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Episode: #880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most

Author: Chris Williamson
Duration: 01:21:29

Episode Shownotes

Greg McKeown is an author, public speaker, and leadership consultant Success requires you to focus on what truly matters. But in the modern world there are more distractions than ever before. So how should you best choose what to prioritise, and what are the pitfalls to avoid? Expect to learn

how Essentialism has evolved over the past decade, why saying no is so hard and how to get better at saying it, how to counteract your desire for novelty, why it’s so difficult to cut your losses, how to use boundaries in your life, the challenges you'll face as you become more successful and much more.. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Greg McKeown. He's an author, public speaker and a leadership consultant. Success requires you to focus on what truly matters.

00:00:11 Speaker_01
But in the modern world, there are more distractions than ever before. So how should you best choose what to prioritize and what are the pitfalls to avoid?

00:00:20 Speaker_01
Expect to learn how essentialism has evolved over the past decade, why saying no is so hard and how to get better at saying it, how to counteract your desire for novelty, why it's so difficult to cut your losses, how to use boundaries in your life, the challenges you'll face as you become more successful.

00:00:36 Speaker_01
and much more. Greg is a legend. Essentialism was superbly formative for me. If you've downloaded the Modern Wisdom reading list, you will know it's in the top five. It's stayed there for as long as I can remember.

00:00:49 Speaker_01
It's a wonderful redress to a lot of the problems that those of us that like to try and achieve things face, which is namely putting more on our plate than our work capacity can handle.

00:01:00 Speaker_01
And he's just so great, and it's become more useful over the last 10 years since he released it. So yeah, so much to take away from this one. This episode is brought to you by the RP Hypertrophy app.

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00:03:54 Speaker_01
That's manscaped.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom20 at checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Greg McKeown. When we first spoke, nearly five years ago now, I said that I might be your arch nemesis.

00:04:27 Speaker_01
And in some ways, I've become worse, but in other ways, I've become much better since then. So I can give you up top, I can give you a thank you for at least adjusting my trajectory over the last five years in a positive direction.

00:04:42 Speaker_00
Well, one of the things that's interesting about that to me is just, in essentialism itself, there's this idea of the paradox of success. So it's four stages. You have clarity leads to success, leads to options and opportunities.

00:04:56 Speaker_00
All of that sounds like the right problem to have, and maybe it is, but it doesn't make them less problems. especially if it leads to the undisciplined pursuit of more.

00:05:06 Speaker_00
And so I think that the more success somebody experiences, I think the more the case for essentialism exists in their life because they go, yeah, this is the problem I thought I wanted and maybe it still is, but now you still have to figure out how to be successful at success and to not have it eat you alive

00:05:28 Speaker_00
and spit you out, you know, this is sort of the path eventually. And so the antidote, of course, is the disciplined pursuit of less but better. So anyway.

00:05:38 Speaker_01
No, I think it's so right as well that I'm aware talking about success on the internet is one of the least popular things to do because the total addressable market is essentially zero compared with talking about grinding from the ground floor up.

00:05:53 Speaker_01
But assuming that the people that are into personal development and work on themselves and read books like yours that have been hugely formative for me.

00:06:02 Speaker_01
Assuming that their goal is to achieve a level of success, you better fucking future-proof yourself. If the thing that you want to get is there and you know.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
Maybe it's one of those things that you just don't get to appreciate or believe until you actually arrive there. And you're like, no, no, no, that's bullshit. When I get to success, it's all going to be fine.

00:06:20 Speaker_01
It's like, look, every single person I've spoken to, every single one of them, the problems don't stop. They get more complex the higher up the ladder you get.

00:06:28 Speaker_00
Yes, that's what it is. And people struggle to believe it if they're in the first phases because those are really complex, challenging issues as well.

00:06:40 Speaker_00
But what happens is that the opportunities increase, and the scale of the impact of those choices increases, and the number of people that are impacted by them, and therefore the number of critics also increases, and on it can go.

00:07:02 Speaker_00
The reward for getting to the top of the mountain is that there are other mountains. And in a way, that's a great part of life that behind every mountain, there's mountains, but it doesn't make it easier.

00:07:17 Speaker_00
And I think this is a very poorly understood area of success. People just assume, if I get to the top of that mountain, all the problems disappear. Life is just great. And it's like, no, nobody gets to escape. know, the mortal experience.

00:07:36 Speaker_00
However it's designed, it's designed in such a way that you just can't do that. This is never an option.

00:07:43 Speaker_00
And sometimes I think as people get higher in their level of success, it becomes much more lonely because there's fewer people to appreciate the new set of challenges. So anyway, I think it takes courage.

00:07:56 Speaker_00
I think every phase of life and every phase, if you wish to get to a higher point of contribution, you have to take your life into your hands, take responsibility for it, and be courageous.

00:08:10 Speaker_00
Which means that if you want to keep making progress, you're sort of living in a state of I don't know, like not comfort with discomfort, but you're certainly familiar with it all the time. And the alternative is sort of slowly dying.

00:08:27 Speaker_00
So it's not like you're either on the edge of your ability and facing the fear and taking new risks so that you can have the great adventure continue. Or you're just slowly dying and whatever level of success a person happens to be at.

00:08:46 Speaker_00
So yeah, it's like, those are two tough choices.

00:08:50 Speaker_01
What has changed in your perspective on essentialism over the last 10 years? It's 10th anniversary, 10th birthday party.

00:08:59 Speaker_01
What for me is one of the five books that everybody needs to read, this hundred book reading list thing that I've been pushing for forever. Yours is sat in that top five, like absolute, you have to get this done.

00:09:12 Speaker_01
But I'm interested, you're a decade hence now. What's changed or what's evolved?

00:09:19 Speaker_00
It's such a rich question if I try to just answer it honestly. I mean, it's obviously been completely life changing for me. It's enabled me to operate in a certain kind of rarefied air.

00:09:40 Speaker_00
In a quite humbling way, it has become sort of a part of the zeitgeist, a part of Americana in a certain way. And so,

00:09:48 Speaker_00
You know there are these you know so so steve harvey gets a copy of it it's his favorite book and so we end up doing a bunch of interesting things together and i'm ready to drive a former first lady of california you know she she was given a copy she's giving them out of famous sunday luncheons and.

00:10:05 Speaker_00
Kanye was missing one time and wherever he was, he had a copy of essentialism because that's what he posted on social media. And then when he was on Rogan, he's like, yeah, I'm an essentialist now.

00:10:17 Speaker_00
And so these moments are a bit, some of those are a bit strange, but it's also humbling because because the movement has just begun. And I can feel that, that every year there are more people that essentialism reaches than the year before.

00:10:38 Speaker_00
There are more stories coming of people that really do feel like it's changed their life, which is always a, that's its own sort of strange experience. And so maybe to your question about what's changed, I mean,

00:10:52 Speaker_00
Let me try and offer two things to that. One thing that's changed is I really believe now that people do need the tool set to go with the mindset. And I wasn't convinced of that 10 years ago.

00:11:03 Speaker_00
In fact, I was under contract to create, which you know about this new tool, the essentialism planner. I was under contract 10 years ago to create that, started working on it for a couple of months and just was like, no, I don't think this

00:11:19 Speaker_00
Nobody needs this. And there's so many planners and journals and this kind of thing out there. I don't want to create it just because, okay, essentialism did well, so now we have to do this.

00:11:29 Speaker_00
So I uncommitted from the contract, went away from it, carried on in my own life like every single day doing some kind of written in paper and pen journaling and planning. And I don't think I've missed a day

00:11:44 Speaker_00
In the last 10 years, I don't think I've missed a day.

00:11:47 Speaker_00
And in the process, found eventually this way of using a few minutes every day that I thought was so optimal and so supportive of essentialism, I was like, actually, maybe a plan of wood could really help people.

00:12:04 Speaker_00
And so that's one of the shifts that's happened for me is you need the mindset, but now I actually believe a tool set makes a big difference for people.

00:12:13 Speaker_00
Maybe it's for people that aren't thinking about essentialism as much as I am, which is like everybody. For them, they just want the tool. Give me the tool, give me the best of what you've learned. And so that's one big change, I would say.

00:12:26 Speaker_00
You said there was a second one. Yeah, I was trying to remember. Oh yeah, I know what I was going to say about that. I think we've shifted eras.

