Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown was a timely read for me. My commitments had accumulated over time and this book reminded me I needed to focus on the Essential.
[Estimated reading time: 23 mins]
Buy Essentialism at: Amazon (affiliate link)
Key Takeaways from Essentialism
- Essentialism is about less but better:
- Most demands on your time are trivial. Few are vital. Essentialism is about being able to tell which is which, so that you can focus your efforts on the things where you can make your highest contribution.
- Make active choices. If you don’t prioritise your life, someone else will.
- Recognise the trade-offs that come with every opportunity so that you don’t make them unintentionally.
- First, you should Explore and Evaluate your options:
- Paradoxically, Essentialists begin by exploring more options in order to find the truly great ones. Non-Essentialists instead just agree to whatever pops up.
- Exploration means taking time for things like play and sleep. These can feel “wasteful” but are key to helping us reach our highest contribution.
- Next, you need to Eliminate the non-essential:
- Subtract deliberately, and be highly selective about what you commit to.
- Clarifying your purpose makes it easier to see what is non-essential, and helps eliminate a whole host of decisions.
- McKeown offers various tips to make it easier to say ‘no’ gracefully.
- Lastly, set up systems and routines that make it easier to Execute the Essential:
- Build in buffers. Things rarely go to plan, so if you don’t build in a buffer, you’ll end up reacting in the moment.
- Think about what obstacles you can remove, instead of what resources you can add.
- Focus on minimum viable progress — racking up small wins to build momentum and self-confidence.
- Essentialism is a philosophy.
- Think of it as something that you are, rather than something you do.
- The benefits are cumulative, so you’ll get more out of it if you’re Essentialist at your core.
Detailed Summary of Essentialism
Less but Better
Essentialism is about the disciplined pursuit of less—but better. It’s not about how to get more things done. It’s about getting the right things done.
The Paradox of Success
There are far more activities and opportunities in the world than we have time and resources to invest in. In fact, once you’ve gained a reputation as a reliable high-performer, you get given even more options and opportunities—i.e. more demands on your time. If you accept all these opportunities, you get spread thinner and thinner, which just undermines the clarity and focus that enabled your success in the first place.
This is the paradox of success: success ends up distracting you from focusing on the essential things that produced success in the first place.
Most of the opportunities you get will be trivial. We live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. Essentialists focus their efforts on the few things that are truly essential.
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
From a young age, we’re taught that hard work is the key to great results. But more effort doesn’t always yield more results—the relationship is not linear, even if we want it to be. At some point, doing less but thinking more can actually yield better outcomes.
Active choice
A choice is an action. If you don’t prioritise your life, someone else will. Non-Essentialists tend to view their tasks as things that they “have” to do. Essentialists realise that we “choose” our tasks.
We don’t always control our options, but we can control how we choose among them. Sadly, people sometimes forget they even have a choice, because of how rarely they exercise their ability to choose. Even if they know logically that they have a choice, they may not recognise that fact emotionally, and end up choosing by default. McKeown calls this learned helplessness, and he’s seen it in many organisations.
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.
Choices are hard because they require saying no to something, and that feels like a loss. But choice is at the core of Essentialism.
Trade-offs
Every opportunity comes with trade-offs. Non-Essentialists refuse to face up to this simple fact and try to fit everything in. They think everything is important. They’ll say, “I can do both”. Senior executives of companies are among the worst at accepting the reality of trade-offs.
But they can’t actually do everything, so they end up making trade-offs unintentionally. They’ll end up late to meetings or doing a shoddy job on both projects, perhaps even missing a deadline. Sometimes these trade-off may not manifest immediately, but gradually over time. What starts as a half-hour of work on Sunday getting ready for the week ahead can morph into a few hours and slowly end up being a whole day of work. Until they accept the reality of trade-offs, they’ll end up making sacrifices by default that they wouldn’t have made by design.
Essentialists don’t see trade-offs as a negative thing, but as an inherent part of life. Instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” they ask, “What do I want to go big on?
You can’t have multiple priorities
When the word “priority” came into the English language in the 1400s, it was singular. It meant the very first thing, so you could only have one priority.
