11. Greg McKeown: How To Master Essentialism & Focus On What Matters
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Hey everyone, it's Alex from Alex and Books, and you're listening to The Reader's Journey, the podcast that takes you on a journey to meet amazing authors, discover brilliant books, and learn valuable lessons along the way. Now, let's get started. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Reader's Journey podcast. Today we have Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism. Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's great to be with you, Alex.

Greg, I think a good place to start would be the title of the book. Could you tell us the origin story of Essentialism and what inspired you to write this book? Yeah, Essentialism. One story that was important to me personally was when I had an email from my manager at the time that said, look, Friday between 1 and 2 would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby.

And because I needed to be at this client meeting and I'm sure they were joking, but nevertheless, my wife, you know, gave birth to our daughter in the middle of Thursday night, early Friday morning. And and I felt torn trying to keep everybody happy on email, you know, trying to balance everything. But to my shame, I went to the meeting and.

Afterwards, I remember my manager saying, look, the client will respect you for the choice that you just made. And the look on their faces didn't evince that sort of confidence. But even if they had, it was clear in hindsight that I'd made a fool's bargain. I violated something essential for something less essential. And what I learned from that was the simplest of lessons, which is if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.

And so essentialism is really written for anybody who feels stretched too thin at work or at home. They feel busy but not productive. They feel like their day is being hijacked by other people's agenda for them. And I found that I'm not alone.

Yeah, like when I knew your book, I was going to love it when I read that story. I'm like, wow, this is such a good hook. Like you're at the hospital and you decide to take this meeting right after your wife gives birth is like such a great story. And yeah, I love that quote that you just shared. It's like if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. And that's I think kind of like one of the core messages of the book is like you have to prioritize your work. Right.

And so one of the chapters I really enjoyed is the one you talk about tradeoffs, because I think we live in this culture, which is especially true here in New York City, where people try to do everything and they don't like tradeoffs. But there are actually several benefits to it. So can you tell us some of those?

Yeah, I mean, I just got an email from somebody who was who had read essentialism and and started to make different tradeoffs. In fact, I just interviewed her as well on on my podcast yesterday.

The episode's about to launch, but it was fascinating talking with her. So her basic story is that she was absolutely exhausted. She's absolutely burned out. In fact, she sent me a photograph where no one's ever done this before, a photograph of what she looked like before and after, just based upon how she started making decisions in her life and

So she asked, after reading Essentialism, she asked one question every day, and that was, what's the most important thing to do today? That simple question, but just having that as a discipline, a disciplined pursuit of the answer to that question. She said at first the answers she had were mostly work-related. Slowly they became a bit more about her self-preservation and protecting the asset of her own mind, body, heart, spirit,

But on one particular day, she got a phone call from her dad that said, look, my, you know, your mother's in hospital, which wasn't that unusual. She'd been there a couple of weeks before. And, and, and she said, well, she said, well, look, I can drop everything in, in come. And the dad said, Oh, don't be silly. You know, you, you, you, you've got too much on your plate. Everything's just be fine. You know, but she told me that she remembers exactly where she was when,

What was going on, the weather outside, everything pristinely as she asked again the question, what's the most important thing I can do today? And it was so clear. Most important thing I could do today is go drive two hours to the hospital and be there with her mother. So she does that. And when she she meets with her mother and in the first few minutes talking to her, she's able to say, look, I love you. I'm sure everything's going to be fine. Her mother is able to say the same. I love you.

Within an hour of that, her mother actually slipped into a coma and unfortunately never recovered from that. A week later, she passed away. And so that's why she was writing to me in the first place and telling me the story. She said, look, if I hadn't been an essentialist, I'd have made a different tradeoff that day. And so that's a very personal and evocative story that that life is made up of tradeoffs.

And a lot of the time we don't notice that when we're making decisions. So often we make decisions simply based on, well, someone says, hey, can you do this? And you say, well, I probably can. And we don't recognize that in saying yes, we are saying no to something else. And so essentialists develop a heightened awareness to the tradeoff they're making.

Try to become really aware of that. Every yes to one thing is a no to something else. And often the yes is a trade off to something more important, but less present in your mind.

Yeah, well, that's such an incredible story you just shared. And yeah, I think it's such an important thing to make is like people don't realize that when they say yes to something, they're saying no to all these other things. And I love also the fact that you share about the history of the word priority, because it wasn't until like the 1900s that we made it plural as priorities, which sounds, you know, it's kind of like a contradiction. Like you can't have multiple priorities. It's like one thing is a priority and you should focus on that.

