The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
~ Lin Yutang
I recently finished the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. It was a quick read and took only 3 weeks (unlike Range which took 3 months). I loved the book, especially cause it aligned with my understanding that life is short and you can’t do everything. Essentialism showed me that even within the things I can do, there is scope to prioritize things further.
The first lesson I learned from the book is its definition: What is Essentialism?
Essentialism is the disciplined pursuit of less but better.
Let’s drill down the definition a bit more. The definition sounds fancy and nice, but doesn’t make a lot of sense without understanding the fundamental principle of Essentialism philosophy:
Practically Everything is Unimportant.
There is no hard evidence for this. It’s a subjective matter that you need to observe for yourself. It’s like the Pareto Principle: 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes (the “vital few”).
Based on the principle, the world is a sea of trivial things, where the vital few (essentials) are hidden. The essential is less but better.
We must prioritize finding the essentials, otherwise, we will always stay busy dealing with the trivial things. There is no point in searching if we don’t act on them. So once found, we must ignore trivial things and act on the essentials deliberately.
Combining everything above, here is my interpretation of the previous definition:
Finding the vital few (essential) in the sea of trivial things, and then Acting on them, is Essentialism.
That’s it for today. In the next post, I will discuss how to find the vital few.