Greg McKeown - How To Make Life Effortless | Modern Wisdom Podcast 314

Greg McKeown is a public speaker, leadership & business strategist and an author. Is the toughest path always the right one? Is the more important a thing is, the harder it has to be? Or is there a way to make the execution of what matters most in your life a little easier? Expect to learn why the usefulness of working runs out more quickly than you might think, how Effortless relates to Essentialism, why burnout is not a badge of honour, how to decide what "done" looks like, how to build the courage to be rubbish, how to get the highest return on the least effort and much more... Sponsors: Get 19% discount, 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Effortless - https://amzn.to/3n5wby1 Check out Greg's Website - https://gregmckeown.com/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mindset #productivity #efficiency - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Howdy friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Greg McEwan. He's a public speaker, leadership and business strategist and an author. We're talking about how to make life effortless. Is the toughest path always the right one? Is the more important thing is the harder it has to be? Or is there a way to make the execution of what matters most in your life a little easier? That is the topic of Greg's new book, Effortless. So today, expect to learn why the usefulness of working more runs out quicker than you might think, how effortless relates to essentialism, why burnout is not a badge of honor, how to decide what done looks like, how to build the courage to be rubbish, how to get the highest return on your least effort and much more.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  Greg's first book, Essentialism, is the place to start that I tell people to begin with when they're starting their self-development and productivity learning career. But I do think that that book falls short in certain areas. You can get rid of all of the non-essentials from your life and yet still have too much on your plate. So this is where effortless slots in. It allows you to see that working harder, doing more, banging your head against the grindstone, isn't always necessarily, or even often, the correct solution. I really like the stuff that Greg goes through today. And if you're a fan of essentialism, you're going to adore this. If you are not a fan of essentialism, you need to go and pick it up because it is a fantastic book.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not admitted without parent.

• 1:55Chris Williamson?

  For now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Greg McEwan.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  Greg McKeown, welcome to the show.

• 2:20Greg McKeown?

  It's great being with you, Chris. Thank you.

• 2:22Chris Williamson?

  Welcome back. Welcome back indeed.

• 2:25Greg McKeown?

  Last time we were talking, you were in workout gear.

• 2:30Greg McKeown?

  Do you remember?

• 2:31Chris Williamson?

  I kind of live in workout gear. Yeah, that's my, um, that's kind of my.

• 2:35Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, but you were, you were like cut off at the shoulders.

• 2:38Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it was boiling hot. That's why it was unbelievably hot. I couldn't bear the heat in Newcastle for the first time ever.

• 2:45Greg McKeown?

  And I was overdressed too. I was, it's in the pandemic, but you know, you can take, you take the Englishman out of England, but not, how do you say that? But not the Englishman out of the man. That's not really a great quip there, but, but, but I was dressed like I had a jacket on. I was like overdressed for California and for some reason I was still in that mode.

• 3:04Greg McKeown?

  So we were, anyway, it's great to be with you. That's what I'm trying to get to.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  Good. Well, we're talking about a new book today. Effortless. Very, very excited for this to come out. I'm a huge fan of essentialism. It's one of the foundational books that I give to people when they ask what, I want to get into personal development. What, what should I read? And essentialism's there. So what's the story of how you came to realise that you needed to write this new book?

• 3:36Greg McKeown?

  Well,

• 3:38Greg McKeown?

  partially it was essentialism's fault. You know, essentialism changed everything for me. I'm travelling all over. I'm teaching all over the world and I want to be doing that. I'm not just the father of essentialism by that point. I'm father of four children, a lot of responsibilities and

• 3:58Greg McKeown?

  and I really started finding myself with this question of like, what do you do if there are just too many essentials? If you've stripped away from your life, the non-essentials, I mean, I had chosen not to write another book. I had chosen not to do a workshop business. I'd put on hiatus, the

• 4:19Greg McKeown?

  Stanford class that I co-created, all in the spirit of removing non-essentials. But what happens if what you're left with, in fact, is still more than you? Can do. And in the midst of thinking about that, I find out that my, one of my daughters is was literally having a massive tonic clonic seizure at home while I'm traveling. And that just pushed me over the edge, really. And

• 4:50Greg McKeown?

  you know, felt really like I sort of hit a wall or rather the walls were closing in around me and I, I found myself saying, well, now what? Like essentialism takes you to a certain place. I think it's necessary. But I started to feel it was necessary, but insufficient. And I set on a journey, really, first of all, just to maintain my own sanity and health.

• 5:16Greg McKeown?

  And then the same for my own family.

• 5:20Greg McKeown?

  For what do you do when life is really hard? Life is hard for everyone and in hundreds of different ways. Well, what do you do in that situation? It's important. Life feels hard. How can you make progress in that situation? Do you just give up on the essentials? Like a lot of people do that. And that was a tempting thing for me in that environment. Or do you find an easier path? And if I use George Elliot's, you know, idea on that for a moment, what do we live for if not to make life easier for each other? And so at first it was for me, my own family, for our business, but also now for other people.

• 6:04Greg McKeown?

  And, and it turns out that this book is coming out at a time that I think that may be especially timely. Because of the year, the pandemic. Um, and I just think people are burned out everywhere or on the edge of being burned out. And so, you know, this, this other path, this other way of doing things suddenly seems to have the power of relevancy. I felt like I was maybe before like a

• 6:38Greg McKeown?

  Like a weightlifter who's lifting with their back, or a swimmer who's not breathing properly, or a baker who's kneading by hand. It's like you can do the right things, but if you do them in the wrong way, things will be harder than they need to be. And so the positive way of saying that is that when you can't push any harder, you can find an easier path, a more effortless path, and there's practical principles and practices for how to do that. And that's what this book is all about.

• 7:06Chris Williamson?

  It feels to me a little bit like effortless is a delivery mechanism. So if you had essentialism as a philosophy, as something that was conceptual, perhaps you could call that like the virus, but the delivery mechanism still needed to be there, a way that allowed you to integrate this as easily as possible into the system. Um, yeah, it's very interesting thinking about the challenges that you go through in effortless, because so many of them are so common to people that live lives of productivity, talking about burnouts, talking about this bizarre preconception we have that things have to be hard, the right way is the hard way, this Puritan work ethic,

• 7:47Chris Williamson?

  so much stuff. So I want to, I want to get into that. You split the approach up into three sections. So you've got effortless state, effortless action, and effortless results. So effortless state first, what's that?

• 8:01Greg McKeown?

  Well, if you put it this way, some of the mystics would describe there being only two states in the world. You either have a state of suffering, or what I'm calling here, an effortless state. And really, those are your two options. Um, when the state of suffering is where you're exhausted mentally, physically, emotionally, you're carrying grudges, you're angry in the world, you're so tired, you start to resent everyone and anything that's coming at you. And it's just such an, that that state produces a whole set of actions and results. Um, and

• 8:44Greg McKeown?

  none of that is optimal. You end up, for a lot of overachievers, they respond to those challenges by pushing even harder. And they just get to the idea that everything in life has to be hard. And if it's not hard, it can't be important. And you just get down this of... Hyperactivity path, it doesn't produce the results that you want. So that's, that's sort of option A. Um, option B is that an effortless state is when you're physically rested, uh, you're emotionally free. Um, I was talking with Tim Ferriss on his podcast just recently, and I asked him, I said, how much, what percentage of your mental and emotional energy

• 9:30Greg McKeown?

  have you used, like have been used up by anger and grudges?

• 9:38Greg McKeown?

  And he said, from the age of 15 to 30, he estimates probably between 60 and 70% of his mental and emotional energy was used up on grudges and anger. Can you imagine? I mean, that's just, that is just mad. But, but you, you, you can see that's why effortless state is the beginning of the model. That's why, why, why this is so vital, is that you can't control all the hard things that happen to you, right? For sure not. All right. I've, I've used one example for me in, in just summary, where my daughter suddenly has what turned out to be massive neurological problems over the, like a multi-year experience, um, that change her personality, her physicality, everything,

• 10:22Greg McKeown?

  right? Like you can't change that. At first, we couldn't do anything about it.

• 10:28Greg McKeown?

  So what you can do is you can make it as easy as possible to handle it. You can make sure that you don't make it worse by the way you respond to it. And, and I think the first thing you do when those things happen in life, when the challenges come, is that, is that by getting into the right state about them, you can start to remain in a creative state, an open state, grateful state, um, and that will put you in a better position to be able to know the right action to take, and, and therefore increase your chances of getting good results out of it.

• 11:06Chris Williamson?

  The biggest identification, the one that really struck home with me is the fact that people assume that the right way is inevitably the harder one.

• 11:15Greg McKeown?

  Right.

• 11:15Chris Williamson?

  It's such a common mindset. And I've seen this in myself so much throughout my, as my vintages increased as an entrepreneur, I've managed to cast it off, but every young entrepreneur knows this. They, they realize that hard work can get you some success.

• 11:36Greg McKeown?

  Right.

• 11:37Chris Williamson?

  Then they-

• 11:38Greg McKeown?

  Which I agree with.

• 11:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Then they associate the success with the hard work itself. Then they get rid of the success and just leave the hard work there. I remember I used to, I used to feel guilty if we'd had a successful event at one of our nights. If it had gone well, but I hadn't suffered. I used to feel guilty because I thought, no, it, it should be more difficult than this. If I haven't stayed up until five in the morning doing the accounts, if there hasn't been some sort of catastrophe that I've had to deal with. I think it, it must've felt like I've got headroom above me. I could have done more somewhere. I could have, and it's like, are you telling me that you're complaining because things went well? Looking back with perspective, that's what it was. But yes, so many people assume that the right way is inevitably the harder one.

