Today I’m diving into Greg McKeown's book “Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less”... Greg McKeown explains an Essentialist as someone who knows that they have limits; someone that sees boundaries as liberating; someone who sets rules in advance; and someone who is comfortable with cutting losses. The multi-hyphenate movement, and the North American standard achievement metric of level of “busy-ness”, and our de facto participation in it, seems, to me, to be one of the biggest roadblocks to an essentialist lifestyle. I did have a lot of pride in “doing so much” or “working so hard”. Back in 2013 I had enrolled in full-time university, was living on my own an 1h30 min away from campus, and holding down 2 or 3 jobs at a time. It went like this throughout my 6 years there, and what ended up happening every year were barely passing grades, rotating burnout jobs, starting a website, sporadically starting and ending small business ideas, and the blowing up of a chunk of my income socializing and shopping because it was where I winded down and received approval and praise for the things I was doing. Even at my last years of university, when I was finally able to get a student loan to support me and my grades spiked up dramatically, I still did not learn to slow down, and still felt the need to fill up my schedule to prove my worth to the world. Greg explains the “Sunk-Cost Bias” as the tendency to continue to invest time, money, or energy into something we know is a losing proposition simply because we have already incurred, or sunk, at a cost that cannot be recouped. But of course this can easily become a vicious cycle: the more we invest, the more determined we become to see it through and see our investment pay off. The more we invest in something, the harder it is to let go. Reflecting, I can see that I operated under the sunk-cost bias for over 10 years, during my time at University, at certain jobs, and other educational pursuits. I continued to put time and money into a University degree despite constantly changing my major, failing grades, and no clear end goal. I stayed at abusive jobs because I felt like it would be more of a headache to apply, interview and train for a new job during the madness of everything else going on. I was a YES-Man and committed to events, workshops, speaking opportunities, project opportunities even if I was exhausted by Day 2 of each of one. Mind you, everything I said yes to and pursued I had originally shown interest in and enjoyed, but that was the problem. I was interested in so many things! And they were all overlapping! Everything was made to be a priority. What ended up happening was that I was decent at many things but nothing really pushed me towards a singular direction - it instead spread me too thin, and that investment of time and money didn’t end up paying off the way I thought it would. ... Towards the end of 2020 I went from doing too much, to a grand halt. In these last couple months I have trained myself to reflect on old jobs and opportunities to research their underlying patterns, what i liked about them, and to remember when i did feel that spark and ask myself why. After that I researched jobs and careers that are in demand in the market, in depth, until I find that “aha” - that oh yes, this is the one - and then commit to that, and that alone. Now my time is more relaxed, more open to small hobbies, and more dedicated to a singular goal and constantly asking myself as opportunities come up - if they will add a stepping stone to the direction I want to go. Don’t get me wrong, I still need to work multiple part-time and freelance jobs to get by with bill payments, but I no longer give them as much investment - 90% of my energy is towards a now clear singular end goal. The result, I suspect, is a more rewarding path and quicker progression.
