#719: Walk & Talk with Greg McKeown — How to Find Your Purpose and Master Essentialism in 2024

Brought to you by AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, Helix Sleep https://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses, and Momentous https://livemomentous.com/tim high-quality supplements. Greg McKeown (@GregoryMcKeown https://twitter.com/GregoryMcKeown) is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Greg-McKeown-ebook/dp/B00G1J1D28/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most https://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Make-Easier-What-Matters/dp/0593135644/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Together they have sold more than two million copies in 37 languages. He is also a speaker, host of The Greg McKeown Podcast https://gregmckeown.com/podcast/ and founder of The Essentialism Academy https://essentialism.com/ with students from 96 countries. More than 175,000 people have signed up to his 1-Minute Wednesday https://gregmckeown.com/ newsletter. He is currently doing a doctorate at The University of Cambridge, and he is easily one of my favorite thinkers on all things related to effectiveness, efficiency, and—at the end of the day—quality of life. Greg is originally from London, England, and he and his wife Anna are parents to four children. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep http://helixsleep.com/tim! Helix was selected as the best overall mattress of 2022 by GQ magazine, Wired, and Apartment Therapy. With Helix http://helixsleep.com/tim, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete http://helixsleep.com/tim—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering 20% off all mattress orders plus two free pillows at HelixSleep.com/Tim http://helixsleep.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health. * This episode is also brought to you by Momentous http://livemomentous.com/Tim high-quality supplements! Momentous offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, and I’ve been testing their products for months now. I’ve been using their magnesium threonate https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products, apigenin https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products, and L-theanine https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products daily, all of which have helped me improve the onset, quality, and duration of my sleep. I’ve also been using Momentous creatine https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products, and while it certainly helps physical performance, including poundage or wattage in sports, I use it primarily for mental performance (short-term memory, etc.). Their products are third-party tested (Informed-Sport and/or NSF certified), so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. If you want to try Momentous for yourself, you can use code Tim for 20% off your one-time purchase at LiveMomentous.com/Tim http://livemomentous.com/Tim. And not to worry, my non-US friends, Momentous ships internationally and has you covered. * [00:00] Start [10:02] How 2023 informed 2024’s highest priorities. [16:09] Greg’s system for effortless execution of daily tasks. [27:42] Directional documents, shameless repentance, and shifting success. [36:53] Poetic mysticism and matchmaking introspection. [41:51] What compass guides you toward purpose? [45:10] The truth as a path to your best possible future. [50:34] Maslow’s forgotten pinnacle of self-transcendence. [54:28] Why self-actualization is an insufficient foundation for meaningful relationships. [1:03:09] Recommended reading for relationship cultivation. [1:07:43] A true, bittersweet tale of progressively deepening love. [1:13:28] The benefits of treating social media as an option rather than an obligation. [1:16:12] AI: good servant, poor master. [1:17:23] Blocking time for a top priority. [1:27:55] “It’s the tools, stupid.” [1:30:56] Embracing the constraints that stack the decks in your favor. [1:35:41] How to sign up for Greg’s free “Less, But Better” 30-day email program https://gregmckeown.com/. [1:37:09] Employing the George Costanza opposite life hack. [1:40:53] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases.

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible, using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi-mineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So, part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That's just, like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe.

• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the market. Label does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.

• 2:52Tim Ferriss?

  Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do and did last night, on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions and on and on. They have you covered. So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix Sleep Quiz at helixsleep.com/tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes. Personally, for the last few years, I have been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress.

• 3:37Tim Ferriss?

  I also have one of those in the guest bedroom, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. They frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. Helix mattresses are American-made and come with a 10- or 15-year warranty, depending on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door, free of charge. And there's no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home. That's why they offer a 100-night risk-free trial. If you decide it's not the best fit, you're welcome to return it for a full refund. Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both GQ and Wired magazines. And now Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise to bring you a truly elevated sleep experience. Their newest

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  Collection of mattresses called Helix Elite includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness preferences. So you can get exactly what your body needs. Each Helix Elite mattress comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure relief and thousands of extra micro coils for best in class support and durability. Every Helix Elite mattress also comes with a 15 year manufacturer's warranty and the same 100 night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. And you, my dear listeners, can get 20% off of all mattress orders plus two free pillows. So go to helixsleep.com/tim to learn more. That's helixsleep, H E L I X, helixsleep.com/tim.

