Ah yes, a book review. And what better place to get a book review than on a random website usually dedicated to streaming video games and tech tutorials? Well, I also enjoy self help stuff, especially around the topic of productivity. So there’s that. Mostly, I saw someone recommend Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and I thought, “that sounds interesting.” Then I thought, “let’s make a review out of it”.
Overall, it was okay. A 3 out of 5 for me.
It starts by building a case for being an “essentialist”, so the title is accurate. I think this book is really geared towards someone who has already accomplished a lot in his life and he is overwhelmed by the demands of his work. He needs to learn to say “no” and make room for himself to enjoy life.
The problem is that almost every example is about someone who got successful by being the guy who took on too much. The successful person was the person who tried to do it all and went above and beyond. Each person may have had some focus in some cases, but took on too much overall and burnt out. Now they need essentialism to find a more enjoyable life.
I’m personally pretty scattered. I’ve got a huge list of projects I want to do and I have a hard time focusing on any of them for any length of time. I mean, it’s only been 6 months since my last entry on this site, not too bad, right? I was hoping that Essentialism could help me get some focus, boil things down to what’s really important and get to task. I really didn’t get that message. The loudest message was the unintended one:
If you want to be successful, work your ass off. Successful people overwork themselves to get where they are.
Then once you get to a comfortable place, you can turn down projects and otherwise say no to things and generally maintain your lifestyle. It’s almost like purposely conforming to the Peter Principle. Use hard work to get promoted up and then essentialism to underperform at whatever role you want to stay at.
Unfortunately for someone in my situation, if I turned down all but the best opportunities, I’d have no opportunities at all. Sorry, nobody is offering me 6+ figures to do some interesting job. I’m usually out there searching for scraps and hoping to over perform by enough to get another shot.
What I did find interesting in the book was the final section. It had a few generally good pieces of advice, but decided that it needed to call them part of essentialism. For example, the book talked about being prepared. Having a buffer to fall back on in case things don’t go according to plan. It’s almost assuredly not an essentialist thing to have huge amounts of redundancy and alternative plans. I mean, the author can include whatever he wants in his own definition of the concept he created, but there’s no logical consistency between being prepared for every possible contingency when your whole message is streamlining things and only doing what’s essential.
He took a good habit and tried to jam it into his supposedly good thing. No, I’m not buying it. Same with things like small wins, another interesting concept that I generally agree with, but certainly not part of being an essentialist. Yet the author tries to jam that concept in as well. It’s like he had to meet a page count and he threw in some nice ideas at the end to meet that count even when it doesn’t really fit or directly contradicts the thesis of his book.
That final part was a bit awkward even if it had good advice. The initial three parts were okay, but only if you’re already where you want to be and want to start coasting. The best thing I got out of the book goes against the thesis of the book.
If you want to be successful in the working world, try to do it all. Try to over perform. Burn yourself out. Get to where you want to be, but without good life balance, and then you can use this book to help find that balance.
So, 3 stars.