Essentialism

Some good idea, as long as you have the privilege to implement them. It aunt's you have other people to do the "non-essential" things you deem to be beneath you.

When I was a teenager I worked on my dad's construction crew during the summer. When I complained about the boring stuff I was doing, he said "You want to do exciting stuff, but i need you to do what's needed."

I think there's a reason most of his examples are executives. Quite honestly, most executives could just not show up and still be considered successful. Front line workers still have to actually do the work.

Das Buch bietet eher eine Lebensphilosophie als eine ausgetüftelte Art, seinen Berufsalltag zu strukturieren.

Quick read. Some good reminders and approaches to identifying and preserving what's truly important in life to make the best use of our limited time.

Some dubious references used as evidence but minor offenses and not core to the message.

This had a weirdly low signal to noise ratio given the subject. It felt largely anecdotal, both from the author’s experience and those of the tech leaders and historical figures he quoted. I think this could have a been stronger left as a series of blog posts (or perhaps just one).

That said, it does have some useful insights — if you can find a summary somewhere, I advise reading that instead.

"Cut out everything that's not essential." That's it. That's the whole book. If the author had taken his own advice, there'd be no book, just a bumper sticker. Still, it did have a surprisingly transformative effect on my life. For one thing, I realized that coffee with friends IS ESSENTIAL to me. And I quit most of my jobs. And I'm evaluating things differently now. And hardly watching any TV or movies. Worth reading if you are not making as much progress as you'd like on the things that are important to you, if you are trying to do everything. Like many of these business books written by men, though, he seems to be in a position to not think of scrubbing the bathroom floor as essential, you know?

"the way of the essentialist" strikes me a little odd sometimes... Maybe I did not listen carefully enough, but I would assume I would affront a lot of friends and close acquaintances by saying: "Sorry, I cannot do that. It is not essential to me"
Maybe it helps with making the most out of one's own limited time, but what about the connection to others? I would assume, that 'doing things for others, that are not essential to one's own goals' could help make a greater impact overall in the long term.

Disclaimer: I enjoyed listening to the book and I think there are practical things in there, that could prove helpful (especially for somebody like me, who makes it his own mission to solve other's problems). I am just not quite sure yet, if I really want to be the essentialist described in this book.

"We should begin by recognizing the reality that just because something is good is not a sufficient reason for doing it. The number of good things we can do far exceeds the time available to accomplish them. Some things are better than good, and these are the things that should command priority attention in our lives."
- Dallin H. Oakes, "Good, Better, Best"

That's basically what this book is about- learning to say no to some very good things so that you can pursue the best things.

I would love to see more people read this book. It's not a perfect book. As other reviewers have pointed out, many of the examples given are not great, and McKeown really likes to name-drop Stanford and the Silicon Valley tech culture. But the ideas in this book completely changed my outlook.

Simply terrific.