Greg McKeown has dedicated his career to discovering why some people break through to the next level—and others don’t. He has also dedicated himself to the gospel of Jesus Christ and currently serves as a bishop in Menlo Park, California.

From Greg's online bio: "He has authored a remarkable book which was an instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.  As well as frequently being the #1 Time Management book on Amazon, this book challenges core assumptions about achievement to get to the essence of what really drives success."

"McKeown is the CEO of THIS Inc, a company whose mission is to assist people and companies to spend 80 percent of their time on the vital few rather than the trivial many. Clients include Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, Pixar, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter, VMware and Yahoo!."

In this interview we talk about how the principle of Essentialism apply to his calling as bishop and the culture at-large in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Links:

Buy Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Greg McKeown's Website

7 Unbreakable Rules of a Meeting

Liz Wiseman Interviews & Articles on Leading Saints

Interview Transcript

The following is a rough transcript of the interview. Please excuse the many grammar mistakes or misspelled words. It is our intention to make the transcript available as soon as possible rather than perfect.

 

Kurt Francom (LS): Today I'm very excited to welcome and author that I've been following his last few books and been following the content he puts online and it's really been life changing and impactful for me and that person is Greg McKeown.. How are you Greg?

Greg McKeown (Greg): I'm just doing wonderful. Thanks for having me.

LS: Yeah for sure. Now you are in Menlo Park area in California?

Greg: That's it.

LS: Now you don't sound like you're accent doesn't sound too Menlo Parkian.

Greg: I love how that sounded like you said accident. Referring to my accent.

LS: No there's nothing accidental about your accent.

Greg: I'm from London, England originally and grew up in Leeds and Yorkshire in the north of England.

LS: Great so I know there's a long story behind it but generally speaking how did you land all the way in California from London.

Greg: Well, it really started right when I came home from my mission and enrolled in Law school and I just was so hungry to feel the sense of mission and to maintain the sense of mission I've felt for 2 years. I just couldn't seem to feel it fully in law and there's nothing wrong with law and lots of important work to be done there but I just could not sense my complete mission there but I was still in it. I was actually, actually this story that's interesting I was reflecting on recently was I went back to visit somebody in the church office building and they said something just curious and in passing said look if you do decide to stay in America you should come and help us with this event and it wasn't so much what they wanted me to do as that question and the assumption of if you didn't have to do what you are doing if you could do something different what would it be? And so I went down the foyer of the church office building and wrote down on a piece of paper, "What would you do if you could do anything?