blindly follow a path prescribed by another person?
If so, you are not alone.
The Invincible Power of Choosing to Choose
For too long, we have overemphasized the external aspect of choices
(our options) and underemphasized our internal ability to choose (our
actions). This is more than semantics. Think about it this way. Options
(things) can be taken away, while our core ability to choose (free will)
cannot be.
The ability to choose cannot be
taken away or even given away
—it can only be forgotten.
How Do We Forget Our Ability to Choose?
One important insight into how and why we forget our ability to choose
comes out of the classic work of Martin Seligman and Steve Maier, who
stumbled onto what they later called “learned helplessness” while
conducting experiments on German shepherds.
Seligman and Maier divided the dogs into three groups. The dogs in
the first group were placed in a harness and administered an electric
shock but were also given a lever they could press to make the shock
stop. The dogs in the second group were placed in an identical harness
and were given the same lever, and the same shock, with one catch: the
lever didn’t work, rendering the dog powerless to do anything about the
electric shock. The third group of dogs were simply placed in the harness
and not given any shocks.1
Afterwards, each dog was placed in a large box with a low divider
across the center. One side of the box produced an electric shock; the
other did not. Then something interesting happened. The dogs that
either had been able to stop the shock or had not been shocked at all in
the earlier part of the experiment quickly learned to step over the
divider to the side without shocks. But the dogs that had been powerless
in the last part of the experiment did not. These dogs didn’t adapt or
adjust. They did nothing to try to avoid getting shocked. Why? They
didn’t know they had any choice other than to take the shocks. They had
learned helplessness.
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.”
I’ll be the first to admit that choices are hard. By definition they
involve saying no to something or several somethings, and that can feel
like a loss. Outside the workplace, choices can be even harder. Any time
we walk into a store or a restaurant or anywhere selling something,
everything is designed to make it hard for us to say no. When we listen
to a political advertisement or pundit, the objective is to make it
unthinkable for us to vote for the other side. When our mother-in-law
calls us up (mine excluded of course) and wants us to do something, it
can be hardest of all to feel we really have a choice. If we look at
everyday life through this lens, it is hardly surprising we forget our
ability to choose.
Yet choice is at the very core of what it means to be an Essentialist. To
become an Essentialist requires a heightened awareness of our ability to
choose. We need to recognize it as an invincible power within us,
existing separate and distinct from any other thing, person, or force.
William James once wrote, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in
free will.”2 That is why the first and most crucial skill you will learn on
this journey is to develop your ability to choose choice, in every area of
your life.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
“I have to.”
Forfeits the right to choose
“I choose to.”
Exercises the power of choice
When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by
drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a
function of other people’s choices—or even a function of our own past
choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose. That is the path of
the Nonessentialist.
The Essentialist doesn’t just recognize the power of choice, he
celebrates it. The Essentialist knows that when we surrender our right to
choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit
permission to choose for us.
CHAPTER 3
DISCERN
The Unimportance of Practically Everything
MOST OF WHAT EXISTS IN THE UNIVERSE—OUR ACTIONS, AND ALL OTHER FORCES,
RESOURCES, AND IDEAS—HAS LITTLE VALUE AND YIELDS LITTLE RESULT; ON THE OTHER
HAND, A FEW THINGS WORK FANTASTICALLY WELL AND HAVE TREMENDOUS IMPACT.
—Richard Koch
In George Orwell’s classic allegorical novel Animal Farm we are
introduced to the fictional character Boxer the horse. He is described as
faithful and strong. His answer to every setback and every problem is, “I
will work harder.” He lives true to his philosophy under the direst
circumstances until, exhausted and broken, he is sent to the knackers’
yard. He is a tragic figure: despite his best intentions, his ever-increasing
efforts actually exacerbate the inequality and problems on the farm.
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?
I remember when I was young I wanted to earn some pocket money.
One of the few jobs available for twelve-year-olds in England was a
paper route. It paid about a pound a day and took about an hour. So for
a while I heaved a bag that seemed heavier than I was from door to door
for an hour each morning before school (and just for the record, we
couldn’t just throw the paper onto someone’s front porch, as is done in
the United States. We had to take the paper up to the tiny letterbox on
the door and then force the paper all the way through it). It was hardearned pocket money, to be sure.
The considerable effort I had to put in just to earn that one pound a
day forever changed the way I thought about the cost of the things I
desired. From then on, when I looked at something I wanted to buy I
would translate it into the number of days I would have to deliver the
papers to get it. One pound of reward equaled one hour of effort. I
realized that at this rate it would take quite a while to save up for that
MicroMachine I wanted.
Then, as I started to think about how I might speed up the process, I
had the insight that I could wash the neighbors’ cars on Saturday
mornings instead of delivering papers. I could charge two pounds per car
and could clean three in an hour. Suddenly, the ratio of hours to pounds
changed from 1:1 to 1:6. I had just learned a crucial lesson: certain types
of effort yield higher rewards than others.
Years later at university I went to work at a coaching company. I
worked in their customer service department for $9 an hour. It would
have been easy to think of the jobs in terms of that ratio between time
and reward. But I knew what really counted was the relationship
between time and results.
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 more, earned more, and contributed more.
Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield
more results. “Less but better” does.
Ferran Adrià, arguably the world’s greatest chef, who has led El Bulli
to become the world’s most famous restaurant, epitomizes the principle
of “less but better” in at least two ways. First, his specialty is reducing
traditional dishes to their absolute essence and then re-imagining them
in ways people have never thought of before. Second, while El Bulli has
somewhere in the range of 2 million requests for dinner reservations
each year, it serves only fifty people per night and closes for six months
of the year. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferran had stopped serving
food altogether and had instead turned El Bulli into a full-time food
laboratory of sorts where he was continuing to pursue nothing but the
essence of his craft.1
Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it
sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing
more … and more and more. Yet at a certain point, more effort causes
our progress to plateau and even stall. It’s true that the idea of a direct
correlation between results and effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet
research across many fields paints a very different picture.
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, lowquality 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
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.4 Indeed, the examples
are everywhere.
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.7
Some believe the relationship between efforts and results is even less
linear, following what scientists call a “power law.” According to the
power law theory, certain efforts actually produce exponentially more
results than others. For example, as Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief
technology officer for Microsoft, has said (and then confirmed to me in
person), “The top software developers are more productive than average
software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1,000X but
by 10,000X.”8 It may be an exaggeration, but it still makes the point that
certain efforts produce exponentially better results than others.
The overwhelming reality is: we live in a world where almost
everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.
As John Maxwell has written, “You cannot overestimate the
unimportance of practically everything.”9

As we unlearn the 1:1 logic, we begin to see the value in pursuing the
way of the Essentialist. 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.
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
Many capable people are kept from getting to the next level of
contribution because they can’t let go of the belief that everything is
important. But an Essentialist has learned to tell the difference between
what is truly important and everything else. To practice this Essentialist
skill we can start at a simple level, and once it becomes second nature
for everyday decisions we can begin to apply it to bigger and broader
areas of our personal and professional lives. To master it fully will
require a massive shift in thinking. But it can be done.
CHAPTER 4
TRADE-OFF
Which Problem Do I Want?
STRATEGY IS ABOUT MAKING CHOICES, TRADE-OFFS. IT’S ABOUT DELIBERATELY
CHOOSING TO BE DIFFERENT.
—Michael Porter
Imagine you could go back to 1972 and invest a dollar in each company
in the S&P 500. Which company would provide the largest return on
your investment by 2002? Would it be GE? IBM? Intel? According to
Money magazine and the analysis they initiated from Ned Davis
Research, the answer is none of the above.1
The correct answer is Southwest Airlines. This is startling because the
airline industry is notoriously bad at generating profits. Yet Southwest,
led by Herb Kelleher, has consistently, year after year, produced
amazing financial results. Herb’s Essentialist approach to business is
central to why.
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.
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.’ ”
At first, Southwest was lambasted by critics, naysayers, and other
Nonessentialists who couldn’t believe that this approach could possibly
be successful. Who in their right mind would want to fly an airline that
traveled only to certain places and didn’t serve meals, no matter how
cheap tickets were? Yet after a few years it became clear Southwest was
onto something. Competitors in the industry took notice of Southwest’s
soaring profits and started trying to imitate their approach. But instead
of adopting Kelleher’s Essentialist approach carte blanche, they did what
Harvard Business School professor Michel Porter terms “straddling” their
strategy.
In the simplest terms, straddling means keeping your existing strategy
intact while simultaneously also trying to adopt the strategy of a
competitor. One of the most visible attempts at the time was made by
Continental Airlines. They called their new point-to-point service
Continental Lite.
Continental Lite adopted some of Southwest’s practices. They lowered
their fares. They got rid of meals. They stopped their first-class service.
They increased the frequency of departures. The problem was that
because they were still hanging onto their existing business model
(Continental Lite accounted for only a small percentage of flights offered
by the airline) they didn’t have the operational efficiencies that would
allow them to compete on price. So they were forced to skimp in other
ways that ended up compromising the quality of their service. 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. According to Porter, “A strategic
position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other
positions.”3 By trying to operate by two incompatible strategies they
started to undermine their ability to be competitive.
The straddled strategy was enormously expensive for Continental.
They lost hundreds of millions of dollars to delayed planes, and,
according to Porter, “late flights and cancellations generated a thousand
complaints a day.” The CEO was eventually fired. The moral of the story:
ignoring the reality of trade-offs is a terrible strategy for organizations. It
turns out to be a terrible strategy for people as well.
Have you ever spent time with someone who is always trying to fit
just one more thing in? Such people know they have ten minutes to get
to a meeting that takes ten minutes to walk to, but they still sit down to
answer a couple of e-mails before they go. Or they agree to put together
a report by Friday, even though they have another huge deadline that
same day. Or maybe they promise to swing by their cousin’s birthday
party on Saturday night, even though they already have tickets to a
show that starts at the exact same time. Their logic, which ignores the
reality of trade-offs, is I can do both. The rather important problem is
that this logic is false. Inevitably, they are late to the meeting, they miss
one or both of their deadlines (or do a shoddy job on both projects), and
they either don’t make it to their cousin’s celebration or miss the show.
The reality is, saying yes to any opportunity by definition requires saying
no to several others.
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.
In an insightful op-ed for the New York Times, Erin Callan, the former
CFO of Lehman Brothers, shared what she had sacrificed in making
trade-offs by default. She wrote: “I didn’t start out with the goal of
devoting all of myself to my job. It crept in over time. Each year that
went by, slight modifications became the new normal. First I spent a
half-hour on Sunday organizing my e-mail, to-do list, and calendar to
make Monday morning easier. Then I was working a few hours on
Sunday, then all day. My boundaries slipped away until work was all
that was left.”4 Her story demonstrates a critical truth: we can either
make the hard choices for ourselves or allow others—whether our
colleagues, our boss, or our customers—to decide for us.
In my work I’ve noticed that senior executives of companies are
among the worst at accepting the reality of trade-offs. I recently spent
some time with the CEO of a company in Silicon Valley valued at $40
billion. He shared with me the value statement of his organization,
which he had just crafted, and which he planned to announce to the
whole company. But when he shared it I cringed: “We value passion,
innovation, execution, and leadership.”
One of several problems with the list is, Who doesn’t value these
things? Another problem is that this tells employees nothing about what
the company values most. It says nothing about what choices employees
should be making when these values are at odds. This is similarly true
when companies claim that their mission is to serve all stakeholders—
clients, employees, shareholders—equally. To say they value equally
everyone they interact with leaves management with no clear guidance
on what to do when faced with trade-offs between the people they serve.
Contrast this with how Johnson & Johnson bounced back from the
tragic cyanide murder scandal in 1982.5 At the time Johnson & Johnson
owned 37 percent of the market and Tylenol was their most profitable
product. Then reports surfaced that seven people had died after taking
Tylenol. It was later discovered that these bottles had been tampered
with. How should Johnson & Johnson respond?
The question was a complicated one. Was their primary responsibility
to ensure the safety of their customers by immediately pulling all
Tylenol products off drugstore shelves? Was their first priority to do PR
damage control to keep shareholders from dumping their stock? Or was
it their duty to console and compensate the families of the victims first
and foremost?
Fortunately for them they had the Credo: a statement written in 1943
by then chairman Robert Wood Johnson that is literally carved in stone
at Johnson & Johnson headquarters.6 Unlike most corporate mission
statements, the Credo actually lists the constituents of the company in
priority order. Customers are first; shareholders are last.
As a result, Johnson & Johnson swiftly decided to recall all Tylenol,
even though it would have a massive impact (to the tune of $100
million, according to some reports) on their bottom line. The safety of
customers or $100 million? Not an easy decision. But the Credo enabled
a clearer sense of what was most essential. It enabled the tough trade-off
to be made.
We can try to avoid the reality
of trade-offs, but we can’t
escape them.
I once worked with an executive team that needed help with their
prioritization. They were struggling to identify the top five projects they
wanted their IT department to complete over the next fiscal year, and
one of the managers was having a particularly hard time with it. 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.
It is easy to see why it’s so tempting to deny the reality of trade-offs.
After all, by definition, a trade-off involves two things we want. Do you
want more pay or more vacation time? Do you want to finish this next email or be on time to your meeting? Do you want it done faster or
better? Obviously, when faced with the choice between two things we
want, the preferred answer is yes to both. But as much as we’d like to,
we simply cannot have it all.
A Nonessentialist approaches every trade-off by asking, “How can I do
both?” Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating
question, “Which problem do I want?” An Essentialist makes trade-offs
deliberately. She acts for herself rather than waiting to be acted upon. As
economist Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no solutions. There are only
trade-offs.”7
Jim Collins, the author of the business classic Good to Great, was once
told by Peter Drucker that he could either build a great company or
build great ideas but not both. Jim chose ideas. As a result of this tradeoff there are still only three full-time employees in his company, yet his
ideas have reached tens of millions of people through his writing.8
As painful as they can sometimes be, trade-offs represent a significant
opportunity. By forcing us to weigh both options and strategically select
the best one for us, we significantly increase our chance of achieving the
outcome we want. Like Southwest, we can enjoy the success that results
from making a consistent set of choices.
I observed an example of this on a recent flight to Boston, when I
began chatting with two parents who were on their way to visit their son
at Harvard. They were clearly proud their son was there, and I was
curious about what strategy they and he had pursued in getting him
accepted. 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.
This logic holds true in our personal lives as well. When we were
newlyweds, Anna and I met someone who had, as far as we could tell, an
amazing marriage and family. We wanted to learn from him, so we
asked him, What’s your secret? One of the things he told us was that he
and his wife had decided not to be a part of any clubs. He didn’t join the
local lodge. She didn’t join the book clubs. It wasn’t that they had no
interest in those things. It was simply that they made the trade-off to
spend that time with their children. Over the years their children had
become their best friends—well worth the sacrifice of any friendships
they might have made on the golf course or over tattered copies of Anna
Karenina.
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?” The cumulative
impact of this small change in thinking can be profound.
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?”
In a piece called “Laugh, Kookaburra” published in The New Yorker,
David Sedaris gives a humorous account of his experience touring the
Australian “bush.”9 While hiking, his friend and guide for the day shares
something she has heard in passing at a management class. “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?”
Trade-offs are not something to be ignored or decried. They are
something to be embraced and made deliberately, strategically, and
thoughtfully.

EXPLORE
Discern the Vital Few from the Trivial Many
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. The way of the Essentialist, on the other hand, is to explore
and evaluate a broad set of options before committing to any. Because
Essentialists will commit and “go big” on only the vital few ideas or
activities, they explore more options at first to ensure they pick the right
one later.
In Part Two, we will discuss five practices for exploring what is
essential. The gravitational pull of Nonessentialism can be so strong that
it can be tempting to skip over or skim over this step. Yet this step, in
itself, is essential to the disciplined pursuit of 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.
Ironically, in a Nonessentialist culture these things—space, listening,
playing, sleeping, and selecting—can be seen as trivial distractions. At
best they are considered nice to have. At worst they are derided as
evidence of weakness and wastefulness. We all know that highly
ambitious or productive person who thinks, “Of course, I’d love to be
able to set aside time on the calendar simply to think, but it’s a luxury
we can’t afford right now.” Or “Play? Who has time for play? We are
here to work!” or as one leader said to me in an on-boarding process, “I
hope you had a good night’s sleep. You won’t get much of that here.”
If you believe being overly busy and overextended is evidence of
productivity, then you probably believe that creating space to explore,
think, and reflect should be kept to a minimum. Yet these very activities
are the antidote to the nonessential busyness that infects so many of us.
Rather than trivial diversions, they are critical to distinguishing what is
actually a trivial diversion from what is truly essential.
Essentialists spend as much time as possible exploring, listening,
debating, questioning, and thinking. But their exploration is not an end
in itself. The purpose of the exploration is to discern the vital few from
the trivial many.
CHAPTER 5
ESCAPE
The Perks of Being Unavailable
WITHOUT GREAT SOLITUDE NO SERIOUS WORK IS POSSIBLE.
—Pablo Picasso
Frank O’Brien is the founder of Conversations, a marketing services
company based in New York that has been named to the Inc. 500/5000
List of “America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies.” In response to
the frenetic pace of today’s workplace he has initiated a radical practice.
Once a month he gathers each employee of his fifty-person company
into a room for a full day. Phones are prohibited. E-mail is outlawed.
There is no agenda. The purpose of the meeting is simply to escape to
think and to talk. Mind you, he doesn’t hold this meeting on the middle
Friday of the month, when productivity might be sluggish and people
aren’t getting any “real work” done anyway. He holds this daylong
meeting on the first Monday of the month. The practice isn’t just an
internal discipline either: even his clients know not to expect a response
on this “Do-Not-Call-Monday.”1
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.
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. One leader I worked with admitted to
staying at a company five years too long. Why? Because he was so busy
in the company he didn’t take time to decide whether he should be at
the company. The demands of each day kept him from really stepping
back to get perspective.
Similarly, a senior vice president at a major global technology
company told me he spends thirty-five hours every week in meetings. He
is so consumed with these meetings he cannot find even an hour a
month to strategize about his own career, let alone how to take his
organization to the next level. Instead of giving himself the space to talk
and debate what is really going on and what really needs to happen, he
squanders his time sitting through endless presentations and stuffy,
cross-functional conversations where nothing is really decided.
Before you can evaluate what is and isn’t essential, you first need to
explore your options. While Nonessentialists automatically react to the
latest idea, jump on the latest opportunity, or respond to the latest email, Essentialists choose to create the space to explore and ponder.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Is too busy doing to think about
life
Creates space to escape and explore
life
Space to Design
The value of creating space to explore has been emphasized for me in
my work with the d.school at Stanford (officially the Hasso Plattner
Institute of Design at Stanford). The first thing I noticed when I walked
into the room where I had been asked to teach a course was the lack of
traditional chairs. Instead there are foam cubes you can sit on—rather
uncomfortably, as I soon discovered. Like almost everything at the
d.school, this is done by design. In this case the cubes are there so that
after a few minutes of uncomfortable perching students would rather
stand up, walk around, and engage with one another—not just the
classmates sitting to their right or to their left. And that is the point. The
school has used the physical space to encourage new ways of engaging
and thinking.
To that end, the school has also created a hiding place called “Booth
Noir.” This is a small room deliberately designed to fit only one to three
people. It is windowless, soundproof, and deliberately free of distraction.
It is, according to Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft in their book Make
Space, “beyond low-tech. It’s no tech.” It’s tucked away on the ground
floor. It is not, as Doorley and Witthoft point out, on the way to
anywhere else.2 The only reason you go there is to think. By creating
space to think and focus, students can step back to see more clearly.
For some reason there is a false association with the word focus. As
with choice, people tend to think of focus as a thing. Yes, focus is
something we have. But focus is also something we do.
In order to have focus we need
to escape to focus.
When I say focus, I don’t mean simply picking a question or possibility
and thinking about it obsessively. I mean creating the space to explore
one hundred questions and possibilities. An Essentialist focuses the way
our eyes focus; not by fixating on something but by constantly adjusting
and adapting to the field of vision.
On a recent meeting back at the d.school (in another room with no
seats or desks but with whiteboards from floor to ceiling covered with
Post-its of every fathomable color), I met with Jeremy Utley. He is my
partner in developing a new prototyped class that, in a moment of
genius, Jeremy dubbed “Designing Life, Essentially.”
The sole purpose of the class is to create space for students to design
their lives. Each week it gives them a scheduled excuse to think. They
are forced to turn off their laptops and smartphones and instead to turn
on the full power of their minds. They are given assignments to practice
deliberately discerning the essential few from the many good. You don’t
have to be at the d.school to practice these habits. We can all learn to
create more space in our lives.
Space to Concentrate
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.
To me, it is a little sad that this executive was driven to such
measures. Yet while his methods may have been extreme, I can’t argue
with his intention. He knew that making his highest point of
contribution on a task required that he create the space for
unencumbered thought.
Think of Sir Isaac Newton. He spent two years working on what
became Principia Mathematica, his famous writings on universal
gravitation and the three laws of motion. This period of almost solitary
confinement proved critical in what became a true breakthrough that
shaped scientific thinking for the next three hundred years.
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 email 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.
It seems obvious, but when did you last take time out of your busy day
simply to sit and think? I don’t mean the five minutes during your
morning commute you spent composing the day’s to-do list, or the
meeting you spent zoned out reflecting on how to approach another
project you were working on. I’m talking about deliberately setting aside
distraction-free time in a distraction-free space to do absolutely nothing
other than think.
This is of course more difficult today than ever in our gadget-filled,
overstimulated world. One leader at Twitter once asked me: “Can you
remember what it was like to be bored? It doesn’t happen anymore.”
He’s right; just a few years ago if you were stuck in an airport waiting
for a delayed flight, or in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, you
probably just sat there, staring into space, feeling bored. Today,
everyone waiting around in an airport or a waiting room is glued to
their technology tools of choice. Of course, nobody likes to be bored. But
by abolishing any chance of being bored we have also lost the time we
used to have to think and process.
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.
No matter how busy you think you are, you can carve time and space
to think out of your workday. 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.
As he explained to me: “I do recall one particular day where, by virtue
of circumstances, I was either on conference calls or in meetings nonstop
from 5:00 A.M. until 9:00 P.M. At the end of the day, I remember how
frustrated I felt by the thought that I was not in control of my schedule
that day; rather, it was in control of me. However, that frustration
immediately gave way to a sense of gratitude given it was the only day I
could recall feeling like that since taking my current role.”
In this space he is able to think about the essential questions: what the
company will look like in three to five years; what’s the best way to
improve an already popular product or address an unmet customer need;
how to widen a competitive advantage or close a competitive gap. He
also uses the space he creates to recharge himself emotionally. This
allows him to shift between problem-solving mode and the coaching
mode expected of him as a leader.
For Jeff creating space is more than a practice. It is part of a broader
philosophy. He has seen the effects of the undisciplined pursuit of more
on organizations and in the lives of executives. So for him it’s not a
slogan or a buzz phrase. It is a philosophy.
Space to Read
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. I once attended a question-andanswer session with Bill at the headquarters of the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. By chance he had just
completed his latest “Think Week.” Though I had heard about this
practice, what I didn’t know was that it goes all the way back to the
1980s and that he stuck to it through the height of Microsoft’s
expansion.5
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.
If setting aside a full week seems overwhelming or impossible, there
are ways of putting a little “Think Week” into every day. One practice
I’ve found useful is simply to read something from classic literature (not
a blog, or the newspaper, or the latest beach novel) for the first twenty
minutes of the day. Not only does this squash my previous tendency to
check my e-mail as soon as I wake up, it centers my day. It broadens my
perspective and reminds me of themes and ideas that are essential
enough to have withstood the test of time.
My preference is for inspirational literature, though such a choice is a
personal one. But for the interested, here are some to consider: Zen, the
Reason of Unreason; The Wisdom of Confucius; the Torah; the Holy Bible;
Tao, to Know and Not Be Knowing; The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An
Explanatory Translation; As a Man Thinketh; The Essential Gandhi; Walden,
or, Life in the Woods; the Book of Mormon; The Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius; and the Upanishads. There are a myriad of options. Just make
sure to select something that was written before our hyperconnected era
and yet seems timeless. Such writings can challenge our assumptions
about what really matters.
Whether you can invest two hours a day, two weeks a year, or even
just five minutes every morning, it is important to make space to escape
in your busy life.
CHAPTER 6
LOOK
See What Really Matters
WHERE IS THE KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE LOST IN INFORMATION?
—T. S. Eliot
The late writer Nora Ephron is arguably best known for movies like
Silkwood, Sleepless in Seattle, and When Harry Met Sally, each of which
was nominated for an Academy Award. Ephron’s success as a writer and
screenwriter has a lot to do with her ability to capture the essence of a
story—a skill she honed in her earlier career as a journalist. But for all
her years in the high-octane world of journalism, the lesson that affected
her most profoundly dates all the way back to her high school years.
Charlie O. Simms taught a Journalism 101 class in Beverly Hills High
School. He started the first day of the class Ephron attended much the
same way any journalism teacher would, by explaining the concept of a
“lead.” He explained that a lead contains the why, what, when, and who
of the piece. It covers the essential information. Then he gave them their
first assignment: write a lead to a story.
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.”1
In every set of facts, something essential is hidden. And a good
journalist knows that finding it involves exploring those pieces of
information and figuring out the relationships between them (and my
undergraduate degree was in journalism, so I take this seriously). It
means making those relationships and connections explicit. It means
constructing the whole from the sum of its parts and understanding how
these different pieces come together to matter to anyone. The best
journalists do not simply relay information. Their value is in discovering
what really matters to people.
Have you ever felt lost and unsure about what to focus on? Have you
ever felt overwhelmed by all of the information bombarding you and not
sure what to make of it? Have you ever felt dizzy from the different
requests coming at you and unable to figure out which are important
and which are not? Have you ever missed the point to something in your
work or at home and not realized your mistake until it was too late? If
so, this next Essentialist skill will be immensely valuable.
