In Essentialism, Greg McKeown, CEO of a leadership and strategy agency in Silicon Valley who has run courses at Apple, Google and Facebook, shows you how to achieve what he calls the disciplined pursuit of less. Being an essentialist is about a disciplined way of thinking. It means challenging the core assumptions of "we can have it all" and "I have to do everything" and replacing them with the pursuit of "the right thing in the right way at the right time".

By applying a more selective criteria for what is essential, the pursuit of less allows us to regain control of our own choices so we can channel our time, energy and effort into making the highest possible contribution toward the goals and activities that matter.

Using the experience and insight of working with the leaders of the most innovative companies and organisations in the world, McKeown shows you how to put Essentialism into practice in your own life, so you, too, can achieve something great.

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Product details

Listening Length	6 hours and 14 minutes
Author	Greg McKeown
Narrator	Greg McKeown
Audible.in Release Date	26 November 2015
Publisher	Random House AudioBooks
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B079WWHZMM
Best Sellers Rank	#55 in Audible Audiobooks & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Audiobooks & Originals) #12 in Business & Careers #111 in Analysis & Strategy

Customer reviews

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2 star		2%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from India

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An essential read for everyone irrespective of what you do or don't do.

Reviewed in India on 12 December 2016

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The biggest take away from this book is...

It teaches in detail on how to set boundaries and say NO to social pressures!
It teaches how to make choices in life that matter to us.
It teaches (step by step) on how to choose activities that are meaningful to us and not just because everyone else is doing them.

I find this book is like a chapter from Stephen Covey's 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.' But an elaborated chapter. It is definitely a worthwhile read.

I bought the paperback version and the fonts and binding are okay.

62 people found this helpful

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Ayantika Mukherjee

A must read!!

Reviewed in India on 3 February 2021

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A spectacular self-help book which offers relatable and easy to implement tips, tricks and information to include in our daily lives. The word 'essentialism' itself speaks loud its meaning. The author says that being essentialist is not something we do, it should be a part of us. Planning the day ahead with proper schedules and working without disturbance is what makes each day guilt free and enjoyable. Scanning for the non essential things buys us more time and help us in completing the day's task without any hassle.
The language is lucid and the chapters are explained with examples, charts and tables to make it easier for the reader's to understand various concepts.

5 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

excellent guide for experience people but for fresher in job market, it may not be that applicable

Reviewed in India on 20 August 2018

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This book can serve as guide for people who has achieved some level of experience and know what they are better at, what they like. Also experience people are likely in a better stage so that they can choose what they want to do from available options. Junior people just starting career; may not have that liberty.

When we have clarity of purpose we tend to contribute our best. When our career progresses, we get multiple options, paths and these new options can lead us to diffused effort and reducing our chances of great success in future.

13 people found this helpful

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Be Happy

Nice but not that Great

Reviewed in India on 18 June 2017

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Other books in the market do a better job than this book to get point across. This book is high on generic focus on what is important and don't get distracted with trivial things message but now on actual case studies and concrete steps. A better book would be Leo Babauta written power of less

16 people found this helpful

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Natarajan Mahalingam

Of the most essential, executed with focus & mindfulness!

Reviewed in India on 6 July 2021

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Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less, as a title, clearly encapsulates the concept of identifying, exploring, eliminating, and executing the most important task, with mindfulness & focus. The author does a good job of detailing each chapter/concept described by comparing non-essentialist vs. essentialist characteristics through the book. These tables form the crux of the storyline and having them ready to reference from time-to-time will help us apply the learning from the book

Though many of the concepts, pitfalls, opportunities, and examples are generally things we might already know of, the distinction that the author brings out through the tables mentioned above, make it interesting reading. Across a spectrum of work & family-based stories, examples, and experiences, the author has expressed his thoughts in a humble and vulnerable way. Looking forward to applying the concepts of essentialism! (as well as, Effortless, the next book by this author!)

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Sudheer

Good book. Not that introspective or interesting.

Reviewed in India on 10 December 2019

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It's a good book. A decent one. I would recommend this a friend. But personally, I felt it was kinda bland.
Some parts were uninteresting and prolonged. Could've been better. There are other options to choose from, better ones i feel, on the similar kind of a topic.

If you're looking for something good to read, if you're a beginner, suggest you to go for it since the language and writing style in easily understandable.

One person found this helpful

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sunk cost

Reviewed in India on 17 October 2020

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this book is just a force fit of the word essentialism for every scenario - wardrobe, leadership, food, job etc. there are good examples in the book but just no order or structure. also title of book should be Planning and Focus.

One person found this helpful

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Maithilee

What's the hullabaloo about?!

Reviewed in India on 12 September 2021

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This book is a rehash of so many others, making the final product too generic to be of any real import. It is basically the same thing said a thousand times in minutely different ways. I was particularly put off by the irrelevant examples, which abound in this book.

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Top reviews from other countries

C Jennings

Thought Provoking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2019

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Again, this is one of those books that I took in bite sized chunks. Read a bit, consider and try to put into practice until my actions were becoming habitual. You choose to improve or you don't.

1. I have become much better at saying no, but saying it nicely or without actually using the word!
2. I have become better at getting things done and prioritising what is and is not important to me (although that is still work in progress)
3. I have become better at time management.
4. I procrastinate less (not totally gone, but also work in progress)

All in all a very useful and thought provoking guide to help you take back control of areas of your life. It has certainly helped reduce my stresses and anxiety in life and I would strongly recommend reading if you are stressed or anxious.

