#786: Tactics and Strategies for a 2025 Reboot — Essentialism and Greg McKeown

Greg McKeown is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Greg-McKeown-ebook/dp/B00G1J1D28/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most https://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Make-Easier-What-Matters/dp/0593135644/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. 200,000 people receive his weekly 1-Minute Wednesday https://gregmckeown.com/1mw/ newsletter, and he recently released The Essentialism Planner: A 90-Day Guide to Accomplishing More by Doing Less https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0593578414?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Sponsors: Momentous https://livemomentous.com/tim high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off) Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra https://www.eightsleep.com/tim/ sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra) Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim high-yield cash account: https://Wealthfront.com/Tim https://wealthfront.com/Tim New clients get 3.30% base APY from program banks + additional 0.75% boost for 3 months on your uninvested cash (max $150k balance). Terms and conditions apply. The Cash Account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC (“WFB”) member FINRA/SIPC, not a bank. The base APY as of 1/30/26 is representative, can change, and requires no minimum. Tim Ferriss, a non-client, receives compensation from WFB for advertising and holds a non-controlling equity interest in the corporate parent of WFB, which creates a conflict of interest. Individual experiences and outcomes will differ. Instant withdrawals may be limited by your receiving firm and other factors. Investment advisory services provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Securities investments: not bank deposits, not bank-guaranteed or FDIC-insured, and may lose value. * Timestamps: [00:00] Who is Greg McKeown? [05:12] Handling destabilizing events and personal turmoil. [10:47] Writing as therapy and “screaming onto the page.” [13:35] Using Morning Pages and AI tools for personal reflection. [17:52] Carl Rogers and the power of deep listening. [20:33] Reviewing the core concepts of Essentialism and Effortless. [24:54] Temporal landmarks and the fresh start effect. [29:25] Personal quarterly offsites and the importance of direction over speed. [31:13] The three essential questions for quarterly reviews. [34:16] Making essential tasks effortless — practical examples and strategies. [37:03] The law of inverse prioritization — why important things don’t get done. [38:45] Strategies for making tasks simpler — the microburst concept. [44:37] The courage to be rubbish. [47:09] Pre-mortems and anticipating obstacles. [52:37] Michael Phelps’ preparation and routine. [01:07:31] The 1-2-3 method and defining what “done” looks like. [01:15:19] Meaning over productivity, and making vs. managing. [01:23:14] Radical gratitude and finding meaning in suffering. [01:36:43] Parting thoughts on deep connection and listening. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Greg McKeown, last name spelled M-C-K-E-O-W-N. He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, one of my most highlighted books on Kindle, and Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. He's also a speaker, host of the Greg McKeown Podcast, and founder of the Essentialism Academy with students from 96 countries. 200,000 people receive his weekly One Minute Wednesday newsletter, and he recently released The Essentialism Planner: A 90-Day Guide to Accomplishing More by Doing Less.

• 0:40Tim Ferriss?

  And this episode is an exploration of all the great things we hope to accomplish in a new year, how to approach them practically, intelligently, and most joyfully. After just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible, enjoy. About three weeks ago, I found myself between 10,000 and 12,000 feet, going over the continental divide, carrying tons of weight, doing my best not to chew on my own lungs, and I needed all the help I could get. And in those circumstances, I relied on Momentous Products every single day and every single night. Now, regular listeners probably know I've been taking Momentous Products consistently and testing them, the entire spectrum of their products, for a long while now.

• 1:25Tim Ferriss?

  But you may not know that I recently collaborated with them, one of the sponsors of this episode, to put together my top picks, and I'm calling it my performance stack. I always aim for a strong body and sharp mind. Of course, you need both, and neither is possible without quality sleep. So I didn't want anything speculative. I wanted things I could depend on, and it is what I use personally. So I designed my performance stack to check all three boxes, and here it is. Creapure Creatine for muscular and cognitive support. The cognitive side is actually very interesting to me these days. Whey Protein Isolate for muscle mass and recovery, and Magnesium 3-Enate for sleep, which is really the ideal form of magnesium, as far as we know, for sleep. I use all three daily, and it's why I feel 100% comfortable recommending it to you,

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  my dear listeners. Momentous sources Creapure creatine from Germany and their whey isolate is sourced from European dairy farmers held to incredibly strict standards. And I've chatted with the CEO about their supply chain, about how they manage all of these things. It's incredibly complex and they go way above any industry standards that I'm familiar with and I am familiar with them. All Momentous products are NSF and informsport certified, which is professional athlete and Olympic level testing. So, here's the main point. What's on the label is exactly what you're getting. And this is not true for the vast majority of companies in this industry. So, this is a differentiator. Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think.

• 2:52Tim Ferriss?

  Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use TIM at checkout for 20% off of my performance stack. One more time, that's livemomentous.com/tim. I'll spell it out, it's a long one. Live moment O U S dot com slash Tim. So, livemomentous.com/tim for 20% off. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep.

• 3:34Tim Ferriss?

  The Pod Cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the Pod Cover's dual zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So, stop fighting, this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable.

• 4:17Tim Ferriss?

  Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your pur-. Perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner, great, you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own ideal temperatures. It's easy. So get your best night's sleep. Head to eightsleep.com/tim and use code TIM to get $350 off of the Pod4Ultra. They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  No, I would have seen it before.

• 5:00Speaker 03

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

• 5:13Tim Ferriss?

  When something hits, could be a calamity, it could just be something destabilizing, could be anything. How do you center yourself so that you don't just end up feeling like you're in the washing machine? Because I am very good at getting things done, even when I'm internally suffering a lot of turmoil. But the last handful of days have been very, very challenging. And we don't have to go into specifics, but this is a close loved one. And a lot of the responsibilities are going to fall on me to figure things out. It's also the holidays, right? So the people I want to get a hold of, I cannot get a hold of. And I recognize that fretting over it does not fix anything and it makes me, it makes my day less peaceful and enjoyable.

• 5:54Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll make a reference to one of our earlier conversations, which may have been on the record, may have been behind the scenes. But there is, I'm pretty sure that you mentioned a piece of artwork called The Listener, I want to say.

• 6:11Greg McKeown?

  Yes, that's right.

• 6:11Tim Ferriss?

  Which is this sort of centered, calm person, and I have it up on my wall at home with all of this shouting, commotion and chaos around him. And in the center, he's just perfectly centered and thinking clearly. So I suppose my question is, How do you help get yourself closer to that depiction of the listener? When you realize, wow, there may be a lot of chaos around me, there may be a lot of chaos in my head. And look, I'm meditating like twice a day. It's helpful. It doesn't seem to be quite enough. And maybe the answer is, look, you sit with it. This is just something

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  you're gonna have to weather. So don't make a problem out of a problem, in a sense. But I'm curious what you found helpful in those circumstances.

• 7:04Greg McKeown?

  I think I can respond that I don't think it's just sitting with it. And I'm pro meditation, and I'm certainly pro prayer. But the thing I want to say is sort of distinguishing the noise outside of us and the noise inside of us. Because they are two different things. And I want to sort of share a story and then illustrate the action that comes back from it. But this last summer, I was back in England, I'm doing this doctorate at the University of Cambridge. And so part of the requirement of that is to have residency every year there. And this summer, I felt really destabilized while I was there. And it wasn't the doctorate

• 7:47Greg McKeown?

  that I don't think was particularly major part of why, is because my best friend of 35 years, Sam Bridgestock, is dying of cancer. And that's been a long time coming. We've known that that would happen. But facing it more directly in person, but it wasn't even just that, because it wasn't like I didn't know before. It wasn't that I'd come to a new understanding of the truth or the reality. It was, I actually, for a while, I couldn't work out what it was. But then I realized, oh, he has. So much mind share about the reality of my whole life. We became friends when I was 10 years old.

• 8:32Greg McKeown?

  And those years, those developmental years, I mean, I escaped to that friendship. And it was so stabilizing to me at the time to have a relationship that was open and honest. And if I'm completely frank, at a little bit of a risk in a way, but in a family culture that didn't prioritize that for a whole series of complex reasons. So suddenly, the imminent and certain loss of him. It's like, my goodness, my whole sense of reality is being shaken. So it's not just, even though this is a loss of such a friendship and so on, it tapped right back into this whole sense of, well, what is true? And who do you go to to validate that?

• 9:15Greg McKeown?

  And do I have enough internal sense of truth to be able to navigate this? Because he was the one I would go to. Oh, my goodness, this is what's happening. This is the reality. This is the situation in those most complex relationships. And the idea of like, oh, I won't be able to go to him. It destabilized something at a different level. And all human systems have these levels, right? From the surface, which is secure, safe, shallow. And then you go further, closer and closer, like to say, the onion of human systems at the core are things that are so meaningful that they are inherently blisteringly vulnerable.

• 9:56Greg McKeown?

  Because to mess with them, to tweak them even, I mean, the opportunity is enormous. I mean, that's where massive transformational change happens. But, you know, if it gets shaken by something, everything shakes. It's the earthquake because the tectonic plate of truth inside of you is getting readjusted or either you're getting a clearer sense of what is true. And that's all contextual, because I think.

• 10:22Greg McKeown?

  From your own description, if you're using language of destabilization, it's because whatever's happening externally isn't just reverberating at the surface or the middle, it's hitting something really deep.

• 10:36Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure.

• 10:37Greg McKeown?

  And so of course, then that changes everything. Nothing works the same way before. Everything is, has been injected with some sort of degree of uncertainty. I just want to come back to this idea of like, just meditating, like the idea of just sitting with it. And people that are like, more deeply meditative than I am, may say, well, no, no, that, that practice would be the thing to do. But I found this summer, and I find in general, I need to write it out and loudly. It's one of the things I try to teach our children about. There's all kinds of prayer, there's all kinds of writing. Scream it out, cry it out, whatever it is. It's like, it doesn't have to be a conservative version of this. A little example of this was given to me, somebody that had on my podcast, had just

• 11:22Greg McKeown?

  started a new business, and that destabilized, not all the way to the core, but you know, suddenly she's waking up, she doesn't have a set income as before, and she wakes up at like four in the morning, just hot sweat, just, what have I done? Just super stressed.

• 11:38Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like my morning this morning.

• 11:39Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. Well, that's it.

• 11:42Tim Ferriss?

  Different reasons, but you know, viscerally.

• 11:44Greg McKeown?

