I recently reread Essentialism by Greg McKeown, a book I recommended in 2019. This bestseller encourages you to do “less but better.”

I liked the book on my first reading. I appreciate it more now, because I read it with a different purpose. Back then, I was focused on the “how.” I was looking for advice on how to essentialize, and settled for a number of practical tips on how to deal with the overload of the 21st century. This time, I read it with an intention to create a new identity for myself as an “essentialist,” a goal inspired by my business coach who was inspired by this book. Reading it from that perspective, I got more value from it.

Here is what I concluded after this time’s chewing of the book:

What is an essentialist?

An “essentialist” is someone who has simplified and organized his life around creating and keeping a few top values. This requires that you know your top values, you judge every opportunity in relation to them, and you pro-actively reduce existing activities, commitments, and belongings to ensure that you have time, energy, and space to pursue those top values.

This starts with deciding what’s top—what are the most important values you want to create in the world (or that you have created). My top values are my book, my marriage, and my business, with my health and fitness seen as the non-negotiable foundation for achieving all three. Your top values will vary. A good place to start is to consider the five major value areas of human life:

• Health & Wellness
• Work & Career
• Relationships & Romance
• Recreation & Flow
• Money & Trade

You can only have a few top values, because otherwise they complicate and muddle your life instead of simplifying and organizing it. It’s impossible to work out the relationships if you have a half a dozen “top” values. Nor will that many “tops” guide you as to what to eliminate as nonessential.

The benefit of becoming an essentialist is that you can pursue your top values with an intensity and single-mindedness that you will achieve much more profound and lasting results. And you’ll do this using less energy and experiencing minimal moments of suffering. It is a prescription for success and happiness.

My model for this is a novelist I read about who stopped all fan interactions. He shut down his website, went off social media, stopped making speaking appearances. Why? Because those were all low-quality interactions with his fans. His novels were high-quality interactions. He wanted the highest quality connection with his fans, and that’s what it took.

The three essentials of essentialism

I’d now sum up the “how” of “essentialism” in terms of three high-level processes:

1) Maintain a value-creation mindset—never lose sight of your top values and how your actions in the moment contribute to creating them over the long term.

I say creating values not gaining them, because I see the goal of an essentialist life is the creation of something new, something that is your original take.

This doesn’t mean that your creation can’t be similar to others’, like “create a happy home and nurturing environment for your children.” But your take on this will be distinctive to you. If it’s not, you’ll have no way to judge.

2) Constantly differentiate the important from the unimportant by means of a value orientation. It is crtically important that when you let go of the unimportant, you do so on the grounds of gaining your top values, not giving up on lesser values because you “can’t” have them due to circumstances.

(To be clear, this explanation reflects my own conceptualization of values and the need to orient to values.)

3) Take the need for speedy decisions seriously—build in the systems, routines, and principles that make everyday choices easy and frictionless. Save the deep thinking for the deeply creative, momentous decisions.

This perspective reflects the fact that thinking is a means to action, and action is a means to gaining and keeping values. The values are identified, clarified, prioritized by thinking. That’s what accelerates action and successful results in the world.

So what is an “essentialist”? Someone who has integrated these values and processes into their minds and lives.

Becoming an “essentialist” is not a goal like winning a race. As your interests evolve and the world changes around you (or you change the world around you), your priorities will naturally shift. There will always be a need to integrate values, prune nonessentials, and build new systems. It is a “be” goal—an identity goal, rather than a “do” goal, or a “repeater” rather than an “ender.”

Why I was less concerned with “how to” this time around

One reason I got so much value from the book is that I have been rethinking the purpose of “how to” advice. I see that you cannot create true “step-by-step” instructions for processes that involve thinking. The application of an idea to a new concrete is inherently creative. It requires fresh thinking.

As a result, what you get from many “how to” articles or books (including mine) is a retrospective summary of the thinking the author did to achieve his goal. It is at best scaffolding that you can use to speed up your own “how to” learning curve. If your circumstances are very similar, it may point you to exactly what you need to think about in your case. If not, it may serve more as a low-resolution map of the terrain than a navigation app. You will need to get creative and do your own experiments to figure out the exact “how” that achieves your goal, given your existing knowledge, values, and skill—and any old baggage that distorts these.

(This is why I have added year-round group coaching to the Thinking Lab. Coaching is what helps another person bridge the gap between theory and practice.)

The bottom line: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less is a short, readable book, well worth the investment of your time. It is especially valuable if you read it for the vision and the mindset he embodies. From that perspective, its purpose is to help you see the possibility for your life, the life of a creator.