Essentialism (III): The Nonessentialist

 If there is such a thing as an Essentialist, there must be a thing as a Nonessentialist.

There is, says McKeown, and he knows too well of it. He has a story in his book to tell.

In his case it was a choice between staying with his wife a few hours after the birth of their child and attending a meeting with a client.  He attended the meeting.  His colleague told him "They will respect you for this".  The clients' reaction at his presence suggested that they did not.  What was worse is that the meeting ended up mattering for nothing at all.  The once in a lifetime moment was gone and would never return and what had replaced it was without consequence.

In thinking about this, McKeown realized a truth that has been said many times and many ways:  If you do not prioritize your life, someone else will.

Why is this?  This became a core of his thought, and how people succeed - Essentialism - his life's work.

In working with his clients, he realized a second truth:  Pursuing success can become a catalyst for failure, because our pursuit of success can blind us to our real priorities.

The progression is easy enough to imagine; I am sure it has happened to many.  We do a good job and are successful.  In our success, we are given more options and opportunities.  We take those options and opportunities and spread ourselves thinner and thinner.  In the end, we are working on everything but our priorites.

There are three elements in the world, suggests McKeown, that lead to Nonessentialism:

1)  Too many choices - "We have all observed the exponential increase in choices over the last decade.  Yet even the midst of it, and perhaps because of it, we have lost sight of the most important ones".  The growth in choices, he says (quoting Peter Drucker), has created the situation where more and more people have choices.  And by having choices, they have to manage themselves.  And society is not at all prepared for it.  We are unprepared because..."for the first time, the preponderance of choice has overwhelmed our ability to manage it."  We become so overwhelmed that we develop "decision fatigue", the inability to filter out what is important and what is not.

2)  Too much social pressure - Simply put, it is not just that we have more choices, it is that thanks to technology we are now more exposed to more decisions and outside influences.  We therefore suffer not just from an information overload, but an opinion overload as well.

3)  The idea that "You can have it all" - It is not a new idea of course; Western business and corporations have been peddling it for years.  The idea that you can do everything:  career, family, hobbies, religion - everything.  We write job descriptions this way, our advertising is aimed at people this way.  Our technology enables this by 24 hour/7 day/365 day a year access to information.  We no longer talk about a priority (as we did from the time the word entered the English language in the 1400's) but we speak (since the 1900's) of priorities. The "one big thing" became "the several big things".

And so we try to do it all, making trades at the edges.  When we do not choose purposefully and directly, says McKeown, other people will choose for us.  And since we have lost the idea of what is a priority, everything - the important, the unimportant, the trivial - all become mixed together.  

He closes this section with a quote from an Australian nurse, Bonnie Ware, who cared for people in the last twelve weeks of their lives.  The biggest regret people had: "I wish I'd had the courage to life a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

This, suggests McKeown, does not happy naturally.  We will have to choose.

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Thoughts and Application:

It is not just life that causes us to be overwhelmed by choices, it is the very culture we live in. Capitalism abounds in the idea that we can have almost everything we want.  We are given a hundred choices for the simplest of things.

Take shoes.  When I was growing up, I had such large feet I only ever had one choice through the 8th grade:  Keds.  The years New Balance started making wide shoes was the year my life changed.  Now, just with a quick look on The Large InterWeb Retalier, the search term "men's sports' shoes" draws in over 20,000 results.

As noted above as well, society serenely tells us we can have it all.  Our employers do.  Our government does.  Often, much of our religion does.  In every way, we "live" in a world of "we can do it all".

We cannot of course - something that I have to learn time and time again.  And what is worse, the precious time and energy wasted on those choices that went nowhere - the sacrificial after hours work for projects that failed, the time and effort spent impressing people that did not matter, the hard coin spent on things that we thought would matter - is gone and can never be recovered.

We cannot do it all.  We simply have to choose, not matter who or what entity tells us otherwise.