This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
“Essentialism is not about how to get
more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake
of less either. It is about making the
wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest
point of contribution by doing only what is essential.” – Greg McKeown, Chapter
1: The Essentialist, Pages 13-14
“When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be
helpless. Drip by drip we allow our
power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s
choices – or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to
choose. That is the path of the
Nonessentialist.” – Greg McKeown, Chapter 2: Choose, Page 38
“If you believe being overly busy and overextended is evidence of productivity, then you probably believe that creating space to explore, think, and reflect should be kept to a minimum. Yet these activities are the antidote to the nonessential busyness that infects so many of us. Rather than trivial diversions, they are critical to distinguishing what is actually a trivial diversion from what is truly essential.” – Greg McKeown, Part II: Explore, Page 55
Is This An Overview?
People have limited time and energy to accomplish what they
want. Individuals have to make
trade-offs based on what they want to accomplish. Those who try to accomplish everything, are
dividing their attention, time, and energy across different activities, which leads
to worse performance. The basic value
proposition of essentialism, is for individuals to stop trying to do
everything, which enables individuals to focus on where their efforts can contribute
most.
Essentialists focus on doing few activities with high
quality outcomes, rather than attempting many activities with low quality
outcomes. Essentialism focuses the
individual on the appropriate activities, to make worthwhile trade-offs, not a
justification to just do less activities.
What essentialists do is explore and evaluate what an opportunity is
worth, eliminate the nonessential and trivial, and then design behaviors and
habits to implement the intended activities.
Essentialists use the power of gracefully saying no to an activity, to
prevent being distracted from what is essential.
Caveats?
The ideas of the book are based on economics, that people
have limited resources which cause people to make trade-offs on how they are
used. The ideas in the book are based on
assumptions which economics has gone beyond, which can also create a
contradiction. In an effort to remove
the trivial, the essentialist can make decisions using the claim ‘if it isn’t a
clear yes, then it’s a clear no.’
Removing the trivial requires perfection, which means spending more
limited time and energy on the potentially nonessential. Economic ideas which contained methods of
perfection, have transitioned into satisficing, a more realistic decision
making framework.
This book created a narrative fallacy for essentialism. The examples and ideas that are used to
support essentialism express how individuals can benefit from them. What are not included are the examples of how
essentialism can harm society. How
essentialism can harm society can be thought of as nonessential to this
book. Leadership is often the source for
the direction of a group, but leadership can create strategic ignorance, to
prevent information from reaching them.
Information for which the leaders would be liable for, as that could
harm the leader’s ability to provide direction.
Preventing leadership from taking accountability, which would be
nonessential. For the author, it's
essential to have time to discover and reflect on what decisions are
essential. But if leadership already
took time to discover the priority of activities, then any alternative views
can be considered as nonessential as those views would be wasting resources and
time. The methods used to decline the
nonessential views, can be very ungraceful.
