if you have trouble making decisions...
exploring essentialism ✨
Last week, I failed to write a Fridays are for France🇫🇷! post! Why? I’ve been deep into Greg McKeown’s bestseller “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” and it totally changed my view about how I’ve been approaching my writing…
When I started to write about France, my brain became so busy with arguments that I should actually be writing topics closer to the book I’ve been writing…which resulted in me getting overwhelmed and not writing anything at all🙈 - this is something psychologists call “decision fatigue”.
Have you ever experienced something like this? Apparently, too many options can actually be a bad thing, and is called the “paradox of choice.” So much of society has spent centuries working towards the privilege to be able to make our own decisions, but at a certain point too many choices lead to overwhelm and anxiety.
Studies (this is an article about it if you’re interested!) have even shown that menus that have fewer food options actually make more sales! When we’re hungry, the last thing we want to do is to have 1000 choices of what to eat. Similarly, how many people say there’s nothing to watch in a time where we have 1000s of films available at our fingertips?
Why else do so many of us have trouble making decisions? Perhaps it’s because we’ve been conditioned by the school system that in order to be a “good student”, we must obey our teachers and follow instructions. If we started making up our own rules, chances are we’d get punished for it. This breeds good employees, but not necessarily good artists, entrepreneurs, and “free thinkers.” Fun fact: our modern school system was modelled after the army😅 and structured during Industrial Revolution to prepare students to work in factories! Click here to learn more!
❤️Side note: I LOVED school when I was little, and still do! So I’m not trying to bash it- just providing context as to why it might be uncomfortable for some of us to transition from employee to self-employed👀.❤️
In Essentialism, McKeown quotes the Austrian-American writer Peter Drucker:
“In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time-literally-substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”
It’s no surprise that after being conditioned from a young age to follow “orders”, a lot of us feel lost when we leave school or a traditional job! And even if we enjoy carving our own path, as many artists and entrepreneurs do, many people aren’t cut out for a lifestyle that depends on making so many decisions on their own, because it can feel like like they’re jumping into the deep end every time they do so. Frightening! The lifestyle of an artist, entrepreneur, etc. requires a lot of confidence and inner faith- especially if your employees or family depend on you financially.
In McKeown’s book, he offers some tools to help those of us who need help self-navigating our career and life. He defines essentialism as “the disciplined pursuit of less, but better.” In other words, he claims that you must get clear about what is essential, and eliminate everything else…for now. It’s cutting fat. Editing your wardrobe. Saying no. Setting boundaries. Cleaning your physical and metaphorical house. Prioritizing your top task. Getting clear about what really matters to you right now in a world that’s always competing for your attention; trying to convince you that you should be doing this thing, no that thing, actually that thing!
Once you get clear about what is essential to you, it feels like a weight has been lifted! However, it requires you to be brave about letting go of what is not essential; when we don’t have the courage to get really honest with ourselves about what we really want right now, McKeown argues that we risk being governed by what other people want or our past self wanted. This could be due to anything from fear, a lack of time to reassess, or not giving yourself permission to explore different things to see what makes you actually happy. (Sounds pretty similar to “limiting beliefs”, doesn’t it?)
Discovering what our heart truly desires could be as simple as realizing you actually do like to wear pink now, or want to spend more time with your children. It could also be as life-changing as realizing your current career or city doesn’t serve you anymore, and that you need to give yourself the time and space to experiment with what does.
So…as mentioned, I was reading Essentialism because of my career goals. Since the book I’m writing doesn’t have France as a main topic, you could say that my Substack would not only be falsely advertising my writing to any potential readers of the book, but also any potential publishers or literary agents as well.
Okay, I LOVE writing and learning about France, I hope to move there again, and I want to use it as a setting in another book one day…but at this moment in time, France as a MAIN topic can’t take priority if I want to be smart about my time management. But don’t worry- it’s not going away completely!
Okay. Pause. Let’s review the word priority. My mind was blown after reading this passage in Essentialism:
“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.”
How many of us think about things in terms of our “top 5 priorities”? I know I do! Rewiring my brain to only think of priority as singular helped put my to-do list in perspective.
For example, every day you can ask yourself “what is the most important thing to complete today?” and feel satisfied that you are actually moving in the direction you want, whether that’s revolved around family, friends, career, or health, etc. It’s better to complete only one task that will get you closer to your goals, rather than complete a bunch of nonessential items that leave you with a sense of false productivity.
Of course, this is assuming you actually know what you want. But our wants are always changing as we grow up! Sometimes we won’t know if something is the right path unless we just take action and try it out, then later reflect on how it feels. It’s kind of like dating: if you don’t take the leap to go on that first date, how will you know if that person is right for you?
So while the Alice in Wonderland meme at the top of this post of is true (if you don’t know what you want, then any path will get you there), we may have to continually leap, experiment (Tiny Experiments!) , and “fail” to find out what path works best for us at this moment in time!
Thanks so much for reading friends!! I’m curious, is there an area of your life you feel you need to prioritize that you haven’t been? What about an area you need to edit out for now, even if it’s hard? Please let me know in the comments if you feel like it! ❤️