00:12:36 Speaker_00
Okay, so if you say agrarian age, industrial age, information age, I think in the 10 years since I published Essentialism, we've shifted to an influencer age, and that's a non-trivial shift.

00:12:54 Speaker_00
If you say, okay, the lead characteristic of the information age was distraction, then the lead characteristic in this new age is disorientation.

00:13:08 Speaker_00
While I think that those are similar in some ways, I think that this new is much more foundationally challenging. The word that I think would have been relevant 10 years ago, but is different when I talk to people about it now, is noise.

00:13:26 Speaker_00
Everybody's buried in noise. And so it's the ability to eliminate noise. It's the ability to not just eliminate though, synthesize noise so that you can connect the dots through it like it's raw material from which to create something meaningful.

00:13:46 Speaker_00
These skills now seem to me primary in a way that even 10 years ago, I wouldn't have said that.

00:13:52 Speaker_01
You must feel prophetic, like a British Cassandra sort of seeing in advance.

00:13:59 Speaker_00
Well, my brother certainly would call me a Cassandra, so I don't know. I mean, maybe there's something to that.

00:14:03 Speaker_01
Go on, carry on. You know what I mean. Fuck, this book came out 10 years ago. This book came out 10 years ago, and it's become more relevant over time. Like a weather reporter, the Mayan calendar or something.

00:14:20 Speaker_00
That type phrase, that's nice.

00:14:23 Speaker_01
It's true. And whether it was you just catching a trend early that's then sort of ripped a hold and then got further ahead. But I love that idea of going from distraction, disorientation.

00:14:34 Speaker_01
And that's not something I'd thought of before, but I think it's pretty accurate because it's not just about our attention being pulled away and the optionality of that, it's the sheer volume. And I always talk about this.

00:14:50 Speaker_01
There was one day in 2010 or 2011, maybe, January 2011 or something, there was one day where humanity had the right balance of available information to information that we wanted. And then we immediately, fucking eons,

00:15:05 Speaker_01
millennia, we wanted more information than we had. And then there was one day around about 2011 when we had it, and we immediately fucking smashed through it.

00:15:13 Speaker_01
And now we're out just in the void, fucking orbiting, orbiting above the Earth, just surrounded by information. It's a fundamental change that humans have had to go through from being scavengers of information to being discerners of information.

00:15:30 Speaker_01
You're no longer looking for things, you are choosing between things. And it's a fundamentally different skill. And I think that, you know, that sort of essentialist mindset becomes even more of a prophylactic against that sort of thing.

00:15:44 Speaker_01
as you have to be more discerning, as you have to work out, is this relevant or not? Not even, how do I get it? Not even, can I focus on the thing that I want?

00:15:52 Speaker_01
But this barrage of different things, stimuli, information, potential goals, potential projects. Am I going to work from home? All of the stuff that happened from COVID, all of those, that's optionality that's been opened up.

00:16:03 Speaker_01
Hooray, that means that there's lots of different ways you can go. But boo, who has to make the decision? You do.

00:16:11 Speaker_00
Well, the way I think about it is that we are either in or approaching a truly limitless era. That's the good news. The bad news is that the obstacle to that is the noise. In some ways, it's both the obstacle and the raw material. The enabling, yeah.

00:16:33 Speaker_00
It's both, but figuring out how to navigate that We're using this disorientation word and noise comes from the Latin nausea. So when we say, yeah, we feel all this noise in our world, it's like, yes, we actually feel nauseous. It's seasickness.

00:16:55 Speaker_00
And so when we go on social media and we're absorbing so much information that way, including news, right? So it's not just influences in the original sense of the word. Oh, you should wear these clothes or live this way.

00:17:09 Speaker_00
It's not just that, it's all of the things, all of the information is getting put through that lens, that process to us. When we get off social media, it's like, where are we? We don't even know where we are. We don't know what's up, what's down.

00:17:24 Speaker_00
And so it's like reactivity becomes a lifestyle rather than, yes, well, sometimes I'm reactive. It's like we're just constantly in this reactive state.

00:17:34 Speaker_01
Let's say that somebody isn't familiar with the essentialist framework. Why And we can do a little brief in a second, but just that reactivity point, what's bad about being reactive? Why does that not fit into an essentialist's worldview?

00:17:52 Speaker_00
Well, I mean, let's start with this, right? Like, I haven't named this law. You and I are going to name this law, maybe. And it's this, that the highest priority today is the least likely thing to happen. So that's the strangest thing.

00:18:11 Speaker_00
And I stand by that. I believe that's a law, at least a law in this era. It might be that it's a natural law and it's just a human bias that's just really challenging to overcome.

00:18:26 Speaker_00
But when I go through a planning process in the day and I've identified the priority, when I look at it, I think, there's no way that would have happened today. It doesn't even always happen after I've defined it.

00:18:37 Speaker_00
I might not even make any progress on it today. But I'm like, if I hadn't defined it, there's no way I would have made any progress. Like, we react. to either complete trivia, the trivial many, or maybe to important things, or maybe to urgent things.

00:18:53 Speaker_00
But the essential, the most important thing, the most important relationship, that is never the thing that happens first, unless you make it so. So that's one reason that I think living reactively is suboptimal.

00:19:12 Speaker_01
Well, it completely puts you at the mercy of

00:19:17 Speaker_01
whatever next comes careening into consciousness, whether it's a notification on your phone, whether it's a fear that you've had, whether it's memory of the fact that you don't have any bread in the cupboard. It's the most salient thing.

00:19:29 Speaker_01
And the Eisenhower matrix of urgent versus important, the urgent will always... I mean, when I think back to when I was really, really obsessive about working on productivity,

00:19:41 Speaker_01
When I think back to that, the amount of time, months, months that I would put off the important thing. Months that I wouldn't do it for. Like the most important thing, which evidently not that important. Well, no, it is.

00:19:52 Speaker_01
It's just somehow other stuff gets in the way.

00:19:54 Speaker_01
And, you know, if you're not careful, and this is something I'm sort of realizing as I grow up and get a little bit older, you don't have an unlimited amount of time to do the important things in your life. You don't have an unlimited amount of time.

00:20:08 Speaker_00
No, no, no. I'll say it further, and this would come close to another law, is that... I mean, in essentialism, I call it the 90% rule. And it is... I mean, the 90% rule says, focus only on those things that are 90% or above important.

00:20:28 Speaker_00
That is, if it's not a clear yes, it becomes a clear no. So that's like an extreme rule to try and help us escape the tendency to do just the good stuff or the middle stuff, is be more selective.

00:20:43 Speaker_00
But over the last 10 years, something I have come to observe and believe is that we have only enough time left. to do the 90% and above.

00:20:56 Speaker_00
And that's the tougher aha, because you say, oh, every time I'm doing something that's just good or completely trivial, I am making a trade-off I would probably not make if they were really placed in front of me as choices.

00:21:13 Speaker_00
I mean, nobody on their deathbed says, oh, I just should have spent a bit more time scrolling on Instagram. That's what I wish I'd done.

00:21:21 Speaker_00
But this is the nature, I think, of the noise and the deafening nature of it is that we don't hear the signal in the noise.

00:21:33 Speaker_00
And so everything starts to seem equally important where the reality is always, always that a very few things are, I mean, like something like this infinitesimally small things, but infinitely important.

00:21:52 Speaker_00
And that's in every human system, in every set of data, in every set of tasks, there is something that is so much more important than everything else. you have to really work to get to it.

00:22:07 Speaker_00
It's a little like thinking that you – a lot of the productivity language and focus has been around, how do you do more? How can you be more efficient? And so on and fine. Okay, I don't think about what I do is like that, but

00:22:24 Speaker_00
That's more like thinking you're in a coal mine your whole life and then waking up one morning and going, oh, I've never have been in a coal mine. It's always been a diamond mine. Well, how would that shift all of your behavior?

00:22:35 Speaker_00
I have to operate differently now. I have to get really good at finding the diamonds, pausing, thinking, reflecting, exploring, pushing everything aside that isn't the diamond. Well, I'm not going to focus on that.

00:22:48 Speaker_00
I need to find the thing that really matters. And I don't know why it's the case, but I absolutely observe like it's a reality in all human systems and all circumstances that you have. I think about it now like an onion of human systems.

00:23:07 Speaker_00
You have the noise and trivia at the edge. As you move in, you get towards a bit more important. It's a little more You have to be a little more careful around it because it's a little more intimate.

