Revitalized Reading Podcast
Revitalized Reading Podcast
Book Review: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown (Ep.19)
Are you feeling overwhelmed or overextended by everyday work and life tasks? Do you feel like you put in lots of time and energy to things that really don't matter that much? If you said yes to any of these questions, I think you'll really enjoy this review of 'Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less'
Works Cited:
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18077875-essentialism?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=nVT88q1WZt&rank=1
- https://gregmckeown.com/
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Hello everybody, this is your host Josh, and welcome to the Revitalized Reading Podcast. For today’s episode, I will be reviewing ‘Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. If you are someone who enjoys Self-improvement or motivational books, I think you’ll really enjoy todays episode. Let’s get started! Here is the synopsis found on the back of the book. “Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilized? Are you often busy but not productive? Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the way out is the way of the essentialist. Essentialism isn’t about getting more done in less time. Its about getting only the right things done. Only once we discern what is absolutely essential and eliminate everything else can we make our highest possible contribution toward the things that truly matter. By forcing us to apply more selective criteria for where to spend our precious time and energy, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices, instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. Essentialism is not one more thing to do. It’s a whole new way of doing less, but better, in every area of our lives.” The edition I will be using is the First edition, published in 2014, and is 237 pages long. Now that I’ve shared the general gyst of the book, I want to give you some more information about the author, Greg Mckeown. There isn’t that much info about him that is publicly available unfortunately, but there’s enough to get a decent idea about him and the life he’s made for himself. Greg McKeown was born in London England in 1977. When he was 19, Greg would serve a two year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Upon his return, he would choose to leave his path towards law back in England, and would instead pursue a bachelors degree in communications and journalism at Brigham Young University in Provo Utah. He would then earn his MBA from the Stanford graduate school of business. Greg started his own company McKeown inc, a leadership and strategy design agency based in silicon valley California. Greg’s first foray into writing was in 2010, with the book ‘Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter’, he co-wrote the book with Liz Wiseman. In 2014, Greg would publish his first standalone book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less’ which is a New York Times bestseller. In 2021, Greg would publish a sequel of sort to Essentialism titled, ‘Effortless: Make it easier to do what matters most’. Since 2014, Greg has been a highly praised public speaker, and has also hosted a very successful podcast of his own ‘The Greg McKeown Podcast’. He’s had many famous businessmen, authors, and celebrities on the show such as Al Gore, Matthew McConnaughey and Arthur Brooks. Greg continues to live in Silicon Valley, where he is happily married with 4 children, and is currently a Bishop of a local congregation for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in that area. I am very excited to give you a brief overview of the content of the book. Essentialism is broken up into 4 parts, so I’ll take us through each one giving a general description of what is touched on or discussed in each part. So lets start out with Part 1: Essence. Greg begins the book by giving a rudimentary explanation of what it means to be an Essentialist. Simply put, an essentialist is someone who takes control of their life, by prioritizing and caring about the essential elements of this life. Here we are told to choose what is most essential to us, discern the importance of things around us, and learn to Trade-Off between what is essential, and what might seem important or pressing, but really isn’t. Part II: Explore. In this section, we are given a guide on how to explore our options and situations to best understand what the essential things are in our lives. The following words are a roadmap on how to explore the essential and begin the journey of transforming yourself into an essentialist. First you need to escape, escaping from a busy schedule or a chaotic environment for a few days, or even a few hours is a helpful step to begin to contemplate what is most important NOW. The next step is to look, look around you and inside yourself to really see what the most meaningful things are. Then there is Play. Playing or leisure allows you to relax, clear your mind, and better assess the situation. Then we have Sleep. A commodity that gets slept on…….that was bad, forgive me, but a good nights sleep that isn’t just a few hours a day is also very important to