Hello and welcome to Verbal to Visual, today I’d like to share a visual summary of the
book Essentialism by Greg McKeown.
This book is about the disciplined pursuit of less, which is an idea that intrigues me,
especially as it relates to my professional life and what I’m attempting to do with
my creative career.
And I hope that you find these ideas useful and actionable as well, and to dig deeper
into them, do go pick up the book.
It’s a great read.
Let’s start with two ideas that are at the core of essentialism.
The first is that for every single thing that you say “yes” to, that means you’re
gonna have to say “no” to a bunch of other things, which means it’s worth putting a
lot of value in your yes, and also not being afraid to say “no”.
That concept is a relatively simply one to grasp, but it does beg the question: “How
do you determine what to say yes to?”
One thing to keep in mind is that not all effort is created equal, that there are certain
types of effort that yield more results that others.
So what you’re on the lookout for are the best places to put your effort, the best “yes”,
the tasks and that projects that you can take on that will yield the greatest results.
With those core ideas and core questions in mind, we jump into the three sections of this
book: explore, eliminate, and execute.
Each chapter of this book has a single-word title, and that word is always a verb.
I appreciate that about this book, the simplicity and the action-oriented nature of it.
Within the explore section of the book, you must escape.
You’ve got to create a time and a space where you can concentrate, where you can design,
where you can read.
This is all about the advantages that come with being unavailable, and intentionally
creating times where you are unavailable to do deep thinking and deep work.
You’ve also go to look.
You’ve got to hone your observational skills and be a journalist of your own life.
The idea from this chapter that I found to be the most helpful relates to the morning
journaling that I do, and the prompt of “looking for the lead”.
As I look back on the past day or maybe even the past week - what is the lead to that story?
So in exploring the past, either the immediate past or distant past, what is the most fascinating
thing about the particular chunk of time that I’m looking at.
You also must play.
The value of playing lies in it’s ability to broaden the range of options available
to you.
There’s this expansion of awareness that happens when you do enter that state of play.
It’s also a very clear antidote to stress, which is likely a regular component of your
life.
And play has a positive impact on executive functions, things like planning and deciding
and anticipating and prioritizing.
Play actually allows you to do those things better.
Sleep is an important activity as well, the idea being that you must protect the asset,
the asset being your brain, your whole body, and your ability to make good decisions.
Without enough sleep you lose the ability to see what actually is essential, and the
quality of your effort and attention steadily declines.
And in order to put your efforts toward the things that are most important, you have to
select.
You can’t say “yes” to everything, and you have to decide some metric by which to
determine what gets your “yes”, and here McKeown brings in the idea from Derek Sivers
of it being either “Hell yeah!” or “No.”
There’s no in between.
And that “hell yeah” only gets a very small percentage, so if you don’t have that
immediate reaction, it’s probably not worth doing.
From that exploratory section of the book, we move on to eliminating, starting with the
prompt to clarify, deciding what is the target that you’re shooting for, bringing in this
ideas of essential intent.
And that without having your essential intent defined, it makes it a whole lot harder to
know what things to say yes to and which things to say no to.
And of those two responses, it’s understandable that it’s often harder to say no than it
is to say yes, but it is something that you must dare to do.
You must dare to say “no” even if it makes you unpopular, because as McKeown puts it,
saying “no” often means trading popularity for respect, but in order to make that trade,
you do need to say “no” firmly, resolutely, and gracefully.
And I think it’s worth recognizing that it’s harder to do all of those things, to
say “no” in that way, that it does take effort and practice, but that it’s worth
getting good at saying “no” in those ways.
Ideally you’ll get good at saying “no” up front, but sometimes you might need to
uncommit.
If you recognize that the direction you’re going is taking you toward a bad place, making
the tough decision of turning the plane around and starting to move toward a better place,
even if that turn requires an extra bit of energy.
And you’ve also got to edit along the way, to make those subtractions that actually add
quality to your life and to your work.
