If I were to summarize the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown, I would simply put up the graphic (from the book) above.

We all have finite energy. Nobody can “have it all”. You need take the time to explore and find a few pursuits that are a definitive “YES!”, and most other things need a polite but firm “No”. We know that everything is not equally important, but we still spend too much time putting out small fires.

The creates two difficult questions. What are your highest priorities? What is your “North Star”? What are you going to aim that big arrow at? As Mary Oliver says in the famous last line of her poem The Summer Day:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Second, what are you going to *stop* doing? For many people, this will be the hardest part. You have to let go of goals, say no, go part-time, decline requests, disappoint people, all in order to reclaim the energy to redirect toward your chosen focus.

This is closely related to the probably-apocryphal story of Warren Buffett and the Pilot.

I struggle with both questions. I don’t really have a singular life goal, which is partially why I pursued financial freedom. Meanwhile, I enjoy trying out different interests. But at the end of the day, I do have higher priorities in my mind and I want to do better at truly making them a priority in real life. I have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to the top picture.

While this book suffers a bit from the “magazine article stretched thinly into a book” dilemma, I found it a worthwhile read overall. It’s a simple concept, but there are some useful tips to implement it. Here are a few selected highlights from the book:

On reflection I discovered this important lesson: If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.

[…] Once an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware, who cared for people in the last twelve weeks of their lives, recorded their most often discussed regrets. At the top of the list: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

Many capable people are kept from getting to the next level of contribution because they can’t let go of the belief that everything is important. But an Essentialist has learned to tell the difference between what is truly important and everything else.

In other words, it’s not enough to simply determine which activities and efforts don’t make the highest possible contribution; you still have to actively eliminate those that do not.

How do we maintain this focus and keep from being distracted? A good routine helps:

Routine is one of the most powerful tools for removing obstacles. Without routine, the pull of nonessential distractions will overpower us. But if we create a routine that enshrines the essentials, we will begin to execute them on autopilot.

[…] We won’t have to expend precious energy every day prioritizing everything. We must simply expend a small amount of initial energy to create the routine, and then all that is left to do is follow it.

This includes establishing clear boundaries.

One simple answer is we are unclear about what is essential. When this happens we become defenseless. On the other hand, when we have strong internal clarity it is almost as if we have a force field protecting us from the nonessentials coming at us from all directions.

For example, when asked to work extra on a Saturday:

Clay simply responded: “Oh, I am so sorry. I have made the commitment that every Saturday is a day to be with my wife and children.”

Even though I spend a lot of time online reading through forums, blogs, e-mail newsletters, substacks, and so on, I don’t spend much time on Twitter or Facebook. Slowly reading a detailed review or educational article is one thing, but 100 different people making short, forceful, absolute statements within 5 minutes quickly overwhelms me. There is surely a lot of good discussion, but in a terribly noisy room.

I checked out How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell for a different perspective. This blurb was intriguing:

Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.

While I didn’t agree with many of the arguments made in the book, as usual I just tried to find what was useful to me and leave the rest.

What is meant by the goal to “do nothing”?

The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.

From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.

What are we trying to avoid?

But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.

Here’s what I want to escape. To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves.

Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.

People read a tweet or a headline, react, and click a button—thousands and millions of times over in a matter of days. I can’t help but liken the angry collective tweet storms to watching a flood erode a landscape with no ground-cover plants to slow it down. The natural processes of context and attention are lost. But from the point of view of Twitter’s financial model, the storm is nothing but a bounteous uptick in engagement.

An short bit about John Muir, “Father of the National Parks”:

Muir had already developed a love of botany, but it was being temporarily blinded by an eye accident that made him re-evaluate his priorities. The accident confined him to a darkened room for six weeks, during which he was unsure whether he would ever see again. The 1916 edition of The Writings of John Muir is divided into two parts, one before the accident and one after, each with its own introduction by William Frederic Badè. In the second introduction, Badè writes that this period of reflection convinced Muir that “life was too brief and uncertain, and time too precious, to waste upon belts and saws; that while he was pottering in a wagon factory, God was making a world; and he determined that, if his eyesight was spared, he would devote the remainder of his life to a study of the process.” Muir himself said, “This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields.”

On Epicurus, “epicurean”, and unhappiness:

More generally, Epicurus observed that people in modern society ran in circles, unaware of the source of their unhappiness:

“Everywhere you can find men who live for empty desires and have no interest in the good life. Stupid fools are those who are never satisfied with what they possess, but only lament what they cannot have.”

Quite contrary to the modern-day meaning of the word epicurean—often associated with decadent and plentiful food—what the school of Epicurus taught was that man actually needed very little to be happy, as long as he had recourse to reason and the ability to limit his desires.

On giving others (and ourselves) space to change our minds:

This is one of the things I find the most absurd about our current social media, since it’s completely normal and human to change our minds, even about big things. Think about it: Would you want to be friends with someone who never changed their mind about anything?

But because apologizing and changing our minds online is so often framed as a weakness, we either hold our tongues or risk ridicule.

Weird stuff happens when attention = money. Creating hate = attention = money. Creating dissatisfaction = attention = money. Creating distraction = attention = money.

There are many things going on in the book, but I support physically go outside and hang out with people in-person, and preferably both at the same time. I will put more effort towards these pursuits. (I would say it’s a cheap form of entertainment, but booking an AirBnb within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park was not cheap! 😁)