maintaining a clear mind and healthy body while your exploring the essentialist lifestyle for yourself. Finally, the last word is select. Selecting what areas or goals matter most might seem daunting, but Greg shows us a method on how to organize what’s in front of us. Part III: Eliminate. Now that we have had time to explore and think, its time to eliminate the nonessential tasks, goals, attitudes, and people from our lives. This requires one to clarify with themselves what can and should be eliminated. It also requires us to Dare ourselves and others to eliminate the nonessential tasks. This might result in uncomfortable conversations or situations, but its worth it if it helps you do more, with less. Then we have to uncommit from the things we know aren’t essential for ourselves or even for others. From there we can edit our lives to maximize time and reduce time wasting or energy consuming activities that don’t mean much to us or our goals. One of the most important parts of eliminating nonessential activities is learning to set limits for ourselves. If we don’t have boundaries with our work, with others, or even ourselves, we can’t fully transform into an essentialist. Part IV: Execute. The final part of the book is the most important, and its living the essentialist life each and every day. This is done through using a Buffer, in other words, make extra time to focus on the most important things. Then we must subtract the parts in our days, jobs, or relationships that make it harder to be an essentialist. Fundamentally changing our mindset is difficult, so constantly monitoring progress is key. Small victories are victories nonetheless. Then we have to continue the flow or momentum of progress, staying consistent is vital. Maintaining an essentialist focus in all aspects of our lives will help us to fully transform our lives into essentialist ones. When all is said and done, we have to become essentialists, it might be challenging, but the trade off of temporary stress or strife for a life that is fulfilling and limiting regret is well worth it. With that, the book ends. I want to share with you 3 of my favorite quotes from the book, I’ll list off the page numbers if you would like to follow along. The first quote is on Pg.7, “The way of the essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.” Our next quote can be found on pg.19, “Essentialism is about creating a system for handling the closet of our lives. This is not a process you undertake once a year, once a month, or even once a week, like organizing your closet. It is a discipline you apply each and every time you are faced with a decision about whether to say yes or whether to politely decline. It’s a method for making the tough trade-off between lots of good things and a few really great things. It’s about learning how to do less but better so you can achieve the highest possible return on every precious moment of your life. This book will show you how to live a life true to yourself, not the life others expect from you. It will teach you a method for being more efficient, productive, and effective in both personal and professional realms. It will teach you a systematic way to discern what is important, eliminate what is not, and make doing the essential as effortless as possible. In short, it will teach you how to apply the disciplined pursuit of less to every area of your life.” The final quote I want to share with you is on pg. 237, “The life of an essentialist is a life lived without regret. If you have correctly identified what really matters, if you invest your time and energy in it, then it is difficult to regret the choices you make. You become proud of the life you have chosen to live. Will you choose to live a life of purpose and meaning, or will you look back on your one single life with twinges of regret? If you take one thing away from this book, I hope you will remember this: what-ever decision or challenge or crossroads you face in your life, simply ask yourself, ‘what is essential’ Eliminate everything else. If you are ready to look inside yourself for the answer to this question, then you are ready to commit to the way of the essentialist.” So how does Essentialism rank when it comes to reading comprehension and engagement? For comprehension, I give the book a 10/10. The reading is simple, and Greg does a great job at explaining deeper concepts in a concise but basic manner. For engagement, I also give the book a 10/10. The design of the pages, and the divided sections of each part made it a very enjoyable and engaging reading experience. As far as the G-R rating goes, this book is a clear cut G, nothing further to really say on that. Now its time for me to share the Goodreads reader reviews for the book. Like always, I’ll share the top rated review for each star rating, and I’ll give short commentary after each review. As a quick side note, ‘Essentialism’ has a overall rating on Goodreads of 4.07. Our 1 star review is from Julie, she said, “This book contains great advice for affluent people who don't fear losing their jobs when they choose really important things like planning their weddings (real example from the book) over doing tasks that are part of the job that they've been hired to do.
