Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show I'm Greg McEwan and I'm your host for the What's Essential Podcast.

I'm also the author of Essentialism, the discipline pursuit of less and my goal is to decode exactly how to design a life that really matters because if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.

If you're new to the show, take a deep breath. Almost everything is trivial. Only a few things are essential and that's what this show is all about.

My job is to interview, get deep really with authors, entrepreneurs, psychologists and everyday people to help explore what's essential so that we can eliminate everything else.

Through a process of listening, unpacking and going deep with each guest, we turn each episode into practical advice for intentionally planning and living in order to move forward.

If you enjoy this podcast, if it means something to you, then why not suggest it to family and friends and even earn a reward?

For the month of December, we're launching a special referral program that both you and your friends, colleagues, co-workers and more will benefit from.

They have a chance to get introduced to the What's Essential Podcast and you can qualify for some exclusive referral rewards as a thank you for sharing it.

All the details can be found in the What's Essential Podcast description.

For this first episode, I asked my followers on Twitter and LinkedIn who I should have a conversation with.

I also wanted to talk with someone who has really had an impact on my life.

So that's why I was absolutely delighted. But when I asked all of you on social media, who should I interview the most frequent answer, the most popular answer was my wife, Anna.

In particular, thanks to Justin Strong who made this suggestion, also Jason Moore, and the many people that then participated in that conversation as well supporting it.

People wanted to hear from Anna and I'm delighted with that because she's the most important person to me.

She epitomizes everything that's essential to me. And also as you will see, she's absolutely key to the birth of essentialism.

Without her, there wouldn't be the book and there wouldn't be this podcast. There couldn't be this podcast.

So I'm going to be interviewing Anna as we take you to the very beginning, the birth of essentialism and also discuss how essentialism has shaped and continues to shape our everyday lives and our everyday decisions.

And so with that, let's turn to my discussion with Anna McEwen.

All right. Well, here we are. So how are you doing?

I'm doing well.

How are you feeling about this conversation?

Little nervous.

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