Essentialism

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown

Sam Elliot is a capable executive in Silicon Valley. His company was acquired recently by a larger, bureaucratic organization, and he decided to be a good citizen about it. He started saying yes. He said yes to meetings he didn't need to attend. He said yes to the Nigerian sales team call. He said yes to a presentation deck for the new division head who had only just taken over. He said yes to a friendly favor for a colleague on another team, and then another, and then one more after that.

None of these yeses felt wrong in the moment. That's the point. Each one came with a face attached, someone he didn't want to disappoint, a relationship he wanted to protect, a future he didn't want to close off. The calculus seemed reasonable each time it happened. Saying no is awkward. Saying yes is easy. And in an organization where he was new, where proving himself felt important, where visible activity seemed like the appropriate response to uncertainty, yes was the default. Every single time.

By Thursday evening he was staring at ten open email tabs and wondering why he felt simultaneously overworked and useless. The stress was going up. The quality of his work was going down. He was, as McKeown puts it, "majoring in minor activities." The core product strategy he had been hired to lead, the actual work that mattered, was quietly rotting in the background. Not because of one bad decision. Because of dozens of small good ones.

Then the company offered him an early retirement package. He was in his early fifties and had no interest in fully retiring. He went to speak with a mentor, who gave him one piece of surprisingly counterintuitive advice: stay, but do only what you would do as an outside consultant. Say no to everything that doesn't qualify. And don't tell anyone.