#786: Tactics and Strategies for a 2025 Reboot — Essentialism and Greg McKeown

We feel constantly pressed for time. We try to do too much, yet when someone makes a request, we say yes without thinking. We feel we have to do it all. But because we’re going in so many directions, we make little progress in any of them. Yet most of these activities are trivial. As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism puts it, we’re majoring in minor activities.

The way out of this trap is to practice essentialism: “do less but better.” McKeown explains how you can distinguish the vital few from the trivial, then eliminate the nonessentials and make your optimum contribution in your life and work.

In today’s hustle culture, many people think the only way to live a productive and rewarding life is to work as hard as possible. This idea is so ingrained in our culture that many work to the point of near-constant exhaustion, sacrificing their mental and physical health. But according to business strategist Greg McKeown, there’s an easier way to get the most out of your time and effort. In Effortless, he expands on this one simple truth: Achieving your goals doesn’t have to be so hard. By simply taking the easiest path, we can be healthier, happier, and more productive.

In our guide, we’ll lay out McKeown’s argument that the easiest path to success is the most viable, and we’ll provide actionable advice on how to implement this idea into your daily life. We’ll also further explore McKeown’s main points by comparing and contrasting them to other ideas in books on productivity and happiness.

In today’s hustle culture, many people think the only way to live a productive and rewarding life is to work as hard as possible. This idea is so ingrained in our culture that many work to the point of near-constant exhaustion, sacrificing their mental and physical health. But according to business strategist Greg McKeown, there’s an easier way to get the most out of your time and effort. In Effortless, he expands on this one simple truth: Achieving your goals doesn’t have to be so hard. By simply taking the easiest path, we can be healthier, happier, and more productive.

In our guide, we’ll lay out McKeown’s argument that the easiest path to success is the most viable, and we’ll provide actionable advice on how to implement this idea into your daily life. We’ll also further explore McKeown’s main points by comparing and contrasting them to other ideas in books on productivity and happiness.

Many people want to retire as millionaires so that they have the time and money to travel, buy luxury cars and homes, or visit with their friends and families. However, you don’t need to be a millionaire to do all these things. You don’t even need to retire.

In The 4-Hour Workweek, entrepreneur, consultant, and life coach Tim Ferriss explains how anyone can live the retired millionaire lifestyle by building their own business, automating it, and then collecting the income while they go off to live their dreams. In this guide, we’ll describe each of Ferriss’s steps to creating this life. We’ll also examine why some of his recommendations are particularly effective and explore alternatives and counterarguments to other suggestions.

We feel constantly pressed for time. We try to do too much, yet when someone makes a request, we say yes without thinking. We feel we have to do it all. But because we’re going in so many directions, we make little progress in any of them. Yet most of these activities are trivial. As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism puts it, we’re majoring in minor activities.

The way out of this trap is to practice essentialism: “do less but better.” McKeown explains how you can distinguish the vital few from the trivial, then eliminate the nonessentials and make your optimum contribution in your life and work.

In his epic 707-page Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss shares the habits and beliefs of 101 people at the top of their game, including tech investors like Chris Sacca and Peter Thiel, entrepreneurs like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Evernote’s Phil Libin, superhuman athletes like Amelia Boone and Wim Hof, media figures like Edward Norton and Whitney Cummings, and more.

These are the principles that successful people use to achieve audacious goals, improve themselves, and be happier. The premise: if you can apply the lessons from this book, you can be more effective.

Everyone wants to make a living doing meaningful work that aligns with their values and makes them happy. However, many people feel stuck in the wrong life doing unfulfilling work. They hope that once they find their “passion,” everything will magically fall into place. According to Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, this attitude hinges on the belief that there’s only one path to a meaningful life and limits your ability to experience joy and satisfaction.

In Designing Your Life, Burnett and Evans argue there are multiple paths to career and life happiness—learning how to recognize and evaluate these paths increases your chances of experiencing satisfaction. They share principles from their popular life design courses to help you explore multiple paths and purposefully plan a balanced life in which you can truly thrive.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the authors’ methods for purposefully planning a happy and meaningful life. We’ll also expand on their ideas with research and practical advice from other self-help practitioners.

If you haven’t thought about your inevitable death today, Jodi Wellman suggests it’s time to start. In her book You Only Die Once, Wellman champions the principle of memento mori—the intentional recognition of our mortality—as the key to leading a better life. According to Wellman, regularly meditating on your mortality motivates you to live more deliberately and meaningfully, balancing vitality and meaning.

In this guide, we’ll explain why Wellman argues that contemplating death will help you live a better life. We’ll then discuss what it means to live a good life and how to reflect critically on the life you’re living, before outlining Wellman’s steps to improve the quality of your life right away. We’ll also provide additional commentary on the history of memento mori, different cultural perspectives on death, and insights from other experts in positive psychology, including Martin Seligman (Flourish) and Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning).

Although we live longer today and have more material wealth than ever, many people feel anxious rather than happy. In Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers an antidote. People are happiest when they feel in control of their inner thoughts and feelings and experience a “flow state”: a sense of enjoyment, purpose, and meaning.

Csikszentmihalyi explains: how controlling and ordering your consciousness brings flow and enjoyment, which personality characteristics produce flow, and how to find flow in your work and relationships.

If you want to know how to live your life, who better to ask than people who’ve lived life to its fullest? Tribe of Mentors is distilled life advice from more than 130 world-class experts in a wide variety of fields, such as actor Ben Stiller, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and media mogul Ariana Huffington. Author Tim Ferriss reached out to these experts and compiled their advice after a mild existential crisis left him seeking direction.

In this guide, you’ll learn the experts’ advice on how to identify what matters most to you, how to navigate non-traditional career paths, how to appreciate failure, and more. In our commentary, we’ll supplement Ferriss’s advice with tips for success from other top-performing experts and authors, including Cal Newport, Ryan Holiday, and Laura Vanderkam.

Although we live longer today and have more material wealth than ever, many people feel anxious rather than happy. In Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers an antidote. People are happiest when they feel in control of their inner thoughts and feelings and experience a “flow state”: a sense of enjoyment, purpose, and meaning.

Csikszentmihalyi explains: how controlling and ordering your consciousness brings flow and enjoyment, which personality characteristics produce flow, and how to find flow in your work and relationships.

Do you ever wonder if there's more to success than just reaching the finish line? In Chop Wood Carry Water—a story of a young man’s journey toward becoming a samurai warrior—mental performance coach Joshua Medcalf reveals how authentic success comes from embracing the process of growth rather than fixating on end results. Medcalf argues that cultivating a positive mindset, focusing on daily practice, and reframing challenges as opportunities can lead to both success and a more fulfilling life.

This guide distills Medcalf's wisdom into practical methods that will help you clarify your goals, feel more positive and engaged as you work toward them, and stay motivated through setbacks. Additionally, we’ll supplement Medcalf's ideas with psychological research and actionable methods from other self-improvement authors and practitioners.

The Happiness Hypothesis explores the nature of human happiness, blending the philosophical and theological wisdom of ancient thinkers with insights from the field of positive psychology. Our satisfaction is driven by how our mental filters interpret the events in our lives, with the human brain perpetually divided against itself in the struggle between the desires created by our emotions and the attempts of reason to control them. The key to happiness is to use reason to focus the mind away from desires that will only bring fleeting happiness, while giving in to those desires that will bring lasting fulfillment.