Review: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Essentialism is an answer to the Multiarmed Bandit problem: how are we supposed to do real meaningful things when our time and bandwidth is being sucked by everyone around us? The answer is a three step cycle: Explore, Eliminate and Execute (or to put it in non-businessy, corporate terms to become effective Explore-Exploiters).

I. Explore

Exploring means to look through a wide variety of options of tasks, jobs, and experiences. It is why colleges have introductory classes, corporations have rotational programs, and drinkers get flights. The advantage of exploring is that it is a focused process. Whereas often times exploration is something that we do reactively (saying "yes" to new options), when we do it proactively we can cover ground a lot faster.

Exploration is made up of two substeps, escaping and selecting.

I. 1. Escape: in order to figure out what options to select, one must create and defend time and spaces where exploration is possible. This should be a scheduled period, where interesting topics and ideas can be quickly breezed through. I almost want to say "This is your Wikipedia time directly countering your [Social Media Cancer of choice] time."

I. 2. Select. Once choices- projects to work on, goals to pursue, schools to apply to- have been brought for, they must all go through an important sieve: "Does this actually matter to me?" To determine that you can start by setting minimum specifications, and then ramping them upwards until you have a set of the best possible options.

II. Eliminate

Once options have been assembled, they need to be eliminated. But not only eliminated in a way to make a choice, but the final choice itself has to be whittled down. The final choice needed to be edited, revised... to be made essential! It needs to have clarity, and be obvious to you now and in the future what it means for that goal or desire to be achieved.

The process of eliminating also becomes a giant shield: asks will bounce off because you've already committed to some course of action. It gives you an excuse (mostly to yourself) about what you cannot do because you can literally not do it.

III. Execute

The final step of the cycle (which is really a concurrent step with the other two) is to execute. With the design chosen, and the final specs laid out, this is rather easy: break the goal into a bunch of tiny, constituent parts and do them one after another in a way that gets you a lot of "small wins".

IV. Review

This book reflects a lot of thought that I've had in my own life. I used to be very much a "minimalist" college student (probably because I didn't have any money) but I still have a revulsion to 'clutter' in terms of "owned objects" that don't have any value. I also see the "nonessentialist" worldview in a lot of high school/college classmates. These are the students who never have any time to just chill because they're doing research, in CRU, leading a club, founding a new club and taking 18 credits worth of classes and they're not even doing any of it very well. I've also seen the opposite in some of my classmates: everything they're doing points in the same direction and though each individual component is small the sum of tiny undirectional efforts is something that launches them to Princeton or Stanford.

The book is filled with lots of self-help, rah-rah business filler. "Make sure you sleep", "Don't fall into the Sunk-Cost fallacy," and a whole host of other Daniel Kahneman inspired nuggests of information. But if you're prepared to skim through those parts and try to figure out the best parts to have a happy, leaner life, this is a good read.