I recently posted on my Facebook page that I had finished reading this book. For my benefit as well as yours I will just summarise a bit of the book, Essentialism The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. As I review this, I will point out things that agree with the Bible or maybe where it disagrees.

First impressions – The book was easy to read both in content and in font size, graphics, headings. Yes, the physical aspect of the book does play into how easy I find to read the book. It was easy to finish. Do you know what I mean? I started it and easily kept reading. It didn’t get stuck on a pile of books to finish in the next decade. I read the physical book with a highlighter in hand.

Getting this out of the way – My husband bought this book and gave it to me to read. He knows how much I enjoy reading and reading this type of books. The review, opinions, and thoughts here are my own. This is a secular book in the category of Business/psychology.

 What is Essentialism? 

“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 your highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.” (page 5)

What does it mean to do the right things? We live in a noisy world; meaning the media, people, friends, social media are all saying things. Maybe it is things that they are doing and we think we should do it. Maybe it is intentionally things that others want us to do. We need to know what God is calling us to be at this time.

Essentialism requires courage. We are going to do and be different than all the noise around us.   This is going to require discipline. That means that we will need to be intentional.

“The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default.” (page 7) How easily do we just go to default mode. It is often easy and doesn’t require much thinking. Essentialism is going to require courage and discipline. We need that to live by design.

“Essentialism is a disciplines, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.” (page 7)

I made it to page 7 only 239 more pages to go. Don’t worry I won’t go into as much detail.

Four Parts of Essentialism

The book has four parts: Essence, Explore, Eliminate, and Execute. Also throughout the book there are charts that showing the non-Essentialist and the Essentialist. I found the charts helpful to just show a summary of some of the differences.

The author talks a bit about priorities. The importance of priorities but also gives a bit about the word priorities. The word came to English in the 1400s and it was singular. There was only one priorities but it in 1900s it became plural. A word that means first or prior thing now has come to be multiple things. I think we really need to go back to the idea that priority is one word. My priority might change from one day to the next but it is the one thing that is important. You can’t do everything.

Essentialism involves choice. An essentialist says, “I choose to.” While the non-essentialist says, “I have to.” There is a big difference. You make the decision and you choose it.

Here are some quick take aways from the book.

Have time to think. Sit and think, evaluate. Have space in your life for this. The Bible talks about being still and listening to God. That is what this time should be in our lives. Do you have be still time in your day or week?

Sleep is important. That goes along with the book I read on that. An Essentialist understands the importance of sleep.

Live with intent. As a Christian, our intent should be to love God and glorify Him in all we do. If we keep that intent in the front of our thinking as we make decisions and live each day, our life and schedule will be different.

An Essentialist knows when to say, “yes” and when to say, “no”.  Just because someone asks you to do something, doesn’t mean you need to say yes.

Know when to stop even if the project isn’t finished. When I was homeschooling, it was easy to decide, I bought the curriculum, we started it, we will finish it but we should have stopped. It wasn’t working. Be willing to stop.

How will I put this into my life?

My quick answer is, “I am still thinking about that.” Any really that is true. I don’t have a boss and a job description so it is a bit more difficult to see how it could apply in my life.

It has made me consider my attitude so instead of saying, “I have to make lentil and barley stew for 50 people on Thursday.” I changed it to be, “I have an opportunity to make lentil and barley stew for 50 people on Thursday.”

I am still asking myself the question, “What is essential?”. This morning I was intentional in sitting and just listening to the Lord. I had to be disciplined to sit and be still. I have a page of thoughts. On one specific thing God said, “be faithful and leave the rest to me.”

“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” Psalm 46:10 (ESV)

Are you trying to do too much? Do you need to learn principles of Essentialism in your life?