People have limited time and energy to accomplish what they want.  Individuals have to make trade-offs based on what they want to accomplish.  Those who try to accomplish everything, are dividing their attention, time, and energy across different activities, which leads to worse performance.  The basic value proposition of essentialism, is for individuals to stop trying to do everything, which enables individuals to focus on where their efforts can contribute most. 

 

Essentialists focus on doing few activities with high quality outcomes, rather than attempting many activities with low quality outcomes.  Essentialism focuses the individual on the appropriate activities, to make worthwhile trade-offs, not a justification to just do less activities.  What essentialists do is explore and evaluate what an opportunity is worth, eliminate the nonessential and trivial, and then design behaviors and habits to implement the intended activities.  Essentialists use the power of gracefully saying no to an activity, to prevent being distracted from what is essential. 

 

The ideas of the book are based on economics, that people have limited resources which cause people to make trade-offs on how they are used.  The ideas in the book are based on assumptions which economics has gone beyond, which can also create a contradiction.  In an effort to remove the trivial, the essentialist can make decisions using the claim ‘if it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no.’  Removing the trivial requires perfection, which means spending more limited time and energy on the potentially nonessential.  Economic ideas which contained methods of perfection, have transitioned into satisficing, a more realistic decision making framework. 

 

This book created a narrative fallacy for essentialism.  The examples and ideas that are used to support essentialism express how individuals can benefit from them.  What are not included are the examples of how essentialism can harm society.  How essentialism can harm society can be thought of as nonessential to this book.  Leadership is often the source for the direction of a group, but leadership can create strategic ignorance, to prevent information from reaching them.  Information for which the leaders would be liable for, as that could harm the leader’s ability to provide direction.  Preventing leadership from taking accountability, which would be nonessential.  For the author, it's essential to have time to discover and reflect on what decisions are essential.  But if leadership already took time to discover the priority of activities, then any alternative views can be considered as nonessential as those views would be wasting resources and time.  The methods used to decline the nonessential views, can be very ungraceful.