00:23:21 Speaker_00
And then at the very center of it, you have things that are so vulnerable and so disproportionately important. They're everything. This is how I think it is. I think that's true in a personal life. I think it's true in a relationship.

00:23:37 Speaker_00
I think it's true on a team, an organization, a country, at every level of human system, this strange phenomenon seems to exist. And so once you discover that, Once you understand that, I think your life changes completely, irrevocably.

00:23:55 Speaker_00
At least that's what happened to me.

00:23:57 Speaker_01
How can people better work out their priorities? It sounds all well and good if it's not above 90% important, but you've just admitted yourself that we're living in an age where everything feels important.

00:24:07 Speaker_01
Not only does everything feel important, but the most important things are often the least urgent. So you have to get through the non-important urgent shit first.

00:24:15 Speaker_01
then you need to get through the non-important, non-urgent shit to find the important, non-urgent shit that sits at the bottom.

00:24:23 Speaker_01
How, after all of this time teaching people, doing courses, and all the rest of it, what's the best framework that people can use to work out what they need to work on?

00:24:31 Speaker_00
I can teach people how to do it in six minutes, which is really cool. But I mean, not to teach them in six minutes. I mean, they can learn to do it themselves every day in six minutes.

00:24:42 Speaker_00
And I learned it in some ways from someone I interviewed on my podcast. And what happened to her is that she'd started a new business and she woke up at like three in the morning, hyperventilating. Oh my goodness, what have I done?

00:24:57 Speaker_00
I've just quit this job. I'm not yet earning sufficient income. And she's just in that panic mode. And quite spontaneously what she does is she grabs this huge sheet of paper that she plans to throw away. So it's just like,

00:25:12 Speaker_00
Maybe if I just get all of the noise out of my head and just free write, and she's just messy and it's crazy and it's chaotic and it's, let's say she's swearing all the way through it. And it's just like, it's not for anyone.

00:25:24 Speaker_00
Not even in a sense it wasn't even for her. She's just like pouring it out. And what she noticed happening, and she's learned, I mean, even I think the first time she did it was like the six minute process. It was like nothing.

00:25:36 Speaker_00
But then she has learned since then. It's like in six minutes, what happens is she went from Confusion, I don't know if this was her language, but this is my language now, right? She went from confusion to clarity to creation.

00:25:48 Speaker_00
But first she's just confusion, noise. Then she starts going, hmm, well, maybe what would I do about that? What could I do that would be healthy? So it started to turn into questions that were relevant for her.

00:25:59 Speaker_00
And then within just these few minutes, she's looking like, okay, well, here are some plans. This is what I could do. And she was able to go back to bed at peace with the sense that, okay, I still know what the problems are, but I've worked through it.

00:26:13 Speaker_00
It's not just spinning in my head. What is she writing? What was she writing? Yes, what is she writing? Well, the prompt was something like, what's going on in your head? What is happening? So the prompt is quite a simple prompt.

00:26:29 Speaker_00
And she taught me this too. I've never heard anyone share this and I love this. It's called instinctive elaboration. And what instinctive elaboration is, is that if you ask yourself a question or are asked a question, there is an involuntary

00:26:45 Speaker_00
mental process that takes place. You cannot not think about it, which is a pretty powerful phrase. And I think we've all experienced it.

00:26:55 Speaker_00
Somebody asks you an interesting question and it just hijacks the way that you were thinking and what you were thinking about. And so you can use this to your benefit by having good prompts. So after this, I started the following process.

00:27:11 Speaker_00
What, so what, now what? So every time I'm writing my journal, I say, okay, what is going on? And that's the free writing. That is just all the noise. It doesn't matter. No judging. Maybe you plan on throwing it away if that helps. I don't care keeping it.

00:27:27 Speaker_00
I don't mind who reads it. I want the noise. So what? Now the prompt now is not what's going on, but like, well, what does it mean?

00:27:38 Speaker_00
Let's just try and look at that noise as if, let's imagine someone else showed me their writing, and I'm looking at it and going, oh, I wonder what that says. What does that mean? And so you're just trying to now connect the dots a little bit.

00:27:53 Speaker_00
And then the now what, I have a really clear structure for this. I call it the one, two, three method. The highest priority item for the day, that's the one. You might spend two hours on that, ideally.

00:28:07 Speaker_00
The two is two things that are urgent and essential, and the three are maintenance items. That's like the laundry of our life. If we don't do it, tomorrow gets a lot harder. And that together becomes what I think of now as my done for the day list.

00:28:22 Speaker_00
And it doesn't mean that I won't do anything else, but if I get those one, two, three things done, I know I have done the most important thing. some urgent things and some maintenance items that will help my future self be thankful to me."

00:28:37 Speaker_00
And I say, okay, well, if I just do those things every day, life is going to be better and it's going to help me orient my way through this noise. And that's what we need because it seems to me that there are just two kinds of people in the world now.

00:28:54 Speaker_00
There are people who are lost and there are people who know they are lost. And if you can get in the second category, that's really helpful because if you're lost and you know you're lost, you're actually not lost anymore because you know what to do.

00:29:09 Speaker_00
know, you can stop. I don't know what I'm doing. Let's write this all out. This is where I'm at. This is some confusing. Okay. What does all that mean? Okay. What am I going to do about it?"

00:29:18 Speaker_00
The problem is when we don't realize we're lost and we just keep barreling ahead without pausing and reflecting and getting... It's like a plane is off track 90% of the time. The key is

00:29:30 Speaker_00
to getting where it's supposed to get to is that it has an automatic get back on track function. And so in a disorienting world, what we need is a reorienting process.

00:29:41 Speaker_00
And that's why I think this daily process is such a helpful tool for living essentialism in a noisy world.

00:29:49 Speaker_01
I had a conversation with a guy called Nick Pollard, the people displeaser, and he used a not too dissimilar analogy, which was, a missile doesn't hit the target, the missile doesn't hit not the target. And that's the way that missiles work.

00:30:04 Speaker_01
This is not the target, avoid it. This is not the target, avoid it. And after you've not avoided all of the not the targets, you end up hitting the thing that you meant to hit.

00:30:12 Speaker_01
You know again so much of the sort of the essentialist mindset is around the elimination, it's around the not doing.

00:30:18 Speaker_01
I'm completely obsessed with the idea that success in life is at least probably 90% avoiding catastrophe as opposed to expediting success.

00:30:29 Speaker_01
because the catastrophes are the things that knock you out of the bottom, they're the things that cause game over.

00:30:35 Speaker_01
You spend your entire life caring about your health and eating organic and ensuring that you don't have seed oils, and then one day you drive your car without your seatbelt on. It's like, hey, guess what? Game over.

00:30:45 Speaker_01
So those are the things that really come in and make step changes to the quality of what you're doing. So just going, actually speaking on Nick's work, People Pleasing, I think there's a lot of parallels with what you do.

00:31:00 Speaker_01
Talk to me about why saying no to new, more things is so hard. Nick came at it from an emotional health perspective, but I'm interested to hear it from a work-life purpose productivity perspective from yourself.

00:31:15 Speaker_01
Basically, why saying no is so hard and how people can learn to say no more effectively.

00:31:21 Speaker_00
Well, there's sort of one way you could go with that question, but I'm sort of wanting to answer it a different way because of how you set the question up. And it's like Socrates was described as like the wisest man in the world.

00:31:36 Speaker_00
And he said, well, I don't know if I am, but if I am, it's because I have this daemon with me. he says, this daemon... We don't really use that term now, and it's not the same as a demon, but this sort of entity... It's like conscience.

00:31:52 Speaker_00
Yes, I suppose conscience, but it felt very separate to him. He said, my daemon never tells me what to do, but he always tells me what not to do. And I thought that that was such a consistent idea with what you were just sharing.

00:32:09 Speaker_00
And I remember when Storm Ida came through, I was stuck in the airport. And I mean, the storm is completely consuming the airport. There's water coming through the ceilings.

00:32:21 Speaker_00
People are already starting to lose their minds and I've been in these situations enough in airports to know, you just don't want to be there through all of that. If you can possibly just get somewhere else away from the storm, that's better.

00:32:33 Speaker_00
And I knew that there was a hotel about 10 minutes from the airport. I'd stayed in it before and I could physically see it. And I thought, look, if I just get there, it's just 10 minutes over there,

00:32:42 Speaker_00
And I try all these things and everything's not working out because they've shut everything down because there's water pouring everywhere. And finally, I even tried to rent a car and they were like, no, this is impossible.

