#106 - Less but better

Read time - 3 minutes

Less but better.

That’s a quote from my favorite, and most commonly recommended book, Essentialism.

I recommended it to a professional friend at lunch this week. He is an extremely talented entrepreneur who’s had a lot of success in an early career.

During lunch I went a little into coaching mode - and actually asked “are you ok if I go a bit into coaching mode here?”. I asked him “are you getting everything you want from your business? He replied “yes and no - I’m getting plenty of work but keep adding projects that require my time and expertise but don’t really have a plan for repeatability or scale”.

The first question you may ask in response to that is, “do you need to scale your business”? That’s exactly what I asked at some point, and the answer was not necessarily to create a big company. But this person was starting to burn out and get pulled in too many directions.

I asked a few more questions, which ultimately led to me recommending the book Essentialism. And I told him the whole book could be summarized with one sentence:

Less but better.

He smiled and understood what I was getting at immediately.

He knew intellectually that he was saying YES to too many projects, continuing what he’s been rewarded and conditioned his whole life to achieve - MORE.

This is a common theme of nearly 100% of high achieving people building the first phase of their careers. And it was for me. We’re good at getting stuff done, which gives us more opportunities to do more things we can succeed at, which gives us rewards (money, recognition, status) that make us feel good about ourselves, which motivates us to do more.

For almost 100% of these peopele, this cycle continues until somethng breaks.

For me it was pretty clear - divorce, business struggles, and generally having to start over.

For others it’s not so clear - slow build of burnout that leads to subtle health, relationship, and lifestyle issues.

Those of us lucky enough to get an opportunity to start over have a chance to learn that at some point more isn’t better. If we want to do truly great work and make the impact we desire, we have to do less.

Less but better.

If you haven’t read Essentialism, I’d highly recommend giving a read or listen.

Talk to you next week,

Mike