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Jorge Tovar
Jorge Tovar

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Essentialism - Book Notes

TL;DR: Read this Book, when… 📔

  • You feel that you are doing too much but not getting anything done
  • You feel overwhelmed by your duties

Overview

This book is mainly about pretty simple but useful strategies to ignore the noise and focus on the important things.

Notes 📝

Essentialism: is the disciplined pursuit of less

If you don't prioritize your life someone else will

you need to have the courage to live a life true to yourself, not the life others expect from you

Process 🔝

  • Explore: The right thing, time, and reason
  • Eliminate: Cut off the trivial many
  • Execute: Less but better

Choose

You have to decide, you need to exercise the power of choice

Discern

Certain types of effort yield higher returns than others

Trade off

Decide which problems you want

-Explore 👓

Escape

Create space to explore life, concentrate and read

Look

Find the essence in the information

Play

Play sparks exploration

Sleep

Sleep is key, needed for high performers

Select

Use narrow criteria, look for the thing where you can make the highest point of contribution

- Eliminate ❌

Clarify

Find the purpose, find the Why

Dare

Have the courage to say NO, we can say no and regret it for a few minutes or days, or we can say yes and regret it for weeks, months, or even years

Uncommit

Avoid the sunk-cost bias (giving up even when you lose something is sometimes the best choice)

Edit

Making things better means subtracting something

Limit

Boundaries are liberating

- Execute 🚀

Buffer

Build-in buffer for unexpected events

Subtract

Remove obstacles to progress

Progress

Start small and get big results, small wins create momentum and affirm our faith in our further success

Flow

Routine enables difficult things to become easy (cue, routine, reward)

Focus

At work do what you enjoy, In family be completely present

Be

Live a life that matters

- Leadership 👨‍🎤

  • Fewer things are done better
  • The Mindset is less but way better
  • In hiring be selective
  • In strategy remove the obstacles and focus on the WHY
  • Focus on the highest goal and points of contribution

Conclusion ✍️

Actually few things in life matter, our current society is full of noise and many trivial things, we should strive for a life full of good moments with family, joy, deep work, and enjoy and reconnect with the essential things.

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