The Big Picture
On December 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 crashed into the
Florida Everglades, killing over one hundred passengers.2 It was the firstever crash of a wide-body aircraft and one of the worst airline crashes in
U.S. history. The investigators were later shocked to discover that, in all
vital ways, the plane had been in perfect working condition. So what
went wrong?
The Lockheed jet had been preparing to land when first officer Albert
Stockstill noticed that the landing gear indicator, a tiny green light that
signals the nose gear is locked down, hadn’t lit up. Yet the nose gear was
locked; the problem was the indicator light, not the gear function. While
the officers were hyperfocused on the gear indicator, however, they
failed to notice that the autopilot had been deactivated until it was too
late. 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.
Being a journalist of your own life will force you to stop hyperfocusing on all the minor details and see the bigger picture. You can
apply the skills of a journalist no matter what field you are in—you can
even apply them to your personal life. By training yourself to look for
“the lead,” you will suddenly find yourself able to see what you have
missed. You’ll be able to do more than simply see the dots of each day:
you’ll also connect them to see the trends. Instead of just reacting to the
facts, you’ll be able to focus on the larger issues that really matter.
Filter for the Fascinating
We know instinctively that we cannot explore every single piece of
information we encounter in our lives. Discerning what is essential to
explore requires us to be disciplined in how we scan and filter all the
competing and conflicting facts, options, and opinions constantly vying
for our attention.
Recently, I chatted with Thomas Friedman, the New York Times
columnist and award-winning journalist, about how to filter the essential
information from the nonessential noise. Before I met with him he had
been at a lunch meeting with sources for a column he was writing.
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.
The best journalists, as Friedman shared later with me, listen for what
others do not hear. At the lunch, he had been listening for what was
being said only at the periphery. He was listening more for what was not
being said.
Essentialists are powerful observers and listeners. Knowing that the
reality of trade-offs means they can’t possibly pay attention to
everything, they listen deliberately for what is not being explicitly
stated. They read between the lines. Or as Hermione Granger, of Harry
Potter fame (an unlikely Essentialist, I’ll grant you, but an Essentialist in
this regard all the same), puts it, “Actually I’m highly logical, which
allows me to look past extraneous detail and perceive clearly that which
others overlook.”3
Nonessentialists listen too. But they listen while preparing to say
something. They get distracted by extraneous noise. They hyperfocus on
inconsequential details. They hear the loudest voice but they get the
wrong message. In their eagerness to react they miss the point. As a
result they may, using a metaphor from C. S. Lewis, run around with fire
extinguishers in times of flood.4 They miss the lead.
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
In the chaos of the modern workplace, with so many loud voices all
around us pulling us in many directions, it is more important now than
ever that we learn to resist the siren song of distraction and keep our
eyes and ears peeled for the headlines. Here are a few ways to tap into
your inner journalist.
Keep a Journal
Stating the obvious, the words journal and journalist come from the same
root word. A journalist is, in the word’s most literal sense, someone who
writes a journal. Therefore, one of the most obvious and yet powerful
ways to become a journalist of our own lives is simply to keep a journal.
The sad reality is that we humans are forgetful creatures. I would even
go so far as to say shockingly forgetful. Don’t believe me? You can test
this theory right now by trying to recall from memory what you ate for
dinner two weeks ago on Thursday. Or ask yourself what meetings you
attended three weeks ago on Monday. If you are like most people you
will draw a total blank on this exercise. Think of a journal as like a
storage device for backing up our brain’s faulty hard drive. As someone
once said to me, the faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.
For the last ten years now I have kept a journal, using a
counterintuitive yet effective method. It is simply this: I write less than I
feel like writing. Typically, when people start to keep a journal they
write pages the first day. Then by the second day the prospect of writing
so much is daunting, and they procrastinate or abandon the exercise. So
apply the principle of “less but better” to your journal. Restrain yourself
from writing more until daily journaling has become a habit.
I also suggest that once every ninety days or so you take an hour to
read your journal entries from that period. But don’t be overly focused
on the details, like the budget meeting three weeks ago or last
Thursday’s pasta dinner. Instead, focus on the broader patterns or trends.
Capture the headline. Look for the lead in your day, your week, your
life. Small, incremental changes are hard to see in the moment but over
time can have a huge cumulative effect.
Get Out into the Field
Jane Chen was one of a team of students in a d.school class called
“Design for Extreme Affordability.” The class challenged them to design
a baby incubator for 1 percent of the traditional $20,000 cost. According
to Jane, in the developing world “4 million low-birthweight children die
within the first 28 days because they don’t have enough fat to regulate
their body temperature.”5
If they had raced into this as simply a cost problem, they would have
produced an inexpensive electric incubator—a seemingly reasonable
solution but one that, as it turned out, would have failed to address the
root of the problem. Instead, they took the time to find out what really
mattered. 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. With that key insight they began in earnest
to solve the problem at hand. Eventually Jane and three other
teammates launched a nonprofit company called “Embrace” and created
the “Embrace Nest,” which uses a waxlike substance that is heated in
water, then placed in the sleeping bag–like pod, where it can warm a
baby for six hours or more. By getting out there and fully exploring the
problem, they were able to better clarify the question and in turn to
focus on the essential details that ultimately allowed them to make the
highest contribution to the problem.
Keep your eyes peeled for abnormal or unusual details
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.”
It’s crucial, Mariam says, to seek “a different perspective on a given
story, one that would shed the light on the topic in a fresh, different or
thought-provoking way.” One trick she uses is role play: she puts herself
in the shoes of all the main players in a story in order to better
understand their motives, reasoning, and points of view.
Clarify the Question
Anyone who has watched skilled politicians being interviewed knows
how well trained they can be in not answering the question being asked.
Evading hard questions can be tempting for us all. Often it’s easier to
give a vague, blanket answer rather than to summon up the facts and
information required to give a thoughtful, informed answer. Yet
evasiveness only sends us down a nonessential spiral of further
vagueness and misinformation. Clarifying the question is a way out of
that cycle.
Elay Cohen, senior vice president at Salesforce.com, was one member
of a six-person team crammed into a hot hotel room at the normally
tranquil Cavallo Point, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. For the next
three hours they would compete against five other teams in a business
simulation. The task involved answering a series of questions about how
they would handle hypothetical management situations. As the timer
ticked, Elay’s team was having trouble getting started. Each proposed
answer spawned still more opinions and comments, and soon what
should have been a fairly straightforward problem-solving exercise had
devolved into a sprawling, undisciplined debate. I was there to observe
and coach the team, and after fifteen minutes of this I had to ask the
team to stop. “What question are you trying to answer?” I asked them.
Everyone paused awkwardly. Nobody had a response. Then someone
made a comment about something else, and again the group went off on
a tangent.
I stepped in and posed my question again. And again. Eventually the
team stopped and really thought about what goals they were trying to
accomplish and what decisions really needed to be made to accomplish
them. They stopped the side conversations. 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.
CHAPTER 7
PLAY
Embrace the Wisdom of Your Inner Child
A LITTLE NONSENSE NOW AND THEN,
IS CHERISHED BY THE WISEST MEN.
—Roald Dahl
At the end of the classic musical Mary Poppins the gruff and joyless Mr.
Banks arrives home, having been “sacked, discharged, flung into the
street.” Yet he seems absolutely and uncharacteristically delighted—so
delighted that one of the servants concludes he’s “gone off his crumpet”
and even his son observes, “It doesn’t sound like Father.” Indeed, his
father is almost a new person as he presents his children with their
mended kite and launches into the song “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.” Freed from
the dreary tedium of his job at the bank, Banks’s inner child suddenly
comes alive. The effect of his good cheer is magnificent, lifting the spirits
of the whole house and infusing the previously melancholic Banks family
with joy, camaraderie, and delight. Yes, it is a fictional story, but it
illustrates the powerful effects of restoring play to our daily lives.
The majority of us were not formally taught how to play when we
were children; we picked it up naturally and instinctively. Picture a
newborn baby’s pure joy as a mother plays peekaboo. Think of a group
of children unleashing their imaginations playing make-believe games
together. Imagine a child in a state of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
calls flow as he constructs his own minikingdom out of a bunch of old
cardboard boxes.1 But then as we get older something happens. We are
introduced to the idea that play is trivial. Play is a waste of time. Play is
unnecessary. Play is childish. Unfortunately, many of these negative
messages come from the very place where imaginative play should be
most encouraged, not stifled.
The word school is derived from the Greek word schole, meaning
“leisure.” Yet our modern school system, born in the Industrial
Revolution, has removed the leisure—and much of the pleasure—out of
learning. 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.
This idea that play is trivial stays with us as we reach adulthood and
only becomes more ingrained as we enter the workplace. Sadly, not only
do far too few companies and organizations foster play; many
unintentionally undermine it. True, some companies and executives give
lip service to the value of play in sparking creativity, yet most still fail to
create the kind of playful culture that sparks true exploration.
None of this should surprise us. Modern corporations were born out of
the Industrial Revolution, when their entire reason for being was to
achieve efficiency in the mass production of goods. Furthermore, these
early managers looked to the military—a rather less-than-playful entity
—for their inspiration (indeed, the language of the military is still strong
in corporations today; we still often talk of employees being on the front
lines, and the word company itself is a term for a military unit). While the
industrial era is long behind us, those mores, structures, and systems
continue to pervade most modern organizations.
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.”3
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Thinks play is trivial
Thinks play is an unproductive waste of
time
Knows play is essential
Knows play sparks
exploration
A Mind Invited to Play
The value of play in our lives can’t be overstated. Studies from the
animal kingdom reveal that play is so crucial to the development of key
cognitive skills it may even play a role in a species’ survival. Bob Fagan,
a researcher who has spent fifteen years studying the behavior of grizzly
bears, discovered bears who played the most tended to survive the
longest. When asked why, he said, “In a world continuously presenting
unique challenges and ambiguity, play prepares these bears for a
changing planet.”4
Jaak Panksepp concluded something similar in Affective Neuroscience:
The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, where he wrote, “One
thing is certain, during play, animals are especially prone to behave in
flexible and creative ways.”5
Yet of all animal species, Stuart Brown writes, humans are the biggest
players of all. We are built to play and built through play. When we
play, we are engaged in the purest expression of our humanity, the
truest expression of our individuality. Is it any wonder that often the
times we feel most alive, those that make up our best memories, are
moments of play?
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. Play is fundamental to living
the way of the Essentialist because it fuels exploration in at least three
specific 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.”6
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 amygdala), 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.
I have seen play reverse these effects in my own children. When they
are stressed and things feel out of control, I have them draw. When they
do, the change is almost immediate. The stress melts away and their
ability to explore is regained.
Third, as 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. Einstein’s thought experiments
are brilliant examples of the mind invited to play.”9
Of Work and 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.
Other companies promote playfulness through their physical
environments. IDEO conducts meetings inside a Microbus. In the halls of
Google you’re likely to stumble upon (in one example of many) a large
dinosaur covered in pink flamingos. At Pixar studios, artists’ “offices”
may be decorated like anything from an old-time western saloon to a
wooden hut (the one that most amazed me when I visited was the one
lined floor to ceiling with thousands of Star Wars figurines).
A successful woman I once knew at a publishing company kept an
Easy Button™ from Staples on her desk. Any time anyone left her office,
they would enjoy the childish thrill of slamming their palm down on the
big red button—causing a recorded voice to loudly announce to the
entire office, “That was easy!” And another woman down the hall at that
same company had a framed poster in her office of a children’s book
illustration to remind her of the joy of childhood reading.
Desk toys, dinosaurs covered with flamingos, and offices full of action
figures may seem like trivial diversions to some, but the very point is
that they can be the exact opposite. These efforts challenge the
Nonessentialist logic that play is trivial. Instead, they celebrate play as a
vital driver of creativity and exploration.
Play doesn’t just help us to
explore what is essential. It is
essential in and of itself.
So how can we all introduce more play into our workplaces and our
lives? In his book, Brown includes a primer to help readers reconnect
with play. He suggests that readers mine their past for play memories.
What did you do as a child that excited you? How can you re-create that
today?
CHAPTER 8
SLEEP
Protect the Asset
EACH NIGHT, WHEN I GO TO SLEEP, I DIE. AND THE NEXT
MORNING, WHEN I WAKE UP, I AM REBORN.
—Mahatma Gandhi
Geoff sat straight up in bed, in a panic. He felt as if a bomb had
exploded in his head. He was sweating and discombobulated. He listened
intensely. What was going on? Everything was silent. Perhaps it was a
weird reaction to something he’d eaten. He tried to go back to sleep.
The next night it happened again. Then a few days later it happened
in the middle of the day. He had just returned from India and at first he
thought it might be a reaction to malaria medicine he was taking in
combination with the Benadryl he took to help him sleep when he was
jet-lagged. But as his situation worsened he found his condition was
more complicated. It was like he was experiencing anxiety attacks but
without any anxiety—just the physical symptoms.
Geoff was a textbook overachiever who had a deep desire to make a
difference (to give some context for this, his grandfather was an early
administrator in the Peace Corps). Geoff was fiercely ambitious, driven,
and committed to making a contribution to the world: he was on the
board of Kiva, he had been named Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the
Year and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, he was
the co-founder of a successful impact investment fund, and he was the
CEO of a global microcredit organization that was reaching more than
12 million poor families around the world. He was thirty-six years old
and on top of his game.
Geoff traveled constantly, which often made sleep difficult. His
company was based in Seattle but had offices in San Francisco, India,
and Kenya. He would routinely fly to London for meetings, then to India
for six days to be in five different cities, to Geneva for hours of meetings
with investors, and then back to Seattle for a day and a half. For three
years he traveled 60 to 70 percent of the time. On average, he slept
about four to six hours a night.
But at the ripe age of thirty-six, his pace of work was starting to
threaten his health and his ability to contribute. What started with the
nighttime attacks worsened. One by one each of his organs started
shutting down. His heart rate was erratic. It became painful to stand up
straight. He had to blend his food because he could not digest it. His
blood pressure was so low he blacked out if he stood up too fast. He
went to the emergency room twice. He kept telling himself he would
slow down after the next deal, then the next, then the one after that. But
of course he didn’t. He was sure that if he just kept going he could work
his way out of this. He didn’t want to face the trade-offs that scaling
back entailed. But they soon caught up with him: he would be forced to
cancel meetings at the last minute because he was too weak to attend or
he would give a speech but bomb it because his brain was cloudy. He
started to wonder if he was doing the company more harm than good—
and he definitely was.
Eventually, after a clear diagnosis, he was given two options by his
doctor: he could take medications for the rest of his life to deal with his
symptoms, or he could disengage from everything for a year or two to
treat and recover from his illness. Geoff didn’t accept this trade-off at
first. He was a competitive triathlete, and he thought he could apply the
same logic he would to an ankle sprain or a torn rotator cuff. He
boastfully told the doctor he would take a couple of months off and be
back to full form: “Watch! Just watch!”
He took a two-month sabbatical, and to his surprise he totally crashed.
He slept fourteen hours per night! Then he rested all day long. He could
not even get out of bed some days. He was totally nonfunctional for six
weeks. He came crawling back in to his doctor and admitted this was
going to take a lot longer than a couple of months.
True to his word, he got rid of everything that was creating stress in
his life. He resigned from his boards and decided to leave his company
too. He said: “The decision to disengage was very, very difficult. I
walked out of the board meeting, tears in my eyes, and said to my wife,
‘This is not how I wanted to leave my baby!’ ”
He designed a life totally devoted to regeneration and recuperation as
he went through the treatment protocol. He changed his diet. He went to
the South of France for a year with his family. The treatment and change
in climate and lifestyle worked. With a new mind-set, he began to think
about what he had learned through the experience.
Two and a half years later, Geoff was in Tanzania for a Young Global
Leaders event with the World Economic Forum. One evening at an openmic night Geoff was urged by those who knew his story to share what he
had learned with the group of two hundred accomplished peers.
Through great emotion, he told them that he had paid a high price to
learn a simple yet essential lesson: “Protect the asset.”
Protecting the Asset
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.
In the many hours Geoff spent resting he came to see an interesting
paradox in his addiction to achievement: for a type A personality, it is
not hard to push oneself hard. Pushing oneself to the limit is easy! The
real challenge for the person who thrives on challenges is not to work
hard. He explains to any overachievers: “If you think you are so tough
you can do anything I have a challenge for you. If you really want to do
something hard: say no to an opportunity so you can take a nap.”
By the time I was twenty-one I too thought of sleep as something to be
avoided. To me, it was a necessary evil: a waste of time that could
otherwise be spent productively, something for the weak, or the weakwilled. The vision of being superhuman and sleeping only a few hours a
night was intoxicating. I even experimented with some rather drastic
and unconventional ways to try to cut down on sleep. After reading a
sleep study where some participants were required to sleep only twenty
minutes every four hours around the clock, I tried it out. It was bearable
for a while, but I soon found that while you can technically survive on
this schedule of sleep it has its drawbacks. For example, while I was
technically awake, my brain was just barely functioning. It was harder to
think, plan, prioritize, or see the bigger picture. It was hard to make
decisions or choices and nearly impossible to discern the essential from
the trivial.
It soon became unsustainable, but still I was determined that the less I
slept, the more I could get done. So I adopted the new tactic of pulling
one all-nighter per week. This was not much better. Then my wife, who
did not care for this practice, gave me an article that completely shifted
the way I saw sleep. It challenged the notion that sleep was an enemy of
productivity, convincingly arguing that in fact sleep was a driver of peak
performance. I remember the article cited top business leaders who
boasted about getting a full eight 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.
What about you? Think about the last week. Have you slept less than
seven hours on any of those nights? Have you slept less than seven hours
for a few nights in a row? Have you caught yourself saying or thinking
proudly: “Not me. I don’t need the full eight hours. I can totally survive on
four or five hours of sleep” (if you thought that right now while reading
this, you will get a lot out of this chapter). Well, while there are clearly
people who can survive on fewer hours of sleep, I’ve found that most of
them are just so used to being tired they have forgotten what it really
feels like to be fully rested.
The way of the Nonessentialist is to see sleep as yet another burden on
one’s already overextended, overcommitted, busy-but-not-alwaysproductive life. Essentialists instead see sleep as necessary for operating
at high levels of contribution more of the time. This is why they
systematically and deliberately build sleep into their schedules so they
can do more, achieve more, and explore more. By “protecting their
asset” they are able to go about their daily lives with a reserve of energy,
creativity, and problem-solving ability to call upon when needed—unlike
Nonessentialists, who can never know when and where they’ll be
hijacked by their own fatigue.
Essentialists choose to do one fewer thing right now in order to do
more tomorrow. Yes, it is a trade-off. But cumulatively, this small tradeoff can yield big rewards.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
THINKS:
One hour less of sleep equals
KNOWS:
One hour more of sleep equals several
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.”
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.
Shattering the Sleep Stigma
So if “protecting the asset” is so important, why do we give up our
precious sleep so easily? For overachievers part of the reason may be
that they simply subscribe to the false belief, as I did, that if they sleep
less they will achieve more. Yet there are ample reasons to challenge this
assumption, like the growing body of research demonstrating that a
good night’s sleep actually makes us more productive, not less.
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. But it also comes
dangerously close to encouraging the Nonessentialist mind-set of “I have
to do it all,” the pernicious myth that can lead people to justify spending
longer and longer hours working, with diminishing returns.
That is, until we look at a less well-known finding from the same
study: that 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 the average American. Over the period of a week they
also spent an average of 2.8 hours of 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
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 Harvard Business Review article called “Sleep Deficit: The
Performance Killer,” Charles A. Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep
Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has explained how sleep
deprivation undermines high performance. He likens sleep deficit to
drinking too much alcohol, explaining that pulling an all-nighter (i.e.,
going twenty-four hours without sleep) or having a week of sleeping just
four or five hours a night actually “induces an impairment equivalent to
a blood alcohol level of 0.1%. Think about this: we would never say,
‘This person is a great worker! He’s drunk all the time!’ yet we continue
to celebrate people who sacrifice sleep for work.”2
While sleep is often associated with giving rest to the body, recent
research shows that sleep is really more about the brain. Indeed, a study
from the Luebeck University in Germany provides evidence that a full
night’s sleep may actually increase brain power and enhance our
problem-solving ability.
In the study, reported by the journal Nature, over one hundred
volunteers were given a number puzzle with an unconventional twist; it
required finding a “hidden code” to uncover the answer.3 The volunteers
were divided into two groups; one was allowed an eight-hour stretch of
uninterrupted sleep and another group received interrupted sleep. The
scientists then watched to see which volunteers found the hidden code
and how quickly they found it. The result was that twice the number of
people who had slept for eight hours solved the problem than the
volunteers from the sleep-deprived group. Why? The researchers
explained that while we sleep our brains are hard at work encoding and
restructuring information. Therefore, when we wake up, our brains may
have made new neural connections, thereby opening up a broader range
of solutions to problems, literally overnight.
Some good news for the early birds and night owls among us: science
shows that even a nap can increase creativity. In just one example, a
report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed
that even a single REM—or rapid eye movement—cycle enhanced the
integration of unassociated information. Even a brief period of deep
sleep, in other words, helps us make the kinds of new connections that
allow us to better explore our world.
In a nutshell, sleep is what allows us to operate at our highest level of
contribution so that we can achieve more, in less time. While there
continues to be a culture of machismo when it comes to going without
sleep, luckily the stigma is fading, thanks in part to a few super–high
performers—particularly in industries that typically celebrate burning
the candle at both ends—who have publicly boasted about getting a full
eight hours. These people—many of them true Essentialists—know their
healthy sleep habits give them a huge competitive advantage, and they
are right.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, is one of them. He says: “I’m
more alert and I think more clearly. I just feel so much better all day
long if I’ve had eight hours.” Mark Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape,
and a reformed sleep restrictor who used to work till the early hours but
still be up at 7:00 A.M., is another. He said, “I would spend the whole day
wishing I could go home and go back to bed.” Now he says of his level of
sleep: “Seven [hours] and I start to degrade. Six is suboptimal. Five is a
big problem. Four means I’m a zombie.” On weekends he sleeps twelveplus hours. “It makes a big difference in my ability to function,” he said.
These executives are quoted in an article called “Sleep Is the New
Status Symbol for Successful Entrepreneurs.”4 Nancy Jeffrey of the Wall
Street Journal writes: “It’s official. Sleep, that rare commodity in stressedout America, is the new status symbol. Once derided as a wimpish
failing—the same 1980s overachievers who cried ‘Lunch is for Losers’
also believed ‘Sleep is for Suckers’—slumber is now being touted as the
restorative companion to the creative executive mind.” To this we can
add that it is also the restorative companion to the discerning
Essentialist mind.
In another article in the New York Times, Erin Callan, the former chief
financial officer of Lehman Brothers, tells the story of how “at an office
party in 2005, one of my colleagues asked my then husband what I did
on weekends. She knew me as someone with great intensity and energy.
‘Does she kayak, go rock climbing and then run a half marathon?’ she
joked. No, he answered simply, ‘she sleeps.’ And that was true. When I
wasn’t catching up on work, I spent my weekends recharging my
batteries for the coming week.”5
So if the stigma of sleep still exists in your workplace, consider
developing an initiative at work to explicitly encourage sleep. If that
sounds radical, consider how the many benefits of sleep—greater
creativity, enhanced productivity, even lower health care costs—have
the potential to directly affect the bottom line. With this perspective, it is
not so hard to imagine encouraging your manager or HR department to
develop a written policy (after all, many companies have policies
addressing alcohol consumption, and, as we have seen, the parallels in
how alcohol and sleep deprivation affect performance are real). For
example, Charles Czeisler at Harvard has proposed a policy that no
employee is expected to drive into work after a red-eye flight, and other
companies allow employees to come in late after staying late at work the
previous night. Companies and leaders like these know that “protecting
their assets” is a matter of fiduciary responsibility.
Under the auspices of book research, I recently went to Google to take
a nap in one of their famous nap pods. It was a white spaceship pod (like
something you might imagine seeing on the seventies TV show Mork and
Mindy), of about twenty square feet, big enough to lie down but not
completely flat. It had a dome-shaped cover that concealed most but not
all of my body, and as a result I was a little self-conscious at first and
wondered whether I would be able to fall asleep. Thirty minutes later, as
the pod vibrated gently to let me know my session was over, I didn’t
have to wonder.
When I woke up from the nap I could really feel how much I had
needed it. I felt clearer, sharper, more alert.
To use the pods at Google there is a calendar sign-up. How many
people used it the week I was there? I wondered. Of the fifty people who
work on the floor where it is situated, I imagined at least ten or twenty.
Wrong. According to the calendar, just a single person had taken this
opportunity to recharge brain and body with thirty minutes of midday
sleep. Nevertheless, even the presence of the pod is important in
signaling to employees that sleep is a priority.
Our highest priority is to
protect our ability to
prioritize.
In this section of the book we have been talking about how to explore
and evaluate options in order to discern the essential few from the many
trivial, mediocre, or even just good. By definition this is a process of
prioritization. It includes the challenge of filtering options that, at first
glance, all look important. Yet as the logic of an Essentialist explains, in
reality there are only a few things of exceptional value, with most
everything else being of far less importance. The problem with being
sleep-deprived is that it compromises our ability to tell the difference,
and thus our precious ability to prioritize.
Sleep will enhance your ability to explore, make connections, and do
less but better throughout your waking hours.
CHAPTER 9
SELECT
The Power of Extreme Criteria
AN INNER PROCESS STANDS IN NEED OF OUTWARD CRITERIA.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
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. Or as a leader at Twitter once put it to me, “If the answer isn’t a
definite yes then it should be a no.” It is a succinct summary of a core
Essentialist principle, and one that is critical to the process of
exploration.1
Derek lives this principle himself. When he wasn’t blown away by any
of the candidates he interviewed for a job, he said no to all of them.
