Greg McKeown: Essentialism (2014) 📙

Meine Notizen

Strategie-Klausur: Regelmäßig Pause machen, um zu fragen: „Am I investing in the right activities?” (S. 5)

• „It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution.” (S. 5)

  The Essentialist removes obstacles to make execution easy. (S. 8)

• „Essentialists invest the time they have saved into a system for removing obstacles” (S. 25)
• Was GTD als System ist auf der Mikro-Ebene, ist Essentialism als System auf der Makro-Ebene (Strategie-Klausuren, Sprints, …) 

„The trivial many” = der Krebs der EPU und Lifestyle Entrepreneure.

„If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”

Highest point of contribution (S. 22)

• right thing
• right time
• right reason

„Just imagine what would happen to our world if every person on the planet eliminated one good but nonessential activity and replaced it with something truly essential.” (S. 27)

Ich will ein bisschen playfulness auch in meinen Gründer*innen-Beratungen drinnen haben. Playfulness => creativity

Ein Denker muss auch ein Spieler sein! (S. 86f)

• We make connections we would otherwise not have made.
• „It helps us challenge old assumptions and makes us more receptive to untested ideas. It gives us permission to expand our own stream of consciousness and come up with new stories.“

Protect the asset – WOW! (S. 94f)

• „The best asset we have for making a contribution to the world is ourselves. If we underinvest in ourselves, and by that I mean our minds, our bodies, and our spirits, we damage the very tool we need to make our highest contribution. One of the most common ways people – especially ambitious,  successful people – this asset is through a lack of sleep.“
• „We need to be as strategic with ourselves as we are with our careers and our businesses.“
• Meine Gesundheit und meine Fitness = mein Anlagevermögen
• „Essentialists instead see sleep as necessary for operating at high levels of contribution more of the time. This is why they systematically and deliberately build sleep into their schedules.“
• Ja, jeden Tag um 22:00 schlafen zu gehen, ist ein Trade-off. „But cumulatively, this small trade-off can yield big rewards.“

Levels of sleep (S. 99)

• Marc Andreessen hat „levels of sleep”: „Seven [hours] and I start to degrade. Six is suboptimal. Five is a big problem. Four means I’m a zombie.“

The 90 Percent Rule (S. 104f)

• „As you evaluate an option, think about the single most important criterion for that decision, and then simply give the option a score between 0 and 100. If you rate it any lower than 90 percent, then automatically change the rating to 0 and simply reject it.“
• So lassen sich auch „great teaching opportunities” erkennen!
• „By definition, applying highly selective criteria is a trade-off; sometimes you will have to turn down a seemingly very good option and have faith that the perfect option will soon come along.“
• „When our selection criteria are too broad, we will find ourselves committing to too many options.“
• „Nonessentialists apply implicit or unspoken criteria to the decisions they make in both their personal and their professional lives.“

A systemic process to apply selective criteria to opportunities (S. 111)

Stop wordsmithing and start deciding (S. 127)

• „If we could truly be excellent at only one thing, what would it be?“
• vgl. Gary Keller: The ONE Thing

Vorsicht vor dem „status quo bias” (S. 151)

• = „the tendency to continue doing something simply because we have always done it.“

Was ich in einem Editor suche (S. 157)

• „My job is to make life as effortless as possible for the reader. The goal is to help the reader have the clearest possible understanding of the most important message or takeaway.“

The way of the Nonessentialist = Ich, immer wieder (S. 194)

• „The way of the Nonessentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do it all, have it all, fit it all in.“

Essentialists create systems (S. 198f)

• „We can use our energies to set up a system that makes execution of goodness easy […]“
• Essentialists create systems to make execution effortless.
• „The key is to start small, encourage progress, and celebrate small wins.” 
• „There is something powerful about visibly seeing progress toward a goal. Don’t be above applying the same techniques to your own essential goals, at home or at work.” (S. 201)

Learning essential new skills (S. 213)

• „Learning essential new skills is never easy. But once we master them and make them automatic we have won an enormous victory, because the skill remains with us for the rest of our lives.“

Multitasking vs. multifokusing (S. 220)

• „Multitasking itself is not the enemy of Essentialism; pretending we can multifocus is.“

Ich bin… ein Essentialist! (S. 226ff)

• „There are two ways of thinking about Essentialism. The first is to think of it as something you do occasionally. The second is to think of it as something you are.“
• „It becomes a lifestyle. […] It becomes the essence of who we are.“

Clarity equals success (S. 240)