00:32:51 Speaker_00
But they said, if you just walk straight down that road and it didn't look like it was too bad, it looked a little like it was slowing down the rain. They said, it's a 10 minute walk, just go there and you'll be fine.

00:33:04 Speaker_00
And I took a few paces and I heard my own Damon do not do this." That was exactly the word. And I carried on walking for about another four or five steps and it was louder. Do not do this. And that's it. That's sort of the end of the story.

00:33:18 Speaker_00
I went back, I retraced all my steps, went back to the airport, stayed there for a while until things were calm enough that I was able to get to the hotel and spent the night there. I don't know what would have happened to have gone down that path.

00:33:31 Speaker_00
I'm glad I don't know. But I do think that there's something in this. You could say, okay, what's the most essential thing in my life? What's the very best use of me? I do think those are helpful questions, but they can be overwhelming.

00:33:43 Speaker_00
And so if you ask the opposite, it's like, what don't you want? What is the thing, the number one thing you know you don't want? Okay, well, now you basically know what it is you want, because it's just sort of the inverse of that.

00:33:56 Speaker_01
Yeah. George, my friend, asked this question on the first ever episode, even before you, he was before BG, he was before Greg. And he asked this question, how do you make a miserable person happy? You go, no idea.

00:34:11 Speaker_01
He says, how do you make a happy person miserable? You go, I've got a fucking million, million pieces of advice. You go, right. Okay. So inversion, inversion is a useful tool.

00:34:19 Speaker_01
And I can find out at least I can avoid the pitfalls by making sure that I don't do the things that I know that are going to make me miserable. You know, it's probably,

00:34:30 Speaker_01
maybe a mark of where you've gotten to and the fact that I'm receptive to it and actually more receptive to it than you giving me a four-step matrix of how I'm supposed to identify the most important thing and all the rest of it.

00:34:41 Speaker_01
Because this may be frustrating to people, but fuck it, I don't care. As you get further along in the journey of working on yourself and of identifying how you work best, experience comes along for the ride.

00:34:57 Speaker_01
So previously everything was very effortful and it was system 2. You've got your daily list of affirmations and morning routine and all the rest of the stuff and there's still a place for all of that. But largely what you're doing is you're

00:35:12 Speaker_01
You're forcing all of this water into an ice cube tray so that it sits nice, compartmentalized, because you have no idea what to do. It's messy. The world is messy and chaotic and you need to wrangle it into some sense of order. Fantastic.

00:35:23 Speaker_01
What I've learned that that, whatever it is, conscience, daemon, gut instinct, habit, whatever it is, that thing that goes off there, for the most part, is almost always right, and it gets more right the longer that you go on.

00:35:39 Speaker_01
And you say, well, that's whimsy, it's imprecision, it's wishful thinking, it's untestable, it's unverifiable, it's unfalsifiable. I'm like, yep, I am completely there with you. And yet, when I find myself following that thing, most stuff goes well.

00:35:59 Speaker_01
most stuff goes well and it goes better than it would have done had I have tried to reverse engineer my... what do I want written on my gravestone, broken down into 10-year chunks, broken down into one-year sprints, broken down into daily action.

00:36:11 Speaker_01
Like, it's just... what do I want to do? And that, again,

00:36:18 Speaker_01
The reason that it's so cool is that it is a competitive advantage that compounds with experience, which means that as opposed to it's one of a countervailing forces to things get more difficult the further along the ladder that you get, because this is one of the things that you can't speedrun.

00:36:32 Speaker_01
There is no fucking growth hacking experience, really. It's just it comes along as a byproduct of time. This your first tour that you've done with the band?

00:36:43 Speaker_01
You have no idea how you should eat, how you should sleep, how you should train, when you need to go to the bathroom, how you need to pack everything.

00:36:51 Speaker_01
After a while, maybe you've got a system in place, and then after a while after that, you just do it by feel and you're like, fuck, that's cool. And it's not replicable.

00:36:58 Speaker_01
It means that competition is and it's more fun because it doesn't feel like it's this prescribed top-down dictatorial world. It's this sort of emergent bottom-up, very uniquely you.

00:37:11 Speaker_01
And yeah, at least for me, managing that transition has been a difficult one to allow myself to be more free-flowing, but I really appreciate it.

00:37:20 Speaker_01
I appreciate and I'm grateful to me for letting go of some of the more sort of rigorous and rigid and structured ways that I used to do things to now allow me to sort of tap into that experience. So maybe that resonates.

00:37:32 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, look, One way to riff on that is to say, look, the daemon is playing an extremely complex game. If we use Musk's idea, the simulation idea. In the simulation, we are trying to

00:37:58 Speaker_00
But let's say that part of the central purpose is to maximize the growth of people, that people need to use their agency to make choices, including mistakes, so that they can gain that experience that they didn't have before, so that they can become wiser, become better, and grow.

00:38:19 Speaker_00
Okay, so if that's the case, as a parent, that's what I want for my children too. I want them to make mistakes as soon as possible.

00:38:27 Speaker_00
being a high rapid learning process so there's no shame when they make mistakes i'm never gonna shame them because that's what they're supposed to do is make choices and some will go right and some won't and they'll learn about themselves and other people through the process what we would want optimally is someone like

00:38:45 Speaker_00
Anna and I as parents, to step there, to be able to occasionally say, no, that isn't going to work well for you, but to use that very carefully.

00:38:56 Speaker_00
Otherwise, everything's a no all the time, and then they don't get the optimal growth path and learning of life.

00:39:03 Speaker_00
And so I do think that this sort of disdainment approach and paying attention to that, like, hey, if you're not feeling it, proceed, let's keep going. But as soon as you do, you never ignore that. You just avoid so many of the catastrophic things.

00:39:18 Speaker_00
And in some ways, anything but catastrophic failure isn't failure. It's like, yeah, keep going, keep learning. Just avoid the catastrophic things. And I really do believe that if people are paying attention, if they're listening,

00:39:31 Speaker_00
they will always have a daemon warning. That's been true in my life and I think it's true in all the people I've talked to as I listen to them and their complex life story and their narratives. And I've done quite a bit of that over the last 25 years.

00:39:44 Speaker_00
And as we've gone through literally creating a graphical representation of their life from birth to the moment we're having the conversation, in those big mistake moments, the huge things,

00:39:56 Speaker_00
that have been really, really big, they had a moment of warning and maybe they just were like, oh, I'm still doing it. Don't let the warnings guide you and then play openly within that lane. This seems something like optimal living to me.

00:40:12 Speaker_01
Yeah, beautiful. I wanted to talk about something else that I've been kind of conflicted by this year. So a lot of the people listening to the show will know a good friend of mine, a guy called Alex Hormozy.

00:40:23 Speaker_01
He is very much, hard things are hard, that's why they're hard, stop complaining about them being hard. And I think his messages is fantastic and it's resonated with me a lot and it's given me an awful lot of resilience in times when I've needed it.

00:40:37 Speaker_01
But I'm not convinced that it is a fuel that I need to rely on all the time and I'm interested in. alchemizing something different, or maybe just having a couple of different fuel sources, switching between fucking coal and nuclear or whatever.

00:40:52 Speaker_01
And I came across a really gorgeous quote from you that said, Puritanism went beyond embracing the hard, it extended to also distrusting the easy. And I think

00:41:03 Speaker_01
for the people who take pride and pleasure and meaning and purpose from deploying the hard, from leaning into the hard, from dealing with it, and they say, I can do things other people can't, and I can put my nose to the grindstone, and I will keep going, and I'm going to carry the boats, and so on, that the distrust of the easy comes along for the ride.

00:41:25 Speaker_01
So I'm interested in that arc and how a micro David Goggins can learn to trust the easy and have a little bit more comfort when things come along like that.

00:41:39 Speaker_00
Well, look, all wisdom to me is something like the center between two opposing truths. They're both true, but if you go too far in one direction, it will no longer be true and wise. And so justice and mercy would be like that. But so would, I think,

00:41:58 Speaker_00
hard and easy is like that so if you for example if a person is an insecure overachiever. they will tend to operate out of a mindset where if it's not hard, I'm doing something wrong.

00:42:14 Speaker_00
And so they're always pushing, but they can push too far because they've gained a sort of mindset, something like a bad 1980s motivational speaker slash coach.

00:42:24 Speaker_00
You've got to do 150% and if you don't, then that's not enough and you just got to push further. And that was one of the reasons that I wrote the book Effortless.