Yeah, just so. I mean, you quoted it. But for half a millennium, we weren't pluralizing that term, according to Peter Drucker anyway. And I mean, in the story I just shared from Joe, that's so present. That question, what's the most important thing today? What is the priority today? You can have many important things, but by definition, you can't have very many very first things, right?

But I think a lot of people actually do live their lives as if everything is number one. And so it starts to feel very stressful and frantic and frenetic. And I think in these times, you know, COVID times, you have some of that same phenomenon, but now there's no natural end to anything. So people live differently.

You know, I read an article recently from the founder of Zoom, and the article was called Live Sleep Eat Zoom, describing his life right now. You know, that's all he's doing. Sleep eat Zoom. And I shared that story with somebody just yesterday with a client, and their response was, I think you need to change the order. You know, it's like Zoom.

Eat sleep or something like that. Everything is zoom for them. And they, they have probably 35 hours. They think a week of just zoom meetings pre-schedule before the week begins. Well,

If you do that, then the risk is that you just, you burn out without realizing it. You know, your Fitbit shows 300 steps at the end of the day because you have to move even less than you used to. You know, you're eating junk because it's just whatever you can pull back into the Zoom meeting. I mean, and we can blame out external circumstances for that. But I think it's actually an opportunity because, again,

Because as soon as you start to pause yourself, as soon as you start to say, like, what's the most important thing I do today? As soon as you go, I've got choices. I can choose. Here's a second application of essentialism. So I've already given you one, the question to ask every day, a second one.

Is to have a clear end date and time to work each day. And it sounds obvious, but I think it's well, I just did a little research on this, just just social media, not not scientific research, but but just asking, you know, on a poll on on on social media. OK, how how do you have a set time?

When do you end your workday? Now, you have a set time, no particular time, or 5 o'clock on the dot. And almost nobody has 5 o'clock set. Almost literally nobody had a yes to that. A small percentage, I can't recall exactly, but sort of maybe 10% have a set time. So almost everybody is just like, yeah, I don't know, whenever.

And and so but as an essentialist, I was inspired by another essentialist, Ben Bergeron, who was also just on the podcast. And he's a CrossFit trainer. He works with like basically the fittest people in the world. And one of he's also an avowed essentialist. And so I was very inspired by some of the things he has done.

To actually put essentialism into practice and some of those things, he's, as I would say, you know, better than I am. And I'm like, oh, that's so helpful to see some of this model that I can do it. Well, one of the things he did pre-COVID is he said, well.

I want to be home at 6 o'clock. That's one of the ways I can show family first. So family first is a value. One of the metrics for that is I'm home by 6 o'clock. In order to do that, I need to be in my car at 5.30. That means I need to leave a meeting at 5.25. If I don't, I cannot be home in time. That's really important because when you're in that meeting, you think, oh, well, this time it'll be 15 minutes. I'll get home in 15 minutes. I'll drive really fast so I can spend a few more minutes finishing up this meeting. But of course, that's just not going to work.

But he just has a pattern that no matter what the meeting, no matter who it is, at 525, he starts packing up. And he'll be walking to the door and still talking to them. And at 530, he will leave that meeting. And hearing that story, I thought, well, I'm going to do that. So all through COVID, or at least after I'd heard that story, at 5 o'clock, I walk out of my office, the office I'm in right now, and I call out like a town crier.

whatever the time is to the whole family. So I have my wife, Anna and about four children. And of course we're all here. And, uh, and so I, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's four 59 or it's five Oh one or whatever the time is because it's an accountability to a clear metric to a value I already subscribe to. And so that, that to me is like the second thing I think people can do have a set time. It makes everything work better if you can have a boundary.

You show up. I mean, you show up with much more energy. I'm able to help sort of put dinner together, help the children with various things while I'm still energetic. If I wait till six, six, 37, seven, 38, no one knows what's happening. Nobody knows when things are happening. I don't show up well. And so and so you end up straining all your relationships. You have essential relationships end up getting destroyed.

you know, the least investment. Yeah, that's such an important point you just made, especially now since during COVID, everyone's working from home. So we kind of blur this line between work and, you know, our personal time because, yeah, everyone's just in Zoom meetings all day.

And so another important lesson that you share in the book is the importance of escape and like being unavailable actually in this 24 seven always available world. Because a lot of people see like being busy as like a badge of honor, but that's like the wrong way to look at it. So like what advice would you give those people that are kind of constantly on? Well, if you are constantly on the risk is I won't say it's true for everyone, but the risk is you are constantly

You, you are no longer in control of your own life. If you aren't in control of your schedule, you're not in control of your life. Your schedule is your life. That's. And if you are at the point where you feel like you have no control, like you aren't, well, these are all, I have to do all of these things. Well, then something else is guiding your life. It's not you anymore. Um, I just, uh, I finished up a new book actually, um, about three weeks ago, um,

And I was about to sort of maybe after that was finished,

Maybe just naturally, without really thinking about it, jump into all the catch up and inbox things that I just was completely, I was relatively in monk mode and pushed these other things out. And I was about to jump into it. And Anna suggested to me, well, OK, you probably want to take a couple of weeks so that we can think and plan and dream and talk and talk.

