#355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism

"If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will."— Greg McKeown Greg McKeown (@GregoryMcKeown https://twitter.com/gregorymckeown?lang=en) is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Less/dp/0804137382/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and the founder of McKeown, Inc, a company with a mission to teach Essentialism to millions of people around the world. Their clients include Adobe, Apple, Airbnb, Cisco, Google, Facebook, Pixar, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter, VMware and Yahoo!, among others. McKeown is an accomplished public speaker and has spoken to hundreds of audiences around the world, and in 2012, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Please enjoy! 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Greg McKeown?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country

• 1:09Tim Ferriss?

  on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on-demand, and you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip-hop, rock and roll, or say, low-impact versus high-intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers, and I tend to do on-demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over, but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities, so you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time,

• 1:54Tim Ferriss?

  and that will help, I would say catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now, that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed. With how motivating it was and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So, check it out. Discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited

• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:01Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by WordPress.com. I love WordPress. I have used it for so many years. It's my go-to platform for blogging and creating websites. I use WordPress.com for everything, every day. My site, tim.blog is built on it. The websites for my books, including Tools of Titans, Tribe of Mentors, it's all on WordPress.com. And the founder, Matt Mullenweg, one of my close friends, has appeared on this show many times. Just search Matt Mullenweg Tequila Ferris for quite an exciting time. Whether you're looking to create a personal blog, a business site, or both, you can make a really big impact right out of the box when you build on WordPress.com. And you'll be in good company. It's used

• 3:44Tim Ferriss?

  by The New Yorker, Jay-Z, Beyonce, 538, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a handful. And one of my friends at Google, who shall remain nameless, has told me that WordPress.com offers the "best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable," end quote. And it's one of the many reasons that nearly 30% of the internet is run on WordPress. You do not need experience or to hire someone. That's perhaps the best part. WordPress.com guides you through the entire experience. They have hundreds of designs and templates that you can use. And it's easy to get started.

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  There's no need to worry about security upgrades, hosting, any of that. They offer 24/7 support and they're very, very responsive. If you have questions, they get right back to you. And this allows you to create the highest quality with the least amount of headache and friction. So if you're building a website, period, when my friends come to me and ask what I use, what I recommend they use, the answer is wordpress.com. So check it out. If you want to get started today, learn more with a 15% discount off any new plan. Go to wordpress.com/tim to create your website and find the plan that's right for you. So learn more. Take a look. Wordpress.com/tim for 15% off a brand new website.

• 5:03Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Greg McKeown. That is spelled M-C-K-E-O-W-N. Greg is the author of the New York Times bestseller Essentialism, subtitle, "The Disciplined Pursuit of Less," and the founder of McKeown, Inc., a company with a mission to teach essentialism to millions of people around the world. Their clients include Adobe, Apple, Airbnb, Cisco, Google, Facebook. You may have recognized a few of these. Pixar, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter, VMware, Yahoo, and many others. McKeown is an accomplished public speaker and has spoken to hundreds of audiences around the world.

• 5:47Tim Ferriss?

  And in 2012, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Originally from London, England, McKeown now lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and their four children. He can be found @GregoryMcKeown on Twitter and @GregMcKeown.com. Greg, welcome to the show.

• 6:05Greg McKeown?

  It's so great to be with you, Tim.

• 6:07Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm looking here at a table in front of me with many, many pieces of paper spread out. And they consist of printed out highlights from your book. Your book is one of the most highlighted books that I have on my Kindle. And I wanted to, first and foremost, thank you for writing it because I found it tremendously helpful personally, and it has become one of the few books that I revisit on a regular basis. So first off, I just wanted to express gratitude for you having written the book.

• 6:42Greg McKeown?

  Well, that's awfully nice of you to do that, to say that. That's very humbling. Here I was thinking we were gonna have a bad conversation, and now I feel like now I feel like we might go somewhere.

• 6:54Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, the secret to happiness, low expectations. So it's nowhere to go but up from here. And it's also a book I mention in that way because I don't want to create the illusion that I have some type of set it and forget it solution where the setting of priority or priorities is not an ongoing project at all times, or at least very frequently, something that needs to be revisited. So I'm looking forward to digging into a number of different topics and portions of the book, and as well as many things that are not in

• 7:37Tim Ferriss?

  the book. But perhaps, for those people who don't know, could you just tell a little bit about the genesis of essentialism, whether that is sort of the concept or the focus itself, or the book?

• 7:51Greg McKeown?

  Well, I mean, one of the initiating moments was when I received an email from my colleague at the time saying, "Look, Friday between one and two would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby, because, you know, I need you to be at this client meeting." And, you know, especially in hindsight, I'm sure they were joking, or at least half joking about that, but somehow, I was enough stressed in that moment, or at that time, between all the different competing expectations, responsibilities, that as we go into the hospital, it's Thursday night, we're in the middle of, you know, the daughter's born in the middle of the night, Friday comes along, and I am still feeling torn. And I'm still feeling,

• 8:36Greg McKeown?

  "Look, I probably ought to go. How can I go? How can I keep everybody happy? How can I, how can I do both?" And so, you know, to my shame, I went to the meeting.

• 8:47Greg McKeown?

  I I remember afterwards uh being told uh you know, look, the client will respect you for the choice you just made. Uh and I don't know that they did um yeah, I do know that they did feel that. The look on their faces didn't evince that sort of confidence to me, but but even if they had, you know, it's obvious to you, to me, to everybody listening, that I made a fool's bargain. Um yeah, I violated something more important, more essential for something less important, but less essential. And what I learned from that was the simplest of lessons,

• 9:24Greg McKeown?

  which is if you don't prioritize your life, um someone else will. And and so that gave me fire for the deed to to really dig into the subject, to try and understand better why it is that we we make these kinds of prioritization decisions and what we can do to to be perhaps better at it uh and to actually uh live our life according to the things that we've identified as mattering most.

• 9:52Tim Ferriss?

  And at that time, on that Friday, when you took that meeting, what type of what type of work were you doing? What was your profession?

• 10:00Greg McKeown?

  I've spent uh you know, twenty years in this field generally, so that's uh leadership development, it's uh i- it's writing, it's research, uh it's it's I was working with Silicon Valley companies at the time. And so so there was a secondary part to the story, which is that um that I was already working with these companies and noticed a predictable pattern there at a professional level, which is that these companies in the early days would be very focused on, you know, this is what we're trying to do, it's sort of a phase of clarity. And that clarity would.

• 10:38Greg McKeown?

  Lead to success. There was real alignment between if you knew exactly what you were trying to do at the right time, then you could generate success. And then I noticed that success bred lots of options and opportunities for these companies. Well, that sounds like the right problem to have, but it does in fact turn out to be a problem if it leads to what Jim Collins has called the undisciplined pursuit of more. If these companies, and they often would, fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more, it would lead them to make decisions in such a way that they would plateau in their progress, or even start to fail altogether. So I I named that the the success paradox. And so it was absolutely the combination

• 11:20Greg McKeown?

  of observing this phenomenon inside of these organizations, and then suddenly observing it in my own life, that I realized, oh, this isn't a business phenomenon, it's a human phenomenon. And that there's a pattern here that I think I've been able to put the pieces together. I can see that is is is highly relevant for people who are otherwise successful people. Because the very nature of success is that you will have this basic problem. You'll be stretched too thin at work, at home, both, and and beyond. You'll you'll feel often busy but not productive. You will feel many different pursuits hijacking your agenda each day. And and you'll just have more that you want to do than you can

• 12:05Greg McKeown?

  do. So that's, in fact, the normal scenario for successful people. And so, you know, but but I felt like it was an underserved problem, because most of the literature on success is how to become successful in the first place. But for many, many people, the the real problem is what to do once you are. Even if you don't feel very successful, as soon as you have more options and opportunity, you know, that you can pursue, you need a new way of handling it than being in a scenario where you have no options at all. So so this is where I see the book, you know, came into its own is is it's really one of the few books connected to the subject of success that's about what to do once

• 12:49Greg McKeown?

  you are successful.

• 12:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to underscore, at least my interpretation of that, which is by saying successful.

• 13:00Tim Ferriss?

  You don't necessarily mean someone who's making a million dollars a year, or a company that's generating a billion dollars in turnover a year. But in the simplest terms, it's someone who has more options than they can execute on in their totality, right? And if we think about power on some level being having options,

• 13:24Tim Ferriss?

  there comes a point when you have more options than you can possibly metabolize and use across the board. So then you start to have to winnow that down. And in that case, this is where principles of, say, essentialism are very helpful. And I thought that we might explore a little bit one of the reframes that I think is very clever and very effective, which relates to the endowment effect.

• 13:57Tim Ferriss?

  Could you talk, and I can certainly, I have it right in front of me, if you'd like me to jump in as a reminder.

• 14:05Greg McKeown?

  If you're more familiar with essentialism than I am.

• 14:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, just in case, just in case.

• 14:09Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I write.

• 14:11Greg McKeown?

  It's a reasonable possibility.

• 14:12Tim Ferriss?

  I write very long-winded books and I've done them over a pretty long period of time. So every once in a while I get quoted and I feel lost. So if that happens, let me know. I have everything in front of me. But could you talk about the endowment effect and how you turn around questions people might ask themselves about certain things? Whether that is something they own or an opportunity that gets presented to them? Because I think this is really important.

• 14:36Greg McKeown?

  Well, let's use a metaphor to get to the endowment effect. The, you know, our closet is a pretty good metaphor for the problem and what to do about it. So for a lot of people listening, even as you say, they don't feel incredibly successful financially, incredibly successful in all the things in their life. Right, they probably still have more things in their closet than they actually can use usefully. It's a bit cluttered, maybe it's a lot more than a bit cluttered. I mean, I talked to somebody not so long ago and they said, oh Greg, my closet, they said, you've identified the pain point. They said, I have my closet organized by decade.

• 15:23Greg McKeown?

  So they they they had organized it, but they it it but it is sort of, you know, they I said you don't have a closet, you have a museum, man. And uh and and you know, they have the seventies and the eighties and that she's not using any of these things, she just has them. And and that's an organized version of the problem, which is that we just have so much stuff. And that is true in the physical stuff, it's literally true in the closet, but in the closet of our lives, it is equally true. Now, just staying with this metaphor for a moment, eh eh almost everybody has had a moment where they said, I've had enough. I'm going to organize my closet and they, you know, they begin the process and they take an item off the shelf, off the floor. And they say, you know, I I it's time to just, you know, get rid of this item.

• 16:06Greg McKeown?

  And in the moment of picking it up and reflecting on it, as if to give it away, something mysterious, almost magical seems to happen to many of us. Which is eh eh in that moment, we're looking at, we think, well, you know, yeah, but eh. I I I, you know, I I I don't I'm not sure I want to get rid of it, right, I might, I could use it sometime in the future. Eh, you know, and so and so gave it to me and I, so I, and and and there's something. Eh somehow, in the act of giving it away, it's harder to give it away than it was before we picked it up to give it away. So what's going on? And as it turns out, there's a a heuristic, a brain heuristic, a a predisposition that we have.

• 16:48Greg McKeown?

  Um to all physical objects in our life and also in fact, all the the the opportunities that we have in our life too. And and it is this, it's that we value things more because we have them. Uh a- and that means, that's a good thing in certain situations. I mean, that's why you essentially, you know, owning a home is generally a good thing because people look after the home better. Eh it explains eh the phenomenon of why nobody in the history of the whole world has washed their own rental car. It it you know, it's a positive phenomenon until and unless we overvalue something that we really ought not

• 17:29Greg McKeown?

  to have in the closet at all, it ought to go. It is actually not useful to us. It's not valuable to us, but we are overvaluing it. And therefore keeping it. So it's overvaluing because we own it, or it's endowed to us. So in our life, that is an incredibly real problem. Uh, we we have, um, you know, I'll give you an illustration. It's not in the book, but it's it's it's something that happened to me that really hits a chord and it it happened when I was staring uh, at myself in the mirror. Um, dressed from head to toe in a stormtrooper outfit.

• 18:11Tim Ferriss?

  Where all the good epiphanies start.

• 18:14Greg McKeown?

  Right. And I'm looking at myself and I realize uh, uh, two things. I realize that I have been thinking of this moment in some small degree for thirty years. This is true. I realize I'm standing there staring. I'm I'm I'm in, you know, I'm in the Halloween store, you know. This is not a cheap suit that I'm trying on. And I remember that this is goes back to like when I'm ten years old. And, you know, maybe Return of the Jedi come out or one of the Star Wars movies and my older brother, one of my older brothers had said to me in passing, but with quite a lot of enthusiasm, wouldn't it be great to own?

• 18:58Greg McKeown?

