Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

Encouraged by his small wins he pushed back a bit more. Now when a request would come in he would pause and evaluate the request against a tougher criteria: “Is this the very most important thing I should be doing with my time and resources right now?”

Instead of making just a millimeter of progress in a million directions he began to generate tremendous momentum towards accomplishing the things that were truly vital.

the basic value proposition of Essentialism: only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.

Dieter Rams was the lead designer at Braun for many years. He is driven by the idea that almost everything is noise. He believes very few things are essential. His job is to filter through that noise until he gets to the essence.

It took courage, as it always does, to eliminate the nonessential.

Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better.

The way of the Essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better.

Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done.

The way of the Essentialist rejects the idea that we can fit it all in. Instead it requires us to grapple with real trade-offs and make tough decisions.

The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default.

Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage.

In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making exec...

As it turned out, exactly nothing came of the client meeting. But even if it had, surely I would have made a fool’s bargain. In trying to keep everyone happy I had sacrificed what mattered most.

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

“the paradox of success,”2 which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

PHASE 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it enables us to succeed at our endeavor.

PHASE 2: When we have success, we gain a reputation as a “go to” person.

we are presented with increased options and opportunities.

PHASE 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, which is actually code for demands upon our time and energies, it leads to diffused efforts. We get spread thinner and thinner.

PHASE 4: We become distracted from what would otherwise be our highest level of contribution. The effect of our success has been to undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, the pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure. Put another way, success can distract us from focusing on the essential things that produce success in the first place.

We have lost our ability to filter what is important and what isn’t. Psychologists call this “decision fatigue”: the more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.5

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing.

Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically,

when we try to do it all and have it all, we find ourselves making trade-offs at the margins that we would never take on as our intentional strategy.

We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

“Will this activity or effort make the highest possible contribution toward my goal?” Part One of this book will help you figure out what those activities are.

studies have found that we tend to value things we already own more highly than they are worth and thus that we find them more difficult to get rid of.

If you’re not quite there, ask the killer question: “If I didn’t already own this, how much would I spend to buy it?” This usually does the trick.

In other words, it’s not enough to simply determine which activities and efforts don’t make the highest possible contribution; you still have ...

In other words, once you’ve figured out which activities and efforts to keep—the ones that make your highest level of contribution—you need a system to make executing your intentions as effortless as possible.

Essentialism is about creating a system for handling the closet of our lives.

It is a discipline you apply each and every time you are faced with a decision about whether to say yes or whether to politely decline.

It’s a method for making the tough trade-off between lots of good things and a few really great things.

The prevalence of noise: Almost everything is noise, and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.

Instead, we can conduct an advanced search and ask three questions: “What do I feel deeply inspired by?” and “What am I particularly talented at?” and “What meets a significant need in the world?”

We aren’t looking for a plethora of good things to do. We are looking for our highest level of contribution: the right thing the right way at the right time.

Essentialists spend as much time as possible exploring, listening, debating, qu...

The purpose of the exploration is to discern the vital few fr...

As Peter Drucker said, “People are effective because they say ‘no,’ because they say, ‘this isn’t for me.’ ”9

So eliminating the nonessentials isn’t just about mental discipline. It’s about the emotional discipline necessary to say no to social pressure.

Everything changes when we give ourselves permission to be more selective in what we choose to do.

What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance?

What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?

What if the whole world shifted from the undisciplined pursuit of more to the disciplined p...

I challenge you here and now to make a commitment to make room to enjoy the essential. Do you think for one second you will regret such a decision?

To embrace the essence of Essentialism requires we replace these false assumptions with three core truths: “I choose to,” “Only a few things really matter,” and “I can do anything but not everything.”

By refusing to choose “not law school,” I had chosen law school—not because I actually or actively wanted to be there, but by default.

I think that’s when I first realized that when we surrender our ability to choose, something or someone else will step in to choose for us.