Essentialism

Saying yes to everything felt like the right thing to do. It felt like being useful, ambitious, a good team player. McKeown helped me see it differently.

Essentialism is about the disciplined pursuit of less — not laziness, but selective focus. Almost everything is relatively unimportant. A very few things are genuinely essential. Mixing those two categories up costs you everything.

The question that runs through the whole book: is this a choice, or am I just drifting into it?

I became significantly more comfortable saying no after reading this. That's probably the most useful thing a book has ever done for me.