Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
I enjoyed reading this book very much. I am at heart an essentialist so he was preaching to the choir, but he was doing it with a British accent on audio and it is hard for me to hate books with lovely narrations. Since I am in the middle of big business changes and decisions, the timing on hearing these reminders was perfect for me.
Such a frustrating book. McKeown addresses an important topic that I certainly need to work on, and that's what persuaded me to read this book (based on some praising reviews) and kept me reading it through my annoyance with his tone and attitude. I'm not sure I learned anything new but I definitely was pushed to think about some things that I generally set to the side about how I choose to spend my time and the projects I take on. The book was valuable enough that I'm glad I read it. But I was
I liked the table of contents. It laid out his essential points in a concise list. The chapters themselves were overworked and repetitive. Nothing new here, including his anecdotes and examples.
This book could be summed up with these two quotes: “Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”“Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.” I enjoyed the book and felt that it was he...
This book contains great advice for affluent people who don't fear losing their jobs when they choose really important things like planning their weddings (real example from the book) over doing tasks that are part of the job that they've been hired to do.One bit of advice is - go to the South of France for a year when your work adversely affects your health. Why didn't I think of that when I had surgery? Maybe you don't need to pay for electricity and housing if you live on the beach.Where is t...
This is garbage. The dust jacket says everything that needs to be said. There’s a bunch of chaotic lines on the spine that represent real life. Single moms with three kids trying to squeeze by. People in extreme poverty trying to find food, clean water, and shelter. Guys riding their bikes from a dishwashing job at a busy restaurant to a night job as a janitor to feed their families. People who work. Then there’s an arrow pointing to the circled word “essentialism”. These are parasites who push
Finally! A book that explains to men of privilege how to do even less of the stuff that they don't feel like doing. Who will clean the toilets and wash the dishes while I am saying yes to only Essential tasks? Will Greg McKeown pick up the slack (fingers crossed)?I am torn because I feel like there was something of value in this book. Unfortunately, much like The Four Agreements, the tiny sparks of wisdom were conflated with the author's delusions of himself as modern day shaman-prophet. This is...
This is a case of me finding exactly the book I needed at exactly the right time. (So the rating reflects that--it may not be helpful in the same degree to others.) McKeown offers a simple but profound idea: that we accomplish more when we are choosier about where we direct our efforts. I've been in the process of pulling back from things that once seemed important but have left me feeling frustrated and empty. To read a book that articulates many of the deep urges I've been struggling with, mak...
”Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?”- Mary Oliver (quoted in the book)From looking at my notes – the result of my reading – this book says a lot more than you'd think, and that it's a lot more than ”just do and have what is essential – less is more, less means more, less but better”.It is a discipline method for decision-making, getting to more done by fixing on the essential instead of going in multiple directions and as a result advancing too little in most...
Essentialism is author Greg McKeown's manifesto for the disciplined pursuit of less (but better). The nutshell catch fraise of the book is "if it's not a hell yes, it's a no. The prime directive is to (a) identify what really matters (b) ditch all the CBNQ (close but not quite) stuff (c) bite down and tear your mission apart like you're a cross between Gandhi and a pitbull with Asperger's syndrome i.e. a big hearted, very strong, very aggressively focused person.Pushing 100 balls forward 1 cm is...
I was already a buddying essentialist before I ever picked up this book -- actually, the term I prefer is minimalist, though I suppose essentialist has a more positive meaning. The book did not need to convince me to be an essentialist, nor to instruct me to clean out my closet. What the book did need to do was justify its 220 odd page count. What it needed to do was tell me how an essentialist should deal with non-essentialists. The book does do quite a bit of that. If you are a minimalist like...