Are You Helping Answer Your Security Questions? CYBERCRIMINALS
Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’
Will Help You Declutter Your Workload
“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will,” writes Greg McKeown in “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.”When he set out to write the book, McKeown wanted to know what keeps skilled, driven people from achieving as much as possible. What he found was that many people suffer not from being lazy, but from allocating their time ineffectively. The impulse to “do it all” keeps folks from spending their time on the things that actually matter. The book, then, serves as a guide to cutting out the extraneous and focusing on the essential.
By now, we know everything we post online has probably been stored in a government server somewhere. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a harsh reminder of what social media, particularly Facebook, can be used for. And yet, we’re still willing to share any random detail about ourselves online. Just spend five minutes scrolling through social media and you’ll see thousands of comments on a photo a repair shop shared of a vintage car with the caption, “What car did you learn to drive stick shift on?”; a few hundred people swapping stories after the local vet made a post wanting to know what your first pet was; and Grandma Sophie writing an entire paragraph about the friends she had on the first street she lived on in a post from some page called “The Good Old Days.” These all seem like the standard sort of social media clutter, but posts like this have something insidious in common: They are all connected to common security questions. Think back to the last time you set up an email or bank account. You were likely given a set of questions to provide answers to in case you ever needed to reset your password. A few common questions include:
“Life is not an all-you-can-eat buffet,” McKeown says. “It’s amazingly great food. Essentialism is about finding the right food. More and more is valueless. Staying true to my purpose and being selective in what I take on results in a more meaningful, richer, and sweeter quality of life.” This metaphor can be applied to your work life as well. There aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish every task. The essentialist works to spend their time diligently by pursuing what actually matters, rather than filling their days with meaningless busywork. Early in the book, McKeown uses famed Braun designer Dieter Rams as an example of an essentialist. He notes that Rams’ design philosophy can be characterized by three simple words: less but better. This, in essence, is what essentialists believe. Doing your best work where it matters and cutting out the superfluous will allow you to better manage your time and increase your performance. As McKeown puts it, “It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.” Instead of having their energy spread out in a million different directions, essentialists channel it into what really matters. McKeown also advocates for defining your purpose in order to accurately assess what’s essential and what isn’t. The more a task contributes to your purpose, the more essential it is. Many business owners and leaders struggle to let go of tasks that are best left to other employees. If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to manage a massive workload while resenting the fact that much of what you do is needless, then it’s time to pick up a copy of “Essentialism.”
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What was your first car?
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What was the name of your first pet?
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What street did you grow up on?
This isn’t to suggest the pages that make these kinds of posts have some nefarious intent. People like to talk about themselves, and from a marketing standpoint, these posts are greatly beneficial. When a post gets a lot of response, Facebook will boost its reach without the page having to pay for it, which means they can gather more followers with ease. But comments on such posts are visible to the whole world, and each post is attached to someone’s real name. Is it such a stretch to imagine how easily a cybercriminal could record such valuable details? We recommend not responding to posts that ask for details about your life, regardless of how mundane that information seems. And if your business has a Facebook page, help protect your followers’ information by not creating these kinds of posts. Try sharing a cat meme instead. The internet loves cat memes.
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