I actually just got done reading this one today! You'd be hard pressed to find many who would disagree that most of the things we do aren't massively impactful, but the author massively underplays the actual difficulty of know which things are going to be better to do than others in the moments we decide between them, and the degree to which we can ever really know which things are going to be better choices than others. Like in his example of the hiring practices of some esoteric sounding companies, he goes through their hiring criteria as 'would this person be a perfect fit to work here?', which is pretty vague, and comes after a section where the author just went into how we all need to be less vague with our criteria for things.
Overall I enjoyed it, and if you've never read a 'do less' book, it isn't a bad one. But I didn't feel like the author contributed much to fleshing out his ideas beyond the nice sound-bites scattered throughout the books and quotes on doing less that at times were just there to take up space. It seemed like he was reaching pretty hard for real world examples that supported his ideas too, at times resorting to made up ones like Isaac Newton having been at play when he say the apple falling from the tree that inspired his theory of gravity -- that's a myth -- or talking about the Erikson study Malcolm Gladwell popularized into the 10k hour rule -- which is another load of bull, there was a massive, thousands of hour range in the time it took the violinists to excel, and that was after they had already been preselected for being among the most talented violinists in the world by virtue of having been admitted into various programs like the one the study examined (Erikson himself is very against Gladwell having made something of his work that it actively disproves). Honestly at this point, a good shortcut to test an author's credibility is whether or not they seriously quote anything Malcom Gladwell wrote, mentioning it here again mostly to name drop and say those violinists seemed to sleep a little more on average than others -- which itself is a stretch, as I recall there were like 10 or so in the study. Throughout the book he mostly name drops people and corporations he's quoting or has talked to in an effort to persuade you on the basis of seeing him as an authority as well, which is historically considered the weakest basis for argument there is. True to the book's message, it's one that could have worked better with a lot less in it. Most of the backing he provides for it doesn't hold up, but it is full of nice sayings and maxims on either side of his message that give good perspective on why it's not a good idea to do too much and why it can be a better idea to, as he puts it continually throughout the book as its message, embark on the "disciplined pursuit of less but better." Most of the value of the book is in reading its table of contents, and his scattered 'an essentialist does this, a nonessentialist does that' lines throughout the work. The rest of it in my opinion is better off skipped, true to form with the message of the book, as that's the vital few of it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/0c8f2166-70ab-4a89-a017-7d9addba8339%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
