Was once paired with a colleague who approached projects in a completely opposite way. People predicted there would be fireworks between us. But our working relationship was actually quite harmonious....
The faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.
Sólo cuando te das permiso de dejar de hacerlo todo, de dejar de decirles que sí a todos, puedes hacer tu mayor contribución a las cosas que realmente importan.
Remember that anytime you fail to say no to a non-essential, you are really saying yes by default. So once you have sufficiently explored your options, the question you should be asking yourself is no...
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.
Of the Essentialist involves learning to tell the difference—learning to filter through all those options and selecting only those that are truly essential.
Certain ideas – and people peddling those ideas – constantly pull us toward the logic of non-Essentialism.
Are vital. The way of the Essentialist involves learning to tell the difference—learning to filter through all those options and selecting only those that are truly essential.
Why, he asked, do all of our policing efforts have to be so reactive, so negative, and so after the fact? What if, instead of just focusing on catching criminals—and serving up ever harsher punishment...
When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people – our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families – will choose for us, and before...
We can apply these five questions to our own attempts at building buffers. Think of the most important project you are trying to get done at work or at home. Then ask the following five questions: (1)...
Tom Friel, the former CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, once said to me, We need to learn the slow ‘yes’ and the quick ‘no.
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. These...
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.
Think of Sir Isaac Newton. He spent two years working on what became Principia Mathematica, his famous writings on universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. This period of almost solitary co...
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...
Since becoming an Essentialist I have found it almost universally true that people respect and admire those with the courage of conviction to say no.
STRATEGY IS ABOUT MAKING CHOICES, TRADE-OFFS. IT’S ABOUT DELIBERATELY CHOOSING TO BE DIFFERENT. —Michael Porter
One way to protect against this is simply to add a 50 per cent buffer to the amount of time we estimate it will take to complete a task or project (if 50 per cent seems overly generous, consider how f...
I’m talking about deliberately setting aside distraction-free time in a distraction-free space to do absolutely nothing other than think.