The Art of Essentialism

About Author, "Greg Mckeown"

• What is Essentialism?

  • Essentialism is a form of discipline, described by author Greg McKeown.

  • Essentialism is the art of discerning between external noise and internal voice.

  • It’s not a task and time management tactical list. It’s more than that.

  • It’s a mindset - a way of life.

• Live by the delayed yes

  It’s a good idea to recognize the value of contemplation versus impulse.

  • Create pause with your decisions, even with your boss, and properly identify the essential.

  • Make a decision based not on external pressure. Make it based on internal clarity of purpose.

  • The pause is imperative to determining if something is truly essential - something many of us struggle with.

• Practice Makes Perfect

  • Remove the impulse to just say yes - remember that being impetuous can create unhealthy/non-essentialist decisions.

  • Learn the phrase, “Let me get back to you.”

  • Being useful does not require an immediate answer.

• Know the Joy Of Missing Out (JOMO) vs. Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO)

  • There’s a misconception that if you can fit something in, you should. This is the Fear Of Missing Out (commonly referenced as FOMO).

  • Most of us pride ourselves on taking advantage of all opportunities and think that having a packed calendar is valuable.

  • Instead, relish in missing out on the non-essential, also known as the Joy Of Missing Out (or JOMO).

  • Place value on making the decision to pass on something and understand that missing out can manifest opportunity in its own ways too.

• Know tradeoffs or trade what is most dear

  • Essentialists are eager to explore new opportunities but have an insanely selective criterion for what they’ll take on.

  • Many Essentialists are born from becoming frighteningly aware of the enormous cost they have paid in trying to do it all.

  • Essentialists train themselves on the “tradeoff” and live by it each day.

  • Essentialists are a highly discerning folk and are armed with the logic that less means more and more = mediocre.

  • Be open and honest on the tradeoff and be ok communicating it to others - it benefits everyone.

• Lose the popularity contest

  • Do not attend meetings that are not important - when people question your absence, apologize and ask what they need you to contribute.

  • Be okay with what you lose short-term from a drop in popularity.

  • The long-term respect you gain from real results, real work, real contributions, and real tangible value free of politics outweighs the loss in popularity votes.

  • Real results are where the rewards lie. Do the real work, let the non-essential fall away.

• Be an anti-endowmentalist

  • The Endowment Effect has tricked us all at some point. The Endowment Effect is the idea that we value objects and also opportunities higher if we own them versus if we don’t.

  • This is a classic heuristic trick—it’s a myth. The idea that you must own something to find value is not true.

  • Not having something or letting go of something has real and sometimes the most value.

  • Ask yourself, “If I did not own this today, how hard would I be willing to work to get it?” and trick your brain by classifying things as if you don’t own them during the evaluation.

• Stop making the fool’s bargain

  • Ever heard of The Planning Fallacy ? It means almost all of us, all the time, underestimate the time it takes to get something done.

  • The planning fallacy has tricked all of us. Things inevitably take longer, doing fewer things and choosing more carefully is essential.

• In the end, what truly matters?

  • Greg brings up something powerful from the article, The Five Regrets of the Dying.

  • The article states that the number two regret of the dying is working too much. 

  • There is an unspoken hierarchy in our society about what is valuable; higher on that hierarchy are career success, fame, and wealth. Lower on the list is family, health, wisdom, and personal fulfillment.

  • When you have an Essentialist mindset, career is important - but as it relates to how you are able to provide for your family and gain true fulfillment. It should not be an end in and of itself.

• Priority vs. priorities

  • Not everything is important.

  • Life is not a set of almost equal activities.

  • Life is not an all you can eat buffet. Essentialism is about finding the right food.

  • More and more is valueless. Staying true to my purpose and being selective in what I take on results in a more meaningful, richer, and sweeter quality of life.

• Protect against rampant moment erosion

  • One way to live in the moment is to reduce the impulse to always have something to do.

  • Many have no idea what to do without outside stimulation - downtime is when imagination gets engaged and true creativity happens.

  • Remember when you were just bored? What will it be like to live in a world and society that no longer has time to ponder? The subconscious needs to talk to the conscious and this cannot happen with constant, digital preoccupation.

• Summary - Essentialism

  • Reduce yourself to zero—we have only enough time in each day to fulfill our essential missions; be consumed in your purpose.

  • Learn the art of saying no and be okay with it—place value on this as well. Be particular.

  • The planning fallacy—remember there’s real science on why you have to do less.

