Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

William James once wrote, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

Without clarity and purpose, pursuing something because it is good is not good enough to make a high level of contribution.

Essentialism: only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.

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 word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be

How many times have you started your workday with a schedule and by 10 a.m. you were already completely off track or behind? Or how many times have you written a “to do” list in the morning but then found that by 5 p.m. the list was even longer?

In trying to keep everyone happy I had sacrificed what mattered most.

Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.

As Peter Drucker said, “In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time – literally – substantial and rapidly