Essentialism - Greg McKeown

Trade offs are an inherent part of life, and not necessarily a negative part of life. This book explored how you can use trade offs to your advantage to protect your time and chose activities and habits purposefully to maximize your potential or your businesses potential.

• Essentialists take time to explore and evaluate a broad set of options before committing to any. Once you commit it's best to "go big", so it's best to spend time making sure an idea or activity is vital before taking it on. Explore options first and pick the right one later.

• Have extreme criteria for things you take on. Once you finish exploring your options, the answer can only be "HELL YEA or no".

• If you allow your selective criteria to degrade, anything becomes a target. If a business says yes to any project a customer asks them to do, the morale of the company will plummet because you will lose any greater sense of purpose and it will become impossible to distinguish yourself in the marketplace. Because of this, you should say yes to only the top 10% of opportunities at most. Your criteria when saying yes should be "Is this exactly what I am looking for".

• Use Zero-Based budgeting in life. Whenever you have the opportunity to reevaluate your commitments, throw everything off the table and start from zero. Evaluate every item and justify every item again from scratch.

• Focus on primary obstacles. If you need to cut costs, focus on the least efficient thing first, followed by the second least efficient thing. If you are struggling with writers block, hiring a researcher would be a waste of time - instead you should focus on getting words on the page.