  • Implement the life test mantra—ask yourself, “If I had a week left to live would I value this?”

  • Implement a rating scale to measure true value and effectiveness. Evaluate where each thing falls on a 10pt scale. Give yourself space for the 8-10s. Drop anything lower.

• The Do's and Don'ts

  • Discern more and do less. Elevate value and get the real results.

  • Don’t misinterpret pressure for purpose.

  • Don’t mistake effort with output.

  • Don't comment. Join fewer calls. Attend fewer meetings.

  • Newness may not be news - do you really need to give your brainpower to everything that pops up?

  • Stay on the primary contributions and real results.

• Planning fallacy

  The planning fallacy is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed.

  The planning fallacy was first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979.

  In 2003, Lovallo and Kahneman proposed an expanded definition as the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions.

  According to this definition, the planning fallacy results in not only time overruns, but also cost overruns and benefit shortfalls.

• Empirical evidence

  For individual tasks

  In a 1994 study, 37 psychology students were asked to estimate how long it would take to finish their senior theses.

  The average estimate was 33.9 days.

  They also estimated how long it would take

  "if everything went as well as it possibly could" (averaging 27.4 days) and

  "if everything went as poorly as it possibly could" (averaging 48.6 days).

  The average actual completion time was 55.5 days, with about 30% of the students completing their thesis in the amount of time they predicted.

• Additional explanations

  Kahneman and Tversky originally explained the fallacy by envisaging that planners focus on the most optimistic scenario for the task, rather than using their full experience of how much time similar tasks require.

  Another explanation proposed by Roy and colleagues is that people do not correctly recall the amount of time that similar tasks in the past had taken to complete; instead people systematically underestimate the duration of those past events. Thus, a prediction about future event duration is biased because memory of past event duration is also biased. Roy and colleagues note that this memory bias does not rule out other mechanisms of the planning fallacy.

  In a different paper, Buehler and colleagues suggest an explanation in terms of the self-serving bias in how people interpret their past performance. By taking credit for tasks that went well but blaming delays on outside influences, people can discount past evidence of how long a task should take. One experiment found that when people made their predictions anonymously, they do not show the optimistic bias. This suggests that the people make optimistic estimates so as to create a favorable impression with others, which is similar to the concepts outlined in impression management theory.

  Roger Buehler and colleagues account for the fallacy by examining wishful thinking; in other words, people think tasks will be finished quickly and easily because that is what they want to be the case.

• Methods for counteracting

  Segmentation effect

  The segmentation effect is defined as the time allocated for a task being significantly smaller than the sum of the time allocated to individual smaller sub-tasks of that task. In a study performed by Forsyth in 2008, this effect was tested to determine if it could be used to reduce the planning fallacy. In three experiments, the segmentation effect was shown to be influential. However, the segmentation effect demands a great deal of cognitive resources and is not very feasible to use in everyday situations.

  Implementation intentions

  Implementation intentions are concrete plans that accurately show how, when, and where one will act. It has been shown through various experiments that implementation intentions help people become more aware of the overall task and see all possible outcomes. Initially, this actually causes predictions to become even more optimistic. However, it is believed that forming implementation intentions "explicitly recruits willpower" by having the person commit themselves to the completion of the task. Those that had formed implementation intentions during the experiments began work on the task sooner, experienced fewer interruptions, and later predictions had reduced optimistic bias than those who had not. It was also found that the reduction in optimistic bias was mediated by the reduction in interruptions.

• Real-world examples

  Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant Unit 3 faced severe delay and a cost overrun. The construction started in 2005 and was expected to be completed by 2009, but completed only in 2023. Initially, the estimated cost of the project was around 3 billion euros, but the cost has escalated to approximately 10 billion euros.

  The Berlin Brandenburg Airport is another egregious case. After 15 years of planning, construction began in 2006, with the opening planned for October 2011. There were numerous delays. It was finally opened on October 31, 2020. The original budget was €2.83 billion; current projections are close to €10.0 billion.

  The Sydney Opera House was expected to be completed in 1963. A scaled-down version opened in 1973, a decade later. The original cost was estimated at $7 million, but its delayed completion led to a cost of $102 million.

• Top five regrets of the dying

  1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
     "This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."
  2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
     "This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."
  3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
     "Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
     "Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
     "This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”

• About Bonnie Ware - author of the top five regrets of the dying

  Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

  Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again.”

  among the top ones is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?