Hello, my dear
We are almost at the end of the year 2021. I hope you had a good year and you accomplished a lot of things and wish you many more accomplishments this year. And what better way to start a new year than reading a new book. So today I will be sharing my learnings from book Essentialism by Greg McKeown.
Why this book?
Why this book? I’m glad you asked. I think I was a disciple of minimalism for a long time, even before I knew the concept of minimalism. I used to get dismissed by people over this weird and simplistic approach to my life. I don’t remember exactly where it all started. It could be something my father said once about “simple living high thinking.”
Summary
We have so much noise in our lives, a lot of things to manage and so many things to do. But we are humans and we can’t do it all or have it all. So this book focuses on how we can remove all this noise from life and focus on a few very important items.
Less, But Better
Declutter – Don’t buy unnecessary items, and organize everything by getting rid of items you don’t need. Because these unnecessary things becomes noise and affects your daily decisions.
Explore more and do few – Normally, we think we should do more to achieve more. So we take multiple tasks at once, have multiple aims and objectives, and try to do it all. And this is a very inefficient way of doing things. Instead, explore more and choose very few of those and do that. You can’t have it all. I don’t mean to discourage you, but you see, this is one truth that needs to be accepted. We have limited time and resources, so you can’t have it all. There will be 100 good things you can do, but out of those, prioritise only the 5 great things you really want to do. The sacrifice of those 95 good things is what you will have to make.
We can do anything, but not everything.
Politely say NO! – Saying no is a big task that not everyone is able to do. Because as a society, we have been conditioned to say “yes” more often, even if we are not interested or even if it is painful, because we want to be more accepted. But start saying no to things you don’t want and see how much better life becomes. I have explained the art of saying no in detail here.
Some effort yield higher result – Remember 80/20 principle. 80% of the result comes from 20% of your efforts. So identify and focus more on those 20% tasks and achieve more.
Conclusion
There is too much of options available but most of them are just noise. Practice essentialism and eliminate non essentials from life.
