Squeeze #4 - Essentialism

Welcome to the fourth edition of #latestsqueeze! You can catch up on past editions here.

This time, I'm squeezing Essentialism by Greg McKeown . If you’ve read it before, drop your thoughts in the comments—I’d love to hear your take!

Why I wanted to squeeze it

This book made its way onto my bookshelf for two reasons.

The first was due to an endorsement from a former LinkedIn executive, Julia Leong , who mentioned the book in a women's leadership forum to help leaders prioritise what problems to solve.

The second was because I had so much noise in my head that I could only be satisfied by doing more. More work, more projects and taking on a mindset that the absolute best employees are the ones who can solve the most problems. As you may see from previous editions of #LatestSqueeze, this trend was influenced by my working-class upbringing, which valued hard work and quantity output as signs you were doing a good job.

Growing up, hard work meant visible output—more hours, more tasks, more results. This carried into my early marketing career, where success felt tied to how many emails I could reply to, how many creative briefs I processed and how many Salesforce tickets I closed

However, as my seniority and experience grew, so did the burn-out frequency. What sounds incredibly obvious in hindsight is that as your career progresses, it becomes less about how much you do and more about what you do (and don't do).

So, I picked up Essentialism a few years ago, eager to know what it means to do less without becoming less.

The juice I squeezed

• Essentialism is permitting yourself to stop doing it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, so you can make your highest contribution towards the things that matter. It means to live by the principles of 'less, but better', 'the disciplined pursuit of less' and 'living a life that really matters'.

• 'If you don't prioritise your life, someone else will.' When we don’t take control of our priorities, external noise can mislead us into focusing on the wrong things. In taking back the choice to determine what is or is not essential, we must distinguish between the 'trivial many' and the 'vital few'. A few variables drive significant impact, while everything else is just useless noise.

• Find the signal in the noise. Suppose most information is useless, distracting and otherwise unimportant. In that case, the essentialist's goal is to sift through the noise to understand the essence of the information (the 'So, what?') and what is not being said. They capture the headline, focusing on broader patterns and trends instead of individual details.

• 'If it isn't a clear yes, then it's a clear no.' Enough said.

• Saying 'no' to others takes strength. Whether it's the fear of missing out on an opportunity, worry about ruining a relationship or being seen as a 'no person', saying these two little letters is hard. But when you have 'clarity on what is essential, it fuels us with the strength to say no to the nonessentials.'

• 'Make your peace with the fact that saying 'no' often requires trading popularity for respect. When you say no, there is usually a short-term impact on the relationship. After all, when someone asks for something and doesn't get it, his or her reaction may be annoyance or, disappointment or even anger...The potential upside, however, when the initial annoyance or disappointment or anger wears off, [is that] the respect kicks in.'

• Done is better than perfect. Product managers and engineers use the term minimum viable product (MVP) to create the simplest possible product that will be useful and valuable to the customer. We can adopt a similar idea with minimum viable progress to determine the smallest amount of progress to the essential task we are trying to get done. By starting small, we are more likely to get things done, leading to bigger wins over time. Instead of spreading our energy thin across many tasks, we focus deeply on a few.

Why it's worth the squeeze

• This book gave me the answers I needed to understand my constant need to do everything while figuring out how to limit my burnout patterns.
• When tackling projects with many problems but few resources to solve them, I think about the author's question back to the reader: 'If we could only do one thing, what would it be?'
• It made me a more intentional listener, looking for what's not being said to get to the heart of a problem vs. tackling it at face value.
• Overall, Essentialism helped me reposition myself from 'everything to everyone' to 'less, but better' without the guilt of letting others down or underperforming.
• This book was easy to read at just under 250 pages, small pages, medium-sized font, and some cracker jumbo quotes. Ideas were explained, defined and repeated for maximum impact. And best of all, examples we can all take in the workplace were provided with every idea.

One final thought

'An Essentialist produces more - brings forth more - by removing more instead of doing more.' -Greg McKeown.

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P.S. I write in Australian English (no MM/DD/YYYY here!). All quotes from US contributors maintain the original American English. The author is British and uses UK English.