Only in the 1900s did the term become pluralised. Today, people talk about having as many as “10 top priorities” with no sense of irony.
Step 1: Explore and Evaluate
Because Essentialists will only commit to a vital few ideas or activities, they need to explore more options initially in order to pick the right ones. Even “good” opportunities are far less valuable than the few truly great ones we get. That’s why Essentialists invest time in exploring their options—when some options are just so much more valuable than others, it pays to invest time in finding the few that make the highest possible contribution towards your goals.
Exploration requires time and space to think, look, listen, play, and sleep. [Exploration requires slack.] Ironically, these things are often deprioritised in a non-Essentialist culture and seen as distractions or even wasteful. So we need to carve out that space for ourselves, and we need to be disciplined in protecting that space. [There’s a lot of stuff here that overlaps with Deep Work.]
Ask yourself — when did you last take time out in a distraction-free space to simply think?
Example: Bill Gates’ “Think Week”
Bill Gates famously takes a week off twice each year to do nothing but read articles and books, and think about the bigger picture. He’s done this all the way back to the 1980s, and stuck with it even during the busiest periods of Microsoft’s expansion.
Become a journalist of your life
Become a “journalist of your own life”. Ask questions, listen, and connect discrete events into a broader trend Good journalists don’t just relay information; they look past the minor details to the bigger picture, to find out what truly matters to people. It can be hard to notice incremental changes when you’re focused on the day-to-day but, over time, these changes can have a large cumulative effect.
A good way to tap into your inner journalist is by keeping a journal. Less is more when starting out — don’t write too much until it’s become a daily habit. McKeown suggests reviewing your past entries once every 90 days or so, focusing on the broader patterns or trends. [I started doing a similar “Homework for Life” exercise after reading Storyworthy, which takes less than 5 mins per day. I review monthly, instead of every 90 days, but I’m still always surprised by how much I did each month.]
Play
McKeown defines “play” broadly to mean “anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than as a means to an end”. In our society, play is often seen as trivial. But play expands our minds and broadens our range of options, challenging old assumptions. Play also helps relieve stress, which tends to shut down the creative and exploratory parts of our brains. Key breakthroughs in thinking have often occurred during “play”.
Interestingly, the word “school” comes from the Greek word schole, meaning leisure. Unfortunately, the modern school system has sucked much of the leisure of of school and learning.
Think about some of the things you did as a child that excited you. How can you recreate that today?
Sleep
Sleep helps us operate at high levels of contribution. While some people can survive on less sleep, McKeown has found that most of them are just so used to being tired they’ve simply forgotten what being fully rested actually feels like.
Example: McKeown’s sleep experiment
When McKeown was 21, he saw sleep as a waste of time, and was intoxicated by the idea that you could train yourself to only need a few hours per night. After reading a sleep study where some participants functioned on just 20 mins of sleep every 4 hours around the clock, he tried it for himself.
He found that, while he could technically survive on this schedule, his brain barely functioned. It was hard to make decisions or choices, and he couldn’t discern the essential from the trivial.
McKeown’s views changed after reading an article where top business leaders boasted about getting 8 hours of sleep every night. Bill Clinton said that every time he’d made a major mistake, it had been due to sleep deprivation. Ever since, McKeown has tried to get 8 hours of sleep every night.
While the Non-Essentialist sees sleep as a “burden” and thinks that sleeping one hour less will yield one more hour of productivity, the Essentialist knows that one more hour of sleep yield several more hours of much higher productivity. [Surely this only applies on certain margins.]
Example: the best violinists sleep more
In the famous study of violinists (popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers), K Anders Ericsson found that what distinguished the best violinists from the merely “good” violinists was that they spent more time engaging in deliberate practice.
Interestingly, but reported far less frequently, the same study found that the second most important factor differentiating the best violinists was sleep! The best violinists slept an average of 8.6 hours per day, which was about an hour longer than average. Over the course of a week, they also spent an average of 2.8 hours napping in the afternoon, which was about 2 hours longer than the average. (The best violinists typically took a nap after their main practice session.)
Step 2: Eliminate
Non-Essentialists think of elimination as something you do only when things get overwhelming. For Essentialists, however, elimination is just part of their daily routine.