  Different reasons. But the dynamic is similar. And what she did, she did it all spontaneously, which I think is pretty amazing, but what she did, she grabbed a sheet of paper, and I think it may have been deliberate that she grabbed a sheet of paper rather than a book, like a journal or a planner, because she wanted to scream onto the page. She wanted to do it with complete abandonment, with the awareness, conscious awareness, I'm gonna throw this thing away, no one else gets to see this, or no one else has to see it.

• 12:14Tim Ferriss?

  I see. So the sheet had more of a impermanent implication than a journal, where you can't tear it. You're less likely to tear it out and toss it. This is like, alright, I'm gonna scribble fast and furious, and then that's the act.

• 12:30Greg McKeown?

  Right. And the, and then, I thought was interesting, because without her intent, what she experienced in just a few minutes was that she went, maybe this is my restate of what she experienced, but it's, she went from confusion.

• 12:46Greg McKeown?

  To clarity and then naturally onto creation without meaning to do that. And I thought that that was one of the things that was so interesting in her case study is, is that she didn't wake up going, okay, I need to create a plan of what to do in these circumstances. She just went, the noise is so loud and it's so overwhelming. The emotions are so much, I have to give it somewhere. But that process of screaming into the page of letting it all out, separating ourselves from that discombobulating internal state, I think is extremely powerful because I think it helps us to go from prisoner to observer.

• 13:27Greg McKeown?

  And then from observer, I think, once we start observing, we're better able to become a creator. So I think that's the shift.

• 13:35Tim Ferriss?

  This is a good reminder that these best practices are like brushing your teeth. And I know this, but I've lapsed in my use of something that sounds very similar, which would be morning pages. And it's been a while since I've done it. I picked up a new habit, this meditation, and there are only so many minutes in the morning, right? So it's tough to do a 27 step boot up, especially if you have kids or responsibilities. So the meditation came in, other things went out. One of them was the morning pages, which is fine, but I had forgotten that was in my toolkit. And this is a very good reminder that to me, that when in doubt, kind of go back to the fundamentals.

• 14:20Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe it's something that you've already used. Doesn't necessarily have to be a brand new shiny thing. And in this case, you're absolutely right. While my monkey mind is just running in circles, trying to think my way through it is not going to be helpful. It is just a fruitless labor.

• 14:38Greg McKeown?

  I think so. I mean, I remember this summer, because I happened to be doing the research, I was raging into the page one day for like, I don't know, a couple of hours. And I don't know that anything there was usable for the research or for a future book or so on. It was too raw for any of that. I just definitely wanted to get it all out. And I thought, when I looked at it all afterwards, I thought, yeah, you know, David Allen says, yeah, your mind is a bad office. It's good at all sorts of things, but not that sort of complex organization on its own. And when I looked at the page of all this content, I thought, It's way, way too much for the ram of my mind to be able to navigate.

• 15:18Greg McKeown?

  This is like layers and layers of complexity and intensity that needs to step over there. So I can look at it rather than trying to live in it. One additional little thing I learned in this conversation, in the case that I was mentioning, is a term I had never heard before, and it's instinctive elaboration. And what that is, is when you ask a question, we've all had this happen. If someone asks you a question, it is impossible not to think about it. And that's a really powerful thing to learn about somehow our cognitive inheritance. Because it means if you give yourself a prompt and then rage about it, it's like your mind can't help but go there.

• 16:01Greg McKeown?

  And just recently, I used this instinctive elaboration when I felt overwhelmed, not in the same level of destabilization, but a very intense last 30 days. You know, with family wedding, there's been funerals, there's been the holidays, Christmas, two birthdays, and that's just the normal, high level, some of the stuff that's been going on. So it's been this, you know, really intense period. And I remember one time I was sitting down, my journal is finished, it's over the holidays, and there's so much going on, I was like, I can't just go and grab another one. I thought I had extras and I didn't have it. And I really felt strangely stuck. Of course, there's so many possible solutions, but when you feel frozen or stuck with things, you're not thinking in that creative way. And I literally used like an AI tool and I sort of raged into that.

• 16:45Greg McKeown?

  Like, okay, this is answering this question. What is going on? Just download the what is happening in your life. I like this structure of what, so what, now what? What is happening? Let's just get it out. And then, once I look at it, okay, now what? What's the news? What does this mean? Because we're all meaning makers and destabilizing experiences. What they're really doing is they're messing with our sense of meaning and orientation. And so then now what is, well, what do I do about it? And I just downloaded, like I literally recorded it and then sent the recording. It was like, okay, what do you make of that? And I didn't really expect that much from it, but the restate it gave me back was so helpful. It really put my life in perspective and helped me go, oh, of course, that's why you're feeling all of these things.

• 17:30Greg McKeown?

  And it even gave me some quite, I would say reasonably advanced suggestions of what to do.

• 17:38Tim Ferriss?

  So you uploaded the audio file?

• 17:40Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 17:42Tim Ferriss?

  What tool did you use?

• 17:43Greg McKeown?

  Just GPT.

• 17:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, okay, that's a good experiment. Because that's something you can do kind of in between, right? If I'm walking around here.

• 17:51Greg McKeown?

  That's right.

• 17:52Tim Ferriss?

  I could just let it rip and there's no.

• 17:55Greg McKeown?

  That's right.

• 17:56Tim Ferriss?

  Downside to it.

• 17:57Greg McKeown?

  I've done it a couple of times. Here's a good little prompt to give to that is I didn't do it this last time, but I've asked it before to respond as Carl Rogers would. Carl Rogers was the psychotherapist who really, more than anyone else, introduced into therapeutic processes, the idea of powerful, deep empathic listening. There's been two studies that were done about Rogerian psychotherapy. When I think in like nineteen, maybe eighty something. And then again, in like two thousand something. I can find the links. Questionnaire was sent both times. Huge number of psychologists. Who's the most influential psychologist in psychotherapy?

• 18:40Greg McKeown?

  And both times they identified Carl Rogers as the most influential in their view and in their practice. I think that's pretty amazing because, you know, Freud and so on gets a lot more attention. But in practice, what works is what Carl Rogers did. And of course, what he's saying is similar to what we've been talking about. He says, if someone would really listen to me, he says, whenever someone really listens to me, I find that in the process, my life starts to make more sense. You know, the dots start to connect for me. And it's not that they're trying to do that for me. It's just the nature of the process of being deeply listened to. And so he was the one that sort of really invented the language of empathic restating and brought that into practice.

• 19:25Greg McKeown?

  And the whole idea, I think, is that you are delayering the stuff that isn't the real issue. Whereas in what normally happens in conversation, even everyday conversation is somebody says something and people just immediately give advice. I mean, within just instantly, they have no idea what's going on inside of you. You don't even know what's going on inside of you. And yet they're already giving advice and suggestions and adding confusion and I think often a lot of stress and a sense of judgment and all of those things. Whereas in what he found was that if you would listen deeply enough, and he said it takes a lot of courage to do this. And he said, it's most of us cannot do it. We just don't have the courage to listen like this. But if we are, we restate back

• 20:07Greg McKeown?

  to them and we just keep doing it, we'll go deeper and deeper to the central issues. And it's a sense of like people in the end kind of almost heal themselves because they start to understand what's happening inside of them. Well, I've played around with using GPT to construct that backwards and forwards relationship, communication. And, and actually I found it to be fairly advanced at being able to do it. So I think it can be a very helpful tool.

• 20:34Tim Ferriss?

  I'll give it a shot. Well, thanks for that detour off of our planned programming. I appreciate that. And why don't we then begin at the beginning? We are just about to head into January 1st, the new year, and a lot of people are thinking ahead with aspirations, goals, hopes, maybe some trepidation. And before we get into the bucket of tricks, strategies and tactics and so on, let's back up for people who don't have much context

• 21:12Tim Ferriss?

  on your background. Could you briefly explain what essentialism is and also effortless, the titles of two of your books respectively? And, you know, I've thought about it. As in part, one is what to do, the other is how to do it. But that's not going to give people enough of a table setting. So would you mind just taking a moment to explain what the sort of main kernels are? The core concept for these two?

• 21:45Greg McKeown?

  Essentialism in one word would be focus. Effortless in one word would be simplification. Another way of contrasting them is essentialism is figuring out what the right thing is to do. And effortless is to do it in the right way. And one of the reasons that I wrote both books was because I'd covered some of effortless within essentialism. But as I've traveled around and taught this now, you know, all over, maybe 400 plus organizations around the world over the last decade, almost nobody got the second message, even though it is in there, some of it's in there.

• 22:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know the feeling.

• 22:26Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, well, I can take responsibility for this, but it's like people heard the first mindset shift and not the second. And I think they're both just as important, just as powerful. So what they heard in essentialism is, so essentialism has three elements to it. Explore, eliminate, execute. Explore what's essential as opposed to non-essential, as opposed to the trivial many. It's like, what are the vital few things that make all the difference? Exploring that and identifying that. Then eliminate is to actually delete the non-essentials, to remove them. It's not enough just to know what matters, what's essential in your life, in your year, in your day.

• 23:11Greg McKeown?

  You actually have to get rid of the stuff that's getting in the way of those essentials. And then execute is literally to make it as effortless as possible to do what matters most. So in there, there's these two shifts. Find what's essential, eliminate the non-essential. And then, once you've arrived at that state, or in an ongoing process, really, you're then saying, okay, well, how do I set up systems? How do I organize myself in such a way that the essential things happen?

• 23:43Tim Ferriss?

  Having your best day or your worst day?

• 23:45Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, right.

• 23:46Tim Ferriss?

  Easy day or your hardest day? Well, first of all, and I'll recommend both books to everybody. Essentialism is one of my most highlighted Kindle books that I have. Effortless is similar, and it's the discipline pursuit of less. I would also, in my mind, it's what to do? That is effectiveness would be essentialism. And then how to do it, which would be efficiency, is effortless. And I think for myself, if I'm looking back on the past year, I think I've been very good at identifying the essential. And Old Habits Die Hard, I have been overexerting. I have been efforting my way through some of those essential things

• 24:31Tim Ferriss?

  by subconsciously overcomplicating them or introducing unnecessary complication and obstacles because there is that mantra that was ingrained in me some, at some point, which is if it's important and it's not hard, you are not trying hard enough. But in a world of noise, if you aim to be surgical, there's nothing wrong with that applied focus. So let's hop into new year, new you type of discussion. A lot of folks listening will peg things to like a 30 day challenge, a 60 day reboot, whatever it might be. But you have a different lens through which you look at pegging dates and thinking about these types of landmarks.