And I did that. I followed accounts because it's always essential insight that she provides. And honestly, it was like rediscovering essentialism. It was like becoming an essentialist again. And I neither think I'm the world's best essentialist, but I'm certainly not the world's worst non-essentialist. I'm an aspiring essentialist all the time. And

But it was like I literally said, I think I was writing in my journal, but I was like, I got my life back. It was an amazing thing to just push things off and say no to things and just go just to hold every item that might be on my schedule in my own hands, so to speak, and just weigh it. Should I really be doing this? Is this the most important thing? Is this more important?

than planning, prioritizing, dreaming, talking, recuperating. I mean, when you put it up against something like that, you find, well, there's only a few things that really are more important than that. And it's not selfish. I think it can appear selfish or could feel selfish, but this time around, it did not to me.

It felt so clear. I know my intent and it is I want to make the highest contribution in my life. I want to do what I came here to do. I want to fulfill my mission. Therefore, I must create space. Otherwise, I will reactively do things, fill up my week quickly, easily, and now it

promotes non-essential decision-making after that. So this is what I would suggest to someone who feels like they're just constantly

uh yeah 24 7 doing inactivity mode reacting right yeah and i think like part of being an essentialist is being kind of proactive instead of like reactive and assessing always constantly what's the most important thing and yeah like you said we're all constantly aspiring essentialism like we could always learn more and uh be better and so practice not just like a one-day thing or a one-time thing

And another important part of being an essentialist is this part of this idea of play, because I feel like as we get older, like we see play as something, you know, childish or something that's a waste of time. There's actually like several benefits of play that you include in your book. Could you share some of those with us?

Yeah, I mean, look, the chapter on play exists within the explore part of the book. So there's three practices, principles for becoming an essentialist. It's to explore what is essential, to eliminate what is not essential, and to execute to make it easy to follow through on what matters most.

Play is, I think, a critical part of exploring what is essential. There's a few ways in which I think that's true. But again, let me just speak from personal experience in these last two or three weeks. When I'm playing, meaning when I'm just going on a walk with my wife every day, you know, going really just for like 45 minutes, an hour, just no agenda, just, you know, there's not just talking.

That is a form of play, of productive play. If I'm playing in the swimming pool with my kids, that's play. It's highly – your brain is highly activated in purposeful play.

But you're not stressed. So it's a rejuvenating experience. And what I have found, in fact, you mentioned before that we officially began, you mentioned having BJ Fogg on. And I just had BJ Fogg on my podcast as well. And we did something unusual on that podcast that's connected to play.

I, instead of just saying, oh, well, you tell me about your book and will you give me, you know, how to apply it? I said, okay, let's start off. What is essential for you that you're under investing in? And I did like an essential intervention with him. And as we did this, he was so game for it. It was terrific. And what he said is that the thing that's essential for him that he's not doing is time, right?

away from work proper amounts of time. And he said, I said, well, what would success look like? He said, well, if I could get four to eight hours more over the weekend, I'd feel like that was success. And I said, well, what if we reduce that just to make it more realistic? I said, what if we do a couple of hours extra per day? And he said, no, he had this sort of visceral reaction, which taught me that basically taught me that he has a

something he really wants and that would violate it to set a goal so much lower. There's something really, well, what does he really want? It became clear. He wants to have a three day weekend. That's what, that's, that's what he wants. He wants to be able to move to four days of work and not just three days, three day weekend where you're really working all the time. He means actually turning everything off, unplugging completely, um,

And and so we went through this whole intervention and then used all of his research to help him to actually implement that change. So it was like a magical conversation. I loved it. And I think he did, too. And what what why does he want that? Now, this comes back to your question about play. Why he wants it is because he knows one. It's good for his soul. It's good for his life. It's good for his relationships. It's.

