Investment in the right activities

Building the essentialist way of life.

Hello Buddies,

I was thinking about how swift this year is going. I had a Zoom Meeting on the 3rd of January (just like the day before yesterday) where we discussed our goals for the first quarter of the year. Unbelievable, we are in the third month. Have I achieved my goals? Lols, I can’t say. But I’m glad, a friend in that clique will be launching one of his goals today, please check @thegenzchat on Twitter and Instagram. It’s a podcast that explored everything about the generation Z culture. It tells stories, shares opinions on topics on what it feels like to grow up in generation Z and everything that makes up this generation. Do well to subscribe and start consuming amazing content. I hope you are all good and doing well. Maybe we should dive into today's business.

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I have been postponing this book for a while for two reasons. Firstly, I want to understand the author more and probably listen to him speak about his book. Also, there is a lot to share from this book so I was overwhelmed. Here we are already, let’s dive in already.

Essentialism was authored by Greg Mckeown who explored a stage in his life where he had to prioritize and he made the wrong priority. This made him feel bad about himself. Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless. It is about pausing constantly to do a personal audit of your activities. Frequently asking oneself, “Am I investing in the right activities?”

If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.

Most times we end up working all day without being able to account for the day. You realize that at a time, you just find yourself as always busy but not productive this is because you have let the key to your life to other people to prioritize. I used to have a "friend", he is always ready to execute your daily plan with you. He lives on other people's plans but he realized quite earlier sha, God helped his life. So, people are very much available to walk you into their plan, they will take charge of your life and you will end up being busy all day without any productive act. When we have clarity of purpose, it enables us to succeed in our endeavour.

When we don't purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people – our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families – will choose for us, and before long we'll have lost sight of everything meaningful and important.

The true meaning of priority

When we're asked about our priority for the day, we tend to list more than three tasks and that defeats the purpose of priority. The author said:

“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.”

This shows that Priority is different from the scale of preference or let's call it scale of priority. It is a singular task that is the most important of all your tasks that you need to accomplish. Remember in our first newsletter, we talked about the Biggest and Ugliest Frog. Yes, that exactly is your Priority. Also, to uncover your true priorities, ask yourself, “What will I say no to?” out of the arrays of tasks you feel you should do.

Trade-Off

The single hard fact we need to swallow is that for each of our YESes, there are some things that we have said NO to. “Yes, I will attend the party.” = “No, I won’t Iron my clothes at that time” or “No, I won’t read at that time”. Therefore, we should be careful of our YESes and check at what the NO will be and see if that can be trade off. I'm sure many will prefer Parties to reading sha. Wahala…

People should also know, “If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no.”

In conclusion, Building the traits of an essentialist is a forever continuous process according to the author, the way of the essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better. It is not to run after many things at a time.

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Enjoy your day.