• 25:15Tim Ferriss?

  Could you elaborate on that, please?

• 25:17Greg McKeown?

  The term for this in the literature is temporal landmarks. So what almost everybody is familiar with, this idea of the new year, new you. We all experienced that, oh, it's a new chance. What the research on this is distinguishing is it's like any moment that allows you to distinguish old self to new self.

• 25:39Greg McKeown?

  And that this is a really helpful cognitive malleability that you have because oh, we have an excuse to become a new version of me, to upgrade myself. So the new year, new you is obviously in a chance for people to do that. It gets a bad name in some sense because people say, I mean, everyone says, you know, oh, well, who here has set New Year's resolutions? And then by the seventh of January, you're not doing them anymore. And I actually think people are really wrong to say that in a sense, to frame it like that. What we just need is more temporal landmarks so that we say, yeah, we did the right things. And if it was seven days, well, that was great because that was seven days you wouldn't have done

• 26:16Greg McKeown?

  otherwise. How else can you select meaningful sort of tagging, fresh start moments? Of course, your birthday is a chance to do that, but so could the anniversary and so could your parents' birthday or so could your child's birthdays. You can have the first day of the quarter. So that that's an additional four. And so identifying meaningful dates, and this is more than just a nice idea. And I think people would themselves know if they've experienced this in their lives. Yeah, this is real. You want to increase the number of these you have in 2025 so that you have lots of what's called the fresh

• 26:57Greg McKeown?

  start effect. You want lots of fresh start effects supporting you in getting to the new you. So I think, yes, celebrate if it's seven days, great. If it's two weeks, you know, into January, you're doing that new thing. Fantastic. Build in the next one. What's the next meaningful date of the year? And that's your next chance to be able to have an excuse to improve upon something. I think all of us are prisoners to the way our mind currently works. And we're prisoners until we become observers to it. So I think these temporal landmarks are a chance to sort of separate ourselves a bit. And the moment we get into that observer role, my experience at least is that

• 27:41Greg McKeown?

  Well, it might feel a little esoteric to say this, but it's like, who's observing that? That's the real you. And that observer is not so full of pain, not so full of confusion. The observer is actually really clear. And so anytime you can use different tools to shift into that, anytime we can break down projects and anchor them to meaningful dates, not arbitrary deadlines, but meaningful dates, I think is a good accelerating, encouraging way of going through the year.

• 28:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, something that I've done, in addition to pegging things to dates, I've done this somewhat, I suppose intuitively with the temporal landmarks, is creating landmarks that are effectively tests for the X that I'm trying to improve. So I will have, and I already have two or three of these blocked out in 2025, which are, let's just say, three to 10 day events, which could be a meditation retreat. It could be something very physical at altitude that's going to require types of fitness that I am loathe to cultivate because I find them boring. But if I go on this trip with close friends and I am not up to snuff,

• 28:55Tim Ferriss?

  not only will I suffer, I will be ridiculed and have my balls busted endlessly by my friends who should exactly do that. And by having these, I don't want to say final exams, but these tests that are intended to be enjoyable, but they're only going to be enjoyable if I do the work ahead of time. It builds in a lot of incentive and insurance that I will behave myself on some level and do what I know I should do. Let's hop into, doesn't have to be rapid fire, but I want to give people a number of different concepts and tools that they can hopefully contemplate using. And I'll let you choose in which order you want to tackle these.

• 29:39Tim Ferriss?

  Personal quarterly offsite, which is something that I've long been fascinated from your toolkit. Been fascinated by that for a while. So the personal quarterly offsite, the power half hour or half an hour, and then the one, two, three method. Where would you like to go first?

• 29:55Greg McKeown?

  That order, I think, is good, actually. The personal quarterly offsite, if I put it just conceptually for a second, it's speed over direction. Because we live in a time where it's so easy to have what I would describe as counterfeit agility. So you're moving fast, life feels fast, life is fast and you're taking messages, you're sending messages, you're doing things. But actually, they don't add up to a lot of progress towards what matters.

• 30:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right, it's a millimeter in a thousand directions.

• 30:24Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, precisely.

• 30:25Tim Ferriss?

  So the speed over direction is what you don't want.

• 30:28Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. The metaphor to go with it, right? You could say, well, a plane is off track 90% of the time. It only gets to where it's supposed to get to at the right time because it's adjusting constantly. So it's, what is the forcing function? In our lives to make sure we don't go too far off track? And then find, oh my goodness, it's been five years that I've gone down this path when really I shouldn't have even been on this journey.

• 30:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right. I thought I was going to Arizona. I'm in North Korea. What happened?

• 30:55Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. Yeah, right, right, right. That would be a moment, wouldn't it? And so personal quarterly offsite, I mean, you can take it all the way literally. I mean, Anna and I have done this where we'll travel to somewhere and take a weekend or take a few days possibly. And really talk, big picture. I mean, there's three main questions that I think need to be addressed in a personal quarterly offsite. Even though it's more than these three, but this is the core of it is. One, what are the essential things that we're under investing in? The second question is what are the non-essential things we're over investing in? And then perhaps not surprisingly, how can we make it as effortless as possible?

• 31:40Greg McKeown?

  To be able to make that shift within this next 90 days. Now, there's more sub-questions to it than that, but I think that's the tension. That is so important to identify clearly. And so it doesn't have to be as major as this, though. I mean, that's. I think you could still make meaningful progress in an hour or two on your own or with someone else. I like doing it with an accountability partner, but even there, I think the best practice is you. Fill out this process, you answer these questions yourself, they do it, and then you bring them together. And start talking and get into not negotiation exactly, but exploration and working through things. And I think that's one of the primary benefits of a personal quarterly offsite.

• 32:25Greg McKeown?

  Is really facing the reality that all of us are lost. All of us are going in the wrong direction until we pause, think about it, get clear again. I do not feel like I'm a better essentialist or better at applying these ideas in one sense than anybody else, certainly not inherently, but I think I admit to it faster than maybe the average person. And I think that's the key.

• 32:51Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. It's the new year and many of you no doubt are planning for the year ahead. I'm doing the same. And of course, one thing that tends to be top of mind is setting financial goals, getting your finances in order. And it's a mess out there. The hyper complexities of the US economy, global economy can be very confusing and there's a lot of conflicting advice, but saving and investing doesn't have to be complicated. Here's something refreshingly simple to use and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now you can earn 4% APY, that's annual percentage yield, on your cash from partner banks with the Wealthfront cash account.

• 33:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 34:16Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example of, ideally a real example, but it doesn't have to be, but particularly number three. So there's the, what's the essential that you're under investing in? I'm sure I could sit down and identify that. What's non-essential that you're over investing in? I think I could also come up with that list. How can you make it as effortless or make it effortless to make the trade-off? That is where the rubber hits the road. So I would love to hear an example perhaps of how you've navigated that or seen others navigate it.

• 34:49Greg McKeown?

  We could do it with me or with you right now.

• 34:52Tim Ferriss?

  I'm game to try it. We'll see how if my brain cooperates, but I'm happy to give it a shot.

• 34:57Greg McKeown?

  Okay, so let's just ask these questions with you right now. Let's do like a little essentialist intervention. Maybe I shouldn't call it that, but let's try it.

• 35:05Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 35:06Greg McKeown?

  Well, let's do it for the whole year. What are candidates for things that are essential? That you feel like you've been under investing in?

• 35:15Tim Ferriss?

  I think what I've been under investing in in the last month, which is something that I need to invest in, in almost the most literal sense, because it's something that will have a payoff in the long term as it compounds is physical therapy and training for the legs and glutes and lower back because I've had this chronic pain for, let's just call it two years. It's probably longer with these brief windows of respite and there was a period of time where I was doing this training very consistently and having intermittent progress and then

• 35:58Tim Ferriss?

  about, let's just call it a month ago, I had a injection in a very particular place, which helped the back pain tremendously and I could give a litany of excuses, family, medical situation and various things. I have been neglecting that in part because I'm having this window of relief from the lower back pain. So it's not an immediate pressing issue, but I know it will be. So let's just say that and it's something essential that I'm under investing in, even though I am going to be doing this particular training as soon as we finish this recording. So it hasn't completely left the arena.

• 36:41Tim Ferriss?

  But it's something that I've been inconsistent with that I know is fundamental to my wellbeing. That'd be one.

• 36:48Greg McKeown?

  Well, first of all, it's a great example because when I ask people what's essential that you're under investing in, there are some really predictable answers and one of them is certainly will be health related, fitness related, is something they already know about. Their conscience is already tapping them about. But what I have learned is this strange law of inverse prioritization.

• 37:11Greg McKeown?

  Which is, I literally believe now that the most important thing in our lives at any given time is the least likely thing to get done.

• 37:22Tim Ferriss?

  It's sort of squares with what I see and what I've experienced at points. Why do you think that is?

• 37:27Greg McKeown?

  I think one of the reasons is because it's so important, the risk of failing at it is much higher than anything else in your life. So it adds to this procrastination feeling.

• 37:42Tim Ferriss?

  Performance anxiety.

• 37:43Greg McKeown?

  Yes.

• 37:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 37:45Greg McKeown?

  Very high performance anxiety around that important thing because doing something about it shows that you can fail or might show that, yeah.

• 37:53Tim Ferriss?

  Doesn't work.

• 37:54Greg McKeown?

  It doesn't work. And now we'll be back to the beginning on this thing that's so high stakes. And then the more important the thing is, the more vulnerable it is. So then, you know, you want to avoid, you know, we all know we should, that courage is a virtue, but courage always feels terrible. I mean, like, it is an awful feeling. It's not like you imagine when you see other people being courageous.

• 38:16Tim Ferriss?

  Well, courage doesn't exist without the prerequisite of fear. It's you feel fear and you do the thing anyway. Like, without the fear, courage as a word and concept doesn't apply.

• 38:26Greg McKeown?

  Yep. You know, there's lots of layers of reasons that add on to that. One is sort of pretend perfectionism that drives procrastination. Well, unless I'm going to do this perfectly, you know, unless I'm really ready to do this, unless I'm in the perfect situation, unless I'm going to do it for the full amount of time. So all of these additional rules.