But even for work, there's an even better value proposition because it's great for your life and great for your professional work. When he's unplugged, he has eureka moments. And that's what the research supports. When you create space to think and play and talk and connect and listen and not be emailing, reacting, doing, meeting...

you know, that type of work, you start to have breakthrough insights. And those are not likely to occur in the doing mode. So you want to be in playing mode enough that you can have these, these quantum leaps of insight and

and and that's why play i think is so essential yeah i love that like sometimes i feel like some people might feel guilty you know taking time off or going and playing but such an important part of being an essentialist and like yeah like sometimes i'll go for a walk or just you know go for a bike ride for no reason and that's where i feel like i come up with like great ideas for articles or tweets or you know all these other creative ideas and such an important vital part and as you mentioned i

I had BJ Fogg on the podcast last week and he was talking about how he's so happy now that he's taking three days weekends because of you and he's surfing a lot. Did he say that? Yeah. He said, did he really? Yeah. Yeah. And he emailed me afterwards saying that he, that, you know, he's saying he'd done it, but I didn't know that's new update for me. Yeah. And yeah, he's surfing now. He's, he's very happy. So he, he, uh, you know, he thanks you for that. Yeah.

Well, that's like a really weird podcast-y moment right there, right? Where he has an intervention of mine and now we're talking on yours. I love that whole connection. It's all connected. But yeah, see, that's for real. I mean, it's for real. People can make these trade-offs. And what a liberating feeling it is to discover I can say no. I can not just say no as if that's an interpersonal thing.

Sometimes people, when they hear about saying no, they only imagine me saying no to you or me emailing no to you. But really, strategic no's take other forms. It's just even originally saying, Friday, don't schedule anything. You don't actually have to say no to anyone on that. You just protect it.

And so then he talks to his assistant and says, look, don't schedule anything on that Friday. And here's why. And you start to build in a system that means you are doing what is essential and not doing what is non-essential. But you aren't always just literally saying no. You are building a system of yes to what's essential and no to what's non-essential.

Yeah, and you give this great example in your book about Clayton Christensen and how he sets boundaries. And for example, I believe the boss asked him to work Saturday. He's like, I can't, you know, that's my family time. And he's like, okay, we'll tell the team to work Sunday. He's like, no, I can't. Sunday is like, I go to church. I can't do either. And that's just his boundary. And he protects that time. And that's like what other people need to do too. Clayton Christensen passed away quite, you know, fairly recently. And so a story like that has different meaning.

When you get to look at the totality of somebody's life here, you say, well, it would have been easy for him to capitulate either to the Saturday or to the Sunday. And what he said about that experience was that if he had said yes, because it's an exception, his whole life would have been ruined.

An exception. And when I remember one of the times I met with him in his office, he was interrupted a couple of times with various people calling into him.

And and I won't say who it is that I want to speak out of school, but some of the people calling him into him, you know, was sort of laughable, really. You know, obviously, there are certainly people we everybody knows, you know, famous people, people with great influence that are looking for a bit of his time and looking for him to. And that is how his life evolved.

So you can imagine that if you start when you're young saying, well, yeah, sure, I'll give up Saturdays, I'll give up Sundays, no problem. Oh, yeah, then you're going to end up doing a lot of that. Yeah, it's so important to set those rules and keep to them. Yeah.

Yeah. And another wonderful part of your book that I really enjoyed was this, the factor of sleep, because I feel like very, a lot of type A people, similarly to how they don't let themselves play, they feel like, you know, the less sleep I get, the more work I could do. And you've done a lot of these sleep hacks. Can you tell us like what you learned and the role of sleep in essentialism?

Yeah, like, again, sleep comes under the category of exploring. The highest priority is our ability to prioritize. Think about that. What we need to do first and foremost is protect that ability. And if we don't play, then we won't be able to see anything.

Clearly, if we don't take breaks, if we don't have rhythms in our day, then we'll just get into ruts and we'll do things simply because we've been doing them, not because they're important. The same is, I mean, sleep is perhaps the quintessential example of this bad trade-off. We say, look, what we've been sold is one hour less sleep than

equals one hour more productivity. And I suppose part of the reason we don't see that for the con that it is, is because it's kind of true on day one. On day one, if you say, oh, I've got to get up early to get this thing done and get this project off. Well, you did get up early and you did do the project and the project did get done. So you have an experience that seems to support that logic.

But you've got to play this out over a longer period of time. And it's hard for people to do that because here's more recent research that I've done shows that when people are sleep deprived, they're actually very poor at being able to tell that they're sleep deprived. So sleep deprivation begets sleep deprivation.

And so sleep deprivation makes it harder for us to discern what's important from what's not important. It makes it harder for us to make decisions. I see examples of this all over the place, but just to give it some edge here.

We would never say, I think, to an employee or a family member, you know, wow, it's amazing the way that they make decisions drunk like that. We would never celebrate, you know, inebriation as a form of great decision making. But we might say, you know, good old so-and-so, they pulled an all-nighter, they made this thing happen, you know, they just had been burning the candle at both ends for us here.