  You know, a stormtrooper outfit, just like from the movies, like really like the real thing. And somehow that got lodged in me. Well, that's an that's an idea. That's see, that's something you should pursue. Yeah, that's that would be so cool. My older brother thinks so, so it must be so. And and somehow in the back of my mind, there it lives unquestioned for thirty years. And finally, I'm in the store, uh, you know, thinking about whether to buy this. And in that moment, I actually have a sort of did have a eureka moment, which is there is no part of me that wants this. It stayed with me, but I don't, and my forty year old self does not need this one. This is this is ridiculous. What I why are you in this suit right now?

• 19:40Greg McKeown?

  And and and so I I was able to sort of separate myself from uh from the the the moment. And that's exactly what I'm advocating here. I'm saying that for a lot of us, we have a lot of, it became a shortcut phrase. My wife will say it sometimes to me now, is it, is that a stormtrooper that you're pursuing? Is that stormtrooper opportunity that you you used to think this was the thing? But you're pursuing it because you just sort of have it, you you caught on to it. You you feel a sense of this endowment effect, the sense of it's my opportunity, it's my thing, it's my goal. And and it's no, it's not serving me anymore. I think a lot of people have a lot of stormtroopers in their life.

• 20:22Greg McKeown?

  And and so it's it's not about the the closet, it's it's it's not about the stormtrooper. It's about the stuff that really we need to get past and let go so that we can pursue the right things now. Not just the things that we are pursuing because at one time we wanted to pursue them or one time they came into our life.

• 20:42Tim Ferriss?

  And and it seems like there are a number of ways to identify these, whether they're stormtroopers or items, opportunities that we are endowing with greater value because we have them. Because we're I we either own them or being presented with them, right? So you could take, let's just say that sweater from Aunt Mildred or whatever it is. And rather than asking, how much do I value this item? You turn it around and ask, if I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it? Right? And that turnaround seems really important to me. Or in the case of opportunities, and I'm quoting directly from you here, but you know, how will I feel if I miss out on this opportunity? Instead of that, if I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?

• 21:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right? That strikes me as a very powerful reframe and is certainly also, I think it was Andy Grove at Intel, who also used this, and and there are many other business examples. But if we if we were not already in this line of business, how much would we pay uh to pursue it? Or would we pursue it in the first place, right? As as a way of pruning. Activities and conserving resources so they can be applied to the most important things.

• 21:54Greg McKeown?

  Yes, and the idea is to trick your brain into putting it in the position where you don't own the thing. Where you don't have the opportunity. So you have to reflect on it afresh. You have to say, okay, starting now, do I want this thing now? Do I, how hard would I go after this now if I didn't own it, if I didn't have it? And it helps us to evaluate things more without this inflation of the fact that we own it. Which is of course the endowment effect.

• 22:30Tim Ferriss?

  You created, as I understand it, a class at Stanford GSB at the business school?

• 22:35Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Tim Ferriss?

  Did that, could you describe that class and the curriculum? I know nothing about this. It was just mentioned very briefly in passing in some of the reading that I was doing in preparation for this, but could you describe the class and the intent and the curriculum of that class?

• 22:56Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, it was co-created at the design school at Stanford. And the, I mean, the intent of it was, look, could you, you know, would people be interested in really coming together to design their life? Not just using design principles, which, you know, design thinking has enormous application of value to our lives, but particularly design thinking with an essentialist lens. So if you had to come together and you had to design your life, and we did it in design pairs or even in design threes, where you would be designing for each other.

• 23:42Greg McKeown?

  A life around the most important things, the essential things. And if we haven't made it clear, it ought to be made clear that this is what essentialism is. It's to figure out what is essential. It is to eliminate what is not essential. And it is to then build a system that makes execution as effortless as possible. And that's exactly what we were doing in that class. So people would come and they would work together to get greater clarity about what really mattered versus what was just good in their life. You know, what those very few highest values are, highest value projects,

• 24:25Greg McKeown?

  you know, most important contributions. And then together to work out, how can you start to trade off the things that are of least value, that still play a role in your life, that is still the stormtroopers, still taking up energy, resources, attention, that aren't really the right things. And so this is what we were doing. We had a variety of exercises for trying to get to that.

• 24:53Tim Ferriss?

  Could you walk us through any of those exercises or describe them? Because one of the topics I was going to get to, of course, is how to answer the question, you know, am I investing in the right activities? Or how to determine that? Because there are cases, let's just say, in a sales organization where you have very clear measurables, very clear deliverables, and it's perhaps rather straightforward. Then you have, just say, solo entrepreneurs or early-stage entrepreneurs where they're wearing seventeen different hats at a given time. And they might actually have some trouble identifying the answer to this. So could you walk us through any exercises that you use with the students?

• 25:33Greg McKeown?

  Yes, I would love to do that. And I'd love to do it in a different way. Rather than to talk about the abstract or even just to tell a story about someone. Let's do it like if you're game. I'll go through an exercise that grew out of those experiences, but with you right now. Are you game?

• 25:51Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do it.

• 25:52Greg McKeown?

  Uh, okay. It's this is simple.

• 25:54Tim Ferriss?

  At the risk of embarrassing myself, I will agree.

• 25:57Greg McKeown?

  I don't think you will, and you don't. You and anybody listening doesn't, doesn't have to overthink any of these questions. This is, this is really simple, but, but it cuts away all of the, the, the concepts and just gets moving. So, okay. So Tim, just in your life right now, for real, something, think of something, tell me something that is essential to you, uh, very important to you, that you feel you're under investing in right now. It, it really matters, but you know, you're not really putting the resources you wished you were behind it. Go.

• 26:31Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Uh, I would say

• 26:36Tim Ferriss?

  I'm investing in it pretty well, but probably not as much as I should, uh, or feel that I, that I should. Uh, it would be experimenting with and researching different modalities for addressing

• 26:52Tim Ferriss?

  psychoemotional trauma, things that I have not addressed in previous books. So the, the, the emotional component of life that subconsciously very often drives so many of our behaviors and patterns. It would be doing personal experiments related to that. And, uh, I've already done that over the last four or five years, but really investing in organizing all of that.

• 27:17Greg McKeown?

  Hmm. Now, okay, so, so just clarifying, you, it sounded to me like there's a future book here.

• 27:24Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, potentially, potentially. It's, it's something I didn't think I was going to write for probably a few decades, but it's, I've put it on a closer burner. It's not on the back burner, it's still on a burner, but it's, it's been pushed from the back burner to a front burner.

• 27:38Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, interesting. You, you, you, you can see that if you could identify the tools, the concrete ways of handling this kind of deeper trauma, I'm reading into this now, but that you've experienced, that you know other people have experienced, uh, that, that that could be incredibly valuable to people.

• 28:04Greg McKeown?

  Uh, because because it's actually so much more universal than is obvious, right? It's not talked about a lot, but it's really universal challenge that we've gone through traumas and we don't know, we don't have the skills and the tools to know what to do with that.

• 28:20Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 28:20Greg McKeown?

  So it so it produces suffering.

• 28:23Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. That's right. And in fact, uh, many of the books that I've written, while I think, uh, very effective for helping people to build businesses, focus on physical performance or improve physical performance and appearance and so on. Can those same objectives can be used as salves or numbing agents to avoid the root psychological or emotional traumas that are causing self-destructive behaviors? Uh, if that makes any sense. So, yeah.

• 28:58Greg McKeown?

  Oh, it makes total it makes total sense and we should go there for a moment because as a friend of mine once said to me, you know, uh, success traps are often harder to get out of than failure traps.

• 29:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 29:12Greg McKeown?

  And so and so and so what you're saying makes perfect sense to me that that even a deliberate intense pursuit of, uh, of of good objectives to be successful to to could could in fact be, as you're as you're as you're saying, they could be just uh, a form of being stuck in a different, more positive looking coping mechanism.

• 29:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 29:38Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Tim Ferriss?

  And and I should say also, I'll let you pick where we want to go. That would be one. That would be one area I'm not investing enough in potentially. The other would be, uh, rehabilitation of a a sacroiliac injury that I have in my hip. So be those are those are two options. We can go whichever direction you want.

• 29:58Greg McKeown?

  Um. I I I don't know, I I kind of am looking to you for which which one's the most important, but I.

• 30:06Tim Ferriss?

  The first, the first one, I think.

• 30:07Greg McKeown?

  The first one, let's then let's stay with that then, because because um, you know, what what I'm exploring a little with you here, just to be sort of transparent on the process is why does it matter so much to you, right? You've said it's essential, you said this thing matters. And and we ought to identify then really, you know, why, and and maybe we're as far as we need to go on that, but I sense in you. It it's it's a pretty deep why for you, you know, whether we have words for it or not, it's like, no, that, you know, I've, maybe it's like this, it's. Uh, all of the books I've done before are really preparing for this.

• 30:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Greg McKeown?

  That those have all given a platform, you know, this is millions of people, literally, right? And and and, you know, and well done, you you built. You built this extraordinary platform to be able to reach people, make a difference. And. And now what? What what what is the what is the the highest or deepest contribution that can then be made? And as as you're doing it, I feel like there's a sort of. Uh, you know, is that quote that which is most personal is most universal?

• 31:13Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 31:13Greg McKeown?

  And there's something about that here, which is, which is okay, if we get really honest and and raw. We find that there's a lot of unresolved, a lot of unresolved trauma. And now we're riffing here a little bit be beyond the process, but but, I mean, this is something that's very like. Yeah, this is important to me, the subject that we're on too.

• 31:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Greg McKeown?

  And so I can relate to it in this way. Uh, one of the things I've begun doing research about is um, is intergenerational trauma.

• 31:45Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:45Greg McKeown?

  And how and how, even if in our own lives, we go, I I think my life has been pretty good and life has worked out and so on. What you find is that there can be uh, that that it can be multiple generations of an of unresolved. Issues that manifest wordlessly in our own lives. Because no one talked about them.

• 32:12Greg McKeown?

  So the ramifications are real, but we don't have language. That's the worst scenario to be in.

• 32:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 32:19Greg McKeown?

  Is to have, is to have the, the problem without any ability to, to even talk about it, to address it, to, to even know that it's really there until we have language for things that are not even that real.

• 32:29Tim Ferriss?

  Or, or, or the ability to feel that something is off and an inability to identify what it is, even, even in the absence of words. So, so the,

• 32:41Tim Ferriss?

  what I would put together would be a, from my perspective, or from my experience, a comprehensive description of my personal journey, but also the tools that I've found to be most effective, not only for myself, but for other people.

• 32:58Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Tim Ferriss?

  So yes, that's very, very important to me.

• 33:02Greg McKeown?

  Okay. So, so let me ask you another question about this, that, that, which is what would, what is success for you? And I don't mean success like the, okay, the book is this or that, you know, that's not even, that's not even necessarily the thing at this point. It's, it's the, you know, you could go down this journey and conclude, okay, no, this isn't the right time for it and so on. But, but what is your daily amount of time that you would need to invest in this for you to say to me, I now feel like I'm not under investing anymore, you know, I, I, I now feel, so what's the delta between where you are right now and a daily amount?

• 33:41Greg McKeown?

  And where you say, no, I'm not perfect. It's not like I feel amazing about how much time I'm spending, but I feel good about it. It's not under invested anymore.

• 33:49Tim Ferriss?

  This, this is a really good question and I, I want to explain why I, I struggle perhaps a bit to answer it. And I, I think this will also be a struggle that applies to other people. This, this is a, this is a project where I don't yet feel I have gathered enough.

• 34:09Tim Ferriss?

  Research to proceed to the writing and synthesis phase, even though I've collected notes for almost five years. And so there's the question of, am I ready? Or am I not ready? Or am I simply putting off the next step because I am fearful of something? I would say, once I get into synthesis phase, and I am doing a lot of experiments and have for the last four or five years, I would be putting in four to five hours a day, minimum, on this to feel fully vested.

• 34:49Tim Ferriss?

  I can't, I find it very difficult to put together prose in any fashion, or attempt to put it together for more than three or four hours a day. So probably, probably, yeah, three to, three to five hours per day, but I would be thinking about it.

• 35:05Greg McKeown?

  All the time.

• 35:06Tim Ferriss?

  All day, every day. It would be running in the background. Right.

• 35:09Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, Seinfeld was asked recently, how many hours did he spend working on his, the recent one hour special he'd done for Netflix? How long, how many hours did it take for him to do it? And he said, he said, he said, that's like asking God how long it takes for him to, to grow an oak tree. He's like, like, all the time. That's what he's doing all the time. He's just growing trees in the world and every, he said, that's what I'm doing. It's not five hours or 10 hours, it's my whole life, that's what I'm doing. So I understand that from what you're saying. Okay, so that, that's interesting. So, so of the two, you just said two interesting things, though. You said, you said, I don't know what it is that's really keeping me back from doing it.