• 38:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I think I've set up, basically set myself up to fail with the number of checkboxes, like the perfect length. And as we're talking about this, just in terms, I'm skipping to the end, we haven't hit number two, which I'm sure I've got plenty, but in terms of making it effortless, it's just like, and I've done this in other areas too, it's just scale it down. Right? Don't eliminate the session. If it's 10 minutes, it's 10 minutes instead of an hour. But don't put a lot of zeros on the calendar in terms of missed training sessions. It's like, it's gotta be five minutes, it's gotta be five minutes. But like 60 can be the ideal, but what's not allowed is zero.

• 39:23Greg McKeown?

  It's having a maximum and minimum, like it's a lower bar, but also the higher bar, like a limit on both. And when I hear you say, oh, well, an hour would be perfect, or I think that's what you said. I felt overwhelmed for you. Literally, I'm like, what, an hour? That is, you know, like, oh, I can't add an hour of physical therapy, even though I'm sure there are things I should be doing too. And so I like the term microburst for this. That's an environmental reality, right? Like these storms that are just these 10-minute storms, a microburst, but actually setting a timer for 10 minutes. And the key is that you end at the end of the 10 minutes. That's what you're using the discipline for. And you say, okay, I'm gonna do that 10 days in a row, 10 minutes,

• 40:08Greg McKeown?

  and when it hits 10 minutes, I'm done. So that the next day, you know, this is small. Like, I really will end when it says so, and therefore I'll carry it on. There's just almost no end to the application of that. I was just reflecting on this as I was finishing this journal. I need to get the next one. You know, this is like, in January, that will be 14 years that I've kept a journal, and I don't think I've missed a day. I might have done, you know, if I went through it all. But I don't think I have. But the reason is because my upper bound, when I first started, was five sentences, and my lower bound was one sentence. And what normally happens with journals is the exact opposite. First day, people write three pages. And by day two, that is done

• 40:52Greg McKeown?

  by day two, because on day two, they're like, I don't have an hour for this. And so then they go, I'll do it tomorrow. And then day three, now they're gonna do two hours in their mind, and so it's over before they've begun. So I think that's one key thing for you is the 10 minutes. I've done it 10 minutes. Until I have done 10 days in a row, I'm doing 10 minutes. It's way, way better to do that little than than to not do any because you want to do it perfectly.

• 41:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's good advice.

• 41:18Greg McKeown?

  Then, I mean, I think there's so many things that you could do to make this more enjoyable. What is a certain book, could be a podcast, but could be a book or some other thing, audio thing that you only gonna get to listen to, or a movie, you know, fun show, this is the only time I get to watch that, is the 10 minutes that I'm gonna do this. And so you link it together. I've gone through so many classics this year. Because while I'm running, while I'm doing exercise, while I'm traveling, I'm listening to some of the greatest literature ever written. I just almost feel like I'm, it is like cheat code. I'm cheating the system. I am just having wisdom and knowledge and entertainment poured into me while I'm doing something else. I really am getting two for the price of one.

• 42:00Greg McKeown?

  And so that's another way to do it. Of course, you could have a forcing function where if you don't do it. We've heard these things before, but if you don't do it, then you have to pay a certain amount to a charity or to a political party, not of your choosing, or you can create these forcing function bets. I had somebody who was, who had a really important trade off they were trying to make. And their penalty for not making the trade off would be their favorite wine was $300 a bottle of some, I don't know wine, but and they, he would have to pour down one glass of it if he didn't complete it on this day. And that was his forcing function. And that was so painful for him. But it really gave him an excuse. I mean, it's a fun excuse, but an excuse to be on track and to be consistent. So

• 42:44Greg McKeown?

  I mean, there's all sorts of things that we can do, even you publicly talking about it here. Okay. Well, now everybody knows, I mean, all of these things are to try to stack the decks in your favor. And to try to remove those things that make it harder than it needs to be.

• 43:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm already thinking about a few things. I mean, it's very basic, but for instance, you know, I'm staying due to the circumstances with the family stuff, I'm not at home. I'm staying in hotels. And I need to travel to a location and sign in and sign waivers and so on, just to do any of this. And so it's like, all right, look, I've fortunately got the budget. I should just go out later today, get a reasonably thick yoga mat and just stick it in my hotel room. I don't actually need anything else. And currently, because it's a concrete floor, I can't do what I would intend to do because it'll be brutally unpleasant on the joints. And okay, like that's a solvable problem, right?

• 43:41Greg McKeown?

  And obviously I'm trying to sort of stack effortless ideas. One does not have to do any of these things. The question is the key. How do you make it effortless? I mean, okay, in a hotel, somebody in that hotel can go do that for you. Like you could find somebody to pay to do it. And that all sounds like, oh yeah. Champagne type of solution, but it's like, well, that also makes it effortless. It's all about trying to ask that question and giving your brain enough time.

• 44:08Greg McKeown?

  To do a Google search looking for easy solutions. And I think there's such an insecure overachiever, there's such a pushback about this. In the mind, well, what's the easy solution? Oh, no, no, that can't be it. That we don't even allow the search to take place.

• 44:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, also as the insecure achiever, which is a label I've grown quite fond of while we've been talking. That probably characterized me pretty well.

• 44:35Greg McKeown?

  You and me both, we're both in this.

• 44:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, these achiever types often have a modicum of success in any number of ways. Because they are good at solving problems. So the inclination is to ask, how can I do X? But that's not how the sentence needs to start, right? The sentence could be, who could do this besides me? Or who knows, maybe Instacart could go get me a yoga mat, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, Claude the butler. I'm not suggesting that it's like, well, I'll just take my seven story hovercraft down to Scrooge McDuck's office and we'll take some gold coins out of his swimming pool.

• 45:18Tim Ferriss?

  But reframing and rephrasing the questions that you habitually ask yourself. This is something I do try to pay attention to. But my go to is typically like, all right, look, it's going to take me too long to get somebody up to speed on all this bullshit. I'm just going to do it myself. How can I do this as easily as possible? But that still presents a hurdle. And especially in this current day of automation. Getting someone else or someone else vis a vis an app or retailer vis a vis an app to do something like this is available to almost anyone who is listening to this podcast, practically speaking.

• 45:54Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. Well, Warren Buffett described it this way. He said, to be alive today in the developed world, you have more opportunity. More means, more chances for learning and for travel and so on than Rockefeller did. And that was such a good reframe for me because you're talking about Instacart. There are so many ways to make things happen now. And almost all of us do have access to those things. And I'm not trying to minimize this. It's the way of thinking that's outdated. That's where the cluster is. The execution ability in our societies are really pretty unbelievable right now. Now, there's one more tactic worth considering here. One of the principles in Effortless is the courage to be rubbish.

• 46:39Greg McKeown?

  And doing it a shorter period of time. And that's one of the things you could say, well, that's the rubbish version. But you know, you're saying the yoga mat. And I think, well, yeah, I can see why that works. But you could also use something else. It doesn't have to be a yoga mat on the first time today.

• 46:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm being, if we wanted to scale that down to dirty prototype, it's like, okay, well, let me just grab some of the towels or something else. And it's going to kind of be a pain in the ass, but it's better than nothing, right? It's better than doing a zero. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on doing a pre-mortem. Cause I have found that this seems to be something you've given quite a bit of thought to. And the reason I bring it up is I think a lot of people fumble sort of right before the touchdown, so to speak, and that's because they don't think about what could go wrong. And there are lots of questions maybe they have answered, right? And I just came from a company offsite.

• 47:36Tim Ferriss?

  We were chatting earlier today before recording where we talked about where have we been? Where are we now? Where do we want to be? We covered a lot of that ground, but one of the questions that we didn't really think about as much. We did maybe in some nominal way ask like, are there any blockers? But we didn't explicitly ask, you know, what are the most likely things to stop us from getting there? Meaning where we want to go. And that's something I really want to hone as a skill, which I've done intermittently, but maybe you could just lay out what that looks like? If people aren't grasping the example that I'm giving, but what is this pre-mortem?

• 48:20Greg McKeown?

  I think if you want to make optimal progress on. What's essential, then using a strategic narrative is a really helpful way to go about this. I just did a session like this with the leadership of the Navy SEALs. And this wasn't the only thing that we did, but this was part of it, was to, not to write out, but to draw, where have you been, where are you now, where do you want to be, and then this fourth question that you're focusing on, what is going to keep us from doing it? What's stopping us? What's in the way? And so you have all of these commanders and above drawing, and then we're looking at all the drawing. The drawing's not just, it's not

• 49:03Greg McKeown?

  just to be fun or gimmick. It's another forcing function to get to clarity. It's easy to hide behind numbers and too many words and too many bullet points. Like, if you have to create an image, it forces a certain part of your brain to light up. And so they did that. But then, what it enables us to do, to look at, in this case, an image of what's going to keep you from achieving your outcome, is that, first of all, it becomes tangible so that you can actually prosecute it. Well, that might not really be the issue. That is a thought that you have, but that thought is actually outdated thought. That's not really what it is, based in an assumption. So you need to prosecute it before you try to solve that obstacle. You need to say, well, is it really an obstacle? Is that just

• 49:48Greg McKeown?

  the way we've been doing it in the past? How have we overcomplicated it? Every organization, every single organization follows a predictable pattern with overcomplicating. Every society does the same thing. There's a brilliant book written about this by Joseph Tanci called The Collapse of Complex Societies, in which he says, look, all societies become fragile because they solve problems.

• 50:14Greg McKeown?

  That add too much complexity and then there's no mechanism for reducing that complexity other than failure. The most fragile state for a society in his analysis is that it requires all of the resources you have available to maintain the current level of complexity. And so then it doesn't matter what the next massive problem is. He studied all these, you know, dozens of different societies that have collapsed and ones for famine and ones because of war and ones because of civil unrest. I mean, every cause looks different, but he's like, they're the same thing. It's just another massive problem and you don't have any resources to handle it.

• 50:56Greg McKeown?

  So the first thing to do, once you've asked the question, what's getting in the way is to just pause on it. Why do I think that's getting the way? Is that really the problem? And it's back to this falling in love with the problem, not the solution. And high performance people and high performance executives, and in this case, the high performing commanders and major commanders, I mean, they are built to execute. They're the elite of the elite at being able to make something happen. But the problem is, how do you challenge that strength so that you first go, have we identified the right problem? Is this really the issue? Why do we think this is the thing? Why do we think this is getting the way?

