Skip to main content
Alumni

BYU Communications Alum Reflects on Living Essentially

Greg McKeown, Two-Time Bestselling Author, Teaches from Experience When It Comes to Focusing on the Essential Things in Life

Greg McKeown DU

McKeown observed that life—even an essential life—is hard all on its own. What can we do, he wondered, to make it easier? These years taught him that by adopting a mindset of simplifying a challenge, we can lighten burdens and increase our resilience. “You can handle really tough things without making them worse,” he discovered, “[and] you can then keep going for a longer period of time.” …

“I struggle with everything in Essentialism and everything in Effortless. I’ve got failure stories galore in all of it,” McKeown says. But, as he points out, these principles are a life pursuit, not something mastered all at once: “Of course we’re going to make mistakes. Of course we’re going to get some trade-offs wrong. But we just keep coming back and asking, ‘What’s the priority?’”

Read the full Daily Universe article.