A conversation between Greg McKeown and James Laughlin about essentialism, the emotional and practical costs of focusing on what matters, and the necessary suffering or trade-offs involved in choosing less to achieve more. They discuss shutting down initiatives and personal examples of prioritization conflicts (e.g., missing family events for work).
How do you feel about having written a book that requires people to suffer? Thanks, James.
You terrible human. Yeah, one whole component of my business, I literally shut it down within a month of reading it. Killing a baby, like, is something you produced and created.
And you love killing your baby. I just apologize to everyone who's ever read Essentialism. Whenever, whenever I meet them, there's a certain kind of suffering that's required to get to that level of clarity. Are you going to suffer because you didn't pursue something that mattered?
What would a non essentialist life look like?
I would say it's the only undisciplined pursuit of more. And so Essentialism is an antidote to that. One of my colleagues had emailed me and said, Look, Friday between 1 and 2 would be a very bad time for your wife Anna to have a baby because they needed to be at this client meeting. Friday comes along, a daughter's just been born in the hospital. To my shame, I went to the meeting. So it's not really question will you suffer or not, it's in what way are you going to suffer?