Eventually he found exactly the right person. When he realized he had
signed up for several conferences around the world that he wasn’t really
stoked about, he decided to stay home and skip all of them, and in turn
earned twelve days he used to more productive ends. When he was
trying to decide where to live, he ruled out places that seemed pretty
good (Sydney and Vancouver) until he visited New York and knew
instantly it was exactly the right place for him.
Think back to what happens to our closets when we use the broad
criterion, “Is there a chance that I will wear this someday in the future?”
The closet becomes cluttered with clothes we rarely wear. But if we ask,
“Do I absolutely love this?” then we will be able to eliminate the clutter
and have space for something better. We can do the same with other
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The 90 Percent Rule
Recently, a colleague and I were working to select twenty-four people
from a pool of almost one hundred applicants to our “Design Your Life,
Essentially” class. First, we identified a set of minimum criteria such as
“Can attend every class.” Then we settled on a set of ideal attributes like
“Is ready for a life-changing experience.” Using these criteria, we scored
each candidate on a 1 to 10 scale. The 9s and 10s, we decided, were
obviously in. Anyone under a 7 was automatically out. I was then given
the unenviable task of evaluating the in-between candidates: the 7s and
8s. As I struggled to determine which of these candidates would be good
enough, I had the thought: if something (or in this case someone) is just
or almost good enough—that is, a 7 or an 8—then the answer should be
a no. It was so liberating.
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. 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?
Mastering this Essentialist skill, perhaps more than any other in this
section, requires us to be vigilant about acknowledging the reality of
trade-offs. By definition, applying highly selective criteria is a trade-off;
sometimes you will have to turn down a seemingly very good option and
have faith that the perfect option will soon come along. Sometimes it
will, and sometimes it won’t, but the point is that the very act of
applying selective criteria forces you to choose which perfect option to
wait for, rather than letting other people, or the universe, choose for
you. Like any Essentialist skill, it forces you to make decisions by design,
rather than default.
The benefits of this ultraselective approach to decision making in all
areas of our lives should be clear: when our selection criteria are too
broad, we will find ourselves committing to too many options. 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.
Nonessentialists apply implicit or unspoken criteria to the decisions
they make in both their personal and their professional lives. 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 an era
of social media where we are vastly more aware of what other people
are doing, this criterion can create a particularly serious burden by
amplifying all of the nonessential activities we “should” be doing.
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?”
One executive team I worked with had at one time identified three
criteria for deciding what projects to take on. But over time they had
become more and more indiscriminate, and eventually the company’s
portfolio of projects seemed to share only the criterion that a customer
had asked them to do it. As a result, the morale on the team had
plummeted, and not simply because team members were overworked
and overwhelmed from having taken on too much. It was also because
no project ever seemed to justify itself, and there was no greater sense of
purpose. Worse, it now became difficult to distinguish themselves in the
marketplace because their work, which had previously occupied a
unique and profitable niche, had become so general.
Only by going through the work of identifying extreme criteria were
they able to get rid of the 70 and 80 percents that were draining their
time and resources and start focusing on the most interesting work that
best distinguished them in the marketplace. Furthermore, this system
empowered employees to choose the projects on which they could make
their highest contribution; where they had once been at the mercy of
what felt like capricious management decisions, they now had a voice.
On one occasion I saw the quietest and most junior member of the team
push back on the most senior executive. She simply said, “Should we be
taking on this account, given the criteria we have?” This had never
happened until the criteria were made both selective and explicit.
Making our criteria both selective and explicit affords us a systematic
tool for discerning what is essential and filtering out the things that are
not.
Selective, Explicit, and Also Right
Mark Adams, the managing director of Vitsoe, has spent the last twentyseven years deliberately applying selective criteria to his work.
Vitsoe makes furniture. The furniture industry is notorious for
churning out a high volume of product: each season brings a vast
offering of new colors and styles. Yet Vitsoe has for decades offered only
one product: the 606 Universal Shelving System. Why? Because quite
simply, Vitsoe has very particular standards, and the 606 Universal
Shelving system is the only product that makes the cut.
The 606 System epitomizes the Essentialist ethic of “less but better”
discussed in chapter 1 and advocated by Dieter Rams. This is more than
coincidence, given that the 606 Universal Shelving System was designed
by Dieter. But Vitsoe’s approach to hiring may be more selective still.
They begin with the basic assumption that they would rather be
understaffed than hire the wrong person quickly. Accordingly, when
they are looking for a new employee, they have a rigorous and
systematic selection process. First, they interview someone by phone.
This is deliberate because they want to strip away all visual cues while
forming their first impression. Equally, they want to hear how the
prospective employee performs on the phone and whether the employee
is organized enough to find a quiet place at an allotted time. They weed
out many at this stage—in a time-efficient manner.
Second, a candidate is interviewed by multiple people throughout the
company. If a candidate makes it through several interviews, he or she is
invited to spend a day working with the team. Then management sends
a questionnaire out to the whole team asking them how they feel about
the candidate. But instead of just the obvious questions, they ask,
“Would he or she love working here?” and “Would we love having him or
her work with us?” No offer is made at this point, and no commitment is
implied on the part of the candidate. The objective is to allow both sides
to see each other as honestly as possible. If the fit is just right, the
candidate will continue through the final interviews and may receive an
offer. If the team isn’t absolutely sure, then the answer is no.
Once they had a candidate applying for a job on the shelving
installation team. It is an important role; these installers are the face of
the product and the company. The candidate in question did a good job
installing the shelving system. But in the debrief with Mark afterwards
the team had a concern. At the end of the day, when they were packing
up their tools, the candidate just threw the tools into the box and closed
the lid. To you and me, this would seem a minor infraction—hardly
significant enough to mention, let alone overshadow a day’s worth of
otherwise flawless work. But to the team it signified a carelessness that
didn’t jibe with their vision of the ideal person for the job. Mark listened
and agreed, then politely told the candidate he wasn’t the right fit with
the Vitsoe culture. For Mark and his team:
If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a
clear no.
But undergirding their highly selective screening process is more than
a gut reaction (although that matters too). What may seem like a
capricious decision is really the result of a disciplined and continuous
approach to figure out what works and what doesn’t. For example, they
have learned there is a high correlation between how intensely someone
played with Legos as a child and how well he or she will fit with the
Vitsoe culture. They didn’t pick that out of the air. They have tried all
manner of things over the years; some have stuck, but many have not.
The team also uses an explicit set of criteria in making their
evaluation. Their primary criterion is, “Will this person be an absolutely
natural fit?” That is why they have designed the selection process to
include multiple interviews. That is why they developed the workday
trial run. It’s why they send the questionnaire. Like any true Essentialist,
they are trying to gather the relevant information so they can make an
informed, calculated, deliberate decision.
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.2
Opportunity Knocks
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?
The fear of missing out goes into full effect. How can we say no; the
offer is right here for the taking. We might never have gone after it, but
now it is so easy to get it we consider it. But if we just say yes because it
is an easy reward, we run the risk of having to later say no to a more
meaningful one.
This was the situation Nancy Duarte found herself in when building a
communication agency. In 2000, the company was a generalist agency
doing everything from creating corporate identities to print and website
development to designing presentations (work most designer firms
loathed doing). But without one specialty to differentiate them, the
company started to become pretty much like any other design agency
out there.
Then Nancy read Jim Collins’s Good to Great, in which he contends if
there’s one thing you are passionate about—and that you can be best at
—you should do just that one thing. That’s when she realized the real
opportunity to differentiate the company might be in the very type of
work nobody else in the industry wanted to do: designing presentations.
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.
Here’s a simple, systematic process you can use to apply selective
criteria to opportunities that come your way. First, write down the
opportunity. Second, write down a list of three “minimum criteria” the
options would need to “pass” in order to be considered. Third, write
down a list of three ideal or “extreme criteria” the options would need to
“pass” in order to be considered. By definition, if the opportunity doesn’t
pass the first set of criteria, the answer is obviously no. But if it also
doesn’t pass two of your three extreme criteria, the answer is still no.
opportunity
What opportunity is being offered to you?
minimum
What are your minimum criteria for this option to be considered?
extreme
What are the ideal criteria for this option to be approved?
The Best Slice of Pizza in Brooklyn
Applying tougher criteria to life’s big decisions allows us to better tap
into our brain’s sophisticated search engine. Think of it as the difference
between conducting a Google search for “good restaurant in New York
City” and “best slice of pizza in downtown Brooklyn.” 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.
Enric Sala is someone who found his life’s calling in this way.3 Early
on in his career, Enric was a professor at the prestigious Scripps
Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. But he couldn’t kick
the feeling that the career path he was on was just a close second to the
path he should really be on. So he left academia and went to work with
National Geographic. With that success came new and intriguing
opportunities in Washington, D.C., that again left him feeling he was
close to the right career path but not quite on it yet. As often happens to
driven, ambitious people, his earlier success had distracted him from his
clarity of purpose. Since the moment he had watched Jacques Cousteau
aboard the famed Calypso he had dreamed of diving in the world’s most
beautiful oceans. So after a couple of years, when a golden opportunity
presented itself, he changed gears again in order to be where he could
truly make his highest contribution: as an explorer-in-residence with
National Geographic, where he could spend a significant portion of his
time diving in the most remote locations while also using his strengths in
science and communications to influence policy on a global scale. The
price of his dream job was saying no to the many good, even very good,
parallel opportunities he encountered and waiting for the one he could
enthusiastically say yes to. And the wait was worth it.
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.

ELIMINATE
How Can We Cut Out the Trivial Many?
Think back to the closet metaphor we talked about in chapter 1. At this
point in the book, you’ve taken stock of everything hanging in your
closet. You have your clothes divided into piles of “must keep” and
“probably should get rid of.” But are you really ready to stuff the
“probably should get rid of” pile in a bag and send it off?
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. Part Three of this book will show
you how to eliminate the nonessentials so you can make a higher level of
contribution toward the things that are actually vital. And not only that,
but you’ll learn to do it in a way that actually garners you more respect
from colleagues, bosses, clients, and peers.
Getting rid of those old clothes isn’t easy. After all, there is still that
nagging reluctance, that nagging fear that “what if” years down the road
you come to regret giving away that blazer with the big shoulder pads
and loud pinstripes. This feeling is normal; studies have found that we
tend to value things we already own more highly than they are worth,
and thus find them more difficult to get rid of. 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?”
Of course, finding the discipline to say no to opportunities—often very
good opportunities—that come your way in work and life is infinitely
harder than throwing out old clothes in your closet. But find it you must,
because remember that anytime you fail to say “no” to a nonessential,
you are really saying yes by default. 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. It is the question that will reveal
the best path forward for your team. It is the question that will uncover
your true purpose and help you make the highest level of contribution
not only to your own goals but to the mission of your organization. It is
that question that can deliver the rare and precious clarity necessary to
achieve game-changing breakthroughs in your career, and in your life.
CHAPTER 10
CLARIFY
One Decision That Makes a Thousand
TO FOLLOW, WITHOUT HALT, ONE AIM:
THERE IS THE SECRET TO SUCCESS.
—Anna Pavlova, Russian ballet dancer
Let’s start with a game. On the next page are mission statements from
three companies. Try to match each company with its mission
statement:1
COMPANY MISSION STATEMENT
1 AGCO.
A chief manufacturer and
distributor of agricultural
equipment such as replacement
parts, tractors, hay tools, and
implements.
A Profitable growth through
superior customer service,
innovation, quality, and
commitment.
2 DOVER CORPORATION.
A manufacturer of equipment such
as garbage trucks and electronic
equipment such as ink-jet printers
and circuit board assemblies.
B To be the leader in every market
we serve to the benefit of our
customers and our shareholders.
3 DEAN FOODS CORPORATION.
A food and beverage company, in
particular a milk, dairy, and soy
products manufacturer.
C The Company’s primary objective
is to maximize long-term
stockholder value, while adhering
to the laws of the jurisdictions in
which it operates and at all times
observing the highest ethical
standards.
How did you do? If you had absolutely no idea how to solve this
puzzle, you are not alone. The largely indistinguishable statements make
the task almost impossible. Such vague, inflated mission statements may
still be considered “best practice” in some quarters, but in many cases
they do not achieve what they were intended to achieve: to inspire their
employees with a clear sense of purpose.
This section of the book is all about how to eliminate nonessentials in
order to ensure that we can pour our energies into the activities that are
most meaningful to us. The first type of nonessential you’re going to
learn how to eliminate is simply any activity that is misaligned with
what you are intending to achieve. It sounds straightforward enough,
but to be able to do that you need to be really clear about what your
purpose is in the first place—which is where this chapter comes in.
Answer Code: 1(A), 2(B), and 3(C)
From “Pretty Clear” to “Really Clear”
Executives I work with often suggest their company purpose or strategy
is “pretty clear,” as if to say that is sufficient. 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.
This would matter less if it were not for the fact that clarity of purpose
so consistently predicts how people do their jobs. In working with
executive teams I have been amazed to see what happens when teams
are only “sort of clear” about what they are trying to achieve rather than
“really clear.”
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.
This is not just my theory or something I read in another business
book. In gathering data from more than five hundred people about their
experience on more than one thousand teams, I have found a consistent
reality: 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.
When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the
trivial many. When they have sufficient levels of clarity, they are capable
of greater breakthroughs and innovations—greater than people even
realize they ought to have—in those areas that are truly vital. In my
work, I have noticed two common patterns that typically emerge when
teams lack clarity of purpose.
PATTERN 1: PLAYING POLITICS
In the first pattern, the team becomes overly focused on winning the
attention of the manager. The problem is, when people don’t know what
the end game is, they are unclear about how to win, and as a result they
make up their own game and their own rules as they vie for the
manager’s favor. Instead of focusing their time and energies on making a
high level of contribution, they put all their effort into games like
attempting to look better than their peers, demonstrating their selfimportance, and echoing their manager’s every idea or sentiment. These
kinds of activities are not only nonessential but damaging and
counterproductive.
We do a similar thing in our personal lives as well. When we are
unclear about our real purpose in life—in other words, when we don’t
have a clear sense of our goals, our aspirations, and our values—we
make up our own social games. We waste time and energies on trying to
look good in comparison to other people. We overvalue nonessentials
like a nicer car or house, or even intangibles like the number of our
followers on Twitter or the way we look in our Facebook photos. As a
result, we neglect activities that are truly essential, like spending time
with our loved ones, or nurturing our spirit, or taking care of our health.
PATTERN 2: IT’S ALL GOOD (WHICH IS BAD)
In the second pattern, teams without purpose become leaderless. With
no clear direction, people pursue the things that advance their own
short-term interests, with little awareness of how their activities
contribute to (or in some cases, derail) the long-term mission of the team
as a whole. Often these activities are well-intentioned, and some may
even be essential on a personal level. But when people are working in
teams, many disparate projects that are at odds with each other do not
add up to the team’s highest level of contribution. Teams like this seem
to take five steps back for each step forward.
In the same way, when individuals are involved in too many disparate
activities—even good activities—they can fail to achieve their essential
mission. One reason for this is that the activities don’t work in concert,
so they don’t add up into a meaningful whole. For example, pursuing
five different majors, each of them perfectly good, does not equal a
degree. Likewise, five different jobs in five different industries do not
add up to a forward-moving career. Without clarity and purpose,
pursuing something because it is good is not good enough to make a
high level of contribution. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The crime
which bankrupts men and states is that of job-work;—declining from
your main design to serve a turn here or there.”
When teams are really clear about their purpose and their individual
roles, on the other hand, it is amazing what happens to team dynamics.
Formal momentum accelerates, adding up to a higher cumulative
contribution of the team as a whole.
So how do we achieve clarity of purpose in our teams and even our
personal endeavors? One way is to decide on an essential intent.
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.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Has a vague, general vision or mission
statement
Has concrete quarterly objectives but ones
that fail to energize or inspire people to take
their efforts to the next level
Has a value set but no guiding principles for
implementing them
Has a strategy that is
concrete and
inspirational
Has an intent that is both
meaningful and
memorable
Makes one decision that
eliminates one thousand
later decisions
When Martha Lane Fox was asked by the British prime minister to be
the United Kingdom’s first “Digital Champion,” she had the opportunity
to create a description for this newly created role. You can just imagine
all the vague, uninspired, or jargony ways Martha might have tried to
explain it; it was a Dilbert comic strip waiting to happen.
Instead, Martha and her team came up with this essential intent: “To
get everyone in the U.K. online by the end of 2012.” It was simple,
concrete, inspiring, and easily measured. It gave everyone on the team
clarity about exactly what they were trying to do, so they could
coordinate their actions and energies to eliminate everything else. It
empowered everyone on the team, however junior, to push back and
say, “But does this new idea really help us to achieve our intent?” And it
enabled them to better harness the support of partners to massively
accelerate the journey. And even though their full aspiration isn’t yet
reached, that clarity of purpose enabled them to make a far greater
contribution than they could have made under any other circumstances.
This is the kind of statement of purpose that we need for our
companies, teams, and careers. So how do we craft a statement of
purpose that is both concrete and inspiring, meaningful and memorable?
STOP WORDSMITHING AND START DECIDING
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?”
ASK,
“HOW WILL WE KNOW WHEN WE’RE DONE?”
That said, when it comes to achieving clarity of purpose, inspiration
does matter. When we think of inspiration, we often think of lofty
rhetoric. But while rhetoric can certainly inspire, we need to remember
that concrete objectives have the power to elevate and inspire as well. A
powerful essential intent inspires people partially because it is concrete
enough to answer the question, “How will we know when we have
succeeded?”
This was illustrated brilliantly to me by Professor Bill Meehan, who
spent thirty years with McKinsey advising CEOs and senior leaders on
strategy and now teaches a class called “The Strategic Management of
Nonprofits” at the Stanford School of Business. When I took his course as
a graduate student, one of the assignments he gave us was to evaluate
the vision and mission statements of nonprofit organizations.
As the class reviewed more than one hundred examples, they noticed
that some of the most grandiose were actually the least inspiring. For
example, one had the mission to “eliminate hunger in the world,” but
given that there were just five people in the organization, the mission
felt like little more than empty words. Then out of the cluttered
landscape of such loose idealism came a statement we all immediately
understood and were inspired by. It was from a slightly unexpected
place: the actor/social entrepreneur Brad Pitt, who, appalled by the lack
of progress in rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, had
started an organization called “Make It Right” with the essential intent
“to build 150 affordable, green, storm-resistant homes for families living
in the Lower 9th Ward.” That statement took the air out of the room.
The concreteness of the objective made it real. The realness made it
inspiring. It answered the question: “How will we know when we have
succeeded?”
Living with Intent
Essential intent applies to so much more than your job description or
your company’s mission statement; a true essential intent is one that
guides your greater sense of purpose, and helps you chart your life’s
path. For example, Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in jail
becoming an Essentialist. When he was thrown in jail in 1962 he had
almost everything taken from him: his home, his reputation, his pride,
and of course his freedom. He chose to use those twenty-seven years to
focus on what was really essential and eliminate everything else—
including his own resentment. He made it his essential intent to
eliminate apartheid in South Africa and in doing so established a legacy
that lives on today.
Creating an essential intent is hard. It takes courage, insight, and
foresight to see which activities and efforts will add up to your single
highest point of contribution. It takes asking tough questions, making
real trade-offs, and exercising serious discipline to cut out the competing
priorities that distract us from our true intention. Yet it is worth the
effort because only with real clarity of purpose can people, teams, and
organizations fully mobilize and achieve something truly excellent.
CHAPTER 11
DARE
The Power of a Graceful “No”
COURAGE IS GRACE UNDER PRESSURE.
—Ernest Hemingway
The right “no” spoken at the right time can change the course of history.
In just one example of many, Rosa Parks’s quiet but resolute refusal to
give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus at exactly the right
moment coalesced into forces that propelled the civil rights movement.
As Parks recalls, “When [the bus driver] saw me still sitting, he asked if I
was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ ”1
Contrary to popular belief, her courageous “no” did not grow out of a
particularly assertive tendency or personality in general. In fact, when
she was made a secretary to the president of the Montgomery chapter of
the NAACP she explained, “I was the only woman there, and they
needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no.”2
Rather, her decision on the bus grew out of a deep conviction about
what deliberate choice she wanted to make in that moment. When the
bus driver ordered her out of her seat, she said, “I felt a determination
cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”3 She did not know how
her decision would spark a movement with reverberations around the
world. But she did know her own mind. She knew, even as she was being
arrested, that “it was the very last time that I would ever ride in
humiliation of this kind.”4 Avoiding that humiliation was worth the risk
of incarceration. Indeed, to her, it was essential.
It is true that we are (hopefully) unlikely to find ourselves facing a
situation like the one faced by Rosa Parks. Yet we can be inspired by
her. We can think of her when we need the courage to dare to say no.
We can remember her strength of conviction when we need to stand our
ground in the face of social pressure to capitulate to the nonessential.
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, neighbor, 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.
I did not set out to write a chapter about courage. But 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.
I say this without judgment. We have good reasons to fear saying no.
We worry we’ll miss out on a great opportunity. We’re scared of rocking
the boat, stirring things up, burning bridges. We can’t bear the thought
of disappointing someone we respect and like. None of this makes us a
bad person. It’s a natural part of being human. Yet as hard as it can be to
say no to someone, failing to do so can cause us to miss out on
something far more important.
A woman named Cynthia once told me a story about the time her
father had made plans to take her on a night out in San Francisco.
Twelve-year-old Cynthia and her father had been planning the “date” for
months. They had a whole itinerary planned down to the minute: she
would attend the last hour of his presentation, and then meet him at the
back of the room at about four-thirty and leave quickly before everyone
tried to talk to him. They would catch a trolley car to Chinatown, eat
Chinese food (their favorite), shop for a souvenir, see the sights for a
while and then “catch a flick” as her dad liked to say. Then they would
grab a taxi back to the hotel, jump in the pool for a quick swim (her dad
was famous for sneaking in when the pool was closed), order a hot fudge
sundae from room service, and watch the late, late show. They discussed
the details over and over before they left. The anticipation was part of
the whole experience.
This was all going according to plan until, as her father was leaving
the convention center, he ran into an old college friend and business
associate. It had been years since they had seen each other, and Cynthia
watched as they embraced enthusiastically. His friend said, in effect: “I
am so glad you are doing some work with our company now. When Lois
and I heard about it we thought it would be perfect. We want to invite
you, and of course Cynthia, to get a spectacular seafood dinner down at
the Wharf!” Cynthia’s father responded: “Bob, it’s so great to see you.
Dinner at the wharf sounds great!”
Cynthia was crestfallen. Her daydreams of trolley rides and ice cream
sundaes evaporated in an instant. Plus, she hated seafood and she could
just imagine how bored she would be listening to the adults talk all
night. But then her father continued: “But not tonight. Cynthia and I
have a special date planned, don’t we?” He winked at Cynthia and
grabbed her hand and they ran out of the door and continued with what
was an unforgettable night in San Francisco.
As it happens, Cynthia’s father was the management thinker Stephen
R. Covey (author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) who had
passed away only weeks before Cynthia told me this story. So it was
with deep emotion she recalled that evening in San Francisco. His simple
decision “Bonded him to me forever because I knew what mattered most
to him was me!” she said.5
Stephen R. Covey, one of the most respected and widely read business
thinkers of his generation, was an Essentialist. Not only did he routinely
teach Essentialist principles—like “The main thing is to keep the main
thing the main thing”—to important leaders and heads of state around
the world, he lived them.6 And in this moment of living them with his
daughter he made a memory that literally outlasted his lifetime. Seen
with some perspective, his decision seems obvious. But many in his
shoes would have accepted the friend’s invitation for fear of seeming
rude or ungrateful, or passing up a rare opportunity to dine with an old
friend. So why is it so hard in the moment to dare to choose what is
essential over what is nonessential?
One simple answer is we are unclear about what is essential. When
this happens we become defenseless. On the other hand, when we have
strong internal clarity it is almost as if we have a force field protecting
us from the nonessentials coming at us from all directions. With Rosa it
was her deep moral clarity that gave her unusual courage of conviction.
With Stephen it was the clarity of his vision for the evening with his
loving daughter. In virtually every instance, clarity about what is
essential fuels us with the strength to say no to the nonessentials.
Essentially Awkward
A second reason why it is hard to choose what is essential in the moment
is as simple as an innate fear of social awkwardness. The fact is, we as
humans are wired to want to get along with others. After all, thousands
of years ago when we all lived in tribes of hunter gatherers, our survival
depended on it. And while conforming to what people in a group expect
of us—what psychologists call normative conformity—is no longer a
matter of life and death, the desire is still deeply ingrained in us.7 This is
why, whether it’s an old friend who invites you to dinner or a boss who
asks you to take on an important and high-profile project, or a neighbor
who begs you to help with the PTA bake sale, the very thought of saying
no literally brings us physical discomfort. We feel guilty. We don’t want
to let someone down. We are worried about damaging the relationship.
But these emotions muddle our clarity. They distract us from the reality
of the fact that either we can say no and regret it for a few minutes, or
we can say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months, or even years.
The only way out of this trap is to learn to say no firmly, resolutely,
and yet gracefully. Because once we do, we find, not only that our fears
of disappointing or angering others were exaggerated, but that people
actually respect us more. Since becoming an Essentialist I have found it
almost universally true that people respect and admire those with the
courage of conviction to say no.
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.”8
A true Essentialist, Peter Drucker believed that “people are effective
because they say no.”
Nonessentialists say yes because of feelings of social awkwardness and
pressure. They say yes automatically, without thinking, often in pursuit
of the rush one gets from having pleased someone. But Essentialists
know that after the rush comes the pang of regret. They know they will
soon feel bullied and resentful—both at the other person and at
themselves. Eventually they will wake up to the unpleasant reality that
something more important must now be sacrificed to accommodate this
new commitment. Of course, the point is not to say no to all requests.