• 12:26Greg McKeown?

  I remember somebody saying to me, a fan of essentialism, they said, essentialism is so great, but it'll be the hardest, it should come with a warning. This will be the hardest thing that you'll ever do. And for a while I just absorbed that like, oh yeah, I should tell people that. And actually for a while I did. And then I thought, what, what madness this is? What, why do I just have to assume that it has to be the hard path? In fact, I was saying that even though the last quarter of essentialism is, is already devoted to the idea of how do you make execution of what matters most easier? And, and I thought that, that's just an assumption that just lives everywhere. And basically-

• 13:11Greg McKeown?

  A hundred percent of the time, it remains unquestioned. Just started a new, asked to be on a committee, this council, and this new app that they're trying to create for youth all over the world. They think it can make a difference to millions of people, a positive difference. And at the end, they say, well, now, listen, this is so important. It's going to be really, really hard to make this happen. And no one said anything. And in previous versions of me, I wouldn't have said anything either or thought anything. But now with this new mindset, I just, why does it have to be? Does it have to be? In fact, it's interesting because in the same speech, they said, when they were asked themselves to lead this effort,

• 13:57Greg McKeown?

  the person that had asked them to do it said, how do you feel? And they said, well, yes, I'm willing to do it, but like with fear and trembling. And they said, well, they said, well, hopefully with some joy though, too, right? And that's the thing is this idea that the more important is the harder it has to be. Think how limiting that is. It's one of the things that I think people can do to immediately start applying essentialism and effortless is basically identify one thing that's essential that you know if you did it consistently would be a game changer for you. And then the second question is only two questions. The second is how can you make that effortless?

• 14:33Greg McKeown?

  Because it interrupts all the normal mind flow of like, okay, yes, I want to do this, but it's big, hard lifting. I've got to get to the top of Everest. Yeah, but how do you make it effortless? Oh, you get a helicopter to the top of Everest. Oh, that, I was just talking to somebody who works in special ops. Well, they did for years, they're out of special ops now, but been in military for years and years. I mean, that's a place that emphasizes all the time that you have to work harder, harder, harder, harder to achieve results. Right? That is a theme. And again, there's a place for it, but it runs out of its usefulness as a strategy early on. And he told me this story about when they they used to say he's deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq and they used to be responsible in the special ops team to get through you

• 15:16Greg McKeown?

  know some metal door to find some value, a high value asset, someone on the other side. And how they would do that is they would put explosives on the hinges, they blow it and that's how you get through. Well, now you've got a hole in the wall, you have a lot of blowback from that. You've let the entire neighborhood know you're there. Not, yeah, that could be a very dangerous proposition as well. You can hurt both the soldiers and the people on the other side, innocent people can get hurt. So this is the solution, right? That's one way. But then someone else on his team said, well, you know, actually, I'm the son of a carpenter and and I, if you could just get me a small

• 16:00Greg McKeown?

  hydraulic drill, I could just get those hinges off in like half a second. Be silent, be easy. There's no risk to anyone. And that idea, just even the idea that there's a more effortless way to achieve your objective is so rarely advocated for or utilized that we don't even, we're just not even asking the question. So if if hard work equals success, then what happens if you want to be very successful? Well, therefore, you have to work very hard. What if you want to be very, very successful? Now you have to work very, very, very hard and so on. And so it goes. And this is what I think accounts for a lot of burnout in otherwise well-intended good people, entrepreneurs, you know, is that they've got this faulty idea. And then you look at some of the people that actually

• 16:44Greg McKeown?

  are incredibly successful, you look at a Warren Buffett, how does he approach it? Does he say, well, I want to, I want to be very, very successful, therefore, I'm going to, you know, kill myself? Is that his approach? Is that what he says? Is that what he's done? No, he says that their investment strategy borders on lethargy. That's an amazing statement, lethargy. What is, what is that? That's just another word for like laziness, for effortlessness. He said, we are not interested in finding seven foot.

• 17:18Greg McKeown?

  Poles to, not poles, to jump over, fences to jump over. We're not looking for investment opportunities. We have to jump seven feet in the air. We're looking for investment opportunities that are one foot high, that we can step over. And that is like a huge key to their tremendous success is that they're looking for the things that are clear yeses, that are easy yeses, and that they can, that they can go big on because it's just right there in front of them. That's what they're looking for. They distrust the other stuff. There's a different way, and you must find it if you want to escape the level of success you're currently at. If you can't push any harder,

• 18:04Greg McKeown?

  don't try to push any harder.

• 18:07Greg McKeown?

  Open yourself to a new question. How can this be easier? How could this be effortless? What might, how could we make this more enjoyable? These questions

• 18:17Greg McKeown?

  open your mind to new answers and new possibilities.

• 18:22Chris Williamson?

  How can people let go of the emotional tether that they have to their Puritan work ethic? It's all well and good, me and you sitting here and saying, there's an easier way. You don't need to burn yourself out. But what if it's Chris from seven or eight years ago, who has this emotional attachment. It's almost where he gets his sense of self-worth from. He has anxiety when he's not doing that. How do they let go?

• 18:49Greg McKeown?

  I was coaching somebody,

• 18:54Greg McKeown?

  Kim, who's a manager at a university. She's responsible for lots of different teams. And she was just like the type of person you're describing. If she, she felt guilty if she stopped to eat lunch. No, no, no, I don't mean stopped. I mean, if she ate lunch, she felt guilty.

• 19:18Greg McKeown?

  She was the type of person who, she's up at 4am in the morning, photoshopping for a young woman's activity at church the next day. I mean, she's just like.

• 19:29Greg McKeown?

  If she's not exhausted, she feels guilty. I mean, that's, that's who we're talking to here. But I think a lot of people are in that category, even if they're not quite as extreme as her. They don't do it quite the way she does. There is this deep mentality. And

• 19:46Greg McKeown?

  one of the things that I would say to you, and I said to her is like, well, don't over complicate your way out of this. Don't assume that the way out of this deep mindset has to be painful, hard, wrenching, difficult, and all of that. That's just reapplying the same logic that got you into the state. What if you, all you have to do is ask a different question? What if that's the, that's the difference? And that is what, that's what I asked her to do. I said, I said, the next time somebody asks you to do something, just ask yourself, you can write it on a sticky note, you can put it on your, some way to remember, to ask yourself, look, what would this look like if it was easy? Is there an easy solution?

• 20:30Greg McKeown?

  Is there an effortless way of doing this? So she gets a call from one of the professors at the university. He says, look, I'd like you to get your videography team to come and record my class this semester. And she just immediately goes into her overachiever, over thinker, over deliverer mentality. That's well worn path for her. Immediately she's thinking, okay, I'll get the whole team involved. They'll go down there, they can, we get a couple of different angles. We'll edit it all together. We're going to add music, we had intros, outros, graphics. We're going to wow him, he's going to love us, he's going to be so impressed. You know, that's what he's go, he's going for. And then she remembers the one interrupt, the one question, well, how

• 21:16Greg McKeown?

  is there an effortless way to do this? Might, might there be an easier way? And so she put that to him, well, what, what might be an easy solution? Well, as they talk about it, it turns out that it's just one student.

• 21:29Greg McKeown?

  Who has some athletic commitments, which mean they won't be able to be in every class, but they need this class to graduate. And he's just trying to accommodate this one student for some of the classes. And so the solution they come up with on the phone is that another student will just record it on an iPhone and send it afterwards, whenever he misses. And that totally solves it. It hadn't occurred to him, wouldn't have occurred to her, hadn't at that point. And she hangs up and she's just like, what just happened? In 10 minutes, we have solved the problem that would have been four months of work with all those extra bells and whistles. So I actually do think that just inverting the question from why does this have to be so hard? Or how can I over deliver? Or how can I? Do you just say, well, how can it be easier? What would it look like if it was easy?

• 22:15Greg McKeown?

  What, what, what, what is an effortless solution to this? And what I will say from my own life, my own life feels way more complicated still than it ought to be. It loads of stuff feels harder than it ought to be.

• 22:28Greg McKeown?

  That's why I wrote the book. I wrote it for me. I wrote it for other people in that situation. That is our life right now. But I also think the other side of it is that every day I'm using these questions now.

• 22:41Greg McKeown?

  And I personally find them almost magical. I, I can't, just can't believe how often, if I pause and ask the question, something will come forward that just is, was always there as an option, but I didn't see it.

• 22:55Greg McKeown?

  Silly example is a, at a printer on my desk, not on their desk, on the floor of my office over here. Been there two weeks. I like to keep things organized and, and every time I'd see it, it was just enough complication in my mind about, oh, do you sell it? Do you, do you, do you throw it away? If I throw it away, I have to find a recycling center. I don't know where that is. So it is this whole, that, that all like two, two seconds in my head, but it was enough to go, oh yeah, I'm coming back to that later. For two weeks I'd done that. Because again, all the, all the extra stuff in my head, all that noise. And I asked the question, is there an effortless way? I look outside, there happen to be a couple of workers out there. And I don't know them, but they're just out there. And I'm like, I wonder if they want it. So I walk outside, hey, I've got this printer. It's working, but it's been replaced. Do you want it? Yes. I walk inside, get it, give it to them.