Take on the role of an editor in your life to eliminate the non-essentials. This doesn’t just mean saying “no” to things. It means subtracting things deliberately, in order to add life and energy to the things that remain.
Be highly selective
Be highly selective, else you will end up committing to too many things. There’s always a trade-off when you turn down a “good” option—because you’re hoping that the perfect option will soon come along. This may or may not happen. But the point is that applying selective criteria forces you to choose which perfect option to wait for, instead of other people choose for you.
Being selective is especially hard when opportunities come to us, as our FOMO goes into full effect. Just remember that if you say “yes” to something now because it is easy to do so, you risk having to say “no” to a more meaningful reward later.
Two decision rules: ‘Hell Yeah! or No’ and ‘the 90 percent rule’
Derek Sivers, a writer and entrepreneur, describes a simple technique for becoming more selective if you’re often overcommitted: when deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Hell yeah!” — say no.
McKeown builds on this to come up with a “90 percent rule”: as you evaluate an option, think about the single most important criterion for that decision, and then give the option a score between 0 and 100. If you rate it any lower than 90%, then automatically reject it. This stops you getting caught up in indecision, getting stuck with the 60s or 70s. You can apply this rule to just about any decision.
[I kind of get where Sivers and McKeown are coming from. However, I think these two methods tend to encourage rash, emotional decision-making over thoughtful, deliberate decisions. For example, it’s much easier to feel “Hell Yeah!” about helping a local guide dog charity with guaranteed puppy cuddles than it is to work on a cure for trachoma that may or may not pan out (and certainly does not come with cuddles), even though the latter is likely to be a far more effective way of doing good. McKeown’s suggestion allows more room for deliberation, but he still encourages people to apply just a single criterion and automatically rejecting if it falls short of that one. But most decisions in life depend on multiple factors. I don’t see why we should entirely defer to the most important factor instead of weighting it more heavily. Annie Duke’s How to Decide gives better guidance, in my opinion.]
Making your selection criteria explicit can help. Non-Essentialists often apply implicit or unspoken criteria to their decisions, which can be as broad as “I will do it if my manager/someone asks me to” or “I will do it if a lot of other people are doing it”.
Be purposeful
A good editor must have a clear sense of the overarching purpose of the work they are editing.
One reason it is so hard to say ‘no’ to the non-essential is simply because we don’t know what is essential. So clarifying your purpose or essential intent can settle a thousand later decisions. For example, deciding to become a doctor instead of a lawyer will eliminate a universe of other options and provide direction for your next steps. Your essential intent should also be concrete enough that you know when you’ve achieved it.
[W]hen we have strong internal clarity it is almost as if we have a force field protecting us from the non-essentials coming at us from all directions.
Clarity of purpose is a strong predictor of how well people perform in their jobs, as well as in teams. A team with a strong shared purpose will cooperate to further that purpose. But if the team lacks a clear purpose, the members put their efforts into looking good and pursuing their own short-term, uncoordinated interests instead.
A similar thing occurs in our personal lives. When we aren’t clear about our true purpose, we make up our own social games while neglecting truly essential things like health, family and spirit. We spin our wheels working on a variety of short-term projects that don’t build on each other to become something greater.
Say ‘no’ gracefully
One of the most important Essentialist skills to master is saying ‘no’ firmly and gracefully. This can be hard. Many people end up agreeing to things they don’t want to do because they’re afraid of rocking the boat. It’s a natural part of being human — we hate the social awkwardness and don’t want to let others down.
But you’ve probably experienced that a pang of regret after you’ve agreed to something you didn’t really want to and realised you’ll now have to sacrifice something important. Clear boundaries can actually be liberating as they stop others hijacking your time.
A few tips for saying no
- Set explicit boundaries. If you have clear boundaries around what days or times you’ll work, or what kind of favours you’re willing to do for acquaintances, it’s easier to say “no” to requests that cross those boundaries.
- Separate the decision from the relationship. You can deny a request without denying the person who made it.
- Pause. Pause for just a few seconds and ask yourself, “Is this essential?”. This can greatly reduce the number of commitments you’ll regret.
- You don’t have to use the word ‘no’. For example, you can say “I don’t think this is the right option for me”.