• 51:40Greg McKeown?

  That's really non-trivial part of the thought process. If you really think you've pinpointed and unlocked the real issue, which, as I say, most people with the curse of competence make the mistake of not prosecuting it, then of course, now you're saying, okay, well, we really do think this is the obstacle. We do think this is the problem. Then it's really creating a lot of buffer for that, to expect the unexpected, to know that things will come up. When you're example that we've started this conversation with, right? Like, let's say, I assume two months ago, you didn't know this was going to happen. And here it is, and it's having all this effect. And it's like, we don't know what will happen in 2025, but I'll bet anybody, almost any amount of money, that they will have such things come up in 2025 that they're not yet prepared

• 52:25Greg McKeown?

  for. If you think about the future as only perfect best case scenario, you are setting yourself up for really frustrating, stressful, poor execution. The best performers, you think here, like, I think of Phelps, think about Phelps' process. So when they're creating the coach, Bob Bowman and Phelps, effectively their strategic narrative, right? Effectively, they don't literally do it, but drawing out where they've been, where they want to go, what could get in the way. The list is a long list, longer than I realized, because of course, he's performed so many times at elite level, what really can get in the way at the Olympics, other than the

• 53:10Greg McKeown?

  other competitors? Oh, no, they got a long and complex identification of possible problems. One of the things that they said, which was interesting to me when I talked to Bob about this, he said, well, the conditions in China or in any Olympics is that they will be worse than the conditions he's used to training in. That never occurred to me before, because I just sort of always look so extraordinary, you know, you just assume that the athletes are having great experiences, you know, off camera. And he's like, that's never how it is. It's always much more chaotic. There's always many more problems, things, the conditions aren't ideal. So his goal was, how can I make Phelps' experience as normal as possible in really abnormal circumstances?

• 54:00Greg McKeown?

  So some of the things that they do, okay, they have a set routine so that he's there two hours before every race. That's a lot of buffer, especially for me who can be quite time blind, you know, like it's easy to just show up right at the time or a couple of minutes late, two hours ahead of time. Why? Because no matter what happens, you have buffer now. They're in the pool following a normal routine so that he can feel normal even though everything's abnormal. So they're doing the same thing until forty five minutes when he sits on the massage table, never lies down because it's routine. You routinize everything you can routinize. When he comes to the call time, he sits down, puts a towel next to him on one side, his goggles

• 54:44Greg McKeown?

  on the other, so that no one can sit next to him. You just don't need another distraction. It's another thing you can control in the routine. He's listening to the same music. When he gets up to the board to jump off, he's getting on always from the left hand side, always dries it before he gets up there. All of this is as a result of having identified previously problems that could come up. And if you do it in this sequence, then you've mitigated all those execution problems. When he stands to jump into the pool, he flaps his arms in a very particular Phelpsian way every time. That's just the physical preparation in advance. He also had mental preparation processes that included, for example, for ten years before

• 55:26Greg McKeown?

  the Beijing Olympics, he is every night and every morning told to put in the videotape. You can see how long it's been going on for. Put in the videotape. And it means to imagine the perfect race from end to end in slow motion. But it also includes exercises like, what will you do if your goggles fill with water? To imagine stroke by stroke, perfect race, even though your goggles are filled with water, and so on, like lots of different mental preparation cycles. And in fact, that is what happened in one of the races is his goggles did fill with water, which you could just imagine how just if you have never anticipated that, never thought through it psychologically, mentally, that's it, that's over. Forget a

• 56:11Greg McKeown?

  race, forget the Olympics. I would hate to try and do that for even a couple of lengths would be not at all enjoyable. And he still is able to win because he's literally prepared for these scenarios. When it came down to those Olympics, Bob Bowman said to me, he said, I knew it was feasible to happen, but I couldn't believe that it happened as effortlessly as it did. It just, everything clicked every time, one after another. He says at the end, he stood like in the movie, The Miracle. He stood in the hallway and just on his own, just had this moment of sort of exquisite meltdown of like, here I have, I've been speaking with confidence, but the thing actually executed so beautifully, so well. No one had ever done it before.

• 56:55Greg McKeown?

  You know, like somebody described him, if he wins seven gold medals, he'll be like the first man on the moon. If he wins eight, he'll be like the first man on Mars. And he does the eight. When I went to the cube in China, I was reflecting on this, how did he make the execution look so effortless? It's like, that's why, you know, that's why I went and ended up interviewing Bob about this because I was like, oh, you've got to explain it. What went on, what's behind the scenes? It's not just the moment that looks like the moment of execution. It's what are all the problems, what are all the mitigating things we can do? We'll build that into the routine. He added this final thought, which I think is interesting. He said, if you ask Phelps about this, he might not even tell you there is a routine. It's so normal now and it was built so deliberately.

• 57:40Greg McKeown?

  That's just life. And yet all of it was built in place as anticipation for challenges and problems. So that then the whole thing feels effortless, fluid. But really it's because of all of this anticipation planning.

• 57:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and it's also, it strikes me not what is holding this back. It could be present tense, but you know, what could prevent this? I know one very, very successful, one of the most, maybe the most successful consumer packaged goods investors. He's also a serial founder, so he invests in, if you go to Whole Foods, everything there is CPG. All right, he will ask co-founders, he said, three years from now.

• 58:24Tim Ferriss?

  You guys have had a huge dispute and one of you wants to leave. What are the most likely reasons? That's his question, like, what are the most likely reasons? And I mean, there's a lot that can uncork, obviously, if there's a, if there are already tensions or finger pointing at play, then Right. He'll get to see it, but it often will unearth other things that might be problematic. Right? Maybe there's an equity split that one person feels is unfair. Maybe there's a power dynamic where they're both trying to split CEO duties 50 50, which I've never seen work. And so on and so forth, right? But having those come up early allows him as an investor to say, okay, great. And I'm role playing here, but he might say, I want to invest.

• 59:08Tim Ferriss?

  Here are the terms I'm willing to agree to, but a condition of that will be that we fix A, B, and C that you guys brought up. And that's it, right? So that's a way of sussing out a pre-mortem. And in my case, to focus on my like lower back rehab, it's very simple. It's like, okay, well, if I'm traveling, what happens? Because sure, if I'm at home and I have all of my toys and tools and my routine is already established. So there isn't a lot of hemming and hawing or figuring out how to order food from room service or whatever. That's great, but you need to develop systems and plans and contingencies so that you do what you're supposed to do on your worst days.

• 59:52Tim Ferriss?

  The best days will hopefully kind of take care of themselves, but the world doesn't always serve you up perfect days. So in the case of the low back stuff, it's like, okay, well, I should have yoga mat. I'm just using the yoga mat example, pre-ship to every hotel room. Maybe we choose hotels based on which ones have gyms or yoga mats already in the rooms, which is true for some places. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. But basically put that into a template, right? Maybe that's a Google Doc for me or for someone else where it's like, okay, I have to book a hotel for location X. Like, what are the rules? What's the template? And then that's it. It's just done.

• 1:00:33Tim Ferriss?

  Hopefully it's a set it and forget it type of operation where it's like, okay, identify a possible problem. Identify solution to possible problem. Build that into every.

• 1:00:46Tim Ferriss?

  Time X is done, right? Whatever that X might be.

• 1:00:49Greg McKeown?

  The word that you use that isn't a new word to any of us, but brings to mind an extreme and amazing case of this is the word systems. And I don't know if you know Rob Dyrdek.

• 1:01:04Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think so.

• 1:01:05Greg McKeown?

  He's an MTV star. Have you seen the show Ridiculousness?

• 1:01:09Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think I have. Maybe, maybe, yeah, I'll have to look it up.

• 1:01:13Greg McKeown?

  It's a kind of American home videos, you know, crazy crashes and terrible things and hilarious. Well, that's one of the shows that he's most famous for now, a big MTV show. Before that, he was famous first. His first big show was Robin Big. And then before that, he was famous as a skateboarder. Lots of people listening to this know already who Rob Dyrdek is. But in persona, he's this skateboarder. I mean, he's funny and he's a certain kind of version of him. But as I've got to know, Rob, he absolutely blows my mind in the intentionality of the system he's building. I think he's the second best paid skateboarder in America, among many other things.

• 1:01:59Greg McKeown?

  I want to try and capture this because he sent to me a document. It's called The Rhythm of Experience. I've had a lot of people send me kind of life plan tools and documents and versions of things, right? Like his vision statements, ambition statements and goals and roles and all sorts of things you might expect to have in there. This is a 50-page document that is like seeing the future. Every single thing he learns about himself, about a system, about a problem, they just build it into the same single document, everything. So when he got married, he has therapy, I think he does it either every week or every two weeks from the time they got married. He's like, it's like a Ferrari. We're just updating Ferrari.

• 1:02:42Greg McKeown?

  It's not because there's a problem, it's just anticipation. Of course there'll be problems. So we just build it into the routine. So anything that comes up in those conversations, he doesn't just go, oh yeah, that's good. I'll really try and go work on that, go improve on that. He goes, okay, right. I'm not communicating well about what my schedule is. Okay. So he builds it into the routine. Every single morning, an email of my routine will be sent every day forever going forward to my wife. So she never has to have that specific problem again. Everything he learns, he builds into the system. So that he isn't learning the same lesson, you know, like living 20 years, but actually you're just living the same year 20 times. He's actually gaining 20 years of experience.

• 1:03:24Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask you a question about his document, the rhythm of experience, because it sounds like there are two things, at least just to confirm that I'm understanding this. He has a document that contains learnings and various things. He also has very rapid action after, let's just say, wife gives the feedback. I don't know what your schedule is. I want you to communicate. I'd love for you to communicate better about that. He's like, great. From this point forward, daily email to wife regarding schedule. But it sounds like that goes into action. How that's implemented, I don't know, but what does the document do? Right? Because if the document is 50 pages long or however long it is,

• 1:04:08Tim Ferriss?

  presumably there would have to be some scheduled time for reviewing that or using it. My takeaway is that he basically creates a rule and systematizes things that he doesn't have 100 one-off Band-Aid solutions, right? There's like some sort of recurring semi-permanent or permanent policy that he puts in place to address various things. But how is the document actually used?