• 5:02Tim Ferriss?

  This is their best offer to date and it will not last long. So take a look. With Helix, better sleep starts now.

• 5:13Tim Ferriss?

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

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  No, I would see an appropriate time.

• 5:23Speaker 01

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

• 5:35Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Tease that out. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And this episode, I'm very excited to announce, is an experimental format. As per usual, I will be deconstructing in some fashion world-class performers to tease out the habits, routines, frameworks, et cetera, that you can use in your own lives. And my guest today is a guest who is very relevant for me personally right now, Greg McKeown. And he is relevant because he is easily one of my favorite thinkers on all things related to effectiveness, efficiency, and, at the end of the day, quality of life and keeping your priority or priorities.

• 6:21Tim Ferriss?

  Top of mind so that you are laser focused to do what really matters, the high leverage things, which are sometimes the small things done with relentless focus that deliver incredibly, incredibly important outcomes. So, let's get to it. This is a walk and talk with Greg McKeown. And overall, it is about how to find your purpose and master essentialism in 2024, or in the new year, if you're listening to this later. And the walk and talk format is something I wanted to experiment with because, let's face it, most of us sit too much. And if we consider sitting, the new smoking on some level with its health implications, and I want to give credit to Kelly Starrett, who is also a multiple time podcast guest for, I believe,

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  coining that expression, we should get out and walk more. Part of what makes us human, part of what enabled our brains to become these incredible machines they have become, which are powered on less electricity than a light bulb, by the way, is walking. The fact that we perambulate, the fact that we walk historically much of the day. And I wanted to also contend with some back issues that I have that are exacerbated by extended sitting. And many different health issues are correlated to extended sitting. So, this is a direct oppositional approach to perhaps the YouTube build TV show approach, which is this is audio

• 7:45Tim Ferriss?

  only. And when I'm recording this, I am out walking. I have a high fidelity headset on, and Greg is doing the same. We are doing something good for our bodies while we are having a fun and productive conversation. And my suggestion to everyone listening is, if you can, do a walk and listen. There is no reason for you to be parked in front of a laptop, watching a video, contributing to your own physical demise, hour by hour, if you can be out walking around, listening to this, also doing something good for your body, and therefore for your entire life. So, get out, try a walk and listen while

• 8:28Tim Ferriss?

  we walk and talk. You can be part of the conversation. And that's enough preamble on the format. But I really feel strongly that this is something I'm going to do more of. I loved doing it. And my hope is that you will join us in walking more. It is the cure all for so many things. Greg McKeown, who is he? You can find him on Twitter at Gregory McKeown, spelled M C K E O W N. Greg is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, mega bestsellers. Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, which is a book I've read many times. And then I've reread my Kindle highlights, probably 15, 20 times.

• 9:08Tim Ferriss?

  And his second book, Effortless, subtitle, Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. Together, they've sold more than 2 million copies in 37 languages. He's also a speaker, host of the Greg McKeown Podcast, and founder of the Essentialism Academy with students from 96 countries. More than 175,000 people have also signed up to his One Minute Wednesday newsletter. He is currently doing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and he is, as I mentioned, easily one of my favorite thinkers on many, many, many, many, many different areas. And he is intensely practical. Originally from London, England, Greg and his wife Anna are parents to four children. You can find everything Greg at GregMcKeown.com.

• 9:51Tim Ferriss?

  And without further ado, please enjoy, hopefully while you are in motion, this wide-ranging conversation with Greg McKeown. Happy New Year.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  Happy New Year to you. Are you feeling good about the new year? How are you feeling about this year?

• 10:08Tim Ferriss?

