Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.
Done right, a strategic intent is really one decision that makes 1,000 decisions.
Essentialism is not about how to get more things done, it's about how to the get the right things done. It doesn't mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.
Essentialism: only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.
The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things.
Take a deep breath. Get present in the moment and ask yourself what is important this very second.
The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the non-essentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.
Music is my life. The things that people do don't seem interesting to me at all - going out to bars, carrying on, going to parties. What the hell do people do? Shop? Play golf? Have vacations? That doesn't seem interesting to me. To me, my job as a musician is to be a good receptor. A lot of music comes through me.
O' What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!
The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.
It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.