The Essentialist

• Always thinking if this is the best use of time and resources right now?
• A pursuit of less is better
• Constantly asking, "Am I investing in the right activities?", "Which Problems do I want to solve"
• Its about exploring the options and then making a one time decision that helps decide all other decisions so that we don't need to struggle with decision fatigue
• With the tools of today we have not just decision overload but option overload. Rather than cramming a lot of information into our life its more about picking the^^ ones that help us make the highest possible contribution and eliminate others.^^
• Explore, eliminate and execute - People are effective because they say NO
• Mary Oliver wrote: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

Choices

• If there is ONE thing you could be doing with your life right now, what would you do?
• Just working hard to "have to do it all", doesn't amount to one's belief in one's importance and value. It might be just a smokescreen to hide what we want

Discern: The Unimportance of practically everything

• According to Power law theory, certain efforts produce exponentially more results that others

Trade-Off

• The idea is to make our own choices. What do we want to go big on and what we want to give up. That deliberate decision has lots of dividends in the future.
• Four burner system of life - Family, Friends, Health and work. In order to be successful we need to cut off one of your burners. In order to be really successful we need to cut off two.

Explore

• Instead of reacting to everything around us that gets us excited. We make a deliberate choice to evaluate a broad range of options first (exploring, listening, debating, questioning and thinking) and commit to a path.
• The purpose of exploration is to figure out what is the most vital thing from the many choices we have.

Escape

• We need to create a space to explore and ponder. If we don't we would just be getting washed away in the steam of life.
• More actionable : Taking 15 minutes a day to focus on ourselves.

Look

• By looking for what really matters, we can find what we have missed
• Take 5 minutes - Give it five minutes
• Building small incremental changes to let them build over time.

Play

• Play is the antidote to stress but more importantly it lets your mind go into a space to make connections we don't usually make

Sleep

• Sleep is an investment in ourselves

Select

• Three questions

  • What Am I deeply passionate about?
  • What taps my talent?
  • What meets a significant need in the world?

• Clarify

  • When we don't know what is clear aspirations we have, we succumb to social games to make us look good in comparison to other people.
  • Making concrete actionable goals.
    • Martha and her team came up with this essential intent: “To get everyone in the U.K. online by the end of 2012.” It was simple, concrete, inspiring, and easily measured.

• Uncommit

  • HALF OF THE TROUBLES OF THIS LIFE CAN BE TRACED TO SAYING YES TOO QUICKLY AND NOT SAYING NO SOON ENOUGH.—Josh Billings
  • Sunk-cost bias
  • Endowment Effect - Instead of thinking, "How would I feel if I miss this opportunity?" we should be thinking "If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice to obtain it."
  • Zero Based Budgeting - When accountants allocate a budget they use zero as baseline and make sure every item is justified. Effective allocation of resources based on need rather than history
  • Pausing for five seconds before we speak

• Edit

  • Stephen King has said, “kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
  • “I must apologize: if I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.”

• Limit

  • Setting boundaries for having clear distinctions and to proactively eliminate the demands and distractions

• Buffer

  • 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.
  • One way to protect against this is simply to add a 50 percent buffer to the amount of time we estimate it will take to complete a task or project
  • Building Buffers:
    • What risks do you face for this project?
    • What is the worst-case scenario?
    • What would the social effects of this be?
    • What would the financial impact of this be?
    • How can you invest to reduce risks or strengthen financial or social resilience?

• Subtract

  • Finding bottlenecks in our system or routines Design Systems state machine
  • The approach is to make one time investments to remove obstacles and in the future it would reduce efforts to maximise results.

• Progress

  • Small wins. Leaning into the power of ^^steadiness and repetition^^

• Flow

  • Over time, this loop—cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward—becomes more automatic as the cue and reward become neurologically intertwined.”
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  • Eliminating distractions by establishing a routine.

• Focus

  • Focusing on our game rather than the opponent
  • There is no such thing as multifocus (not multitask) - "What is important right now?"
  • The Pause that refreshes - Closes his eyes and deeply breaths in. On exhale we leave behind the last items.

• Be

  • Every choice we make to pursue the essential and eliminate the nonessential builds on itself, making that choice more and more habitual until it becomes virtually second nature.