Book Review – Essentialism by Greg McKeown

Dear Zuck,

Kindly cancel my account. I know, Facebook is free (and always will be), and yet I just finished Essentialism by Greg McKeown and am now convinced to focus solely on what is core in my life and business. Having also just completed a 30-day study of your site – albeit a highly informal and decidedly unscientific version of a study – I’ve concluded that Facebook is anything but essential. McKeown tells me I must “say no firmly, resolutely, and gracefully” more often, prioritize better, and edit from my life that which detracts from what is truly important. To me, Facebook has become a sad morass of a populace desperately grasping for relevance and validation, the pathetic result of our “lookame” culture gone completely off the rails. McKeown says to do less, but better; I fear your site is only about doing more… and then telling everyone and their brother about it. And good Christ, hearing that the plastic surgery industry is booming because people my age want to take better selfies to supposedly improve their images on social media, well… that was enough for me. 

Dude, I hope you’re not taking this personally. I mean, who am I to judge the empire you’ve built? It’s just that the author’s challenge for us to stop “doing things we detest, to buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like” gave me pause. He goes on to say that the essentialist “distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many.” Doesn’t that kind of capture it? My wife has raised our children to believe that if they enter adulthood with two or three true friends, then they have successfully navigated the craziness of their formative years. I think that’s spot on. Can’t really explain what possessed me to reconnect with so many people I’d lost touch with for – let’s face it – good reason. The end result from that exercise has been a bunch of pretty empty noise.

The book goes on to profile the management philosophies of your peers Jack Dorsey and Peter Thiel. You probably already know that Dorsey has considered his main role at Twitter and now Square as that of chief editor, sifting through the thousand things he and his teams could be working to determine the one or two that are actually important. He is essentially a traffic cop trying to find the intersection of those couple of ideas on which they should be focused. And your boy Thiel insisted that PayPal employees focus exclusively on a single priority at work. Simple, right? So, as essentialists we make our tough choices and eliminate the glut as we merrily go about our work. The ongoing challenge is to remove those meetings from which we achieve little or nothing, skip the events that produce no meaningful contacts, and forget the social media that adds no value. No hard feelings, guy. I’ll still tweet at you. Cool?

Your acquaintance, 

Chris