Essentialism (XXX): Execute: Be

 "Beware the barrenness of a busy life" - Socrates

McKeown starts this chapter with story of Mahatma Gandhi, a man who started his adult life thinking that he would become a barrister and ended his life pursing the liberation of the oppressed, ultimately seeing the independence of India.  Gandhi, suggest McKeown, the essence of the Essentialist life: having found his purpose, he removed everything that did not serve it, a process he called "reducing himself to zero".  He wove cloth and wore it.  He avoided all newspapers as "their contents only added non-essential confusion to his life."  He simplified his diet.  He went days without speaking.  At his death, he owned less than ten things.  He never - intentionally - held political office, yet became the Father of his Nation.

It is impossible, suggests McKeown, to argue with the statement that Gandhi lived a life that mattered.

We are all not Gandhi - nor should we be.  But, McKeown suggests, we can purge of our lives of the non-essentials and live the way of an Essentialist, each in our own way.

There are two ways of thinking about Essentialism. The first is something that we practice occasionally, something we try to fit into our lives as yet another thing that we have to "pack in".  The second is to think of it as something that we are, something that is intrinsic to us.

Essentialism finds its itself embedded in many spiritual and religious traditions. Whether as founders of religion or as reformers, the call to the essentials of a faith and its cousin, simplicity, are in almost every major religious tradition,  And this extends to philosophers and men and women of all walks of life:  anyone can embrace the way of the Essentialist.

Like many things in life, McKeown suggests that the Non-essentialist runs the risk of minoring in the majors.  The Non-essentialist has non-essentials at their core; they can never - without reversing the two - reach the essentials on a long term basis:

In contras, the Essentialist has identified their Essentials and have them at the core:

Over time, then, the Essentialist continues to make the essentials more of their core and the non-essentials less:

(Author's note:  If this looks a lot like Stephen Covey's Circle of Control, you would not be wrong.)

As we focus on our Essentials, we will encounter new opportunities and options - which themselves can lead us astray from our main purpose.  But if we know our essentials - if we are Essentialists - we will have the clarity to recognize which of those opportunities and options match with our interests, talents, and purpose.

By continuing to focus on the Essentials - by making the decisions every day to focus on those things that are our Essentials (and these will be different for every person), we slowly transform ourselves into an Essentialist. We learn to do less and less - so that we can do more.

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Application:

The quote from Socrates resonates with me, especially in an age given to busy-ness and effort and a life that can be 24/7/365 if we let it.  We can plan out every minute of every day and still accomplish nothing of value.

One of the "lectures" that I give as part of "Sage Advice" portion of my job to those entering the industry is how my career over the past 25+ years has been reduced to documents being stored away (once upon a time in bankers boxes in storage facilities, now mostly online storage), waiting for shredding and/or deletion.  Hours, days, weeks, months even years spent on projects that were super critical at the time and were presented as needing my total sacrifice - all slowly drifting away as recycled paper and re-opened memory.

Does that cover everything?  Of course not.  There were plenty of things that I did that were outside of that venue (or even in it) that were essential, times with family and friends, of service and enjoyment, of things that lasted beyond the moment themselves.

There were some. There could have been more.

My struggle has not so much been having the non-essential and essential reversed in my core, it has been my unwillingness to surrender the non-essentials to the more essential because...reasons.  Choice was seen as limiting, not expanding my ability to do more through less.  Sometimes choosing the good was confused with choosing the best.

Now I am trying to always ask:  What is truly essential?