Essentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. Instead of asking, What do I have to give up? they ask, What do I want to go big on? The cumulativ...
A Nonessentialist 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? An Essentialist makes trade-o...
Up in four predictable phases:
The question you should be asking yourself is not: What, of my list of competing priorities, should I say yes to? Instead, ask the essential question: What will I say no to?
The pause that refreshes. This technique is easy. He stops for just a moment. He closes his eyes. He breathes in and out once: deeply and slowly. As he exhales, he lets the work issues fall away. This...
Once you’ve figured out which activities and efforts to keep in your life, you have to have a system for executing them.
Not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the non-essentials, and not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but cutting out some really good...
If we just say yes because it is an easy reward, we run the risk of having to later say no to a more meaningful one.
Why would intelligent, capable British and French government officials continue to invest in what was clearly a losing proposition for so long? One reason is a very common psychological phenomenon cal...
When we look back on our careers and our lives, would we rather see a long laundry list of accomplishments that don’t really matter or just a few major accomplishments that have real meaning and signi...
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,...
We often think of choice as a thing. But a choice is not a thing. Our options may be things, but a choice—a choice is an action
Una idea muy popular en Silicon Valley es Algo terminado es mejor que algo perfecto.
To harness the courage we need to get on the right path, it pays to reflect on how short life really is and what we want to accomplish in the little time we have left. As poet Mary Oliver wrote: Tell...
This is why an Essentialist takes the time to explore all his options. The extra investment is justified because some things are so much more important that they repay the effort invested in finding t...
The second is the pathetically tiny amount of time we have left of our lives. For me this is not a depressing thought but a thrilling one. It removes fear of choosing the wrong thing. It infuses coura...
The results of this research were startling: when there was a high level of clarity of purpose, the teams and the people on it overwhelmingly thrived. When there was a serious lack of clarity about wh...
The idea that we can have it all and do it all is not new. This myth has been peddled for so long, I believe virtually everyone alive today is infected with
The Nonessentialist 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 gr...
Sunk-cost bias is the tendency to continue to invest time, money, or energy into something we know is a losing proposition simply because we have already incurred, or sunk, a cost that cannot be recou...