Essentialism — What I Love About This Book
Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I love this book. You should read it. Anyone you mentor should read it. And most importantly, your boss should read it. All the copies you buy and distribute you can consider as an investment in your future happiness and sanity.
So what is it about? Well, focusing on what’s essential. Essential to your life, to your work, to you. You you. The one you’re truly stuck with for the rest of your life. It’s having discipline to do less but better.
More specifically, the disciplined pursuit of less vs. the undisciplined pursuit of more... acknowledging how success leads to further growing commitments and the messy undisciplined pursuit of more & more accomplishments.
Another important point that it covers: if you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. Oh that doesn’t sound good, does it? But has it happened to you? What would it take to avoid that?
(Drop by Greg McKeown’s web page for the book for a quick video overview.)
When you read it, you might say, “Well, I kind of already know that already.” Knowing and doing. Sometimes you need to have a cohesive text pull it together and put it into action, plus give yourself permission to do some really hard things.
Like saying, “No.” Oh, I’ve been that guy. I have said, “No.” to people in the past. I’ve seen the light drain out of their eager eyes. It’s not fun to be Mr. Killjoy. But it can be essential to your team succeeding so that you don’t get derailed by side projects and dubious tasks.
It takes gumption, and the ability to speak with clarity and purpose as to why what you’re saying “No.” I’ve also not said “No” when I should have and then seen the price paid: in my team’s mission being randomized and in my own feelings about myself gutted. I’ve also had everyday people quite happily attempt to prioritize my life to achieve their goals. The challenges arise daily.
So some of the book was indeed preaching to the choir, for me, but the message to the choir is still important, and like any good preaching, it adds clarity and powerful insights to what you might already know to be true to yourself.
My discovered gold: Essential Intent.
To me, the part where this book explodes wide open is when it gets to Essential Intent. This is chapter ten. This is the key take-away from the book I’ll carry going forward with great fervor: what is the team’s Essential Intent? Something brief and clear and inspirational. The clarity of the essential intent becomes a power tool for every person on the team to decide whether a new challenge / task / question is worth their attention. It empowers each person while giving them direction and knowledge that what they are working on is aligned with the total purpose of the team and the team’s responsibility to deliver.
Part of what excites me here, too, is that it resonates with the concept of Harmonious Initiative, something I’m studying in greater detail on the side. I was introduced to a write-up of Harmonious Initiative at Microsoft by a passionate leader, Mark Flick, and it clicked with me. It excited me because it put form to that I had seen succeed in the past. More on that another time, but part of Harmonious Initiative is having your team executing on a clearly communicated mission with no doubts what your purpose is and how you will execute together to achieve that purpose. It’s the resonance within a committed team working well together.
Essential Intent is all about that, too.
It’s powerful stuff for me also because I’ve been in the opposite: an organization where anything like Essential Intent was completely absent, resulting in ambiguous meandering work that put the team into a reactive state because what the heck else were we doing that was more important than this new thing that just got handed down this morning? We were diffused and pulled in many different directions and it was poisonous and demoralizing. What was our purpose? Well, to do whatever needed to be done.
Oy!
If you can’t write up what your team and organization’s current Essential Intent is then that is a big fat canary going ker-plop dead in your coal mine. Either rise up to fix it or hold your breath and boogie on out of there.
And a book like Essentialism provides clarity now to say, “Hey, we’re reactive and over committed to un-aligned tasks that sum up to unclear accomplishments. We need to align around a concrete, inspirational goal and prioritize the work achieving that goal with great discipline while ruthlessly abandoning anything else. Like this here wonderful book says.” <<Book drop>>
You have probably gone through messy times like that, too. And no doubt the team eventually pulled itself in a good direction and accomplished great things. What could have happened sooner to achieve that? What clarity? What inspiration?
There are plenty more gems in the book. You should go read it. I like the focus on prioritizing sleep. I can see it being important to give people permission to prioritize sleep — I was regaled with stories of a now departed leader who did everything he could to get as little sleep as possible. Three hours, two hours if possible. This was the leader who also thought 9:30pm staff meetings were a great idea.
Regular 9:30pm meetings. Really. This dude happily prioritized other people’s lives. Not for me. You?
Essentialism. I love it. Give it a read. Cheers.