Yeah, you don't want that. You don't want people making decisions in a sleep-deprived state because actually if you get, let's say, four hours of sleep, it's the same as if you're drunk. The executive function of your brain is reduced significantly. So I'm trying to challenge that idea that workaholics and non-essentialists believe in

which is that less sleep will increase productivity. Actually, there's almost no data to support that idea at all. It's just a situation where we have come to believe something culturally that masks from us the truth. Anders Ericsson, in his studies about top performers, found that the top performers, whether we're talking in chess or violin or you name it,

sleep more than the good performers. He found on average 8.4 hours, if I remember right, in every 24-hour period, which meant they both slept more at night and took more naps. And so actually sleep and napping correlate with high performance, exactly the opposite of what workaholism has shown.

subscribed to us has sold to us the truth is almost opposite to what has been sold right and it's such a great thing to learn because it's a win-win like you get more sleep you feel better rested and you're you know you're able to perform higher so it's like you know it's all positives all around so it's such an important point and

When it comes to prioritizing, we're filled with opportunity and we have this fear of missing out. How do you decide what to say no to? And then specifically, I think a lot of people have trouble saying no. What kind of strategies do you use to say no to an opportunity? I mean, saying no is a repertoire. You need to develop a whole repertoire.

Well, let's first of all, let's look at this on like a continuum. On the one end of the continuum, you have the polite yes.

Somebody suggests something, yes, automatically, reactively, without a moment, positively, enthusiastically. It's not even polite, yes. It's like the enthusiastic yes, the instant enthusiastic yes. That's at one end of the continuum. And actually, just to be honest, I think there's a lot of otherwise successful people, a lot of driven people who spend a lot of their lives there.

Because when the request comes, in the instant it comes, it's almost like, well, if I'm asked, the answer is yes. And if I could possibly do it, the answer is yes. And they are then experiencing sometimes the curse of capability, which is I can do it, so therefore I have to do it. They're further trapped there because they see the only other alternative being the rude no. Well, no, I can't do that. There's too much for me and whatever.

Or I just, you know, this doesn't work for me. So either because it's impolite or because it shows it presents them as being weak somehow or incapable somehow. They're trapped on this one side. They only have one choice.

What the essentialist understands that the essentialist doesn't say, oh, yes, you should just say no all the time reactively. I mean, that would be a completely different book. That would be like a book called Noism. And I wrote a book called Essentialism. It's different. We're not suddenly advocating for reactive no's to everything, but it's at least to pause, to weigh it up like we talked about before. So when a request comes in, pause.

Okay, in that pause, what can you do? Well, first of all, just pausing allows somebody else to somehow fill in the blank. They can go, well, you know, if this is not a good time, well, we can talk about that. You know, the pause is helpful even just on its own, but also in the pause. You can, I mean, this is very simple, but like you could ask a question. You could say, oh, hey, could you tell me a bit more about what you're wanting me to do? Can you help me understand why that's important? Let's just talk about it just for a minute. Even that alone creates anxiety.

A buffer, a filter, and it helps people challenge. I taught this to a university asked me to come and teach essentialism. And one of the managers there emailed me later and shared this story. It's not a huge story, but so real.

She said that in the past, when asked to do something, she would say yes immediately and prove that she could do it. She'd skip lunch if she had to. Most of the days, she did skip lunch because that just seemed selfish, she said, if you can imagine such a thing. And so this request comes in after the training.

And the person says, well, listen, we need you and your team. She's responsible for videography, among other things, in the department. And we need you to video a whole semester of my class. I'm a professor. We need the whole video class. She said in the past she would have immediately said yes, jumped into action. She's highly efficient. She'd have got a whole team going. The whole team would have been there, make this happen for the whole semester, whatever that is, three, four months, right?

And this time she just pauses and she just says, OK, well, listen, I'm so I'm so glad you thought of me. Can you just tell me a little more about what you're trying to achieve, why you're trying to do that? What she said within just a few minutes of conversation, they had identified that this was for one student.

one student who was going to be doing sports on some of those weeks, but this class was required for them to be able to, you know, they were just trying to create a win-win for this student so that they could graduate within a timely manner and so on. And so they came up together with a solution that one other member of the class would just use that iPhone to record every lecture and send it to them. That was the solution. The

Professor was delighted with that solution. They themselves were operating fairly reactively and they just, oh, video, I've got a video. Okay, call that number. That's who to do it. They weren't pausing and thinking. They were being reactive themselves. They were delighted with a simple solution that they didn't have to schedule or edit or do anything. It's just easy. But this manager who reached out to me, I mean, Kimberly is her name. She received back four months earlier

of extra time scheduling her team that would have been there and editing and doing all of this, that kind of rebate, all for a little pause. So the idea is to discover that it isn't this polite, yes, rude, no. It's

Pause and explore. Pause and ask a question. Pause and push back. Pause and offer a different solution. Well, actually, the team best to deal with that is this team over here. Pause to come up with a new option. These are all valid forms of no. The best essentialists don't say no at all. In fact, that isn't what they say at all.

