Luckily, however, we can get our priorities straight by adopting essentialism.Įssentialism focuses on four main points: This overload of stuff massively hinders our productivity.

Our lives are so jam-packed with tasks and responsibilities that we struggle to identify which of them are the most important.Įven if we make a concerted effort to go through all our tasks and pick out the ones we should prioritize, we still end up with too much on our hands. To discern what is truly essential we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make. Instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” they ask, “What do I want to go big on? 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.Įssentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. In these notes, you’ll learn all about how to identify the essential things in your life and what you can do to cut out everything else, thus giving you the mental and emotional fortitude to perform those most vital tasks to the highest standards possible. Instead, we should be focusing on what we should do, thinking instead about what is essential to our happiness and well-being. In fact, we’ll find our closets cluttered with junk we never use and our schedules filled with tasks we can’t complete, at least not well. Not only that, but having and doing everything won’t necessarily make us happier.

We can’t be the expert in every field, we can’t have every toy, nor can we have every possible experience. More and more recently, it seems like us humans are trying to keep up with technology by trying to do more, have more, produce more, and learn more…īut the problem with this “more more” mentality is, that it’s in direct conflict with the unfortunate fact that we can’t do it all! Just because technology has made it possible for us to google the entire globe’s information in an instant, doesn’t mean we should force ourselves to do it. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of LessĮssentialism can help you discover why less is sometimes actually more.

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