00:42:33 Speaker_00
Was as an antidote to that you can think about it like an insecure overachievers guide to healthy productivity.

00:42:40 Speaker_00
What does that look like is there a way that is actually more optimal get better results without this endless assumption that burnout is the way. Yeah, you could take it too far, but that's not who I'm writing to.

00:42:54 Speaker_00
I'm writing to those that only default one way. So there's a case study that blew my mind when I read it. The more I got into it, the more some of these ideas sort of elevated for me. So go back with me to the 1850s.

00:43:10 Speaker_00
And the great expedition of the time, like getting to Mars is ours today, getting to the moon was the 1960s, this was who's getting to the South Pole. And no one had ever done it in all of recorded history.

00:43:24 Speaker_00
You have Shackleton that tried and failed, that's sort of the most famous failed attempt at doing it. And then after Shackleton, there are two teams that set off on almost the same day, a Norwegian team, a British team.

00:43:35 Speaker_00
The British leader, the expedition leader, had as a mindset something like maximum effort equals maximum reward. And so he translates that like this. Day one, we'll go 30, 40, even 50 miles if we can.

00:43:52 Speaker_00
We will maximize the distance because obviously, if you maximize the distance each day, you'll get to the South Pole faster than the Norwegian team. So that's what he starts. Day one, day two, day three is like that. Then they get really bad weather.

00:44:08 Speaker_00
They're so burned out physically that they have to stop, set up their tents, and sit in no progress. So it affects them psychologically. We know this because they wrote in their journals, oh, we have worse luck than anyone who's ever tried this.

00:44:26 Speaker_00
We have the worst weather conditions of anyone. And they're wrong about that. In fact, they have better weather conditions than the team they had based their own attempt on, but they felt like it was true.

00:44:38 Speaker_00
So now they are physiologically and psychologically exhausted. One entry, We don't think anyone could make progress in weather like this. But one team could, and that's the Norwegian team who had a different mental model.

00:44:52 Speaker_00
Expedition leader, something like optimal effort equals maximum results. But he got it, curiously, from the indigenous people in Antarctica, who had taught him this, that making maximum progress in those conditions is about sweat management.

00:45:13 Speaker_00
That is, if you sweat too much, you will burn out the body too soon, you will be colder, you will freeze, and it will have all of these negative consequences. So he translates what they had taught to him into the rule, 15 miles a day, one five.

00:45:31 Speaker_00
Day one, we could go way further, but we won't. Day two, day three, day four, they get the first bad weather day. Well, they have sufficient energy to be able to continue making the progress.

00:45:42 Speaker_00
So they go maybe 13 miles, but it's somewhere within the range, 13 to 15 miles, even on those bad weather days. They avoid completely the boom and bust approach to execution that the British team has.

00:45:55 Speaker_00
But the plot thickens when they get within 45 miles of the South Pole because now they have to choose what to do because they have perfect weather conditions and perfect sledding conditions.

00:46:08 Speaker_00
So they could, if they break the rule one time, make it to the South Pole in a single day. And to make the decision harder, they don't know where the British team is for all they know the British team is ahead of them.

00:46:20 Speaker_00
That's a good moment to pause and just reflect on our own mindset. What would we do? What does the insecure overachiever do? Do you push? Do you pace? I've asked audiences this all over. 85% or above will admit, including me, to push. Why?

00:46:42 Speaker_00
Because that's the mindset, because we really genuinely believe maximum effort equals maximum results. Okay, well, they don't. They pace it still, takes them three days, they get to the South Pole, they've beaten the British team by more than 20 days.

00:46:59 Speaker_00
That's not what should happen. Every insecure overachiever knows that's not what should happen. That's not how the world works, and yet it is.

00:47:09 Speaker_00
Eventually the British team make it there as well, but they're so burned out, not one of them make it home alive to England. They all die on what would have been the journey home.

00:47:18 Speaker_00
Whereas in the Norwegian team, their approach allowed them to make the non-trivial 16,000 mile journey home. And when I read the biography of this, The Race to the Poles.

00:47:30 Speaker_00
biographer chooses to describe the progress being made by the Norwegian team with words I find, even to this moment, outrageous. He said, they made progress with, this is his words, without particular effort. I mean, what can you say?

00:47:45 Speaker_00
What can you say about that? It almost knocked me off my chair when I read the words. I mean, I'm in the middle of writing Effortless, so it supports the case I'm making, but it's still an outrageous moment.

00:47:55 Speaker_00
It's the most arduous physical challenge known to humanity. That's why it was so exciting. That's why people were trying to do it.

00:48:02 Speaker_00
And yet their progress was defined, of course, not no effort, but that that wasn't the distinguishing quality of their advancement.

00:48:12 Speaker_00
And in that, I think there is something so real to challenge the thinking that has been absorbed, swallowed almost through the pores of our skin if we're interested in success and achievement. that we have to be going beyond the max.

00:48:27 Speaker_00
When no one is admitting that when you go beyond the max, what's actually happening is that you're setting yourself up for the bust. No one's talking about the bust. I'm training right now for an Ironman, and there's literally a way that you can track

00:48:43 Speaker_00
your actual power over time. And yet you wish it was higher than it is, and there are things you can do to push that number up over a long period of time, but it's what you have.

00:48:54 Speaker_00
And so the reason you want to know this is that when you actually do the Iron Man, You never want to be above your average in the entire race. Because every time you think you're, oh, look, I'm making all this progress. See, look at me.

00:49:06 Speaker_00
I'm passing people and this is what I need. It's like, no, what you're doing is making yourself slower later. You're drawing from a tank. What's that? Yeah, you're drawing from the tank. Right, exactly.

00:49:18 Speaker_00
And so this idea of finding what is your maximum, your optimum, and going back a little ways, like the 85% rule. Go 85% and you'll find you can go further and faster and for longer.

00:49:31 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's fascinating. This has been something that's really captured me this year.

00:49:37 Speaker_01
I think most people probably need to hear David Goggins screaming in their face to go harder, as opposed to Greg McKeown whispering in their ear that they're already enough, on average.

00:49:47 Speaker_01
And, you know, reliably working harder will make pretty much all problems go away in one form or another, but they will make problems go away in the only way the problems can be judged. outwardly.

00:49:57 Speaker_01
It'll achieve more success, it'll get you more renown, it'll get you all of these things, but you might be totally fucking miserable and joyless when you're doing it. And what happens over a long enough timeline?

00:50:06 Speaker_01
What are the prices that you need to pay for that? What relationships blow up? What's the risk of burnout? How quickly do you manage to reach the stars but then you explode upon re-entry?

00:50:15 Speaker_01
You have no ability to do re-entry because you are never able to switch off. I'm going to I'm going to Jamaica for a Sokoku retreat early in the year. So I'm going to do seven days, no phone, no internet, no nothing.

00:50:30 Speaker_01
And that to me, it sounds lovely in advance, but I get the sense that it's maybe going to be like a Navy SEAL hell week when I get there. The most opulent version of a Navy SEAL hell week is I'm in Jamaica.

00:50:44 Speaker_01
But I'm really, really obsessed with this idea that not only the distrusting of the easy, not only the sort of inculcation of the hard, but that for the insecure overachiever, it's the precise opposite piece of advice.

00:50:57 Speaker_01
And on average, maybe more people need to hear it. Maybe more people need to hear somebody telling them that they're lazy and that they're sat on the couch and they need to go to the gym and do the things.

00:51:07 Speaker_01
But for the sort of people that read your work and that listen to this podcast, I really, I really, really want to be a redress to that kind of energy.

00:51:16 Speaker_01
Look, you, you, you need to be able to turn it on and you need to be able to build your capacity to turn it on. That's what training is, right? That's what doing the wattage hours on the bike and sitting on there and all the rest of it.

00:51:25 Speaker_01
But you more than being able to turn it on, you need to turn it off. And I'm a living example of this, man. Like I'm, I'm somebody that has not stopped for seven years doing this project. And I'm now working harder.

00:51:40 Speaker_01
to learn how to not work hard than I ever learned how to actually work hard. Because working hard came easily to me. Working not hard brings up all manner of problems, all manner of challenges. Who am I? Am I falling behind? Does this matter anymore?

00:51:57 Speaker_01
What if people forget me? What if I forget me? My self-worth was wrapped up in how much I achieved this day, and I haven't achieved that much. Well, you meant to not achieve that much. Ah, yeah, I know, but maybe I can go harder.

