Book Review: Essentialism - The Disciplined Pursue of Less

How to Do Less, But Better

What happens if you suddenly stop accepting all work requests, meetings and selectively choose only those that add value and allow you to have a quality of life like you've never had before?

That's the experience that Greg Mckeown, the author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less proposes that the reader do in their professional life - the result may be more surprising than it seems at first sight - and in a very positive way..

The Way of the Essentialist

If I could synthesize the concept of essentialism into a sentence, it would be to focus all the energy on the effort where it could have the most impact. Of course, to be able to do this, it is necessary to carefully choose what you are going to invest this effort in and convince the people around you that this is the strategy that will bring the maximum return on investment, not only for yourself, but also for the team and the organization.

If you don’t prioritise your life, someone else will

Or put another way, when everything is important, nothing is important. Another result is that we get distracted from what is really important and what we should invest in to have the greatest possible impact.

Explore and Evaluate

Ask yourself “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution towards my goal?” - if the answer is no then you know its a candidate for elimination.

Discerning the trivial many from the vital few

Ask yourself “What do I feel deeply inspired by?”, “What am I particularly talented at?”, “What meets a significant need in the world?”

Eliminate

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.

Cutting out the trivial many

To eliminate non-essentials means saying no to someone. Often. To do it well takes courage and compassion. It’s about the emotional discipline to say no to social pressure. Remember, when we forfeit our right to chose, someone will chose for us.

Execute

Removing obstacles and making execution effortless

The Essentialist approach, instead of forcing execution, invests the time they have saved into creating a system for removing obstacles and making execution as easy as possible.

Choose

We often think of choice as a thing. Options may be things but a choice is an action. It is not just something we have but also something we do. A crucial lesson we need to learn is that certain types of efforts yield higher rewards than others. Ask yourself “What is the most valuable result I could achieve in this job?”. Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessary yield more results.

Explore

Escape

We need space to escape in order to discern the essential few from the trivial many. Unfortunately, in our time-starved era we don’t get that space by default – only by design. While non-Essentialists automatically react to the latest idea, jump on the latest opportunity, or respond to the latest e-mail, Essentialists choose to create the space to explore and ponder. Escape to a space where you can focus and explore ideas.

Play

Play, which I would define as anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than as a means to an end – whether it’s flying a kite or listening to music or kicking around a football – might seem like a non-essential activity. Often it is treated that way. But in fact play is essential in many ways.

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

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

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

Sleep

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

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

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

Select

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

If it isn’t a clear yes, it’s a clear no

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

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

Eliminate

Clarify

From “Pretty Clear” to “Really Clear”

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

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

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

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.

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.

Dare

The Power of a Graceful “No”

Have you ever felt a tension between what you felt was right and what someone was pressuring you to do? Have you ever felt the conflict between your internal conviction and an external action? Have you ever said yes when you meant no simply to avoid conflict or friction? Have you ever felt too scared or timid to turn down an invitation or request from a boss, colleague, friend, neighbour, or family member for fear of disappointing them? If you have, you’re not alone. Navigating these moments with courage and grace is one of the most important skills to master in becoming an Essentialist – and one of the hardest.

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

Uncommit

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.

Edit

An editor is not merely someone who says no to things. A three-year-old can do that. Nor does an editor simply eliminate; in fact, in a way, an editor actually adds. What I mean is that a good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters.

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

Editing Life

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

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

Limit

The Freedom of Setting Boundaries

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

Execute

Buffer

The Unfair Advantage

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

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

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

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

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.

Subtract

Bring Forth More by Removing Obstacles

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 of 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.

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 non-Essentialist approaches execution in a reactive, haphazard manner. Because the non-Essentialist 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 non-Essentialist 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 non-Essentialist 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 maximise your results.

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.

Progress

The Power of Small Wins

The way of the non-Essentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do it all, have it all, fit it all in. The non-Essentialist 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.

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.

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.

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 towards 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.”

Focus on Minimal Viable Progress

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?

Flow

The Genius of Routine

The way of the non-Essentialist is to think the essentials only get done when they are forced. That execution is a matter of raw effort alone. You labour 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 to 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.

Making it Look Easy

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 again, 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.

Focus

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 prepare mentally 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.

Non-Essentialists 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.

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.

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. Multi-tasking itself is not the enemy of Essentialism; pretending we can “multi-focus” is.

How To Be In The Now

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.”

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.”

Be

The Essentialist Life

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 non-essential 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.

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”).

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 non-essential 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 non-essential.

The Essential Life: Living Life That Really Matters

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.