Greg McKeown on ESSENTIALISM: WHY the Power of LESS Unlocks True Productivity

Why did you become successful and your friends from high school didn't? Most likely it's because you learned to focus on what was really important and not on what was Trivial. Today, Greg McKeown, speaker and writer, teaches highly successful people like you the disciplined pursuit of less. Yes, less. On radio, TV and at business conferences or audiences love his English accent and he loves living in America. He wrote a book called Essentialism and it's been one of the best books I've read in years and completely shifted my mindset. And what's great is that Ethan Willis. Where's Ethan? Ethan is here somewhere, actually knows him and made an introduction personally and then we got to know each other. And in the spirit of Les, Greg's title is just one word which is the name of his book, Essentialism. Please welcome the very bright Greg McKeown.

Now, I wasn't going to share a story, but I've been thinking about it all day and I want to share it. This was one day I got an email from my boss at the time and she said Friday would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby. What do you think about that? And it turned out, in fact, I mean, she was expecting otherwise that would have been an even weirder email to receive. Right. Friday was her due date and I was in the hospital with her on that Friday. And the reason that this was she didn't want me to go to this meeting, my boss is that this was, yeah, she wanted me to go to a client meeting. And so I'm there on the day on Friday with my wife and my daughter's born, they're healthy, it's fine. This is it, right? This is what's important. But instead of being able to be focused on that, I felt torn. I'm on email, I'm trying to do both. How can I keep both sides happy? And I remembered, no, I know all about this. I know what's important, I know what matters. And so with all the conviction I could muster, I said yes and I went to the meeting. I remember afterwards my boss at the time said, the client will respect you for the choice you just made. I don't know if that's true. The look on their faces not evince that sort of confidence. But what if they had? So what? Surely I had made a fool's bargain. Surely I had allowed something non essential to take the place of something clearly essential. And that was where I learned this simple lesson, which is if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will and out of that grew a question. I mean, let me just put it to you really quickly, right? I mean, I mean that's what I learned. Right. But what about you? I want to do a quick poll. I want you to snap if any of these are true for you. Right? Snap. We're going to quick poll. Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin at work or at home? Snap for that. I've got some people dancing at the back to this. Have you ever found yourself busy but not productive? Have you ever found yourself saying yes just to please or to appease or just to avoid trouble? Right. The question is why? That's a non trivial question. Why do otherwise successful people find themselves stretched too thin at work or at home? Why? I spent years, I quit my job. That was probably a good idea, wasn't it? Quit my job, started a new company and pursued this question with serious passion. Why is it that this happens? And this is what I found, an answer hidden in plain sight. The reason that otherwise successful people find themselves stretched too thin at work or at home is success. Yes. What's the pattern? Here's the pattern. You get focused, right? Few things, right. Time, put a lot of energy in, generates tremendous momentum, leads to success. Good. What comes with success? New options and opportunities. That's it. That's what we want. That sounds like the right problem to have, but it does in fact turn out to be a problem if it leads to what Jim Collins has called the undisciplined pursuit of more. The undisciplined pursuit of more. If you fall into that problem. Now I'm exaggerating the point in order to make it. But success can become a catalyst for failure. Like Bill Gates said, success is a very poor teacher. Right. Okay. So I'm not anti success. That would be the wrong place to have such a message. Perhaps. But here's what I've learned. I've learned that you have to become successful at success. And it's a different kind of discipline. In fact, the antidote to the undisciplined pursuit of more is the disciplined pursuit of less, but better. And what we've learned is that as we try to teach this to people, first of all, they just can't do it. Life is just so fast, so consuming with the non essential. This is the culture of our times. And so we created a program, a one year executive development program for slow growth. Because we know that's what it really takes, a process to change. There's lots of talk about mindset today to change the mindset from everything that everyone's doing, everything popular now, to the right things at the right time for the right reasons. And let me just give you one illustration. This is a totally true story. Executive in Silicon Valley doing award winning work, totally focused. As a result of that, his the company gets purchased by a larger, more bureaucratic firm who goes into the new company. And he wants to be a good team player, a good citizen of the new regime. So that means loosely, he starts saying yes to everyone and everything without really thinking about it. If there's an email chain, he wants to be on it. A conference call, the same, you tell me what happened to his stress goes up, but what happens to the quality of his work goes down. And there you see the success paradox already at play. And he almost leaves the company