• 35:53Greg McKeown?

  You know, so you don't, there's a, there's a question mark here around, do I spend time on more research?

• 36:02Greg McKeown?

  Per day.

• 36:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 36:04Greg McKeown?

  Or do I spend, do I shift? You know, you've got a gathering of research phase and then there's a, I'm gonna consciously be applying it and writing about my applications. So it's sort of a two-phase process that you're following, overlapping but still distinct. Um, and, and to answer my question about how much time you need to spend, you have to know which phase you're in.

• 36:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right. I, I would also say if, if this is something that's useful fodder, that, that the fear may be as simple as fucking it up because I've built this book up in my mind for the last five years as, as almost certainly the most important book I will have written to date and may ever write. And there is a, there's a, there's a very clear fear of fumbling the ball when I've been given a fantastic opportunity to do some good. So I think there's that as well. There's a fear of fucking it up.

• 37:00Greg McKeown?

  Oh, absolutely. I, I, I completely relate to that. I have just barely begun in this very early process of working on a, on, on a book and, and, uh, and my mantra to myself for quite a while with this has been, don't write a rubbish book.

• 37:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Greg McKeown?

  And, uh, and, and actually just recently, I think I say, sharing that with my wife and she's like, yeah, you might want to come up with another mantra.

• 37:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 37:28Greg McKeown?

  And, and she's right. I thought it was kind of funny, it kind of cute me say that, I don't want to write a rubbish book. It's not cute inside, it's a real fear. I mean, you don't, you, when you, when something's important and we, and, and frankly, when from my point of view, uh, it's the easiest thing in the world to write a bad book. Right, that, that's, that's like, that's what happens in fact, and, and, and often after a book that's been successful, the next book's very hard for people to, to write. So, so that alone is a fear, but then you've got this double whammy fear because you're going, it matters so much. I cannot get this wrong. I cannot mess this up.

• 38:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Greg McKeown?

  And, and, and, and I think you can sense, but I'm, I'm putting words in your mouth, but I think you can sense that that may be. Just an obstacle that's, that's, that's keeping you back. But it, it isn't really real. Like, you're not gonna write a rubbish book. But you, but you, you worry that you are, and that worry is holding you back. Does that sound right? What are your thoughts?

• 38:30Tim Ferriss?

  That, that sounds right to me. It's helpful just to talk through, frankly. So this is, this is valuable for me. And your, your mention of the, the mantra replacement that your wife suggested made me think of something I was told, and I can't recall the attribution, so someone can find this certainly, but that worrying is like praying for what you don't want. So in a sense.

• 38:54Greg McKeown?

  That's brilliant.

• 38:54Tim Ferriss?

  I have the wrong, the antecedent framing that I have right now is, is preventing me from, from taking the, the most essential next actions. Okay, so I can see, I, I, I, I accept and I agree that it, that's probably a phantom worry. Like, I'm not, if, if I wrote a book that I felt was rubbish, I also wouldn't publish it, right?

• 39:18Greg McKeown?

  You wouldn't publish it? So there's no, there's, there really isn't, that fear isn't real?

• 39:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Greg McKeown?

  What, what, what's the better mantra for you?

• 39:26Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the first thing that came to mind was good now is better than perfect later, since there is a lot of suffering in the world. And not that I'm playing savior or anything like that, but I've experienced a lot of pain myself and found things that work. So there's an argument to be made that the sort of compounding of suffering over time would mean that if I put out a book that is eighty percent of what it could be in ten years, it's still better that I put it out now.

• 39:56Tim Ferriss?

  That, that may not be the, the right mantra, but just as a enabling belief, that could be one or assumption.

• 40:02Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, yeah, I like, I like that. Um, it, it. I'm one, I'm curious about whether it's perfectionism that is the barrier.

• 40:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I, I think that's absolutely one.

• 40:16Greg McKeown?

  You think it is?

• 40:16Tim Ferriss?

  Well, well, I, I cut short your multiple choice question.

• 40:20Greg McKeown?

  That's all right, that's all right. Yeah, but it feels like that is definitely an element. But the second element is, is, is it? Is it just the very subject itself? It's just like, oh, this must, I guess that is a form of perfectionism still, isn't it? It's just, it matters so much. It can really make a difference, but if I don't get it right. What, what? If you don't get it right, what, what happens then? Let's say, let's say you didn't get it right. What, what's, what's the fear really?

• 40:47Tim Ferriss?

  What's the fear really? Uh.

• 40:52Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, that I let people down, that I receive widespread criticism because I didn't do enough due diligence to cover all the bases and to test the different modalities that I should. Uh, part, part of the big challenge in this particular arena for me, the subject matter, which is so broad, is that unlike physical performance, where you have many measurables, unlike in the realm of startups, where you have key metrics and so on, which are measurables. A lot of this emotional terrain is very squishy.

• 41:32Tim Ferriss?

  There's a lot of bullshit and a lot of charlatans and a lot of, uh, I would say, imprecise thinking and faulty logic that needs to be sifted through. So it's, it's, it's been a very challenging realm in which to do testing and research, if that makes sense.

• 41:53Greg McKeown?

  Oh, yeah, makes perfect sense. We, we, we've got, we're, we're like in the germ theory era.

• 41:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 41:59Greg McKeown?

  Of, of emotional traumas.

• 42:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Greg McKeown?

  Where just, just, you know, it's a wild, wild west in comparison to what eventually we'll know and we'll learn about the subject. Uh, okay, so, so, so, so let's say, let's say you, that you are, uh, this is too bombastic way of saying it, but let's say you've kind of been a little bit hiding behind this concern, this, this fear. And, and, and we're gonna now shift towards phase two of the project, right? Where it's, where, okay, I don't have it all. Of course I don't have it all. There is no such thing as that, you know, uh, eighty percent is gonna be good enough, my mantra. Eighty percent, uh, if it's eighty percent good, I'm going to be able to move forward. Um, so let's say you do move to the second thing. You said you identified three to five hours.

• 42:46Greg McKeown?

  Um, is that additional three to five hours of, from where you've been before? Is, uh, are you spending some time on an hour? So now you have to add another two hours? What, what's the?

• 42:58Tim Ferriss?

  I'm spending the way I I've been working on it. And my apologies for folks if this is, if this is not immediately seemingly apply to what you're doing. But hopefully this is helpful just to hear people or to hear the two of us work through this process wise. The research phase for me is very chunky, if that makes sense. It's two weeks of twenty four seven and then four weeks of trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. And it's, it's not a daily, slow and steady process. Whereas the, if I were to say enough is enough, Tim, you could always do more research. This is a defense mechanism you're using to put off starting.

• 43:42Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, the composition of the book, start the composition of the book. Then I would get it into a phase where I'm looking at that three to five hours a day on a regular, consistent basis. So I would say I'm effectively starting at zero because I'm in phase one. Where for instance, uh, ending about a week ago, I was two weeks off the grid. Doing pure experimentation and research and gathering notes. So I have that, but then for the last week, I have effectively spent zero time on it. Because I am in the down, the downshifted phase. Without an active experiment.

• 44:26Greg McKeown?

  Okay, so, so before we can move on, this is all, everything we've done is really covering the first phase. They're not equally, they're not equal phases, but phase one of applying essentialism is what is essential? And that includes, why does it matter? What does success look like? What's the, the thing you want to shift to and so on? So it's, it's, you know, and I, and I always want to emphasize this small side point, which is that sometimes when people, even when they read essentialism, or certainly if they've read, heard about it, just at the peripheral level, they think I've written a book about sort of saying no. And that is part of it, but I didn't write a book called, you know, called No-ism. It it's it's about essentialism, and so that's why the the thrust of this conversation

• 45:08Greg McKeown?

  has to be there, because we've got to get clear what's essential, what do we actually need to make a change that's in that that is highly important to us, and that's what gives a drive to everything else. So, just before moving on to the the the trade-off phase, I think I can identify my my core question before with the multiple choice, I don't feel like I gave the multiple choice properly, it's it's is the primary thing the the perfectionism, or is the primary thing just the personal pain? Not not of writing a book, that's its own kind of pain, you know, that's its own kind of heavy lifting, right? For sure, there's that, but there's just this particular subject, the very nature

• 45:53Greg McKeown?

  of it, is riskier. You know, riskier to put it out there, riskier to be vulnerable, riskier to to explore these things at that kind of a level, riskier to be criticized when it's something that's so personally uh so personally vulnerable.

• 46:11Tim Ferriss?

  I go. That's a very fair question. I think it's I think it's perfectionism. I've I've because I've spent the last handful of years coming to terms with the risks inherent in writing a book like this, and the inescapable barrage of criticism that I will get, and so I'm really trying to, in gathering the notes, focus on or have the base assumption that it's not how many people don't get it that matters, it's how many people do get it, and focusing, I mean, there there are, and I think, you know, I heard recently in this, actually a documentary, which is very entertaining, called The Price of Everything, I'm paraphrasing here, but there are sort of three categories of people, those who

• 46:56Tim Ferriss?

  see, those who can see when shown, and those who will never see, and I'm I'm really in the context of a book like this, trying to focus on the first two categories. So I've accepted the the risks, I think, come to terms with most of them, it's it's perfectionism, I think.

• 47:14Greg McKeown?

  Yes.

• 47:15Tim Ferriss?

  That is that is the hurdle I'm not clearing at the moment.

• 47:20Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Tim Ferriss?

  At least one of them.

• 47:21Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, and and and um it it just, I mean, I just still wanna be on this just for a moment. I mean, I I just wanna support you with the process. I mean, that that that this, the idea of a kind of uh tools for Titans, but applied to this pain point.

• 47:40Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:41Greg McKeown?

  Just seems totally relevant.

• 47:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Greg McKeown?

  It just seems, you know, as anxiety has become the number one, you know, uh diagnosed condition, uh beating out depression now, right? There's there's there's stuff going on.

• 47:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Greg McKeown?

  And there's stuff going on, there's more traumas going on in a variety of ways, I think. It's fair to say, but also there's more openness to talking about traumas. So all these backlog of things not discussed is suddenly uh be, you know, being uh able to be discussed. Uh and and there's just so much going on in the cloud of noise out there in social media and a variety of ways, you know, that that I think people feel unsettled inside. I mean, we've always known that there were things out there that could hurt us, right? There's we had the Cold War, we had, there's always risks in the world. But recently, I feel like the risks feel more within people than they used to.

• 48:39Greg McKeown?

  And so I I just think it's so relevant and and and I I think I think that the the way that you would approach it, uh you know, there's there's there are obviously people that will need it just the way you do it, weaknesses and all, you know.

• 48:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Greg McKeown?

  What's and all, that that that there, so so I uh, uh, okay, so that's it.

• 48:58Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 48:59Greg McKeown?

  There's phase one, okay, so so so let's let's move down to phase two, which is, what what are you willing to give up to do this? You know, what, let me ask it slightly differently, which is, what is something non-essential that you're over-investing in currently?

• 49:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, I've I've already categorically in the last six months, cut out certain things, say, uh certainly any type of book blurbs which necessitate reading books, those are all gone.

• 49:29Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 49:29Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking engagements, all gone, uh with very rare exception, unless they happen to be within a fifteen-minute walk of where I live, which doesn't doesn't happen very often. Uh, and so on.

• 49:43Greg McKeown?

  No, your email, your email bounce back is just like classic. No, it's classic. I never, I never seen anybody that's done this ever. Right? Your email bounce back has a word attachment to it. Am I making this up? I think this is what I seem to recall.

• 49:58Tim Ferriss?

  It, it, it might, it might. It is evolved over time, but it's, it's very, it's very clear on the things that I do not do.

• 50:05Greg McKeown?

  Oh, it is. And it like lists them one after another, after another. Like, none of this stuff. If you are reaching out to me for any of this stuff, there is no point. There's no point.

• 50:19Tim Ferriss?

  And I do, I do, when possible, try to point people to other helpful resources, which, which for whatever, for whatever reason, people really don't want to read. They want me to regurgitate it in a half-assed manner to them one on one, rather than just pointing to them to a resource. But that's a whole separate conversation. So there are, there are things that have categorically decided to say no to, because I do not do moderation well with those.

• 50:44Greg McKeown?

  With those sayings.

• 50:47Tim Ferriss?

  Right. I don't do moderation well.

• 50:49Greg McKeown?