One bit of advice is - go to the South of France for a year when your work adversely affects your health. Why didn't I think of that when I had surgery? Maybe you don't need to pay for electricity and housing if you live on the beach. Where is the chapter on why it's important to choose to pick your kid up from school when she can't stop vomiting, rather than to finish bringing the payroll system back on line? Family first! Tough choices are for undeserving slackers. All those essentialists will figure out a way to get paid if it is important to them. The message of doing what is most important is a good one. Unfortunately, so many of the examples are so ludicrous that it's hard to take the author seriously.” The 2 star review is from Emily, “All 272 pages of this book could have been condensed into a three-page blog post, perhaps without the pages filled with cutesy large text. My ultimate takeaway is that I find Greg McKeown incredibly annoying. However, there are also some other, intuitive ideas that can be helpful, like: · You cannot have it all. Decide what your agenda or goal is, and pursue only opportunities that lead you to that goal. If you don't have your own agenda, someone else will make it for you. Don't commit casually to plans you're not sure about. · Don't be afraid to be unavailable. If you can't do a side project, say so. Focus requires you to set aside time for your priority. · Teams function better if there is one clear, quantifiable, overarching purpose. I'm trying to work on this as a manager, so it was nice to have this reinforced. · Keeping a journal and making time to read are important. McKeown literally suggests the Book of Mormon, which makes me want to read trashy YA instead. I do agree that it's better to take time for yourself in the morning - I always feel better when I have time to hang out and make myself breakfast, instead of checking my email as I sprint for the N train. There, see? I wrote this book in four bullet points! Essentialism! On the topic of Greg McKeown: I find it extremely - if not impossibly - difficult to take someone seriously who tries to use Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela as examples of essentialist thinkers. "Rosa Parks said NO to others' agendas, you can too!" Is this for real? It's so obvious that this guy is a rotating speaker for Jack Dorsey companies. Google's got Lego sets in its offices, guys! Unleash your (nebulously defined) sense of play!! It may just be that I've never sacrificed sleep for productivity (because I'm a monster when I don't sleep at least 7 hours), but I also find the recent spate of celebrities and CEOs touting the benefits of sleep somewhat odd. Ariana Huffington really just wants you to take a nap? Jeff Bezos sleeps eight hours? No one has ever thought of this before. AMAZING. Hanne provides us the 3 star review, “It must be tough to write a book about Essentialism because people will be watching like a hawk to see whether you stick to your own advice – and sadly I’m not sure that he did. But first things first, I didn’t have a name for it but ‘Essentialism’ is what I have been doing for a while now – at work at least. I have yet to tell any of my family or friends that I wasn’t positively answering their invitation because it wasn’t essential to me and my goals for the near future. But at work, I am a strong believer in this principle. It’s way too easy to get enrolled in everything, meaning you won’t be able to actually achieve anything. So pick carefully and focus on that, just that. And yes, sometimes you can’t pick yourself, because it’s something you have to do. But even then, be mindful about what is important. In this book, Greg McKeown gives sound advice. Unless you are over the moon enthusiastic about a new possible project, say no. Don’t ever say yes, just because you fear people will like you less. Because even though saying no will sometimes result in some frowning from the other party, I strongly believe that how you say your no is more important. I know people at work who will almost shout back a brisk and severe ‘No, not now!’ and I don’t like them much indeed. But saying in a friendly way that ‘now is not a good time’ hasn’t hurt any relationship yet. There are two things I liked less about the book. The first is that he uses a lot of examples that have been used to death so to speak: I cannot even begin the count the number of non-fiction I read lately that uses the example of Rosa Parks’ bus ride and the ‘No school today’ essential journalism lesson of Nora Ephron. Then on top, he uses many examples of other books I (unfortunately for the author) recently finished: d.school’s babywarmers from Creative Confidence (Tom and David Kelley) and Michael Phellps’ swimming routine from The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg). None of these examples are bad, but they felt like old material to me. But then again, anyone who rarely reads business or popular psychology books won’t mind because they probably won’t recognize the stories and find them just as insightful as I did, the first time I read them. The second one is