• 1:04:34Greg McKeown?

  Everyone on his team has access to the same document, so it's not just for him to remember. And so this is the brain. This is what you're going to first. Like you're not coming to him, hey, how should we handle this and that? Unless it's not in that document. It really is, I mean, we all sort of know the idea of the difference between working in your business and on your business. But he's just applying that to his life in a more sophisticated, developed way than anyone I have seen.

• 1:05:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm curious because I have, not surprisingly, spent a lot of time thinking about systems. I come up with rules and policies and this, this and this. That I have found to be the easy part. I create a document or someone else creates a document. There's a Google Doc, it's shared with everyone on the team. But by the way, in the process of doing business, week to week, month to month, year to year, there are hundreds of Google documents. And aside from, for specific documents, saying, if they're short enough, let's just say there's a short, which there is, I have a sort of 12 commandments of Tim's calendar type of document. It's like, okay, like every Wednesday morning, review this or something. Okay, you can have somebody put in a recurring calendar item to do that.

• 1:05:46Tim Ferriss?

  But otherwise, I'm most interested in how the team uses the document because there's a search and discovery challenge sort of inherent with Google Docs and so on. Now, if it's a single doc, that's interesting, but that presents its own challenges if it becomes kind of unwieldy. It's like, hey, my wife didn't get the reminder on the calendar. They're like, what reminder on the calendar or whatever? And they're like, oh, it's on page 47, buried under miscellaneous. Why didn't you find it? And it's like, because no human would ever think to find that quickly there. So I don't know if there's any light you can shed on that.

• 1:06:27Greg McKeown?

  While we're sort of thinking about that, I'm just remembering of other precision things that he has on there, right? So he gets his haircut once a week at exactly the same time because he likes his hair just to be, never have to think about that, never have to schedule it. And every time I schedule an appointment to get my haircut, every time I think, you're doing this wrong, Greg. Because there's a way to systematize that and I know someone who's done it and I haven't done it yet. I mean, what we're talking about is the difference between linear results and residual results. Right? So if a linear result is one way, you say, well, it only happens today if you take action to do it today. Right? So linear income, right?

• 1:07:11Greg McKeown?

  You get paid per hour, per day, and so you get paid when you work today, right? And residual income would be, okay, income that rolls to you through all sorts of investments that can do that when you're sleeping. So it just is happening automatically. It's such a game changer to shift one's mindset between the two.

• 1:07:31Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about if you're open to it and feel free to defer this and continue on a different thread if you like, but defining done, this is also something that has captured my attention. I'll let you open that in any way that makes sense, but why is it important to define what done looks like?

• 1:07:52Greg McKeown?

  Because insecure overachievers can endlessly complicate any task to a infinite degree. So just asking the question, what does done look like? And then sticking to it, knowing when this thing has happened, when we've reached that point, that is what done will be on this project, this goal. It of course is an accelerating thing to do. And then maybe just saying it a different way, it's almost like a natural law. Like, if you don't know what done looks like, you cannot be done. Even defining a done for the day list, I think is really helpful. So as part of a tool that I actually never

• 1:08:34Greg McKeown?

  thought I would do it, I was under contract to create an essentialism planner 10 years ago. And after I worked on it for a few months with a team, I just concluded, yeah, I think I would just be creating something just totally non-essential, which you know, would be too ironic. And I just, it's just not helpful enough to anyone. This is just like every other planner like this and or journal. And I uncommitted, got out of the contract. And then a couple of years ago, after I'd carried on trial and error in my own life, applying these ideas, I finally was like, no, actually, I think I have something now that's special and it works and it's so helpful to me. I think I'm ready to actually

• 1:09:16Greg McKeown?

  get into contract and do it. So we did that, went through again, more iterations, removed loads of stuff you would normally have in a planner, so that it really is sort of just the heart of it, has a personal quarterly offsite in it, has a weekly process you go through, and then a daily process. And the output of the daily process is a done for the day list. It doesn't mean when you've done these six items and it's a particular, it's called the one, two, three method. So there's six items total. When you've done those six things, you can feel you're done for the day. And maybe you don't do anything else, but you know, you have done important things, urgent things, key things for tomorrow. And there's a method to get to that, but.

• 1:09:55Greg McKeown?

  A done for the day list is, I think, helpful psychologically for removing unnecessary cognitive strain on our minds when we're just perpetually doing. There's no doing and then not doing times. There's just endlessly looping, endlessly doing semi tasks or semi distractions in a digital world.

• 1:10:18Tim Ferriss?

  The one, two, three method, you mentioned that, that is the one most essential thing, two essential and urgent things, and three maintenance items equals done for the day?

• 1:10:28Greg McKeown?

  Yep.

• 1:10:28Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. And could you give an example of what that might look like in your own life? What that one, two, three has looked like or might look like?

• 1:10:38Greg McKeown?

  I'm gonna back up just for, just a second, just to say, okay, this is part of the daily process. There's a solid science behind the structure and this protocol. And nobody needs to know that, you know, what all that research is, but it's helpful just to know that that's the case. It follows this structure that I call it the power half an hour, because I basically think, look, for most people, maybe everyone, including me, it's unrealistic to say, oh, take control of your whole life. But if you could take control of half an hour of your life, that will improve every other minute of the other twenty-three and a half hours. Okay, now that's a pretty high return on effort. And, and it is a micro version. You can do it, the minimum, I would suggest, I think you can do this well, still

• 1:11:23Greg McKeown?

  have a valuable experience, it's like six minutes, and that's sort of a backup, you know, lower bound. But you're answering three questions, I mentioned them previously, but you do it on a daily basis. What, so what, now what? That's the structure. So that every day, you take that noise. So instead of it building up days and weeks at a time, you're like, you're just spending that immediately, just getting the noise out. What's going on? Download. So what? What's the news in your life? Try to find the headline, the key. Why does this matter? What does this mean? And then the third thing, the now what, is the one, two, three method. What does it look like for me? Okay, you know, so the priority for the day. So I'm thinking about Saturday, priority for the day on Saturday. My niece is getting married.

• 1:12:08Greg McKeown?

  Clara and John, a shout out to them. And so that's the priority. And that's an obvious one, I suppose, on that day, because, you know, certain things, it's already structurally built in. I still find it helpful to identify it. Because it helps me go, okay, that's the mission. That's the priority singular. If I only do one thing today, if I only need to give my attention to one thing today, this is what I need to give attention to. Then underneath that, you have, okay, two things that are essential and urgent. These, I sort of described this as like the taxes of our life. And that was kind of literally true on Saturday, right? We're coming to the very end of the year. Any final financial things I need to have sorted out, retirement, taxes, anything, this would be the last day to check.

• 1:12:52Greg McKeown?

  You know, so I think those were the items that were on there. Maintenance items, I describe as like the laundry of our life, which can be literally the laundry. But I have a car that has one of the tires is just losing air on it. Obviously, it's not normal, simple thing. But if I didn't take care of that, which doesn't mean I have to execute it. The task is schedule this or have this organized so that you know it's done. The three maintenance items per day are the things that make tomorrow a lot harder if you don't resolve them today. Your future self is always grateful that you took care of the maintenance items. And of course, this is all just a rule of thumb. This one, two, three. But I have just found it so helpful.

• 1:13:37Greg McKeown?

  And I don't do it every day. I still wish I did. But what I notice is that when I don't do it, my day is more frenetic, more frantic. I don't have as clear sense of the day. It's not nearly as satisfying, because even though I can still be productive in a kind of more forced way. You don't know if you're doing the most important thing. You don't know, yes, I have selected these things. You don't have something to come back to, going back to the plain analogy of, okay, well, all these things happened that I didn't expect to happen. Yes, that's normal. That's life. But you don't have a chance to go, okay, like, coming back to the most important thing, let's work on this again.

• 1:14:20Greg McKeown?

  And so that's an example from just literally this weekend of how I would think about it. And it just allows you, on the days that I've done it, to enjoy the experience. And also, and I suppose maybe this is the most important benefit, is that you actually know and work on the most important thing, which, as previously stated, is actually the least likely thing to happen. That's, of course, a very satisfying way to live. Because if you go through 2025 and you literally every day did, if you and I, if everyone listening to this, does the most important thing every day, if they did nothing else different in 2025, there's no question that would change both trajectory and momentum.

• 1:15:05Greg McKeown?

  You know, the whole velocity of the year would be different because of our tendency not to do the most important thing. And of course, the other things add to that sense of a more effortless approach to doing the things that matter most.

• 1:15:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would also add to that, that working on the most important thing gives you a sense of mission and purpose that smaller things do not. So it's not purely the clinical moving of the needle on important things, because really, there's nothing outside of your psychological experience of reality, but the feeling of being moored and pointed in the right direction with the bigger thing, psychologically is really, really, really valuable. It's not just about whatever the points might be. Sure, the points are nice, but really, psychologically and psychoemotionally, knowing that you're working on.

• 1:16:03Tim Ferriss?

  Something that matters, however you've defined that, is I have just found, you know, this past year, I think I've done a very good job of that. And it's remarkable what that does for your mental health.

• 1:16:18Greg McKeown?

  Well, just describe that a little more in detail. So you're describing the impact of meaning, you know, practically knowing each day, each week and so on, I'm pursuing something that means something to me.

• 1:16:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:16:31Greg McKeown?

  But what difference has it made for you psychologically?

• 1:16:34Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, well, I would say that there's a bit more to it, just in terms of maybe characteristics when choosing that important thing. So for instance, for me, there has to be a making or mastery component, one or the other. So either creating something or I am trying to master something, not just, this is on the flip side, like manage or mitigate. So for instance, even though doing the PT for the low back and so on is incredibly important, if I decide that is the most important thing per se, it's depressing.

• 1:17:12Tim Ferriss?

  There's no winning there. It's doing something not to lose.

• 1:17:16Greg McKeown?

  Right.

• 1:17:16Tim Ferriss?

  There's a lot of fear associated with it. It is not an inspiring headspace to inhabit. Now, it doesn't need to be doing, you know, back PT in the Gulag by candlelight. I mean, it doesn't have to be miserable, but it doesn't have the requisite payoff that I would want in a most important thing. It still needs to get done, which means that it's maybe the two essential and urgent things, or one of the maintenance things, right? It's a non-negotiable maintenance. This is not a nice to have, but for instance, been working on my first book in seven years, which is making fantastic progress. Shocker, it's become absurdly long.

