Your Busyness is Not Proof of Progress. Neither is Your Exhaustion.

In 2019, I was dreaming about transformers.

I was in the power sector then, an operational maintenance provider, and I had been quietly classified as what every organisation loves and every organisation quietly destroys—a high performer with high potential. In corporate language, that phrase sounds like a compliment.

In practice, it means we can load this person until she breaks, and she will not complain, because complaining is beneath her. My own workload was already full. My boss’s responsibilities had migrated onto my desk. And because I was competent, more kept coming.

I was seeing spreadsheets in my dreams. I was doing maintenance calculations in my sleep. I would wake up crying and not know why. My husband, who watched all this with patient concern, kept asking me the most obvious question a normal person can ask a spiralling one: why don’t you just rest?

And the honest answer was—I did not know how. I could not see the space in my week where rest was even allowed. The very job God had blessed me with had become the thing quietly making me depressed, and I did not have the vocabulary or the permission to say it out loud.

Then my pastor preached a Thanksgiving sermon that year, and something in it caught me. I made a small, private vow to God—that in this season, I would learn to thank Him by learning to rest. That was the beginning, but I want to be honest: the lesson did not fully take place. I limped through the rest of that season with a slightly better vocabulary but the same over-committed calendar. I was not yet free.

The real turn came a few years later, when Apostle Emmanuel Iren handed me a book. He was preparing me to become CEO of Celebration Church, and he gave me Greg McKeown’s Essentialism with a simple instruction: read this before you take the role.

I read it in the transition. And something in it landed with a force that four years of exhaustion had not managed to teach me. It was the single sentence that reorganised how I work: you cannot do everything, and trying to do everything is not the sign of a serious person—it is the sign of a person who has not yet learned to choose.

Sit with that. Because it goes directly against what most of us were trained to believe. We were raised on the idea that the truly committed person carries more, and the truly excellent person carries everything. Essentialism pushed back on both. The truly effective person, McKeown argued, is not the one holding the most. She is the one who has ruthlessly identified the vital few and dropped the trivial many. Subtraction, not addition, is what makes work great.

Here is what changed when I actually applied it.

I stopped performing for the room. The only audience I was working for became God—and, quietly, myself. I stopped letting other people’s expectations set my pace. If someone else’s urgency was not connected to my actual assignment, I did not adopt it. I let their pressure be their pressure. And the only person I allowed to put me on a schedule was me.

I got specific about what deserved my full effort. If it was glass—the things that break if I drop them, from my early weeks of essays—I gave it everything. If it was rubber—the things that hurt when they fall but bounce—I did them properly, on time, at a sustainable pace. And if it was plastic—the meetings I did not need to be in, the emails that did not need my reply, the invitations I once said yes to out of guilt—I let it roll. I did not agonise. I did not apologise. I let it roll.

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And here is the counter-intuitive part I want you to actually receive: I did not become less effective. I became more. I am still, honestly, one of the most productive people I know. I run a global church. I write two Substack essays a week. I am raising a small child. I am writing books. I am still busy. But the busyness is now on the right things, and the wrong things—the plastic—I am no longer bleeding time and health for. The output went up when the input got smarter. That is essentialism working, not resting on a beach.

You do not have to reach the crying-in-bed stage to learn this. That is the whole point of me telling you the story. You do not have to be broken to earn the right to subtract. You can learn now, at your desk, from a woman who did learn it—but far later than she needed to. Read Essentialism. Look at your week with fresh eyes. Sort the glass, the rubber, and the plastic honestly. Then, without a companion essay of explanation, let the plastic roll.

You are not more committed because you are carrying more. You are just more tired. And there is a version of your career, your calling, and your life where the productive one and the peaceful one are the same person.

This week: Take one thing on your plate right now that is not glass—that you have been carrying because you did not want to look uncommitted, or because you said yes on autopilot, or because it made someone else feel important.

Let it roll. Not with drama. Not with an announcement. Just quietly, this week, stop carrying it. And notice what does not fall apart when you do.

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With all the fire in my heart,

Bisola.