00:52:06 Speaker_01
Is this a difference between me being a bitch or me actually taking some well-deserved time off? And then you go even deeper than that, and you say, well, no. Am I taking time off simply so I can come back harder? That doesn't seem like time off.

00:52:19 Speaker_01
That's not me actually enjoying joy. That's me using joy as an instrumental good toward another instrumental good. I want an inherent good.

00:52:27 Speaker_01
I want to be able to go away and enjoy this thing for the sake of enjoying this thing, not because I think that Andrew Huberman said a seven-day fucking Sokoka retreat's gonna allow me to do... You know? And, uh... These are the challenges.

00:52:36 Speaker_01
These are the challenges that happen as you get further down the self-growth, self-development journey. They don't get easier, they just get more complex.

00:52:47 Speaker_00
I mean, one way to think about what you just said is, I call it the onion of human systems. And that's, I mean, it's consistent with something we've talked about before, but in any human system, right? So a person is a human system, right?

00:53:03 Speaker_00
That's one way to think about it. A relationship is a human system. It's all of the interaction and it's highly complex. I mean, take a single person. and try to understand everything that's in their mind and how it's all connected.

00:53:18 Speaker_00
That is unbelievably complex. So the complexity, like we live in a ridiculously complex world. And so human systems are ridiculously complex. The problem is,

00:53:30 Speaker_00
If we operate in a way that we only ever at the outer edges of the onion, then we're dealing with the relatively safe and relatively trivial.

00:53:46 Speaker_00
And so, I mean, I think what you're describing in your journey this last year is I've been moving closer to the center in my own life.

00:53:58 Speaker_00
Circumstances are such that it's happening and some of it is just the success itself and going, okay, well, what does it mean? And if I don't have to work for the same reasons I used to have to work, then why do I do that?

00:54:10 Speaker_00
And so it raises questions that are closer to the highest level of vulnerability and highest level of impact possible. Is it the center?

00:54:22 Speaker_00
I sometimes think about this as like the red button at the center, and there's all sorts of protective measures that people employ to avoid going there.

00:54:35 Speaker_00
And I used to think that was sort of fundamentally pretty much just bad, but I understand it more now because it's like, you mess with that thing, you're resetting. That red button's like, there can be unbelievable resets.

00:54:50 Speaker_00
If you reset it stupidly or reactively or something like that, then yeah, I suppose you risk blowing up your life. But let me just describe what I think is down there.

00:55:00 Speaker_00
What I've found down there is that at the center of the center, like the holy of holies of our mind and heart and life, it's a meaning frame. Of course, it's not just one, but there are meaning frames. That is,

00:55:16 Speaker_00
well, what things mean to us, how we, when we're looking at a set of data or circumstances, how we interpret it. And we are, whatever we are, we are meaning machines.

00:55:29 Speaker_00
I mean, we are constantly sort of trying to make sense of where somebody said it that way. What does that mean? Oh, they said it with a slightly different tone of voice. What does that mean? We're constantly trying to map meaning in others and ourselves.

00:55:42 Speaker_00
Here's the thing. It's not just a meaning frame. It's what I've come to describe as a frozen meaning frame. And this is how it works. You have a true frame.

00:55:57 Speaker_00
There's a meaning frame that's based in truth that has got locked like two magnets with something not true. And then because it's happening so deep in us and so subconsciously, we then just move forward in life with that that being locked.

00:56:15 Speaker_00
we don't even know that that's operating us. It's an operating system and it's shaping a hundred decisions, a thousand decisions, and we don't even know why.

00:56:25 Speaker_00
And so then people at the surface are trying to say, well, that habit's not really the habit I want. And let me read a book about habits and then I'll be able to change it and I can move the food out and I can get rid of all the rubbish food.

00:56:36 Speaker_00
And yet somehow I'm always eating food. You know, sometimes, somehow, even though I know all those stuff, I can't stop doing it. Why? because they're operating at the surface. You have to get to the center. Let me give you a single illustration of this.

00:56:49 Speaker_00
I was working with a very intelligent PhD student, great husband, great father, great in his faith, but in his actual career work, he just can't get any motivation. And he's doing really well. He's at one of the top universities.

00:57:05 Speaker_00
So on the surface, again, it looks fine, but he knows inside there's no meaning here. And I can't seem to thrive in this environment. And he doesn't know why.

00:57:15 Speaker_00
So we go through this rapid listening process to be able to go from the surface down, down, down, always knowing, at least I know there's something at the center. We don't know what it is yet. And we find what it is together in about an hour.

00:57:28 Speaker_00
So it was quite rapid. His sister had died when he was young. And when she died, his young version of making sense of this world he's in is the only things that matter in life are my family and my faith.

00:57:46 Speaker_00
Now that makes perfect sense as a 10-year-old or something trying to make sense of his world. And it's not that that's totally false. it's a set of truth mapped like those magnets with something not true. He doesn't even know it's there.

00:58:02 Speaker_00
But here he is as a PhD student at the top university struggling.

00:58:05 Speaker_00
As soon as he worked it out, we were able to zoom in and begin a process of starting to look at it, untangle it, gently separate it, and enable him to operate at a completely different level.

00:58:21 Speaker_00
And that's one illustration, but I have spent the last... I don't even talk about it in either Essentialism or Effortless, really not at all, but that's really been the story of the last 25 years of my life, have been unbelievable moments like that with people one-on-one, sometimes in bigger groups, where you are listening in a way that gets to the heart of the matter.

00:58:46 Speaker_00
these vulnerable but valuable unlocks at the center.

00:58:50 Speaker_00
This is the process I think you're going through, and it will be feeling really messy and really vulnerable, partially because the closer you get, the higher stakes it is, but also because perhaps there hasn't been a structured process to try and make sense of this journey.

00:59:10 Speaker_00
But I think if you think about it more in terms of this onion system, It will help you to go, okay, of course this feels vulnerable, of course this is weird, and you know what you're looking for.

00:59:20 Speaker_00
What are those meaning frames inside, way down, truths matched with untruths that I can start to identify, unlock, and then be able to release a new way of living and operating?

00:59:33 Speaker_01
Let's just revisit that now, again, five years on. Everyone can go back and listen to the first episode we did, which was great, on essentialism. Second episode we did, which was on effortless.

00:59:42 Speaker_01
And, you know, a lot of things have changed for me since the first time that we spoke.

00:59:47 Speaker_01
And I'm interested to get your perspective, having also presumably watched people be introduced to the approach and then grow over time and end up in different sorts of places.

01:00:00 Speaker_01
What are the challenges in remaining an essentialist as your career progresses, as everything gets more, as you get closer toward the outcomes that you want, maybe you surpass the outcomes that you want?

01:00:14 Speaker_01
Take me through the things that people are going to encounter.

01:00:20 Speaker_00
Well, let's level set by saying this, that almost everything that has been written and published, both in the popular press and in academic circles, and certainly online, are advice for how to become successful.

01:00:34 Speaker_00
And almost nothing has been written about what to do once you are. Now, that's a problem. And okay, you can say, well, most people are trying to make the journey from zero to one.

01:00:47 Speaker_00
So maybe the idea is, well, there's a smaller market for the one to infinity market. But I've spent so much of my life working with people in that category that I feel a lot of sympathy and even compassion.

01:01:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, I would say compassion better even than sympathy because because there's a lot of misjudgment, really low quality judgment of people that are successful.

01:01:23 Speaker_00
Because if you're trying to go from zero to one and then somebody's up there and they're in three, four, five, 10, it's like, oh, yeah, they're all right, they're fine, they'll be okay.

01:01:34 Speaker_00
And it's like, that's because they actually don't understand what it is once you start to get there. So, what is someone going to experience?

01:01:43 Speaker_00
They're going to experience, what's that word where you're standing on a high building and you're looking over- Vertigo. Vertigo. The success vertigo is definitely part of the problem. It's just like, whoa, where even am I now?

01:02:00 Speaker_00
I've just been trying to get up here. And now I got up here and now this just feels so strange. And the number of people up here, there's like down there on level one, there was like a million people.

01:02:12 Speaker_00
And then as I got up, as I carried on walking up and going up and up and up, the numbers start siphoning out. And now up here, it's like,

01:02:19 Speaker_00
There's three people up here and they're all really busy doing their thing and I don't know who to talk to or how to operate. And so the loneliness of leadership and the loneliness of success is huge.

