Current Mood: Forced Essentialism

For the last several years, I have been pondering - and yes - hoping there would be a event in modern human history that would be *so* widespread and *so drastic* that it would require us to question *so many* aspects of our daily existence it would trigger a 21st century renaissance.

Being a student of History and having a major in Philosophy, I have these thoughts often. But running a fast growing and exciting business, having an awesome and busy family, I have not had the opportunity to slow down enough to write and share these thoughts. But appropriately so - the current environment and my current mood have created just such an opportunity.

Hence why I'm writing this.

I have no way of knowing if the COVID 19 pandemic what I exactly envisioned, not do I know if it will be sufficient to cause the kind of broad-base 'revaluation of everything' worthy of the name "Renaissance" - but I'm secretly hoping that it it will be.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Much of what I envision to be a necessary mind shift in the post 21st century renaissance is well summarized in (and inspired by) Greg McKeown's book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. I highly recommend this book, and equivalently, the life philosophy it champions. It first was brought to my attention when Google Cloud's Rob Enslin spoke about it at a conference.

An Opportunity to Question Every Habit

The problems with any book that is meaningful enough to inspire action in us are two fold:

1) When is a good time to start?

2) How do make changes for long enough for them to become habits ?

This is why I right now see an opportunity in this period of social distancing, quarantine, shifting work structure and family dynamics.

In this moment (and probably not after this moment for a very long time), right now is the BEST time break out of all old habits and create new ones. It's not even fully a choice - it doesn't require any discipline at all. We're being forced to change so many of the things we used to do on autopilot - by our employers, by our schools, by our customers.

Social Distancing Reinforces Key Ideas from The Book

So much of essentialism has to do with choosing to do what's most important and most necessary, and saying 'no' to everything else. If you review the impact of social distancing just by itself - it's remarkable how many things we will no longer be doing or so many places we will no longer be going... with a net impact of.... probably not as much as you thought.

My objective in this article is not to fully summarize the book. I can't do it justice. I simply want to highlight that if there is anything else in modern human history opportunistically convenient to practice essentalism, I don't know what it could be.

Just look a the main chapter points from the book:

Part 1: Essence - we have the power of choice, the unimportance of practically everything, and trade-offs

Part 2: Explore - the perks of being unavailable, look to see what really matters, extreme criteria

Part 3: Eliminate - being clear on what is important, cutting losses, being the ultimate editor of your life

Part 4: Execute - unfair advantage, small wins, routine, and "what's important now?"

My Personal Experience: A Double Win

Living with essentilism in mind accomplishes two concurrent and extremely valuable things.

1) I have noticed, just in the last 24-48 hours, being forced to say NO to many many things we would normally just do out of habit has created lots of mindfulness, deeper connections, and creative head space. Downtime with my kids and my wife, turns out, results in so much quality time together doing very simple things. Really connecting, laughing out loud, working out together, cooking, reading, etc. etc. etc. as opposed to running around as we normally would do on a weekend.

From a business standpoint, I've also been able to spend time thinking really deeply on a few strategic issues which were really important - but I never got around to being able to get beyond the superficial simply because of the relative 'business' of the day to day.

2) Having a deeper dedication to essentialism creates a remarkable time amount of space and energy to effectively tackle truly urgent and unexpected events like the one we're experiencing right now! The way that we have responded at SADA has been very poised, organized, synchronized, and I know that our people, customers, and partners truly appreciate it.

If we're saying yes to too many things all the time, our baseline itself tends to be distracted, not present, not engaged, and revving really hot - from a stress standpoint, which not only lowers IQ, but makes that current state unhealthy, and intolerable - leaves us with having no real ability to respond to anything extraordinary and critical outside of over proscribed and overly complex lives.

Don't waste this moment to practice essentialism

For the next few weeks, your lives will be very different than what you're used to. A period like this may not happen again for years. I encourage everyone to truly view this shock to the system as an opportunity to reevaluate everything about what is essential, and what is not. In a lot of ways, we don't have a choice, and that's a great way to force the creation of new habits and stretch the mind to new ways of thinking.

And if you have time (you should now have the time...) read this book! If it's meaning enough for Rob Enslin to basically make it 'assigned reading' for all of the Google Cloud organization, then it's worth you checking it out too!