• 23:40Greg McKeown?

  Within literally two minutes of asking the question, I don't just have the solution, that solution is, is executed, done. And that, that you can say it's a silly example, but a small example, but that is, life is made up of those things that are just harder than they ought to be. And we make them harder than they need to be. And it's because we're asking the wrong questions. And if we can change the question, if we can invert it, you'll be amazed at what is possible that isn't possible if you're doing it the harder way.

• 24:13Chris Williamson?

  Trying to just bookend what we've said there and give people a scalable takeaway from that section. Each of the different solutions that you need are because each situation is different. The guys that you need to give the printer to aren't the solution to the lady that needs to film the video stuff. But the scalable solution is inverting the question. Instead of saying, why is this so hard? Why is this uncomfortable? What would it look like if this was easier? What would this situation look like if it wasn't so hard? If it wasn't going to be painful, if it wasn't going to be a slog? What would this situation look like?

• 24:49Greg McKeown?

  Yes, it is simply in many instances in your life. When something, when you have something that's expensive, that you weren't expecting something to be expensive for something. Somebody gives you some proposal for something that's much more than you were hoping it would be. Just ask the question, well, is there an effortless solution? What might be an effortless solution to this problem? That happened to Southwest Airlines. They're a low cost carrier. They're trying to be careful on how they spend money. Everyone else at the time is using a complex expensive ticketing system. And it's going to cost them $2 million to install it.

• 25:28Greg McKeown?

  They don't want to spend that $2 million, but they're worried that they're going to go out of business if they can't be competitive in. And then suddenly somebody says, what's an easy solution? We said, well, I guess the effortless solution would be we don't care what anyone else thinks a ticket is. We don't care what Continental thinks a ticket is. And they're like, yeah, we don't care. We don't are interested in that. And so they got rid of that complexity, that clutter by asking that question. And what they came up with is they said, well, we already give people receipts. So we'll just print on the receipt, this is your ticket. And we'll skip the whole $2 million system, all that complexity, all that time, all that effort, just resolve, it's just done. So the question, yes, the takeaway is ask a better question.

• 26:08Greg McKeown?

  Ask an effortless question and you open yourself up to possibilities and solutions that will come to you that won't otherwise come to you. That that is the takeaway. Yes.

• 26:19Chris Williamson?

  If you roll it forward over time, if you spend too much time doing effortful, living effortlessly as opposed to effortlessly, you end up with burnout. And you have a quote in the book that's burnout is not a badge of honor. And that is an absolute bar. That's so correct when I think about some of the young entrepreneurs that I know who see it as a rite of passage, who see the late nights and the early starts as a rite of passage, and it takes time to get, I don't know whether, I don't know whether it's a byproduct of the fact that when you get towards your 30s, you become chronically aware of your own mortality and the late nights just annihilate you.

• 26:59Chris Williamson?

  But there is a, an awakening, like a manual pause for the men that occurs around that time. And you think, God, this sucks. And I've had those periods. I've had those burnout periods. For the type A go-getters or the people that like to overwork, how can you deliver them the red pill on burnout? And also, what are some of the signals, the early signals of burnout and the warning signs that you notice and take heed of?

• 27:33Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. So first of all, that last point, one of the, one of the trickiest things about burnout is that the closer we get to it, the worse we are at discerning it. And because, because the problem with burnout is it's affecting your own ability to think. It changes the way you are experiencing your life. So you're, that's what the research shows. The closer you had to burn out, the less likely you are to actually notice it. So this is,

• 28:04Greg McKeown?

  so this is one of the reasons that, that you sort of need to develop a heightened awareness. Things that you can do. I mean, I mean, one test that I like is, am I, did I use up more energy today than I can recuperate today?

• 28:23Greg McKeown?

  Similar question, can I, did I use up more physical emotional energy this week than I can recuperate this week? Because some days you are going to, and even some weeks you're going to, you know, there are rhythms to life. Of course, there are times that there is a sort of big push moment.

• 28:43Greg McKeown?

  But you don't want to live your life in that place. Because then you won't be, you won't get to choose when you have to stop. It will eventually be chosen for you, but you'll also be choosing the highest cost path. By the time you stop, you just look at what your relationships look like with the people that matter most to you. You, you look like, look at what your overall health is. You look at what your overall life, life quality is. You won't be happy with the results of that by the time you're forced to stop. So I think that's one test about it. I think a second test that I like for burnout is like when you start to resent people.

• 29:26Greg McKeown?

  When any request that comes to you just irritates you, bothers you, my goodness, just another thing, another thing. That's a good signal that you are burned out. Uh, you, once, you know, when, when somebody's moved something in your, in your home and you can't find the thing that you wanted to find and that just drives, you can't believe it's so frustrated about this. You feel impatient and so on. This is a pretty good sign that you're, that you're burned out. If you feel like you're using, um, a lot of nervous energy. You know, that's the fuel that you're using is nervous sort of anxious energy, uh, stress energy. You know, again, that can help to get you through certain things, but you don't want to be running on that fuel all the time.

• 30:09Greg McKeown?

  Because that has all sorts of, um, negative externalities. So, uh, so yeah, those are maybe two or three tests that I think you can use to kind of start to assess. You know, am I, am I, you know, am I, am I on the edge of burnout or even way past it?

• 30:26Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any strategies for how people can bounce back from burnout quickly?

• 30:32Greg McKeown?

  Well, I think that the the principle is we should start with is that relaxing is a responsibility.

• 30:41Greg McKeown?

  So that's a different frame. It's not like a nice thing to do after the fact. It's like real relaxation is is as important responsibility as any other venture that you have in your life. Um, what I would recommend that people do on this is that I think that they should start a little list. Somewhere between 10 and 20 items. And at first, your average overachiever might not even be able to put one thing on that list. But the list is what things relax me, what is relaxing for me? Uh, my wife and I have both done this and it's our lists are completely different.

• 31:18Greg McKeown?

  It was very helpful for us to have for ourselves, but also for each other. So that if I'm trying to support her, same you could do it with the members of your team. So that if you're trying to create an environment that is that supports a proper balance between, you know, between work and relaxation. That you actually can have signature experiences created for them. So I know for my wife's birthday, for example, or if I'm just saying, hey, you know, I can see she's starting to get a bit burned out. I can look at the list and actually construct an evening or a day or try and, you know, instead of just going, oh, you know, you should take the day off, you should relax. Well, that's quite stressful for overachievers. They don't know what to do with that space. It's not, it's not, that doesn't, that's not going to, you don't want blank space.

• 32:02Greg McKeown?

  A lot of people don't. So you actually have to learn relaxing as its own capability. And as they say, for overachievers, they're more comfortable setting a goal to run a marathon than they are to take a nap.

• 32:17Greg McKeown?

  Right. Take a nap isn't much, is it like, what? I don't know about that. I don't know if I can do that. I don't know how. Yeah, that's the, that's the mission impossible. Um, and in fact, is is one specific thing I think people, you know.

• 32:32Greg McKeown?

  If people understood the actual research around the value, the return of investment on taking an effortless nap, I think it would be, they would lean into it more, more easily. I'm not always great at getting the number of hours of sleep I need at night, but I am like a champion napper. And I don't, I don't even, honestly, for a long time, I didn't even know that people thought of that as a bit childish, you'll take a nap. And I think that was, I think that was like sleep time for my three year old. It's like, I, I don't know where I picked it up, but I just a hundred percent believe in it. As soon as I feel that

• 33:11Greg McKeown?

  sleep pressure building as it does through the day naturally, um, somewhere in the afternoon, oh, I'm so happy to go take a nap. I recognize I will be twice as productive in the rest of my day. Discernment way better. My state can be restored, even just literally half an hour of lying down. Yeah, I was just talking to somebody the other day and they, they said, oh yeah, if I ever work from home, I, I used to say, if I ever work from home, I'm going to take a nap every day. And in one year of working from home from pandemic, they've never done it. The opportunity is there now, but the mindset is still, is still built around some other, I would say, industrial age view of productivity where we treat ourselves like

• 33:56Greg McKeown?

  a, like a, you know, a, a mill or a factory. Well, neither are those things. We're not a factory. We're, we're, we're humans with biology and, and the system needs times of concentration and times of relaxation. And that is optimal performance when you can get those two together.

• 34:19Chris Williamson?

  Moving on to the next section, which is effortless action. What's that?

• 34:23Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Chris Williamson?

  How does that, how does that integrate with where we're at so far?

• 34:27Greg McKeown?

  Effortless state is just, you know, always come back to. So that when you're out of that state, you, as we, most of us are most of the time, we just need to keep coming back to it. Oh, I need to, I need to take a nap. I'll physically check in. Oh, I need to, I need to eat something. I haven't eaten anything. Eat something healthy. Um, you know, that's, that's about the sort of constant adjustment. But as we get into that effortless state, what we want to do is, is to simplify the action itself. So I see, I see a lot of the times that the action itself is not really the problem. The, the problem is getting to it. But all these assumptions, it has to be hard. You're

• 35:11Greg McKeown?

  over complicating, you're overthinking and so on. But then when you get to the task itself, people still can approach that in a way that the action is, is harder, more overwhelming than it needs to be. So there's a few things here, I think, that you can do. You can say, you can say, well, let's do it with you. Are you game? You game to do, you game to play?

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  You love doing this. You did it to me last time. Let's do it again.

• 35:34Greg McKeown?