01:02:31 Speaker_00
And this is one of the reasons that you see the psychological discombobulation of people that achieve success in a sense overnight, even though they almost have always been working for years to get there.

01:02:42 Speaker_00
But then suddenly it pops, they get into this movie. I had Matthew McConaughey on my podcast and we've remained friends since.

01:02:48 Speaker_00
He's like, the day after the big break happens and the movie comes out, he's like, I walked down the same road the day before and there was two or three people that looked at me and maybe they weren't even really looking at me.

01:03:01 Speaker_00
He says, afterwards, there was two or three people not looking at him and they might've been looking at him. The difference was so different.

01:03:07 Speaker_00
And one of the things he ended up having to do, not immediately, but he took a year or two out of it just to go, okay, I don't even know where I am anymore. And I don't just want to be the rom-com guy.

01:03:18 Speaker_00
So I had to, he like took a sort of connect the dots year or two. And I thought that was pretty, pretty Pressing to him pretty showed a pretty strong degree of foresight to not just become a function of the machine.

01:03:34 Speaker_00
And that's that that's basically what i think it is is that as you're moving up the levels you're building a machine that's gonna produce the thing you want to produce the success and building that system i think is key to getting from zero to one and even beyond.

01:03:50 Speaker_00
there's a certain point at which the machine is working so well, it's like, who's serving who? Did I become the cog? Am I now the node in the system I built and I'm just answering to it? Or am I still the creator?

01:04:08 Speaker_00
And the gravitational pull of success is so strong that it is harder to escape it I mean, truly, success traps are harder to escape than failure traps. Failure traps, you're incentivized to change. Success traps, you're incentivized to carry on.

01:04:25 Speaker_00
And so it takes a greater self-awareness to be able to push apart and not be a cog in the system, but separate and look at the system. Okay, what is happening here? what is the state of affairs? How's it all working?

01:04:44 Speaker_00
And do I want to enter that system again? Or how would I now want to change it for the next 10 years of my life?

01:04:50 Speaker_00
Or the next, in your case, you're saying five years, that's sort of a key metric, the last five years where you were now for the next five years. So I think it's the escape from it

01:05:02 Speaker_00
so that you can start to look at it, not be in the system you've built, but to be able to observe the system. I think about it like the observer's advantage. because we can build really successful complex prisons if we're not careful.

01:05:21 Speaker_00
And so yeah, we built it and it did what we wanted, but then when you get it and you're like, maybe that isn't what I wanted, but I'm still in it now and everyone else seems to want it, so maybe I should want it.

01:05:30 Speaker_00
And so it's all this very confusing sort of multi-mirrored experience that we're having. And so to be able to escape it, to be able to say, look, that is not me.

01:05:40 Speaker_00
That system, that success, that way of working, that way of operating, that is not the real me. The real me is the observer. And that I really think is literally true, right?

01:05:52 Speaker_00
The observer, the fact that we can, for example, if we're having a panic attack, whether because of failure or success, because they can both produce it, the fact that it is psychologically

01:06:05 Speaker_00
possible to actually observe yourself having a panic attack means that the observer isn't having a panic attack and the observer is you. It's such a discovery at any phase of success to discover, oh, I'm not my thoughts and I'm not my life.

01:06:25 Speaker_00
That's just where I am and what's happening right now, but I can observe it. I just think in some ways it's harder to do that as success becomes its own form of noise.

01:06:37 Speaker_00
It's so loud, and there's money involved, and there's fame involved, and there's people involved, and there's criticism involved, and there's opportunity involved, and there's more involved, and all of those things are so loud.

01:06:52 Speaker_00
It's like, how do I get myself to observe again? do I not just get to the next party and the next moment and the next opportunity and the next flight and the next… That's the journey, I think, to help become successful at success.

01:07:08 Speaker_00
And if you think about some of the horror stories of success in the past, and there's a lot to pull from,

01:07:15 Speaker_00
You can see why success can become such a catalyst for failure, because it takes us away from the observer role where we can actually get clarity about our life. What's happening? So what? Now what?

01:07:31 Speaker_00
That question from the observer position seems to be the right process at all levels of success, but man, it's harder at the highest levels.

01:07:40 Speaker_01
The other element is you're learning to say no to things that previously you would have begged to have had the opportunity to say yes to.

01:07:48 Speaker_01
And for every unit of effort that you put in now, however many years hence, the impact that you have is a thousand times or a hundred times what it would have been in the beginning.

01:07:58 Speaker_01
So you're telling me that the pressure and the implications are greater than it's ever been, and the temptation

01:08:06 Speaker_01
uh for distraction is greater than it's ever been right and my resilience is going to be pulled on more by more things than it's ever been and i need to do i need to do all of this i need to spin this thing in a neutral bolt up to make something that's actually what i want and um

01:08:24 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's a fascinating challenge. It's a really fascinating challenge.

01:08:28 Speaker_01
Alex talks about that scene in The Matrix where the woman in the red dress walks past them and Morpheus says, Neo, are you looking at me or are you looking at the woman in the red dress? Turn around.

01:08:39 Speaker_01
And he says, yeah, you have to learn on the come up to be able to ignore a hypothetical 10. He says, yeah, but what about a hypothetical 1,000? Or what about 1,000 hypothetical 1,000s? And that's this ever, it's like reverse habituation.

01:08:55 Speaker_01
You know, you've got the sort of hedonic treadmill. This is like the hedonic no. You need to be able to ever more sensitively say no to ever more attractive things that look ever more enticing, but you need to continue to be able to say no.

01:09:10 Speaker_01
And then, you know, you actually need to be able to pull the trigger and say, well, maybe this is such a step change. Maybe this speaks to me so much. This is the opportunity that I've been looking for. And all of this needs to occur at once.

01:09:22 Speaker_01
And to put the icing on the top of the cake, you need to do all of it while no one gives you sympathy. While everybody says, well, that's a champagne problem. Oh my God, you do too many options. How out of touch? You know, it's so unrealistic.

01:09:35 Speaker_01
Do you not know that people are dying? You don't know that people are in poverty? You go, dude, if you are the sort of person that wants to be successful, this is precisely the sort of problem that you are going to face.

01:09:44 Speaker_01
The only issue is that you're not facing it right now.

01:09:46 Speaker_01
So, yeah, that altogether, the thousand hypothetical 1000s, more impact than you've ever had before, more distraction than you've ever had before, more options than you've ever had before, playing at a level that you've never been at, and you still need to be able to say no.

01:09:59 Speaker_01
It's not easy.

01:10:00 Speaker_00
Well, one thought that comes to mind, or two thoughts, I guess. One is Elon Musk mentioned at one point that for every minute he spends on Tesla, that's worth a million dollars. That's what he estimates. So, think about that.

01:10:15 Speaker_00
It's so easy to be... If a culture gets infected with envy, then what you produce is a lot of immoral pride looking up. Of course, you can have pride looking down. You can be one up because of success and achievement.

01:10:48 Speaker_00
But there is a different kind of pride, right? There's a different kind of ego looking up going, well, look at them. They're all right. And it's easy for them. And if only I had that, then I'd be... So that happens too.

01:11:00 Speaker_00
And I think that's as blind as the opposite because it lacks all the empathy and the complexity of what life is like. Why is it that not 100% of the time, but a very high percent of the time, people that win the lottery discombobulate? Why is that?

01:11:18 Speaker_00
It's worth pausing about because everyone who plays the lottery presumably wants to win and believes that if they win, life will immediately be better for them, and it's not what happens.

01:11:32 Speaker_00
So that's worth thinking about because whether you win the lottery or you just achieve something more than you expected to or things work out for you, you're still in the same situation. And it's like, if you can't manage level one.

01:11:49 Speaker_00
Why do you think you can play at level 1,000?

01:11:52 Speaker_00
If you're in a computer simulation or if you're playing a computer game and you can't do level one yet, if someone just gives you some hack and now you're in a level 100 at the same game, why do you think being at the level means you can perform at the level?

01:12:09 Speaker_00
And so it's a bit of a I would say it's a slightly tragic thing to wake up to and go, oh, I got to this level, whatever that level is now. And now I have to learn a new set of skills and a new way of thinking. Oh, I've got to do it again.

01:12:26 Speaker_01
With no arriving. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again.

01:12:28 Speaker_00
I've got to do it again. Absolutely. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again.

