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Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by [Greg Mckeown]

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Greg Mckeown

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less Kindle Edition

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Have you ever found yourself struggling with information overload?

Have you ever felt both overworked and underutilised?

Do you ever feel busy but not productive?

If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is to become an Essentialist.

In Essentialism, Greg McKeown, CEO of a Leadership and Strategy agency in Silicon Valley who has run courses at Apple, Google and Facebook, shows you how to achieve what he calls the disciplined pursuit of less. Being an Essentialist is about a disciplined way of thinking. It means challenging the core assumption of ‘We can have it all’ and ‘I have to do everything’ and replacing it with the pursuit of ‘the right thing, in the right way, at the right time'.

By applying a more selective criteria for what is essential, the pursuit of less allows us to regain control of our own choices so we can channel our time, energy and effort into making the highest possible contribution toward the goals and activities that matter.

Using the experience and insight of working with the leaders of the most innovative companies and organisations in the world, McKeown shows you how to put Essentialism into practice in your own life, so you too can achieve something great.

Print length

267 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Virgin Digital
Publication date

17 April 2014
File size

7388 KB
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"Essentialism will give you richer, sweeter results and put you in real control, giving greater precision to the pursuit of what truly matters."--Forbes

"In this likeable and astute treatise on the art of doing less in order to do better...McKeown makes the content fresh and the solutions easy to implement. Following his lucid and smart directions will help readers find 'the way of the essentialist.'"--Success

"Do you feel it, too? That relentless pressure to sample all the good things in life? To do all the 'right' things? The reality is, you don't make progress that way. Instead, you're in danger of spreading your efforts so thin that you make no impact at all. Greg McKeown believes the answer lies in paring life down to its essentials. He can't tell you what's essential to every life, but he can help you find the meaning in yours."--Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell is Human and Drive

"Entrepreneurs succeed when they say 'yes' to the right project, at the right time, in the right way. To accomplish this, they have to be good at saying 'no' to all their other ideas. Essentialism offers concise and eloquent advice on how to determine what you care about most, and how to apply your energies in ways that ultimately bring you the greatest rewards."--Reid Hoffman, co-founder/chairman of LinkedIn and co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Start-up of You

"As a self-proclaimed 'maximalist' who always wants to do it all, this book challenged me and improved my life. If you want to work better, not just less, you should read it too."--Chris Guillebeau, New York Times bestselling author of The $100 Startup

"Great design takes us beyond the complex, the unnecessary and confusing, to the simple, clear and meaningful. This is as true for the design of a life as it is for the design of a product. With Essentialism, Greg McKeown gives us the invaluable guidebook for just such a project."--Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

"In Essentialism, Greg McKeown makes a compelling case for achieving more by doing less. He reminds us that clarity of focus and the ability to say 'no' are both critical and undervalued in business today."--Jeff Weiner, CEO, LinkedIn

"Essentialism is a powerful antidote to the current craziness that plagues our organizations and our lives. Read Greg McKeown's words slowly, stop and think about how to apply them to your life--you will do less, do it better, and begin to feel the insanity start to slip away."--Robert I. Sutton, Professor at Stanford University and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss and Scaling Up Excellence

"Essentialism is a rare gem that will change lives. Greg offers deep insights, rich context and actionable steps to living life at its fullest. I've started on the path to an Essentialist way of life, and the impact on my productivity and well-being is profound."--Bill Rielly, Senior Vice President, Intel Security

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

Greg McKeown writes, teaches, and speaks around the world on the importance of living and leading as an Essentialist. He has spoken at companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Symantec, and Twitter and is among the most popular bloggers for the Harvard Business Review and LinkedIn Influencer's group. He co-created the course, Designing Life, Essentially at Stanford University, was a collaborator of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Multipliers and serves as a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum. He holds an MBA from Stanford University. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00HELB6XI
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Virgin Digital; 15th edition (17 April 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 7388 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 267 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0753555166

Best Sellers Rank: 16,715 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 7 in Business Teams
- 9 in Business Time Management
- 18 in Business Systems & Planning (Kindle Store)

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Greg Mckeown

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Greg McKeown is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, "Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" (Crown Business, April 2014). He has taught at companies that include Apple, Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter and VMware. He was recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

He has conducted research in the field of leadership, strategy and why people and teams thrive and why they don't. He is a blogger for Harvard Business Review and the Influencer Network on LinkedIn.

He also collaborated on the writing and research of the Wall Street Journal bestseller "Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter" (Harper Business, June 2010), "Bringing Out the Best in Your People" (Harvard Business Review, May 2010).

Prior to this research and teaching, Greg worked for Heidrick & Struggles' Global Leadership Practice assessing senior executives. His work included being a part of a year long project for Mark Hurd (then CEO of Hewlett Packard) assessing the top 300 executives at HP.

