Essentialism

Description

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Essentialism was a great read and I’m excited to share a summary of the book with you.
I will warn you up front: this isn’t a short summary. That said, I did my best to identify the key ideas and deliver them to you.
There are 4 parts in the book. The first part outlines the core mindset of an essentialist while the following three parts turn the mindset into a systematic process for the disciplined pursuit of less.
The basic proposition of essentialism is that you can make your highest contributions towards the things that really matter only when you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all and say yes to everyone.
The book discusses two types of people: essentialists and non-essentialists.
The way of the essentialist involves the relentless pursuit of less but better, rejects the idea that we can fit it all into our lives, requires us to grapple with real trade-offs and make tough decisions, and enables us to live by design rather than by default. The essentialist realizes that almost everything in life is noise and that very few things are essential. Essentialists constantly pause to ask “Am I investing in the right activities?”
Through essentialism, one can figure out how to get the right things done rather than how to get more things done. Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies and then making execution of those things almost effortless.