that I think the author did not stick to the essentials. Or better said: he didn’t stick to the essentials that would serve everyone. Take his chapter about planning for instance: He gives the example of a speech you will have to give in a few months’ time. His advice is to start now, and spend 4 minutes daily to draft the speech, and then put it away until the next day. I can imagine this working for some people, but Mr Greg Mckeown has never been inside my brain: If I even start thinking for 30 seconds about something like that, my head will be bubbling and fizzing with ideas for the next 24 hours at least. Meaning that my brain will be too busy with possible speech scenario’s to get anything else done. Some people are planners, some are not – I don’t think this has anything to do with trying to stick to essential things. There are a few chapters like that in the second part of the book, where Mr Mckeown described processes that work for him, but in my opinion are not necessarily linked to this philosophy of essentialism, and even make them sound a little elitist in his many overviews of how Essentialists are different (better?) than other people. Net, I believe in the philosophy, and the book describes it very well while giving good advice, especially in the first half. The second half might not serve everyone as he mixed too many other things into it that might not work for everyone, but unfortunately the way he writes it he leaves no option: you either do it all and be part of the Essentialist club, or you don’t. Having said that, I think us readers are smart enough to pick and choose and not be bothered about whether Mckeown will think we do it properly or not.” For the 4 star review, Jacob says, “Essentialism starts with giving yourself permission (or forcing yourself) to stop trying to do it all. Only then can you make your highest contribution to the things that really matter. I think a lot of us intuitively get the principle of focus makes for better results; the hard work, in my mind, is deciding what to focus on and being disciplined enough to say no to other things. Something that resonated with me was the notion of trying to "learn it all and do it all". Fining "a new obsession every day, sometimes every hour, making a millimeter of progress in a million directions." Although this is a fair critique, I think there is a time for this, since we are not born knowing precisely what we are good at, what we love to do, or what the landscape around us facilitates us doing. A valid argument could be made that at 25 I should have isolated my focus area...” Finally, our 5 star review comes from C. They said, “This book will challenge you to do only what’s essential in your life, and eliminate the rest. The goal is “less but better,” achieved by focusing on the vital few, not the trivial many. It advocates being more meaningful and purposeful; not just more productive. It explains how to live “by design, not by default.” It’s not about asking, “What do I have to give up?”; it’s about asking, “What do I want to go big on?” It applies to all of life, including work and personal life. I read this because I have a lot of demands on my time. In the past couple years I've gotten better at focusing on what will actually make a difference, and at exercising the power of saying no. This book motivated me to be even more disciplined.” Before I move on to the final segments of today’s show, here are three peer reviews that were given for ‘Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less’. Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global said, “A much needed antidote to the stress, burnout, and compulsion to do everything that infects us all.” Chris Guilleabeau, author of ‘The $100 startup’ said, “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.” And Finally Jeff Weiner, CEO of Linkedin said, “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.” So what is the overall score for this book? I think that this book deserves a 9.5/10, its nearly perfect, but not quite. Let me expound on that……good (Design, structure, real life scenarios, broad explanations) bad (doesn’t seem entirely practical at some points, it does seem more oriented towards people with established careers. The Author may or my not be practicing what he preaches.) A few months from now, I will be doing another episode surrounding this book. I’ll be going over the book again, and more specifically reporting back to you with some guests how the 21 day Essentialist challenge went. This challenge is in the appendix of the book, and if you already own it, or want to try it yourself, let me know how its changed your life or helped you on the podcasts social media pages. Thank you so much for joining me again today, there are so many other podcasts you could be listening to, or things you could be doing, so thank you for taking the time to listen to me. Stay tuned on the podcast social media pages for the season 3 self-improvement/motivation vote where you get to help me choose which book I read next season. Have a wonderful day everyone, stay safe, and as always, keep reading.