The point is to say no to the nonessentials so we can say yes to the
things that really matter. It is to say no—frequently and gracefully—to
everything but what is truly vital.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Avoids saying no to avoid feeling social
awkwardness and pressure
Says yes to everything
Dares to say no firmly,
resolutely, and gracefully
Says yes only to the things
that really matter
So how do we learn to say no gracefully? Below are general guidelines
followed by a number of specific scripts for delivering the graceful “no.”
SEPARATE THE DECISION FROM THE RELATIONSHIP
When people ask us to do something, we can confuse the request with
our relationship with them. Sometimes they seem so interconnected, we
forget that denying the request is not the same as denying the person.
Only once we separate the decision from the relationship can we make a
clear decision and then separately find the courage and compassion to
communicate it.9
SAYING “NO” GRACEFULLY DOESN’T HAVE TO MEAN USING THE
WORD NO
Essentialists choose “no” more often than they say no. There may be a
time when the most graceful way to say no is to simply say a blunt no.
But whether it’s “I am flattered that you thought of me but I’m afraid I
don’t have the bandwidth” or “I would very much like to but I’m
overcommitted,” there are a variety of ways of refusing someone clearly
and politely without actually using the word no. Later in the chapter
you’ll find more examples of ways to gracefully word your “no.”
FOCUS ON THE TRADE-OFF
The more we think about what we are giving up when we say yes to
someone, the easier it is to say no. If we have no clear sense of the
opportunity cost—in other words, the value of what we are giving up—
then it is especially easy to fall into the nonessential trap of telling
ourselves we can get it all done. We can’t. A graceful “no” grows out of a
clear but unstated calculation of the trade-off.
REMIND YOURSELF THAT EVERYONE IS SELLING SOMETHING
This doesn’t mean you have to be cynical about people. I don’t mean to
imply people shouldn’t be trusted. I am simply saying everyone is selling
something—an idea, a viewpoint, an opinion—in exchange for your
time. Simply being aware of what is being sold allows us to be more
deliberate in deciding whether we want to buy it.
MAKE YOUR PEACE WITH THE FACT THAT SAYING “NO” OFTEN
REQUIRES TRADING POPULARITY FOR RESPECT
When you say no, there is usually a short-term impact on the
relationship. After all, when someone asks for something and doesn’t get
it, his or her immediate reaction may be annoyance or disappointment
or even anger. This downside is clear. The potential upside, however, is
less obvious: when the initial annoyance or disappointment or anger
wears off, the respect kicks in. When we push back effectively, it shows
people that our time is highly valuable. It distinguishes the professional
from the amateur.
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.
Essentialists accept they cannot be popular with everyone all of the
time. Yes, saying no respectfully, reasonably, and gracefully can come at
a short-term social cost. But part of living the way of the Essentialist is
realizing respect is far more valuable than popularity in the long run.
REMEMBER THAT A CLEAR “NO” CAN BE MORE GRACEFUL THAN
A VAGUE OR NONCOMMITTAL “YES”
As anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of this situation
knows, a clear “I am going to pass on this” is far better than not getting
back to someone or stringing them along with some noncommittal
answer like “I will try to make this work” or “I might be able to” when
you know you can’t. Being vague is not the same as being graceful, and
delaying the eventual “no” will only make it that much harder—and the
recipient that much more resentful.
The “No” Repertoire
Remember, Essentialists don’t say no just occasionally. It is a part of
their regular repertoire. To consistently say no with grace, then, it helps
to have a variety of responses to call upon. Below are eight responses
you can put in your “no” repertoire.
1. The awkward pause. Instead of being controlled by the threat of an
awkward silence, own it. Use it as a tool. When a request comes to you
(obviously this works only in person), just pause for a moment. Count to
three before delivering your verdict. Or if you get a bit more bold,
simply wait for the other person to fill the void.
2. The soft “no” (or the “no but”). I recently received an e-mail inviting
me to coffee. I replied: “I am consumed with writing my book right now
:) But I would love to get together once the book is finished. Let me
know if we can get together towards the end of the summer.”
E-mail is also a good way to start practicing saying “no but” because it
gives you the chance to draft and redraft your “no” to make it as
graceful as possible. Plus, many people find that the distance of e-mail
reduces the fear of awkwardness.
3. “Let me check my calendar and get back to you.” One leader I know
found her time being hijacked by other people all day. A classic
Nonessentialist, she was capable and smart and unable to say no, and as
a result she soon became a “go to” person. People would run up to her
and say, “Could you help with X project?” Meaning to be a good citizen,
she said yes. But soon she felt burdened with all of these different
agendas. Things changed for her when she learned to use a new phrase:
“Let me check my calendar and get back to you.” It gave her the time to
pause and reflect and ultimately reply that she was regretfully
unavailable. It enabled her to take back control of her own decisions
rather than be rushed into a “yes” when she was asked.
4. Use e-mail bouncebacks. It is totally natural and expected to get an
autoresponse when someone is traveling or out of the office. Really, this
is the most socially acceptable “no” there is. People aren’t saying they
don’t want to reply to your e-mail, they’re just saying they can’t get back
to you for a period of time. So why limit these to vacations and
holidays? When I was writing this book I set an e-mail bounceback with
the subject line “In Monk Mode.” The e-mail said: “Dear Friends, I am
currently working on a new book which has put enormous burdens on
my time. Unfortunately, I am unable to respond in the manner I would
like. For this, I apologize.—Greg.” And guess what? People seemed to
adapt to my temporary absence and nonresponsiveness just fine.
5. Say, “Yes. What should I deprioritize?” Saying no to a senior leader at
work is almost unthinkable, even laughable, for many people. However,
when saying yes is going to compromise your ability to make the highest
level of contribution to your work, it is also your obligation. In this case
it is not only reasonable to say no, it is essential. One effective way to do
that is to remind your superiors what you would be neglecting if you
said yes and force them to grapple with the trade-off.
For example, if your manager comes to you and asks you to do X, you
can respond with “Yes, I’m happy to make this the priority. Which of
these other projects should I deprioritize to pay attention to this new
project?” Or simply say, “I would want to do a great job, and given my
other commitments I wouldn’t be able to do a job I was proud of if I took
this on.”
I know a leader who received this response from a subordinate. There
was no way he wanted to be responsible for disrupting this productive
and organized employee, so he took the nonessential work project back
and gave it to someone else who was less organized!
6. Say it with humor. I recently was asked by a friend to join him in
training for a marathon. My response was simple: “Nope!” He laughed a
little and said, “Ah, you practice what you preach.” Just goes to show
how useful it is to have a reputation as an Essentialist!
7. Use the words “You are welcome to X. I am willing to Y.” For example,
“You are welcome to borrow my car. I am willing to make sure the keys
are here for you.” By this you are also saying, “I won’t be able to drive
you.” You are saying what you will not do, but you are couching it in
terms of what you are willing to do. This is a particularly good way to
navigate a request you would like to support somewhat but cannot
throw your full weight behind.
I particularly like this construct because it also expresses a respect for
the other person’s ability to choose, as well as your own. It reminds both
parties of the choices they have.
8. “I can’t do it, but X might be interested.” It is tempting to think that
our help is uniquely invaluable, but often people requesting something
don’t really care if we’re the ones who help them—as long as they get
the help.
Kay Krill, the CEO of Ann, Inc. (a.k.a. Ann Taylor and LOFT women’s
clothing retailers), used to have a terrible time saying no to social
invitations. As a result, she would end up at networking events she had
no interest in attending. She would find herself going to office parties
and regretting it the moment she got there.
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. That advice liberated
her. Now she is able to pick and choose. With practice, politely declining
an invitation has become easy for her. Kay explains: “I say no very easily
because I know what is important to me. I only wish that I learned how
to do that earlier in my life.”11
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
practicing. 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. Tom Friel, the former CEO of Heidrick & Struggles,
once said to me, “We need to learn the slow ‘yes’ and the quick ‘no.’ ”
CHAPTER 12
UNCOMMIT
Win Big by Cutting Your Losses
HALF OF THE TROUBLES OF THIS LIFE CAN BE TRACED TO SAYING YES TOO QUICKLY AND
NOT SAYING NO SOON ENOUGH.
—Josh Billings
By any estimation, the Concorde jet was a striking achievement in
aeronautical engineering. Aboard this passenger plane you could fly
from London to New York in as little as two hours, fifty-two minutes,
and fifty-nine seconds.1 That’s less than half the time of a traditional
plane, making the Concorde the fastest passenger plane in the world.
Unfortunately, it was also an extraordinary financial failure. Of course
many great ideas, innovations, and products are. But what made this one
different was that it consistently lost money for more than four decades.
Yet each time it went over budget the French and British governments
poured more and more money in. They did this even knowing that the
chance of recouping their continued investments, let alone the original
expenditures, were miniscule; with the plane’s limited seating, few
orders coming in, and the high cost of production, it was clear that even
with exaggerated estimates the project would never be profitable.
Indeed, when the British cabinet papers were released under the thirtyyear rule, they revealed that government ministers at the time knew the
investment “could not stand on normal economic grounds.”2
Why would intelligent, capable British and French government
officials continue to invest in what was clearly a losing proposition for so
long? One reason is a very common psychological phenomenon called
“sunk-cost bias.”
Sunk-cost bias is the tendency to continue to invest time, money, or
energy into something we know is a losing proposition simply because
we have already incurred, or sunk, a cost that cannot be recouped. But
of course this can easily become a vicious cycle: the more we invest, the
more determined we become to see it through and see our investment
pay off. The more we invest in something, the harder it is to let go.
The sunk costs for developing and building the Concorde were around
$1 billion. Yet the more money the British and French governments
poured into it, the harder it was to walk away.3 Individuals are equally
vulnerable to sunk-cost bias. It explains why we’ll continue to sit
through a terrible movie because we’ve already paid the price of a ticket.
It explains why we continue to pour money into a home renovation that
never seems to near completion. It explains why we’ll continue to wait
for a bus or a subway train that never comes instead of hailing a cab,
and it explains why we invest in toxic relationships even when our
efforts only make things worse. Examples like this abound; consider the
somewhat bizarre story of a man named Henry Gribbohm, who recently
spent his entire life savings, $2,600 in total, at a carnival game trying to
win an Xbox Kinect. The more he spent, the more determined he became
to win. Henry said, “You just get caught up in the whole ‘I’ve got to win
my money back,’ but it didn’t turn out that way.”4 The more he invested
in trying to win this nonessential item, the harder it was for him to walk
away.
Have you ever continued to invest time or effort in a nonessential
project instead of cutting your losses? Have you ever continued to pour
money into an investment that wasn’t panning out instead of walking
away? Have you ever kept plodding down a dead end because you could
not admit, “I shouldn’t have pursued this direction in the first place”?
Ever been stuck in a cycle of “throwing good money after bad”? A
Nonessentialist can’t break free of traps like these. An Essentialist has the
courage and confidence to admit his or her mistakes and uncommit, no
matter the sunk costs.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Asks, “Why stop now when I’ve
Asks, “If I weren’t already invested in
this project, how much would I invest
already invested so much in this
project?”
Thinks, “If I just keep trying, I
can make this work.”
Hates admitting to mistakes
in it now?”
Thinks, “What else could I do with this
time or money if I pulled the plug
now?”
Comfortable with cutting losses
Sunk-cost bias, while all too common, isn’t the only Nonessentialist
trap to watch out for. Below are several other common traps and tips for
how to extricate yourself politely, gracefully, and with minimal cost.
Avoiding Commitment Traps
BEWARE OF THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT
A sense of ownership is a powerful thing. As the saying goes, nobody in
the history of the world has washed their rental car! This is because of
something called “the endowment effect,” our tendency to undervalue
things that aren’t ours and to overvalue things because we already own
them.
In one study demonstrating the power of the endowment effect, the
Nobel Prize–winning researcher Daniel Kahneman and colleagues
randomly gave coffee mugs to only half the subjects in an experiment.5
The first group was asked how much they would be willing to sell their
mug for, while the second group was asked what they would be willing
to pay for it. It turned out the students who “owned” the mugs refused to
sell for less than $5.25, while those without the cups were willing to pay
only $2.25 to $2.75. The mere fact of ownership, in other words, caused
the mug owners to value the objects more highly and made them less
willing to part with them.
In your own life, I’m sure you can think of items that seem to be more
valuable the moment you think about giving them away. Think of a
book on your shelf you haven’t read in years, or a kitchen appliance still
sitting in the box, or the sweater you got from Aunt Mildred but never
wore. Whether or not you get any use or enjoyment out of them,
subconsciously, the very fact that they are yours makes you value them
more highly than you would if they didn’t belong to you.
Unfortunately, we have this bias when it comes to nonessential
activities as well as belongings. The project that isn’t getting anywhere
at work seems that much more critical when we’re the team leader on it.
The commitment to volunteer at the local bake sale becomes harder to
get out of when we’re the one who put the fund-raiser together. When
we feel we “own” an activity, it becomes harder to uncommit.
Nonetheless, here is a useful tip:
PRETEND YOU DON’T OWN IT YET
Tom Stafford describes a simple antidote to the endowment effect.6
Instead of asking, “How much do I value this item?” we should ask, “If I
did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” We can do
the same for opportunities and commitment. Don’t ask, “How will I feel
if I miss out on this opportunity?” but rather, “If I did not have this
opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain
it?” Similarly, we can ask, “If I wasn’t already involved in this project,
how hard would I work to get on it?”7
GET OVER THE FEAR OF WASTE
Hal Arkes, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University who
studies judgment in decision making, was puzzled by an enigma. Why
are adults so much more vulnerable to the sunk-cost bias than young
children? The answer, he believes, is a lifetime of exposure to the “Don’t
waste” rule, so that by the time we are adults we are trained to avoid
appearing wasteful, even to ourselves.8 “Abandoning a project that
you’ve invested a lot in feels like you’ve wasted everything, and waste is
something we’re told to avoid,” Arkes said.9
To illustrate this he gave the following scenario to a group of
participants: “Assume that you have spent $100 on a ticket for a
weekend ski trip to Michigan. Several weeks later you buy a $50 ticket
for a weekend ski trip to Wisconsin. You think you will enjoy the
Wisconsin ski trip more than the Michigan ski trip. As you are putting
your newly purchased Wisconsin ticket in your wallet you notice that
the Michigan ski trip and the Wisconsin ski trip are for the same
weekend. It’s too late to sell or return either ticket. You must choose
which to use.” When asked, “Which ski trip will you go on?” more than
half said they would opt for the more expensive trip, even though they
would enjoy it less. Their (faulty) reasoning was that using the cheaper
ticket would be wasting more money than using the expensive ticket. It’s
natural not to want to let go of what we wasted on a bad choice, but
when we don’t, we doom ourselves to keep wasting even more.
INSTEAD, ADMIT FAILURE TO BEGIN SUCCESS
I remember a friend who would never stop to ask for directions because
he could never admit he was lost. So we would waste time and energy
driving around in circles, getting nowhere—the epitome of a
nonessential activity.
Only when we admit we have made a mistake in committing to
something can we make a mistake a part of our past. When we remain in
denial, on the other hand, we continue to circle pointlessly. There should
be no shame in admitting to a mistake; after all, we really are only
admitting that we are now wiser than we once were.
STOP TRYING TO FORCE A FIT
In the movie Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman plays a struggling actor who is
trying to get work. The movie begins comically with a series of failed
auditions. At one he is told, “We need someone a little older.” At the
next he is told, “We’re looking for someone younger.” Then at the next,
“You’re the wrong height,” to which he responds, “I can be taller.” The
executive responds, “No. We’re looking for somebody shorter.”
Desperate to make it work, Hoffman’s character explains: “Look. I don’t
have to be this tall. See, I’m wearing lifts. I can be shorter.” But the
executive also insists, “I know, but we’re looking for somebody
different.” Still persistent, the would-be actor pushes back again: “I can
be different.” The point is that we often act like Dustin Hoffman’s
character by trying too hard to be something we’re not. Whether in our
personal or professional lives, it is all too tempting to force something
that is simply a mismatch. The solution?
GET A NEUTRAL SECOND OPINION
When we get so emotionally hung up on trying to force something that is
not the right fit, we can often benefit from a sounding board. Someone
who is not emotionally involved in the situation and unaffected by the
choice we make can give us the permission to stop forcing something
that is clearly not working out.
I once wasted months of effort trying to force a project that just wasn’t
working out. Looking back, the more I put into it the worse things
became. But my irrational response was to invest still more. I thought, “I
can make this work!” I did not want to accept I had been wasting my
effort. I finally shared my frustration with a friend who had the
advantage of being emotionally removed from the project—someone
who wasn’t burdened with the sunk costs and could evaluate my
decisions with some perspective. After listening to me he said, “You’re
not married to this.” And with those simple words I was liberated to stop
investing in a nonessential.
BE AWARE OF THE STATUS QUO BIAS
The tendency to continue doing something simply because we have
always done it is sometimes called the “status quo bias.” I once worked
at a company that used an employee evaluation system that seemed to
me so woefully outdated that I became curious about how long it had
been in place. As I searched for its creator in the company I found that
nobody, up to and including the long-standing head of HR, knew of its
origin. More shocking still, in the ten years she had been at the
company, nobody had once questioned the system. It’s all too easy to
blindly accept and not bother to question commitments simply because
they have already been established.
One cure for the status quo bias is borrowed from the world of
accounting:
APPLY ZERO-BASED BUDGETING
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.
You can apply zero-based budgeting to your own endeavors. Instead of
trying to budget your time on the basis of existing commitments, assume
that all bets are off. All previous commitments are gone. Then begin
from scratch, asking which you would add today. You can do this with
everything from the financial obligations you have to projects you are
committed to, even relationships you are in. Every use of time, energy,
or resources has to justify itself anew. If it no longer fits, eliminate it
altogether.
STOP MAKING CASUAL COMMITMENTS
Some people’s days are full to the brim with soft commitments they have
taken on unintentionally through an offhand comment or casual
conversation they had somewhere with someone. You know the kind I
mean—you’re chatting with your neighbor about her work on the PTA,
your colleague about a new initiative she is heading up, or your friend
about a new restaurant he wants to try, and before you know it, boom,
you’re committed.
FROM NOW ON, PAUSE BEFORE YOU SPEAK
It might sound obvious, but pausing for just five seconds before offering
your services can greatly reduce the possibility of making a commitment
you’ll regret. Before the words “That sounds great, I’d love to” fly out of
your mouth, ask yourself, “Is this essential?” If you’ve already made a
casual commitment you’re regretting, find a nice way to worm your way
out. Simply apologize and tell the person that when you made the
commitment you didn’t fully realize what it would entail.
GET OVER THE FEAR OF MISSING OUT
We’ve seen ample evidence in this chapter suggesting that the majority
of us are naturally very loss-averse. As a result, one of the obstacles to
uncommitting ourselves from a present course is the fear of missing out
on something great.
TO FIGHT THIS FEAR, RUN A REVERSE PILOT
One of the ideas that has grown popular in business circles in recent
years is “prototyping.” Building a prototype, or large-scale model, allows
companies to test-run an idea or product without making a huge
investment up front. Exactly the same idea can be used in reverse to
eliminate nonessentials in a relatively low-risk way, by running what
Daniel Shapero, a director at LinkedIn, calls a “reverse pilot.”10
In a reverse pilot you test whether removing an initiative or activity
will have any negative consequences. For example, when an executive I
work with took on a new senior role in the company, he inherited a
process his predecessor had gone to a huge effort to implement: a huge,
highly visual report on a myriad of subjects produced for the other
executives each week. It consumed enormous energy from his team, and
he hypothesized that it was not adding a great deal of value to the
company. So to test his hypothesis he ran a reverse pilot. He simply
stopped publishing the report and waited to see what the response
would be. What he found was that no one seemed to miss it; after
several weeks nobody had even mentioned the report. As a result, he
concluded that the report was not essential to the business and could be
eliminated.
A similar reverse pilot can be carried out in our social lives. Are there
commitments you routinely make to customers, colleagues, friends or
even family members that you have always assumed made a big
difference to them but that in fact they might barely notice? By quietly
eliminating or at least scaling back an activity for a few days or weeks
you might be able to assess whether it is really making a difference or
whether no one really cares.
Even using these techniques, 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.
CHAPTER 13
EDIT
The Invisible Art
I SAW THE ANGEL IN THE MARBLE AND CARVED UNTIL I SET HIM FREE.
—Michelangelo
Every year at the Academy Awards the most notable prize is for “Best
Picture.” The media speculate on it for weeks prior to the broadcast, and
most viewers stay up well past their bedtimes to see it awarded. There is
a far less hyped award on the night: the one for film editing. Let’s face it:
most viewers flip the channel or go into the kitchen to refill their
popcorn bowl when the winner of “Best Film Editing” is announced. Yet
what most people don’t know is that the two awards are highly
correlated: since 1981 not a single film has won Best Picture without at
least being nominated for Film Editing. In fact, in about two-thirds of the
cases the movie nominated for Film Editing has gone on to win Best
Picture.1
In the history of the Academy Awards, the most respected (if not
exactly celebrated) film editor is Michael Kahn, with eight nominations
—more than anyone else in the business—and three wins under his belt.
While his is hardly a household name, the films he has edited certainly
are. He is the editor of such notable films as Saving Private Ryan, Raiders
of the Lost Ark, Schindler’s List, and Lincoln. Indeed, over thirty-seven
years he has edited almost all of Steven Spielberg’s movies, becoming his
right-hand man in the process. Yet only a handful of people know Kahn’s
name. It is for good reason that film editing is sometimes known as the
“invisible art.”
Clearly, editing—which involves the strict elimination of the trivial,
unimportant, or irrelevant—is an Essentialist craft. So what makes a
good editor? When the editing branch of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences sits down to select their nominees for film editing,
they try, as Mark Harris has written, “very hard not to look at what
they’re supposed to be looking at.”2 In other words, a good film editor
makes it hard not to see what’s important because she eliminates
everything but the elements that absolutely need to be there.
In chapter 6 we likened exploring to being a journalist; it involves
asking questions, listening, and connecting the dots in order to
distinguish the essential few from the trivial many. So it makes sense
that the next stage in the Essentialist process, eliminating the
nonessentials, means taking on the role of an editor in your life and
leadership.
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.”3
An editor is not merely someone who says no to things. A three-yearold 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.
Editing aids the effortless execution of the Essentialist by removing
anything distracting or unnecessary or awkward. 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.”
Of course, editing also involves making trade-offs. Instead of trying to
fit it all in—every character, every plot twist, every detail—an editor
asks, “Will this character or plot twist or detail make it better?” For an
author—whether of films, books, or journalism—it is easy to get overly
committed to a certain idea or body of work, especially one you slaved
over. It can be quite painful to eliminate passages, pages, or even
chapters that took weeks, months, maybe even years to write in the first
place. Yet such disciplined elimination is critical to the craft. You must,
as Stephen King has said, “kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even
when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your
darlings.”4
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Thinks that making things better
means adding something
Attached to every word, image, or
detail
Thinks that making things better
means subtracting something
Eliminates the distracting words,
images, and details
Of course, editing a film, or a book, or any other creative work is not
the same as editing your life. In life, we don’t have the luxury of
revisiting a conversation we have just had, or a meeting we just led, or a
presentation we just made and reworking it, red pen in hand.
Nevertheless, four simple principles inherent in editing do apply to
editing the nonessentials out of our lives.
Editing Life
CUT OUT OPTIONS
To state the obvious, editing involves cutting out things that confuse the
reader and cloud the message or story. It is a matter of record that welledited movies and books are easy on the eye and the brain.
When making decisions, deciding to cut options can be terrifying—but
the truth is, it is the very essence of decision making.5 In fact:
The Latin root of the word
decision—cis or cid—literally
means “to cut” or “to kill.”
You can see this in words like scissors, homicide, or fratricide. Since
ultimately, having fewer options actually makes a decision “easier on the
eye and the brain,” we must summon the discipline to get rid of options
or activities that may be good, or even really good, but that get in the
way. Yes, making the choice to eliminate something good can be painful.
But eventually, every cut produces joy—maybe not in the moment but
afterwards, when we realize that every additional moment we have
gained can be spent on something better. That may be one reason why
Stephen King has written, “To write is human, to edit is divine.”6
CONDENSE
Many people have been credited with coming up with this apt sentiment:
“I must apologize: if I had more time I would have written a shorter
letter.” It’s true that doing less can be harder, both in art and in life.
Every word, every scene, every activity must count for more. An editor is
ruthless in the pursuit of making every word count. Instead of saying it
in two sentences, can you say it in one? Is it possible to use one word
where two are currently being used? As Alan D. Williams observed in the
essay “What Is an Editor?” there are “two basic questions the editor
should be addressing to the author: Are you saying what you want to
say? and, Are you saying it as clearly and concisely as possible?”7
Condensing means saying it as clearly and concisely as possible.
Likewise, in life, condensing allows us to do more with less. For
example, when Graham Hill moved into a 420-square-foot apartment in
New York, he wanted to see how well he could condense everything he
owned. The ultimate result was a design he calls a “little jewel box.” The
jewel box works because every piece of furniture has multiple functions.
The wall on the left of the picture, for example, acts as a large projector
screen for watching movies and also houses two guest beds that can be
pulled out when visitors come to stay. The wall to the right folds down,
over the couch, to reveal a queen bed. 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. For example, one employee at a
company I’ve worked with (one who was well enough established to not
have to worry about being fired) routinely skipped the weekly meeting
other people attended and would simply ask them what he had missed.
Thus he condensed a two-hour meeting into ten minutes and invested
the rest of that redeemed time getting the important work done.
CORRECT
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
verbalize.
