This post reflects on the book Essentialism: Disciplined Pursuit of the Less. So far we have discussed the following:
- What is Essentialism?
- Finding the vital few by:
- Creating space for thinking.
- Embracing Trade-offs during prioritization.
- Extracting the Essential Intent.
With the tools above, we can filter out many trivial distractions from our lives, but it’s still not enough. That’s how big the sea of trivial things is. We need even more tools to eliminate the non-essentials from our lives.
To explain the next concept, I found the fabricated story about Warren Buffet’s advice to his Pilot the simplest.
The Fake Story of Warren Buffet – 25/5 Rule
Mike Flint, Buffett’s personal airplane pilot for 10 years, once asked Buffet for career advice. He suggested Flint go through the following 3 steps exercise:
- Step 1: Write down your top 25 career goals.
- Step 2: Then review the list and circle your top 5 goals.. The 5 items circled are List A and the 20 items not circled are List B.
This is where it gets interesting. Flint planned to focus on List A, but still work on List B on the side when he got time. He reasoned that List B contained important career goals close to List A’s value. But Step 3 was different than his expectations.
- Step 3: Focus all your energy towards List A, and avoid List B at all costs.
List A vs List B
At a higher level, we understand what a distraction is: Excessive social media, sleep, procrastination, gaming, etc. We realize that we must avoid these, and more, to be productive. If we waste time on any of these, we often feel guilty.
But what about List B? It has 20 career goals that are part of our top 25 goals. They are not distractions in the traditional sense. List B is full of “Good” goals; very close to List A’s value.
But any time you spend towards List B robs you of time for List A. Ultimately, they distract you from List A, but you don’t feel guilty since you are unaware of the distraction.
That’s why they say: “Good is the enemy of Great”. It’s much harder to avoid items that score 8/10 than 5/10.
Opportunities are not equal
Life is too short to pursue every opportunity you get. The next step in Essentialism is to understand that:
Opportunities can be distraction.
When we say: “Eliminate the non-essential”, it also includes sub-par opportunities. So eliminate them. If you don’t say no to trivial opportunities, you will not have time for the essential ones.
Use extreme criteria to judge the value of each opportunity. Pursue an opportunity only if it scores 9/10 or 10/10. Everything else should be eliminated.
If you don’t feel “Hell Yeah!” about the opportunity, turn it down.
This is easier said than done. Especially when the opportunity is knocking (with a ton of Endowment Effect) on the door. All I can say (and hope) is that it gets better with practice.