  Nobody does moderation well. That's my, that's my opinion about this subject. People don't do moderation well. I, I decided to go off sugar a, a year ago, almost a year ago, New Year's Eve, talking to somebody, I'd been thinking about doing it for a while. They'd been off sugar for 12 years. And I'm like, okay, you can do 12 years. I can do a year. I'm going to make this decision. If I'd gone 95% off sugar, oh, no, I'm out before I begin. Everything's an exception. Well, that's, you know, that's amazing cake. I gotta eat that. I mean, that's, this is a holiday. I've got to eat that. It's the weekend. I'm, I'm going out on a date with my wife. I got it. I've got to eat it now. She's like, everything's an exception. So I, I think there's a variety of things in

• 51:30Greg McKeown?

  life that it's a much, much easier to go 100% than it is to go 95%. Because what you're doing is you're taking out the decision process. It's done. We are not doing sugar. Now, I don't have to think every time. And by the way, there's crazy amounts of sugar in this world. I don't have to think about it every time. The decision's already made. So anyway, I guess it. So there's a lot of things you've cut out. What is something?

• 51:57Tim Ferriss?

  I have one. So first, I want to just mention that one of the one of the concepts in essentialism that I really appreciated is trying to find the one decision that removes a thousand decisions, such as the elimination of sugar that you mentioned as just one example. I will tell you where I struggle and I think I'm better than maybe average Joe or Jane at saying no to things. I'm quite good. But one of the great ironies of writing a book called, say, Essentialism or The Four Hour Work Week, is that if those concepts hit and the books do well,

• 52:35Tim Ferriss?

  you suddenly have a flood, a torrent of inbound requests and all sorts of new categories of things to contend with. And I find myself struggling to say no to people who probably land on the spectrum of good acquaintance to reasonably good friend who ask for help with various things. And there are certain things that I feel very comfortable saying no to, like the book blurbs. But I have hundreds of requests. Those aren't all from friends,

• 53:16Tim Ferriss?

  but dozens certainly for promotion of their books on social. It's usually book related because people want their books to sell. Being on the podcast, you name it. And I have, I feel like friends who do not fully think of the ramifications of their request, oftentimes when it's last minute, where they wouldn't ever go to the New York Times the day before they have something come out and ask for everything to be reshuffled for their benefit. That is what ends up happening to me on a fairly regular basis. So I think I allocate too much time to trying to explain myself to those people or placate those people in some way. And I would love to hear your thoughts on.

• 54:03Tim Ferriss?

  Best practices or heuristics related to that specifically because I don't view myself as a people pleaser, but nonetheless with this particular subset of people, I do find it really challenging and there are times when people I would like to maintain a good relationship with who come to me last minute for help that I cannot deliver without massively inconveniencing my entire team and reshuffling get very pissed in a way or they take it very personally and maybe that's okay. I think I tend to think that it is and I'm going a little long here, but it's I think a challenge that a lot of people face. What are your thoughts?

• 54:43Greg McKeown?

  Well, let's, let's just agree on the problem first of all, because as a CEO, a friend of mine once told me, he said, he said, I take every time and resource estimate that's given to me now and I multiply it by pi. So he's saying, I thought he was exaggerating at first, but he's saying, he's saying that people so massively underestimate everything. And there is another heuristic for this, right? It's called the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy is saying these things take, we as humans underestimate almost all the

• 55:23Greg McKeown?

  time how long things will take and we do that even with things we have done ourselves before. Driving from point A to point B takes us 15 minutes, but if we're in the middle of writing an email, we will convince ourselves we can do it in five minutes this time. We've got all green lights, everything's going to work out. Somehow it'll be done in five minutes. Of course, we do, it doesn't take that long. It takes 15 minutes and we're late for the meeting.

• 55:46Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 55:46Greg McKeown?

  But we want to con ourselves into it. What you're describing, I think, has two pieces to it. The first is this piece and the second is the relationship impact of, of how to handle this. But what you're describing is a problem where somebody is really underestimating what their request is. They're saying in their head, they're going, this is a two-minute favor to him. It's not hard. All you have to do is put out a tweet. How hard can it be? Or whatever. And so in their head, their ask is very small. But the reality is that their ask is much bigger.

• 56:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right. They don't think, they also don't think about the reputational risk or anything like that of endorsing something that I don't have time to read. For instance.

• 56:32Greg McKeown?

  Well, that's e- exactly so. Uh, you, you know, so, so I think that there is something around this. Again, before we get to the relationship impact of, uh, and maybe it's, maybe you already did it, but of actually creating one page, you, you, you've got the email bounce back document, having a page that says, look, this is the real cost. The total cost of ownership of me saying yes to this. So, so that, and, and maybe there's even, i- i- i- once it's created, it could be used in a variety of ways. One is reactively, right? When the request comes in, okay, I need you to read this first. I need to understand. But maybe there's a proactive approach, which is like, look, this is, I'm just putting this out there.

• 57:15Greg McKeown?

  This is what this actually costs. Because even what you just said, reputational cost, not that people aren't thinking about that. You know, they're just thinking about getting their thing achieved. And, and so being able to try and calculate all of that, the total cost of ownership. I mean, that's what you have to do with the planning fallacy is we have to consider the total cost. So that we don't start projects, so we don't complete. In fact, there's a, there's a, uh, New York Times just ran a piece about exactly this, uh, that I'm aware of because of, because it's quoting essentialism, uh, you know, in, in trying to address the problem. But if all these projects we start, we don't finish. This is just a version of that problem. That they're coming, they're not, they're not being, they maybe are being thoughtless, maybe. They don't think they're being thoughtless. They just think it's not a big deal for you.

• 58:00Greg McKeown?

  And they don't understand the full range of impact. So I think writing this out, like almost like it's a recipe, this is the cost. And in that, I think in the helpful side of it, you could say, so in the future, if you want to be considered, this is the process you would need to go through. Uh, you, you know, so that, so again, what's, what's happening is that you've got to help other people's problems be their problem.

• 58:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 58:27Greg McKeown?

  And, and there's, there's a story that I came across with a book that I really like on this, this principle, which is. I think it's a true story, I can't quite remember now, but it's um about Dr. Cloud. He's, he's, he's talking about meeting with a couple, a husband and wife, parents. And they come to see him and they say, um, they say, look, you know, our, our son, we have so many problems with our son. And, uh, you know, he's, he's, he's on drugs, he's, he's drinking all the time, he's living back at home with us now, I mean, he's just not got a job, everything. It's just such a mess for us, it's just so concerned. And he says, okay, well, I understand, where is he though? You have an appointment here to deal with this, where is your son? And they said, they said, well, you know, he, he, he's, he doesn't really see that he has a problem.

• 59:12Greg McKeown?

  And, uh, and, and Dr. Cloud says, well, uh, I think, I think he's right. And, uh, they, they're shocked at that, what, what do you mean that he's right? Uh, you know, you just described all the problems, he said, no, he says, he said, listen, he says, if, if you look outside your window in the morning, and your sprinkler head on your lawn is faulty and it's spraying on your neighbor's grass. And your neighbor's grass is green and your grass is dying. Who has the problem? You, you've got the problem, right? Because your grass is dying, your neighbor doesn't have a problem, their grass is fine. Your son doesn't have a problem.

• 59:57Greg McKeown?

  Cause he's comfortable at home with you, he has to do whatever he wants, he's, he's looked after, life is fine, he doesn't have a problem. You have a problem and your job now is to help your son to have a problem. Let, let your son have his problem. It is well intended, you'd be well intended to try, but you've got it all wrong, you, you've got to let him own it. If he doesn't have a problem, if he, if everything's taken care of for him, he can't move forward, he can't get better. And and so now, obviously, it's a bit strong to use that example with the example that you you've led this conversation with.

• 1:00:38Greg McKeown?

  But but it is a similar principle is that there has to be a boundary and there has to be an education of going. You've made this problem my problem right now. Let me just lay this out so that you can own the problem. So in the future, we can do this perhaps in a better way.

• 1:00:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's it makes perfect sense. I I was told something not not too terribly long ago, maybe two years ago, which was along the lines of.

• 1:01:04Tim Ferriss?

  A line you could use with such people, although you'd probably have to dress it up a little bit, which is, you know, your lack of planning does not constitute my emergency.

• 1:01:13Greg McKeown?

  Right.

• 1:01:14Tim Ferriss?

  And which is, which is, I suppose, in theory, makes a lot of sense, but it sometimes falls by the wayside in practice due to fear of social repercussions, which we we can get to in a second. I mean, I've had some awful experiences and I don't want to turn this into a 100% Tim Ferriss therapy session, but just so people know, for those people out there who may be like, oh, yeah, that Tim Ferriss, he never agreed to X or whatever it is. I've had instances where journalists from mainstream publications have reached out for book blurbs or help with their own projects. I've very politely declined because I've been unable to help them in the capacity they required.

• 1:01:54Tim Ferriss?

  And they've gone on to write like hit pieces or hatchet pieces or slam pieces about me out of spite. And it's like that kind of shit happens. So I think I'm a little once bitten, twice shy from a lot of those experiences. But ultimately, does any of that prevent me from doing the essential project that we discussed? Not really. So.

• 1:02:19Greg McKeown?

  Well, that well, that that right there is, of course, is is exactly the point. If, you know, one can say, let's take the let's take the the opposite argument for a moment and and I'll just. Play non-essentialist to the conversation, which is, yes, Tim, you're getting it wrong. You're thinking about yourself too much. And you, every single request that someone from, uh, from, from media or any friend or any acquaintance, that anything that they want from you, you should be saying yes, because what, you know, you got helped by lots of people. Therefore, you're under total obligation to do it for everybody else. Uh, and, and, and you've got this wrong. So is that argument right, Tim?

• 1:03:04Greg McKeown?

  Is it really right? It could be right. Is it right?

• 1:03:07Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, it's, it's, I don't think it's right. And even if it were right, it's not sustainable. Right? Even if.

• 1:03:14Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, but if something, if something's not sustainable, that's like foundationally clear that it can't be right. Because like by definition, it's something that's not sustainable will not continue. It cannot continue.

• 1:03:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:03:27Greg McKeown?

  So what you just said, which is awesome, is like, i- i- is like, well, it's correct, other than it's impossible.

• 1:03:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 1:03:36Greg McKeown?

  So other than that, uh, but, but you've just done us a favor, which is that you, you've helped us to, to, to understand the basic foundational error with non-essentialism. Like, the problem with non-essentialism is that it happens, it is the only problem, happens to be a lie. It's just got that inconvenience associated with it. You, you can't actually do everything. You can't actually get this next book that we've just identified what it is, why it matters, deeply why it matters, launch living and, and, and out into the universe,

• 1:04:16Greg McKeown?

  and also do everything that people think is reasonable for you to do. You cannot do both of those things. Now, a- a- as soon as you come to terms with that, you say, okay, well, good, okay, that's not a solution I can have. That actually isn't, it's not, you say not sustainable, that means it can't be done. You can pretend you can be doing it for a little while, and then the book doesn't get written. Uh, and so all those people that, uh, the ones that aren't probably asking anything from you, but they're still in pain and you could still do something to be useful to them, provide them some helpful insights that you've gained. Uh, you know, you can do that, or you can, you can keep helping the people that are asking

• 1:05:01Greg McKeown?

  for, for, for things that, that really, you know, disrupts that whole process. So which do you want? You know, which problem, Tim, do you want?

• 1:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the former, the former.

• 1:05:13Greg McKeown?

  Right. Okay, now you're right, it doesn't make the problem go away, that you suddenly feel bad and, and that there could be other hit jobs, and there could be other misunderstandings and criticism, that's true now. So what we do is separate the decision from the relationship. You've got to think of the decisions in two separate buckets. We've just done that. You know, you, you, you've made the decision, you understand the decision, and then, of course, you say, well, there is still gonna be relationship impact, and, and that is true, and I don't think you should pretend that that isn't true. Uh, you know, that, uh, somehow in some airy-fairy essentialist land, oh, you can have it all.

• 1:05:49Greg McKeown?

  You know, cause that would be violating the whole idea, which is that, uh, uh, essentialists embrace the reality of trade-offs. Of course there are trade-offs. You know, of course there will be people that are frustrated, right? That they want a piece, but, but just think about, think about, uh, you know, think about somebody, eh, Oprah. How many requests are going that she can't possibly ask? How many people sent her books? Can you imagine how many books were being sent to Oprah at the, at the height of her, the, the, the Oprah show and everything? I mean, it, it's just insane, the number of things.

• 1:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  Warehouse is full, had to be.

• 1:06:24Greg McKeown?

  Warehouses full are going that way. And she had to get somehow, we assume she appeared to, to be, to get to a level of peace with going, look, there's no way I can even touch any of that stuff. I've got to find, to be truer to this, to this voice within me, of clarity about what my mission is. Uh, and, and my essential mission, and not all of this other stuff. It's not being unhelpful to the world. For you to say no to something that's less important is not being unhelpful or selfish in the world. That I don't buy that. You, you, your obligation is to this, to the highest point of contribution you can make.

• 1:07:07Greg McKeown?