  I did, but I wanted to do it a little differently today. So, so, you know, back to this question I asked at the beginning. Okay, what now, starting now in your life, uh, what is something, yep, important game changer, something that you, you know, you want to get done? You, you, you know, if you did it, especially if you did it consistently, it would, it would make a big impact. Could be business, personal, anything. What's the first thing?

• 36:00Chris Williamson?

  Let me think. Uh, write a new lead magnet for my email newsletter. I know that, I know that if I do that, that it will massively bump the number of subs that I have on my newsletter. I'm already doing the newsletter, so I'm already doing part of the work and there is a bottleneck. There's a rate limiting step on the number of subscribers that I've got. If I release a new lead magnet, then, and I know what I want to do, I just haven't started because I just think, oh, it seems like a really big task. It's going to take ages.

• 36:33Greg McKeown?

  Okay, lead, a lead magnet for what, what you're describing is literally a particular type of article?

• 36:40Chris Williamson?

  It will be a PDF.

• 36:41Greg McKeown?

  An offer.

• 36:42Chris Williamson?

  PDF, just a free PDF, downloadable PDF, sign up to the newsletter and get your PDF.

• 36:47Greg McKeown?

  Got it. Uh, and so now that's it. We've already identified that. Now the question is, everything else is about effortless. So the big question, as I've already mentioned, is how could we make this effortless for you? Um, you know, the, some of the questions that could help us answer that question. Well, what does done look like?

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

  PDF, completed, edited, finalized and uploaded onto landing page, integrated with email client, ready to go.

• 37:21Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. Okay. So it's, it's, it's, it is uploaded and scheduled on your email client. Yeah.

• 37:28Greg McKeown?

  What is the first physical, obvious action you can take, the very first one towards that goal?

• 37:36Chris Williamson?

  Open the note in Apple Notes or Notion, which I'm going to create the outline of the content of the lead magnet.

• 37:46Greg McKeown?

  Okay. So it's, it's just opening the app. That's the first step. What can you achieve in a 10 minute microburst on that? Do you spend 10 minutes, the next 10 minutes, you're in there, you've got 10 minutes, what could you achieve?

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  The lead magnet is going to be a hundred books that I think everybody should read. And I could go through my existing Amazon shopping list, which is already on the internet. And I could run through that and take off the highlights from there. I've already done some of this work.

• 38:18Greg McKeown?

  Yep. So within 10 minutes, you're not going to get all hundred in there probably, but you're going to get, you know, you're going to get what number?

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  20, 20 between 10. I mean, they're there. I've got, there's, there's tons on that list. So it would be pretty easy.

• 38:34Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. So, um, so next question. So we've, we've identified 20, we've identified a 10 minute thing.

• 38:43Greg McKeown?

  If you worked on it, is this something you would generally want to work on in one big push? Or is it, if you worked on this, let's say every day and you were going to add 20 per day over a five day period, does that feel sustainable to you? Does that feel like, yeah, I, I could imagine doing that in that way? Or is that uncomfortable in some way?

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  That would probably be fine. I'd be tempted to batch it in a different way. I'd probably get all 100 listed in one go, so that I'm in one mode of thinking. And then the next one will be to actually fill out why I think people need to read this book. And then perhaps another one after that would be getting the Amazon short links and doing that across or sending that to someone in the team and getting them to do that. And then any of the other bit, maybe an intro. So just trying to batch those together. But I think, given that they're quite discreet, different tasks, I'm pretty certain I could sit down and blast through and get all of the books listed. And then maybe the big chunk will be writing why I think they're good. So maybe we do, you know, a couple of hours each day or a couple of hours, every couple of days for a little while.

• 39:53Greg McKeown?

  So, so what I'm exploring with you is, is whether there's an upper bound would be helpful, right? Like the, you know, lower bound is that you, that you open this app, right? Like every day you open the app till it's done. Maybe the lower bound even is the 10 minute micro burst that we just talked about, where you say, okay, for 10 minutes, I'm going to work it. And you literally time yourself for that 10 minutes. But here's the key part is that you have an upper bound. And I'm not sure what that is yet for you, but that you say, okay, at this point I'm done. Because the temptation is, and you already used it, blast through it. And that was the language, right? I'm going to blast through it. Well, I'm, I know you have that capability.

• 40:36Greg McKeown?

  On days that you don't really have the time, space, energy to do that. You think that's the way to make it happen. So then you go, well, I can't do it today. Because I can't blast through it. I can't get those 100 done today. So therefore you don't do it. And you're in the situation that you are describing. So if you have an upper bound, and I like the timing bound for you on this, because then you say, well, listen, I have podcasts that I'm recording at this time, that is in 20 minutes, but I will, I can succeed my goal for the day, because it's a timed amount of time. No matter how many books I get done or not, it's done by the end of that 20 minutes. That is my goal. So I don't know quite what it is for you with this, but it's an upper bound so that you pace yourself. It's, it's one of the biggest errors, I think, of, of, of the

• 41:21Greg McKeown?

  sort of the exhausting path, is that people push themselves and power through.

• 41:29Greg McKeown?

  And what that means is that they just, they can only do it for a short burst. They can only, by day two, by day three, you're just like, I don't have an hour or two to do on this today. So I've got to wait until I have a full hour or two to do it and I have the energy to do it. And I know somebody pushed on a project like this the whole weekend. They push, push, push. And then they just like, they couldn't even think about that project for two more weeks after that. They didn't get it done and they couldn't even think about it because it was too much. It was too overwhelming. It's just exhausted their mental interest in that subject. And so that's what I would be suggesting for you is like a little bit of pacing. Okay. So what's the right pace for you, by the way? What is the upper bound that sounds right?

• 42:10Chris Williamson?

  I think any more than an hour in between all of the other stuff that I'm doing, especially for the big chunk, which is writing out the descriptions of the books. I think much more than an hour would probably, I'd start to have a flinch effect away from it. Just to interject on what you said there, it feels like

• 42:29Chris Williamson?

  the rev limiter that you have on a car. So you just, it just allows you to bounce off the ceiling. But what you can do as opposed to letting yourself get into that red is you can actually bring that down. And if you're sufficiently experienced with how your ebb and flow of energy works and what you know that you can tolerate without getting into burnout, you can take, okay, I don't want to hit burnout, which is a particular distance over a particular amount of time. Let's rate that down from a macro aggregate into a micro daily. And okay, well, okay, so maybe I think, maybe I think I could get away with adding maybe like half an hour in. And maybe I could get away with adding an hour in. So I like, I like that.

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  I like a lot of what we're going to talk about when we get into the final section is that next action. It's what's the physical thing that you can do. But this is a integrating the what does done look like? Which is super important. Give yourself license to say that you have done the work for today. It gives you more freedom by putting it into a time constraint.

• 43:35Chris Williamson?

  It liberates you from what could be a really difficult piece of work. I might get to 95 books and think, oh, God, I need to find the rest of the books. If I'm working for two hours, I've worked for two hours. Like, that's two hours of good work. I'm not working to a deadline. If there's an outright deadline and it's three days away, this is a little bit different. But when it's, for most people, ongoing tasks that need to be completed as and is, you're like, well, I've done two hours on it. Should I not feel satisfied with my two hours of hard work? And by defining done, which I absolutely love, you have to decide what done looks like.

• 44:15Chris Williamson?

  By doing it within a time window, you always liberate yourself. I feel like this insight I've seen from a couple of different people, yourself and some of my friends that have it too. And it is, um,

• 44:29Chris Williamson?

  the thing that all of those people have in common is they've got quite strong family lives.

• 44:36Greg McKeown?

  The forcing function.

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  It absolutely is. Whereas I'm sure when you were young and didn't have those responsibilities quite so much and were still where I'm at now, where I don't have a misses or kids or a dog that's knocking on the door saying, we've got such and such as barbecue tonight. That's when you can just keep nose on grindstone and just continue to go away in a way. So I love that. Define what done looks like. Give yourself a window and use windows of time as little mini extrapolated or reverse extrapolated burnout indicators and use that as a little rev limiter. Awesome.

• 45:14Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I mean, I think for you, I'm not saying an hour. You said an hour before you flinched is what you described, like an hour more, I start to flinch with that. I think for you, it's like half an hour is tops on this assignment. You can do a lot in half an hour. I know you can. If you start doing this within a half an hour, you'll have a whole thing. And that's fine. You leave it there and you move on. You know, you see that the benefit, I took on a big project six months ago. And I knew if I forced it, I could get it done. Now, actually, I thought if I forced it, I could do it in maybe three months. But I didn't, I said, no, it's gonna give yourself the time. It's a six month project. It was a major project.

• 45:55Greg McKeown?

  At the end of that six months, I got it done. It felt effortless. The journey was effortless. It was really rewarding and really great. And there's other people I know that would like to do it. It's overwhelming to even start. And other people I know that started pushed too hard at the beginning, exact same challenge that we're taking. And, and they're halfway through now. It's still taken six months, but they pushed hard for three months. Didn't get it done and now have semi given up. And, and so this power of pace is not obvious to overachievers. We want to get it all done now. We're going to force it. We're going to push it. You pace yourself. You go slow to go smooth and then smooth turns out to be fast. That's the military phrase, right?

• 46:37Greg McKeown?

  Go slow to go, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. So that's on the pacing thing, but for you, now this is a good transition for effortless results and the distinction.

• 46:49Greg McKeown?

