In my mastermind group, I was recently sharing that I was stretched too thin and felt like I was entirely too busy but not productive. I felt that my agenda was not my own and I was at the mercy of other people and my calendar. A friend of mine recommended the book Essentialism which I downloaded after the meeting on audible and started listening to on the way home.
“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”
― Greg McKeown
This book was the answer and has opened up a whole new life for me and is one of the first things I have every client I work with read. The author Greg McKeown is a best seller in the New York Times, WSJ and Amazon. I reached out to him for an interview and to my absolute delight he said he’d love to.
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This is one of my favorite interviews I have ever done. Not only are the concepts in Essentialism life changing but Greg is a Christian and he shares how the concepts and principles in the book came from his faith.
“We often think of choice as a thing. But a choice is not a thing. Our options may be things, but a choice—a choice is an action. It is not just something we have but something we do.”
― Greg McKeown
The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy – instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us.
Essentialism is not one more thing – it’s a whole new way of doing everything. A must-read for any leader, manager, or individual who wants to learn who to do less, but better, in every area of their lives, Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.
“the pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure. Put another way, success can distract us from focusing on the essential things that produce success in the first place.”
― Greg McKeown
Resources
Essentialism by Greg McKeown
Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Article for Harvard by Greg McKeown
Twitter: @GregoryMcKeown
Bio
Greg McKeown has dedicated his career to discovering why some people break through to the next level—and others don’t. The definitive treatment of this issue is addressed in McKeown’s latest project: the instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. As well as frequently being the #1 Time Management book on Amazon, this book challenges core assumptions about achievement to get to the essence of what really drives success. McKeown is the CEO of THIS Inc, a company whose mission is to assist people and companies to spend 80 percent of their time on the vital few rather than the trivial many. Clients include Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, Pixar, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter, VMware and Yahoo!. His writing has appeared or been covered by Fast Company, Fortune, HuffPost, Politico, and Inc. Magazine. He is among the most popular bloggers for the Harvard Business Review and LinkedIn’s Influencers group: averaging a million views a month. McKeown has been interviewed on numerous television and radio shows including NPR’s All Things Considered and NBC’s Press: Here. Entrepreneur Magazine voted his interview at Stanford University the #1 Must-See Video on Business, Creativity and Success.
