Essentialism by Greg McKeown - Book Summary

This is my summary of ‘Essentialism’ by Greg McKeown. My notes are informal and tailored to my own interests at the time of reading. They mostly contain quotes from the book as well as some of my own thoughts. You can check out the book on Amazon here.

DISCLAIMER: I found the book too long. I’ve included it here because it did spark some interesting thoughts for me, and I wanted to share the good ideas from it below. At the same time, ‘Essentialism’ should have been a long blog post. There are lots of fillers, platitudes, and repeated content, which makes for a frustrating read. Please note that this is only my opinion.

My main learning was that essentialism and minimalism are not just about doing less. It’s about doing less with discipline. It’s not enough to say No to many things and declutter. You also need to find what you value most, say Yes to it, and pursue it with discipline and resilience.

The rest of this summary doesn’t follow the structure of the book. I took the parts that taught me something and ordered them by their general topic. This allows me to compare and contrast lessons from different books. Different authors often talk about the same concepts under different names and organized in different structures. The topics are ordered alphabetically.

Cognitive biases

• Sunk cost bias: 

  • We tend to value things we already own more highly than they are worth. Thus we find them more difficult to get rid of. 

  • Ask, “If I didn’t already own this, how much would I spend to buy it?”

Communication

• How to say No: 

  • Separate the decision from the relationship 

  • Focus on the trade-off. 

    • “Sure! What should I deprioritize?” 

    • Remind the person asking what you would be neglecting if you said yes and force them to grapple with the trade-off. 

  • A clear No is better than a vague or noncommittal Yes. 

    • “I am going to pass on this” is far better than not getting back to someone or stringing them along with some noncommittal answer like “I will try to make this work” or “I might be able to” when you know you can’t. 

  • “Let me check my calendar and get back to you” 

  • “I can’t do it, but X might be interested.” Often people requesting something don’t really care if we’re the ones who help them, as long as they get the help.

• Writing advice: 

  • “To write is human, to edit is divine.” - Stephen King

  • An editor asks two questions to the author: 

    • Are you saying what you want to say? 

    • Are you saying it as clearly and concisely as possible?

Hiring

• If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no. 

  • One wrong hire is far costlier than being one person short. 

  • Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Bozo explosion’: The cost of hiring too many wrong people, which often leads to multiple wrong hires because the wrong person will tend to attract more wrong people.

Leadership

• Jeff Weiner’s leadership principles: 

  • Fewer things done better

  • Communicating the right amount of information to the right people at the right time

  • Speed and quality of decision making

Motivation

• Of all forms of human motivation the most effective one is progress. Herzberg’s research shows that the two primary internal motivators for people are achievement and recognition for achievement.

Prioritization

• The word ‘priority’ came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next 500 years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. 

• Jack Dorsey thinks of the role of CEO as being the chief editor of the company. “By editorial I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing. But there are only one or two that are important. And all of these ideas and inputs from engineers, support people, designers are going to constantly flood what we should be doing. As an editor I am constantly taking these inputs and deciding the one, or intersection of a few, that make sense for what we are doing.”

Product design

• Weniger aber besser (less but better): 

  • Dieter Rams is driven by the idea that almost everything is noise. Very few things are essential. His job is to filter through that noise until he gets to the essence. 

• The law of the vital few: 

  • You can massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. 

  • Stated in “Quality-control handbook” by Joseph Moses Duran (1951)

Productivity

• Decision making:

  • Systematically explore and evaluate a broad set of options before committing to any. 

  • The latin root of the word decision - cis or cid - literally means “to cut” or “to kill” 

• (goal setting) Productivity is not just about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. There are trade-offs: we can’t have it all or do it all. 

  • “The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” - Lin Yutang

  • Reject the idea that you can fit it all in. Instead, grapple with real trade-offs and make tough decisions. Don’t ask, “How can I make it all work?”, start asking “Which problem do I want to solve?” 

  • Saying yes to any opportunity by definition requires saying no to several others. 

  • 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. 

  • Strategically eliminate the non-essentials. Don’t just get rid of the obvious time wasters, but cut back on some really good opportunities as well. 

  • If the answer isn’t a definitive yes then it should be a no. “No more Yes. It’s either HELL YEAH! or No.” 

• (goal setting) If there’s one thing you are passionate about - and that you can be best at - you should do just that one thing. 

• (meetings) Don’t attend meetings just because you are invited. Make sure you have a direct contribution to make, otherwise skip the meeting. 

• (taking effective breaks) 

  • Bill Gates famously took a regular week off his daily duties at Microsoft simply to think and read. Twice a year, he secluded himself for a week and did nothing but read articles and books, study technology, and think about the bigger picture. 

• (time management) 

  • We have our own individual choice. We can choose how to spend our energy and time. “I have to” → “I choose to” 

  • Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, schedules up to two hours of blank space on his calendar every day. He divides them into thirty-minute increments, yet he schedules nothing. 

  • Reverse pilot. Test whether removing an initiative or activity will have any negative consequences

  • The ancient Greeks had two words for time: 

    • Chronos. The god Chronos was imagined as an elderly, grey-haired man, and his name connotes that literal ticking clock, the chronological time, the kind we measure. 

    • Kairos. Refers to time that is opportune, right, different. Chronos is quantitative, kairos is qualitative. The latter is experienced only when we are fully in the moment - when we exist in the now. Today many call it mindfulness.

Resilience

• Internal locus of control: We may not always have control over our options, we always have control over how we choose among them.

Strategy

• “Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs. It’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” - Michael Porter 

• Avoid “straddling”. 

  • Straddling means keeping your existing strategy intact while simultaneously also trying to adopt the strategy of a competitor. 

  • Examples: Continental Airlines trying to copy Southwest with ‘Continental Lite’.

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