Essentialism

by Greg McKeown

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.

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 your highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.

Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.

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

“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 endeavour. 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.

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.

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 pluralise 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.

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.”

1. EXPLORE AND EVALUATE

“Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution towards my goal?” Part One of this book will help you figure out what those activities are.

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 non-essentials,

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.

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 endeavour you encounter.

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

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.

STEP 2. ELIMINATE: CUTTING OUT THE TRIVIAL MANY

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.

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?

As poet Mary Oliver wrote: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

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.

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.”

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.”

“If you could do only one thing with your life right now, what would you do?”

That’s when I realised that in sacrificing my power to choose I had made a choice – a bad one.

The Invincible Power of Choosing to Choose

For too long, we have overemphasised the external aspect of choices (our options) and underemphasised 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.

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.

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.

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 non-Essentialist. The Essentialist doesn’t just recognise 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.

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

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.

A non-Essentialist thinks almost everything is essential. An Essentialist thinks almost everything is non-essential.

According to Porter, “A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions.” 3

We can try to avoid the reality of trade-offs, but we can’t escape them.

A non-Essentialist 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?”

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.

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 on 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.”

Here’s another paradox for you: the faster and busier things get, the more we need to build thinking time into our schedule. And the noisier things get, the more we need to build quiet reflection spaces in which we can truly focus.

Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, for example, schedules up to two hours of blank space on his calendar every day. He divides them into thirty-minute increments, yet he schedules nothing. It is a simple practice he developed when back-to-back meetings left him with little time to process what was going on around him.4 At first it felt like an indulgence, a waste of time. But eventually he found it to be his single most valuable productivity tool. He sees it as the primary way he can ensure he is in charge of his own day, instead of being at the mercy of it.

LOOK See What Really Matters Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? – T. S. Eliot

PLAY Embrace the Wisdom of Your Inner Child A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men. – Roald Dahl

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.”

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.”

Play doesn’t just help us to explore what is essential. It is essential in and of itself.

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.

Our highest priority is to protect our ability to prioritise.

“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.

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

gut reaction

— Funny. I wonder how much gut health effects thinking

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.

ELIMINATE How Can We Cut Out the Trivial Many?

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 non-essentials so you can make a higher level of contribution towards the things that are actually vital.

The first type of non-essential you’re going to learn how to eliminate is simply any activity that is misaligned with what you are intending to achieve.

From “Pretty Clear” to “Really Clear”

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.

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 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.

So how do we craft a statement of purpose that is both concrete and inspiring, meaningful and memorable? STOP WORDSMITHING AND START DECIDING

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?”

the actor/social entrepreneur Brad Pitt, who, appalled by the lack of progress in rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, had started an organisation 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

Courage is grace under pressure. —Ernest Hemingway

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.

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.

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.”

— Nice wow

Below are general guidelines followed by a number of specific scripts for delivering the graceful “no.”

SEPARATE THE DECISION FROM THE RELATIONSHIP

there are a variety of ways of refusing someone clearly and politely without actually using the word no.

The more we think about what we are giving up when we say yes to someone, the easier it is to say no.

REMIND YOURSELF THAT EVERYONE IS SELLING SOMETHING

MAKE YOUR PEACE WITH THE FACT THAT SAYING “NO” OFTEN REQUIRES TRADING POPULARITY FOR RESPECT

REMEMBER THAT A CLEAR “NO” CAN BE MORE GRACEFUL THAN A VAGUE OR NONCOMMITTAL “YES”

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 they can’t.

Below are eight responses you can put in your “no” repertoire.

1. The awkward pause.

2. The soft “no” (or the “no but”).

3. “Let me check my calendar and get back to you.”

4. Use e-mail automatic replies. It is totally natural and expected to get an autoresponse when someone is travelling or out of the office. Really, this is the most socially acceptable “no” there is.

they’re just saying they can’t get back to you for a period of time. So why limit these to holidays? When I was writing this book I set an e-mail auto reply with the subject line “In Monk Mode.”

Say it with humour.

Use the words “You are welcome to X. I am willing to Y.”

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

BEWARE OF THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT

“the endowment effect,” our tendency to undervalue things that aren’t ours and to overvalue things because we already own them.

PRETEND YOU DON’T OWN IT YET

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,”

INSTEAD, ADMIT FAILURE TO BEGIN SUCCESS

The tendency to continue doing something simply because we have always done it is sometimes called the “status quo bias.”

You can apply zero-based budgeting to your own endeavours. 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.

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.

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 University 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.”

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.”

To state the obvious, editing involves cutting out things that confuse the reader and cloud the message or

The Latin root of the word decision – cis or cid – literally means “to cut” or “to kill.”

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,

— Add to list i love. Like comfort crisis points and antifragile

The disappearance of boundaries is typical of our non-Essentialist era.

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.

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 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.

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.

Imagine a neighbour 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 garden 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 garden and in his, where they belong.”

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.

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 grown-ups 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 in the playground. Their freedom, in effect, more than doubled.

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.

How to Make Execution Effortless There are two ways of thinking about execution. While non-Essentialists tend to force execution, Essentialists invest the time they have saved by eliminating the non-essentials into designing a system to make execution almost effortless.

A “buffer” can be defined literally as something that prevents two things from coming into contact and harming each other.

USE EXTREME PREPARATION

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.

ADD 50 PER CENT TO YOUR TIME ESTIMATE

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.

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?

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.

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.

Produce More by Removing More Aristotle talked about three kinds of work, whereas in our modern world we tend to emphasise 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.

1. BE CLEAR ABOUT THE ESSENTIAL INTENT We can’t know what obstacles to remove until we are clear on the desired outcome.

yourself, “How will we know when we are done?”

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.

3. REMOVE THE OBSTACLE Let’s say your “slowest hiker” turns out to be your desire to make the report perfect.

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.

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

— Important

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.”

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.

FOCUS ON MINIMAL VIABLE PROGRESS

“What is the smallest amount of progress that will be useful and valuable to the essential task we are trying to get done?”

A colleague in New York uses a simple tactic: 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.

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.

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.

Making It Look Easy Routine is one of the most powerful tools for removing obstacles. Without routine, the pull of non-essential distractions will over-power us.

OVERHAUL YOUR TRIGGERS

CREATE NEW TRIGGERS If the goal is to create some behavioural change, we’re not just confined to our existing cues; we can create brand-new ones to trigger the execution of some essential routine.

“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?”

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder 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

start with one change in your daily or weekly routine and then build on your progress from there.

Many of our non-essential routines are deep and emotional. They have been formed in the furnace of some strong emotions.

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.

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

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?”

— Nice

There Is Only Now

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, grey-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.

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

How to Be in the Now What can we do to be fully present in what is in front of us? Below are some simple techniques to consider.

FIGURE OUT WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT RIGHT NOW

I realised 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 centred 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.

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.”

Beware the barrenness of a busy life. —Socrates

People with Essentialism at their core get far more from their investment than those who absorb it only at the surface level.

As these ideas become emotionally true, they take on the power to change you.

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.

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.

BE RIDICULOUSLY SELECTIVE IN HIRING PEOPLE

DEBATE UNTIL YOU HAVE ESTABLISHED A REALLY CLEAR (NOT PRETTY CLEAR) ESSENTIAL INTENT

GO FOR EXTREME EMPOWERMENT

He doesn’t allow roles to be general and vague. He ensures that everyone in the team is really clear about what they are expected to contribute and what everyone else is contributing.

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 No. 1 initiative.

CHECK IN OFTEN TO ENSURE MEANINGFUL PROGRESS

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.