  I'm feeling great about the new year. I'm feeling really outstanding about the new year, actually. My, my realization on New Year's Eve, as I was doing an inventory, was that despite my predilection to self-flagellate and always look for the black lining on the beautiful cloud, that

• 10:32Tim Ferriss?

  2023 was a great year. I did a lot of things right. I did a lot of things that were uncomfortable and overall feel really good about it. So my overall feeling is do more of that, keep going, which is unusual as a realization or maybe just a framing for New Year's Eve. So I feel really good about 2024. And of course, the hacks that kicked this whole experimental walk and talk podcast off, people have no context. In case we use this, I am walking around with multiple quarms of audio recording attached to my head and my hips. And I am really appreciating the combination of

• 11:13Tim Ferriss?

  locomotion and conversation. And you had sent me a text, which was very simple, at least at face value, which is, what is your top goal of 2024? And I thought to myself, that's a damn good question. And I would like to hear your answer, at least explore it with you. And here we are. So how are you feeling about 2024?

• 11:35Speaker 03

  The way I've been thinking about it myself is just what is the number one highest priority for the year? So normally, I'm not even thinking about it necessarily like a goal, because that itself can be constraining.

• 11:51Tim Ferriss?

  Could you say that wording one more time, just so I make sure it sticks in?

• 11:54Speaker 03

  What is the number one highest priority for the year? That's not very different than where I worded it when I texted you, but it just means a little different than just, okay, well, you've got all these existing goals. What's the next book? How do you get the podcast to the next level? Like, it's saying, look, bigger picture than that. Step back, look at your whole life from the broadest possible perspective and get connected to that. Like, something like, okay, what do you understand the purpose of life to be? And therefore, what is missing right now? You know, if you got to the end of your life and you didn't do something differently this year, what might you regret?

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Just a couple of months ago, I dropped off my daughter Eve, who you and I have talked about before. She was the one that got really sick and we dropped her off. So she is healthy again. She is well again. She's really done well and I was dropping her off for a mission. So she's gone to Brazil for a year and a half. And I thought dropping off would just be like this really happy thing because I felt happy about it and she did and the whole family did. It's just this great thing and she's going to Manaus, which is in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest, which she also loves.

• 13:09Tim Ferriss?

  I know where that is.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  It's all good. I mean, she's learning Portuguese, but she just like everything was working good about it. But about 10 minutes before I drop her off, I just have this awful feeling, just not, not like, oh, this is bad, this is wrong, but I suddenly just feel grief and, and strong emotions and I can see, uh, I can sort of see her whole life to this moment flashing before my eyes. And I have, I don't know, something, the language I've given to the experience was something like a micro essentialist judgment day or something like that.

• 13:47Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. What does that mean?

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Well, it means like, did you miss it? Did you miss her life? Were you there for it?

• 13:56Tim Ferriss?

  Like a ghost of Christmas past type of.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:59Tim Ferriss?

  Essentialism review.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Yes, just like a Christmas Carol type experience in a micro version of it because it's done, you know, like there's of course, of course, there's a role to be played in her life, you know, forever, but that phase is done. And so like, whatever I feel in this moment, that's it. I, the moment has gone and I'm just now reflecting on it. And in that moment, I did sort of come to this awakening of like, no, I, I was, I was there for it more than I wasn't. We traveled together, we did things together. We've made all these memories, our relationship connect and safe, safely attached. But I also learned in that moment, like my goodness, this life is so pathetic, short. And I learned also in that moment, it's not divided between.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  One X, two X, three X activities, you know, on an important scale, it's like one X, ten X, a thousand X. And this was an a thousand X relationship. And did I live it like that was reality? That is reality, but did I understand that in the moment? I mean, that's fairly dramatic way to answer your question, but it's like, that's the perspective that I was reflecting on as I was thinking about. Okay, therefore, if all of those perspectives are the true perspectives that approximates reality, how do I think about where to put my time and energy for 2024? When there's so many good things you could be doing and so many things that will act upon me,

• 15:26Speaker 03

  good things that will act upon me that would consume the whole year easily. Uh, you know, what, what's, what's missing? What do I need to do differently? And, and an answer did come to me, but that's some of how I've been thinking about it.

