ضرورت محوری

081 - Essentialism

Hello there, Kevin here with another episode of the Feel Good English Podcast, the podcast that is helping you become more fluent in English at the same time helping you become more fluent in life.

And today I am going to talk about a book that can help you become more fluent in organizing your life, organizing your work, your studies, or even organizing your house.

And speaking of organizing your house that’s actually how I came across this book. “Came across”, phrasal verb, to find something when you’re not necessarily looking for it. So I came across a book called Essentialism and let me tell you why I came across this book.

So it’s the beginning of the year and I was feeling that I needed to clean out my house, kind of organize my house. Clean out my house, “to clean out” means to get rid of things that you don’t need unwanted or unnecessary things.

So wanting to start the New Year fresh, I wanted to clean out my apartment. And I focused on two rooms one being my kitchen and the other one being my bedroom. And mostly clothes, I had a lot of clothes that I wasn’t using, they just sat there and I was thinking maybe one day I will wear these clothes. However after a year or even two, three years I never did. So I made the decision that I was going to clean out my bedroom, get rid of clothes that I wasn’t using.

I am somebody who likes to research things on the Internet, I like to find proven ways to do things; you could probably imagine from this podcast. I like to learn about how to do things, learn from other people.

So I came across this book, Essentialism and in the book they have a section about how to know what to get rid of and there is something called the ninety percent rule.

Giving you an example of my bedroom, I looked at a piece of clothing and I said to myself, or I thought to myself, is there a ninety percent chance that I am going to wear this? If there is not a ninety percent chance, meaning a very very good chance that I’m going to wear this article of clothing again, then I will get rid of it.

If it is eighty percent, no, not good enough. If I know I won’t wear it then it goes away.

What did I do with my clothes? Well, I gave away a lot of them. To “give away” is to donate, to give away for free, so I gave away a lot of the clothes. And if it is nice, something of value, I am going to try to sell it online, one of those used clothing websites and apps.

Anyway, so very cool technique I found in this book. I am going to talk about a couple other ideas from this book. If you are feeling the urge, the desire, the urge to declutter your work life, another good word “declutter”, “to declutter” is to get rid of clutter, clutter is things that are taking up space.

So if you are feeling the urge to declutter your work life or if you are finding yourself too busy, maybe you seem like you’re always busy but you are just not being very productive or maybe you feel that other people are taking too much of your time. Other people’s agendas are hijacking, like a terrorist on an airplane, hijacking your time, this book can help you.

A couple ideas I am going to share with you. Before I get into that, let me remind you you can get a free course on feelgoodenglish.com, that contains seven audio lessons and seven corresponding transcripts, to the awesome book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

If you want that free course go to feel goodenglish.com and click on the button “Free course”. Hey, that makes sense.

Now let’s get into the lesson on the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown. .

Nowadays, hardly anyone, meaning almost no one, has any time be bored, we are never bored. Modern technology like your phone of course gives us constant communication, entertainment, stimulation. So think about a typical day, how much time during a typical day do you sit doing nothing?

Just sitting there.

Well I can think of one instance maybe when you’re in the bathroom, that’s about two to five minutes depending, but other than that, when do you just sit there doing nothing?

No one really likes to be bored these days; if we are sitting down we usually grab a phone, if we’re waiting for the bus or if we are waiting for something, we grab our phone and we look at it.

In the book Essentialism a lot of what the author talks about is knowing what areas in your life, what projects, what tasks you should focus on.

What are the most valuable tasks that you need to focus your time on?

And I am not going to go deep into that in this episode, I have talked about this idea from other books and another lessons, sometimes these books kind of repeat the same concepts.

So I am going to talk about some

think about their groundbreaking theories.

“Groundbreaking” means very revolutionary, changing everything. So these groundbreaking theories came to them while they were taking space.

The author of this book says that many of today’s very successful CEOs, owners of companies do the same thing. They schedule a few hours, or a few minutes of blank space in their day.

I would recommend doing it for five minutes to start out with, just literally sitting somewhere doing nothing for five minutes. That sounds stupid maybe but it is probably not that easy.

Sit down for five minutes, sit at your desk, on a sofa, whatever that may be and just think about what’s going on. Watch what kind of thoughts come to your head.

We often get lost in the small day to day tasks and we forget why we’re doing them in the first place. But essentialism, the key idea in this book teaches us to always concentrate on the bigger picture and by giving our self space, taking a few minutes or thirty minutes or even an hour, good luck with that one, an hour just sitting there, that is not easy. But this can help us to refocus and to concentrate on the bigger picture.

So once you have gotten clear on what you need to eliminate from your life, what tasks are taking your time, what are time wasters, and also finding what is essential that you need to focus on to achieve your goals, then what do you do?

