At this point, I had been engaged with my current company for a little over three years. We had received traction and a bit of publicity, but we were nowhere near our fullest potential. After patiently listening to all of the things I was working on or going to be working on, my mentor directed my attention to one of the most valuable leadership lessons I’ve learned in my life: the disciplined pursuit of less.
The disciplined pursuit of less is an essentialism theory that was coined by Greg McKeon. Simply framed, success is our biggest barrier to becoming very successful. Greg’s rationale is summed up into four phases:
Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.
For a couple of months, I resisted this thinking. I reasoned that these different opportunities were things I was supposed to take advantage of so I could be very successful. Overtime, however, something happened. I realized that my fundraising within my current company was slowing, transparency was decreasing, and morale wasn’t where I would’ve liked it to be. In that moment, it was clear that I didn’t have clarity of purpose.
I shifted gears after I carefully evaluated my priorities, my commitments, and my values. As I went through the personal reflection exercise, I started to let my values dictate my commitments and I began to make the difficult decision of letting things go. I learned that I had to say no more often if I was ever going to be able to say yes to the things that I wanted to do.
Taken From TdJakes.com
Read more: http://www.tdjakes.com/posts/the-disciplined-pursuit-of-less