  Because effortless action in the book is really about how you take one project, one activity, and you make it as easy as possible to complete. There's very practical section in the book. The third section of the book is about how can you use effort in a certain way to make the results you want flow again and again and again. So that's the difference between linear results, that is one effort equals one reward versus residual results, which is you, you maybe even put in a little more effort at the beginning. Takes a little more to set it up, but it flows to you again and again and again after that.

• 47:33Greg McKeown?

  And so I'm like going to give you the challenge because I've just started to learn this myself of a one click solution for what you gave to me, this lead magnet article. Right now, we've talked about how to make it simpler for you to do it. But what I want to know is could you construct it to the point? You've already got members of your team. You already talked about that. But could you construct it to the point where all you have to do is one click? It's a huge challenge. It's a, it's way beyond where you are right now with it.

• 48:05Greg McKeown?

  So it's not that you're going to be able to do that immediately, but that you construct the right people in your team and you empower them in the right way. That when you say, listen, I want to do a lead magnet article on the top hundred books, that they have access to your Amazon page yourself, themselves, that they can go through and curate all of that yourself and bring to you 120 books. And, and, or even they, even they look at your podcast, who you've had on, what they know about you, they've done all of that evaluation for you. They bring you 100 books. They've already written a few thoughts about each of them based on what you've said on your podcasts. They've done all of that work so that they bring it to you.

• 48:41Greg McKeown?

  Now, based on my own experience with this, you, you probably have to do this a few times on a few projects before they know your voice, know what you're doing, know how you'd, so that, but again, there could be a point where in the future you have the lead magnet and it's a one click solution. They send it to you and all you're doing is approve or not. And the whole thing has been done. So that's, that's the difference between effortless action and what I'm describing as effortless, effortless results. And that is the, for me personally, the hugest thing in this book. It's like I spent too much of my life trying to make it better, easier, simpler,

• 49:21Greg McKeown?

  to get a thing done myself and not nearly enough time focused on how do you get results just to flow to you? Whether you're sleeping or not, whether you're thinking about it or not. And that, that, that's the difference between being able to make a two X contribution in your life and a 10 X or 100 X. Is if you can construct systems, hire the right people, get the right teams in place, empower them in the right way. They can produce results while you're sleeping or not. You know, whether, whether you're focused on it today or not, whether you're taking the day off, whether you're relaxing today, stuff still happens. Amazing things can happen. And so I, I just put that to you. How can you get to a one click solution?

• 50:02Chris Williamson?

  That would require me to finally make the decision to hire an assistant, a full-time EA, which I haven't done yet. I don't think it's too ridiculous. All of the structures are there, the root content that the team would need is there. One thing that you may be proud of me for is I've now outsourced the production of pretty much all of my social media content. So we have these beautiful trailers that are being made by social media guy Joe, who has come on full-time now, and he's just phenomenal. He's listened to the show for ages, so he understands my voice. He's doing recreationally what he needs to do for his research for work in any case. So today, he listened to the Jordan Peterson episode on the route down to London to go see his girlfriend. And

• 50:48Chris Williamson?

  while he's driving down, I'm getting voice notes from him saying, dude, like this bit at 13 minutes and 45 seconds, like, I know what I'm gonna do with that and do this. And it's just, I don't need to, it's just hands-off. He just makes this beautiful content from all of the stuff that I already do. Then he takes my newsletter, because he gets delivered the newsletter every week, and then he repurposes that into tweet storms for the following week, because he knows that it's timely and he knows that it is in my voice. And then every time he reads the newsletter. So that is, that's my equivalent. I probably would have said to you a year ago, I want to be able to scale my exposure on social media, and you would have said, what would have been a one-click solution. For me now, it's

• 51:31Chris Williamson?

  maybe a voice note in a WhatsApp chat solution. So technically, it is one-click. There's maybe some words, but, hey mate, got this new episode coming out with Greg. Really think that we can like dig some great content out of this. Just put it on your list for next week. Beep, done. And it'll appear, and then it'll appear on the internet. So that is one of the things. It's a great, no, go, go, carry. Just something that is probably lurking in the back of some people's minds is they don't, they don't have a team. And maybe they're a one-man band, or maybe the tasks that they have to do, they can't outsource to other people. What's the effortless results solution for someone that can't outsource?

• 52:16Greg McKeown?

  Well, effortless results is, you know, the, can you, you can apply it in any situation that you're in. It's really just to do with the mindset.

• 52:31Greg McKeown?

  I mean, in your particular instance, you know, what would a, what would a one click solution look like for you without hiring people? Is that the question you're asking me?

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  No, for other people, not for me particularly.

• 52:44Greg McKeown?

  So you just mean in general, how can a person achieve residual effortless results if they don't just have a team that they can hire? That's what you're asking. Yeah, I mean, I would say that no matter what somebody's situation is economically, they ought to lean into the idea of, you know, of network. I know when I first came to the United States, I mean, I literally had no money at all. So it wasn't like I could have solutions that looked like, oh, I'll hire that person. So exactly as you're saying, that definitely wouldn't have been an option. But I did reach out to, I built, I started building, you know, just,

• 53:28Greg McKeown?

  I would knock on people's doors, so to speak. I would call them up and just network and tell people this is what I'm trying to achieve. I want to teach, I want to write. And so by, by getting to know people beyond your normal group, you are, you know, to say it this way, I had Benjamin Hardy on the What's Essential podcast and he said, he just wrote a book called Who Not How?

• 53:54Chris Williamson?

  Awesome episode. I really enjoyed that.

• 53:56Greg McKeown?

  Thank you, Chris. I really liked that too. I walked away kind of changed by that myself and again, aware of how often I was doing, you know, making my own action easier rather than, oh, this find somebody. That there is a huge network of people now. You certainly don't have to be hiring someone full time. But taking networking seriously, uh, so that you can start to think about how you can serve them. It may be the way that you will serve other people and create value for them is in is introducing them to someone else in your network. And so you you are still serving them. You're you're still creating exchange of value. And that's all money is, is an exchange of value. So even if you don't actually have pounds of dollars and so on, you still can create value for people.

• 54:41Greg McKeown?

  You can still make yourself wealthier. You could still, uh, connect with through other value creation. And and as you're doing that, I think you are still looking for people who follow what, um, Warren Buffett, he has these three, these three words, uh, they all start with I. So I call it the three I's test now. It's like who you're looking to work with is people that have high integrity, high intelligence and high initiative. And I wish I had had that test 20 years ago. That that that's such a simple, clear test. And so I just look now for people that are high, high in all three I's.

• 55:24Greg McKeown?

  And when I find them, I I just, it's just so such a pleasure to work with them because you don't have to worry and you're not, well, you know, integrity issues. I don't know if they're going to be honest with me. They're going to say one thing and do something else. I mean, that's exhausting if you're working with somebody in that capacity. If if you find somebody that's high intelligence, that means they can figure things out, means that there's high processing abilities. Uh, I don't, I don't mean what their resume says they went to school on. I mean, can they do stuff and they're capable. Uh, and then the third, in some ways, it's the thing I most long for is high initiative. Because that's, that's so much more effortless if you're working with somebody that's got high initiative. Because effort, really what effort is, is mental exertion.

• 56:08Greg McKeown?

  It's having to think about something. With your article, it says you have to think, um, you know, think about which articles to get, think about what you want to say about each of these books, think about, you know, all of that is, that's the effort, it's mental exertion. If you've had some with high initiative, they're doing the thinking for you. So, I mean, I suppose I've just given a list of how to find people that you want to work with. But I'm just wanting to distinguish that you don't have to pay the person. You certainly don't have to hire them full time. And that's, that's a more unusual step for people, especially as they're starting out. Uh, but there's so many services available now that weren't before. You can go on Fiverr, you can go somewhere else, somebody that are very low price point.

• 56:51Greg McKeown?

  You can test, you can see that, is this a good fit? As that is your, is your starting, you know, launching your business. Um, I suppose the only other thing I wanted to say about effortless results is that,

• 57:04Greg McKeown?

  is that you can apply it. I mean, I'll give you another entrepreneurial application is a way you learn. Uh, if you learn as, like, there's two different ways of learning. One way of learning is what, what you were almost, almost all of us have been taught in school, which is here's the content. It's going to be a test. You're going to be tested on approximately this stuff. So review that stuff, try and memorize that stuff, try and, you know, reproduce that for a moment. It's not, I'm not like all negative about that. You are going to learn if you do that, but it is limited value. Because you are really learning something once to apply it once.

• 57:48Greg McKeown?

  You know, you memorize the stuff, you go take the test. That is your reward for having learned it. And then you forget it because it's served its purpose. That is linear learning. Um, residual learning is completely different. I remember Elon Musk was once interviewed and asked, I mean, it was a bit of a leading question, but he was basically asked, look, how have you learned so much so fast? Because what people don't know about Musk is that he, you know, before he started SpaceX and Tesla, he had no background in, in mechanical engineering. Just think of that. Uh, he had no background in, in, you know, in, in rocket science.

• 58:32Greg McKeown?