Greg is an active social innovator. He served as a Board Member for the Washington D.C. policy group, Resolve (KONY2012), and as a mentor with 2 Seeds a non-profit incubator for agricultural projects in Africa. And he has been a guest speaker at non-profit groups that have included The Kauffman Fellows, St. Jude and the Minnesota Community Education Association.

Originally from London, England, he now lives in Silicon Valley, California with his wife and their four children. Greg holds an MBA from Stanford University.

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Claire Lingale

Some great ideas here but some irritants as well

Reviewed in Australia on 6 January 2020

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There's some thought provoking content but unfortunately the use of "he" and "him" distracts from the message. If you think this is a trivial matter, then I suggest you mentally replace with "she" and "her.". It would make more sense as the demographic is predominantly female as is the world population. But when you replace you can then see how jarring this is. It is not a small error but it's easily fixed. Please Greg, in this day and age we can do better.

8 people found this helpful

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Sarah Carthew

Really good read

Reviewed in Australia on 30 January 2020

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Essentialism is a great reminder of how to keep the space and be effective to do whats essentially important in life. It guides the reader subconsciously on a journey as well as consciously to help them discover what is a priority. “The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.” Would recommend.

4 people found this helpful

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Liz

Essentialism improves focus

Reviewed in Australia on 7 August 2021

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My big take away is that the word priority is singular. Now instead of writing multiple ‘priorities’ for the day…I just focus on the most important. It always gets done and other achievements are icing on the cake. Hugely helpful book when you’re feeling snowed under.

2 people found this helpful

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Stephen Sandor

Best book I've read in the last 5 years

Reviewed in Australia on 16 May 2021

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I'm a keen fan of Simon Sinek and have read his latest book 'The infinite game' and how it's important to stay in the game. Essentialism is the application of how to stay in the game with what matters.
I bought 10 of these as a gift to clients and friends because I believe so much in this First Principle philosophy and the impact it can have on your mindset.
I am in my third read so I can embed it deep into my psyche

Reviewed in Australia on 15 August 2020

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I thought the book was great. I love the concepts and have taken some good thoughts away from it.

What I found myself asking throughout the book though was, how do I make this happen. If you’re looking for specific ways to implement essentialism into your life, you will find it lacking.

But in saying that, I would still recommend, because the ideas in the book are what we all need in this distraction filled, go after everything life.

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Ian de Groot

A book that gives you implementable particle steps to improve your life.

Reviewed in Australia on 15 March 2021

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If life is to busy, if you cant achieve all that is on your plate, or if you are switching directions. This book would be a great read with practical application to help you obtain a more fulfilling life.

One person found this helpful

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Mark Bilbrough

A practical approach to focus on the important.

Reviewed in Australia on 31 May 2015

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I really enjoyed this book. I think this book provides a rounded view on focusing in on the stuff that is really important. I like the idea of exploring options but then distill down action on what is essential. I think this book would suit those that enjoyed 'The ONE Thing' by Gary Keller. I'm actively using the practices in the book to stop trying to do everything, and focus on doing things that matter.

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marcello gamberoni

I wouldn't read it twice

Reviewed in Australia on 20 May 2020

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Bought this book because Sam Ovens (absolute legend) racomended it... Unluckily it wasn't as good as expected. A few nice points here and there but didn't feel like a life changing book

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C Jennings

Thought Provoking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2019

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Again, this is one of those books that I took in bite sized chunks. Read a bit, consider and try to put into practice until my actions were becoming habitual. You choose to improve or you don't.

1. I have become much better at saying no, but saying it nicely or without actually using the word!
2. I have become better at getting things done and prioritising what is and is not important to me (although that is still work in progress)
3. I have become better at time management.
4. I procrastinate less (not totally gone, but also work in progress)

All in all a very useful and thought provoking guide to help you take back control of areas of your life. It has certainly helped reduce my stresses and anxiety in life and I would strongly recommend reading if you are stressed or anxious.