• 1:17:58Tim Ferriss?

  One day I'll write a short book, it's gonna be a hell of an accomplishment.

• 1:18:02Greg McKeown?

  By the way, someone was just raving to me last night about Tools of Titans. This is the groom who just was married.

• 1:18:08Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, amazing.

• 1:18:09Greg McKeown?

  Who's like, he's like, yeah, I normally I try to read. He said 20 minutes a day, but I sat down and it says, I was just gone for like two hours working through it. There's so much.

• 1:18:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's nice to hear.

• 1:18:17Greg McKeown?

  That was literally yesterday. They just out of the blue said that. So carry on anyway.

• 1:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, thanks. That makes me feel good. That was a fun book to write, which isn't always the case. So that is one at the top, which feels very good to get back into as I feel like much of what is online, most of what is online increasingly is just becoming ephemera, very short half-life. It's just like you could put out the best thing imaginable in most formats that are available today, and it will have vanished from the minds of the people it passed in front of within 24 hours. Books still hold an interesting place. They have a certain durability.

• 1:18:57Greg McKeown?

  Yep.

• 1:18:57Tim Ferriss?

  Might not last forever, but there's a certain durability that I think is really important.

• 1:19:01Greg McKeown?

  There's a deep cachet about it, deep, not just, oh, that's impressive. This, it holds a certain place in people's minds still and then for good reason. I mean, you know, books have lasted longer than almost anything else. So, yeah.

• 1:19:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So for me, if I'm, among other things, trying to impact lives, I feel like that feels like time very well spent.

• 1:19:19Greg McKeown?

  Yep. Yep. I understand that.

• 1:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  So all of that is on the making side, right? Then I also have been spending a lot of time on archery specifically, which is every bit as frustrating as golf in a lot of respects. I don't play golf, but I've talked to a lot of golfers and that's the closest comparison. When it's going well, man, is it beautiful. And when you can't figure out what you've changed to make things go sideways, it's very frustrating, but it's become this constant that I can work on, in some cases incremental gains, in some cases big gains. I don't want to imply that I'm going to master archery, but I am practicing as if that is my goal.

• 1:20:05Tim Ferriss?

  And there's an article, let me just pull it up. I want to give credit where credit is due. That I'm reading right now on mastery and it is on read trung, T R U N G dot com. And the name of the piece, which I recommend to folks, it's actually a fantastic read is, and read trung.com is a reference to Trung Phan, who is the writer, Jerry Seinfeld, Ichido Suzuki and the Pursuit of Mastery, Notes from the 1987 Esquire Magazine issue that inspired Jerry Seinfeld to, quote, pursue mastery because that will fulfill

• 1:20:46Tim Ferriss?

  your life, end quote. So we'll put that in the show notes, but it basically makes the point that if you choose a discipline or something to approach through the lens of deliberate practice and mastery, which never ends, right? This may be something you do for incredibly long period of time. And it also highlights different archetypes and why they fail to pursue mastery, which I found very helpful, that that art, that sport, that fill in the blank, could be your most constant companion you have in life. And there's something very reassuring about that. So to have that as a through line, also as identity diversification, so that if something goes sideways with the podcast

• 1:21:28Tim Ferriss?

  or something goes sideways in family life, that you have diversified your psychological health on some level because it's not totally invested in one basket. So I would say that speaks a bit to how I've been choosing things. It's making your mastery versus like mitigating, like mitigating risk or managing. That's how I've been thinking about it for myself. And I feel for myself, I need something that is inspiring as the most important thing. Now, that's not always going to be the case, right? If you have a family member has an acute health emergency, it's like, okay, that may be the most important thing. But

• 1:22:13Tim Ferriss?

  if you have the flexibility, if you have the ability to choose.

• 1:22:19Tim Ferriss?

  I want something that's inspiring because that inspiration, that breathing in generates energy, it generates the excitement and the life force, for lack of a better term, that then trickles down to everything else. But if the thing I choose is kind of depressing or it's avoiding something bad, it's running away from something as opposed to towards something, then it doesn't work for me. It really doesn't.

• 1:22:51Greg McKeown?

  You said a few different things there, but one thing that stands out to me is just this idea that meaning isn't a nice to have. It was described this way to me once and I liked this, that because life is suffering, you need to pursue meaning that justifies that level of suffering.

• 1:23:10Tim Ferriss?

  100%. I've been thinking a lot about this as well.

• 1:23:13Greg McKeown?

  So let's say the most famous person in the world about meaning would be Viktor Frankl, in his creation of logotherapy out of the Nazi Germany concentration camps. He's a psychologist and a Jew and he's going through those experiences and he, you know, crafts his story in Man's Search for Meaning. But just building on that, it's like he sometimes would try to, if he was in therapy with somebody, he would say, you know, they would say, oh, I just want to die, you know, I'm like, I've got no reason to live. And he's, I don't know precisely the words he would use, but he's effectively saying, okay, well then, you're sort of, why haven't you done that? Like, what is it that actually keeps you here then? And the meaning could be as, and I don't mean as trivial, but it might sound trivial.

• 1:23:55Greg McKeown?

  It could be, well, I have a cat and I need to feed the cat. Those answers were not nothing to him at all. He would use that as sort of a gateway to being able to reconstruct a life of meaning because there's something, some meaning that can be built upon. And so I really think this is an under-taught and under-appreciated idea.

• 1:24:20Greg McKeown?

  And I think it distinguishes itself considerably from productivity. Because you could be productive at all sorts of things like that you shouldn't even be doing, or don't really motivate you, don't drive you. You could be doing task execution all day long and feel really meaningless in your life. Finding something meaningful, something beautiful, something creative, as you're describing, not consuming, changing the ratio of consumption to creation, I think is one really kind of self-evident shift that I think a lot of people would benefit in. Consuming does not fill you with meaning.

• 1:25:01Greg McKeown?

  Creating anything, even if it's not very good at first, it's just being in the act of creation, I think is closer to meaning. So I struggle a little bit, like, people will describe what I'm into, oh yeah, he's a productivity thinker. I never self-identify that way. Because like essentialism, for example, is about, it's not about doing more things, it's about doing more of the right things. Essential, the very word, it means very important. It's trying to craft your life around the highest meaning activity you can currently conjure. I think it's about as good an antidote to the psychological traumas and taxation of our lives that exists. And maybe it's the only one, really.

• 1:25:44Greg McKeown?

  This idea like of radical gratitude, radical gratitude is expressing thanks for things you're not thankful for. Because that's what gratitude actually is. I mean, if you look at the definition of gratitude, I did not know this till just a few years ago. I thought gratitude was a life changer, game changer, and it meant be grateful for the good things in your life. That is, remember them, express them, focus on them. That's not the definition of gratitude. If you look at a definition of gratitude in the dictionary, what you find is that it's living with a spirit of thankfulness. And that's not the same thing. Because that's not just for the quote-unquote good things, that's for everything. And as I was thinking about this, I was like, well, that was a game changer for me when

• 1:26:24Greg McKeown?

  my daughter Eve was very ill with a undiagnosed neurological condition, which is free falling in her executive function. I found that radical gratitude was a way out of sort of the madness of not being able to control the situation and watching some of the picture of health suddenly become mentally and physically hugely incapacitated on the way to being in a coma. So I learned it there. But as I was talking about it yesterday, when I was sharing this with someone, I thought, well, it's so easy to point back to that because it all worked out in the end, right? You know, years go by and okay, it's resolved, so I can point back to radical gratitude there. But can I do it now? And I thought, can I express this idea out loud?

• 1:27:06Greg McKeown?

  Because it sticks in my throat as I, even as I go to talk about it now. Can I say out loud, I am thankful that my best friend of 35 years is fatally ill with cancer? Because I want to rage against that, that phrase, that idea. It feels so, I won't say wrong, because that's not quite right, but it is something so violating about that expression. But it's in the expression of it that you open yourself. It's like an act of faith that opens meaning that's invisible until you express the first half of the equation.

• 1:27:49Greg McKeown?

  Because opening oneself to the idea that there could be meaning in this suffering. And there's such a gift in that. So it's sort of hidden behind this action I don't want to take, the expression of it. But I'm grateful for this challenge because like one of the thoughts that came to me just yesterday about this was because now I need to live, I don't mean in a guilt way, but I need to live double now. Like I cannot just go through life. I must live it alive.

• 1:28:20Greg McKeown?

  In a sense, living it doubly because he can't do that now. So the forty to fifty years, hopefully, maybe that we could have had together, that that is not happening now. That's not going to be the story. And I still find that unimaginable, is almost impossible for me to get my head around that. But if that's the reality, what's the possible meaning in it? This, I think, is like, something like the actual test of life, is to open oneself to the possibility that there is meaning in suffering, that suffering isn't because God is a vivisectionist, that's C.S. Lewis's language for it. Like, you have to decide, has God a vivisectionist? Does he take pleasure in suffering? Or is there meaning in our suffering?

• 1:29:02Greg McKeown?

  And that's only one answer to this question. But to take responsibility for my life in a different way, to value the remaining years and hopefully decades differently, it's like I have a responsibility burned into me, like a scar, like a scar. I don't think I could have it taken away from me. I don't think so, but I certainly don't want it to be. It's like, no, that scar stays. I need that scar. And I want to live out of that understanding and just try to make good on the years I get that he doesn't get. And there's something about that. I mean, I'm obviously still living in the grief of all

• 1:29:44Greg McKeown?

  of this, but I think that's one way to detect meaning that can save us, you know?

• 1:29:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I know that can't be easy to think about and feel, but I do appreciate the opening oneself to the possibility that you can be grateful not just for the obviously uplifting and positive things, but to tag on that I am grateful for X difficult thing because... to cue the mind to hopefully produce something that...

• 1:30:26Tim Ferriss?

  Engenders meaning even when overwhelmed with suffering. Yeah, plenty for me to chew on there, too.

• 1:30:32Greg McKeown?

