Minimal vs Maximal Thinking

I’ve been thinking about minimal and maximal thinking, and I observe this in myself and others. I’ll try to explain the concept and apply it to work and to prayer.

We all employ both minimum thinking and maximum thinking. The difference between the two is this: minimum thinking is to put in as little effort, time, money, or resources as possible to get the needed outcome.

For example, if I don’t enjoy cooking and I’m in a hurry, I use minimalistic thinking to figure out what’s the quickest way I can cook my breakfast. Or I just pour some cereal into a bowl to get some breakfast into my face so I can move on with my day.

Maximalist thinking is how you create as much value as possible. So, for example, when I was in my early twenties and had just graduated college, I had my degree and a grunt job that was paying my bills – or a little bit less than paying my bills. It was something I wasn’t passionate about. So my mindset was to work as little as possible to get enough money to pay my bills.

At that time, I was involved in community theater and in art, and there, I was employing maximalist thinking. I was trying to figure out how much time I could spend memorizing lines, how much time I could spend practicing my acting and facial expressions and vocal techniques. How much time I could spend writing my own plays and screenplays at the time.

So, whatever you’re focused on, whatever your passion project is at that time, becomes your maximal mindset. Everything else then becomes a minimal mindset to sort of make room for that.

Applying Minimum and Maximum Thinking to Work and Wealth

This concept of minimum versus maximum thinking is incredibly powerful when we apply it to how we approach our work, whether as an employee or an entrepreneur.

Often, employees adopt a minimal effort mindset toward their job, and really, minimal effort toward their money-making ability. They often only want to make as much as they need to get by. Their financial growth is typically limited to the tens of thousands of dollars available within a company’s raise structure.

Entrepreneurs, however, think about making as much as possible, not just getting a raise. They focus on how to create as much value as possible from the vast market. There are billions and billions of dollars available in the market. So, the entrepreneur goes out to where the value is and asks, “How can I provide as much value to the market?” For example, an entrepreneur might invent a new bathroom scale, a new kitchen knife, or a new car dashboard device that over a million people want to buy. If they make more than a dollar per sale, they’ve created more than a million dollars of value.

Maximum Gains Through Strategic Mindsets

We can see this same principle applied to other areas of life, like spirituality. If you are a monastic, you’re thinking maximally about your spiritual life. You ask, “How can I pray as much as possible? How can I reduce my money-making endeavors to the smallest amount possible, down to even zero because my financial needs are taken care of, and put as much time and effort into prayer and fasting and asceticism?”

These are where we see massive gains. When we apply that maximalist mindset to the right things, we will see massive gains. And similarly, applying the minimum mindset to the right things helps us save time and energy for those big, impactful pursuits.