in frustration. And then someone gives them some counterintuitive advice. They say, retire, enroll. Which is different than saying quit, stay and don't tell anybody. We don't need anyone in that scenario. But he said, what if I took a different lens and I experimented with essentialism? What if I asked myself constantly, absurdly, what is essential? Eliminate what's not, make it as effortless as possible to do the things that matter most well? He does this, what happens? He gets fired. It doesn't get fired. He doesn't get fired. It would just change the whole tenor of our conversation if that is what had happened to him. Now here's what happens. He said, I got my life back, went to dinner with his wife every night, went to the gym. He created space at work in his work environment. In that space he found again his creative freedom. And by the end of that year, his performance evaluations have gone up. Gets one of the largest bonuses of his whole career. What do you make of such a story? Maybe it's just a trick. N equals one, you know, just one story that illustrates the point I wish to make. Or maybe at play is something foundational, fundamental, universally applicable. Like this. You can either do a few things superbly well, or you can do many things averagely well. And that that basic trade off exists everywhere. Visually. You can either be pulled in a million directions, the undisciplined pursuit of more, or the alternative, to be able to get focused on the right few things at the right time for the right reasons, to figure out, for example, the priority. The priority. Do you know about this? Does anybody know the history of the word priority? It was like you would. But here's the thing. The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. Think of it, it stayed singular for 500 years. I mean, for half a millennium, nobody in any meeting anywhere thought about pluralizing that term. And then in the 1900s, in the middle of the industrial revolution, somebody decided, look, why don't we just have priorities? Let's just have loads and loads of very first things that you have to do before everything else. And yet with no sense of irony at all, have you not been in a meeting where somebody said, well, Here are the 20 priorities? The idea was singular, it was a powerful idea. But to get there, to build there, it's so countercultural. It's a totally different scenario to get into that mindset. If we experiment with the idea of essentialism again and again, we can do something significant. There was a barrister in England once who might have stayed a barrister, but he had this family emergency come up and he goes to South Africa because that's where it was. And when he goes to South Africa, he's on the train and he gets kicked off the train because he's Indian. And it was in the middle of apartheid. He had a first class ticket, but they still kicked him off. It was illegal. And so he takes on the South African government. He ended up staying in South Africa for 21 years. And I went recently to his house in South Africa where he was. Where he was living for those years. He was successful, incidentally, there. We're talking about Mohandas Gandhi. When he goes back to India after that 21 years, he's already successful. Everybody wants a piece of him. In fact, when he arrives on the train in India, they literally are saying, run for prime minister. We want you to take on the British. And he says no. He says, I don't know what's essential yet. I don't know what it is yet. And so he doesn't spend two weeks in some sort of political game pretending to listen. He spends a whole year listening to India. What is the essential thing? And you know what he finds? Salt. This miniscule, but as it turns out, totally vital idea. Because the British controlled the production of salt. They control the production of bread and the whole food chain. And that's when he learns the idea for the salt marches. And he walks across India in civil disobedience to make salt on the beach. And 600,000 Indians follow him. And the British take note. And, you know, he just kept on with these essentialist experiments all the way. When his grandson was beaten up in South Africa, once for being too black and once for being too white, they sent him to live with the grandfather and for an hour a day, for a year and a half, he listened to his grandson, Arun Gandhi, who I also interviewed. And that was the turning point of his whole life. And we know through a series of essentialist experiments that include prayer, meditation and fasting. A process that he called in the only poem he ever wrote that I read in that house just recently, he said he called the process reducing himself to zero. What he was doing instead was being consumed with a single purpose, the priority of his life to produce independence for the Indian people. And he achieved it. When he died, the US Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall, said of him, here is a man who has shown simplicity is more powerful than empires. And Einstein said of him, generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth. We don't have to be Gandhi. I get that. But doesn't it matter that we figure out to create space, to design a life around, around the things that really matter most to us, the essential few? Life is fast and full of opportunity. And the complication is that we've been conned into believing we have to do everything. And the impact of that is that we make a millimeter progress in a million directions. I have a position on this, that we can make a different choice, that we can learn over time through slow growth to become essentialists, and as a result of doing that, actually live a life that really matters. Thank you for having me.