It’s pretty easy to figure out what we have to do for ourselves, what we shouldn’t do and what we should do. However, if other people are involved in your decisions, things get a little more complicated.

We tend to fear saying no to other people; we, don’t want to disappoint them, we don’t to hurt their feelings we don’t want to lose the relationship and we feel sometimes that if we say no to somebody else’s demands for us, we might damage our relationship with them.

However, we do need to develop the ability to say no.

How about an example? So let’s say you are out some time with a friend having some beers and you are a little buzzed, meaning you are not quite drunk but you are feeling pretty good and he has an idea of “Hey, let’s go to New York in three months from now, let’s go to New York for a week, have a great time.”

And you say, “Hell yeah, that sounds like an awesome plan, I am down.” Meaning, I am down, meaning let’s do this, I accept your idea.

But the next day or a few days later you are thinking a little bit more about reality and you have been saving money for another idea. Maybe you were wanting to study English somewhere and you were saving money for that, so if you go to New York you’re going to spend all of that money and you know your friend will just want to have a good time.

You can speak some English, but he won’t let you, he’ll just want to speak your language the whole time because he is lazy and he just likes to get drunk. And you’re thinking, “You know what? This is probably not the best idea for me.” However, you did agree to doing it, so you feel bad about saying no now that he thinks you’re going.

Other people have intentions for us, they want us to do things with them, not of liking us and wanting to be with us but often times it’s their intentions and their priorities.

We have to be able to say no when we don’t feel it is the best thing for us.

Other people’s intentions can take us from what’s really important; can remove us from our focus, our big picture.

Somebody who is not able to say no will end up giving a lot of their time to other people and never fully devoting time to their own projects.

So remember failing to say no to things can lead to you missing out on opportunities. If you are in New York that week and you don’t have any more money, maybe when you come back there’s a big opportunity to study but you don’t have any more money and then the opportunity is lost.

So you have to get used to saying no, you have to get accustomed to saying no. Listen to that sentence again: You have to get used to saying no, you have to get accustomed to saying no when it’s in your best interest.

Always be clear about your goals, take time, give me your self space again so you know what is essential for you, what are your intentions in life. And don’t let other people take priority over your own.

So two ideas from the book, now two action steps. The first idea here was about giving yourself space to escape, to think, to remind yourself what the big picture is.

Want to go deeper with this, here is what you can do. Keep a journal. A journal is a little book that you write in and at the end of the day, or in the beginning of the day you can write down what you’re going to do or what happened to you that day.

However, force yourself to write as few words as possible, as little as possible. Don’t write continuously, think about it, sit there maybe in your quiet time when you are giving yourself space and write down as few words as possible about what is important to you, what happened or what you are going to do.

Writing as few words as possible will help you think through everything; “to think through” is to think through a process, to think about something deeply. It will help you think through something and get rid of all of the things that aren’t essential.

So just sift out, “to sift” is to kind of filter, to sift out. So it will help you filter out what is essential. And as you read back through these journal entries at the end of the week or the month, you will see patterns and you will notice and you will remind yourself what is most essential.

The second part was about learning how to say no, being able to tell people no when you know it is the right thing to do, not worrying about hurting somebody’s feelings and being able to prioritize your intentions and your big picture goals as opposed to letting other people take priority over your time.

It’s kind of crazy to think about how often we let other people control our time, right? Unless it is your boss and he pays you and he can do whatever he wants, but that’s just the way the world often works.

Anyway, action step here, think of a time in the past when you know you should have said no to a certain situation. You ended up going somewhere or doing something that you knew you didn’t want to do. How did you feel after that?

And if you had said no, do you think the relationship would have been destroyed, or do you think your friend, or whoever, would have eventually gotten over it? “To get over” is to forget about, to stop thinking about.

Would he have gotten over it? Would she have gotten over it? Probably.

So think about a time in the past when you should have said no and the next time you are in that situation, experiment, say no and see what happens. It probably won’t be as bad as you think.

And that’s it for today’s episode on the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I hope you got some value from this. If you want to go deeper remember you can always find links to the audio book and other resources on feelgoodenglish.com.

And if you want to get the audio book you can sign up to audible for free and get two free audio books. So if this book is the one, go to my website feelgoodenglish.com and you will see how to download the book Essentialism on to your phone and listen to the audio book for free.

Until next time, I hope you are clearing out the unnecessary and saving space and time and energy for only what is most necessary.

And speaking of necessary, jokes are necessary. Your house is so dirty I saw rats on dirt bikes.

If you didn’t get that joke go to feel goodenglish.com and learn why should be laughing at that joke right now.

See you in the next episode