Similarly, in our own professional or private lives we can make course
corrections by coming back to our core purpose. Having a clear
overarching intent, as discussed in chapter 10, enables us to check
ourselves—to regularly compare our activities or behaviors to our real
intent. If they are incorrect, we can edit them.
EDIT LESS
This may seem a little counterintuitive. But the best editors don’t feel the
need to change everything. They know that sometimes having the
discipline to leave certain things exactly as they are is the best use of
their editorial judgment. It is just one more way in which being an editor
is an invisible craft. The best surgeon is not the one who makes the most
incisions; similarly, the best editors can sometimes be the least intrusive,
the most restrained.
Becoming an editor in our lives also includes knowing when to show
restraint. One way we can do this is by editing our tendency to step in.
When we are added onto an e-mail thread, for example, we can resist
our usual temptation to be the first to reply all. When sitting in a
meeting, we can resist the urge to add our two cents. We can wait. We
can observe. We can see how things develop. Doing less is not just a
powerful Essentialist strategy, it’s a powerful editorial one as well.
A Nonessentialist 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.
CHAPTER 14
LIMIT
The Freedom of Setting Boundaries
NO IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE.
—Anne Lamott
Jin-Yung1 was an employee at a technology company in Korea who
found herself planning her wedding while simultaneously preparing for a
board meeting that was to take place three weeks prior to her big day.
When her manager, Hyori, asked Jin-Yung to create the script and all the
slides for their joint presentation at the board meeting, Jin-Yung put in
several fifteen-hour days and completed the work quickly so she could
devote the days leading up to the board meeting to planning her
wedding. Her manager was surprised and delighted that the work was
done ahead of schedule, and Jin-Yung was now free to immerse herself
in five uninterrupted days of wedding planning.
Then Jin-Yung received an urgent request from her manager asking
her to complete an additional project prior to the board meeting. In their
several years of working together, Jin-Yung had never told Hyori “No,”
even when saying yes threw her life into temporary turmoil (as it often
did). Up to this point, Jin-Yung had given unknowable hours to
executing every request and task, and delivering them in neat and
complete packages, no matter the sacrifice. This time, however, she did
not hesitate and she told her manager “No.” She chose not to apologize
or overjustify her answer. She simply said, “I have planned for this time,
I have worked hard for it and I deserve to have it … guilt-free!”
Then something shocking happened. Everyone else on the team said
“No” and Hyori, the manager, was left to complete the task on her own.
At first, Hyori was fuming. It had taken her all week to complete the
task, and she wasn’t happy about it. But after laboring over the task for
days, she saw all sorts of flaws in the way she’d been doing things. She
soon realized that if she wanted to be a more effective manager, she
needed to pull in the reins, and get clear with each member of the team
about expectations, accountability, and outcomes. In the end, she was
grateful to Jin-Yung for helping her see the error of her ways. By
establishing boundaries, Jin-Yung not only opened her manager’s eyes to
unhealthy team dynamics and opened up a space for change, she did it
in a way that earned her abiding gratitude and respect.
The disappearance of boundaries is typical of our Nonessentialist era.
For one thing, of course, technology has completely blurred the lines
between work and family. These days there don’t seem to be any
boundaries at all regarding when people expect us to be available to
work. (I recently had an executive assistant provide me with times for a
client meeting that included Saturday morning, even though there was
no particular urgency for the meeting, and no acknowledgment that
Saturday was an unusual day to offer. Has Saturday become the new
Friday? I wondered.) But what most people don’t realize is that the
problem is not just that the boundaries have been blurred; it’s that the
boundary of work has edged insidiously into family territory. It is hard
to imagine executives in most companies who would be comfortable
with employees bringing their children to work on Monday morning, yet
they seem to have no problem expecting their employees to come into
the office or to work on a project on a Saturday or Sunday.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard business professor and author of The
Innovator’s Dilemma, was once asked to make just such a sacrifice. At the
time, he was working at a management consulting firm, and one of the
partners came to him and told him he needed to come in on Saturday to
help work on a project. Clay simply responded: “Oh, I am so sorry. I
have made the commitment that every Saturday is a day to be with my
wife and children.”
The partner, displeased, stormed off, but later he returned and he said:
“Clay, fine. I have talked with everyone on the team and they said they
will come in on Sunday instead. So I will expect you to be there.” Clay
sighed and said: “I appreciate you trying to do that. But Sunday will not
work. I have given Sunday to God and so I won’t be able to come in.” If
the partner was frustrated before, he was much more so now.
Still, Clay was not fired for standing his ground, and while his choice
was not popular in the moment, ultimately he was respected for it. The
boundaries paid off.
Clay recalls: “That taught me an important lesson. If I had made an
exception then I might have made it many times.”2 Boundaries are a
little like the walls of a sandcastle. The second we let one fall over, the
rest of them come crashing down.
I won’t deny that setting boundaries can be hard. Just because it
worked out for Jin-Yung and Clay doesn’t mean it always does. Jin-Yung
could have lost the job opportunity. Clay’s unwillingness to work on
weekends could have limited his career. It’s true that boundaries can
come at a high price.
However, not pushing back costs more: our ability to choose what is
most essential in life. For Jin-Yung and Clay, respect in the workplace
and time for God and family were most important, so these were the
things they deliberately and strategically chose to prioritize. After all, if
you don’t set boundaries—there won’t be any. Or even worse, there will
be boundaries, but they’ll be set by default—or by another person—
instead of by design.
Nonessentialists tend to think of boundaries as constraints or limits,
things that get in the way of their hyperproductive life. To a
Nonessentialist, setting boundaries is evidence of weakness. If they are
strong enough, they think, they don’t need boundaries. They can cope
with it all. They can do it all. But without limits, they eventually become
spread so thin that getting anything done becomes virtually impossible.
Essentialists, on the other hand, see boundaries as empowering. They
recognize that boundaries protect their time from being hijacked and
often free them from the burden of having to say no to things that
further others’ objectives instead of their own. They know that clear
boundaries allow them to proactively eliminate the demands and
encumbrances from others that distract them from the true essentials.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Thinks if you have limits you
will be limited
Knows that if you have limits you will
Sees boundaries as
constraining
Exerts effort attempting the
direct “no”
become limitless
Sees boundaries as liberating
Sets rules in advance that eliminate the
need for the direct “no”
Their Problem Is Not Your Problem
Of course, the challenge of setting boundaries goes far beyond the
workplace. In our personal lives, too, there are some people who seem to
know no boundaries when they make demands on our time. How often
do you feel your Saturday or Sunday is being hijacked by someone else’s
agenda? Is there someone in your personal life who doesn’t seem to
sense when he or she is crossing the line?
We all have some people in our lives who tend to be higher
maintenance for us than others. These are the people who make their
problem our problem. They distract us from our purpose. They care only
about their own agendas, and if we let them they prevent us from
making our highest level of contribution by siphoning our time and
energy off to activities that are essential to them, rather than those that
are essential to us.
So how do we take a page from Jin-Yung and Clayton Christensen and
set the kinds of boundaries that will protect us from other people’s
agendas? Below are several guidelines for your consideration.
DON’T ROB PEOPLE OF THEIR PROBLEMS
I am not saying we should never help people. We should serve, and love,
and make a difference in the lives of others, of course. But when people
make their problem our problem, we aren’t helping them; we’re enabling
them. Once we take their problem for them, all we’re doing is taking
away their ability to solve it.
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.”3
Cloud then offered them a metaphor. Imagine a neighbor who never
waters his lawn. But whenever you turn on your sprinkler system, the
water falls on his lawn. Your grass is turning brown and dying, but Bill
looks down at his green grass and thinks to himself, “My yard is doing
fine.” Thus everyone loses: your efforts have been wasted, and Bill never
develops the habit of watering his own lawn. The solution? As Cloud
puts it, “You need some fences to keep his problems out of your yard
and in his, where they belong.”
In the working world, people try to use our sprinklers to water their
own grass all the time. This may come in the form of a boss who puts
you on a committee for her pet project, a colleague who asks for your
input on a report or presentation or proposal she hasn’t taken the time to
perfect yet herself, or a colleague who stops you in the hallway and talks
your ear off when you have an important meeting to get to or a vital
phone call to make or critical work on your desk.
Whoever it is that’s trying to siphon off your time and energies for
their own purpose, the only solution is to put up fences. And not at the
moment the request is made—you need to put up your fences well in
advance, clearly demarcating what’s off limits so you can head off time
wasters and boundary pushers at the pass. Remember, forcing these
people to solve their own problems is equally beneficial for you and for
them.
BOUNDARIES ARE A SOURCE OF LIBERATION
This truth is demonstrated elegantly by the story of a school located next
to a busy road. At first the children played only on a small swath of the
playground, close to the building where the grownups could keep their
eyes on them. But then someone constructed a fence around the
playground. Now the children were able to play anywhere and
everywhere on the playground. Their freedom, in effect, more than
doubled.4
Similarly, when we don’t set clear boundaries in our lives we can end
up imprisoned by the limits others have set for us. When we have clear
boundaries, on the other hand, we are free to select from the whole area
—or the whole range of options—that we have deliberately chosen to
explore.
FIND YOUR DEALBREAKERS
When I ask executives to identify their boundaries they can rarely do it.
They know they have some, but they cannot put them into words. The
simple reality is, if you can’t articulate these to yourself and others, it
may be unrealistic to expect other people to respect them or even figure
them out.
Think of one person who frequently pulls you off your most essential
path. Make a list of your dealbreakers—the types of requests or activities
from that person that you simply refuse to say yes to unless they
somehow overlap with your own priorities or agenda.
Another quick test for finding your dealbreakers is to write down any
time you feel violated or put upon by someone’s request. It doesn’t have
to be in some extreme way for you to notice it. Even a small “pinch” (to
use a description I think is helpful for describing a minor violation of
your boundaries) that makes you feel even a twinge of resentment—
whether it’s an unwanted invitation, an unsolicited “opportunity,” or a
request for a small favor—is a clue for discovering your own hidden
boundaries.
CRAFT SOCIAL CONTRACTS
I was once paired with a colleague who approached projects in a
completely opposite way. People predicted there would be fireworks
between us. But our working relationship was actually quite
harmonious. Why? Because when we first got together I made it a point
to lay out my priorities and what extra work I would and wouldn’t be
willing to take on over the life span of the project. “Let’s just agree on
what we want to achieve,” I began. “Here are a couple of things that
really matter to me …” And I asked him to do the same.
Thus we worked through a “social contract,” not unlike the one JinYung and her boss worked out in the opening story. Simply having an
understanding up front about what we were really trying to achieve and
what our boundaries were kept us from wasting each other’s time,
saddling each other with burdensome requests, and distracting each
other from the things that were essential to us. As a result, we were each
able to make our highest level of contribution on the project—and we
got along famously, despite our differences, throughout the process.
With practice, enforcing your limits will become easier and easier.

EXECUTE
How to Make Execution Effortless
There are two ways of thinking about execution.
While Nonessentialists tend to force execution, Essentialists invest the
time they have saved by eliminating the nonessentials into designing a
system to make execution almost effortless.
In chapter 1 we talked how our life can resemble an overly full closet
and how an Essentialist would approach organizing it. We talked about
how if you want your closet to stay tidy you need a regular routine. You
need to have one large bag for items you need to throw away and a very
small pile for items you want to keep. You need to know the dropoff
location and the hours of your local thrift store. You need to have a
scheduled time to go there.
In other words, once you’ve figured out which activities and efforts to
keep in your life, you have to have a system for executing them. You
can’t wait until that closet is bursting at the seams and then take
superhuman efforts to purge it. You have to have a system in place so
that keeping it neat becomes routine and effortless.
It is human nature to want to do easy things. In this part of the book
you’ll learn how to make executing the right things—the essential things
—as easy and frictionless as possible.
CHAPTER 15
BUFFER
The Unfair Advantage
GIVE ME SIX HOURS TO CHOP DOWN A TREE AND I WILL SPEND THE FIRST FOUR
SHARPENING THE AXE.
—Attributed to Abraham Lincoln
In the Hebrew Bible a story is told of Joseph (of Amazing Technicolor
Dreamcoat fame), who saved Egypt from a savage, seven-year famine.
The Pharaoh had a dream he could not interpret and asked his wisest
advisers to explain it correctly to him. They couldn’t interpret it either,
but someone remembered that Joseph, who was in prison at the time,
had a reputation for explaining the meaning of dreams, and thus he was
called for.
In the dream Pharaoh was standing by a river when he saw seven “fatfleshed” kine (or cows) come out of the water and feed in a meadow.
Then seven others came out that were “lean-fleshed.” The second set of
cows ate the first set. Joseph explained that the dream meant there
would be seven years of plenty in Egypt and then seven years of famine.
Therefore, Joseph suggested that the Pharaoh appoint someone “discreet
and wise” to take a fifth of the harvest every year for seven years and
store it as a buffer for the years of famine. The plan was approved and
Joseph was given the position of vizier, or second in command, over
Egypt. He executed the plan perfectly so that when the seven years of
famine arrived everyone in Egypt and the surrounding areas, including
Joseph’s extended family, was saved. In this simple story is one the most
powerful practices Essentialists employ to ensure effortless execution.
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 canceled. We do not know if we’ll
slip on a slick road 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.
A “buffer” can be defined literally as something that prevents two
things from coming into contact and harming each other. For example, a
“buffer zone” at the periphery of a protected environmental area is an
area of land that is used to create extra space between that area and any
potential threats that might infiltrate it.
On one occasion I was trying to explain the concept of buffers to my
children. We were in the car together at the time and I tried to explain
the idea using a game. Imagine, I said, that we had to get to our
destination three miles away without stopping. Almost at once the
children could see the challenge. We couldn’t predict what was going to
happen in front of us and around us. We didn’t know how long the light
would stay on green or if the car in front would suddenly swerve or put
on its brakes. The only way to keep from crashing was to put extra space
between our car and the car in front of us. This space acted as a buffer.
It gave us time to respond and adapt to any sudden or unexpected moves
by other cars. It allowed us to avoid the friction of violent stops and
starts.
Similarly, we can reduce the friction of executing the essential in our
work and lives simply by creating a buffer.
During the car “game” with my children, they noticed that when I got
distracted talking and laughing I would forget the buffer zone and get
too close to the car in front of us. Then I would have to do something
“unnatural”—like swerve or slam on the brakes at the last second—to
adjust. A similar thing can happen if we forget to respect and maintain
buffers in our lives. We get busy and distracted, and before we know it
the project is due, the day of the big presentation has arrived—no matter
how much extra time we built in. As a result we are forced to “swerve”
or “slam on the brakes” at the last minute. From chemistry we know that
gases expand to fill the space they are in; similarly, we’ve all
experienced how projects and commitments tend to expand—despite our
best efforts—to fill the amount of time allotted to them.
Just think of how often this happens in presentations, meetings, and
workshops you have attended. How many times have you seen someone
try to fit too many slides into too little time? How many times have you
been to a conference where you felt that the presenter cut off a
meaningful conversation because of feeling obliged to get through all the
content he or she had planned? I have seen this so often, it has started to
seem the default position. So when I worked with a facilitator who had a
different philosophy it was truly liberating. He was designing a fourhour workshop. But instead of allowing the typical ten minutes at the
end of the session for questions and comments he suggested a full hour.
He explained, “I like to allow a luxurious amount of time just in case
things come up.” At first his idea was dismissed as indulgent, and he was
instructed to go back to the traditional format. Sure enough, the class
ran over its allotted time, and the facilitator had to try to rush through
the remaining content. So the class was changed to allow the hour
originally suggested. Things came up as he had expected, but this time
there was a buffer built in. Now the class could end on time and the
facilitator could focus on teaching, rather than rushing.
A mother I know learned a similar lesson when preparing to go on a
holiday with her family. In the past, when they went on vacation she
would leave the packing until the night before. Inevitably, she would
end up staying up late, losing steam, getting too little sleep, finishing the
packing in the morning, forgetting something, leaving late, and having
to “push through” the long drive to compensate. This time, however, she
started packing a week in advance. She made certain the car was fully
packed the night before so that in the morning the only thing she had to
do was wake up the children and get everyone in the car. It worked.
They got off early, with a good night’s sleep, nothing was forgotten, and
when they hit traffic it wasn’t stressful because they had a buffer for that
possibility. As a result they not only arrived on time but enjoyed a
frictionless and even pleasant journey.
The Nonessentialist tends to always assume a best-case scenario. We
all know those people (and many of us, myself included, have been that
person) who chronically underestimate how long something will really
take: “This will just take five minutes,” or “I’ll be finished with that
project by Friday,” or “It will only take me a year to write my magnum
opus.” Yet inevitably these things take longer; something unexpected
comes up, or the task ends up being more involved than anticipated, or
the estimate was simply too optimistic in the first place. When this
happens, they are left reacting to the problem, and results inevitably
suffer. Perhaps they pull an all-nighter to make it happen. Perhaps they
cut corners, hand in an incomplete project, or worse, fail to get it done
at all. Or perhaps they leave someone else on the team to pick up the
slack. Either way, they fail to execute at their highest level.
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.
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
When a Nonessentialist receives a windfall, she tends to consume it
rather than to set it aside for a rainy day. We can see an example of this
in the way nations have responded to finding oil. For example, in 1980,
when Britain discovered North Sea oil, the government suddenly had a
massive windfall in additional tax revenues, to the tune of 166 billion
pounds ($250 billion) over a decade.1 Arguments can be made for and
against how this money was used. But what is beyond contestation is
that it was used; instead of creating an endowment to prepare against
unexpected disasters (such as, in hindsight, the coming great recession),
the British government spent it in other ways.
The way of the Essentialist, on the other hand, is to use the good times
to create a buffer for the bad. Norway also benefited enormously from
windfall taxes from oil but unlike Britain, Norway invested much of its
good fortune in an endowment.2 Today, this endowment has grown over
time to be worth an extraordinary $720 billion, making it the world’s
largest sovereign wealth fund and providing a cushion against unknown
future scenarios.3
These days the pace of our lives is only getting faster and faster. It is
as if we are driving one inch behind another car at one hundred miles an
hour. If that driver makes even the tiniest unexpected move—if he slows
down even a little, or swerves even the smallest bit—we’ll ram right into
him. There is no room for error. As a result, execution is often highly
stressful, frustrating, and forced.
Here are a few tips for keeping your work—and sanity—from
swerving off the road by creating a buffer.
USE EXTREME PREPARATION
When I was a graduate student at Stanford I learned the key to receiving
top grades was extreme preparation. The moment we received the
syllabi for our classes I would make copies of them and paste together a
calendar for the whole semester. Even before the first day of class I knew
what the big projects were and would start on them immediately. This
small investment in preparation reduced the stress of the entire semester
because I knew I had plenty of time to get all the assignments done even
if my workload suddenly got heavy, or if a family emergency forced me
to miss some classes, or if any other unexpected event should happen.
The value of extreme preparation on a grander scale can be seen in the
story of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott in their race to be the
first people in modern history to reach the South Pole. Both men had
exactly the same objective. But their approaches differed.4 Amundsen
prepared for anything and everything that could possibly go wrong;
Scott hoped for the best-case scenario. He brought just one thermometer
for the trip and was furious when it broke. Amundsen brought four
thermometers. Scott stored one ton of food for his seventeen men.
Amundsen stored three tons. Scott stashed supplies for the return
journey in one spot marked with a single flag, meaning that if he went
even a fraction off course his team could miss it. Amundsen, by contrast,
planted twenty markers, miles apart, to ensure that his team would see
them. Roald Amundsen prepared diligently and read obsessively for his
journey, whereas Robert Falcon Scott did the bare minimum.
While Amundsen deliberately built slack and buffers into his plan,
Scott hoped for the ideal circumstances. While Scott’s men suffered from
fatigue, hunger, and frostbite, Amundsen’s team’s journey was relatively
(under the circumstances) frictionless. Amundsen successfully made the
journey. Scott and his team tragically died.
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.5
ADD 50 PERCENT TO YOUR TIME ESTIMATE
I know someone who always thinks it will take her five minutes to get to
the store because she made the journey in five minutes once. The truth is
it usually takes ten to fifteen minutes. In and of itself this would not be a
huge problem, but unfortunately it is typical of most of her estimations
in life. As a result she is perennially late and, to make matters worse, in
a constant state of stress and guilt about it. She has been stuck in this
cycle for so many years she no longer even recognizes that she lives in
constant stress. It has even affected her physically. But she still continues
to believe she can make it to the store in five minutes—or finish the
conference call in half an hour or the major report in a week, or
whatever else she is trying to squeeze in—and every once in a while she
does. But the costs are high to her and the people around her. She would
make a far greater contribution on all these rushed endeavors if she were
simply to create a buffer.
Have you ever underestimated how long a task will take? If you have,
you are far from alone. The term for this very common phenomenon is
the “planning fallacy.”6 This term, coined by Daniel Kahneman in 1979,
refers to people’s tendency to underestimate how long a task will take,
even when they have actually done the task before. In one study thirty-
seven students were asked how long they thought it would take them to
complete their senior thesis. When the students were asked to estimate
how long it would take “if everything went as well as it possibly could,”
their averaged estimate was 27.4 days. When they were asked how long
it would take “if everything went as poorly as it possibly could,” their
averaged estimate was 48.6 days. In the end the average time it actually
took the students was 55.5 days. Only 30 percent of the students
completed the task in the time they had estimated.7 Curiously, people
will admit to having a tendency to underestimate while simultaneously
believing their current estimates are accurate.8
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.
Whatever the reasons, the result is that we tend to be later than we
say we will be: later to meetings, later to deliver things at work, later in
paying our bills, and so on. Thus execution becomes frustrating when it
could have been frictionless.
One way to protect against this is simply to add a 50 percent buffer to
the amount of time we estimate it will take to complete a task or project
(if 50 percent seems overly generous, consider how frequently things
actually do take us 50 percent longer than expected). So if you have an
hour set aside for a conference call, block off an additional thirty
minutes. If you’ve estimated it will take ten minutes to get your son to
soccer practice, leave the house fifteen minutes before practice begins.
Not only does this relieve the stress we feel about being late (imagine
how much less stressful sitting in traffic would feel if we weren’t running
late), but if we do find that the task was faster and easier to execute than
we expected (though this is a rare experience for most of us), the extra
found time feels like a bonus.
CONDUCT SCENARIO PLANNING
Erwann Michel-Kerjan, the managing director of the Risk Management
and Decision Processes Center at Wharton, recommends that everyone,
starting with heads of state, develop a risk management strategy. For
example, he has worked, in connection with the World Bank, to identify
the most vulnerable countries in the world, and as a result Morocco,
identified as number 58 out of the 85, has an action plan to prepare
against areas of risk.10
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
percent 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 buffers to reduce the friction caused
by the unexpected.
CHAPTER 16
SUBTRACT
Bring Forth More by Removing Obstacles
TO ATTAIN KNOWLEDGE ADD THINGS EVERY DAY. TO ATTAIN WISDOM SUBTRACT
THINGS EVERY DAY.
—Lao-tzu
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 approach. He puts Herbie at the front
of the pack and lines up all the other boys in order of speed: slowest to
fastest. It’s counterintuitive to have the fastest person at the back of the
line, but the moment he does it the pack begins to move in a single
group. Every boy can keep up with the boy in front of him. The upside is
that he can now keep an eye on the whole group at once, and they will
all arrive at the campsite safely and at the same time. The downside is
that the whole troop is now moving at Herbie’s pace so they will arrive
late. So what should he do?
The answer, Alex finds, is to do anything and everything to make
things easier for Herbie. With the slowest boy at the front of the line, if
Herbie moves one yard an hour faster, the whole troop will get there
that much faster. That is an amazing insight to Alex. Any improvement
with Herbie, however small, will improve the pace of the whole team
immediately. So he actually takes weight out from Herbie’s backpack
(the extra food and supplies he brought with him) and distributes it
throughout the rest of the group. And indeed, this instantly improves the
speed of the whole group. They make it to camp in good time.
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.
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.
But this can’t be done in a haphazard way. Simply finding things that
need fixing here and there might lead to marginal, short-term
improvements at best; at worst, you’ll waste time and effort improving
things that don’t really matter. But if you really want to improve the
overall functioning of the system—whether that system is a
manufacturing process, a procedure in your department, or some routine
in your daily life—you need to identify the “slowest hiker.”
A Nonessentialist approaches execution in a reactive, haphazard
manner. Because the Nonessentialist is always reacting to crises rather
than anticipating them, he is forced to apply quick-fix solutions: the
equivalent to plugging his finger into the hole of a leaking dam and
hoping the whole thing doesn’t burst. Being good with a hammer, the
Nonessentialist thinks everything is a nail. Thus he applies more and
more pressure, but this ends up only adding more friction and
frustration. Indeed, in some situations the harder you push on someone
the harder he or she will push back.
Essentialists don’t default to Band-Aid solutions. Instead of looking for
the most obvious or immediate obstacles, they look for the ones slowing
down progress. They ask, “What is getting in the way of achieving what
is essential?” While the Nonessentialist is busy applying more and more
pressure and piling on more and more solutions, the Essentialist simply
makes a one-time investment in removing obstacles. This approach goes
beyond just solving problems; it’s a method of reducing your efforts to
maximize your results.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Piles on quick-fix solutions
Does more
Removes obstacles to progress
Brings forth more
Produce More by Removing More
Aristotle talked about three kinds of work, whereas in our modern world
we tend to emphasize only two. The first is theoretical work, for which
the end goal is truth. The second is practical work, where the objective is
action. But there is a third: it is poietical work.2 The philosopher Martin
Heidegger described poiesis as a “bringing-forth.”3 This third type of
work is the Essentialist way of approaching execution:
An Essentialist produces more—
brings forth more—by removing
more instead of doing more.