- A clear ‘no’ can be better than a vague ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’. Delaying an eventual ‘no’ usually just makes it harder and may make the asker more resentful.
- Suggest an alternative. For example, you could offer up a smaller commitment you would be willing to make (e.g. I can’t drive you but you can borrow my car), or suggest someone else.
- Practise over e-mail. There’s less social pressure over email, and you have time to draft your response to be as graceful as possible.
- Focus on the trade-off. Think about what you are giving up when you say ‘yes’.
- Ask what you should deprioritise. Sometimes you may not have the power to say ‘no’ (e.g. to your boss). But you can make them confront the trade-off inherent in their request. [This is very useful advice. Many managers often forget what you’re working on when they assign new work, so it’s helpful to remind them.]
As you practice saying no, you may also find that your fears of disappointing or angering others were exaggerated. There might be some annoyance initially, but once that wears off, respect usually kicks in.
Beware of cognitive biases
Without a good system, well-intended commitments without a clear ‘expiry date’ can pile up over time. Purging such commitments be hard because we’re vulnerable to several cognitive biases:
- Sunk-cost bias. We tend to throw good time, money or energy after bad when we have already incurred costs that are “sunk” and cannot be recovered. The only way out of this vicious cycle is to admit you’ve made a mistake.
- Endowment effect. We tend to overvalue things we already own. While the endowment effect usually describes belongings, it can also apply to activities we feel we “own”. We can easily get attached to a certain idea or piece of work that we spent a long time on.
- Status quo bias. Our tendency to do what we’ve always done is useful as it saves us time and energy. But every once in a while, consider applying a “zero-based budgeting” approach to your commitments. What commitments would you take on if you were starting from scratch? You can apply this to projects, financial obligations — maybe even relationships.
[K]ill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
Some tips for overcoming these biases:
- Test the counterfactual. Go through commitments you’ve made and ask yourself: “If I didn’t have this opportunity, what would I be willing to do to acquire it?
- Run a reverse pilot. Quietly eliminate or scale back something you used to do, and see if anyone notices.
- Get a neutral second opinion. Ask someone who is not emotionally involved in the situation for their opinion. They may give you the “permission” to stop forcing something that clearly isn’t working.
Step 3: Execute
The last step, Execute, is about setting up a system or routines that make it so that you do essential things by default.
Researchers suggest that almost 40% of our choices are not really conscious. If our routines are counterproductive, this can be troubling, but if our routines are aligned with our intentions, it makes practising Essentialism easier. Instead of using your energy to prioritise every day, you just spend a small amount of energy to create the routine, and then follow it.
With repetition, your routine no longer requires effort and becomes second nature. [See Tiny Habits and Atomic Habits for more on how to build routines and change them.]
Build in buffers
Non-Essentialists often fall prey to the “planning fallacy”. They assume a best-case scenario where everything goes smoothly, and end up consistently underestimating how long a task will take. But the world is unpredictable. Something unexpected crops up, or the task ends up being harder than anticipated. And if their plans don’t build in a buffer, they’ll end up reacting in the moment to the problem—usually with poor results.
The Essentialist, by contrast, looks ahead and plans for different contingencies. One way to protect against the planning fallacy is by simply adding a 50% buffer to everything.
Focus on removing obstacles
When we think of execution, we often default to “addition”—throwing more time, more resources, or more energy at a problem. But Essentialists focus on the obstacles they need to remove instead.
Example: The slowest hiker
When Alex led a group of boys on a hike, he noticed that they would keep getting spread out as the faster boys gained ground. The group would have to stop repeatedly for the slowest boy to catch up.
Alex then moved the slowest boy, Herbie, to the front of the line, so that he’d set the pace for the entire group. He then realised that if he could get Herbie to move just a little bit faster, that would speed up the entire group.
Alex proceeds to take weight out of Herbie’s backpack and distribute it to the other boys. With this small change, the whole group can move a lot faster.
You might be able to use a similar approach to other problems in your life. What is the “slowest hiker” in your job or your life? Possible obstacles might include not having the information you need, or a desire for perfection.
Minimum viable progress
Instead of starting big and then flaring out, we should start small. Small, concrete wins build momentum and boost our self-confidence.
