Essentialism
I listened to Greg McKeown's 2011 book Essentialism over the last six days as I did my regular cardio.
The core of the books is that we're unfocused and distracted in life and that by becoming an "essentialist" we will learn how to:
- Figure out what's actually important (IE essential)
- Learn how to eliminate what's not (IE nonessential)
- Develop a system that allows you to execute on the essentials
The following quote serves as a pretty good idea of what the core of essentialism actually is:
“Less, but better. A more fitting definition of essentialism would be hard to come by. The way of the essentialist is the relentless pursuit of less but better.”
This idea resonates with me and has been something of a focus in my life over the past few years. However, I think if you've read other books in the productivity niche like Deep Work by Cal Newport, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman or The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington it's going to be covering a lot of the same ground.
For those who haven't, or feel like their lives are chaotic or unstructured or unfocused I would recommend it.
For others, it's a nice refresher on some key ideas.
Essentialism reinforces my theory that most nonfiction books are stuffed with far too many anecdotes to reach a certain word count that makes the book "worth buying." This book, and many others, could probably be a lot shorter and just as effective.
Ironically McKeown makes this exact point in Essentialism itself:
“There are two basic questions the editor should be asking the author: 1. Are you saying what you want to say? 2. Are you saying it as clearly and concisely as possible?”
Overall: 50
I use the 20-80 scale to rate things. For nonfiction books I just use one overall rating, while for fiction books I have four different sub-categories.