Regular play helps the brain to do those things better. Play is also a very clear antidote to stress, which is a regular component in all of our lives, to varying degrees.įinally, play has a positive impact on executive functions like planning, deciding, anticipating, and prioritizing. There’s an expansion of awareness that happens when you enter a state of play, and that expansion helps you to see things that you didn’t notice before and consider options that previously you’d been blind to. The value of playing lies in its ability to broaden the range of options available to you. That’s what I start with, and then I keep writing. The idea from this chapter that I found to be the most helpful relates to the morning journaling that I do, specifically the prompt to “look for the lead.” As I look back on the past day or the past week, I ask myself what the lead might be to the story of thank chunk of time.

You’ve got to hone your observational skills and be a journalist of your own life. This is all about intentionally creating times when you are unavailable in order to give yourself the space to do deep thinking and deep work. You’ve got to create a time and a space where you can concentrate, where you can design, and where you can read. Within the explore section of the book, you must escape. I appreciate that about this book–the simplicity and the action-oriented nature of it. ExploreĮach chapter of this book has a single-word title, always a verb. With those core ideas and core questions in mind, we jump into the three sections of this book: explore, eliminate, and execute. What you’re on the lookout for are the best places to put your effort, the best “yes”–the tasks and the projects that you can take on that will yield the greatest results. Certain types of effort yield more results that others. The first is that for every single thing that you say “yes” to, that means you’re going to have to say “no” to a bunch of other things.įor that reason it’s worth putting a lot of value in your yes, and also not being afraid to say no.īut how do you determine what to say yes to?Īs you work to answer that question (with the help of the ideas that follow), keep in mind is that not all effort is created equal. Let’s start with two ideas that are at the core of essentialism. To dig deeper into them, do go pick up the book.

I hope that you find these ideas useful and actionable. In an era that emphasizes having more, doing more, and achieving more, this book’s tagline of the disciplined pursuit of less is intriguing.Īpproaching my life and my work with an essentialist mindset appeals to me, especially in the current stage of my creative career as I look toward what future projects I might want to take on. Today I’d like to share a visual summary of the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

Essentialism by greg mckeown