In his book ‘Essentialism’ Greg McKeown tells the story of how, just a couple of hundred years ago, the word ‘priority’ meant the single most important thing.
Then we messed with it and invented a word called ‘priorities’ which as we now know means lots of most important things.
If you could do just one thing today, what would it be? Would you be able to discern the single most important thing to focus on today. McKeown calls that essentialism.
Our lives would be better – more productive, more focused, more calm if we were able to identify only the essential things to do in our lives. Being disciplined to focus, not on everything that we are expected to do or feel pressure to do, but just the most important things that take us towards – whatever you want to call it – our vision, our ‘why’, our purpose.
The reality as I see it is that many of us have swallowed the lie that we can have it all, do it all and be it all. Not possible. Not going to happen. And many of us stuff our lives up trying to achieve it all.
You can be a better leader by setting the example for your people of knowing what are the essential things that you need to focus on, and say no to the rest.
What is the one thing that you must do today? So do it!