  But what I think happens a lot is that people get caught up in the idea that can I do this thing? And they, it's like they, they pretend there's nothing left, nothing else going on in their life. The request comes in and they go, can I do this? Well, yes, I can do this. I know how to do this. I can make this happen. And, and, and that's not life. That's non-essentialist junk. That's just rubbish. The question is, if I do this thing, what doesn't get done? What else gets pushed out? Now, I, I'm not saying don't be helpful to people that come requesting things. There can be absolutely ways of helping people. I want to help people. But, but if it's at the cost of something that's actually more important, that makes a higher contribution, we have an obligation not to do it.

• 1:07:53Greg McKeown?

  And there's one more piece here, which is important, which is that you don't want to hurt these relationships, and that's where the concern really comes from. So the question is, is how can you deal with this in a way that minimizes the damage to you through some media outlet stuff, doing some hit piece, or help people to understand the, the context behind it? And I think that still comes back to at least for yourself, writing this all out. You know, this is what I am trying to do and why it matters. I mean, in a way, it's having the conversation we've just had. But written out so that it can be expressed again and again and again. The why behind this answer, the why, is the thing that we miss out on. So let's in fact move to step three.

• 1:08:37Greg McKeown?

  So step one was what is essential, step two is what is non-essential, and step three is how do you create a system that makes executing what's essential as effortless as possible? And it's a it's a perfect way to get there at this point because because having this this written out document, I mean, how you'll use it is, I'm not sure yet about that in my own head, but if you have it clearly written out, this is what I'm doing, this is why, this is the cost of of of disrupting that, this is what it does, this is who will lose out if I don't stay focused on this now, uh, all of that becomes like a core a communication core for yourself, a pivot, but place to pivot to.

• 1:09:19Greg McKeown?

  When the request comes in and you go, oh, I maybe I can change, you know, everything today to make that possible, and you go, hold on, let's go back to the document. Uh, my my assistant was was away for a little while, a couple of weeks, and uh, and the amount of damage I managed to do in those couple of weeks was ridiculous. You know, the number of things I managed to commit to, I tell you, she came back, actually, she was gone for a month, I'm remembering now, it's for for a honeymoon, and and when she she comes back, and I I I was very positive, I wasn't saying, oh, I've messed everything up, I said, I said, let me tell you all the things that happened in the month you've gone, and it was just kind of a little silence at the end of it all, because she's like, she didn't say it, but this is this is what's in the silence, it's like, you know, what

• 1:10:04Greg McKeown?

  what's wrong with you, you, how are you thinking that you can take on all of those projects and all of those ideas, you know, like, that's, you you aren't, you aren't thinking fully about the cost of doing all those things, and she was dead right, and what grew out of that is we came up with three rules

• 1:10:21Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:21Greg McKeown?

  of things that I would and wouldn't do, uh, and uh, I'll give one of the rules was no personalization, I don't do any personalization, so if I'm if I'm doing keynotes, workshops, whatever, I'll listen, I'll understand what the, you know, what the company or the client at the conference needs, but Uh, but I'm not going to redo, rethink, re-change. I'm not changing the slides. I'm not changing the, you know, the subtle things you can do in the moment, but I'm not redoing stuff. Because if you re- if you personalize everything as I as I has a how to want to do, uh, you you you you it's like you're rewriting a book every time. I mean, you have to rethink everything.

• 1:11:03Greg McKeown?

  And so that was one rule and and we had two other rules. Those are so helpful. And when I'm.

• 1:11:08Tim Ferriss?

  Are you willing to share the other two rules?

• 1:11:09Greg McKeown?

  I'm I'm trying to I I should I should know what they are, right? If I say there's three rules and they were really useful to me.

• 1:11:17Tim Ferriss?

  If they come up, they come up. We can also wait for them to surface.

• 1:11:22Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, so um, uh, so actually, one was, one was, don't over over um, over correct based on uh, based on a negative feedback. And that's a little more vulnerable to shout out one, but I think everybody suffers with that. That's that's why, you know, which is most persons most universal. I, you know, so so so we do an event, do a keynote conference, gets good feedback. One of the people, you know, in the comments says X, and I think, geez, absolutely right. That is a that is a valid criticism. Let's change it. Let's redo how we're doing this to address that concern. It's the same sort of thing. It's it's overreacting to it.

• 1:12:03Greg McKeown?

  And and frankly, when you overreact to this kind of feedback, uh, you really cause a problem for other people giving feedback. And I and I in hindsight can see how that's been in my life, right? Somebody who's trying to be helpful, they're trying to be honest, they're giving the feedback, and I'm multiplying the effect of it. Uh, and then, you know, so that was number two. And um,

• 1:12:27Greg McKeown?

  I think number three might have been something like, you know, um.

• 1:12:33Greg McKeown?

  It was like even no new projects like beyond what we'd identified, like we've already identified a couple of really big things I want to go after. It was like no, no, no new projects outside of that. Um, it, it, it might have been, it might have been specifically no workshop business. Uh, which is, there's always a demand for it with essentialism. There's always been interest in it. I always feel an obligation because of. One, there's a need, people are interested and two, you know, just, just, I think, yeah, there's, there's a full business here and, and it could, it could easily be or have been. Successful business and those things have kept pulling me into it and, and, and I just, my, whenever I start working on it.

• 1:13:17Greg McKeown?

  I'm like, you know, you see those kids, it, it, they're at a supermarket, you see a kid on the floor, not throwing a tantrum. They're just lying on the floor, like legs spread out, arms spread out, uh, just like. It, it, they, they, they have no energy to even get up off the floor. This is, this is how much passion they feel to, for being in the supermarket on this day. They're just like, nothing here is interesting. Not one part of me wants to be getting up and doing this. That's how I feel in that business. It's just not what. It's not what I'm supposed to be doing. And, and my, my, my poor assistant has had to hear me. Say that in one way or another so many times.

• 1:14:02Greg McKeown?

  Oh, okay, I should do, I know I should do this. Okay, let's do it. We're gonna make it happen. And finally, she's just like, look, there's no part of you that wants to do this. Why are you doing this? And so we managed, I think those are the three rules. We got that.

• 1:14:16Tim Ferriss?

  So instead of stormtrooper, you could use floor angel as a shorthand for that one. Doing floor angels.

• 1:14:23Greg McKeown?

  Floor Angel Projects, that's exactly what it is. So, so we've identified only a little bit here of what you can, of, of building a system for you. And I, and I don't wanna, I don't wanna shortchange this too much. We need to do a little more, which is, you've identified now something that you, is essential to you. You've identified something that's non-essential, but awkward for you, that, that, that's risky for you, that you, you, you could give up. So there's a trade-off now, so we have an essential trade-off. And, but that's not enough, because as soon as, you know, we've finished this conversation, all of those dynamics that have been there before still are there. There is a system in place that keeps you away from getting on with this next book.

• 1:15:05Greg McKeown?

  It, it keeps you saying yes to, to requests and, and feeling very fearful about, uh, about pushing back. We've identified one thing so far you can do to build a system, which is writing this all out so that you have it there. So that you can either say in person, or put in email, or express clearly the why, and, and, and, uh, of, of why this cannot simply be an easy yes, why this is a costly yes. And, and this makes me just think for a moment just about this simple idea, which is that to every request, whether the request comes from somebody else or from within ourselves, which is where a lot of the non-essentialist stuff comes from. There's only three options, right? You can say yes, you can say no, or you can negotiate. And that's it.

• 1:15:49Greg McKeown?

  And, and I think what happens is that people default yes, because they're so fearful of the rude no and its effects. And so, they forget that there is a negotiate part of this. There is a educate part of this, and that's what I think this is, this document can help with. Uh, is, is reminding yourself, you know, getting yourself clear, and then you can educate other people too. Uh, because they just don't know, they don't understand what their request really means and what their cost really is. Uh, so, so that's one thing, but there's got to be more, and we ought to do something else that will actually help you make the shift. Let me just ask one more time, do you want to make this shift? Do you want to make this trade off?

• 1:16:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I do.

• 1:16:32Greg McKeown?

  Okay, so, so what would help do it? I mean, you've got masses of ideas yourself already of hacks and, and, and tools and tricks to be able to help people to execute when they otherwise wouldn't. So you could definitely help co-design this, right? That's how we began, right? The design school at Stanford, to, to help actually design a system that's weighted in your favor. And we know when we'll get there, we'll know when we've achieved it because on a day you don't want to make the trade off, you'll still make it.

• 1:17:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:17:06Greg McKeown?

  On a day that you don't want to make the trade offs, you'll still make it. That's when you've got a system working on your side.

• 1:17:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, which is, I should just also note for people listening, applies to diet, applies to exercise, applies to just about anything where a system can be designed that is weighted in your favor in such a way that it's, it's unlikely to fail, right? So, so one question slash topic that would be very helpful just to hear you talk about, I, I've thought about it quite a lot, but I'd love to hear your thoughts and it'll give me also an excuse to read something from your book that I, that I enjoy, is determining

• 1:17:50Tim Ferriss?

  what a fair, well reasoned, polite decline looks like and recognizing that I, I only have control over the delivery of that message, not how people emotionally respond to it. And really just leaving it at that, like I have delivered my message in a fair, even handed manner and it's up to the recipient as to how they want to respond. And if they, if they overreact in some negative way, that is their problem, not my problem. And I, I bring it up on a meta level, I just want to mention one line that I highlighted in your book, actually I'll mention two.

• 1:18:35Tim Ferriss?

  The first is make your peace with the fact that saying no often requires trading popularity for respect.

• 1:18:42Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll just read this part here. "Yes, saying no respectfully, reasonably, and gracefully can come at a short-term social cost, but part of living the way of the essentialist is realizing respect is far more valuable than popularity in the long run." This gives me an excuse to just read, I don't think I would use this exact text, but Peter Drucker, who is one of my favorite authors, his extremely boringly titled book, The Effective Executive, is, remains one of my, my, my repeat reads. But his response, and you may have to help me with the last name here, but I think it's, is it Czech Sentmejai? Is that the professor he's replying to? But he's replying to a request, and his polite decline goes as follows.

• 1:19:26Tim Ferriss?

  Quote, "I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February 14th, for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I've learned much from it. But, my dear Professor C..." I'll just abbreviate. "I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative. I don't know what that means. I just keep plotting. I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity," whereas I do not believe in creativity, "is to have a very big, all caps, very big, wastepaper basket to take care of all, all caps, invitations such as yours. Productivity in my experience consists of not, all caps, doing anything that helps the work of other people, but to spend all one's time on the work the good Lord has fitted one to do and to do it well." End quote.

• 1:20:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's very clear and very, uh, direct. Uh, do you, do you have any suggestions for templates or favorite ways of saying no to requests from people you know that you simply cannot or do not want to comply with?

• 1:20:27Greg McKeown?

  Let's just pause for a second on that story. How do we have the text? Why do we know that that's how he responded? We, we know because, we know because it got published in the book on creativity.

• 1:20:45Greg McKeown?

  Positively saying, this is one of the keys to creativity. Is, you know, I reached out to him and he showed me this and I learned something in the process, which is that highly creative people are willing to block out space to do the work that they are built to do and want to do and aren't just doing everything that everybody else is doing or everybody asks of them. So it, what it helps us to identify is that there is such a situation as being able to push back, say no, and there to be a positive result come from it. You know, I liked your, I liked your email bounce back. This was, this was positive to me. I learned things from it myself. This is, you know, there is such a thing and often we're such novices at no.

• 1:21:30Greg McKeown?

  We, we just are so fearful of it. We don't learn how to do it and we don't do it. So we just assume that bad things are going to come. Sometimes they do. But I think that we are, we, we have to do like reverse pilots sometimes. Where we try not doing something and saying no to something or just not doing it at all and seeing what the effects are uh, and, and learning from it uh, in, in, in, in our way. You know, in terms of a template, I've explored lots of templates and lots of, of things. Is, uh, an example that came up recently, I really liked, which is, uh, that illustrates one way to do this is from, um, is from Warren Buffett. Uh, Warren Buffett, right, uh, respected?

• 1:22:11Greg McKeown?

  Yes, right, uh, quoted all the time, arguably the most respected investor ever. Uh, you know, he's constructed a system in his life that allows him to communicate and give back to people. You know, through his, uh, through, through his annual conference, for example. But that, that doesn't mean that he's saying yes to every request along the way. So in fact, there's an interesting story. Tony Robbins tells a story in his, in his book on finance about Warren Buffett. In which he basically failed to get Warren Buffett to ever be interviewed for his book. And he's, he's getting all the big top investors and he's priding himself on being able to access these people and he's,

• 1:22:50Greg McKeown?

  he's using all of those name people and those relationships, excuse me, to go after Warren Buffett and to keep. Tapping him for an interview. And, and, and still he's not getting anything. So then they're at some media event together, they're about to, you know, one's, he's leaving and Tony's going on to be interviewed and he catches him for a second, he says, oh, I'm doing this book and so and so is, is reaching out to you and I'd love to have you in this. And his response was, um, was, oh, you know, I, I just don't, I think I just said everything I could say on that subject. I just don't think there's, you know, there's anything else I could, uh, I could, I could add to what's, uh, what's already out there. And that's, that's his polite no.

