This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Essentialism" by Greg McKeown. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is the meaning of “less but better” and who coined the phrase? How does it apply to lifestyle?
The phrase “less but better” denotes a design philosophy put forward by German industrial designer Dieter Rams. Rams firmly believed that the best design involved as little design as possible. Inspired by Rams, Greg McKeown applied this principle to the broader context of living one’s life.
Keep reading to learn about the principle “less but better”, as it applies to lifestyle.
Less But Better: The Way of the Essentialist
We feel constantly pressed for time. We’re trying to do too much, yet when someone makes a request we say yes without thinking, in order to please them or avoid resentment. We feel that we must do it all.
As a result, we’re stretched too thin, we’re going in too many directions, and we’re making only minuscule forward progress on our many tasks and projects. We’re busy but not necessarily productive. We feel overworked but underutilized, because we’re spending much of our time on things that matter little.
As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, puts it, many of us are majoring in minor activities. The way out of this trap is to live by the principle “less but better”. Dieter Rams, a retired academic and industrial designer, coined the phrase and wrote a book in 1994 with that title. McKeown focuses his book on how to put it into practice, changing your thinking and your life.
To start with, we’re rewarded for saying yes to everything (nonproductive behavior) and punished for saying no (productive behavior). Successful people are caught in a conundrum. It develops like this:
- Successful people have a clear purpose — they know what they’re trying to accomplish — and therefore they succeed at the tasks and projects they take on.
- Because of their success, they end up taking on more and more. They become the go-to person who can always be counted on to help and their bosses and others present them with increased options and opportunities.
- Increased options and opportunities, which demand more time and energy, lead to scattershot efforts — these successful people get spread too thin.
- They’re distracted from doing their most important work at an optimum level. In effect, their success has undermined the clarity of purpose that led to their success in the first place.
Thus, pursuing success, if done in an indiscriminate way, can end in failure. Pursuing too many goals can distract us from focusing on important things.
There are several reasons we’re prone to failing this way.
There are too many options. Because of our ever-expanding choices, we can’t distinguish the most important ones. More people having more choices represents a major change in the human condition — one for which our society isn’t prepared. We’re unable to manage the overwhelming number of choices by sorting the important from the trivial. We suffer “decision fatigue,” which results in poor choices.
Social pressure keeps increasing. In addition to having a plethora of choices, we’re also under increasing pressure to make certain choices. Social media enable others to constantly weigh in on what we’re doing. We have both information and opinion overload.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Greg McKeown's "Essentialism" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Essentialism summary :
- How to do less but to do it better
- Why you need to be disciplined in your pursuit of less
- How you can learn to say no