  That's my own lived experience with it, but it's also you can go back and follow the trail of research about this, you know, the whole post-traumatic growth literature. That is those people that go through trauma and don't just, first of all, there's sort of three options, right? You can collapse through it. There are some people that return to level as before. That would be kind of the resilience mindset. And then there's this other phenomenon happens less often, but it does happen and has been identified, characterized, codified and studied is people that move to a higher level of living post the trauma. And so, you know, we've all been very familiar with PTSD. Post-traumatic growth is less referenced, which is just too bad because I think that's

• 1:31:13Greg McKeown?

  really the thing you want to understand, that there is a way that we can in tangible ways have beauty for ashes, that it is not just a poetic idea. It's not just nice to have. It's like, if there's so much suffering and those are the raw materials through which we can actually build a life of meaning. It's like, oh, okay. So now I need to embrace it differently, not spend my whole life just trying to avoid it or to, you know, in a kind of positive toxicity.

• 1:31:44Tim Ferriss?

  You also can't avoid it.

• 1:31:46Greg McKeown?

  You cannot avoid it.

• 1:31:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Greg McKeown?

  Impossible.

• 1:31:49Tim Ferriss?

  It's just like, all right, I want to drive for the rest of my life without hitting any red lights. It's like, it's not going to work. So you might as well figure out how to handle red lights.

• 1:31:57Greg McKeown?

  It's a great metaphor for it. Anna will say to me, you know, from time to time, no one gets out without a mortal experience. And there's a term for this. It's called sonder and it's a term for that, the experience of sort of remembering and knowing that other people's life is as complex and emotionally challenging and so on as our own. And it's not obvious all the time because it's easy to come up with shallow stories about other people. I hear it quite a bit from people, oh, well, that person's all right, you know, because they're, maybe that person has money or because that person's famous or because that person's, you know, appears to be above the fray. And it's like, I actually think it's a sort of a limit of imagination, certainly a limit of empathy, but to realize like, no, not one of those people is escaping the mortal experience of

• 1:32:42Greg McKeown?

  suffering that all of us are. Yes, maybe they have different set of problems, or maybe they have possible solutions that you wish you had access to. I mean, obviously, people are in different positions in life. But man, I have never met a person that could escape, even close to escaping it. It's like, you can't. It's hardwired into, I don't want to call life a simulation, but like, if you say it is for a moment, it's like, yeah, it's hardwired into this. You cannot escape it. This is why I think so many people try to actually pursue distraction of any number of kinds because of an attempt to avoid the pain and suffering. And I think most addictions really are that at the core, to avoid the experience of being alive. And that's because it's so painful to be alive.

• 1:33:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, can be.

• 1:33:25Greg McKeown?

  And so, an alternative to that is to open yourself to the meaning. Well, this isn't happening for me, not to me. I don't know a faster way to get there than radical gratitude.

• 1:33:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, thank you for that, Greg. And just to reiterate something you said earlier about, you know, how we can turn the stories of others into these NPC, like, extras in video games, where they're just, you know, simply explained in one sentence, whereas we have this raging torrent of nuance in our lived experience. And a few things come to mind. One, and I wish I had the attribution on this, but someone said, you know, everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about, number one. Number two, I interviewed Chris Bosh, very well-known basketball player on the podcast, and I'm pretty sure it was him who said, and somebody else had said this to him, you know, if you're sitting at a table, and everyone else put their problems on the table, you did the same, he's like, you would pick your problems right back up. It's like, once you saw actually what everyone

• 1:34:20Tim Ferriss?

  was contending with.

• 1:34:22Greg McKeown?

  We should just underscore that, because I think that's such a strange phenomenon. At Stanford University, the Stanford Memorial Church, if you go into that, is a nondenominational church from the very beginning, but they carve in stone all of these key ideas. And one of them is basically what you just said, so I won't repeat it. But that is a strange phenomenon. There is something that that gives me a glimpse of, you know, a sort of glitch in the matrix in that illustration. That even for the discomfort and the uncomfortableness and the pain and the frustration of our problems, something about them is, I think it's beyond just they're familiar to us. I think they are connected to us. If we're going really philosophical, I would say something like,

• 1:35:06Greg McKeown?

  maybe we knew we'd have these. Like, we actually did have a chance to choose them or not, like, pre here. And it certainly has that kind of vibe to it, to me, when you share it and I'm sort of just having it hit me again. It's like, yeah, we actually do want these problems. Oh, wow, there is something in them, that there's something like stepping stones to becoming what we uniquely need to become next, to become more and more of who we really are and less and less of who we really aren't, which is, you know, that's the real essence of essentialism. It's not tasks and to-dos and even goals. It's like a becoming process. And these are the raw materials for doing it.

• 1:35:47Greg McKeown?

  It's not toxic positivity, because it's not pretending there aren't problems and not pretending there aren't challenges. It's to open oneself to the possibility that there's no other way, that this is the way to becoming who we're supposed to become. I'm not saying every single thing in life is like that. I'm not saying the flat tire is the thing. I'm not saying it like that. But these tests of life are actually, some of them in my life have felt signature, that they really are built to be, in a sense, particularly excruciatingly hard for me. But even in that, if you can glimpse the other side of it, like, no, but that means it was done with a high degree of care, of thought even.

• 1:36:32Greg McKeown?

  It's a really different way to live, and I'm still, obviously, just learning in that journey. It's a disciplined pursuit. Of meaning.

• 1:36:40Tim Ferriss?

  Discipline Pursuit of Meaning. Maybe that's your next book. So we've covered a lot of ground. I think this will give folks a lot of grist for the mill, things to chew on for the next year, where they want to point themselves, how they want to think about meaning, suffering, mastery, choosing the most important thing. We've covered a lot. Is there anything else we are going to talk about where people can find the essentialism planner and also perhaps get started learning more about principles that we've covered in brief here. But is there anything else that you'd like to cover, whether concepts or closing words, anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind to a close?

• 1:37:22Greg McKeown?

  I had a really interesting conversation with Eric Newton, who took to social media, I didn't know him before, to list what he'd learned from the biggest suffering in his life, which was, well, fatal diagnosis of his wife. He described their relationship prior to this as having lots of ups and downs, you know, once he described it as a sort of fantastic love affair, but then also like he describes all the problems and challenges that had him on my podcast once I'd read this because someone sent it to me like, hey, this is similar to the kinds of things you're wrestling with. And what's particularly interesting about the story is that it wasn't just when she got this diagnosis that things changed.

• 1:38:07Greg McKeown?

  It was post that where she got into what turned out to be the last six weeks of her life, that she hit a regret. And the regret was not having been deeply connected enough with the people closest in her life. I thought that was such a distinct kind of insight. He said, she's suddenly unlocked a level of vulnerability and intimacy that he literally didn't know existed, not just in their relationship, he just didn't know existed in life. To have someone be so honest, so open, so without all of those layers of the onion that, you know, to go back to that metaphor.

• 1:38:51Greg McKeown?

  And so for six weeks, he was like, okay, this actually is love. Now, here, they've been married for years and all of these ups and downs, everything. He's like, this is what it actually means. And he summarized it something like this. He's like, if there's a purpose in any of it, it is to have ever deepening connection with the people who matter most to you. And, I mean, I was touched by that. I was touched by his story. I was fascinated by that story. But the question I walked away with was, how do you live like that normally? Is there a skill set to it? Or is it just one of those things that you would have to have that extremity to be able to access that? And it links back to some of this research I've been doing on Carl Rogers.

• 1:39:36Greg McKeown?

  Because I do think that there's a way that we can at least get a lot closer to that ideal in normal living. And it is a kind of palpably better form of listening than almost anybody experiences in life. It's teachable, it's learnable, like, it's there, it's available, but almost nobody's trained in it. The only people that are really trained in Rogerian listening is like psychotherapists, if they have been. And if they haven't been, the risk is enormous that they will make problems worse in their attempt to make them better, because they simply won't be addressing anything like the right issue. They'll be attacking the leaves of the problem, not the roots of the problem. And they will do that. And they'll build in their own mental models of solutions instead of getting to what the real stuff is.

• 1:40:20Greg McKeown?

  And that's the people that are trained in it. Or to some extent, trained in it. But think about like all the doctors that aren't trained in it. That's what happened with Eve, it's just unreal. That's a story for a different day, but like, there were doctors with all this training that they just thought they knew what was wrong with her. If we had done what they had said, she would be dead. And it's not about their expertise, in a sense, it's their expertise was the problem, is that they didn't have the humility to be listening properly. And so I think that's the thing I want to say is that I do think that there is a form of listening that we can provide for each other that is so powerful, that's so curative. And I do sometimes think it's the primary thing missing in modern life.

• 1:41:05Greg McKeown?

  My son just said it to me recently. I mean, so many things I've got wrong as a parent, as a person. But he just said that if there was ever a problem, I knew I could come in. I knew you would listen. So even if it was something you were doing that was frustrating, I knew you would listen. That's not passive listening. It's a very particular kind. And man, I want to teach that. Man, I really, really want to help people learn how to do this with each other.

• 1:41:31Tim Ferriss?

  Where should people go to stay informed of your now pending class related to Greg Arian listening?

• 1:41:41Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I really want to do this. I'm not kidding about it. It's not just a spontaneous thing. I wasn't planning on talking about it, so it is spontaneous, but I really think this has to happen. I mean, I think people could just, the easiest single thing, go to gregmckeown.com homepage, they can get right now, what we do have right now is a less but better course. They'll get it for free. They can sign up in 10 seconds and then we will send information about this apex listening, or for want of a better term, courses on there. And we'll do them live and like we'll learn together how to do this because it's everything.

• 1:42:18Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you, Greg. Really appreciate the time, Greg, and the flexibility with scheduling. It's always a pleasure to have a conversation with you. And for everybody listening, as always, we'll have everything that we've discussed linked to in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. And if you search Greg McKeown, certainly you can also try with the M C K E O W N. And this will be the most recent episode as of right now. And until next time, first of all, thank you for tuning in, everybody. And be just a bit kinder than is necessary, not just to others, but also to yourself as you're looking forward to the next year. Don't beat yourself up over last year.

• 1:43:01Tim Ferriss?

  Just see if you can plan for not just a better, but more joyous new year. How can you not just do the important things, but do the joyous things? How can you not just do the hard things, but find ways to make those important things a little less effortful, effortless even? These are all questions worth considering. Thanks, everybody. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

• 1:43:45Tim Ferriss?

  It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday.

• 1:44:30Tim Ferriss?

  Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. The Pod Cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the Pod Cover's dual-zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your size of the bed

• 1:45:11Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:45:54Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:46:13Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:46:58Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:47:39Tim Ferriss?

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