• 15:40Tim Ferriss?

  So it sounds like, if I'm hearing you correctly, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that the way you're thinking about 2024 was informed by this realization slash reinforcement that as we think about different priorities, different relationships, they're not incrementally different, right? They are, in many cases, sort of exponentially different, where you have like a one X, as you put it, I think, kind of one X or two X versus like a hundred X, thousand X, right? In terms of importance, so you have that farewell with your daughter, sending her off to the house. I've always wanted to visit, but that's a separate story. So where do you go from there, right? Because people have these realizations, maybe they go, I have no idea.

• 16:22Tim Ferriss?

  They go on a rafting trip with friends and they think to themselves, oh my God, this was so nourishing. I deepened my relationships with three of my most cherished friends and I need to do more of this. But then it like sand through the fingers, slips away as they re-enter their daily lives. And that's kind of it. Things get busy, things get crowded out. So what do you do? Or what did you do or what are you doing after you have that realization?

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Let me answer this in a conceptual way first, right? Like. Well, I have all sorts of limitations that make focus challenging, that make prioritization challenging, that that make relationships challenging. And all of us have our own mix of, literally, our DNA can predispose us to various weaknesses. And so, the key for me seems to have been, I have to build, I mean, the word gets overused, like, build a system that's equal to that challenge. And so, I have like a paper plan that I built, designed myself and keep adapting all the time. As soon as I learn, oh, that's kind of a weakness for me, I build something in. And oh, that, that's a tendency where I make

• 17:31Speaker 03

  trade-offs that not pleased with later, I build something in so that it acts on me. And this really is the whole idea of effortless, right? Like effortless execution is, I don't want to trust my weaknesses. I want to build a system that means my weaknesses become something like irrelevant. That's what I'm trying to build. So, one of those things, like, I mean, literally, physically, my, I take it with me everywhere. My personalized plan, I take everywhere, literally everywhere I go, I will have it. And so, in it, I have the key relationships of my life, right? And that, for me, is very simple. That's

• 18:12Speaker 03

  my wife, Anna, that's our four children. They are the thousand X's in my life. And then there is a select group of friends. And then there's a much broader group of people that I also am building relationships and making sure I'm checking in on that really matter to me. If I fail in those relationships, then probably, everything's probably okay. But, but if I fail in my relationship with the thousand X's, it's like, no, nothing's okay. You're like, with my wife, Anna, like, let me use that as an example. If, I mean, it's an old saying, but it's like, if things are bad in your marriage, it doesn't matter how good anything else is, nothing's good. And if everything's good in your marriage, like it doesn't matter how bad everything else is,

• 18:54Speaker 03

  everything is, everything is good. It's like, this is so disproportionately important. And so, I don't think I can separate my answer to your question without saying, yeah, it's actually the establishment building of this family that means there is a permanent system in place to help me remember what matters and who matters.

• 19:16Tim Ferriss?

  When do you revisit that? In other words, if you're carrying this with you everywhere, and it seems like, and again, I'll just, I'll add in my thoughts and then you can refine as we go. But it seems like unlike a lot of folks, and this would include me, who probably start with, what should I do? Right? What should my priorities be? Seems like you are starting with KU. And if you have this constant reminder, which acts as a system, I'm wondering how you use that system, right? Because I think about my phone, I have 1,379,000, making that up, notes on my phone. And I'm like, oh, I, this is so important. I'm definitely going to come back and read this. And 99% of the time, I never look at it again. So how do you use this list of people?