• 1:23:31Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:32Greg McKeown?

  And, and the people that are vested in it, I don't think are saying no. And I don't even think they have to be, as Peter Drucker was kind of, I mean, that was a particularly explicit way of dealing with it, right? And I don't think that's necessary either. I think you could just be very quiet, happily, gently. I, you know, I'm, I, I, I just don't think I could add anything to, to that project. So thanks for thinking of me. I just don't think I'm, I'd be the right person for that. I just think, uh, you know, I've, I've, I've done everything I can do on that. And, and it's so important. I mean, Peter Drucker's, not Drucker, um, Warren Buffett. I cannot find the original citation of this, that it's him, but he's quoted as having said, that the difference between successful people and very successful people is that

• 1:24:15Greg McKeown?

  very successful people say no to almost everything.

• 1:24:18Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:19Greg McKeown?

  And that's what he's doing. So I think what I'm trying to say is sometimes you can simply say no. I mean, it, it does depend on the relationship and the request. But also I think sometimes it's just the best no is a yes. It's saying, it's saying, look, yes, I can, I can do, you know, I, I'm doing this. So I, I just couldn't do anything beyond this. Uh, you know, I, I, I'm, your quest to be interviewed for something, hi, you know, I've, I'm, I'm working on this book. Uh, this, uh, this really important project. It's high risk for me. I think it can make a huge difference, but it's consuming all of my energies and creativity right now to do this right.

• 1:24:59Greg McKeown?

  And I just can't get this wrong. Uh, that's, uh, that's, that's, you know, that's what I've, that's what I can do. Um, I, I, I think it's, it's starting with the yes. In some ways, I think the best no's are really, uh, really saying the yes that we're committed to, saying what we're, what we're doing. And, and you're right, sometimes people go react badly, but that, if we've been respectful, if we've been thoughtful, if we've been useful within the parameters that we've identified. For example, if you can actually do a favor for someone in five minutes, if you really have a system that allows it to be five minutes. Fine, five minute favor, I'm a big, I, I can be a believer in that. Discipline giving, I'm a believer in that.

• 1:25:43Greg McKeown?

  But if, within that context you've made, if then somebody is upset, takes the victim approach, is basically throwing a tantrum. Yeah, that's, that's no fun for anybody, but that's not good enough reason to have said yes to it. Uh, as, as every great leader has, has ever dealt with, and every great parent has dealt with. Almost on a daily basis, every great parent is dealing with a situation where a child wants something, and they may throw some sort of tantrum, if it is of a major tantrum, because they didn't get the thing they wanted, of course. And we just have to be adult about it, and mature about it, and, uh, and, and recognize, yeah, you're not gonna keep everybody happy all the time, what a calm.

• 1:26:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Now, you, you have, is it four kids?

• 1:26:32Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, right. Not, not, not very essentialist of me.

• 1:26:37Tim Ferriss?

  But you've had a fair amount of practice with the, the tantrum mitigating, or at least, uh, accepting of those possible consequences. I'd love to chat for a second, if, if we, um, if we can, and this just gives me an option to, uh, to read also something that, that stuck with me from your book, which was, uh, and I'll just read the excerpts. So, so this is a case study or a story of a gentleman named G E O F F. And talks about his progressive burnout effectively, but he, he ultimately

• 1:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  "Paid a high price to learn a simple yet essential lesson, and that is protect the asset." And then I thought this was worth mentioning for people who are type A personalities, achievers who are very good at getting things done or pride themselves on that. And the quote is as follows. "In the many hours Jeff spent resting, he came to see an interesting paradox, resting after he burned out. Interesting paradox in his addiction to achievement. For type A personality, it is not hard to push oneself hard. Pushing oneself to the limit is easy. The real challenge for the person who thrives on challenges is not to work hard." He explains to any overachievers, "If you think you are so tough, you can do anything. I have a challenge for you.

• 1:27:57Tim Ferriss?

  If you really want to do something hard, say no to an opportunity so you can take a nap." And I thought this might be a good place to explore the quarterly offsite, which I don't recall as being explored very much in the book, but I've heard it mentioned in some interviews that you've done. Could you perhaps elaborate on what the personal quarterly offsite is?

• 1:28:22Greg McKeown?

  It's creating space for you to actually think long-term about what really matters in the great scheme of things. I mean, it's the same as any executive team. They have a quarterly offsite, an annual offsite. Why do they do it? Because they know if they don't, they're going to get buried in reacting to proximate issues instead of seeing strategically where they want to be headed and what trade-offs they need to make in order to get there. And it's just the same for, it's the same for the individual level.

• 1:29:02Greg McKeown?

  We, my wife and I started doing quarterly offsites two or three years ago. And Um, and in fact, in fact, one of the things I did to try and construct a system to make sure we followed through is I did it where we had a few people come together. Uh, and, uh, and I was sort of leading the, the, the, the process. But, but underneath it, one of the important intents of it was so that Anna and I could actually have a full day. Once every quarter, you know, away from everything else. And to think about the, the, the long-term goals and, and out of that process for us.

• 1:29:43Greg McKeown?

  And what, what, what are you doing on that in, in that process? You, you're saying, okay, what's happened over the last? Uh, you know, well, you, the big picture, you can say, okay, what's happened in my life? What's, what's the long-term perspective here? Uh, where have I, where, where am I? Where, where have I been? What's been going on? Um, you see, you're trying to get a clear view of, of your life, what's been going on with it? And then you say, okay, going forward, long-term perspective, what, what would I like to be achieving? What, what, what feels important? Again, it's not just success. Set, it's not just goal setting, you can set the wrong goals. It's what's essential to me, what it feels like my mission to pursue.

• 1:30:26Greg McKeown?

  Uh, and, and I remember in that very first official session that we did. Um, Anna, she was going through the process, had identified a couple of things that were really important and I could tell they were. They had been within her, but they just sort of came to a, a surface. Um, one, one of them, one of them was a, a, I don't know, it might sound funny to people, but, uh, but it was like horses. Horses, right? That's a weird thing to say, isn't it? Horses, that's not what you expect me to say. She said, I just have this vision of having a place. With horses and it, it's not necessarily even that we would own the horses. It wasn't even necessarily that.

• 1:31:07Greg McKeown?

  And we do, we don't have any horse background. It's not like we, we, you know, horse people, I mean, I, nothing like that. But, but it was a sense of if we, if we were to achieve what that means. Our children would grow up in a certain kind of environment. It was like a symbol of a certain type of childhood. And our children were at the time were, were, were sort of in, in the golden years. Which means, which means the years before they're driving and after they're out of diapers. And so it's like a magical period because you can do things, you can make memories together, you can do it. And and we weren't living in a place at the time.

• 1:31:48Greg McKeown?

  We were in the middle of Silicon Valley, which is terrific in lots of ways, but it's not, it's not, you you're not gonna end up with horses, right? It in, you have to think differently. And that single insight in that quarter, the offsite shifted a whole sense of intent. And we realized if we want to do this while our children are still in this golden years, we're gonna have to move uh sooner rather than later to be able to achieve this dream. Otherwise, we're gonna achieve it after at least the eldest is out of the house and then what what what is the point? And so it was an insight, a strategic insight that has had profound influence on on a, you know, it's a one decision that makes a thousand.

• 1:32:28Greg McKeown?

  There's a whole series of things we had to do to put in process, to be prepared, to organize it, to find such a place and so on. And it took a while to do it, but um it took a couple of years, maybe, maybe as much as that. Um, and uh, and and now now we live in a community that you're required to have space for horses. You don't have to have them, but you have to have space for them. And and that single criteria again ma- makes a lot of other influences change, right? You you're going to be around a lot of nature, you're going to be even the kind of people in some ways that you're around a certain certain value system that they care about, all those kinds of things.

• 1:33:08Greg McKeown?

  And so and so that's the, that's sort of a a personal example of why to hold personal quarterly offsites. It it it it shifts the whole direction you're going in. It gives you, it it tilts and bends uh your your, you know, your narrative as you go forward.

• 1:33:28Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any recommendations for other?

• 1:33:32Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, format best practices or any best practices for personal offsites. Is it, is it an afternoon? Is it a day? Is it two days? Is it, uh, in your living room? Is it offsite?

• 1:33:45Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, okay. I think, I think, here's what I think. I think, I think it's offsite. Uh, it's in nature or thereabout. You know, it's, uh, it's somewhere that's, that's quiet, uninterrupted. I know of some people, I've never done this, but I, I, I know of some, uh, uh, uh, someone who has a second phone and their second phone is, uh, is like one of these little credit card sized phones. And there's only two people in the world that have the number to this phone. And so when they go, it means they can be reached for emergency, but that's it. And so they are just gone so that they can have an uninterrupted space, which is very hard to have these days. So you want to be in an uninterrupted environment. You want to not have, uh, text and email and all of that available.

• 1:34:30Greg McKeown?

  Uh, you know, I, I, I recommend you either do it on your own or maybe with one other person, you know, a design partner, uh, that you can, that you can really go through the process. I think that the longer the perspective is, the better. Uh, you know, the one I was referring to, we actually started prior to our life. Um, and you know, it was back, uh, to, you know, so we started at great grandparents, in fact. Uh, great grandparents, parents, your own life, and then going forward to the end of your life, to your kids, grandkids, great grandchildren, or if you don't have children, it's just the people that you'd influence generations from now. And it's that kind of huge vision, that kind of level of perspective that helps to, to draw up within you

• 1:35:13Greg McKeown?

  an unexpected insight, something that you already know, but somehow is being buried because you're, you're thinking about life in, in, in just sort of reactive ways.

• 1:35:23Tim Ferriss?

  What questions do you ask related to, or might you ask related to say your grandparents or great grandparents? In, in that portion of the, of the session?

• 1:35:33Greg McKeown?

  Well, uh, things that include, uh, well, first of all, write down anything you know about them. It won't take long. It's its own kind of lesson, actually. Uh, what, what, what do you know about them? Most people.

• 1:35:52Greg McKeown?

  I I think less than five percent of people, not scientifically, but based on thousands of people, uh many thousands of people I've asked this question to now, um cannot name the first and last names of each of their great grandparents, right? The eight great grandparents, they cannot name the first and last name of all eight. We cannot even name the the the first and last names of the people that made us everything we are. It's extraordinary. It it's its own lesson. They we they they that's where we live, the country we live, the the language we speak, that everything was in was either de- determined by them or largely influenced by these people. We don't even know their names. Amazing. But we know something about them. If we know anything about them, we should gather it. What what has lasted?

• 1:36:38Greg McKeown?

  What decisions have they made that still affect us? Even if we don't know anything about them, what does it? You know, they we we don't know their names. We know that, well, they moved to this country. They moved to this place. They did anything that we know they've impacted us. So what lasted? For good or ill, what has lasted? You get to grandparents, so people know a lot more about their grandparents in general. You're asking, okay, what positive things did they do that that are still with you? How did they shape you? The in in ways that you would want to to pass on to others. What challenges did they bring into the table, meaning to or almost always not meaning to? If you you you've been impacted by decisions they made.

• 1:37:17Greg McKeown?

  Uh it's true for almost everybody. I mean, great, very rare you have all positives from your ancestors, right? I mean, that that would be fantastic. And sometimes people do get pretty close to that. But but uh but mo- for most of us, it's pretty dysfunctional family history, once you get back a little ways. Uh and and the same for parents. So you're you're really trying to understand what is their impact? What have their decisions been impact on me positively and negatively? What am I grateful for? Uh uh I mean, I'm a big believer in the idea that if we're gonna blame people, we gotta blame them intelligently.

• 1:37:57Greg McKeown?

  Um, I, I, I, I watched somebody talking about this one time and it had an impact on me, which is if you're gonna blame your parents or your grandparents for something, you can blame them for everything, meaning. Uh, yeah, I blame you for this bad decision, but I also blame you for giving me my life.

• 1:38:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:38:13Greg McKeown?

  You know, I, I also blame, I blame you for having, you know, messed this thing, you know, a thing up that's always made this particular thing hard for me or for my, for my mother, father. But I also blame you for the fact that they turned that around and became strong, and I've always, always benefited from that strength. Because you blame intelligently, you see the good and the bad, you blame intelligently, you're looking at the whole picture so that you can see your life with some sort of perspective.

• 1:38:40Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:41Greg McKeown?

