Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating question, Which problem do I want? An Essentialist makes trade-offs deliberately.
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...
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?
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.
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 opt...
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
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 sec...
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 mad...
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.
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 reali...
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 proce...
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 Thur...
Psychologists call this decision fatigue: the more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.5
Only by going through the work of identifying extreme criteria were they able to get rid of the 70 and 80 per cents that were draining their time and resources and start focusing on the most interesti...
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Less but better is a principle whose time has come.
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...
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.’
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:...
Is there a point at which doing less (but thinking more) will actually produce better outcomes?
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.