44 people found this helpful

W Yang

Good sensible ideas - but would you CHOOSE to put them to practice?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 September 2015

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Single most memorable passage:
"Charlie O. Simms taught a Journalism 101 class at Beverly Hills High School. He started... by explaining the concept of a "lead". He explained that a lead contains the why, what , when, and who of the piece. It covers the ESSENTIAL(my emphasis) information. Then he gave them their first assignment: write a lead to a story.
Simms began by presenting the facts of the story: "Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund 'Pa' Brown"
The students hammered away on their manual typewriters trying to keep up with the teacher's peace. Then they handed in their rapidly written leads. Each attempted to summarise the who, what where, and why as succinctly as possible: "Margaret Mead, Maynard Hutchins, and Governor Brown will address the faculty on ..."; "Next Thursday, the high school faculty will ..." Simms reviewed the students' leads and put them aside.
He then informed them that they were all wrong. The lead to the story, he said, was "There will be no school on Thursday."
"In that instant," Nora Ephron(of [Sleepless in Seattle] and [When Harry met Sally]) recalled, "I realised that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the POINT. It wasn't enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it MEANT. And why it MATTERED." Ephron added, "He taught me something that works just as well in life as it does in journalism." " p73-74

Disclaimer - I have not read a whole lot of management/self-improvement books, so I cannot say that I am a very good judge of the genre. There is a danger that this book is actually littered with tired old cliches that I hadn't noticed, in which case I shouldn't have bothered you with this. That said -

Self-improvement books are a strange breed - myself included, you so often see people who read one and then complain that the book only wrote about the really obvious things. In the same sense, however, homo sapiens are a strange breed who never quite do what they know to be the obviously good things for themselves. grin emoticon Enter, then, the study of management - the study on "coordination of the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives by using available resources efficiently and effectively". Sounds like self-improvement on a larger scale, but with the added benefit of providing results from well-designed research.

The author is a management consultant with an MBA degree from Stanford. Perhaps naturally, the book often reads like a business strategy book with plenty of case studies from the corporate world, but as Ephron says, those methods can easily be used for life in general. The book's message can be neatly summed up in one sentence - "Figure out what is really important and essential in your life, and eliminate everything else to focus your efforts and achieve maximum output/contribution to society". The rest of the book is just filled up by how to achieve that goal.

While 'the rest of the book' is coherently structured with a logical, well-suited flow and sensible, well-researched suggestions backed up by sociology/psychology research findings(these days it seems impossible to read something that doesn't quote [Flow] by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and [Thinking Fast and Slow] by Daniel Kahneman, although probably due to my reading interests. Perhaps I should just give up and add them to the reading list), some solutions that the author suggests will just sound implausible. One example is the importance of being able to say no to your boss so that you can concentrate on something more essential. Obviously, I cannot imagine myself doing so to my bosses, consultant surgeons. For some other solutions, I thought they can only be done when one is reasonably financially secure, so that he/she can take the risk/hit by cutting out/declining all the non-essential activities that regularly plague our lives. However, (as my stock-phrase goes) if we are to look at the moon instead of the finger pointing at the moon...

The part that really inspires me in this book is its single-minded pursuit and the determination for what constitutes the most important thing in our lives; what makes our lives meaningful for us(as illustrated in the above anecdote), and what will ultimately enable us to be useful to the rest of the humanity. Sure, it may not always be obvious to all of us, and the method of elimination the book suggests may not guarantee to lead us to an answer. In fact, our lives may quite possibly be meaningless! :-D Nevertheless, for me it is certainly worth a try.

The other aspects that left a strong impression for me was the authors repeated emphasis on how pursuing Essentialism is a choice, and the importance of EMOTIONAL(not intellectual) acceptance of the book's ideas for them to work - which is to say, as discussed at the beginning, it is not because we don't know what to do why we don't do them. There is always a choice, and we simply choose not to.

131 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

A long blog post

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 July 2019

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Some nice ideas in this book but not very well written and most of them are just not practical unless you have the money to skip off the south of France for 6 months. Also using Rosa Parks & Gandhi as examples feels a bit crass especially when you put them next to another examples in the book like saying no because they had to plan a wedding. All the ideas in the book could easily fit into a shot blog. All in all ok but nothing really new or useful for 99% of us that actually have bosses and need to pay the bill.

33 people found this helpful

Lisa Kirsten Smith

Sorry, not for me

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 June 2020

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Essentially, don’t spread yourself too thin and keep prioritising. For me, I found this book rather demotivating as someone who struggles to keep all the balls in the air at home and work and consistently overcommits. Each section has a table that breaks down the kind of stuff non-essentialists do and what a perfect essentialist person would do differently. However, this had the opposite effect on me to what the author intended. I was just left feeling a bit rubbish and thinking ‘yeah, I’m a non-essentialist - I’m never going to change! WAHHH!’

What worked better for me was Tony Crabbe’s Busy. This got more into the psychology of why people tend to overcommit, get distracted or avoid stuff in the first place. Tony Crabbe also uses coaching strategies to help the reader come up with their own solutions.

Sorry - Essentialism wasn’t for me! It may work for some though...

20 people found this helpful

Maria Davies

Milking the Point

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 November 2017

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I think the author is rather milking the point, which is against the ethos of his subject matter. I feel an easier read on the subject is Gary Keller's The One Thing.

37 people found this helpful

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