Example: Writing a book in small steps
Before McKeown began writing his book, he would share a short idea on Twitter. He’d then take the ideas that got a good response and expand them into blog pieces.
Through this iterative process, he could discover which of his ideas seemed to resonate most with other people.
If you have a big, important task coming up, ask yourself: “What is the smallest amount of progress that will be useful and valuable to the essential task I am trying to get done?” Spending just 10 mins on a project or assignment a few weeks before it is due can save you a lot of stress and scrambling further down the line.
Essentialism is a philosophy
McKeown suggest thinking of Essentialism as something that you are, rather than something that you do. It’s not just setting a New Year’s resolution to “say no” more often, or to manage your inbox better. It’s more of a lifestyle that informs how you do everything. You have to constantly ask yourself, “Am I investing my time in the right things?”
Essentialism has roots in many spiritual and religious traditions. There are examples of Essentialists succeeding across every domain of human life, and throughout history. But Essentialism isn’t just about success; it’s about living a life of meaning and purpose. There are many different ways in which people can make their highest possible contribution.
Essentialists are somewhat contrarian. When other people are saying yes, Essentialists will say no.
While other people are padding their résumés and building out their LinkedIn profiles, you will be building a career of meaning. While other people are complaining (read: bragging) about how busy they are, you will just be smiling sympathetically, unable to relate. While other people are living a life of stress and chaos, you will be living a life of impact and fulfilment. In many ways, to live as an Essentialist in our too-many-things-all-the-time society is an act of quiet revolution.
Most of us will have both a little Essentialist and a little non-Essentialist in us. McKeown admits he still struggles with Essentialism, despite writing a whole book about it. He still instinctively wants to please people, and still falls into the trap of thinking “I can do both” when good opportunities come his way. But he has found it gets easier over time.
The benefits are cumulative, so those who are Essentialist at their core will get more out of it. As McKeown has become more and more of an Essentialist, he’s gained a greater sense of clarity and control, as well as more joy in the journey. He smiles more, and values the simpler things in life.
My Review of Essentialism
Essentialism is full of advice you probably already know, but still need to be reminded of every now and again. I think I’m already an “Essentialist” in many ways. I get easily flustered when I have too much on, and really hate letting people down, so I’m naturally reluctant to say “yes” to many things. (For that matter, I’ve never really understood why people end up overpromising when they don’t want to let others down? It’s far easier to let someone down initially, when they’re making the initial request, than it is to let them down later, once you’ve told them you’ll do something that you can’t deliver well. I don’t get it.)
Anyway, while I’m pretty good at not letting others hijack my time, I do occasionally fall into the trap of trying to pursue too many different goals at once. Self-improvement books often exacerbate this with messages like get 1% better every day, or practise regularly, even if you don’t “feel like it”. While these messages can be helpful, focusing single-mindedly on consistency can make it hard to let go of goals or habits that really need to be deprioritised, even if just temporarily.
In my case, reading Essentialism gave me the permission to put off writing this summary for several months. I had recently moved (again), and was trying to learn a new language at the same time I was exploring a career pivot. I didn’t have the bandwidth to do it all, and realised that this summary simply wasn’t the most important thing I had to do. That’s not to say I gave up on it altogether—you’re still reading this after all—I just took some pressure off myself and shifted to a slower, more sustainable pace. Reading and learning are still “Essential” for me, even if publishing two summaries a month is not.
Let me know what you think of this summary of Essentialism in the comments below!
Buy Essentialism at: Amazon <– This is an affiliate link, which means I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through it. Thanks for supporting the site! 🙂
If you enjoyed this summary of Essentialism, you may also like:
- Book Summary: Deep Work by Cal Newport
- Book Summary: Getting Things Done by David Allen
- Book Summary: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
3 thoughts on “Book Summary: Essentialism by Greg McKeown”
Fantastic summary! I haven’t read the book but the points made are solid and helpful. Hope the move has gone well!
Thanks Lizzie! The move has indeed gone well, but of course it always take some time to adjust 🙂
I skipped this book, because I thought it would be full of platitudes. However, as you pointed out – we “still need to be reminded of every now and again.”
Thank you for the review.