  Uh, this is something I learned at the, the, the design school, it's, it's, it's, I didn't know it then. I was still thinking birth till death, thinking. I thought that's pretty long-term perspective. If you're getting people to think about their whole life from birth till death, you are doing a good thing. And I think it probably was a good thing, and it's certainly far more long-term than most people think on a daily basis. But it's so insufficient, it's necessary but insufficient. We've got a, what a, what a, what a self-centered perspective. I couldn't believe it actually when I really realized how blind of a perspective I was suggesting. I mean, but like, like, like my story begins. It like, like the story of my life is really about me.

• 1:39:27Greg McKeown?

  What a, what a weird thing to, to think. That, that, that I, it's about my birth, my death, and what's happened in between. Now, the narrative is so much richer than that, and I've got to tap into that. So that as I then move into the future, I'm also doing the same thing. So in these personal courses, the offsites, it's pushing yourself beyond that. You're saying, okay. What, what do I want my children, grandchildren, generations, especially this idea? What do I want my, the generation that has forgotten me?

• 1:39:59Greg McKeown?

  What impact do I want to have on them? Yeah, yeah, i- i- if it's true that we can't even name our great grandparents, then it's gonna be true that our great grandchildren can't, won't name, bear to name us. Or it might be true, might not be true, might be true. But the impact doesn't change, just the memory changes. It's, it's, it's, impact outlasts memory. And so, and so this perspective, this helps to reveal for us the difference between good things and essential things. And, and that's the whole shift. You know, the, the, the essentialism is different to every other productivity system that I'm familiar with in this primary way.

• 1:40:41Greg McKeown?

  It's not about getting more stuff done, it's about getting more of the right things done. And it's not about efficiently doing what's on the to-do list. It's realizing that the most important thing isn't even on the to-do list. That's the insight. And that's what the personal quarterly offsite can do.

• 1:41:01Tim Ferriss?

  Could, could you chat a little bit? This is very helpful about the, uh, what makes a good design partner? And what that might look like? How you help each other? Uh, because design thinking came up a little bit earlier. Uh, maybe you could just define that for folks since it came in the context of the D school at Stanford. But, uh, you know, what, what is design thinking? And what makes a good design partner? Uh, and what might they ask you or do in a quarterly offsite?

• 1:41:36Greg McKeown?

  Um, okay, well, let's start with what makes a bad design partner.

• 1:41:39Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 1:41:40Greg McKeown?

  Um, yeah, a bad design partner, bad friend, bad, you know, relationship is one that, that eats the heart out if you're successful and has some sort of pleasure if you're unsuccessful.

• 1:41:56Greg McKeown?

  Right, like that's, that's, that's what's, that, that's, that's like a bad relationship. And, uh, and, and unfortunately, I think because of our human weakness, that, that is often what we're offering, you know, that's often what we're offered. And so you've got to find that person who is celebrating your success, who wants your success. When you're successful, they don't, they don't go, oh geez, I'm now jealous of that, oh, what's wrong with me? They're just delighted. A- a- and I, I, I, I say this not in a small way, I mean, that's, I, I am fortunate, they're my design partner, right, that's my wife, Anna is, is this, and she has been the whole time I've ever known her, and it's been really amazing.

• 1:42:39Greg McKeown?

  And I think often about how different my life would have been without her being that design partner. Li- uh, I, I, I'm not, not making some, I don't know, some cheap comment or cheap praise. I, me without her is, is not to have written essentialism, no way. I might have wanted to, I might have thought about it, but the idea of executing, or the idea of completing it, the, the idea of, of, of, of the, the, the key breakthrough moments, it's, it's not that she's done it, it's that she's believed in me as I've tried to do these things. I mean, I read somewhere that all you need is one person to, uh, believe in you for the rest of your life. To have somebody believe in you, affirm you, just not, and, and, and, and a weaker version of that is like,

• 1:43:24Greg McKeown?

  don't talk them down. That don't, you know, why are you doing that? Oh, that seems weird, uh, why would you want to achieve that? Any of that kind of stuff, just to have somebody that isn't doing that is something. But, but that's, that is, that has been incredibly useful to me with, with, with, with Anna and, and so with a design partner, you know, that's, that's what you're trying to least approximate. And so it could, it could be, it doesn't have to be a spouse, of course, it could be, it could be a friend, it could be, uh, it could be a colleague, it could be, you know, some, it could be a parent, it could be, you know, anybody, but as long as these are the rules of the road. Uh, I, I, I think, I think the only other thing I want to say about the design partner is,

• 1:44:08Greg McKeown?

  is that one shouldn't expect the conversations to all be easy. Uh, especially if you're choosing someone who knows you well. Just because they're, just because they're a supporter of you doesn't mean that they're going to say easy things to you. Um, I mean, I don't know. I mean, the idea of having a close relationship with someone, I mean, I'm talking marriage now for some reason. And, and reflecting on that. The idea that you can have a relationship without having conflict is absurd. There is conflict in all of life. And so having conflict about what is important.

• 1:44:51Greg McKeown?

  Uh, it is really to be expected. And to figure out together, to, to, to have even what is sometimes painful conversations. Who, what is most important to us? Is it this thing or that thing? Which is the trade off? How much of this are we really going to have in our life? This is hard work. And it's not one more thing to do. It's like the very work of life. And so with a design partner, you, you, you're engaging, you're willing to engage now in something over time that could be quite, quite tough. Especially as I say, if you're living together with this, the output of the decisions.

• 1:45:31Greg McKeown?

  Um, you know, those are, those are some of the things I've, I, I've, I've learned that I've thought about. But I do think having a design partner or two is, uh, it can be a good idea. Now, maybe, maybe one other comment about it is, is that, and maybe I've been a little idealistic to say it this way, but, but having people who can powerfully listen is got to be a key element of, of success with a design partner. To be a powerful listener is, is, uh, is also pretty rare. Um, you know, people that aren't, the second you say, well, I've been thinking about this, jumping in with their opinion, reading their autobiography into your life, telling you what, you know,

• 1:46:14Greg McKeown?

  you've got to have space and, and I, I think it would be better to go on a personal course of insight on your own. Than it would be to go with somebody who's just gonna jump in immediately and interrupt your thinking and tell them about what you, they think. The whole idea is to create space to be able to.

• 1:46:34Greg McKeown?

  Discern that voice, we will have lots of names for it, right, but we'll just the voice. Uh, your own conscience, your own sense of direction and to be able to listen to that. So that you can discern again between all these good things, all these different tools and and so on. And really what it is that you feel even you, you know, what you came here to do. And that's the point of it. If if if there's no one who can help with that process, go on your own. Uh, but if you've got somebody who can do it together with and you're doing it for them too. So it's not one way. You you you're being listener for them.

• 1:47:15Greg McKeown?

  And not just to what they're saying, but to try and get deeper and to hear what they're not saying. Uh, in pursuit of, I mean, the the Quakers have a process. It's very powerful. You you can put a link to this possibly. I don't know. The podcast notes or whatever, but but a process that they follow uh called the clarity. Uh, it's not the clarity council, but it's something like that, the clarity. Uh, and and it's they they they they have rules, these two rules, which is that you're not allowed to make, give any opinion. And you're not allowed to uh give any advice, any advice, any opinion. You you can only ask honest questions.

• 1:47:58Greg McKeown?

  In pursuit of helping someone to find clarity. And so your goal is not to persuade them to do something or persuade them not to do something. It is to ask questions so that they can feel and get clear on what is they feel right to do.

• 1:48:17Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:48:18Greg McKeown?

  That that is, uh, that's again, I know I'm talking high standards. I know this is uh these aspirational things. But that's really what you're trying to get to. You're trying to create an environment. I mean, I, one of the things I'll do, I certainly meditate. I mean, I I pray. Uh, and so I I pray when I'm on these off sites so that I can uh feel that sense of direction. Uh, you know, I'll I'll read, I'll bring literature with me that gets me centered. Um.

• 1:48:47Tim Ferriss?

  What type of literature or any examples?

• 1:48:50Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I mean, be beyond beyond scripture, which I I do bring and do read. Uh, it can be, it can be, you know, it's classic literature. It's uh, it's, you know, what it's not is as important as what it is. It's not rubbish. It's not just thought of the day latest reactive thing. It's uh, you know, it's as far away from the the latest news update as I can get. So I just finished reading um, John Adams autobiography, not autobiography, um, a biography by by David McCullough. And I loved that. That's a long biography and by the end of it, I just

• 1:49:31Greg McKeown?

  loved John Adams and loved what he was trying to do and it inspired me no end to what I want to be able to do with my, you know, with my son. I have a son and and and he's a namesake, just like John Adams has John Quincy Adams and and it's just inspiring. I mean, John Adams reads, he was reading Latin, Greek, all of these, not these classic texts, not just classic texts in English in their original Greek and Latin. I mean, that's amazing. It puts me without excuse. Suddenly I think, okay, I need to give up this kind of junk gossipy news uh, that that is so easy to get dragged into multiple times a day. Breaking, everything's breaking news now. Everything's breaking news.

• 1:50:16Greg McKeown?

  This is the most important thing that's ever happened. And it's and when you you click on the bait, what you find is that somebody is now talking about someone who was tweeting about somebody else who was tweeting. And that's the breaking news. This is gossip. This is just gossip. This is just nonsense. Well, at least that's how I feel about it. And and and so so that's an example of a kind of book that I would uh, that I would want to be reading, something, something that can that can ground me in principles that are longer term than hopefully than my own life. I mean, that's what I want to be uh, connected to.

• 1:50:58Tim Ferriss?

  So let's come back to, if you're willing to, uh, prayer for just a second. Do you have any prayers or types of prayers that you uh, return to more often than others?

• 1:51:11Greg McKeown?

  Um, you know, so, so prayer for me is, what it is characterized by is not being rote. Not being, I'm sorry, not being rote. Rote. So, so when it's, when it's great, it has a single, um, a, a, a single test point, which is already kind of mentioned, which is that you can feel that voice of clarity. You can actually send, uh, send to yourself, okay, I can now feel the difference between all of these voices around me. There's a, in my office, I have

• 1:51:55Greg McKeown?

  a, a, a picture of, uh, by, by James Christensen, uh, it's called The Listener. And in, in the picture, you have the listener is in the middle is a young man and, uh, and around him, he's got all these people, very colorful picture, he's sitting there almost in a, almost in a sort of Buddhist seated positions, eyes closed, to represent that he's trying to listen to his voice of conscience instead of all these other people around him. Some of them are laughing, some of them are yelling, then there's Shakespeare's in there, I think his mother-in-law was painted in there, you know, he's got all these just different people. And he's trying to listen, not to all of that, but to the voice within it. That's when I know that prayer's working, so to speak, is that it's not just sort of one way, I'm

• 1:52:39Greg McKeown?

  not just going through, I'm not going through the motions, if I, I go through the motions, but when I go through the motions, the, it's not, it's not changing. I don't feel different afterwards, you're just, you, you're, you're having a, I mean, if you, if you and I got on the phone, and every time I got on the phone with you, I said exactly the same things, thoughtlessly, our relationship would not be very real, you know, this would get very irritating.

• 1:53:03Greg McKeown?

  And so for so for me, you know, it's about the realness. I mean, I certainly subscribe to uh to the the idea, to the principle that that the state of my heart be- before God that matters at any given moment. It's not what I did yesterday. It's not what I did ten years ago, good or bad. It is this moment, and of course, that's true in every moment, this moment, your p- condition. Am I am I willing to admit my vulnerabilities? And tha- tha- that's that's what I'm trying to do in prayer. It's it's look, this is what's going on. This is what's a struggle for me. This is what's a trouble. And I'm really willing to do what you whatever I'm, if I can hear the voice of clarity, I commit right now, I'm doing it.

• 1:53:45Greg McKeown?

  I will do it. And if I'm in that state, then it it becomes clear what to do and what not to do. And especially important on something like a personal course of the offsite. Uh but also true, of course, in in this, you know, this ongoing journey of trying to discern not between, not just between as as as you could frame it, uh yeah, good and evil. Um, maybe it is that still i- i- in some way, but really, for me, I don't think about it like that. I'm trying to discern between essential and good. I'm trying to say, look, it's all good.

• 1:54:24Greg McKeown?

  I got I got a long list of things I can do today, and there's nothing on it that, there's nothing on this list that's like bad. There's nothing in me, I don't I don't I don't personally struggle with like, oh, I want to do something bad in my life. I don't feel that. But I want to know between the essential and the good. I want to know what that is, because I don't have time to get all the good and all the essential things done. I don't have that time. I don't think actually any of us do. I think really, we have enough essential things to fill the rest of our life. And that is precisely why I must, I it's so so jugularly important to me

• 1:55:05Greg McKeown?

  to to to figure it out. It's because every time I'm not doing what's essential, I am giving up something that is essential.