  So people don't know that. They assume that was his background. He didn't know anything about those subjects exactly. He certainly didn't have degrees in them. And so he has to, he has, he has managed to upgrade his thinking enormously. Uh, in order to be able to then not just be in those fields, but in fact, you know, push the limits and expand the knowledge within those fields. And he was asked, how have you, how have you managed to do that so fast? And so, and he said, he said, well, I like to think about this as a semantic tree. He said, it's as knowledge as a semantic tree. And he means by that, that the trunk of the tree are the first principles, the things, the core

• 59:15Greg McKeown?

  principles of this new industry. He says, you've got to get really clear on that. If you can get the trunk of the, the understanding of, of the, if you can get the principles clear once, you have a structure to add all the other learning to. Now that's where he's saying it's a tree. You've got the trunk and then the branches and the leaves. You can add little new things you learn onto a structure you have learned and are confident in. But what I want to add to his answer is that what it really does, if you can get to the principles that you, like, if you can understand the principles of whatever you're trying to do, you can apply it hundreds and hundreds of times into the future.

• 59:59Greg McKeown?

  And so that's an example of like, you invest once to understand it deeply, but then you can apply it in a thousand other situations. You don't need money to do that. You can achieve that result simply by saying, okay, I'm going to study this, but I'm looking for the, the the core principles so that I can adopt them, absorb them into my mindset. Uh, and then we have, have, you know, same as Mungar, you talked about, maybe it was before we started the interview, but the idea that you've got a worldly wisdom that you get if you've understood the principle deeply, you can apply it in smart ways in whatever entrepreneur venture you're pursuing.

• 1:00:39Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the most important principles that you use?

• 1:00:45Greg McKeown?

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 1:00:49Greg McKeown?

  One principle for me is,

• 1:00:56Greg McKeown?

  well, the principle is

• 1:01:01Greg McKeown?

  that if you want to be 100 times more successful in life, you need to be 100 times more grateful.

• 1:01:12Greg McKeown?

  As soon as you say the word gratitude, I think people go, oh, yeah, yeah, I think I've heard that before. And it's like

• 1:01:20Greg McKeown?

  that they say that because they haven't even scratched the surface of it. If they react that way, they think, oh, yeah, I've done a little gratitude in my life and it makes me feel a little better. And it's like, yeah, that isn't it at all. If you can be grateful in everything, in everything that happens to you, you will get 100x return of like the results you want in life. I don't even hesitate to say that. Gratitude gratitude will make gratitude probably is one of the key themes that runs like a golden thread through about the state, action and results. If you can be

• 1:02:01Greg McKeown?

  one of the tactics for this developed after getting to know BJ Fogg of Tiny Habits. And he develops these these habit recipes for the Stanford Design Behavior Lab. And a habit recipe in its simplest format is after I X, then I will Y. And for this practice, I've said, okay, after I complain, I will say something I'm thankful for.

• 1:02:33Greg McKeown?

  And what I noticed when I first started that is I complain a lot more than I realized.

• 1:02:39Greg McKeown?

  Like, I really couldn't believe it because I think of myself as being quite positive and being quite grateful and optimistic and those things. But I just was amazed. I just, I just was like all day long, just complaining about things. Walk into the room, oh, you know, children, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? We, you know, just chat chat with Anna. Well, this meeting took longer than I thought and this thing happened. This is what I'm leading with. As soon as you add on, like, I wasn't, I didn't say, okay, I'm going to eliminate all complaining in my life. That seemed overwhelming. But every time you complain, you just say something you're thankful for, say something positive afterwards. And, and we started then after, after just, it had an amazing force about it. It just immediately had an impact on everyone I would talk to. Just they, they, their life was better. They would be,

• 1:03:24Greg McKeown?

  they would be more energized. They would talking, enjoy talking to me a bit more because it's not, you know, no one wants to talk to someone who's complaining, you know, they, they want to talk to someone who's got, who's grateful and grateful for them. And it just started this whole positive, self fulfilling, like, cycle of good.

• 1:03:43Greg McKeown?

  And so even with our children, sometimes we'll play the game and,

• 1:03:48Greg McKeown?

  and they'll say, I remember my someone time saying, after you've complained, okay, something you're grateful, you say, oh, I'm so grateful that my dad is making us play this game, you know, just like that, like sarcastic gratitude. And, uh, well, that's the thing about gratitude is you can't beat it, is that we all laughed. It immediately changed the feeling. And we, we were already, we were already in the positive state. And so it just made it easier to then carry on with everything else in life that we wanted to do.

• 1:04:20Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I could really go a long time on this, but like, you can't overdo this principle. It's good, it's the right, it's the, it's the state to be in, in good times and bad.

• 1:04:34Greg McKeown?

  If things are really, really hard right now, somebody listening to this is really hard, gratitude will help you. If somebody is in a state of amazing success, right, which definitely these seasons come for people, they can have more good happening to them. There's a huge risk when those things start to be good. You start to become arrogant, you start to be full of yourself, you start, you're still massively comparative because there's always someone to look to. So always someone who's got more followers, more bigger podcasts and bigger book, more money, there's always something. So being more successful doesn't suddenly make you more happy. It's a great threat, in fact, success. So being grateful in times of success is a great antidote to

• 1:05:19Greg McKeown?

  the sort of the pride cycle of life where we get too full of ourselves. So in good times and bad gratitude is like the optimal state. And if I had to really say simply what I think the effortless state is, I think this is it. It's a state of gratitude. And there's a whole theory by Barbara Fredrickson called the broaden and build theory, where she's identified that basically state produces better relationships and better results,

• 1:05:47Greg McKeown?

  rather than the other way around. People think if I have great results and I have great relationships, then I'll be in a good positive state. It's exactly opposite. You change the state and it starts to change the relationships and the results you're producing around you. And this is why I think it's just come back to it again and again. And I can summarize this principle. I should have started with this because this is the best way of saying it. This is the principle. If you focus on what you lack, you'll lose what you have. And if you focus on what you have, then you'll get what you lack. That's the principle.

• 1:06:26Chris Williamson?

  I love it. I think it was you that told me the last time that we spoke about an example that was very similar to that. And it stuck with me for so long, just thinking about the effect that being grateful has on us, thinking about just how much of a, it's so polarized to so much bad thinking. So much of the malaise and the ambient anxiety and the external comparison game and the I could be here and all of it goes away.

• 1:07:02Chris Williamson?

  Every time that I learn a little bit more about it, and you said it before, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, gratitude. Yeah, journals on the morning pages. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard it. And every time that someone else comes back up, I had Susanna Hallinan on the podcast, the happyologist, positive psychology expert. She's episode 32. So she was 10% deep into this journey. And she said happiness is built upon a foundation of gratitude. Without gratitude, you cannot have happiness. And still now, episode 32, coming back to to bite me in the ass. Before you go, I want to go back to something that we actually spoke about before we started recording. You

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  talked about the courage to be rubbish. And particularly why I love it is that rubbish is a word only British people are going to understand. So every American that reads it's going to go, what's rubbish? Does he mean trash?

• 1:07:58Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I love it for that reason, too, that it's such a such a nice British word.

• 1:08:05Chris Williamson?

  Anglo sized, yeah.

• 1:08:06Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I love it for that reason, too. Yeah. So I got to comment on what you just said, though, about like, that just reminds me of another phrase that Benjamin Hardy used when when he was on the podcast. And he said, it was based on a book, I think he hasn't, it's co authoring, but it hasn't out yet. But it's, it's on this principle of.

• 1:08:26Chris Williamson?

  It's a half gap, isn't it?

• 1:08:28Greg McKeown?

  Are you, are you in? Yeah, he says, are you in the the gap or the gain?

• 1:08:34Chris Williamson?

  That's it. I can't wait, Ben. Ben, if you're listening, I listened to that episode. And it's one of those things where an author drops a book that they're going to bring out. And this concept was so interesting. And the book's still not here. So me and you are on the same team here. We're both pissed off that Ben hasn't hurried up and written it.

• 1:08:49Greg McKeown?

  Exactly. Get on with it now, Ben. So, so this, just on that, his point about it, so it just supports what you were just saying entirely, is that, like, if you want to be happy. You need to be in the gain. You have to look at what progress have I made? What's gone right? What? Who have I become that I've grown? It's like you look at the progress if you want to be happy. If you want to be unhappy, you just look at the gap. And that's it. You can probably be successful either way. But you definitely will not be happy if you're looking at the gap all the time. And so it's about a ratio question. What percentage of your life are you in the gap? What I haven't achieved yet, what I haven't accomplished, what I haven't become?

• 1:09:33Greg McKeown?

  And how much of you, your time are you looking at what you have achieved and have succeeded and so on? The gain or the gap, I think, is a great summary of what, you know, what we're trying to talk about here. But the good news is about what we're saying about state today. Is that the moment you get into an effortless state, the moment you are in a grateful state, for example, you immediately are not in a fearful, angry, grudging, comparative state. It's instant. You can only be in one state in a moment. So, so the moment you're grateful, even where my son is sort of, yeah, sarcastically grateful, it's already happened. It's already moved.

• 1:10:17Greg McKeown?

  And of course, in any moment, you could go back to complaining and so on. But, but we, we, we've just, we've been emphasizing it just as a family, just this last, this last couple of days, this week. It's spring break for us. And, uh, and so I, we've upped the ante. It's like, yeah, you can criticize, complain, but after three things you're thankful for. And it's amazing to me, it's amazing to me that, that it works. It just works. They start getting into arguing about anything. I mean, you can argue about anything in life, can't you? It doesn't, it's most ridiculous things you get all focused on. And it's what does it? It's, it brings the whole state of the, the culture that you're in, the environment you're in gets bring down.

• 1:11:00Greg McKeown?

