3 Quotes from Essentialism To Help You Feel Less Overloaded

A book that truly changed how I defined my values

Book Title: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less Author: Greg McKeown Genre: Non-fiction; Self-Help

In line with my Konmari phase, Essentialism was part of my journey discovering my values via the concept of minimalism. Now, there are some negative views of minimalism, with some defining it as getting rid of everything. For me, my growing understanding of this concept is getting rid of everything that doesn’t matter.

For example, if at this moment, getting rid of everything that doesn’t matter meant you could keep everything that you own, including all 32 Cabbage Patch Kid dolls, then I define that as still aligning with the values of minimalism (others might disagree). However, with shifting contexts and shifting priorities (e.g., maybe you have to move to a smaller place in ten years), you might find that your values have changed, and those 32 Cabbage Patch Kid dolls, given the restriction and smaller spotlight you have to put on your relationship with objects, might not be at the iceberg of priorities anymore. That’s okay too. This is what minimalism means to me.

Whereas Marie Kondo’s books very much discussed the most tangible aspects of minimalism and helped me reflect on my relationship with the objects I owned, Essentialism is a book that took this in a more abstract relationship, helping me reflect on my relationship with time.

Here are the quotes that most prompted me to rethink my relationship with time.

Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.

For most of us, we start out the first years of our life having other people set priorities for us. This is necessary because we are floppy, inefficient soft flesh that needs to be taken care of, by others wiser and older than them, and that’s okay.

Most of us go through adolescence where we start rebelling — except instead of rebelling, what I truly think is that we develop our own priorities, values and meaning that might differ from our parents’. In this turbulent phase, we learn to rebalance amongst both our own and others’ priorities.

But, some of us, myself included, never really have this rebellious stage for some reason, and go through the majority of their life not even questioning how others are setting priorities for them. This becomes a default.

I read this quote at an important flipping point in my life where I learned not to exist by default of yielding to others’ priorities and started to reflect on my own values. I started making better decisions that align better with what I actually want, which often didn’t always conflict with others. I just never thought to be any other way.

Sticking with this default led me to feel overwhelmed and burnt out, feeling like I had to cling on to all this work by default. I didn’t. There was a way out.

Is anything coming up when I unravel this story? Are there things that you go about your life accepting as a default, never questioning whether there could be a more efficient way to exist? What are they?

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.

I think the best example of this that people see and understand on television are people stuck in relationships that don’t click anymore — yet they stay in these relationships out of familiarity.

But for me, before I read Spark Joy by Marie Kondo, this was me holding on to items that I didn’t want and didn’t work but weren’t sh*tty enough to land in the trash. I literally never thought to let them go (or to upcycle them into something better) because I stayed in this default.

And then, in reading Essentialism, these reflections generalized beyond relationships with objects.

I began reflecting on how I structured my time and why I structured it this way. I reflected on just how much others seemed to have this implicit say in the way I structured my time, and then experimented on whether these beliefs were true. Some of the time, I couldn’t shift them, and I just needed to find some way to efficiently get something done. Importantly, however, some of these beliefs weren’t true. I was able to reschedule things for later or to devise a better plan that fit expectations for both me and collaborators or supervisors.

This experimentation i.e., putting into action the testing of these beliefs, was the most important outcome that shaped my time going forward. It helped redefine not only my values, but my perception of what “productivity” means.

What about you? Are there things you do by default because you don’t think about how much they take up your time? Do they hold value for you or someone else? Did they hold value for you at the beginning but change over time? Do they still hold value for you?

What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?

*Akhem*, louder for those sitting in the back, please?

At some deeper level, I knew this concept already. When I thought about how not to compare myself to others, I thought about why I was and what was comparing myself too — and this was it.

I was comparing myself to other people’s Instagram highlight reels, or in-lab (pre-pandemic) recounts of being busy beyond belief (B³).

But soon, I realized I didn’t even want to be B³. Being B³ is unpleasant, draining and valueless.

What was pleasant, energizing and valuable is (unsurprisingly) everything in the second half — listening, pondering, meditating, connecting.

Why don’t we talk about this more? Or, let me change that. I’m going to talk about this more. Until I’m like a broken record and then some.

When are you currently busiest? What value does the word “busy” hold for you? How do you ideally want to spend your time, outside of what others think?

Conclusions

If I were to distill Essentialism into one question, it would be:

What matters?

It’s such a simple question that builds a foundation for unpacking across so many contexts. It prompts us to question how we’re defining our values and our relationship with time. It also prompts us to question how much our values are being influenced by others and whether that’s out of our conscious decision or something that occurred by default.

What are your thoughts? Is Essentialism or Minimalism your thing?