Generally speaking, they're saying something else. But they're nevertheless becoming strategic about what they say yes to. Yeah, I mean, that's such a simpler solution. Like instead of having the whole camera crew there, just have someone record on the iPhone and send it. And yeah, just taking a moment to pause and reflect and think, do I want to do this? Yes or no? And then if yes, maybe what's the best way to do it? Instead of just immediately jumping into like, okay, let's do it. And this is how we're doing it. Just taking that second to reflect.

Yeah, I think so. And so let's say someone is kind of ahead and they already said yes to something and you have kind of like a chapter talking about how to uncommit from things that you already said yes to. What if someone finds themselves in that situation?

The word uncommit is the name of a chapter. And I think that the I think the chapter is is worth, you know, is worth a read in and of itself. It's a particular situation where you find yourself having said you will do something, then regretting it afterwards, but feeling stuck.

just because you've said yes now some people feel really torn like well i said yes and therefore i can't you know it would be wrong not to do it after i've said it and and and i think that's i think that's true i mean when you say you should you should mean what you say when you say things but what i also think is true is that continued honesty and continued dialogue is valid

so that you can say to somebody, look, I know I said I would do this. Can we talk about it? Will you let me out of this commitment? Can we discuss it together so that we can find, you know, perhaps a better way of approaching this? I do think you've got to be careful. You're likely to take a, you know, some sort of hit if you say yes, and then you're not going to do it. You ask not to do it. But I think it's false economy to think that

There's no hit if you say yes and then you don't deliver well on something. You say yes and you resent it the whole time.

Or you say yes and you never uncommit from it, but you never do it. I mean, all of those options also have cost. They have trade-offs. And so I think there's something that can be strong about going back and saying, oh, we said we'd do these four things, but really I think these are the two that are deserving. What do you think? Raising it back and having a discussion, I think, is just one approach to being able to uncommit. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice. Like we've been talking about before, there's always trade-offs. And even if you might want to say no to something, there's a trade-off there. And if you say yes, there's also a trade-off. So just one important thing to keep in mind.

And I know a lot of people who are listening and kind of like type A people who are always thinking about the future and like what is going on next. And like they're always thinking ahead and they have trouble actually like living in the moment and being present. And I feel like that's also an important part of being an essentialist. Can you share like some of the strategies you use to be present? Yeah, I mean, the.

A question that summarizes this, this essentialist approach to being present is to question what's important now. And I'm not somebody who subscribes that literally 100% of your attention should be in this moment. I know there are practitioners who believe that and teach that, and I'm not

I think they're probably tapping into something that's really important because for a lot of people, I think they spend almost no time in the present. They are thinking endlessly, worrying about the future, regretting something or being frustrated about something in the past. And you cannot act directly on either of those things. You can't change the past. And the future is not actually tangible. You only ever have this moment.

So I think there's a balance here because in order to know what's important now, you almost certainly do need to think about the past and the future that puts it into context. And, and so what, what I encourage people, a friend of mine, um, use the metaphor with me that, that, um,

the difference between one, the next chess move and playing for the third, fourth and fifth chess move down, you know, later in the game, a beginner chess player plays just the next move. A master chess player may even have seven or eight or even nine moves ahead in their mind. I mean, extraordinary ability to be able to anticipate that many steps. And that's what gives them the advantage. So that's how they know what's important in the next move.

Because they're being more strategic. So an essentialist isn't just being more present, that they are discerning what matters in the moment using perspective. So they want to be able to take the right next action, what's important now and doing it now. But they're also taking time to plan and prepare and to produce perspective so that they know in this moment what to do.

Wow, that's such a great analogy. I haven't thought of that before. Like you want to identify what's important now and also look at the big picture and like see how it all fits together just like a chess master would. That's incredible. And so I like how not only do you talk or give advice on how to be an essentialist for like individuals and regular people, you also have a bonus chapter in the book where you talk about how to be an essentialist in the leadership role. So for any leaders who are listening right now, what advice could you share with them?

