essentialism

When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices – or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose.

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

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

His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems.

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

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs. It’s about deliberately choosing to be different. —Michael Porter

One important insight into how and why we forget our ability to choose comes out of the classic work of Martin Seligman and Steve Maier, who stumbled onto what they later called “learned helplessness” while conducting experiments on German shepherds.