  You've got some of this toxic on your team. It just brings everybody down. It's every, but as soon as you have that person starting to say something they're thankful for, it re-energizes the room. People just start smiling and laughing. It's an amazingly fast fix.

• 1:11:13Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what? Sorry, I'm good.

• 1:11:15Greg McKeown?

  I'm going to. Yeah, we'll riff on this. Keep riffing on this.

• 1:11:18Chris Williamson?

  So I started doing gratitude journaling, probably about.

• 1:11:22Chris Williamson?

  Four years ago, something like that, three or four years ago. And what I found was my natural state wasn't massively grateful. I think if you haven't done formal gratitude practice, it's actually quite weird. Like to do it, if you're not naturally, if that's not your inclination. And if you're a, you know, a bloke from the, the north of the UK, then that perhaps might-

• 1:11:43Greg McKeown?

  You're saying this isn't, this isn't the normal thing. You're saying this isn't the normal thing, you know? That's interesting.

• 1:11:48Chris Williamson?

  So what I found was that after a while, when I, it's supposed to only take three minutes in the morning and three minutes at night. But when I got to the three great things that happened to me today section.

• 1:12:01Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Chris Williamson?

  It was taking 10 minutes because I couldn't think of anything. And then what-

• 1:12:04Greg McKeown?

  Oh, really?

• 1:12:05Chris Williamson?

  What I found over time was that I, during the day, was finding things to be grateful for as a gift to my future self that night, so that I didn't feel like an idiot when it came time for me to write them down. So I actually formalizing, formalizing the gratitude made the present experience of things in the moment different as well. Because it, it made me accountable to myself. I was like, look, I need, I need to have this thing. And I think that's, that little story, I often use that as a justification for a formalized practice. Now, you've actually managed to, um, formalize the practice into a way that rides the crest of now. That's actually, it's, it's always happening. But an equivalent would be to, to have some sort of accountability, whatever it might be.

• 1:12:50Chris Williamson?

  The accountability can be your wife, or it can be, can be a diary, or it can be something else. But you need those triggers.

• 1:12:56Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, and I, I subscribe to all, to everything you just said. Uh, I, I've been doing a gratitude journal too daily. I do it, I do it from, I, it's like mental health for me. It's like no matter, like I really need it to do it at night. And I'm amazed at how forgetful I can be.

• 1:13:18Greg McKeown?

  And I'll sit there, okay, what are the big things I'm grateful for today? And in that process, at first, I can say not just, oh, I don't know what to write. I just forget that that morning, that same morning, something great happened at nine AM, 10 AM. And some meeting, some event, some news, something great happened. And I just couldn't even remember it. Yeah. The same day when I come to write about it. So the practice, I think, is enormously important, something that I used to do every week. Before the pandemic, I had it built into my routine.

• 1:13:50Greg McKeown?

  Was, actually, it was a church thing. I would do it there, which isn't great, but I would do it at church. I had like a, and then pandemic, no, no one's going, no one's meeting, no one's doing. So it removed that routine out of my life. And just recently, I've got back to doing it each week, where you summarize it for the week. And I've been really surprised, the research supports this, that you'll get a bigger bump of benefit if you do gratitude lists on a weekly basis than even on a daily basis. I do both now. I don't think they're mutually exclusive at all, but, but doing it on the week, what that does is you get to sense, I think, a bigger set of progress. You get to see a bigger sense of, wow, yeah, look at all those things and they added up and look at this.

• 1:14:35Greg McKeown?

  The, so you have a more satisfying sense of progress. I think yes to all of these. You, I don't know that you can overdo this principle. I, I don't, I don't see it. I believe thoroughly that if you want to achieve a hundred times the results you have in your life, you just, you just say, okay, I'm going to be that much more grateful. Ramp up the gratitude. Yeah, to everyone, to everything, and the bad things too. When, when things happen that are bad, well, I'm thank, I'm glad, I've done this before. I'm thankful that I survived this thing today. I'm thankful that this thing is done and over.

• 1:15:14Greg McKeown?

  I'm thankful that somebody, this happened yesterday, somebody, somebody sent me a private message on LinkedIn that was negative, it was like pretty harsh actually, about something I just posted. And, and when I come to write about that, I'm thankful that they wrote to me and said this, said something that was critical. And sometimes as I'm writing for the things you wouldn't necessarily normally think to be grateful for, I don't know what I'm going to say for why, but thankful this happened because. Yeah, because it was an act of faith to write the first census because you don't know why. But in the moment, you start to go, yeah, because, because I hadn't thought about

• 1:15:55Greg McKeown?

  that angle before. I'm not sensitive enough to that. And so I was able to, which I did, rewrite the post that I'd just done with more context to it. And even though I didn't enjoy in the first moment of that, it was teaching and it was an opportunity and being grateful for it just means that you see the learning and the benefit from it. I mean, you can't control so many of the things that happen to you in life. But if you can be grateful in whatever comes, the good and the bad, I mean, you're like, it's like a superpower. I mean, a person who can turn a negative into a positive can never be defeated. That's what the effort the state gives you. Whatever comes, fine, the next big challenge, it's

• 1:16:39Greg McKeown?

  all right. Because we know how to turn it into something good.

• 1:16:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what it feels like? So people use Nassim Taleb's anti-fragile principle for things like this. But I actually don't think that that's necessarily perfectly correct. I actually think that this feels a lot, not softer, it feels more fluid than that. And a good example of this actually is what's happening, what will be happening right now as we're recording this. So I had Jordan Peterson on the show last night. Earlier on this week, Marvel Comics featured someone that looks suspiciously like his philosophy as the principles beneath Red Skull, the magical super Nazi that's the enemy of Captain America.

• 1:17:27Chris Williamson?

  So basically, Tana Hasi Coats, that was the particular author of the comic book, was saying Jordan Peterson is, he has some analogies between his philosophy and that. So today, Jordan has released a bunch of Hail Hydra, which was the thing from Captain America, which looks like the Hydra head from above. But he's changed it into a lobster and put hail lobster. He's released them on posters and T-shirts that are limited edition and all the proceeds go to charity. And he put a tweet out yesterday that had 40,000 likes on it, something like that. So what he's done is he's taken something which has happened and said, okay. Well, how, not only how can I perhaps deal with this, but how can I find gratitude

• 1:18:12Chris Williamson?

  that this is now an opportunity for me to do it? And yeah, there's some particulars with regards to his platform that permit him to have more degrees of freedom with things like this. But presumably somebody lower down the status hierarchy or the clout hierarchy, their challenge would similarly be down regulated in kind. So yeah, seeing stuff like that, when people take something that ostensibly should be quite a bad day, being called out by the biggest comic on the planet for being the underlying philosophy behind a magical super nazi, probably doesn't rank on every author's like, this is a, this is a good day.

• 1:18:47Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Chris Williamson?

  But now it seems really charming, the, based on what I'm seeing online, it looks like the public opinion's massively in his, in his favor and whatever his chosen charity, some homeless, homeless children in Canada, something, they're going to get some insane amount of donations. So yeah, that's a, for a tacit example there. Right. Courage to be rubbish. What does the courage to be rubbish mean?

• 1:19:16Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. Courage to be rubbish is, well, I've got to share a story about it. There's a British industrialist, Henry Kramer, 1959, he wants to support and accelerate progress on a human powered flight. So this is like 50 years after the Wright brothers have actually successfully flown in a, you know, in an engine powered plane, but no one's done the human powered flight. So basically a bike inside of a plane. And he thinks, he thinks this is going to be doable. I mean, this is only like 10 years before, you know, Neil Armstrong is on the moon. So it doesn't seem crazy to him that they can do this.

• 1:19:58Greg McKeown?

  So he sets this thing, £50,000, quite a lot of money even now, but it's a lot in 1959. Go. All sorts of teams get involved, well-funded, you know, impressive brains, all this. And for 17 years, they fail. Just no, just nothing. Enter Paul McCready, who comes in, he's in debt, he doesn't have money for a team. He has just basically his friends and family. In fact, he has his young son become his test pilot.

• 1:20:34Chris Williamson?

  Dad, what am I doing today? No, don't worry, don't worry, son, just keep your helmet on.

• 1:20:38Greg McKeown?

  It's gonna, it's gonna be all right, it's gonna be all right, son. So he's staring at the problem, why have not people been able to make more progress on this? And he suddenly realizes everyone's been trying to solve the wrong problem. They're all trying to build these really beautiful machines. Elegant, you know, wooden ribs, plastic casings, all this, just, just beautiful things. Great teams, great minds, all this, in order to, you know, they have to, they have to do this half a mile flight, two mile flight, something around these two pylons without stopping. And that's what they're focused on. And he goes, no, it's exactly opposite. What you need is an ugly as they come thing

• 1:21:21Greg McKeown?

  that can crash and be rebuilt cheap and fast. That's, that's the real problem to be solved. If we can solve that, then we'll be able to learn so much faster and then be able to figure out how to do this. So they built this thing totally ugly, looks, looks amateurish. Uh, it was really light. Uh, it would, they, they go, they, they tried to fly it, it would crash. They just grabbed some broom handle, uh, you know, stick it back on. And within five minutes, they'd be back up in the air.

• 1:21:59Greg McKeown?

  He said that the, the competitive teams would take six months from that sort of setback. They tried to fly the plane, it would crash, okay, ship it back, we'll take it back to the university, take it back to the institute. Let's rebuild what we're doing. Six months of, of downtime between their learning cycle compared to him with five minutes. They, they, they would maybe have more crashes in one day than some of their competitors would have in the lifetime of the machine. And so it was on their 223rd attempt that they succeeded. They won the first Kramer Prize and went on to win two years later, they crossed the English Channel uh, and won the second Kramer Prize for a hundred thousand pounds.

