1. Explore more; commit less
One paradox of essentialism is that essentialists exploremore than their nonessentialist counterparts — they’re just systematic about it. Essentialists are incredibly selective about what they commit to. In the interim period, they can be curious about lots and lots of things. They just don’t go deep until they find something that’s a total 10-out-of-10 ‘Yes! This is the thing I should be doing.’ Think of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive saint day after day, “This might sound crazy but…” And most of the ideas were crazy until, as Jony put it, eventually an idea was so great it took the air out of the room.
2. Negotiate the nonessentials
For a lot of people it is laughable to imagine saying “No!” to a senior leader. They worry, for good reason, that such a blunt response will immediately be a career limiting move. However, when we get caught between the false dichotomy of “either I have to say yes to everything or I will be seen as insubordinate” leads a lot of people to avoid the conversation about what they should really be focused on. When people believe that nonessentials are nonnegotiable they lose a lot of power in that very moment.
3. Conduct a career offsite
As someone once said to me, we spend more time planning our vacation than planning our careers. We can apply the practice of a quarterly offsite to our own lives and careers by taking a few hours to think about the bigger picture questions: “If I can only achieve three things over the next three months what would they be?” and “Where do I want to be five years from now?” When we only react to the latest email we become rudderless; blown about by every wind of corporate change.
4. Come back to your purpose
My friend and ocean advocate, Lewis Pugh, has designed an extraordinary career around his professional purpose: to create National Parks in the Oceans. His clarity of purpose enables him to achieve the (almost) impossible. Among other things he swims in the most extreme water conditions imaginable. In one recent TED talk he describes swimming in the North Pole in temperatures of minus 1.7 degrees (see it here). He says, “The most powerful form of self-belief comes from believing in something greater than you. Because when you’ve got purpose, everything becomes possible.” So when you are exhausted or getting pulled in a million directions come back to your purpose.
5. Give up the idea that success means pleasing everyone
Thinking that you can say “yes” and keep everyone happy is a false premise. When you try and say yes to everyone, is everyone happy? No! You will make a millimeter progress in a million directions, which will frustrate you and everyone else. When you say push back you may be sacrificing an ounce of popularity in the moment, but you’re trading up for a longer-term respect.
6. Celebrate the reality of tradeoffs. Instead of asking, “How can I make it all work?” Ask, “What are the tradeoffs I want to make?” Make them deliberately and strategically. Don’t try to straddle every request. As Michael Porter has written, “Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs. It’s about deliberately choosing to be different.”
In the end, it is this idea of choosing to be different that can be so powerful. Designing a career of contribution is less about adding layers of activity like we do in an oil painting. Instead, it is about becoming more of who we are already are by chiseling away those things that don’t feel right.