Yeah, I love that you asked that. I actually don't get that many questions about this normally, which I think is a shame because I, in my mind, don't have this separation. I don't think, oh, essentialism is just for individuals, even though I suppose the book, the majority of the book is written with that frame. Essentialism starts off with a simple idea. It's less but better.

less but better is a design principle, um, literally from Dieter Rams, uh, head designer at Braun, uh, for 35 years. But it's, it's also therefore design principle for anything. Uh, I, I co-created a class, um, uh, at Stanford called designing life essentially. And in fact, I'm going to be bringing, uh, a lot of that to life, uh,

at essentialism.com soon. I'll be a little early to make that announcement, but soon you will see it. And, you know, one of the reasons I've done that is because I'm a big believer that you can take a design principle and design your life instead of living it by default. You therefore, you know, it's not,

The design principle can be applied to everything. It's a principle. It's like a first principle. Less but better is a first principle. Once you understand it and adopt it, you can apply it a thousand times. It's one of the things that makes it so valuable. You can apply it, yes, to your schedule, but also you could apply it to how you hire for your business.

If you're hiring as a manager or your own entrepreneurial venture, you could apply. What would it look like? A non-essential approach to hiring would be to hire fast and fire slow. So you're expanding your

constantly the number of people in the business until eventually it's overloaded with probably the wrong people. It's not really their fault. You just selected them haphazardly, not selectively enough. And eventually you'll have to cut them out because either the business will die or, you know, so, so you're not being kind to make decisions in that way. Uh, what you want to do is hire slow and fire fast, uh,

You want to make sure that the right people are there so that the business can last for a long time so that you can be the most useful you want to be. That's just on hiring. What about communication styles? Less but better. If you're setting, for example, if you were setting strategy in your business or as a team, you want fewer things done better. You want to be very careful about what goals you set and

You're going to set them together on your team and you're going to also together decide what not to do. And so that anybody on the team can answer the question, what's the priority?

What are the few projects we're going to go big on this quarter, uh, this year. And so that everybody is empowered around it. Uh, so every element of the leadership, um, tool set, there is an essentialist version of that skill and a non-essentialist version of it. And, and an essentialist leader, uh, can produce the most extraordinary results, uh,

And indeed, as soon as you find, I mean, basically, if you find a leader that's produced extraordinary results, with rare exceptions, what you have found is an essentialist. Yeah.

Yeah, I love how, yeah, like less but better is a principle and you could apply it not just to the individual, but to the leadership role. And yeah, especially like that example where you say one wrong hire is worse than being one person short. Like you want to have less employees that are better than having more employees that, you know, aren't that great. And yeah, you could apply this principle to like all areas of your life. So that's incredible. Yeah.

Yeah, I found a story recently that's in my new book, and it's from Warren Buffett. And he uses three I's, three I's to select people. The first I is integrity. The second is intelligence. And the third is initiative.

And I think that's really just very clear, simple approach. He makes the broader observation that the most successful companies in the world hire very trustworthy people and trust them a lot.

So that's a combo there that's important. Like you might put a lot more work up front or be more thorough in your selection process, but you do it so that afterwards you can leave them alone. You support them, but you're not having to monitor them and manage them and tell them what to do and control what they're doing. They're going to do great things because they have high integrity, high intelligence, and high initiative. That's the combo.

that you want. And, and, and, you know, I, I've an entrepreneur friend of mine who, who, who violated that at first ended up hiring somebody to, to manage their finances and,

They found out that there was a discrepancy, $300,000 missing. They thought, that seems a bit suspect that the person, you know, escaped a little bit. Oh, well, I thought you just wanted to do A, B, and C in a way.

And instead of taking the time right there to just go, okay, we're done. We can't have somebody with a $300,000 discrepancy. And they just said, oh, well, right now we don't want to take the hit and the hassle and they don't want to deal with it right now. And so that turned out into being –

I'm going from memory now, but something like a $5 million thing. But it was certainly in the millions by the time they discovered it was for real fraud. And the person was on holiday at the time, and they never came back, and they just disappeared off the face of the earth. And so this is what happened from after that experience.

He put in place an essentialist, highly selective process for bringing in people. And the person they brought in was just great fit culturally, great fit. You know, honesty was high. Capability was high. And they've gone on to just do great things. So, you know, so this is you know, this is both sides of the application of less but better.

Well, it's not like that guy that you just mentioned, he should have read your chapter on uncommitting and let that guy go when he first found the discrepancy. Exactly. Exactly. And that's what we don't do is that we feel sunk cost bias, which is that we feel obliged to keep going because we've invested. And, you know, it's funny.

