A woman named Cynthia once told me a story about the time her father had made plans to take her on a night out in San Francisco. Twelve-year-old Cynthia and her father had been planning the date for m...
So they will arrive late. So what should he do? The answer, Alex finds, is to do anything and everything to make things easier for Herbie. With the slowest boy at the front of the line, if Herbie move...
Every second spent worrying about a past or future moment distracts us from what is important in the here and now.
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...
We do a similar thing in our personal lives as well. When we are unclear about our real purpose in life – in other words, when we don’t have a clear sense of our goals, our aspirations, and our values...
We can’t have it all or do it all. If we could, there would be no reason to evaluate or eliminate options. Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, How can I make it all work? and star...
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)...
Today, technology has lowered the barrier for others to share their opinion about what we should be focusing on. It is not just information overload; it is opinion overload. THE
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 unintended consequence is that non-Essentialist managers try to get their teams to pursue too many things – and try to do too many things themselves as well – and the team plateaus in its progress...
The best surgeon is not the one who makes the most incisions;
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.
Most creative individuals find out early what their best rhythms are for sleeping, eating, and working, and abide by them even when it is tempting to do otherwise, Mihaly says. They wear clothes that...
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...
I’m talking about deliberately setting aside distraction-free time in a distraction-free space to do absolutely nothing other than think.
In just one example of many, Rosa Parks’s quiet but resolute refusal to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus at exactly the right moment coalesced into forces that propelled the civil right...
I have since gathered data from more than five hundred individuals about their experience on more than one thousand teams. I asked them to answer a series of questions about a time when they had worke...
Henry David Thoreau (who wrote, I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; … so simplify the problem of l...
George Orwell’s classic allegorical novel Animal Farm we are introduced to the fictional character Boxer the horse. He is described as faithful and strong. His answer to every setback and every proble...
As it happens, Cynthia’s father was the management thinker Stephen R. Covey (author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) who had