At the suggestion of my financial planner, I started reading the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I would like to open with an excerpt from Chapter 1.

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.

If everything is a priority, nothing is. 

This book has come at the right time for me because I have discovered that I need to upgrade the way that I work. What has served me in the past is no longer working for some reason. 

The opening chapter of the book illustrates essentialism by drawing a distinction between a Nonessentialist and an Essentialist. I’ll be the first to admit I’m operating as a Nonessentialist.

THINKS

Nonessentialist: All things to all people

• “I have to.”
• “It’s all important.”
• “How can I fit it all in?”

Essentialist: Less but better

• “I choose to.”
• “Only a few things really matter.”
• “What are the trade-offs?”

DOES

Nonessentialist: The undisciplined pursuit of more

• Reacts to what’s most pressing
• Says “yes” to people without really thinking
• Tries to force execution at the last moment

Essentialist: The disciplined pursuit of less

• Pauses to discern what really matters
• Says “no” to everything except the essential
• Removes obstacles to make execution easy

GETS

Nonessentialist: 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

Essentialist: 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

How do most of us end up operating as nonessentialists?

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. The author calls this “the paradox of success.” I have my own phrase for it: “the reward for doing a good job is more work.” This happens in four 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. As we do more, we get assigned more. 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.

Nonessentialism occurs at the workplace but that’s not the only place. Nonessentialism is everywhere. Nowadays we have too many choices, and we are not prepared to manage all these choices. There is also too much social pressure. The strength and number of outside influences on our decisions have increased. It’s not just information overload but opinion overload. There is also the idea that “you can have it all.” When we try to do it all and have it all, we make trade-offs at the margins that we would never take on as our intentional strategy.

The closet analogy

The book provides the following analogy for Essentialism. The claim is that the techniques of essentialism can do 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. I don’t have to think about it because I can just go to my closet and see for myself. Knowing what you know about me and how disciplined I can be in some areas, you might be shocked to realize that my closet looks like a bomb went off in there. The kicker is that it does not really bother me. Would I like to have a nice organized closet? Sure. I’ve organized it before, but inevitably it ends up a mess again.

Here’s how an Essentialist would approach the 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?” 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?”
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 take all the “probably should get rid of” clothes and get rid of them? There is 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 that’s why we find them more difficult to get rid of. If you’re not quite there, as the killer question: “If I didn’t already own this, how much would I spend to buy it?” 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.
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 for 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. 

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. 

There is a German phrase that sums up Essentialism:

Weniger aber besser - Less but better