When people ask us to do something, we can confuse the request with our relationship with them. Sometimes they seem so interconnected, we forget that denying the request is not the same as denying the person. Only once we separate the decision from the relationship can we make a clear decision and then separately find the courage and compassion to communicate it.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.137.
Peter Drucker, in my view the father of modern management thinking, was also a master of the art of the graceful no. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian professor most well known for his work on "flow," reached out to interview a series of creative individuals for a book he was writing on creativity, Drucker's response was interesting enough to Mihaly that he quoted it verbatim:
I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February 14th - for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I have learned much from it. But, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative- I don't know what that means. I just keep on plodding.... I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours - productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one's time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.
A true Essentialist, Peter Drucker believed that "people are effective because they say no."
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.135, 136.
I did not set out to write a chapter about courage. But the deeper I have looked at the subject of Essentialism the more clearly I have seen courage as key to the process of elimination. Without courage, the disciplined pursuit of less is just lip service. It is just the stuff of one more dinner party conversation. It is skin deep. Anyone can talk about the importance of focusing on the things that matter most - and many people do - but to see people who dare to live it is rare.
I say this without judgement. We have good reasons to fear saying no. We worry we'll miss out on a great opportunity. We're scared of rocking the boat, stirring things up, burning bridges. We can't bear the thought of disappointing someone we respect and like. None of this makes us a bad person. It's a natural part of being human. Yet as hard as it can e to say no to someone, failing to do so can cause us to miss out on something far more important.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.132, 133.
If the answer isn't a definite yes then it should be a no.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.103. See also No More Yes. It's Either HELL YEAH! Or No.
Charlie O. Simms taught a journalism 101 class in Beverly Hills High School. He started the first day of the class Nora Ephron attended much the same way any journalism teacher would, by explaining the concept of a "lead." He explained that a lead contains the why, what, when, and who of the piece. It covers the essential information. Then he gave them their first assignment: write a lead to a story.
Simms began by presenting the facts of the story: "Kenneth I. Peters, the principal of the Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead. college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund 'Pat' Brown."
The students hammered away on their manual typewriters trying to keep up with the teacher's pace. Then they handed in their rapidly written leads. Each attempted to summarize the who, what, where, and why as succinctly as possible: "Margaret Mead, Maynard Hutchins, and Governor Brown will address the faculty on...", "Next Thursday, the high school faculty will..." Simms reviewed the students' leads and put them aside.
He then informed them that they were all wrong. The lead to the story, he said, was "There will be no school Thursday."
"In that instant," Ephron recalls, "I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn't enough to know the who, what, when, and where: you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered." Ephron added, "He taught me something that works just as well in life as it does in journalism."
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.73,74
