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Just search new here. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.

I'm talking today with Greg McEwen, author of the New York Times best-selling book,

Essentialism, the disciplined pursuit of less. Greg, thank you so much for talking with us today.

I'm just delighted to be with you. I love the idea of pursuing less but with

discipline. I think it's interesting because I think most overachievers

would think of discipline as something

that would help them to get more done.

Start by telling me why you talk about the discipline

pursuit of less.

I think for most executives in high performance today, life is fast and full of opportunity

and the complication is that we think we have to do everything. And the impact of that is that we think we have to do everything and the impact of that is that we can end up

making a millimeter progress in a million directions and my position is we can make a

different choice we can discern what's essential, eliminate what's not

essential, and as a result of that make a higher contribution overall. When you

start thinking about pursuing last you might start by kind of saying okay well there's

definitely some not so fun or not so rewarding things I could cut out here but once

...