“Essentialism is the disciplined pursuit of less but better.” Greg McKeown.

EssentialismI have been geeking out to Greg McKeown’s book, Essentialism for the last several months.  I highly recommend listening to the audiobook as Greg has a cool English accent and reads the book really well.  What does it mean in a nutshell?  Remember when someone said, “How are you?” we used to say, “Fine.”  Now we say “Busy.”  We say it with a sense of pride as if it makes us important.  But so much of what is out there to be busy with is unessential and basically just “noise”.

We have never been bombarded with so much information and so many opinions.  There are more options out there for what we could be doing with our time than ever before.  We also suffer from “FOMO” the fear of missing out.  We see so many fun things our friends are doing on social media and we feel we have to over-commit all of our time. There are so many really good things that we could be involved in and do.  Whether in the workplace or in our personal lives, we are always being asked to do more.  But we cannot do anything.  In fact, the less that we do, the better that we will do the few things that we decide are essential.

Finding out what is essential takes space and solitude.  Something else that is absent in our society these days.  We are constantly distracted and never take space and time to just think.  We should be thinking about what our highest contribution could be to the world, to our jobs and in our personal lives.  We want to do a few things really well and make the biggest contribution that we possibly can.

I have been trying to implement the ideas from this book by taking something that I currently do, or am asked to do, and asking myself, “Is it Essential?” If it is not essential, I work toward eliminating it.  That means that I have to get good at saying that difficult two-letter word, “NO.” My hope is that In the course of saying no to the nonessential, I will have more space and time for the essential.  My stress level will go down and my contribution will go up.  The next time someone asks how I’m doing, I’m not going to say I’m “crazy busy”  I’m going to talk about how I have embraced the way of the essentialist and that I am doing less but better. Definitely check out the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown.