This morning, on my walk into work, I listened to an episode of the Art of Manliness podcast called ‘The Difference Between Essentialists and Non-Essentialists‘. It was an interview with Geoff McKeown, author of a book called ‘Essentialism’ that was published about three years ago. In very basic terms, Essentialism is a mindset which involves identifying areas of activity in life that have the most meaning/value when viewed from a long-term perspective and then using these as a filter to help manage decisions on activity and effort on an ongoing basis. Rather than mindlessly saying yes to things or simply committing yourself to try to do everything as best as you can, an Essentialist would know the key goal that they are trying to achieve in life (potentially taking a 100+ year timeframe as a means for deciding this) and then focus attention on actions that contribute to achieving this overarching goal. The idea is not new, but I felt that McKeown had an exceptionally clear way of expressing it, to the point that I am certainly going to read or listen to the book sometime soon. In the interview, reference was made to the famous quote from author Steven Covey’s that “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” which obviously captures the same idea in a nutshell. Listening to this section of the podcast I was reminded of Covey’s classic book ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. I read this way back in early 2001 and so it would have been one of the first books on productivity, self-management that I ever read. I recall that it contained much of value. At that time I was also experimenting with mind-mapping and produced a mind-map summary of the complete book. Amazingly, I have just managed to find a rather fuzzy scanned image of it..
Apart from anything else, I rather like this mind-map as a piece of ‘art’.
One of the things I recall from my reading of ‘The 7 Habits’ was the development of a personal ‘mission statement’ based around the different roles that one plays in life (for me it was things like, father, husband, teacher, manager, researcher etc.) and the same idea is picked up by McKeown through the idea of an ‘Intention’ (The Main Thing). It seems to me that Covey probably has the edge here because I don’t think I could have a single Intention in life but I certainly could have a single Intention for each of my main roles. I think this is certainly something that I will give some further thought to.
Anyway, from that podcast I now have a mind that is filled with curiosity to pursue the idea of Essentialism further, both through McKeown’s book but also by going back to Covey. Annoyingly, I gave my copy of ‘The 7 Habits’ to a charity shop years ago and even bought a second-hand copy more recently but gave that one away too. So, one of my first tasks here is going to be to hunt down another copy of it.
Watch this space for further thoughts on Essentialism then, as and when I have followed up on these sources.
Tim O'Hare 