Often we don’t take the time to really think about which efforts will
produce results and which will not. But even when we do, it is easier to
think of execution in terms of addition rather than subtraction. If we
want to sell more products, then we get more salespeople. If we want to
produce more output, then we ramp up production. There is clearly
evidence to support this approach. However, there is another way to
think of improving results. Instead of focusing on the efforts and
resources we need to add, the Essentialist focuses on the constraints or
obstacles we need to remove. But how?
1. BE CLEAR ABOUT THE ESSENTIAL INTENT
We can’t know what obstacles to remove until we are clear on the
desired outcome. When we don’t know what we’re really trying to
achieve, all change is arbitrary. So ask yourself, “How will we know
when we are done?” For the purposes of this chapter, let’s say your goal
is to get a draft of a fifteen-page, written report attached to an e-mail
and sent to the client by 2:00 P.M. on Thursday. Note: this is deliberately
a precise outcome, not a vague one.
2. IDENTIFY THE “SLOWEST HIKER”
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. They might include: not having the information you
need, your energy level, your desire for perfection. Prioritize the list
using the question, “What is the obstacle that, if removed, would make
the majority of other obstacles disappear?”
When identifying your “slowest hiker,” one important thing to keep in
mind is that even activities that are “productive”—like doing research,
or e-mailing people for information, or rewriting the report in order to
get it perfect the first time around—can be obstacles. Remember, the
desired goal is to get a draft of the report finished. Anything slowing
down the execution of that goal should be questioned.
There are often multiple obstacles to achieving any essential intent.
However, at any one time there is only ever one priority; removing
arbitrary obstacles can have no effect whatsoever if the primary one still
doesn’t budge. To take our example, if getting words on the page is your
primary obstacle, you could hire someone to do research for you and
still be no closer to writing the aforementioned report. So just as Alex
fixes the least efficient machine first, followed by the second least
efficient, and so on—instead of trying to fix them all at once—we too
must tackle the removal of obstacles one by one.
3. REMOVE THE OBSTACLE
Let’s say your “slowest hiker” turns out to be your desire to make the
report perfect. There may be dozens of ideas you have to make the
report better, but in this case your essential intent is to send off the
draft. So to remove the obstacle you need to replace the idea “This has
to be perfect or else” with “Done is better than perfect.” Give yourself
permission to not have it polished in the first draft. By removing the
primary obstacle you have made every other aspect of the job easier.
The “slowest hiker” could even be another person—whether it’s a boss
who won’t give the green light on a project, the finance department who
won’t approve the budget, or a client who won’t sign on the dotted line.
To reduce the friction with another person, apply the “catch more flies
with honey” approach. Send him an e-mail, but instead of asking if he
has done the work for you (which obviously he hasn’t), go and see him.
Ask him, “What obstacles or bottlenecks are holding you back from
achieving X, and how can I help remove these?” Instead of pestering
him, offer sincerely to support him. You will get a warmer reply than
you would by just e-mailing him another demand.
When our children were really little and I was at graduate school, my
wife was feeling strained by the demands of looking after the children all
day every day, and didn’t know quite what to do about it. I was reading
about the Theory of Constraints at the time so it was particularly on my
mind. As we applied the steps above, we realized the primary obstacle
keeping her from making her highest point of contribution in our
children’s lives was a lack of time to plan, think, and prepare; after all,
with three little children it was nearly impossible to have uninterrupted
time. So we worked to remove this obstacle. I opted out of many of the
extracurricular activities to be home in the evenings and we found
someone who would look after the children for a few hours during the
week. As a result, we were able to be more fully engaged and present
during the time we spent with our children. In other words, we both
actually ended up doing less, but better.
Removing obstacles does not have to be hard or take a superhuman
effort. Instead, we can start small. It’s kind of like dislodging a boulder
at the top of a hill. All it takes is a small shove, then momentum will
naturally build.
CHAPTER 17
PROGRESS
The Power of Small Wins
EVERY DAY DO SOMETHING THAT WILL INCH YOU CLOSER TO A BETTER TOMORROW.
—Doug Firebaugh
Think of the last time you were pulled over by the police while driving.
Did you wonder to yourself: “Is this going to be a good ticket or a bad
one?” Not likely. Everyone knows tickets are all bad, right? Yet at least
one innovative police precinct in Richmond, Canada, thinks this is an
assumption that ought to be challenged.1
There is a well-established approach to cracking down on crime: pass
new and harsher laws, set stronger sentencing, or initiate zero-tolerance
initiatives. In other words, do more of what we already do—only more
forcefully. For years, the Richmond Police Department followed these
core and long-held practices of policing systems everywhere and
experienced the typical results: recidivism rates at 65 percent and
spiraling youth crime. That is, until a young, forward-thinking new
superintendent, Ward Clapham, came in and challenged them.2 Why, he
asked, do all of our policing efforts have to be so reactive, so negative,
and so after the fact? What if, instead of just focusing on catching
criminals—and serving up ever harsher punishments—after they
committed the crime, the police devoted significant resources and effort
to eliminating criminal behavior before it happens? To quote Tony Blair,
what if they could be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of
crime?3
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 as simple as throwing litter away in a bin rather than
on the ground, wearing a helmet while riding their bike, skateboarding
in the designated area, or getting to school on time—and would give
them a ticket for positive behavior. The ticket, of course, wouldn’t carry a
fine like a parking ticket but instead would be redeemable for some kind
of small reward, like free entry to the movies or to an event at a local
youth center—wholesome activities that also had the bonus of keeping
the young people off the streets and out of trouble.
So how well did Richmond’s unconventional effort to reimagine
policing work? Amazingly well, as it turned out. It took some time, but
they invested in the approach as a long-term strategy, and after a decade
the Positive Tickets system had reduced recidivism from 60 percent to 8
percent.
You might not think of a police department as a place where you
would expect to see Essentialism at work, but in fact Ward’s system of
Positive Tickets is a lesson in the practice of effortless execution.
The way of the Nonessentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do
it all, have it all, fit it all in. The Nonessentialist operates under the false
logic that the more he strives, the more he will achieve, but the reality
is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off
the ground.
The way of the Essentialist is different. Instead of trying to accomplish
it all—and all at once—and flaring out, the Essentialist starts small and
celebrates progress. Instead of going for the big, flashy wins that don’t
really matter, the Essentialist pursues small and simple wins in areas that
are essential.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Starts with a big goal and gets small
results
Goes for the flashiest wins
Starts small and gets big
results
Celebrates small acts of
progress
By catching and rewarding people in the midst of “small wins,” Ward
Clapham’s approach tapped into the power of celebrating progress. In
one moving example, a police officer pulled over a teenager who had
saved a girl from being hit by a car, gave him a Positive Ticket, and said:
“You did a great thing today. You can make a difference.” The boy went
home and put the Positive Ticket on his wall. After a few weeks his
foster mother asked him whether he was going to cash it in. To her
surprise he said he never would. An adult had told him he could be
somebody, and that was worth more than free pizza or bowling.
Multiply that type of positive interaction by forty thousand times a
year for ten years and you can sense why it started to make a difference.
Each time a young person was recognized and commended for doing
something good, he or she was that much more motivated to continue
doing good until, eventually, doing good became natural and effortless.
When we want to create major change we often think we need to lead
with something huge or grandiose, like the executive I knew who
announced with great fanfare that he had decided to build his daughters
an elaborate dollhouse—but then, because his visions for it were so large
and ambitious, abandoned the project as too burdensome. There is an
appealing logic to this: that to do something big we have to start big.
However, just think of all of the “big,” hyped-up initiatives in
organizations that never ended up amounting to anything—just like that
executive’s dollhouse.
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.4 More recently, 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.5
Instead of starting big and then flaring out with nothing to show for it
other than time and energy wasted, to really get essential things done we
need to start small and build momentum. Then we can use that
momentum to work toward the next win, and the next one and so on
until we have a significant breakthrough—and when we do, our progress
will have become so frictionless and effortless that the breakthrough will
seem like overnight success. As former Stanford professor and educator
Henry B. Eyring has written, “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.”6
When I met Dr. Phil Zimbardo, the former president of the American
Psychological Association, for lunch, I knew him primarily as the
mastermind behind the famous Stanford prison experiment.7 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 to gradually adopt these negative behaviors, could the same
kind of conditioning work for more positive behavior 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.
We have a choice. We can use our energies to set up a system that
makes execution of goodness easy, or we can resign ourselves to a
system that actually makes it harder to do what is good. Ward’s Positive
Tickets system did the former, and it worked. We can apply the same
principle to the choices we face when designing systems in our own
lives.
My wife Anna and I have tried to apply these ideas to our system of
parenting. At one point, we had become concerned with how much
screen time had crept into our family. Between television, computers,
tablets, and smart phones it had become just too easy for the children to
waste time on nonessential entertainment. But our attempts to get them
to change these habits, as you can imagine, were met with friction. The
children would complain whenever we turned the TV off or tried to limit
their “screen time.” And we as the parents had to consciously police the
situation, which took us away from doing things that were essential.
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.
We can all create systems like this both at home and at work. The key
is to start small, encourage progress, and celebrate small wins. Here are
a few techniques.
FOCUS ON MINIMAL VIABLE PROGRESS
A popular idea in Silicon Valley is “Done is better than perfect.”10 The
sentiment is not that we should produce rubbish. The idea, as I read it, is
not to waste time on nonessentials and just to get the thing done. In
entrepreneurial circles the idea is expressed as creating a “minimal
viable product.”11 The idea is, “What is the simplest possible product
that will be useful and valuable to the intended customer?”
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?” I
used this practice in writing this book. 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.
It is the process Pixar uses on their movies. Instead of starting with a
script, they start with storyboards—or what have been described as the
comic book version of a movie. They try ideas out and see what works.
They do this in small cycles hundreds of times. Then they put out a
movie to small groups of people to give them advance feedback. This
allows them to learn as quickly as possible with as little effort as
possible. As John Lasseter, the chief creative officer at Pixar and now
Disney, said, “We don’t actually finish our films, we release them.”12
DO THE MINIMAL VIABLE PREPARATION
There are two opposing ways to approach an important goal or deadline.
You can start early and small or start late and big. “Late and big” means
doing it all at the last minute: pulling an all-nighter and “making it
happen.” “Early and small” means starting at the earliest possible
moment with the minimal possible time investment.
Often just ten minutes invested in a project or assignment two weeks
before it is due can save you much frantic and stressed-out scrambling at
the eleventh hour. Take a goal or deadline you have coming up and ask
yourself, “What is the minimal amount I could do right now to prepare?”
One leader who is an exceptionally inspiring speaker has explained
that the key for him is to start to prepare his big speeches six months
before he does them. He isn’t preparing the entire speech; he just starts.
If you have a big presentation coming up over the next few weeks or
months, open a file right now and spend four minutes starting to put
down any ideas. Then close the file. No more than four minutes. Just
start it.
A colleague in New York uses a simple hack: whenever she schedules a
meeting or phone call, she takes exactly fifteen seconds to type up the
main objectives for that meeting, so on the morning of the meeting when
she sits down to prepare talking points she can refer to them. She doesn’t
need to plan the whole meeting agenda. Just a few seconds of early
preparation pay a valuable dividend.
VISUALLY REWARD PROGRESS
Do you remember when you were five years old and your school held a
fund-raiser? Remember the big thermometer that visually showed the
progress the school was making toward the goal? Can you remember
how exciting and motivating it was to watch the level of the
thermometer go up each day? Or perhaps your parents had a star chart
for you. Every time you ate your spinach, or went to bed on time, or
cleaned your room you got a star, and pretty soon you were doing those
things virtually without any prodding.
There is something powerful about visibly seeing progress toward a
goal. Don’t be above applying the same technique to your own essential
goals, at home or at work.
When we start small and reward progress, we end up achieving more
than when we set big, lofty, and often impossible goals. And as a bonus,
the act of positively reinforcing our successes allows us to reap more
enjoyment and satisfaction out of the process.
CHAPTER 18
FLOW
The Genius of Routine
ROUTINE, IN AN INTELLIGENT MAN, IS A SIGN OF AMBITION.
—W. H. Auden
For years before the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps won the gold at
the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he followed the same routine at every race.
He arrived two hours early.1 He stretched and loosened up, according to
a precise pattern: eight hundred mixer, fifty freestyle, six hundred
kicking with kickboard, four hundred pulling a buoy, and more. After
the warm-up he would dry off, put in his earphones, and sit—never lie
down—on the massage table. From that moment, he and his coach, Bob
Bowman, wouldn’t speak a word to each other until after the race was
over.
At forty-five minutes before the race he would put on his race suit. At
thirty minutes he would get into the warm-up pool and do six hundred
to eight hundred meters. With ten minutes to go he would walk to the
ready room. He would find a seat alone, never next to anyone. He liked
to keep the seats on both sides of him clear for his things: goggles on one
side and his towel on the other. When his race was called he would walk
to the blocks. There he would do what he always did: two stretches, first
a straight-leg stretch and then with a bent knee. Left leg first every time.
Then the right earbud would come out. When his name was called, he
would take out the left earbud. He would step onto the block—always
from the left side. He would dry the block—every time. Then he would
stand and flap his arms in such a way that his hands hit his back.
Phelps explains: “It’s just a routine. My routine. It’s the routine I’ve
gone through my whole life. I’m not going to change it.” And that is
that. His coach, Bob Bowman, designed this physical routine with
Phelps. But that’s not all. He also gave Phelps a routine for what to think
about as he went to sleep and first thing when he awoke. He called it
“Watching the Videotape.”2 There was no actual tape, of course. The
“tape” was a visualization of the perfect race. In exquisite detail and
slow motion Phelps would visualize every moment from his starting
position on top of the blocks, through each stroke, until he emerged
from the pool, victorious, with water dripping off his face.
Phelps didn’t do this mental routine occasionally. He did it every day
before he went to bed and every day when he woke up—for years. When
Bob wanted to challenge him in practices he would shout, “Put in the
videotape!” and Phelps would push beyond his limits. Eventually the
mental routine was so deeply ingrained that Bob barely had to whisper
the phrase, “Get the videotape ready,” before a race. Phelps was always
ready to “hit play.”
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.”3
As we all know, Phelps won the record eight gold medals at the 2008
Beijing Olympics. When visiting Beijing, years after Phelps’s
breathtaking accomplishment, I couldn’t help but think about how
Phelps and the other Olympians make all these feats of amazing
athleticism seem so effortless. Of course Olympic athletes arguably
practice longer and train harder than any other athletes in the world—
but when they get in that pool, or on that track, or onto that rink, they
make it look positively easy. It’s more than just a natural extension of
their training. It’s a testament to the genius of the right routine.
The way of the Nonessentialist is to think the essentials only get done
when they are forced. That execution is a matter of raw effort alone. You
labor to make it happen. You push through.
The way of the Essentialist is different. The Essentialist designs a
routine that makes achieving what you have identified as essential the
default position. Yes, in some instances an Essentialist still has to work
hard, but with the right routine in place each effort yields exponentially
greater results.
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
Makes the essential the default position
Making It Look Easy
Routine is one of the most powerful tools for removing obstacles.
Without routine, the pull of nonessential distractions will overpower us.
But if we create a routine that enshrines the essentials, we will begin to
execute them on autopilot. Instead of our consciously pursuing the
essential, it will happen without our having to think about it. We won’t
have to expend precious energy every day prioritizing everything. We
must simply expend a small amount of initial energy to create the
routine, and then all that is left to do is follow it.
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
A similar process explains how when we drive from point A to point B
every day we can eventually make the journey without consciously
thinking about it, or why once we’ve cooked the same meal a few times
we no longer have to consult the recipe, or why any mental task gets
easier and easier each time we attempt it. With repetition the routine is
mastered and the activity becomes second nature.
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.
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.”5
To some, routine can sound like where creativity and innovation go to
die—the ultimate exercise in boredom. We even use the word as a
synonym for pallid and bland, as in “It has just become routine for me.”
And routines can indeed become this—the wrong routines. But the right
routines can actually enhance innovation and creativity by giving us the
equivalent of an energy rebate. Instead of spending our limited supply of
discipline on making the same decisions again and again, embedding our
decisions into our routine allows us to channel that discipline toward
some other essential activity.
The work Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has done on creativity
demonstrates how highly creative people use strict routines to free up
their minds. “Most creative individuals find out early what their best
rhythms are for sleeping, eating, and working, and abide by them even
when it is tempting to do otherwise,” Mihaly says. “They wear clothes
that are comfortable, they interact only with people they find congenial,
they do only things they think are important. Of course, such
idiosyncrasies are not endearing to those they have to deal with.… But
personalizing patterns of action helps to free the mind from the
expectations that make demands on attention and allows intense
concentration on matters that count.”6
One CEO in one of Silicon Valley’s most innovative companies has
what at first glance would seem like a boring, creativity-killing routine.
He holds a three-hour meeting that starts at 9:00 A.M. one day a week. It
is never missed. It is never rescheduled at a different time. It is
mandatory—so much so that even in this global firm all the executives
know never to schedule any travel that will conflict with the meeting. If
it is 9:00 A.M. on Monday, every person will be there. It is a discipline. At
first blush there is nothing particularly unique about this. But what is
unique is the quality of ideas that come out of this regular meeting.
Because the CEO has eliminated the mental cost involved in planning the
meeting or thinking about who will or won’t be there, people can focus
on the creative problem solving. And indeed, his team makes coming up
with creative, inventive ideas and solutions look natural and easy.
The Power of the Right Routine
According to researchers at Duke University, nearly 40 percent of our
choices are deeply unconscious.7 We don’t think about them in the usual
sense. There is both danger and opportunity in this. The opportunity is
that we can develop new abilities that eventually become instinctive.
The danger is that we may develop routines that are counterproductive.
Without being fully aware, we can get caught in nonessential habits—
like checking our e-mail the second we get out of bed every morning, or
picking up a doughnut on the way home from work each day, or
spending our lunch hour trolling the Internet instead of using the time to
think, reflect, recharge, or connect with friends and colleagues. So how
can we discard the routines that keep us locked in nonessential habits
and replace them with routines that make executing essentials almost
effortless?
OVERHAUL YOUR TRIGGERS
Most of us have a behavioral habit we want to change, whether it’s to
eat less junk food, waste less time, or worry less. But when we try, we
find that changing even the simplest, tiniest habit is amazingly,
disturbingly hard. There seems to be a gravitational force pulling us
inexorably back to the warm embrace of those French fries, that Web
site with the pictures of the goofy cats, or the spiral of worry about
things outside our control. How do we resist the powerful pull of these
habits?
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.”8
What this means is that if we want to change our routine, we don’t
really need to change the behavior. Rather, we need to find the cue that
is triggering the nonessential activity or behavior and find a way to
associate that same cue with something that is essential. So, for example,
if the bakery you pass on the way home from work triggers you to pick
up a doughnut, next time you pass by that bakery, use that cue to
remind you to pick up a salad from the deli across the street. Or if your
alarm clock going off in the morning triggers you to check your e-mail,
use it as a cue to get up and read instead. At first, overcoming the
temptation to stop at the bakery or check the e-mail will be difficult. But
each time you execute the new behavior—each time you pick up the
salad—strengthens the link in your brain between the cue and the new
behavior, and soon, you’ll be subconsciously and automatically performing
the new routine.
CREATE NEW TRIGGERS
If the goal is to create some behavioral change, we’re not just confined
to our existing cues; we can create brand-new ones to trigger the
execution of some essential routine. I used this technique to develop the
daily routine of writing in a journal, and it worked wonders for me. For
a long time I wrote in my journal only sporadically. I would put it off all
day; then at night I would rationalize, “I will do it in the morning.” But
inevitably I wouldn’t, and then by the next night I had two days’ worth
to write and it was overwhelming. So I put it off again. And so on. Then
I heard someone say he had developed a routine of writing a few lines at
the exact same time each day. This seemed like a manageable habit, but
I knew that I would need some cue reminding me to write at the
specified time each day or I would continue to put it off as I’d been
doing. So I started putting my journal in my bag right next to my phone.
That way, when I pull my phone out of my bag to charge it each evening
(already a well-established habit) I see the journal, and this cues me to
write in it. Now it is instinctive. Natural. I look forward to it. It has been
ten years now and I have almost never missed a day.
DO THE MOST DIFFICULT THING FIRST
Ray Zinn is the founder and CEO of Micrel, a semiconductor business in
Silicon Valley. He is a contrarian in lots of ways. He is seventy-five years
old in an industry and city that usually celebrates twenty-year-old
college dropouts. In 1978 he and his business partner invested $300,000
to launch the company and it has been profitable every single year, since
inception (except for one year when they consolidated two
manufacturing facilities). Since going public, their stock price has never
fallen below its IPO price. Ray credits this success to their highly
disciplined focus on profitability. He has led the company as CEO for
thirty-five years, and throughout that period Ray has followed an
extraordinarily consistent routine. He wakes up at 5:30 A.M. every single
morning, including Saturday and Sunday (as he’s done for more than
fifty years). He then exercises for an hour. He eats breakfast at 7:30 A.M.
and arrives at work at 8:15 A.M. Dinner is at 6:30 P.M. with his family.
Bedtime is 10:00 P.M. But what really enables Ray to operate at his
highest level of contribution is that throughout the day, his routine is
governed by a single rule: “Focus on the hardest thing first.” After all, as
Ray said to me: “We already have too much to think about. Why not
eliminate some of them by establishing a routine?”
Use the tips above to develop a routine of doing your hardest task in
the day first thing in the morning. Find a cue—whether it’s that first
glass of orange juice you have at your desk, or an alarm you set on your
cell phone, or anything you’re already accustomed to doing first thing in
the morning—to trigger you to sit down and focus on your hardest thing.
MIX UP YOUR ROUTINES
It’s true that doing the same things at the same time, day after day, can
get boring. To avoid this kind of routine fatigue, there’s no reason why
you can’t have different routines for different days of the week. Jack
Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter and founder of Square, has an
interesting approach to his weekly routine. He has divided up his week
into themes. Monday is for management meetings and “running the
company” work. Tuesday is for product development. Wednesday is for
marketing, communications, and growth. Thursday is for developers and
partnerships. Friday is for the company and its culture.9 This routine
helps to provide calmness amid the chaos of a high-growth start-up. It
enables him to focus his energy on a single theme each day instead of
feeling pulled into everything. He adheres to this routine each week, no
exceptions, and over time people learn this about him and can organize
meetings and requests around it.
TACKLE YOUR ROUTINES ONE BY ONE
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.
I don’t want to imply that any of this is easy. Many of our nonessential
routines are deep and emotional. They have been formed in the furnace
of some strong emotions. The idea that we can just snap our fingers and
replace them with a new one is naive. Learning essential new skills is
never easy. But once we master them and make them automatic we have
won an enormous victory, because the skill remains with us for the rest
of our lives. The same is true with routines. Once they are in place they
are gifts that keep on giving.
CHAPTER 19
FOCUS
What’s Important Now?
LIFE IS AVAILABLE ONLY IN THE PRESENT MOMENT. IF YOU
ABANDON THE PRESENT MOMENT YOU CANNOT LIVE THE
MOMENTS OF YOUR DAILY LIFE DEEPLY.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Larry Gelwix coached the Highland High School rugby team to 418 wins
with only ten losses and twenty national championships over thirty-six
years. He describes his success this way: “We always win.” With a record
like Highland’s he has the right to make the statement. But he is actually
referring to something more than his winning record. When he says,
“win,” he’s also referring to a single question, with its apt acronym, that
guides what he expects from his players: “What’s important now?”
By keeping his players fully present in the moment and fully focused
on what is most important—not on next week’s match, or tomorrow’s
practice, or the next play, but now—Gelwix helps make winning almost
effortless. But how?
First, the players apply the question constantly throughout the game.
Instead of getting caught up rehashing the last play that went wrong, or
spending their mental energy worrying about whether they are going to
lose the game, neither of which is helpful or constructive, Larry
encourages them to focus only on the play they are in right now.
Second, the question “What’s important now?” helps them stay
focused on how they are playing. Larry believes a huge part of winning is
determined by whether the players are focused on their own game or on
their opponent’s game. If the players start thinking about the other team
they lose focus. Consciously or not, they start wanting to play the way
the other team is playing. They get distracted and divided. By focusing
on their game in the here and now, they can all unite around a single
strategy. This level of unity makes execution of their game plan
relatively frictionless.
Indeed, Larry has a fundamentally Essentialist approach to winning
and losing. As he tells his players: “There is a difference between losing
and being beaten. Being beaten means they are better than you. They are
faster, stronger, and more talented.” To Larry, losing means something
else. It means you lost focus. It means you didn’t concentrate on what
was essential. It is all based on a simple but powerful idea: to operate at
your highest level of contribution requires that you deliberately tune in
to what is important in the here and now.
There Is Only Now
Think about how this might apply in your own life. Have you ever
become trapped reliving past mistakes … over and over like a video
player, stuck on endless replay? Do you spend time and energy worrying
about the future? Do you spend more time thinking about the things you
can’t control rather than the things you can control about the areas
where your efforts matter? Do you ever find yourself busy trying to
mentally prepare for the next meeting, or the next assignment, or the
next chapter in your life, rather than being fully present in the current
one? It’s natural and human to obsess over past mistakes or feel stress
about what may be ahead of us. Yet every second spent worrying about
a past or future moment distracts us from what is important in the here
and now.
The ancient Greeks had two words for time. The first was chronos. The
second was kairos. The Greek god Chronos was imagined as an elderly,
gray-haired man, and his name connotes the literal ticking clock, the
chronological time, the kind we measure (and race about trying to use
efficiently). Kairos is different. While it is difficult to translate precisely,
it refers to time that is opportune, right, different. Chronos is
quantitative; kairos is qualitative. The latter is experienced only when we
are fully in the moment—when we exist in the now.
It is mind-bending to consider that in practical terms we only ever
have now. We can’t control the future in a literal sense, just the now. Of
course, we learn from the past and can imagine the future. Yet only in
the here and now can we actually execute on the things that really
matter.
Nonessentialists 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.
Nonessentialist Essentialist
Mind is spinning out about the past or the
future
Thinks about what was important
yesterday or tomorrow
Worries about the future or stresses about
the past
Mind is focused on the
present
Tunes in to what is important
right now
Enjoys the moment
Recently Anna and I met for lunch in the middle of a busy workday.
Usually when we meet for lunch we’re so busy catching each other up on
the events of our mornings or planning the activities for the evening that
we forget to enjoy the act of having lunch together in the here and now.
So this time, as the food arrived, Anna suggested an experiment: we
should focus only on the moment. No rehashing our morning meetings,
no talking about who would pick up the children from karate or what
we’d cook for dinner that night. We should eat slowly and deliberately,
fully focused on the present. I was totally game for it.
As I slowly took my first bite something happened. I noticed my
breathing. Then without conscious intent I found it slowing. Suddenly,
time itself felt as if it was moving slower. Instead of feeling as if my
body was in one place and my mind was in five other places, I felt as
though both my mind and my body were fully there.
The sensation stayed with me into the afternoon, where I noticed
another change. Instead of being interrupted by distracting thoughts, I
was able to give my full concentration to my work. Because I was calm
and present on the tasks at hand, each one flowed naturally. Instead of
my usual state of having my mental energies split and scattered across
many competing subjects, my state was one of being focused on the
subject that was most important in the present. Getting my work done
not only became more effortless but actually gave me joy. In this case,
what was good for the mind was also good for the soul.
Jiro Ono is the world’s greatest sushi chef and the subject of the movie
Jiro Dreams of Sushi, directed by David Geld.1 At eighty-five years of age,
he has been making sushi for decades, and indeed for him the art of
making sushi has become nearly effortless. Yet his isn’t simply the story
of how practice and experience lead to mastery. Watching him work,
you see someone entirely in the moment.
Essentialists live their whole lives in this manner. And because they
do, they can apply their full energy to the job at hand. They don’t diffuse
their efforts with distractions. They know that execution is easy if you
work hard at it and hard if you work easy at it.
Multitasking Versus Multifocusing
I ran into a former classmate of mine years after graduating from
Stanford. I was on campus doing some work on a computer in one of the
offices when he came over to me to say hi. After a minute of pleasantries
he told me he was in between jobs. He explained a little about the job he
was looking for and asked if I could help him. I started asking him some
questions to see how I could be helpful to him, but twenty seconds into
the conversation he got a text on his phone. Without saying a word, he
looked down and started responding to it. I did what I typically do when
that happens. I paused and waited.
Ten seconds went by. Then twenty. I simply stood there as he
continued to text away furiously. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t
acknowledge me. Out of curiosity I waited to see how long it would go
on. But after two full minutes, which is quite a lot of time when you are
standing waiting for someone, I gave up, walked back to my desk, and
went back to my work. After another five minutes he became present
again, interrupting me for the second time. Now he wanted to resume
the conversation, to ask for help with his job search again. Initially I had
been ready to recommend him for a job opening I knew of, but after this
incident I admit to feeling hesitant about recommending him for an
interview where he might suddenly not be present: he’d be present in
body, perhaps, but not in mind.
At this point you might expect me to start talking about the evils of
multitasking—about how a true Essentialist never attempts to do more
than one thing at a time. But in fact we can easily do two things at the
same time: wash the dishes and listen to the radio, eat and talk, clear the
clutter on our desk while thinking about where to go for lunch, text
message while watching television, and so on.
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.
How to Be in the Now
What can we do to be fully present on what is in front of us? Below are
some simple techniques to consider.
FIGURE OUT WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT RIGHT NOW
Recently I had taught a full day on Essentialism to an executive team in
New York. I had thoroughly enjoyed the day and had felt present
throughout. But by the time I returned to my room I felt a sudden pull in
a million directions. Everything around me was a reminder of all of the
things I could be doing: check my e-mail, listen to messages, read a book
I felt obligated to read, prepare the presentation for a few weeks from
now, record interesting ideas that had grown out of the day’s
experiences, and more. It wasn’t just the sheer number of things that felt
overwhelming, it was that familiar stress of many tasks vying for top
billing at the same time. As I felt the anxiety and tension rise I stopped. I
knelt down. I closed my eyes and asked, “What’s important now?” After
a moment of reflection I realized that until I knew what was important
right now, what was important right now was to figure out what was
important right now!
I stood up. I tidied up. I put all of the objects strewn around me away,
in their proper place, so they wouldn’t distract me and pressure me to do
their bidding every time I walked by. I turned off my phone. It was such
a relief to have a barrier between me and someone’s ability to text me. I
opened my journal and wrote about the day. It centered me. I wrote a
list in pencil of all the things on my mind. Then I clarified this by asking,
“What do you need to do to be able to go to sleep peacefully?” What was
essential, I decided, was to connect with my wife and children. Then it
was to do just those few things that would make the first few hours of
the next morning as effortless as possible: schedule a wake-up call and
breakfast in the room; get my slides loaded on the computer; iron my
shirt. I crossed off the things that were not important right then.
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.
GET THE FUTURE OUT OF YOUR HEAD
Getting the future out of your head enables you to more fully focus on
“what is important now.” In this case, my next step was to sit down and
list those things that might have been essential—just not right now. So I
opened to another page in my journal. This time, I asked myself, “What
might you want to do someday as a result of today?” This was not a list
of firm commitments, just a way to get all of the ideas out of my head
and on paper. This had two purposes. First, it ensured I wouldn’t forget
about those ideas, which might prove useful later. Second, it alleviated
that stressful and distracting feeling that I needed to act upon them right
this second.
PRIORITIZE
After this I prioritized each list. Then I worked on each item on the
“what is essential now” list one at a time. I just calmly worked through
the list and erased each item when it was complete. By the time I went
to sleep I had not only done all the things that needed to be executed at
that moment, but I had executed them better and faster, because I was
focused.
The Pause That Refreshes
Jeffrey A. Rodgers, an executive vice president at Cornish & Carey
Commercial/Newmark Knight Frank, was once taught the simple idea of
pausing to refresh. It began when Jeff realized that as he drove home
from work each evening his mind was still focused on work-related
projects. We all know this feeling. We may have left the office
physically, but we are very much still there mentally, as our minds get
caught in the endless loop of replaying the events of today and worrying
about all the things we need to get done the following day.
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.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk who has been
called the “world’s calmest man,” has spent a lifetime exploring how to
live in kairos, albeit by a different name. He has taught it as mindfulness
or maintaining “beginner’s mind.” He has written: “Mindfulness helps
you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize
a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.”2
This focus on being in the moment affects the way he does everything.
He takes a full hour to drink a cup of tea with the other monks every
day. He explains: “Suppose you are drinking a cup of tea. When you hold
your cup, you may like to breathe in, to bring your mind back to your
body, and you become fully present. And when you are truly there,
something else is also there—life, represented by the cup of tea. In that
moment you are real, and the cup of tea is real. You are not lost in the
past, in the future, in your projects, in your worries. You are free from
all of these afflictions. And in that state of being free, you enjoy your
tea. That is the moment of happiness, and of peace.”
Pay attention through the day for your own kairos moments. Write
them down in your journal. Think about what triggered that moment
and what brought you out of it. Now that you know what triggers the
moment, try to re-create it.
Training yourself to tune into kairos will not only enable you to
achieve a higher level of contribution but also make you happier.
CHAPTER 20
BE
The Essentialist Life
BEWARE THE BARRENNESS OF A BUSY LIFE.
—Socrates
It all began while he was studying to become a barrister in England.
With a wealthy family and good professional prospects, the future
looked bright. Every day he woke up with a sense of certainty. He was
clear on his main objective: to prepare to become a professional in law
and then make a comfortable living. But then he took the opportunity to
go on a journey around the world and everything changed.
Mohandas K. Gandhi went to South Africa and saw oppression there.
Suddenly, he found a higher purpose: the liberation of the oppressed
everywhere.
With this new singleness of purpose, he eliminated everything else
from his life. He called the process “reducing himself to zero.”1 He
dressed in his own homespun cloth (khadi) and inspired his followers to
do the same. He spent three years not reading any newspapers because
he found that their contents added only nonessential confusion to his
life. He spent thirty-five years experimenting with simplifying his diet.2
He spent a day each week without speaking. It would be an
understatement to say he eschewed consumerism: when he died he
owned fewer than ten items.
More importantly, of course, he devoted his life to helping the people
of India gain independence. He intentionally never held a political
position of any kind, yet he became, officially within India, the “Father
of the Nation.” But his contribution extended well beyond India. As
General George C. Marshall, the American secretary of state, said on the
occasion of Gandhi’s passing: “Mahatma Gandhi had become the
spokesman for the conscience of mankind, a man who made humility
and simple truth more powerful than empires.”3 And Albert Einstein
added: “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this
ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”4
It is impossible to argue with the statement that Gandhi lived a life
that really mattered.
Of course, we don’t have to try to replicate Gandhi to benefit from his
example as someone who lived, fully and completely, as an Essentialist.
We can all purge our lives of the nonessential and embrace the way of
the Essentialist—in our own ways, and in our own time, and on our own
scale. We can all live a life not just of simplicity but of high contribution
and meaning.
Living Essentially
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.
Essentialism has deep roots in many spiritual and religious traditions.
Gautama Buddha left his life as a prince to seek the ascetic life. This led
him to his enlightenment and the birth of Buddhism. Likewise, Judaism
grew out of the story of Moses leaving his opulent life as an adopted
prince in Egypt to live in the wilderness as a sheepherder. It was there
he encountered the burning bush and discovered his essential mission to
bring the Israelites out of bondage. The Prophet Muhammad lived an
essential life that included mending his own shoes and clothes and
milking his own goat and taught his followers in Islam to do the same.
John the Baptist, too, had the epitome of a simple lifestyle—living in the
desert, wearing camel hair clothes, and eating off the land. Christian
groups such as Quakers also maintained a staunchly Essentialist element
to their faith: for example, they practiced “the Testimony of Simplicity,”
in which they committed to a life of only what was essential. And of
course Jesus lived as carpenter and then in his ministry lived without
wealth, political position, or material belongings.
We can see the philosophy of “less but better” reflected in the lives of
other notable and diverse figures—both religious and secular—
throughout history: to name a few, the Dalai Lama, Steve Jobs, Leo
Tolstoy, Michael Jordan, Warren Buffett, Mother Teresa, and Henry
David Thoreau (who wrote, “I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing
as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must
attend to in a day; … so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the
necessary and the real”).5
Indeed, we can find Essentialists among the most successful people in
every type of human endeavor. These include religious leaders,
journalists, politicians, lawyers, doctors, investors, athletes, authors,
artists. These people make their greatest contribution in many different
ways. But they share one trait: they don’t just give lip service to the idea
of “less but better.” They have deliberately chosen to fully embrace the way
of the Essentialist.
Regardless of what job, field, or industry we are in, we can all choose
to do the same.
Hopefully, at this point in the book, you’ve learned and absorbed all
the core tenets and skills of an Essentialist. In this chapter, it’s time to
take that final step and learn how to use those skills not just to practice
Essentialism occasionally but to become a true Essentialist.
MAJORING IN MINOR ACTIVITIES
There is a big difference between being a Nonessentialist who happens
to apply Essentialist practices and an Essentialist who only occasionally
slips back into some Nonessentialist practices. The question is, “Which is
your major and which is your minor?” Most of us have a little
Essentialist and a little Nonessentialist in us, but the question is, Which
are you at the core?
People with Essentialism at their core get far more from their
investment than those who absorb it only at the surface level. Indeed,
the benefits become cumulative. Every choice we make to pursue the
essential and eliminate the nonessential builds on itself, making that
choice more and more habitual until it becomes virtually second nature.
With time, that inner core expands outwards until it has all but eclipsed
the part of us still mired in the nonessential.
It is easy to get caught up in the “paradox of success” we discussed in
chapter 1. We have clarity of purpose, which leads us to success. But
with our success we get new options and opportunities. This sounds like
a good thing, but remember, these options unintentionally distract us,
tempt us, lure us away. Our clarity becomes clouded, and soon we find
ourselves spread too thin. Now, instead of being utilized at our highest
level of contribution, we make only a millimeter of progress in a million
directions. Ultimately, our success becomes a catalyst for our failure. The
only way out of this cycle is the way of the Essentialist.
But the way of the Essentialist isn’t just about success; it’s about living
a life of meaning and purpose. When we look back on our careers and
our lives, would we rather see a long laundry list of “accomplishments”
that don’t really matter or just a few major accomplishments that have
real meaning and significance?
If you allow yourself to fully embrace Essentialism—to really live it, in
everything you do, whether at home or at work—it can become a part of
the way you see and understand the world. You can change your
thinking so deeply that the practices of Essentialism we have discussed,
and many others you will develop, become natural and instinctive:
As these ideas become
emotionally true, they take on
the power to change you.
The Greeks had a word, metanoia, that refers to a transformation of
the heart. We tend to think of transformations as happening only in the
mind. But as the proverb goes, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he”
(italics added).6 Once the essence of Essentialism enters our hearts, the
way of the Essentialist becomes who we are. We become a different,
better version of ourselves.
Once you become an Essentialist, you will find that you aren’t like
everybody else. When other people are saying yes, you will find yourself
saying no. When other people are doing, you will find yourself thinking.
When other people are speaking, you will find yourself listening. When
other people are in the spotlight, vying for attention, you will find
yourself waiting on the sidelines until it is time to shine. While other
people are padding their résumés and building out their LinkedIn
profiles, you will be building a career of meaning. While other people
are complaining (read: bragging) about how busy they are, you will just
be smiling sympathetically, unable to relate. While other people are
living a life of stress and chaos, you will be living a life of impact and
fulfillment. In many ways, to live as an Essentialist in our too-manythings-all-the-time society is an act of quiet revolution.
Living fully as an Essentialist isn’t always easy. In many ways, I still
struggle with it myself. I still instinctively want to please people when
they ask me to do something, even something I know is Nonessential.
When presented with opportunities—especially good opportunities—I
still fall into thinking, “I can do both” when I really can’t. I still fight the
urge to impulsively check my phone; on my worst days I have wondered
if my tombstone will read, “He checked e-mail.” I’ll be the first to admit,
the transition doesn’t happen overnight.
Still, over time I have found it gets easier and easier. Saying no feels
less uncomfortable. Decisions get much clearer. Eliminating the
Nonessentials becomes more natural and instinctive. I feel greater
control of my choices, to the point that my life is different. If you open
your heart and mind to embrace Essentialism fully, these things will
become true for you as well.
Today Essentialism is not just something I do. An Essentialist is
something I am steadily becoming. At first it was a few deliberate
choices, then it grew into a lifestyle, and then it changed me, at my very
core. I continue to discover almost daily that I can do less and less—in
order to contribute more.
What being an Essentialist means to me is best illustrated in the little
moments. It means:
• Choosing to wrestle with my children on the trampoline instead of
going to a networking event
• Choosing to say no to international client work for the last year in
order to write
• Choosing to set aside a day each week where I don’t check any social
media so I can be fully present at home
• Choosing to spend eight months getting up at 5:00 A.M. every
morning and writing till 1:00 P.M. in order to finish this book
• Choosing to push back a work deadline in order to go camping with
my children
• Choosing not to watch any television or movies when I travel for
business so there is time to think and rest
• Choosing to regularly spend a whole day on that day’s priority, even
if it means doing nothing else on my to-do list
• Choosing to put the novel I am reading on hold because it is not the
priority today
• Choosing to keep a journal almost every day for the last ten years
• Choosing to say no to a speaking opportunity in order to have a date
night with Anna
• Choosing to exchange time on Facebook for a regular call with my
ninety-three-year-old grandfather
• Choosing to turn down a recent offer to be a lecturer at Stanford
since I knew it meant time away from spreading the message of
Essentialism through my lectures, and being with family
The list goes on, but the point I want to make here is that focusing on
the essentials is a choice. It is your choice. That in itself is incredibly
liberating.
Years ago, after I had quit law school, I was deciding what to do next
in my career. With Anna as my sounding board, I explored dozens,
perhaps hundreds, of different ideas. Then one day we were driving
home and I said, “What if I went to Stanford for my graduate work?”
There had been a lot of “What if?” questions like that. Usually the ideas
just didn’t stick. But this time I felt a sense of immediate clarity: in that
instant, I just knew, even as the words escaped my lips, that this was the
essential path for me.
What made me so sure I was on the right path was how the clarity
disappeared when I even thought of applying elsewhere. Several times I
started the application process for other programs but always stopped
after a few minutes. It just didn’t feel right. So I concentrated my efforts
only on that single application. As I waited to hear back from the
university, many other opportunities, some quite tempting, presented
themselves. I said no to all of them. But despite the uncertainty of not
yet knowing whether I had been accepted, I didn’t feel anxious or
nervous. Instead, I felt calm, focused, and in control.
I applied only to Stanford—both times. When I finally received my
offer the second time around it couldn’t have been more clear to me that
this was the most vital thing for me to be doing. It was the right path at
the right time. It was the quiet, personal confirmation of the way of the
Essentialist.
Had I not chosen the path of the Essentialist, I might never have
pursued the “Stanford or bust” strategy. I might never have written for
Harvard Business Review. And I most certainly would never have written
the words that you are now reading, absorbing, and hopefully thinking
hard about how to integrate into your own life.
Becoming an Essentialist is a long process, but the benefits are endless.
Here are some of the ways the disciplined pursuit of less can change
your life for the better.
MORE CLARITY
Remember the metaphorical closet we discussed in chapter 1? As you
continue to clear out the closet 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. As a result, the execution of those essentials
becomes more and more effortless.
MORE CONTROL
You will gain confidence in your ability to pause, push back, or not rush
in. You will feel less and less a function of other people’s to-do lists and
agendas. Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else
will. But if you are determined to prioritize your own life you can. The
power is yours. It is within you.
MORE JOY IN THE JOURNEY
With the focus on what is truly important right now comes the ability to
live life more fully, in the moment. For me, a key benefit of being more
present in the moment has been making joyful memories that would
otherwise not exist. I smile more. I value simplicity. I am more joyful.
As the Dalai Lama, another true Essentialist, has said: “If one’s life is
simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for
happiness.”
The Essential Life: Living a Life That Really Matters
The life of an Essentialist is a life of meaning. It is a life that really
matters.
When I need a reminder of this I think of a story. It is about a man
whose three-year-old daughter died. In his grief he put together a video
of her short little life. But as he went through all of his home videos he
realized something was missing. He had taken video of every outing they
had gone on and every trip they had taken. He had lots of footage—that
wasn’t the problem. But then he realized that while he had plenty of
footage of the places they had gone—the sights they had seen, the views
they had enjoyed, the meals they had eaten, and the landmarks they had
visited—he had almost no close-up footage of his daughter herself. He
had been so busy recording the surroundings he had failed to record
what was essential.
This story captures the two most personal learnings that have come to
me on the long journey of writing this book. The first is the exquisitely
important role of my family in my life. At the very, very end, everything
else will fade into insignificance by comparison. The second is the
pathetically tiny amount of time we have left of our lives. For me this is
not a depressing thought but a thrilling one. It removes fear of choosing
the wrong thing. It infuses courage into my bones. It challenges me to be
even more unreasonably selective about how to use this precious—and
precious is perhaps too insipid of a word—time. I know of someone who
visits cemeteries around the world when he travels. I thought this was
odd at first, but now I realize that this habit keeps his own mortality
front and center.
The life of an Essentialist is a life lived without regret. If you have
correctly identified what really matters, if you invest your time and
energy in it, then it is difficult to regret the choices you make. You
become proud of the life you have chosen to live.
Will you choose to live a life of purpose and meaning, or will you look
back on your one single life with twinges of regret? If you take one thing
away from this book, I hope you will remember this: whatever decision
or challenge or crossroads you face in your life, simply ask yourself,
“What is essential?” Eliminate everything else.
If you are ready to look inside yourself for the answer to this question,
then you are ready to commit to the way of the Essentialist.
APPENDIX
Leadership Essentials
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
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.
ESSENTIALIST TEAMS
Essentialism as a way of thinking and acting is as relevant to the way we
lead companies and teams as it is to the way we lead our lives. In fact,
many of the ideas I have shared in this book first became clear to me in
working with executive teams.
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 had them 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 teams and the people on 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. As one senior vice
president succinctly summarized it when she looked at the results
gathered from her extended team: “Clarity equals success.”
This is just one of the many reasons that the principle of “less but
better” is just as useful in building teams that can make a difference as it
is in enabling individuals to live a life that really matters. Life on 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 Nonessentialist managers try to have their teams
pursue too many things—and try to do too many things themselves as
well—and the team plateaus in its progress. An Essentialist leader makes
a different choice. With clarity of purpose, she is able to apply “less but
better” to everything from talent selection, to direction, to roles, to
communication, to accountability. As a result her team becomes unified
and breaks through to the next level.
THE ELEMENTS OF LEADING AS AN ESSENTIALIST
At this point in the book you’ve learned about flaws in Nonessentialist
thinking and replaced that false logic with the basic truths of
Essentialism. But Essentialism doesn’t end with the individual. If you
lead in any capacity—whether it’s a team of two colleagues, a
department of five hundred employees, or even some group in your
school or community—the next step in your journey, if you are willing
to take it, is to apply these same skills and mind-sets to your leadership.
MIND-SET
Nonessentialist
Everything to everyone
Essentialist
Less but better
TALENT
Nonessentialist
Hires people frantically and creates a “Bozo explosion.”
Essentialist
Ridiculously selective on talent and removes people who hold the team
back.
STRATEGY
Nonessentialist
Pursues a straddled strategy where everything is a priority.
Essentialist
Defines an essential intent by answering the question, “If we could only
do one thing, what would it be?” Eliminates the nonessential
distractions.
EMPOWERMENT
Nonessentialist
Allows ambiguity over who is doing what. Decisions are capricious.
Essentialist
Focuses on each team member’s highest role and goal of contribution.
COMMUNICATION
Nonessentialist
Talks in code.
Essentialist
Listens to get to what is essential.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Nonessentialist
Checks in too much or is so busy he or she checks out altogether.
Sometimes does both: disrupting the focus of the group and then being
absent to the group.
Essentialist
Checks in with people in a gentle way to see how he or she can remove
obstacles and enable small wins.
RESULT
Nonessentialist
A fractured team that makes a millimeter of progress in a million
directions
Essentialist
A unified team that breaks through to the next level of contribution
From looking at this chart, the advantages of applying the Essentialist
approach to every aspect of leadership that matters should be clear. Still,
let’s take a moment to briefly expand on these to get even clearer on
how, exactly, to lead as an Essentialist.
BE RIDICULOUSLY SELECTIVE IN HIRING PEOPLE
A Nonessentialist tends to hire people frantically and impulsively—then
gets too busy or distracted to either dismiss or reskill the people keeping
the team back. At first the hiring bonanza seems justified because of the
pace of growth that must be sustained. But in reality one wrong hire is
far costlier than being one person short. And the cost of hiring too many
wrong people (and one wrong hire often leads to multiple wrong hires
because the wrong person will tend to attract more wrong people) is
what Guy Kawasaki called a “Bozo explosion”—a term he uses to
describe what happens when a formerly great team or company
descends into mediocrity.1
An Essentialist, on the other hand, is ridiculously selective on talent.
She has the discipline to hold out for the perfect hire—no matter how
many résumés she has to read, or interviews she has to conduct, or
talent searches she has to make—and doesn’t hesitate to remove people
who hold the team back. The result is a team full of all-star performers
whose collective efforts add up to more than the sum of their parts (see
chapter 9, “Select,” for more on this subject).
DEBATE UNTIL YOU HAVE ESTABLISHED A REALLY CLEAR (NOT
PRETTY CLEAR) ESSENTIAL INTENT
Without clarity of purpose, Nonessentialist leaders straddle their
strategy: they try to pursue too many objectives and do too many things.
As a result their teams get spread in a million directions and make little
progress on any. They waste time on the nonessentials and neglect the
things that really matter (see chapter 10 on the importance of purpose
and essential intent). These days there is a lot of talk in organizations
about “alignment,” and indeed the more a team is aligned, the greater
their contribution will be. Clear intent leads to alignment; vague
direction produces misalignment every time.
GO FOR EXTREME EMPOWERMENT
The Nonessentialist 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.
An Essentialist understands that clarity is the key to empowerment. He
doesn’t allow roles to be general and vague. He ensures that everyone on
the team is really clear about what they are expected to contribute and
what everyone else is contributing. One CEO recently admitted that he
had allowed ambiguity on his executive team to keep the whole
organization back. To repair the damage, he said he went through a
huge streamlining process until he was down to just four direct reports,
each with a clear functional responsibility across the whole organization.
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.
COMMUNICATE THE RIGHT THINGS TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE AT
THE RIGHT TIME
The Nonessentialist leader communicates in code, and as a result people
aren’t sure what anything really means. Nonessentialist communication
usually is either too general to be actionable or changes so quickly that
people are always caught off guard. Essentialist leaders, on the other
hand, communicate the right things to the right people at the right time.
Essentialist leaders speak succinctly, opting for restraint in their
communication to keep the team focused. When they do speak, they are
crystal clear. They eschew meaningless jargon, and their message is so
consistent it seems almost boring to their ears. In this way, teams are
able to pick up the essential through all the trivial noise.
CHECK IN OFTEN TO ENSURE MEANINGFUL PROGRESS
The Nonessentialist leader is not great on accountability. A primary and
somewhat obvious reason is that the more items one pursues, the harder
it is to follow up on all of them. In fact, a Nonessentialist leader may
unintentionally train his people to expect no follow-up at all. In turn, the
members of the team soon learn that there are no repercussions for
failing, cutting corners, or prioritizing what is easy over what is
important. They learn that each objective pronounced by the leader will
be emphasized only for a moment before giving way to something else of
momentary interest.
