Essentialism is the discipline, the skill, the ability to sort out the vital few from the trivial many, casting aside all but the essential, saving, hoarding your time and energy to laser in on the vital few. Do less but do it to a higher standard. Essentialism is the art of saying NO to the important but still less important than the MOST important. After all it is relatively easy to say no to the unimportant!
It is easy to fritter away your life making tiny progress here and there, all too likely frittering away your life’s energy. Essentialism asks us to find our highest purpose, our greatest goal, and then strip away all else, to constantly question how we invest our hours: Do we spend our precious time, our one and only life, for our highest benefit?
Being overly busy and overextended may be evidence of productivity… or of a lack of priorities and self-organization… and a failure to take the time to sharpen the saw! Essentialism calls for us to design “Escape Space” into our lives, time to reflect, meditate, and journal so as to increase our self-awareness so that we might continually refine and more deeply understand that which is most important, that which is most core, that which gives meaning, that which is essential to our life’s purpose.
Closing Quotes:
“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.” – John Maxwell, b. 1947, ‘The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership’
“Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.” – Josh Billings, 1818-1885
“It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day…so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real.” – Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862
As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier