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.

Length: 272 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Page Flip: Enabled	Audible Narration: Audible Narration Switch back and forth between reading the Kindle book and listening to the Audible narration. Add narration for a reduced price of $12.49 after you buy the Kindle book. Ready	Language: English

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Incredibly helpful … one of the few books that I revisit on a regular basis

, Tim Ferriss

Greg McKeown’s excellent new book is a much-needed antidote to the stress, burnout and compulsion to “do everything,” that infects us all. It is an essential read for anyone who wants to regain control of their health, wellbeing, and happiness, Arianna Huffington

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 NYT bestseller THE START-UP OF YOU

Essentialism holds the keys to solving one of the great puzzles of life: how can we do less but accomplish more? A timely, essential read for anyone who feels overcommitted, overloaded, or overworked―in other words, everyone. It has already changed the way that I think about my own priorities, and if more leaders embraced this philosophy, our jobs and our lives would be less stressful and more productive. So drop what you’re doing and read it., Adam Grant, Wharton professor and bestselling author of GIVE AND TAKE --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Greg McKeown was recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is the CEO of THIS Inc, a leadership and strategy design agency headquartered in Silicon Valley. He has taught at companies that include Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, Twitter and VMware. Originally from London, he now lives in Menlo Park, California with his wife, Anna, and their four children. Greg holds an MBA from Stanford University. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Print length : 272 pages
Word Wise : Enabled
ASIN : B00HELB6XI
File size : 1767 KB
Publisher : Virgin Digital (17 April 2014)
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
Language: : English

Best Sellers Rank: 20,502 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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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.

2 people found this helpful

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Evielyn Chapman

Good concepts

Reviewed in Australia on 16 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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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.

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Mirika Gray

Brilliantly written

Reviewed in Australia on 22 August 2017

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This book really made me question why busy is made out to be such a good thing.

This was an essential book in my productivity journey and learning how to do the most important things.

This book teaches you how to 'choose' the most important things.

Last page caused some major life changes for me. No regrets, focus on what matters, my family, and eliminate everything else.

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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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Joselyn Marie Brown

GREAT read and even better tips, inspiring, clear and concise. McKeown makes every word earn its way to the page!

Reviewed in Australia on 29 April 2015

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This book is really well written. The non Essentialist may feel uncomfortable with principles such as setting boundaries or saying no (to people or projects), certainly setting strict routines may be a struggle for those who like to keep things spontaneous, but the arguments are made very well. I am looking forward to implementing some of these tips even if they initially go against my personality type! ps there is a good tip for limiting screen-time for your kids too!

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Aiden Boyce

A brilliant book for non essentialist

Reviewed in Australia on 28 August 2018

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I loved this book, it was like looking at my self in the mirror. The upside, I’m now using some of the tools, tips and frameworks to change my ways...changing is a little uncomfortable but feeling braver and more positive every day:)

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marcello gamberoni

I wouldn't read it twice

Reviewed in Australia on 21 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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W Yang

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

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 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.

90 people found this helpful

Colm 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.

26 people found this helpful

MISS C HORAK

5 Star Journey Back to the Essential

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 November 2018

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I don’t often give books five stars, but this one deserves it if only because it brought me back to earth at a time when it was sorely needed.

I have, by definition, lived life as an essentialist for quite some time in many respects and yet recently came upon some circumstances, which made me start thinking everything but the essential was essential.

Through thoughtful insights, interesting stories and an easy to read style this book helped guide me back to a place where really only the essential gets taken into account and the rest becomes easier to eliminate.

Thank you Greg.

17 people found this helpful

Maria Davies

Milking the Point

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 December 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.

23 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

A long blog post

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 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.

11 people found this helpful

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