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Essentialism

Theme: The disciplined pursuit of less.

For every single thing that you say yes to, you'll have to say no to a bunch of other things. This means putting a lot of value to your yes and not being afraid to say no. You look for best places to put your effort that will yield the greatest results.

Essentialism advocates for focusing on what truly matters by eliminating non-essential distractions. Here's a summary:

  1. Focus on the Essential: Essentialism emphasizes identifying and prioritizing what is truly important in your life or work. It's about discerning what really matters and saying no to everything else.

  2. Eliminate the Non-Essential: Cut out non-essential activities, commitments, and possessions that don't contribute significantly to your goals or well-being. This creates more space for what truly matters.

  3. Say No, More Often: Learning to say no to non-essential requests and distractions is crucial in embracing essentialism. It allows you to invest your time and energy in the most valuable pursuits.

  4. Create Space for What Matters: By eliminating the clutter of non-essential activities and commitments, you create space to focus deeply on the things that bring the most fulfillment and value to your life.

Overall, essentialism is about simplifying your life, making deliberate choices, and focusing your efforts on the things that truly matter most to you.

Summary

The author broke down the book in three sections:

Explore

  1. Escape: You need to escape to a place, where you can concentrate, design, read, to do deep thinking and deep work.
  2. Look: Hone your observational skills and be a journalist of your own life
  3. Play: Broaden your range of options by expanding your awareness. It's a clear antidote to stress.
  4. Sleep: Protect the asset, your brain, otherwise quality of your effort and attention will steadily declines.
  5. Select: Can't say yes to everything. Determine a metrics that helps you decide what gets your yes. Either bring Hell yeah! or No, there is no in-between.

Eliminate

  1. Clarify: the target you are shooting for. Without having your essential intent defined, it makes it a lot harder to decide what to say yes to and what to say no to.
  2. Dare: to say no, even if it makes you unpopular. This can often mean trading popularity for respect. You need to say no firmly, resolutely and gracefully. It's worth getting good at saying no.
  3. Uncommit: if you recognize the direction you are in is not getting you the desired results.
  4. Edit: along the way to add quality to your life and to your work. This is where you from from being a journalist to being an editor, looking for opportunities to cut out anything that isn't essential so there's more space and attention give to most important.
  5. Limit: your options upfront, to create boundaries in your life/work to give you a sense of freedom.

Execute

  1. Buffer: Create a buffer for breathing room between current focus and future commitment. Without this buffer, the quality of the effort will decline.
  2. Subtract: Remove the obstacles. Take a closer look at the steps underlying creative process and remove the obstacles that make those steps difficult.
  3. Progress: Instead of focusing on huge leaps of progress, build yourself a system of small wins. Steps that you can take each day that allow you to start small and build momentum over time.
  4. Flow: As you build the system of small steps, look for the things that get you in a state of flow. Look for consistent routines that you can put in place for yourself.
  5. Focus: Have a regular state of focused attention/energy, and to always be winning, asking the question What's important Now?.
  6. Be: Live from the sense of essentialism, making it part of your core, and keep increasing that essentialist part of you.

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Quotes

If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.

Our highest priority is to protect our ability to prioritize.

The ability to choose cannot be taken away or ever given away - it can only be forgotten.

Example

If a friend asks you to go out for a few drinks and you say yes, you're actually saying no to a dozen other things you could spend your time on.

We all have situations in life that we regret saying yes to, when we really wanted to say no. Saying no might sting in the moment, but its better than saying yes and regretting afterwards.

An essentialist will allow themselves to think and identify what's critical and what's trivial to their goals. They will eliminate and avoid the trivial things, so they can have more time and energy for things that are important to them.

References

  • Author: Greg McKeown
  • Amazon link