49 people found this helpful

W Yang

Good sensible ideas - but would you CHOOSE to put them to practice?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 September 2015

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Single most memorable passage:
"Charlie O. Simms taught a Journalism 101 class at Beverly Hills High School. He started... by explaining the concept of a "lead". He explained that a lead contains the why, what , when, and who of the piece. It covers the ESSENTIAL(my emphasis) information. Then he gave them their first assignment: write a lead to a story.
Simms began by presenting the facts of the story: "Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund 'Pa' Brown"
The students hammered away on their manual typewriters trying to keep up with the teacher's peace. Then they handed in their rapidly written leads. Each attempted to summarise the who, what where, and why as succinctly as possible: "Margaret Mead, Maynard Hutchins, and Governor Brown will address the faculty on ..."; "Next Thursday, the high school faculty will ..." Simms reviewed the students' leads and put them aside.
He then informed them that they were all wrong. The lead to the story, he said, was "There will be no school on Thursday."
"In that instant," Nora Ephron(of [Sleepless in Seattle] and [When Harry met Sally]) recalled, "I realised that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the POINT. It wasn't enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it MEANT. And why it MATTERED." Ephron added, "He taught me something that works just as well in life as it does in journalism." " p73-74

Disclaimer - I have not read a whole lot of management/self-improvement books, so I cannot say that I am a very good judge of the genre. There is a danger that this book is actually littered with tired old cliches that I hadn't noticed, in which case I shouldn't have bothered you with this. That said -

Self-improvement books are a strange breed - myself included, you so often see people who read one and then complain that the book only wrote about the really obvious things. In the same sense, however, homo sapiens are a strange breed who never quite do what they know to be the obviously good things for themselves. grin emoticon Enter, then, the study of management - the study on "coordination of the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives by using available resources efficiently and effectively". Sounds like self-improvement on a larger scale, but with the added benefit of providing results from well-designed research.

The author is a management consultant with an MBA degree from Stanford. Perhaps naturally, the book often reads like a business strategy book with plenty of case studies from the corporate world, but as Ephron says, those methods can easily be used for life in general. The book's message can be neatly summed up in one sentence - "Figure out what is really important and essential in your life, and eliminate everything else to focus your efforts and achieve maximum output/contribution to society". The rest of the book is just filled up by how to achieve that goal.

While 'the rest of the book' is coherently structured with a logical, well-suited flow and sensible, well-researched suggestions backed up by sociology/psychology research findings(these days it seems impossible to read something that doesn't quote [Flow] by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and [Thinking Fast and Slow] by Daniel Kahneman, although probably due to my reading interests. Perhaps I should just give up and add them to the reading list), some solutions that the author suggests will just sound implausible. One example is the importance of being able to say no to your boss so that you can concentrate on something more essential. Obviously, I cannot imagine myself doing so to my bosses, consultant surgeons. For some other solutions, I thought they can only be done when one is reasonably financially secure, so that he/she can take the risk/hit by cutting out/declining all the non-essential activities that regularly plague our lives. However, (as my stock-phrase goes) if we are to look at the moon instead of the finger pointing at the moon...

The part that really inspires me in this book is its single-minded pursuit and the determination for what constitutes the most important thing in our lives; what makes our lives meaningful for us(as illustrated in the above anecdote), and what will ultimately enable us to be useful to the rest of the humanity. Sure, it may not always be obvious to all of us, and the method of elimination the book suggests may not guarantee to lead us to an answer. In fact, our lives may quite possibly be meaningless! :-D Nevertheless, for me it is certainly worth a try.

The other aspects that left a strong impression for me was the authors repeated emphasis on how pursuing Essentialism is a choice, and the importance of EMOTIONAL(not intellectual) acceptance of the book's ideas for them to work - which is to say, as discussed at the beginning, it is not because we don't know what to do why we don't do them. There is always a choice, and we simply choose not to.

139 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

A long blog post

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 July 2019

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Some nice ideas in this book but not very well written and most of them are just not practical unless you have the money to skip off the south of France for 6 months. Also using Rosa Parks & Gandhi as examples feels a bit crass especially when you put them next to another examples in the book like saying no because they had to plan a wedding. All the ideas in the book could easily fit into a shot blog. All in all ok but nothing really new or useful for 99% of us that actually have bosses and need to pay the bill.

35 people found this helpful

Lisa Kirsten Smith

Sorry, not for me

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 June 2020

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Essentially, don’t spread yourself too thin and keep prioritising. For me, I found this book rather demotivating as someone who struggles to keep all the balls in the air at home and work and consistently overcommits. Each section has a table that breaks down the kind of stuff non-essentialists do and what a perfect essentialist person would do differently. However, this had the opposite effect on me to what the author intended. I was just left feeling a bit rubbish and thinking ‘yeah, I’m a non-essentialist - I’m never going to change! WAHHH!’

What worked better for me was Tony Crabbe’s Busy. This got more into the psychology of why people tend to overcommit, get distracted or avoid stuff in the first place. Tony Crabbe also uses coaching strategies to help the reader come up with their own solutions.

Sorry - Essentialism wasn’t for me! It may work for some though...

22 people found this helpful

Maria Davies

Milking the Point

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 November 2017

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I think the author is rather milking the point, which is against the ethos of his subject matter. I feel an easier read on the subject is Gary Keller's The One Thing.

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