In a recent Capital Ideas podcast, “Why women make great investors,” Capital Group portfolio manager Tomoko Fortune recommended the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown — a favorite among Capital Group associates, including myself. 

Essentialism provides a three-step model for how to help eliminate non-essential activities, making it easier to focus on the things that matter most. Personally, I knew I could benefit from revisiting the principles of this book in order to do a better job of saying no to non-essential activities. So, let’s review.

The “false beliefs” of non-essentialism are:

1. I have to
2. It's all important
3. I can do both

Essentialism rejects those fallacies and replaces them with these core truths:

1. I choose to
2. Only a few things really matter
3. I can do anything but not everything

McKeown makes the case for achieving more by doing less. Fortune’s takeaway from the book was, “Too much clutter in our lives, in our work and in our portfolios will lead to inferior performance.” I have also found this to be true. But I also know how hard it can be to say no sometimes. As McKeown writes, “How often do you say yes simply to please? Or to avoid trouble? Or because ‘yes’ has just become your default response?”

McKeown’s repeated inability to say no was one of the main reasons he wrote Essentialism. Specifically, there was an incident on the day after his first daughter was born. As his wife held their new baby in her arms, McKeown was next to her in the hospital room on the phone with a colleague who wanted him to attend a meeting with a client later that day. His colleague told him the client would respect his decision to attend, and even though McKeown knew it was a time to be there for his wife and child, he said he would attend. When he arrived, the client seemed surprised he was there, and nothing came of the meeting. McKeown had said yes to please his colleague, and as a result he had hurt his family, his integrity and even the client relationship.

After this incident, McKeown realized an important lesson that is now one of the most quoted lines from the book: “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”

Non-essentialism persists for several reasons:

• Too many choices. There has been an explosion in the number of choices we have available to us.
• Increased social pressure. Not only has our number of choices increased, the number of outside influences on our decisions has also increased.
• The idea that “you can have it all.” According to McKeown, this is a myth that leads to more people cramming more activities into their already busy and stressful lives.

Do not think to yourself, “I can do it all” or “I will work harder,” like the sturdy workhorse Boxer did in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I can attest — that mindset just leads to exhaustion. Remember, the non-essentialist thinks, “I have to” while the essentialist thinks, “I choose to.”

When asked in the podcast how she has incorporated the habits and routines of Essentialism into her life, Fortune replied, “In work, I’m trying to keep the number of positions in my portfolio tighter. Day to day, I’m trying to say no to more things … Every Friday, I go into my calendar, and I look ahead and I try to create a couple of hours of white space. I also go through every single thing on my calendar and decide if it’s crucial or not, and I’ll cancel things that can be pushed out or that maybe aren’t necessary … Most of the things I do outside of work are focused on my family and my kids.”

In the same way that our closets become cluttered with clothes we will never wear, our lives can become cluttered with the well-intended commitments, projects and activities that we have said yes to — commitments that will live on in perpetuity unless we have a system for purging non-essentials from our lives.

The essentialist’s 3-step method for removing non-essential activities:

1. Explore: Discern the trivial many from the vital few.
   • Before saying yes to anything on your schedule, ask yourself, “Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution towards my goal?”
   • Stop trying to make it all work and start asking, “Which problem do I want to solve?”
      
2. Eliminate: Cut out the trivial many.
   • Avoid commitment traps. “If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no.” As McKeown writes, “Essentialists accept they cannot be popular with everyone all of the time.”
   • You’re going to have to learn to say no. As McKeown writes, “Anytime you fail to say ‘no’ to a nonessential, you are really saying ‘yes’ by default.”
   • You can’t do two things at once and be present at both. “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.”
      
3. Execute: Remove obstacles and make execution effortless.
   • After you choose which activities and efforts you want to keep — the ones that make your highest level of contribution — you will need to find ways to remove obstacles and make progress on the commitments that matter most to you.
   • Book some white space on your calendar. Focus on your highest priority activity and identify an easy first step you can take to accomplish that task. Write it down, then do it. Go ahead and (politely) decline that non-essential meeting request, call your client, write the first few lines of an important email, move that thing off your desk that has been bothering you for weeks so you can think more clearly, etc.
   • Do it today and then feel the rush of crossing that task off your list. As McKeown states, “Instead of trying to accomplish it all — and all at once — and flaring out, the Essentialist starts small and celebrates progress.”

As you let go of the belief that all things are equally important, don’t be afraid to ask for help. McKeown advises, "If your manager comes to you and asks you to do X, you can respond with ‘Yes, I’m happy to make this the priority. Which of these other projects should I deprioritize to pay attention to this new project?’”

Continue to remove obstacles so you can accomplish what matters most. As more requests come in, keep asking yourself, “Is this the very most important thing I should be doing with my time and resources right now?” As McKeown writes, “When we really have clarity of purpose, it enables us to succeed at our endeavor.” 

What can financial professionals do to focus on what matters most?

Financial professionals focus on what is most important to their clients. At Capital Group, what matters most to us is improving client outcomes. We do this by offering investment solutions and keen insights to our clients and partners. 

For example, we ask questions like, “How can we help plan sponsors motivate financially stressed employees to save for retirement?” Then we provide talking points for our financial partners to share with plan sponsors, such as how to:

1. Use plan features to help reduce participants’ financial stress
2. Be open about the company’s commitment to financial wellness
3. Help employees prioritize their retirement savings

For someone who is financially stressed, deciding to save more for retirement can feel overwhelming, especially if there isn’t an easily identifiable first step they can take.

Utilizing the ideals of Essentialism, financial professionals can help make things easier for plan sponsors by:

1. Examining plan features to determine how easy (or difficult) it is for an employee at their company to save more for retirement
2. Asking plan sponsors if they have implemented automatic enrollment, a qualified default investment alternative (QDIA) and/or auto-escalation to help boost their participation rates
3. Helping plan sponsors simplify their plan design, conduct an investment re-enrollment, and/or provide access to online tools that allow participants to review their retirement savings progress and help celebrate milestones

Participants likely already know they should save more for retirement. To paraphrase McKeown, they want to do the right thing and contribute more – it’s just not a priority for them yet.

Rather than telling participants all the reasons they should save more for retirement, financial professionals might want to consider asking employees why they might want to make a change and then be quiet. If a person has even a faint desire to do something new in terms of their finances, they are likely to begin explaining their reasons. This technique is described in the Capital Ideas article, “Ask the questions that move clients to action,” and is detailed further in the book Instant Influence, by Dr. Michael Pantalon of the Yale School of Medicine.

Once someone finds their own important reasons to make a change, they are more likely to make that change a priority. The role of a financial professional is to help participants find the next step they are willing to take to help themselves financially.

Conclusion

Non-essentialism persists because we believe the myth that we can have it all. By trying to straddle too many things at once, we often just end up disappointing people, including ourselves.

Essentialism makes the case for achieving more by doing less. Eliminating non-essential activities makes it easier for us to focus on the things that matter most. You can choose when to say no in order to get the right things done.

Read important disclosures