• 1:55:14Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm, that's a great way to put it. And uh. We could talk for many, many hours. I may have to, at some point, ask for a round two. This is incredibly enjoyable and helpful, and I thought I would start to wrap up just by reading a few other highlights on these many pages in front of me. And then we can start to put a close to things. But the first is, quote, "To embrace the essence of essentialism requires we replace these false assumptions," which previously come up in the book, "with three core truths." Number one, "I choose to." Number two, "Only a few things really matter." And three, "I can do anything, but not everything."

• 1:55:59Tim Ferriss?

  And then the complementary two highlights later on are, quote, "The ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away. It can only be forgotten." I think that's really important. And then, "To become an essentialist requires a heightened awareness of our ability to choose." And so I wanted to open the door, if you wanted to elaborate on that at all. But then also to ask you, metaphorically speaking, if you could put, you know, one question, one line, word, quote, whatever it might be, on a gigantic billboard to reach billions of people, what that might be. But that'll be probably my last question. But the ability to choose and how often we forget that we do have choices.

• 1:56:43Tim Ferriss?

  We may not love our choices, but nonetheless, we do have choices. Why is it that we so often feel we do not have choices or forget that we have choices?

• 1:56:57Greg McKeown?

  Well, we're creatures of habit, and so we get pulled into a whole set of things as if... And eventually, those habits are acting on us, and so we just really start to believe, "I don't have a choice," and we say it that way. We say, "I have to." Well, what we're saying, when we say we have to, is there isn't, there isn't, there is nothing else that could be done. I have to means there is no agency involved, there's no choice involved. And I had a great little experience with this where we had um a son through, through a funny and, and, and welcome uh sort of wager that I did, just this friendly silly wager with, with, with a friend of mine.

• 1:57:38Greg McKeown?

  Um, he said, uh, we had this, this thing, if, if I won the wager, then he would take my son to baseball for the whole season. Uh, and if, if, and, and, and if I lost, I had to take him to baseball the whole season, which seemed like that was a wager in my favor, but it was really unlikely that I was gonna win the wager and, and um at least, at least he, he thought so. And so as it turns out, um, he lost the wager, so he's now doing this. And, and so this is all just fun and games, but then as the season began, we realized that we of course had been conned in our own thinking, planning fallacy. Of course, there's still requirements for us. We still have to get him all the

• 1:58:20Greg McKeown?

  equipment and we're still gonna get him ready every single time and we still got to go take him to there's still, it's not gonna literally be zero impact just because someone else is taking them to the practices and so on. And so, right as it came, there was still enough going on in our life, it just felt like definitely one more thing and quite a big one more thing. But here we are. We could have said, look, we have to do it. We don't want to, but we have to. And we almost did make that mistake. And then we changed the language, we said, and this is important, I choose to have a son in baseball because, and we had to fill in the blank, because if we don't, he's gonna be really disappointed. By framing it like that, if you say I have to, it just, it's the end of your reasoning, end of your thinking, you can't

• 1:59:04Greg McKeown?

  prosecute the hypothesis. You can't do anything. There's no hypothesis. You just, it's the end of story. By saying, I'm choosing to do this because he'll be upset, now we could test it. Now, he could have been upset. We didn't know, so we can test it. Jack come in here, comes in. So we're thinking about this baseball season, we're thinking it might just be, you know, one more thing and, and we're just wondering, you know, what, what are your thoughts about this? About, you know, if we did it, didn't do it, what are your thoughts? It, it, instant reaction, oh, that'd be fine. That'd be, that'd be fine if we didn't do that. Oh. Well, that was easy. I saved months of work. It was no love lost from at all. That's why we get caught into this. We think we have to, we don't take responsibility. It's a choice.

• 1:59:49Greg McKeown?

  It's a choice because I don't want this output now. Let's go and find out if that output really is what would happen. So I think that that's kind of where we get into it. And in some ways you could say, well, that's not, what's the big deal? But it's the, it's a huge deal. Because at the core of it, what we, what we are is our ability to choose. That's who we are. It's what makes us human. And so when we, when we remove that, when we forget about it, we're removing what makes us most human. And, and so that's when we start living in kind of non-human ways, ma- ma- machine ways, robotic ways, uh, disconnected ways, disconnected relationships. We're not choosing anymore. We are, but we're not doing it very consciously. We're doing it compulsively.

• 2:00:35Greg McKeown?

  And that's exactly the shift that I'd be advocating for. I, I rarely advocate explicitly for what I think is essential or non-essential. Like I, there's almost, there is, there's some for those that are paying attention in the book. You know, some of my values I think are, are, are in there. But it's not explicit. I'm not saying, hey, you should value this thing over that thing. But I am advocating that, that people should be conscious about the value that they are choosing. Not compulsive. Compulsive, this is, this is the environment in which we don't know we're choosing. Uh, we don't, we're not conscious of it. And so we just become a function of everybody else's choices and what everyone else is doing. And whatever we just last thought in our heads, kind of a thing.

• 2:01:20Tim Ferriss?

  Which is a choice in and of itself, right? If, if, if you think you're not making a choice or you abdicate yourself from making a choice, that is in fact a choice.

• 2:01:29Greg McKeown?

  Right.

• 2:01:30Tim Ferriss?

  You are just putting fate in the hand of your, in the hands of other people, other forces, your subconscious and so on, opposed to e- e- exerting agency over your set of circumstances.

• 2:01:43Greg McKeown?

  And, and it's easier to do that in, in the short term. It feels easier. I don't have a choice. See, I'm not responsible. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not on the hook for this. I mean, I'm the victim of everything. I mean, of course, in a, in a sense, we don't have to worry as much because we don't, I, I don't like this, but this is what it is. Uh, and, and that's all fine if everybody around us is making the right choices. And society is going in the right direction. And culture is supporting our highest values and our best contribution that we could make in life, fine.

• 2:02:19Greg McKeown?

  But of course, that's not the case. And so in, in, in a, in a world where, you know, it can be tilted in all sorts of pernicious directions. All sorts of negative themes and influences. If you just go with the flow, if you just go, I, I don't have a choice. I think you, I think, yeah, you know, you can end up living a life so differently than the one you really intended to live. That, uh, that, that, that, again, it's waking up to this. I. Yes, I have a choice. I gotta make a choice. And it might be the wrong choice. I might guess it wrong, of course I am, but I'm gonna make it. I'm gonna actually, uh, you know, to lean into that reality. You can't, the one choice you can't make is to, is to, is to get rid of your ability to choose. It cannot, cannot be done.

• 2:03:03Greg McKeown?

  It's like not, not theoretically, not practically possible. So that's a good, it's good news, though. It's, uh, this discovery, I am choice. Whatever's happened to me, I can make a different choice going forward. Whatever's happened to me intergenerationally. It's full circle back to this new work that, uh, that you're, you're gonna start working on in a new way from this moment on forever.

• 2:03:27Greg McKeown?

  Is, is that, is that we, we don't have to do what happened to us. We don't have to repeat what happened to our mother, father, grandfather, grandparent, great-grandparent. Bad stuff did happen, I'm almost certain, but we can be a transition person. We can say. I have a new choice and I choose differently. And, and it's so powerful. The moment somebody discovers that. When, uh, wait, has an awakening around that. They're able to, they're able to move forward and change everything that comes after them. Uh, we didn't talk about it in my family, but I'm gonna talk about it in my family. We, we, you know, this was a black box and we didn't deal with it, but we're gonna deal with it.

• 2:04:11Greg McKeown?

  It's not gonna be easy, but we're dealing with it now so that it doesn't just get passed on to the next, my great grandkids are still struggling with this stuff. Oh, I'm gonna shift it. Hell, we had alcoholism in our family, but we, I'm not gonna, I can choose not to drink alcohol. I can choose not to pass this on. You know, th- th- this is, this is tremendously, uh, to me empowering, inspiring, um, change in perspective.

• 2:04:36Tim Ferriss?

  Hugely, and, uh, you, like you said, you do have the option to flip the switch, to switch the track, uh, to redirect the train, and you, you can be that transition point for yourself and for the people around you and for the people who come after you. Uh, well Greg, this is, this has been such a a wonderful conversation for me. I, I hope it was, um, somewhat stimulating or, or fun for you to be a part of, and, uh, perhaps we could just close on the, on the billboard question. Does, does anything come to mind as a, a question, a word, a line, a quote, anything that you would put on a billboard as a message to convey to millions or billions of people?

• 2:05:21Greg McKeown?

  Light, light, just that word.

• 2:05:23Tim Ferriss?

  L I G H T.

• 2:05:25Greg McKeown?

  That's it, light. Is that e- every moment in our lives, in whatever capacity we're in, there is always this choice in this moment to step towards light or to step towards darkness. And I don't mean grandiose, you know, as I said before, massive good versus massive evil. It's not that, but each moment we have the choice. Do I step towards the light? Do I step towards some dark version of this moment? Do I, do I get irritated with my kids or do I be patient? Do I, do I listen to the voice of conscience in this moment? Or do I just go after what my ego would want me to go after?

• 2:06:06Greg McKeown?

  And my experience with this, and I'm just, just beginning my own journey of it, of course, but is that if I, if I pursue what is light, it will bring more light. And that light grows brighter and brighter. And maybe it carries on forever, maybe until the perfect day. But that's, that's the idea. Wherever anybody's at, they can do that, right? Whatever choices they've made before. A- a- and all of us have made mistakes, right? All of us have chosen in those moments, oh, I went down, it was a dark choice. I don't mean the, the dark side, like, you know, like some Star Wars thing where you, you go over to the dark side. No, but just in this moment, I, I chose the impatient path. I chose the negative path.

• 2:06:51Greg McKeown?

  I chose the self-interested path. I chose the, you know, or, or, or I could just choose the light. And, and my experience is wherever anybody is on this journey, you know, between light to dark, let's say, wherever they are on that continuum, the people that are most full of light aren't the people who have done all the best things in their lives necessarily. It's which direction they're headed in. It's which decision they just made. A- a- and, and so that's why it's so powerful. It's, this is not getting all burdened about whatever the past has been. It's in this moment, am I leaning into the light or leaning out of it? And, and that's to me is like, seriously? It's like the whole of life written in one single rule.

• 2:07:34Greg McKeown?

  And, uh, and so that's, that's, that would be, I think that would be, you know, my answer for that, at least today, light.

• 2:07:41Tim Ferriss?

  I like it. Well, thank you so much, Greg. People can find you online, gregmccuen.com. They can say hello, give a wave on social at Gregory McEwen on Twitter and probably elsewhere. The book Essentialism, I, I highly recommend it. And I, I don't say that much about, uh, many books. It, it is a, it is a very useful book. I found it personally useful. It's something that I revisit. Uh, is, is there anything that you would like to say in closing remarks? Anything else you'd like to add for people listening? Any ask you'd like to make of them, if anything?

• 2:08:21Greg McKeown?

  No, I don't have anything else for them, but I do want to say, Tim, I really appreciate how, you know, this conversation, I feel like, you know, it's been, I found it more than a normal podcast kind of conversation, and that's, you know, that's credit to you. And, you know, I appreciate that you've brought so much to the conversation and helped it to be what, at least for me, has felt rich and meaningful and real. And so, thank you to you.

• 2:08:52Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks so much, Greg. This is a conversation I think I will certainly listen to again. I'll be revisiting the book. I think that's a good starting point for my next quarterly offsite. And for people listening, I will include links to everything we discussed, of course, everything that Greg has up to, the Quaker process, I've taken notes on things to follow up on, the piece of artwork you mentioned as your reference point. All of that will be in the show notes, which you can find at tim.blog/podcast. Just search essentialism or Greg's name and it will pop right up. And I want to mention one more

• 2:09:35Tim Ferriss?

  quote before we close, and this is also from the book. It is a quote of Lao Tzu, and it goes as follows, quote, "To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day." So, until next time, folks, thank you for listening. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite

• 2:10:20Tim Ferriss?

  new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include... ...favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 2:10:57Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by wordpress.com. I love WordPress. I have used it for so many years. It's my go-to platform for blogging and creating websites. I use wordpress.com for everything, every day. My site, tim.blog is built on it. The websites for my books, including Tools of Titans, Tribe of Mentors, it's all on wordpress.com. And the founder, Matt Mullenweg, one of my close friends, has appeared on this show many times. Just search Matt Mullenweg, Tequila Ferris for quite an exciting time. Whether you're looking to create a personal blog, a business site, or both, you can make a really big impact right out of the box when you build on wordpress.com. And you'll be in good company. It's used

• 2:11:39Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:12:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:13:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country

• 2:13:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:14:26Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:15:11Tim Ferriss?

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