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 (see chapter 17 on the power of progress).
Simply leading according to the principle of “less but better” will
enable your team to amplify their level of collective contribution and
achieve something truly remarkable.
As expressed by Ela Bhatt, a classic Essentialist and truly visionary
leader whose legacy includes such meaningful achievements as winning
the prestigious Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, founding dozens of
institutions dedicated to improving the conditions for poor women in
India, and being named one of Hillary Clinton’s personal heroines:
Out of all virtues simplicity is my most favorite virtue. So
much so that I tend to believe that simplicity can solve most
of the problems, personal as well as the world problems. If
the life approach is simple one need not lie so frequently, nor
quarrel nor steal, nor envy, anger, abuse, kill. Everyone will
have enough and plenty so need not hoard, speculate,
gamble, hate. When character is beautiful, you are beautiful.
That is the beauty of simplicity.3
Indeed that is the beauty of leading as an Essentialist.
Notes
1. THE ESSENTIALIST
1. A version of this story was published in a blog post I wrote for
Harvard Business Review called “If You Don’t Prioritize Your Life,
Someone Else Will,” June 28, 2012,
http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/06/how-to-say-no-to-a-controlling/.
2. Originally called “the Clarity Paradox” in a blog post I wrote for
Harvard Business Review called “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,”
August 8, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/08/the-disciplinedpursuit-of-less/. I have drawn from other HBR blogs I have written in
various parts of this book.
3. Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never
Give In (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
4. Peter Drucker, “Managing Knowledge Means Managing Oneself,”
Leader to Leader Journal, no. 16 (Spring 2000),
www.hesselbeininstitute.org/knowledgecenter/journal.aspx?
ArticleID=26.
5. Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pessoa,
“Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions,” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 108, no. 17 (2011): 6889–92.
6. Bronnie Ware, “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying,” Huflington Post,
January 21, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/bronnie-ware/top-5-
regrets-of-the-dyin_b_1220965.html. I first wrote about this in a blog
post I wrote for Harvard Business Review called “If You Don’t
Prioritize Your Life, Someone Else Will,” June 28, 2012,
http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/06/how-to-say-no-to-a-controlling/.
7. Ibid., “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.”
8. Ibid., “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.”
9. Peter Drucker interview with Bruce Rosenstein on April 11, 2005.
Bruce wrote up the interview in his book Living in More Than One
World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your
Life (San Francisco, CA. Berrett-Koehler, 2009).
10. Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture (dir.
Vicki Abeles, 2011) is a documentary and a movement in schools
working to fight, using my own words, Nonessentialism in school.
They are working to reduce the imposition of unnecessary homework
and stress on children. See their website, www.racetonowhere.com/.
11. There are many citations for this or similar statements. Emile
Gauvreau is just one example: “I was part of that strange race of
people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they
detest, to make money they don’t want, to buy things they don’t
need, to impress people they don’t like” (quoted in Jay Friedenberg,
Artificial Psychology: The Quest for What It Means to Be Human [New
York: Taylor and Francis, 2010], 217).
12. Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” in New and Selected Poems, vol. 1
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 94.
2. CHOOSE
1. M. E. P. Seligman, “Learned Helplessness,” Annual Review of Medicine
23, no. 1 (1972): 407–12, doi:
10.1146/annurev.me.23.020172.002203.
2. William James, Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (Boston:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 1:147; quoted in Ralph Barton Perry,
The Thought and Character of William James (1948; repr., Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1:323.
3. DISCERN
1. John Carlin, “If the World’s Greatest Chef Cooked for a Living, He’d
Starve,” Guardian, December 11, 2006,
http://observer.theguardian.com/foodmonthly/futureoffood/story/0,,1969713,002. Joseph Moses Juran, Quality-Control Handbook (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1951).
3. I originally wrote this in a blog post for the Harvard Business Review,
called “The Unimportance of Practically Everything,” May 29, 2012
4. Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with
Less (London: Nicholas Brealey, 1997); The Power Laws (London:
Nicholas Brealey, 2000), published in the United States as The
Natural Laws of Business (New York: Doubleday, 2001); The 80/20
Revolution (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2002), published in the United
States as The 80/20 Individual (New York: Doubleday, 2003); and
Living the 80/20 Way (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2004).
5. Warren Buffett, quoted in Koch, The 80/20 Individual, 20.
6. Mary Buffett and David Clark, The Tao of Warren Buffett: Warren
Buffett’s Words of Wisdom (New York: Scribner, 2006), no. 68.
7. Ibid., “The Unimportance of Practically Everything.”
8. At a meeting we both attended at the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation in Seattle, Washington. He was speaking, and afterwards
we chatted for a few minutes. He confirmed that he had said it or
words to the same effect and that he certainly believed it was true.
9. John Maxwell, Developing the Leader Within You (Nashville, TN: T.
Nelson, 1993), 22–23.
4. TRADE-OFF
1. “30-Year Super Stocks: Money Magazine Finds the Best Stocks of the
Past 30 Years,” Money magazine, October 9, 2002.
2. “Herb Kelleher: Managing in Good Times and Bad,” interview, View
from the Top, April 15, 2006, www.youtube.com/watch?
v=wxyC3Ywb9yc.
3. M. E. Porter, “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review 74, no. 6
(1996).
4. Erin Callan, “Is There Life After Work?” New York Times, March 9,
2013.
5. Judith Rehak, “Tylenol Made a Hero of Johnson & Johnson,” New
York Times, March 23, 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/03/23/your-
money/23iht-mjj_ed3_.html.
6. Michael Josephson, “Business Ethics Insight: Johnson & Johnson’s
Values-Based Ethical Culture: Credo Goes Beyond Compliance,”
Business Ethics and Leadership, February 11, 2012,
http://josephsoninstitute.org/business/blog/2012/02/businessethics-insight-johnson-johnsons-values-based-ethical-culture-itscredo-goes-beyond-compliancer-than-compliance-based-rulesculture/.
7. Sowell in a talk he gave at Ohio State University in 1992.
8. Stephanie Smith, “Jim Collins on Creating Enduring Greatness,”
Success, n.d., www.success.com/articles/1003-jim-collins-on-creatingenduring-greatness, accessed September 22, 2013.
9. David Sedaris, “Laugh, Kookaburra,” The New Yorker, August 24,
2009,
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/24/090824fa_fact_sedaris.
5. ESCAPE
1. Frank O’Brien, “Do-Not-Call Mondays.”
2. Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft, Make Space: How to Set the Stage for
Creative Collaboration (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2012), 132.
3. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 105.
4. Jeff Weiner, “The Importance of Scheduling Nothing,” LinkedIn, April
3, 2013,
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130403215758-
22330283-the-importance-of-scheduling-nothing.
5. I am indebted here to an excellent first-person account of Bill Gates’s
Think Week by Robert A. Guth, “In Secret Hideaway, Bill Gates
Ponders Microsoft’s Future,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2005,
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111196625830690477,00.html.
6. LOOK
1. Nora Ephron, “The Best Journalism Teacher I Ever Had,” Northwest
Scholastic Press, June 18, 2013,
www.nwscholasticpress.org/2013/06/18/the-best-journalismteacher-i-ever-had/#sthash.ZFtUBv50.dpbs; also written about by
Ephron in her essay “Getting to the Point,” in Those Who
Can … Teach! Celebrating Teachers Who Make a Difference, by Lorraine
Glennon and Mary Mohler (Berkeley, CA: Wildcat Canyon Press,
1999), 95–96.
2. Accident description in the Aviation Safety Network’s Aviation
Safety Database, http://aviation-safety.net/database/, accessed June
9, 2012.
3. To Harry Potter in the film, Deathly Hallows—Part 1.
4. “The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers
when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which
is already nearly gunwale under.” C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
(San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 2001), 138.
5. “Young Firm Saves Babies’ Lives,” Stanford Graduate School of
Business, June 7, 2011,
www.stanford.edu/group/knowledgebase/cgibin/2011/06/07/young-firm-saves-babies-lives/.
7. PLAY
1. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, the Secret to Happiness, TED talk,
February 2004, video,
www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html.
2. Sir Ken Robinson, Bring on the Learning Revolution!, TED talk,
February 2010, video,
www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html.
3. Stuart Brown, Play Is More Than Just Fun, TED talk, May 2008, video,
www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html
4. Quoted in Stuart Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the
Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Avery, 2009), 29.
5. Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and
Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 297.
6. Quoted as conversation between Einstein and János Plesch in János
Plesch’s János: The Story of a Doctor, trans. Edward FitzGerald
(London: Gollancz, 1947), 207.
7. Supriya Ghosh, T. Rao Laxmi, and Sumantra Chattarji, “Functional
Connectivity from the Amygdala to the Hippocampus Grows Stronger
after Stress,” Journal of Neuroscience 33, no. 38 (2013), abstract,
www.jneurosci.org/content/33/17/7234.abstract.
8. Edward M. Hallowell, Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from
Your People (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), 125.
9. Ibid., p. 113.
8. SLEEP
1. K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer,
“The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert
Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406,
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractic2. Charles A. Czeisler, “Sleep Deficit: The Performance Killer,”
interview by Bronwyn Fryer, Harvard Business Review, October 2006,
http://hbr.org/2006/10/sleep-deficit-the-performance-killer.
3. Ullrich Wagner et al., “Sleep Inspires Insight,” Nature 427 (January
22, 2004): 352–55. An additional study further supports the idea:
Michael Hopkin, “Sleep Boosts Lateral Thinking,” Nature online,
January 22, 2004,
www.nature.com/news/2004/040122/full/news040119-10.html.
4. Nancy Ann Jeffrey, “Sleep Is the New Status Symbol For Successful
Entrepreneurs,” Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1999,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB923008887262090895.html.
5. Erin Callan, “Is There Life After Work?,” New York Times, March 9,
2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/is-there-lifeafter-work.html?_r=0.
9. SELECT
1. Derek Sivers, “No More Yes. It’s Either HELL YEAH! or No,” August
26, 2009, http://sivers.org/hellyeah.
2. “Box CEO Levie at Startup Day,” GeekWire, September 24, 2012,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W99AjxpUff8.
3. I originally cited this in a blog post I wrote for Harvard Business
Review called “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” August 8, 2012,
http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/08/the-disciplined-pursuit-of-less/.
10. CLARIFY
1. This exercise and other parts of this chapter were originally
published in Harvard Business Review called “If I Read One More
Platitude-Filled Mission Statement, I’ll Scream,” October 4, 2012.
2. I am indebted here to Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad and their
brilliant piece in Harvard Business Review, “Strategic Intent,” May
1989, http://hbr.org/1989/05/strategic-intent/ar/1. They use as
context the Japanese companies at the time who had a long-term
intent to stretch companies to go beyond their current level of
resources. Over time as I have worked with people and teams this
idea has proven useful but has changed sufficiently enough to be
described differently. Thus an essential intent.
11. DARE
1. Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–
1965 (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 66.
2. Mark Feeney, “Rosa Parks, Civil Rights Icon, Dead at 92,” Boston
Globe, October 25, 2005.
3. Donnie Williams and Wayne Greenhaw, The Thunder of Angels: The
Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People who Broke the Back of Jim Crow
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005), 48.
4. “Civil Rights Icon Rosa Parks Dies at 92,” CNN, October 25, 2005.
5. This story is shared in a few different places, but this account is
taken from my interview with Cynthia Covey in 2012.
6. Stephen R. Covey and Roger and Rebecca Merrill, First Things First
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 75.
7.
http://wps.prenhall.com/hssaronsonsocpsych6/64/16428/4205685.cw/-
/4205769/index.html.
8. Quoted in Howard Gardner, “Creators: Multiple Intelligences,” in The
Origins of Creativity, ed. Karl H. Pfenninger and Valerie R. Shubik
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 132.
9. First referenced in a blog post I wrote for Harvard Business Review
called “If You Don’t Prioritize Your Life, Someone Else Will,” June
28, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/06/how-to-say-no-to-acontrolling/
10. In 1993 Interview re: Paul Rand and Steve Jobs, dir. Doug Evans,
uploaded January 7, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEfIak, Steve Jobs shares how Paul Rand came up with the logo for
NeXT.
11. Carol Hymowitz, “Kay Krill on Giving Ann Taylor a Makeover,”
Business Week, August 9, 2012,
www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-09/kay-krill-on-givingann-taylor-a-makeover#p2.
12. UNCOMMIT
1. “Concorde the Record Breaker,” n.d., www.concorde-artworld.com/html/record_breaker.html, accessed September 22, 2013;
Peter Gillman, “Supersonic Bust,” Atlantic, January 1977,
www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/77jan/gillman.htm.
2. “Ministers Knew Aircraft Would Not Make Money,” Independent,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ministers-knew-aircraftwould-not-make-money-concorde-thirty-years-ago-harold-macmillansacked-a-third-of-his-cabinet-concorde-was-approved-the-cuba-crisisshook-the-world-and-ministers-considered-pit-closures-anthonybevins-and-nicholas-timmins-review-highlights-from-1962-
government-files-made-public-yesterday-1476025.html
3. Gillman, “Supersonic Bust.”
4. Michael Rosenfield, “NH Man Loses Life Savings on Carnival Game,”
CBS Boston, April 29, 2013,
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/04/29/nh-man-loses-life-savingson-carnival-game/.
5. Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler,
“Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo
Bias,” Journal of Economic Perspective 5, no. 1 (1991): 193–206,
http://users.tricity.wsu.edu/~achaudh/kahnemanetal.pdf.
6. Tom Stafford, “Why We Love to Hoard … and How You Can
Overcome It,” BBC News, July 17, 2012,
www.bbc.com/future/story/20120717-why-we-love-to-hoard.
7. I originally wrote this in a blog post for Harvard Business Review
called “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” August 8, 2012,
http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/08/the-disciplined-pursuit-of-less/.
8. Hal R. Arkes and Peter Aykon, “The Sunk Cost and Concorde Effects:
Are Humans Less Rational Than Lower Animals?” Psychological
Bulletin 125, no. 5 (1999): 591–600, http://americandreamcoalitionorg.adcblog.org/transit/sunkcosteffect.pdf.
9. James Surowiecki, “That Sunk-Cost Feeling,” The New Yorker,
January 21, 2013,
www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/01/21/130121ta_talk_surowiecki
10. Daniel Shapero, “Great Managers Prune as Well as Plant,” LinkedIn,
December 13, 2012,
www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121213073143-314058-
great-managers-prune-as-well-as-plant.
13. EDIT
1. Mark Harris, “Which Editing Is a Cut Above?” New York Times,
January 6, 2008. In 1980, Ordinary People won as Best Picture, but its
editor Jeff Kanew was not nominated for Best Editing.
2. Harris, “Which Editing.”
3. “Jack Dorsey: The CEO as Chief Editor,” February 9, 2011, video,
uploaded February 15, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs0RUvZ-hQ.
4. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 10th Anniversary
ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 2000), 224.
5. I wrote about this subject further in a blog post for Harvard Business
Review called “The One Thing CEOs Need to Learn from Apple,” April
30, 2012
6. King, third foreword to Ibid., xix.
7. Alan D. Williams, “What Is an Editor?” in Editors on Editing: What
Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do, 3rd rev. ed., ed. Gerald
Gross (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 6.
14. LIMIT
1. Some minor details changed.
2. Based on a talk Clayton Christensen gave to students at the Stanford
Law School in 2013
3. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How
to Say No (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992), 29–30.
4. I have found this story cited in several places: for example, Jill
Rigby’s Raising Respectful Children in an Unrespectful World (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), ch. 6. But I have yet to find an
original source for the story and therefore share this only as an
anecdote.
15. BUFFER
1. Guy Lodge, “Thatcher and North Sea Oil: A Failure to Invest in
Britain’s Future,” New Statesman, April 15, 2013,
www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/thatcher-and-north-seaoil-%E2%80%93-failure-invest-britain%E2%80%99s-future.
2. Dale Hurd, “Save or Spend? Norway’s Commonsense Example,” CBN
News, July 11, 2011,
www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2011/July/Save-or-Spend-NorwaysCommon-Sense-Example-/.
3. Richard Milne, “Debate Heralds Change for Norway’s Oil Fund,”
FT.com, June 30, 2013, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8466bd90-e007-11e2-
9de6-00144feab7de.html#axzz2ZtQp4H13.
4. See Roland Huntford, The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s
Race to the South Pole (New York: Modern Library, 1999).
5. Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, Great by Choice: Uncertainty,
Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All (New York:
Harper Business, 2011).
6. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Intuitive Prediction: Biases
and Corrective Procedures,” TIMS Studies in Management Science 12
(1979): 313–27.
7. Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, “Exploring the
‘Planning Fallacy’: Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion
Times,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 3 (1994):
366–81, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366.
8. Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, “Inside the Planning
Fallacy: The Causes and Consequences of Optimistic Time
Predictions,” in Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive
Judgment, ed. Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 250–70.
9. Stephanie P. Pezzo, Mark V. Pezzo, and Eric R. Stone, “The Social
Implications of Planning: How Public Predictions Bias Future Plans,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42 (2006): 221–27.
10. Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, “Protecting
Morocco through Integrated and Comprehensive Risk Management,”
n.d.,
www.gfdrr.org/sites/gfdrr.org/files/Pillar_1_Protecting_Morocco_through_Integrataccessed September 22, 2013.
11. Also in this piece he identifies twelve reasons people don’t practice
risk mitigation: Wharton Center for Risk Management and Decision
Processes, “Informed Decisions on Catastrophe Risk,” Wharton Issue
Brief, Winter 2010,
http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WRCib20101_PsychNatHaz.pdf
16. SUBTRACT
1. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
(Great Barrington, MA: North River Press, 2004), ch. 13, p. 94.
2. Sigmund Krancberg, A Soviet Postmortem: Philosophical Roots of the
“Grand Failure” (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 56.
3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/poiesi
17. PROGRESS
1. Parts of this chapter were first published in a blog post I wrote for
Harvard Business Review called “Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison
Experiment?” June 12, 2012.
2. Based on my interviews with Ward Clapham between 2011 and
2013.
3. Speech at the annual Labour Party Conference, September 30, 1993,
when Blair was shadow home secretary; see “Not a Time for
Soundbites: Tony Blair in Quotations,” Oxford University Press Blog,
June 29, 2007,
http://blog.oup.com/2007/06/tony_blair/#sthash.P1rI6OHy.dpuf.
4. Frederick Herzberg, “One More Time: How Do You Motivate
Employees?” Harvard Business Review, September–October 1987,
www.facilitif.eu/user_files/file/herzburg_article.pdf.
5. Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small
Wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011,
http://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins/.
6. “The Lord Will Multiply the Harvest,” An Evening with Henry B.
Eyring, February 6, 1998. http://www.lds.org/manual/teachingseminary-preservice-readings-religion-370-471-and-475/the-lord-willmultiply-the-harvest?lang=eng.
7. Ibid., “Can we reverse the Stanford Prison Experiment?”
8. See his website, http://heroicimagination.org/.
9. We got this idea from Glenn I. Latham’s The Power of Positive
Parenting (North Logan, UT: P&T Ink, 1994).
10. Seen on the wall at Facebook.
11. Popularized by Eric Ries in an interview at Venture Hacks, March 23,
2009, “What Is the Minimum Viable Product?”
http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product.
12. Peter Sims, “Pixar’s Motto: Going from Suck to Nonsuck,” Fast
Company, March 25, 2011, www.fastcompany.com/1742431/pixarsmotto-going-suck-nonsuck.
18. FLOW
1. Michael Phelps and Alan Abrahamson, No Limits: The Will to Succeed
(New York: Free Press, 2008).
2. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life
and Business (New York: Random House, 2012).
3. Phelps and Abrahamson, No Limits.
4. “Plasticity in Neural Networks,” in “The Brain from Top to Bottom,”
n.d.,
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_07/d_07_cl/d_07_cl_tra/d_07_cl_tra.html
accessed September 22, 2013.
5. “Habits: How They Form and How to Break Them,” NPR, March 5,
2012, www.npr.org/2012/03/05/147192599/habits-how-they-formand-how-to-break-them.
6. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of
Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997), 145.
7. David T. Neal, Wendy Wood, and Jeffrey M. Quinn, “Habit: A Repeat
Performance,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, no. 4
(2006): 198–202,
http://web.archive.org/web/20120417115147/http://dornsife.usc.edu/wendywo8. In an interview with Dan Pink,
http://www.danpink.com/2012/03/the-power-of-habits-and-thepower-to-change-them/.
9. Stacy Cowley, “A Guide to Jack Dorsey’s 80-Hour Workweek,”
CNNMoneyTech, November 14, 2011,
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/13/technology/dorsey_techonomy/index.htm
19. FOCUS
1. Jiro Dreams of Sushi, dir. David Geld (2011).
2. “Oprah Talks to Thich Nhat Hanh,” O magazine, March 2010,
www.oprah.com/spirit/Oprah-Talks-to-Thich-Nhat-Hanh/3.
20. BE
1. Eknath Easwaran, preface to The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of
His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, ed. Louis Fischer (1962;
repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), xx.
2. “Gandhiji’s Philosophy: Diet and Diet Programme,” n.d., Mahatma
Gandhi Information Website, www.gandhimanibhavan.org/gandhiphilosophy/philosophy_health_dietprogramme.htm
3. library.thinkquest.org/26523/mainfiles/quotes.htm.
4. Albert Einstein, “Mahatma Gandhi,” in Out of My Later Years: Essays
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1950).
5. Henry David Thoreau to H. G. O. Blake, March 27, 1848, in The
Portable Thoreau, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (London: Penguin, 2012).
6. Proverbs 23:7.
APPENDIX: LEADERSHIP ESSENTIALS
1. Guy Kawasaki, “From the Desk of Management Changes at Apple,”
MacUser, December 1991, and then a follow-up piece, “How to
Prevent a Bozo Explosion,” How to Change the World, February 26,
2006, http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/how_to_prevent_.html.
2. Keith Rabois, answer to “What Strong Beliefs on Culture for
Entrepreneurialism Did Peter/Max/David Have at PayPal?” Quora,
n.d., www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-forentrepreneurialism-did-Peter-Max-David-have-atPayPal/answer/Keith-Rabois, accessed September 22, 2013.
3. From an e-mail and follow-up phone interview in August 2013.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the following people:
Anna: for believing in this project for many years. And believing in me
even longer. With this, as with everything, you have been my closest
friend and my wisest counselor.
Talia Krohn: for masterfully editing out the nonessential until only the
essential remained.
Tina Constable, Tara Gilbride, Ayelet Gruenspecht, and Gianni Sandri:
for starting a conversation and a movement.
Wade Lucas and Robin Wolfson: for taking Essentialism “on tour.”
Rafe Sagalyn: for absolutely delivering on your A++ reputation as an
agent.
Mum and Dad: for, you know, everything.
Nanny and Grandad: for showing us all what an essential life looks
like.
Mom and Dad: for Anna.
Mrs. Sweet: for teaching me.
Mr. Frost: for making us really think.
Sam, James, Joseph, Lewis, and Craig: for liberating me to be myself.
Consider this my “note to explain everything.”
Amy Hayes: for making the whole journey one long win/win.
Justin: for reading various parts of this, in various forms, at various
times of night and day.
Daniel, Deborah, Ellie, Louise, Max, Spencer, and Ruth: for making my
choices easier by first seeing yours.
Britton, Jessica, John, Joseph, Lindsey, Megan, Whitney: for your
unfailing support.
Rob and Natalie Maynes: for the gift of unfiltered conversation.
Peter Conti-Brown: for our “deal.”
Allison Bebo, Jennifer Bailey, Tim Brown, Bob Carroll (Jr. and Sr.),
Doug Crandall, Alyssa Friedrich, Tom Friel, Rocky Garff, Larry Gelwix,
Jonathan Hoyt, Lila Ibrahim, PK, Jade Koyle, Lindsey LaTesta, Jared
Lucas, Jim Meeks, Brian Miller, Greg Pal, Joel Podolny, Bill Rielly, Ash
Solar, Andrew Sypkes, Shawn Vanderhoven, Jeff Weiner, Jake White,
Eric Wong, Dave Yick, Ray Zinn, the entire YGL family, and the GSB
class of 08: for bringing joy to the journey.
Stephen Covey and Steve Jobs: for inspiring me.
God: for planting in me this endless wish—and for granting it.
Taking Essentialism Beyond the Page
As part of his engaging keynote speeches, talks, and workshops, Greg
McKeown shares a strategic framework for living and leading as an
Essentialist. Using real-world examples, Greg McKeown challenges
assumptions and moves his audiences to action. Among his lecture topics
are:
THE DISCIPLINED PURSUIT OF LESS (BUT BETTER) – KEYNOTE
This lecture speaks to anyone who has ever felt overworked but
underutilized, or always busy but never productive. Greg McKeown
offers a framework for discerning what is essential, eliminating what is
not, and removing obstacles in order to make the execution of what is
essential as effortless as possible. The disciplined pursuit of less allows
employees to channel their time, energy, and effort toward making the
highest possible contribution to what really matters.
LEADING AS AN ESSENTIALIST – KEYNOTE
In this keynote, Greg McKeown illustrates why leading as an Essentialist
can help organizations accomplish more with fewer resources, take
teams to the next level, and produce breakthroughs in results and
innovation.
APPLYING ESSENTIALISM – THE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
TRAINING
In this workshop, McKeown gives participants the tools to define the
Strategic Intent of their business. Specifically, they will learn to Evaluate
the trivial many from the vital few, Eliminate the nonessentials, and to
Enable the team to almost effortlessly execute on the essentials.
To inquire about a possible speaking engagement, please
contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at 212-572-2013
or rhspeakers@randomhouse.com. A full profile and video
footage of Greg McKeown can be found at
www.rhspeakers.com.