• 20:00Speaker 03

  The way that my binder works, like the first section is all about direction, sort of, let's say essential intent for my whole life, like what really, really matters. It's as succinct as possible. It's a few pages in total. That's always the place to begin, right? Because I want to come back and get centered in what I have come to learn is closest approximation to the purpose of it all. And I literally have to come back to it, right? Like you've heard the metaphor before, but you know, the idea of a flight is off track 90% of the time, like an airplane literally only gets to where it's supposed to get to at the time it's supposed to get there,

• 20:40Speaker 03

  because it readjusts constantly along the way. And, and I feel like that myself. So like, for example, I don't think that I'm better at being an essentialist than anybody else. I think if there's any advantage I've had in that journey, it's that I just really admit that. I'm a non-essentialist easily. And so it's this idea like there's only two kinds of people in the world. There are people who are lost and there are people who know they are lost. It's like, I know how easy it is for me to get lost. Never heard that. That's good. I'm looking that definitely I will look properly at those few pages once a week. Right? Like every Sunday morning, I will look through that. I will read through it. I'll underline things. That's in your calendar? Yes. Sunday morning? That's right.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  And but but then at other times through the week, if I feel that sensation, I know people feel this. You know, that just sort of feels a bit crazy. It's feeling just a bit frenetic and frantic like, what? I just texted Anna yesterday like, man, in the morning, I'm like, man, I just feel so lost. And I don't mean for the last six months. I mean, for the last half hour. What is, I don't, I feel so lost right now. Okay, that's right. That's the signal. Go back, get centered, take a moment. What really is the intent? What matters in your life? Okay, now from that, you know, and then you start designing your day. And I have some thoughts specifically about that. But, you know, you're asking the the year process. I guess you're asking my system. So that's once a week. Okay, so for per day, let's get to that.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  So I've come to call this the one, two, three method. I do not do it every day. Man, I wish I was doing it every day. But I do it more often than I don't do it. And it's simply this, and it has to be written down for me in paper and pen, like not in technology, free of technology. And I try now more often than not to have this power half an hour, right? Like where I don't go to text and email or apps or my phone for the first 30 minutes. And I do that. I haven't been doing great at that recently, but I still do that more often than I don't. And so in that, then instead of doing that, I'm in my planner and I'm literally writing,

• 22:53Speaker 03

  okay, what's the essential for today? What's the one most essential today? Most important person, most important action for that person. Number two is I write two things that are essential but urgent. That's like, you know, it could be all sorts of things, any, you know, whatever's got a deadline on it. Finish this writing assignment by this deadline. It could be finish these financial things for, you know, retirement documentation stuff. But I don't really want to get to, but I know it's important and there's a deadline. And then the third thing is three things that are. Maintenance items, right? So that's just, I mean, that's anything that if I don't do it, it's not important today, but if I don't do it, it will make life a lot harder later. It's like an effortless strategy. And so that's the one, two, three method, right?

• 23:36Speaker 03

  One essential, two things that essential and urgent, three maintenance items.

• 23:41Tim Ferriss?

  Would you mind, Greg, giving me just some concrete examples so we can visualize what this looks like? They don't have to be real. I mean, they could be hypothetical, but just to give an example of what a one, two, three might look like.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  I'll just sort of talk through, as I talked through yesterday. So yesterday I was in California, in LA, for an event. I was doing a keynote. I had my eldest daughter Grace with me. So the, when I texted and they're like, oh, man, I'm just kind of feeling a bit lost. After I expressed that, I was like, okay, get focused. What is the essential for today? The number one thing? Oh, it's grace is here. It's my relationship with grace. I need to make sure that we connect today, that we're not just with each other all day. Like, I tried to travel with one of my children about 80% of the time for keynotes. And so that's built into the system, but you still have to be present and connected. And so that was the priority.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  The two things that are essential and urgent, right? Like, one of them, the keynote, right? That's coming up. And I don't really know how to phone it in on a keynote, and I certainly fear phoning it in because it's like such an opportunity missed. The thing is coming, like that, that moment will arrive and you're going to be on stage. And it was for, it's 500 people. It's a non-trivial event and all the senior leaders of the organization. And that was one of the key urgent tasks. And then the next urgent task was to do with some family members who are, I won't get into the precise details of it, but there's some health challenges involved. So I've sort of taken it upon myself to say, okay, how could I maybe?

