INSPIRE #194: Get More Out of Life through the Disciplined Pursuit of Less!

Greg McKeown Shares The Secret To Success Through the Disciplined Pursuit of Less – How Essentialism Will Change Your Life & Catapult Your Business & Career

Listen to the podcast below!

BOOKS BY GREG MCKEOWN:

  

SHOW INTRODUCTION:

If you feel like you’re being pulled in too many directions, have too many competing demands, or are working yourself to the bone, but not getting where you want to go, then do we have the show for you!

Today we’ll be talking with Greg McKeown, author of one of my all-time favorite books, the NY Times best-seller Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.

Today we’ll talk about the power of less, of letting go of everything that doesn’t serve you and focusing all your efforts on just what’s essential.

That plus we’ll talk about the how to go in monk mode, why we all want to go fly a kite, why sleep is the new status symbol, what a dinosaur covered in pink flamingos has to do with anything, and why from here on out, there’s no more Yes. It’s either Hell Yeah, Or No!

 Sign up for Greg’s newsletter at http://www.GregMcKeown.com to get the first chapter of Essentialism FREE!

MORE ON GREG MCKEOWN:

Greg McKeown is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.” His writing has appeared or been covered by Fast Company, Fortune, HuffPost, Politico, and Inc. Magazine and Harvard Business Review. He has also been interviewed on numerous television and radio shows including NPR and NBC.

McKeown is the CEO of THIS, Inc. where his clients include Adobe, Apple, Airbnb, Google, Facebook, Pixar, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter, VMware and Yahoo!.

McKeown is an accomplished public speaker. He has spoken to hundreds of audiences around the world including in Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, China, England, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Singapore and the United States. Highlights include speaking at SXSW, interviewing Al Gore at the Annual Conference of the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland and receiving a personal invitation from Haakon, Crown Prince of Norway, to speak to his Annual Innovation Conference.

In 2012 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Originally from London, England, McKeown now lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and their four children. He graduated with an MBA from Stanford University.

SHOW NOTES:

Greg McKeown Online: WebsiteTwitter | LinkedIn

Key Topics:

  • What is the power of less?
  • How’d Greg go from Law School in London to Essentialism
  • Why is it that otherwise successful people and companies don’t break through to the next level?
  • What is the paradox of success?
  • What’s the challenge that comes with success?
  • What is the undisciplined pursuit of more, and why is it so dangerous (and it’s the natural extension of success)
  • Why success can be a catalyst for failure
  • Why according to Bill Gates “success is a very poor teacher
  • How do we become successful at success?
  • What is a contribution or fulfillment gap?
  • What does it mean to retire in roll?
  • Why you should do only the things that bring you the most value
  • Why saying yes to everyone is saying no to everything
  • Why you want to do few things done better to break through to the next level
  • Why our culture is biased to on having to do it all – which makes it more difficult to have success
  • What’s the philosophy of non-essentialism?
  • Why you can’t have it all.
  • Why we want to choose less but better
  • Why the undisciplined pursuit of more makes Greg McKeown furious because it is “a lie which does not deliver on any of its promises”
  • Why the undiscipline pursuit of more
  • Why the antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less or better.
  • What is a core mindset or the logic of essentialism?
  • How to clean out your physical and metaphorical closet
  • What Mary Condley suggests (about cleaning out our closet)
  • What’s the importance of the simple question “Does it spark joy?”
  • How to explore; eliminate and excute; use resources to Reallocate – in the closets of our life
  • What’s the invincible power of choosing to chose?
  • Why you don’t ‘have to do’ things
  • Why the power of choice can be ‘forgotten’ with non-essentialism
  • What’s the ‘invincible power of choice?
  • Why Southwest Airlines has been so successful, and what we all can learn from them
  • What’s the harm of a straddled strategy?
  • How do we protect our time so we can start to narrow things down?
  • What is the 90% rule?
  • Why you constantly want to increase the dial of selectivity
  • Why if it’s not a definite lens, it’s a definite no.
  • Why do we want to all go fly a kite?
  • Why play is essential and why we want to play our way to learn (especially important for our children!)
  • Why is sleep the new status system?
  • What’s a bogus badge of honor in the busy-ness bubble we’re in
  • How we’re waking up to sleep being critical to high performance
  • What the mind blowing truth is on the 10,000 hour rule from the Eric Anders study that’s quoted in Malcolm Gladwell’s book.
  • Why you do not want to ‘be a machine’
  • Why sleep is a must because it ‘helps you discern the vital few from the trivial many’
  • Why relationships with children are ‘hard if you work easy at them and easy if you work hard at them’
  • What’s the importance of the idea of ‘inter-generational family’
  • What are a few of Greg McKeown’s favorite books?
  • Why we should all read a bit of the ‘wisdom literature’

Related Podcasts:

INSPIRE #175: Discover the One Thing You Can Do to Make Everything Else Easier & Create an Extraordinary Life! (Jay Papasan, “The ONE Thing”)

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