Welcome back to The Ground Up Show. My name is Mattia Vella. Today's episode is my conversation with

Greg McEwan. He's the author of The New York Times' bestselling book Essentialism,

The Discipline Pursuit of Less. In the book Greg describes an approach similar to minimalism that

gets us to ask the right questions about where we're spending our time, energy, and effort.

This is my edited conversation with Greg about his Essentialist philosophy,

the myth of success, and why small, consistent steps far outweigh the alternative.

You can get the full one hour interview at patreon.com slash mat diabella where Greg walks me through

the practical steps of how to apply Essentialism to my own life and perhaps yours as well. Enjoy.

Greg, thanks so much for being here. Really excited to talk with you. Talking about the crossover

between less and ambition. So how can we do more with less? Before we delve too deep into that,

tell me a little bit about the work you do right now. Give me a little bit of an introduction.

I wrote the book Essentialism. You know, this is about the disciplined, continual, perpetual pursuit

of less but better. I love how you just framed it as less but with ambition. It's about how to

figure out what is essential, eliminate what's not, and create a system for making it as effortless

as possible to do what you've identified as being very important. When I look at our culture,

I would say in America, but I'm sure it's spread pretty far, there is this work hard, hustle,

grind it out, busyness that is promoted and in a lot of ways people

they enjoy attaching this label to themselves. I'm so busy. I'm just overwhelmed with all this

stuff that I have to do. How do you view our hustle culture today? Is that something that you would

describe it as? When I first came to America, I would ask people how they are and this is

we're talking almost 20 years ago and they would say, you know, they'd say, I'm great. I'm great.

It was almost like I'm American, of course, I'm great. And I liked it. I liked this sort of inherent

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