Sarah Pix
CPAS Leadership Enabler
Are you busy doing lots of good things, but missing what matters most? In Essentialism, Greg McKeown challenges us to do less, but better. Sarah Pix explores why this could be essential reading for church leaders.
As someone who naturally falls into the ‘more is more’ camp, I am probably in Greg McKeown’s list of people who most need to read his book. I did. And I really enjoyed it! It is not a Christian book as such, but there were many Gospel resonances as I listened to Greg unpacking his thesis on Audible. He is a person of faith and has appeared as a guest on the Carey Nieuwhof show a couple of times so you can have a listen if this review spikes your curiosity (Episode 122 and 423).
The stimulus for writing Essentialism came from an email McKeown’s boss saying that Friday would be bad day for his wife to have their baby. The short story is that he was with his wife in hospital as their first child was born, but also on email and leaving to be with a client during that once in a lifetime moment. It was a wake-up call that led him on a journey of learning about prioritisation.
His book is not about time-management, it’s not about doing more stuff, it is about doing the right stuff.
How important for those of us in church leadership where we have any number of good things that we could be doing and a great degree of freedom and flexibility about what we choose to do. Even in the church, we are in danger of equating activity with achievement and if we don’t decide how we will spend our time, someone else will.
We see this principle in the life of Jesus whose sole priority was to do what he saw his Father doing (John 5: 19). We see it in his words to Martha, ‘you are upset and worried about so many things. Only one thing is necessary.’ (Luke 10: 42). We see it in the command to love God first and to seek his kingdom first (Matthew 6:33).
McKeown argues that in order for us to discern the essentials, we need to know why we are alive, what we were born to do. In our language we would talk about the importance of calling. And then he develops his theme, in effect describing the importance of boundaries. Having a huge ‘YES’ inside of us which enables us to say ‘No’ to the things that we are not called to.
He clearly lays out the idea that we can’t have it all. Trade-offs need to be made. We have to make a choice. Every ‘yes’ is a ‘no’ to something else. He highlights the importance of space to think and process if we are to make wise decisions.
The book is full of stories and it is inspirational about the fruit of an essentialist approach, but it also is practical. There is advise about realistic planning, building in a buffer zone, the importance of sleep and the foolishness of compromising on this (did you know that if we only sleep four hours a night, we are the same psychologically and physiologically as if we were drunk?).
Essential reading for leaders who want to focus on what matters most.