Essentialism | Greg McKeown

This episode of Books for Men features Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. A book about doing less but better. What are the truly essential things in your life? Do those. Remove the rest. Full stop. (Not easy, but doable.) Listen for more!

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. And so as always, we are toggling back this week to a non-fiction book, and I actually have made a decision to feature just one non-fiction book in one fiction book for every month. And so that wasn't my intention, but coming off of January and February, I really liked the format of just having one and one as well as a Bad Advice episode. And so I'm going to continue to do that for the foreseeable future. And for that additional week in the month, I'm going to play with a couple of different ideas and maybe even use it as an off week sometimes to give me a little bit of a break with recording. But I don't know, we're in flux right now, but I just wanted to kind of give you that update before I share a little bit about this book.

(01:09)

With that being said, this book is, I don't know if it's my favorite non-fiction book, but it's probably conceptually anyway, a book that I agree with more than any other book, and it's really baked into the fabric of how I live my life. And so I want to share it with you. And it's not a right or wrong way to live, it's just the way that I choose to do so. And believe me, there are some downstream side effects to it and we could get more into that. Anyway, lemme tell you about the book. It's Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. And just as a heads up, I actually interviewed Greg on my previous show. It's not what it seems about this book specifically. And so if you go back into the archives, you'll be able to listen to that.

(02:04)

And although I don't remember the details of it, I do remember it being very lively and fun, and engaging. Something that maybe now that I have mentioned this, I will go back and I will listen to it myself. All right, so let's just start with the nuts and bolts of this book. So it is a self-help or big idea book. It came out in 2014. It's less than 300 pages, I think around the 250 range. It reads very, very easily. It's not a laborious read at all. And so I wouldn't worry about the language or anything of that nature. Its clarity is actually a strong suit of the book, and I think that that's one of the things that makes it so great and also has made it so insanely popular. It's sold, I think, over a million copies since its release, which is a lot of copies for any book.

(03:00)

So what is it really about? Well, it's about setting up your life to do what matters most to you. In a nutshell, that's really what it is. And this book will give you strategies and tools and questions to be an essentialist or become an essentialist. And I think instead of me describing to you what an essentialist is, I pulled an excerpt out of the book where Greg explains what an essentialist is, and I will just read it to you. So he says, “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 non-essentials, and then removes obstacles. So the essential things have a clear, smooth passage. In other words, essentialism is a disciplined systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies than making execution of those things almost effortless.”

(04:06)

So I think the important thing to point out here is that when Greg says your highest point of contribution, he doesn't necessarily mean just from a career standpoint. He talks about in the book How we overvalue non-essentials like cars or houses or these intangible things like the number of followers we have or whatever on social media. But as a result, we neglect the activities that are truly essential by valuing those things like spending time with loved ones or nurturing our spirit, or taking care of our health. And so it's not just a way of looking at how to achieve more in your career, although it could be looked at in that way. It's much more than that. Essentialism as a philosophy is something that spans the entire landscape of your life. And to me, I think that that is a beautiful thing. I mean, some of the things that Greg talks about here are things like you cannot overestimate the importance of practically everything or the importance of trade-offs.

(05:21)

And I think that that is an essential element to understanding essentialism, no pun intended, because when you value one thing heavily, that means by definition you are devaluing something else. So in order to do one thing, you have to trade it off for something else. And for a lot of people, this is a really tough concept to grapple with because it means giving something up. It means releasing that romantic idea that you can have it all because I hate to burst your bubble, but in actuality, you can't have it all. And that's really what it comes down to. And so I have this philosophy that's not in the book, but I'll share it with you anyway, that goes something like this. You cannot get what you want if you're not willing to risk what you already have. You cannot get what you want if you're not willing to risk what you already have.

(06:23)

And so this, again, goes hand in hand with what we're talking about here and what Essentialism is all about. And I think for me personally, this really hits home because from where I started in life and what my interests were, nothing prepared me for the path that I'm on except for my own interest. And I had to make a really tough decision from spinning out of, let's say, non-fiction, big ideal world into writing fiction. And so I wrote my first fiction book back in 2019, which came out in 2021, but now I'm solely focused on fiction. And that's all because it's the thing that matters most to me. And I've designed my life to be able to do that. And it's not easy, but that's what matters to me. And so that's what I've designed my life to be able to do right now. And as I continue to evaluate my own life and new things come into my life as time goes on, that evaluation will constantly change as I would expect it to do for anybody because we are constantly developing and growing as human beings.

(07:39)

Some of the things that Greg talks about in this book are things that you're going to encounter eventually. And so their ideas, things like, “If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.” So true. I always say something like, “Don't worry, if you don't know who you are, the world is going to tell you who you are.” And I don't mean that in a good way. I mean that in a way that everyone's going to have an opinion on what you should do and what you should prioritize for your life. But the only person's opinion that really matters is your own. So I would spend a lot of time thinking about what truly matters to me. And then you just have simple things like how to say no. And because you got to say no if you are embracing this type of philosophy. And he says, “If it isn't a clear yes, then it's a clear no.”

(08:27)

That's a good way to look at it. And especially with this type of thinking or this type of philosophy when it comes to your energy, when it comes to your highest point of contribution, sometimes what you don't do is just as important as what you do. So look, I don't want to keep belaboring on my life or the book. I think you have a pretty good idea of what this book is actually about. And so if you're interested in it at all, I would highly suggest reading it or picking it up, or like I said, maybe listening to the interview I did with Greg if you go back into the archives. But either way, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you think somebody would benefit from it, a family member, a friend, or anybody who you think might like it, then please share it with 'em.

(09:14)

Word of mouth is everything. And with this podcast specifically, we are trying to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do your sharing is impactful to that mission. And I can't thank you enough. And if you want to double down on that support, you could do so by following or subscribing on whatever podcast platform that you're listening to this on. And lastly, if you want more information, visit BooksforMen.org where you can also sign up for the monthly newsletter, which is a roundup of all of the episodes that are featured in that month on the show, as well as my top five favorite quotes from each of the books that are shared, along with links and all the pertinent book information and all that good stuff. So again, if you want to sign up for that, you could do so at BooksforMen.org.