500 Words a Week - Essentialism
Essentialism by Greg McKeown is a book in which the central message is choosing to live a life by design, not by default. We hear repeated throughout the book “if you don’t prioritise your life, someone else will”. Greg discusses how a reason why we may have drifted toward living a life by default is “the preponderance of choice has overwhelmed our ability to manage it”.
Another central message to Essentialism is living a life true to yourself not what other people expect from you. In the book, Greg discusses a person named Bronnie Ward. Bronnie cared for people in the last 12 weeks of their lives and recorded their most 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”.
In living a life by default, we are sacrificing our power to choose. By not making a choice, you are choosing. “When we surrender our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless”. Again, centring around the point of making decisions by design, not default. “We can either make the hard choices for ourselves or allow others to decide for us”.
An important point Greg makes around trying to make decisions by design, is that we need courage. We need courage to say no. “Without courage the disciplined pursuit of less is just lip service”. Greg discusses how we can say no and regret it for a few minutes, or we can say yes and regret for days, weeks, months or even longer. Causing feelings of contempt and resentment to build towards ourselves and what we said yes too. “When people ask us to do something, we can confuse the request with our relationship with them. We forget that denying the request is not the same as denying the person”. We also need courage to admit our mistakes. “Sunk-Cost Bias” refers to our tendency to continue and invest time, energy, and money into something we know is a losing proposition, because we have already incurred a cost we cannot get back. Only by admitting we made a mistake, can we make that mistake a part of our past.
Greg talks about sometimes we might set our goals to high. He encourages us to focus on starting small and celebrating progress. “Many operate under the false logic that the more they strive, the more they will achieve, but the reality is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off the ground”. Go after small and simple wins in areas that are essential to what you want to achieve. These small wins generate momentum and affirms the process of further success.
At the end of the book, Greg talks about two lessons he learned in writing the book. One of these it is “the exquisitely important role of my family in my life”. “At the very, very end, everything will fade into insignificance by comparison”. “The second is the pathetically tiny amount of time we have left”. Therefore we should be more even unreasonable with how we spend our time.