• 1:22:40Greg McKeown?

  I mean, this is like this huge breakthrough, but the breakthrough wasn't an aeronautics breakthrough primarily. The primary breakthrough was that you've got to make failure as cheap as possible.

• 1:22:53Greg McKeown?

  And and and there's a whole variety of ways that you can do that. I mean, you can make, you can make failure cheaper by protecting it from the critic in your head. This is the way you talk about your own performance when you make a mistake. Um, you you you can, I have a friend, super, you know, high capability, high intelligent person, he did his JD, uh, maybe JD MBA, I can't remember now, at Stanford, went on and did another PhD at Princeton. I mean, he's super smart, teaches Spanish to other people. And he just says, listen, you you get, it's like, you've got to imagine you have a thousand beads. And every time you make

• 1:23:35Greg McKeown?

  a mistake, try to speak Spanish, you get to take a bead out. And once you've done a, when you've got a thousand beads out, you're going to be, you're going to be level one mastery in Spanish. You just got to go out there and make mistakes. Whereas some people want to, I've got to learn it, get really good before I ever use the what I know. The courage to be rubbish is where it's in that that you learn. Everything starts rubbish. Every masterpiece started rubbish. They just started, they had the courage to do, you know, the bad version of the article. There's so many people, I meet so many people who say, oh, I want to write a book. I mean, but this idea, they have in their heads, I think, the the they're trying to do the wrong thing. They're trying to solve the wrong puzzle. They're trying to be perfect out the gate. Like

• 1:24:19Greg McKeown?

  perfect, beautiful machines, or they they they think, oh, everything I do needs to be, what I call like baby Yoda, baby Yoda perfect, right from the beginning. It's all, it's just all cute and polished and so on. But actually, like at Pixar, for example, to play a little on that that metaphor, that they they believe in and articulate ugly babies. We we love ugly babies. Because the first, the first, you know,

• 1:24:48Greg McKeown?

  The first sketch of any idea, the sketch is bad, the idea is bad. You know, you can go and see, I've seen them at Pixel and I've worked with the company. They have enshrined these early versions of Toy Story and so on. And they are rough and they do look bad, genuinely. They're saying, of course, we want that. You've got to protect those, you've got to look after those things. Uh, so that you can ever get into, into, you know, better performance later. And so you want to make failure as cheap as possible. Actually, one of the things that we've talked about already, just following through that thread is, is one way to make, make failure cheaper is just be grateful along the way.

• 1:25:29Greg McKeown?

  I, I just was talking to John Acuff, who's just come out with a book called Soundtracks. And he's basically saying, we have all these negative soundtracks in our mind that get in the way. And we have to choose a better, you know, better playlist and play it a lot. So they become our most played soundtracks. And one of the soundtracks that he said, I just find it here, he said, he's picked up this, you either succeed or you have a story.

• 1:25:56Greg McKeown?

  And I love that, right? If you, you either succeed or you have a story, meaning, so he gave me this story. He said that when he was early starting off and trying to market, he, he hired space at a conference. He wasn't even speaking at, and he just thought, he just had this idea that because of his success of his blog and so on, that loads of people would come and meet him there and whatever. So he got a thousand flyers made up that he would have to be when they arrived and he sits there. He's expecting all these people and literally two people come. And one of them is a friend of his that he knew was coming. And I think the other one was the person he brought with him. And so he has a photograph of this now and he's put it on, put it on his blog. This is from years back, but he just tells the story. And, and that's what he's saying, and he says, one of the most popular blogs he's ever written.

• 1:26:42Greg McKeown?

  Uh, you either succeed when you take an action or you have a story. And so this is all about trying to make it cheaper to, for us, so you can fail, but it becomes cheaper. I said a little, little differently, it's how to make life into an asymmetric bet. So that there's low downside and high upside. And if you can make your life like that, if you can, again, to use the phrase, if you can make it a little more effortless. Then then you can keep taking action. My mother was especially good at this. You know, she has, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, but she was really good at encouraging. Uh, well, try it. What's the worst that can happen? It's okay.

• 1:27:26Greg McKeown?

  And so it reduced the emotional burden of, well, what if I do this and I fail? I'll look stupid and I'll be terrible. I was worse than dying. And a lot of people feel like that. They just rather die than than look stupid or do something. And and I didn't, I just didn't grow up with that burden. And I'm sure that meant that I actually did look a bit more stupid than, you know, than the average person more times. I didn't care and I don't care now either. And so it means what I think it produces. You know, speaking from personal experience for a moment, is that it produces a sense of I'm game for that. Let's try it. Let's go, let's go. And then we'll learn and we'll, we can pivot fast, but we're going to learn.

• 1:28:10Greg McKeown?

  Let's go. And you you you just, you're just not going to learn or progress if you're so worried about being perfect that you don't, that you can't even take the first step. Imagine if a baby really, literally somehow was embarrassed that they, that first attempt they have to move, to crawl, to sit up, to stand, they, they, they were being punished for that. Imagine how ridiculous that would be. Uh, they, they get praised for it, encouraged for it. We need to do that for ourselves. We need to do it for other people if we want progress. And we do. And if we want progress to be even easier, which we really do.

• 1:28:49Chris Williamson?

  What I love is the idea of seeing failure as the end in itself and almost the thing that you're, that you're aiming to get to. Not that the outcome I want from this experiment is failure, but that you repurpose failure, you rebrand it as, okay, failure is not a bug. It is a feature of this undertaking that I'm going through now. And every single time that I fail, one of those beads comes off on the, on the, the, the podcast string or on the, I want to be a dancer or I want to be a rugby player or I want to go to the business. I want to get an MBA or I want to get PhD or I want to get a college degree. I want to be, get a job. I want to do whatever. Every time that I don't get a job, because you're going to get rejected from more interviews

• 1:29:34Chris Williamson?

  than you're going to be accepted because you're only ever going to be accepted once.

• 1:29:37Greg McKeown?

  Um, right.

• 1:29:38Chris Williamson?

  Every time that you get rejected, okay, cool. So what did I learn from this? What a privilege it is. How fortunate am I to be able to now be even better than that? And it removes the emotional attachment that we have to the desire to always be correct and moving forward and looking cool and not blundering and falling over. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Everybody's blundering and falling over. Blundering and falling over is it's built into the source code of what you're going to do. In fact, you're probably going to blunder and fall over far more than you're going to succeed. And every single time that that happens, you can be grateful for it. You can be thankful for the fact that you now get to come back and perhaps be a little bit better at avoiding

• 1:30:24Chris Williamson?

  that blunder. When I was reading that courage to be rubbish section, it reminded me of a tweet, a couple of tweets, actually, that I saw this year. And this one's from Thiago Forte. And he says, a paradoxical thing about people who consistently choose the most high leverage activity is that efforts have a rough edged, half-assed quality. Because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity. And someone replied to it and said, perfectionism is a nice way to hide from shipping at a pace necessary to find what works.

• 1:31:02Greg McKeown?

  Well, that's exactly it, right? The co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman.

• 1:31:11Greg McKeown?

  First of all, he says, if you aren't embarrassed by the first product you ship, then you waited too long.

• 1:31:20Greg McKeown?

  And, and he applies that not just in sort of startup strategy, but he hired a new chief of staff, Ben, and he said to Ben, I'm comfortable with a 10 to 15% foot fault rate.

• 1:31:38Greg McKeown?

  If it allows us to move fast, I accept that you will make decisions plenty of times that wouldn't be what I would do in that situation, but I want us to be moving fast. That's the, that's the value. And, and Ben is on record saying, well, that just freed me, just liberated me to go forward, to not be so hesitant, not waiting all the time. And, and that's really what, one of the things that people, that I think keeps people back from doing what's most essential in their lives, doing the things that really matter to them, that they feel actually are pulled towards, is that they have another counterweight pulling them back, which says, yeah, but don't do anything stupid and don't do anything that, that would, that could make you uncomfortable, or don't do anything

• 1:32:22Greg McKeown?

  that could be a failure along the way. And so then they just don't do anything. They don't go anywhere. And, and, and that's, I think is a far bigger risk. I mean, we were talking about progress, progress over perfectionism every day of the week.

• 1:32:37Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Greg, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Effortless is out on?

• 1:32:44Greg McKeown?

  April 27th.

• 1:32:46Chris Williamson?

  April 27th. The link to either preorder or purchase right now will be in the show notes below. Where should people go? You've got so much stuff going on at the moment. Where's best for people to keep up to date with everything?

• 1:32:58Greg McKeown?

  I think if they sign up for the newsletter, they're definitely not losing anything. We have a one minute Wednesday. You can sign up at gregmckeown.com, G R E G M C K E O W N dot com. Also, essentialism.com. That's where the whole academy is getting launched. There's a 21 day challenge that just tries to make it really micro bite sized masterclasses each day, but it's just like little vignettes to help people make progress on what really matters most to them. And there's, there's a whole series of classes coming there that people can take and be part of. I think I would, I think I would go with those.

• 1:33:35Chris Williamson?

  Greg McKeown, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:33:39Greg McKeown?

  Thanks, Chris.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:33:55Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  And Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:34:05Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:34:15Speaker 03

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:34:16Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.