I don't want I want to remind people that like essentialism has to be applied with other principles we know to be true. It's not essentialism or compassion. It's essentialism and compassion. Yes, we want to make decisions in the most compassionate way possible. But sometimes that to do that, what we need to do is separate the decision from the relationship.

Sometimes we need to look at everything and say, look, what is the right decision? And then secondly, okay, what's the most compassionate way to execute that decision?

you don't just have to be mean. You don't have to fire someone on Twitter, right? Like you don't have to fire somebody in an email. You can, you can still come to a decision that someone's not the right fit and find a generous way of dealing with it. So you could have a, a really generous severance package. Uh, you could, you know, you can still get to the decision that needs to be made. And, and, and, and, and, but, but if you, if you don't make the right decision, uh,

In the name of being nice, I think you'll end up doing more damage. Yeah. Because in the end, someone's in the wrong position for too long. That's more frustrating for you. That's more, you know, actually it's frustrating for them too. You know, some companies that have made headlines in saying, well, we will pay you to leave.

uh you know i think um what's the company that does that the uh the online uh shoe company zappos zappos yeah zappos at least at least claims that they do this that they have i think a five thousand dollar uh check that you can take to leave within i don't know what it is within the first couple of weeks the first month or something it's so clever isn't it i mean if somebody don't want to be there you don't want them to be there right you you don't want to be like trying to

oh, well, I'm here now. I mean, I don't feel great about this. I feel like I made a mistake, but you still stick around. You don't want this person around. Let them go so they can do what they really are supposed to do. Yeah, it's like by letting them go, you're actually being kind to them because they're not a fit for that company. And you're helping yourself, you're helping them, and it's a win-win situation. So, Greg...

I really enjoyed this conversation. I want to be respectful of your time, so I want to ask my closing question. I see a whole lot of books on your bookshelf, so I wonder if you could just name two books that had a major impact on your life and how those books changed you. One book that I'm loving right now is from a new friend or acquaintance. Let me just pull this off the shelf. This here, it's from Farnham Street.

They have a couple of books they've done. And they've only done two that they self-publish, which I say only because they they they've taken more care than maybe normally would be done in the way that the books are done. They've really bound beautifully and just so thoughtful. I've been using them to teach my own children mental models while they're while they're young.

because I think there's such practical worldly wisdom. I mean, I think that's one. I often talk about John Adams by David McCullough,

who is not very well now, unfortunately, but is one of the crown, you know, crown jewels of, uh, of American life, um, on the Pulitzer twice. And, and he just, he helped me to have such an appreciation for John Adams and, and for his son, John Quincy Adams. And,

You know, those two are a decent answer for today. I mean, even the fact I was just spent some time recently, my son's 14 now, and we were just talking all through mental models and we've done it several times, introducing this way of thinking, that way of thinking differently.

I'm so inspired that John Adams taught so much to his son, taught him how to think, taught him to learn Greek and Latin and to study the classics. And so by the time he became president, I mean –

I think it's hard to imagine that there would ever be a president again that was so prepared and so educated. I mean, it is absolute phenomenon. John Quincy Adams traveled with John Adams, you know, all through Europe. By the time he was a young man, he had seen more of Europe than most Americans of his day. He traveled so far and he'd been with heads of state and he served as ambassador when he was very young. So he just...

The education level was inspiring. We think about ourselves being educated today, and of course, we are in a mass educated sense.

But my goodness, the depth of what he gave to his son and provided opportunity for his son was something for all of us to try and live up to. Wow, that sounds like an incredible book. And yeah, I'm a huge fan of Shane Parrish and his work with Mental Models. He's one of my dream guests to get on the podcast. So fingers crossed for that. And Greg, so for everyone listening who wishes to learn more about you, where could they connect with you?

I, if there's just one place I just say, go to essentialism.com. Um, you know, they can learn everything from there. I just recently started a one minute Wednesday that seems to be appreciated. One minute thing reading, uh, you know, hopefully is also valuable. Um, and they can sign up for that from there. Uh,

I mean, come and subscribe to the podcast. Come and check it out. I think that this is a way everybody's listened to this, seen this. They have an opportunity to continue the essentialist dialogue there. Yeah, like we mentioned earlier, it's a practice. You want to keep doing it. And so, Greg, I just want to say thank you so much for writing this book. And thank you for coming on the Reader's Journey podcast with us today. It's been my real pleasure. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Greg.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Reader's Journey. You can learn more about what's covered in today's podcast in the show notes below.

If you enjoyed this podcast, the best way you can support it is by subscribing and leaving a positive review. If you're looking for reading tips or book recommendations, head over to alexandbooks.com. If you want to join my reading journey, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter by searching for Alex and Books. That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope to see you soon. Read on, everyone.