This is the “kill your darlings” of Stephen King, the “if I had more time this would
be a lot shorter”.
This is where you move from being a journalist to being an editor, looking for opportunities
to cut out anything that anything that isn’t essential so that there’s more space and
attention given to what is.
And where editing is something that often occurs after-the-fact, on the flip side you
also have the opportunity to limit your options up front, to create boundaries in your life
and in your work, within which you can actually feel a sense of freedom, that there’s this
safe space that you’ve created where you can do your thing uninterrupted.
And I think this applies both to the limits that you put on yourself for any particular
creative task, but also the boundaries that you set up with other people, that appropriate
boundaries within your relationships are what creates that sense of freedom.
And from there we move on to the act of executing on those things that you’ve chosen to say
yes to, starting with the value of creating a buffer, that there’s some space in between
whatever you’re current focus is and a future commitment that’s coming your way, that
a bit of breathing room actually will allow you to execute on your ideas more effectively
so that your efforts fall more within that “D” range compared to the “A” range,
because without the appropriate time buffers of financial buffers, there’s the risk that
the quality of your effort will decline.
Because your attention (either consciously or subconsciously) is elsewhere, worrying
about the rapidly approaching upcoming commitment.
And in order to execute on an idea effectively, you also must subtract.
You’ve got to take a close look at the steps underlying your creative process and remove
the obstacles that make those steps more difficult.
So that instead of having this feeling of trudging up a stairway, maybe it can feel
more like walking down one.
For example, for me with these videos, I sometimes see the task of putting my face on camera
for an intro and outro as an obstacle that’s actually keeping me from doing more and better
work, which is why I’ve been experimenting with subtracting that from my process, because
it might not be essential for my task here of sharing interesting ideas and helping others
develop useful skills.
So think about what the obstacles are in your process that you might be able to remove.
And here there’s an emphasis on progress, and focusing specifically not on huge leaps
of progress but instead on building for yourself a system of small wins, steps that you can
take each day that allow you to start small and build momentum over time.
Do you have a system like that in place?
And is that system rooted in these small steps?
The small wins that over time can take you far.
And as you build that system, look for the things that get you in a state of flow.
Look for those consistent routines that you can put in place for yourself because the
more routine something becomes, the more that opens up the rest of your brain to devote
to the challenging task in front of you, to again increase the quality of your effort,
and thereby the likelihood that your effort will yield the best results.
And as you’re focused on the progress of small wins and looking for that state of flow,
what will help is a regular state of focus, of focused attention, focused energy, and
to always be WINning - asking the question “What’s Important Now?”
Not dwelling on something that happened in the past or stressing about something that
might happen in the future, but putting quality attention to the present, and choosing to
act on the thing that is most important right now.
And to warp things ups, McKeown looks at what it means to actually BE an essentialist, that
essentialism isn’t something that you do, it’s something that you are, with the enoucragement
here to move the essentialist part of you to your core, that you live from a sense of
essentialism and push the non-essentialist part of you away from that core.
And then, over time, working to increase that essentialist core as the non-essentialist
exterior gets smaller and smaller.
So that’s a quick overview of what essentialism is all about.
And each of the individual ideas here is actually an entire chapter within the book, so there’s
lots to continue digging into there.
And for me, as I hope you’ve seen here, one of the tools that I use to help me both
decide what is essential and then execute well on the things that I’ve chosen to say
“yes” to is visual note-taking, this process of giving ideas a visual form, of creating
diagrams and small scenes to help you wrap your head around whatever it is you have in
front of you, to get the most out of the mental effort you put into your work.
And if you would like to develop that skill to help make your yes’s a little bit more
impactful, then check out the resources at VerbalToVisual.com.
Thanks for watching this video.
I hope that you’re able to take some action on at least a few of these ideas, and maybe
move toward those activities that are essential, and move away from the non-essential.
Because I do think that is something that leads to a more fulfilled, that the disciplined
pursuit of less has the potential to create more meaning.
So thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
Till then.