01:12:37 Speaker_00
I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again.

01:12:46 Speaker_00
I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it

01:12:50 Speaker_00
I think the acceptance that everybody faces confusion and a level of chaos every day of their lives, and I was talking to a very successful entrepreneur investor recently who said, Apple, Google, all of the top brands in the world, all of these companies that we think operate in a certain kind of way, he says, when you work there, this is true,

01:13:14 Speaker_00
When you work there, you're just dealing with confusion and chaos every day. That's still what you're managing. And so you are presenting to the world a certain brand.

01:13:22 Speaker_00
And that's not that that's a lie, but somehow in the way it's presented, people can easily assume, well, behind the curtain, everything's smooth. Everyone's no.

01:13:34 Speaker_00
You know tim cook and the executives there and i've worked with enough of the executives to know what i'm talking about with that just dealing constantly with the unknown of that next level of success.

01:13:44 Speaker_00
And so and so upgrading yourself for the current level you're at. Yeah, it's not what we expect. It's not what's expected.

01:13:55 Speaker_01
Just going back to what we were talking about before, this sort of arc from distraction to disorientation. Obviously, we're in a world where technology, social media gives us a lot of access to information.

01:14:07 Speaker_01
It's very easy to make comparisons about what you should be doing versus what others are doing. And it's kind of like option anxiety in a way.

01:14:16 Speaker_01
How do you recommend sifting through the bullshit and determining what information and advice is actually good or bad for us? Should people just turn it all off?

01:14:26 Speaker_01
Basically, to what degree should we be seeking external influence to determine what's right for us to be putting our efforts into?

01:14:36 Speaker_00
I think what you begin with is this assumption that every single person watching this, right? And I suppose it's happening in this moment, right? They're watching or listening to this, two more people sharing thoughts and so on.

01:14:48 Speaker_00
It's like, if you're alive today, you are having more opinion inputs. It's not information overload anymore, right? It's opinion overload. You have more opinion inputs than anybody ever. And it's from people that know you less well.

01:15:06 Speaker_00
than in any other previous era. So the gap and possibility for irrelevance is really high.

01:15:18 Speaker_00
Like if my daughter comes home from school today, and before I even listen to her, I just play a podcast for her, or I just read off of X some statement that someone made, just read it to them.

01:15:37 Speaker_00
What are the chances that what I'm going to share is going to be the most relevant thing that could be said to her in this moment? That's very, very low. And that's sort of the problem.

01:15:47 Speaker_00
So I think you begin by just assuming, oh, you could be below average in your consumption of opinions today, and you'd still have an opinion overload problem.

01:15:58 Speaker_00
So I think with that, I mean, maybe one thing I would recommend to your question, what do you do?

01:16:04 Speaker_00
I think if you fast from social media for a certain period of time, let's say even if you do it once a year, you say, okay, five days, no social media, cut out that noise. You don't have to go to Hawaii to do it, right?

01:16:19 Speaker_00
Like you just go, okay, for one week, I'm just not going to do it. And notice the difference. Notice what happens to your thinking. Notice what you notice. That, to me, is one good rule of thumb.

01:16:35 Speaker_00
I think a second thing that I would recommend is that people… Maybe, again, it's like a once-a-year spring cleaning, but go through everybody you're following and just start from zero.

01:16:48 Speaker_00
Like right now, imagine you weren't following anyone, who would you select to follow? Who are the people now that you think are going to give you the most relevant insight for your life today?

01:16:59 Speaker_00
I think that that idea of starting from zero is a better mindset switch than

01:17:09 Speaker_00
Let's look at the whole list and remove one or two people it's like start the other way around go to zero and see what might be relevant see who now is going to be helping you.

01:17:18 Speaker_00
Go forward what are the impact of these voices been on you on the last year did they help you did they just add more clutter to your life are the things you really care about better. I had Brad Smith on my podcast. He's the president of Microsoft.

01:17:36 Speaker_00
He is one of the only technologists who openly admits to the... Well, he wrote a book about it. It's called Tools and Weapons. And just the admission that all technology can be both, all of it. I've worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years now.

01:17:58 Speaker_00
It is so rare that anyone admits that, especially if they're being paid not to admit it. So you're just always seeing only the upsides.

01:18:07 Speaker_00
Anyway, one of the things that he has said about this, he said, for 100 years, all of the technology that we have has made it easier to connect with people who live far from us at the cost of the people who live closest to us.

01:18:23 Speaker_00
And so you can take that and turn it into a sort of algorithm for life because you can say, oh, right, they only make money if I'm not spending time listening to my wife or my daughter or my son.

01:18:36 Speaker_00
That's the only time any technologist is making money is if I am not doing that communications work, that face-to-face work.

01:18:44 Speaker_00
And as soon as you see that, you're like, oh, well, that makes everything for, well, he's saying a hundred years, but let's just say the last 10 years, that makes the last 10 years make a lot of sense.

01:18:58 Speaker_00
Deep friendships have gone down in every single category, male, female, and all age points. But over the last 10 years, the biggest drop-off has been in men, I think sort of age 30 plus.

01:19:14 Speaker_00
Now, that doesn't mean that they're worse than anybody else, but the drop-off has been higher over that period of time. It's like, well, why is that happening?

01:19:22 Speaker_00
Well, because simultaneously, technology, gaming, social media has had its heyday, uncontrolled growth. So you're making a trade-off.

01:19:34 Speaker_00
You know, I think that if you put sort of all of those together, like maybe give you one more rule, I think it's like technology offered a set time per day. I'm not always great at that, to be honest, but we went through a period over this summer

01:19:54 Speaker_00
when I really was doing it. And immediately the quality of my life went up, immediately. Because what happened is it was like, okay, let's get around and talk and we'll just laugh.

01:20:05 Speaker_00
And maybe we'll go swim and we'll swim together and then we'll just make memories together. And it was the quality of life was immediately improved.

01:20:13 Speaker_00
And it's because we aren't properly aware of this trade-off that technology companies have made effortless for us. know, whatever that device is in our pockets, it's not a phone, right? That's not what it is. Jordan Peterson talks about that.

01:20:28 Speaker_00
Whatever it is, it's not a phone. So I did some thinking after that. Well, what is it? And I think about all my experience in Silicon Valley and I'm like, oh, right. Okay.

01:20:35 Speaker_00
It's a $3 trillion military grade disorientation machine that makes certain people a lot of money at the cost of connection between humans that live together and are close together. That's what it is.

01:20:49 Speaker_00
I'm not saying it's only that or all the time that, that's what I think it is right now.

01:20:55 Speaker_01
What an apocalyptic way to end. I love it. Greg McKeown, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, honestly, you've been a huge influence on me. It's so great to have you in my life. It's so great that you put this stuff out and I love the fact you've revisited it.

01:21:06 Speaker_01
What have you got? You've got new things, new books, new bits and pieces. What should people go and check out?

01:21:11 Speaker_00
Look, Essentialism 10-year anniversary, that's updated.

01:21:15 Speaker_00
Of course, the Essentialism planner, if people, depending when this airs, if they go to essentialism.com, there's a whole set of additional tools that couldn't make it into the planner that people can get and so on, totally free.

01:21:31 Speaker_00
And a really high quality course, if you go to gregmccuhan.com, in 10 seconds you can sign up. It's called Less But Better, and it takes the best of essentialism and effortless into this 30-day course.

01:21:45 Speaker_00
It's 10 classes spread out over that time, and it's just, where do we begin? Here we are, we've talked about so many things, it's totally overwhelming, but where do you begin? Start with this Less But Better course.

01:21:57 Speaker_00
I think those are three things to go with.

01:21:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think that going into the new year, that planner is great timing. And I think a lot of people... Everyone should go back and listen to the first ever episode that I did with you. Just search Greg McEwing, Modern Wisdom, and it'll come up.

01:22:11 Speaker_01
It'd be kind of funny to see how much both of us have changed. You haven't aged. I don't know whether either of us have aged, actually. But I think it's a good time. I think it's really, really good timing. New year, some structure.

01:22:22 Speaker_01
I'm a big fan of a planner. I've used them a lot. And I've got your new one downstairs. So that'll be the first 90 days of next year. We'll be used to that. Greg, until next time, I'm really excited to see what you write next.

01:22:32 Speaker_01
And like I say, I'm genuinely so thankful that you're in my life. I'm so thankful for the work that you do. Yeah, likewise. Thank you, Chris.