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Kind of be a little bit of a coach, which is not really the natural relationship I have with them. But I'm risking it because I think it really matters and they seem to have responded really positively. And so I wanted to keep that going. That would be the next thing. And then of course, maintenance items from there. Maintenance items literally included. I was in Florida the couple of days before California. So like literally I have to unpack everything, put everything back in its place. Make sure that that's just in order so that you don't get behind on those things. I needed to respond to a key email about a contract that we've been in negotiation with over the last couple of months. That would be an item of maintenance.

• 25:59Tim Ferriss?

  So when you're talking about the few pages that you would review on Sunday mornings.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:03Tim Ferriss?

  What would be an example of something from those few pages? Because I feel like this would be very helpful for me in the sense that I feel like I am pretty good at staying on task. I'm pretty good at keeping the important things in mind and majoring in the major things. However, there are certainly times when and weeks when I get a little lost and end up doing a lot of minor things. And at the end of the week, couldn't really point to what I've achieved. What might be some examples from those few pages? If you don't mind sharing.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  I have two pages at the beginning that I don't share anywhere, but it's very carefully worded. The highest expression of what I think the fullest manifestation of my life can be. It's not goals. It's beyond that. It's like who you can be, what your most important relationships can look like. And, and it's sacred, right? Like that's how I feel about that. And so that's all the most important centering part of it because literally if you don't get clear on that. Nothing else matters in the system, right?

• 27:17Speaker 03

  If you execute superbly on things that end up not being what your life needed to be about, then it doesn't matter. Efficiently doing what should not be done at all, of course, is like, it's a form of madness, right? Like, it's, you're speedily going the wrong direction. So from that, I've identified, let's say, five or six roles and a goal that goes with each of those roles. And so my worldview includes the idea that, that I'm a child of God, that you're a child of God. So one of the most unbelievable things to me, right? One of the benefits of my church membership is that every person who wants one, is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, can have a specific blessing

• 28:02Speaker 03

  that somebody gives you personally to you, that nobody else ever gets to read. And it's like, we literally think about it, not metaphorically, like, it's like literal scripture for you. And no two are the same. I've only ever read mine, Anna's, the children's, and my grandfather who died, and grandmother who died, because you can read your ancestors once they've passed away. And my grandfather gave it to me, he was a patriarch. Every thousand people makes up what's called a stake, and every stake has a stake patriarch. And the only thing they do is give these patriarchal blessings. They're the only blessings that are recorded. And this is like, whenever I think about what it is, I'm just like, my goodness, how

• 28:44Speaker 03

  would you go about thinking about life without this document? Because this is like precise and specific revelatory insight into who you are, who you were before you came, who you are here, what's possible, what relationships are going to matter, what weaknesses to think about. And it's like, this is the centering document. So a version of this, when Stephen Covey's talking about, hey, we need to create a mission stake for your life and company and so on, he's describing, let's say, something like a A watered down version of what he's actually using every day.

• 29:18Tim Ferriss?

  I see, I see, I see. So this was adapted sort of a secular version of the blessing effectively.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if you want the kind of language he used for this, so we think of life after this as as having not heaven and hell, but like a series of heavens, let's say, or something like a so different kingdoms, a celestial kingdom, a terrestrial, celestial, like described sun, moon and stars. And so he said to me once, he said, look, I think about my work professionally as a terrestrial mission. It's like I'm trying to bring a certain amount of light, like the light of the moon, but there's this whole other light that's way brighter.

• 29:54Tim Ferriss?

  How long is your blessing? Is it two pages long?

• 29:57Speaker 03

  It's like two to three pages.

• 29:59Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, wow. Okay. So it really gets, really covers a lot.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Yes, and it's a different range. I mean, some peoples could be as short as half a page, but I remember meeting somebody that had one that was eight or nine pages. And it really doesn't matter because what it is, is a portal. What I just described, what a portal, all reading, every book is potentially a portal, right? It takes you there in time and place. And that's what makes, you know, fiction especially so powerful. You suddenly experience this whole other world. But I really think that that's a way of thinking about scripture that isn't obvious to most people, even people that sometimes are like reading scripture all the time. It's not words. It just opens up the possibility. So like I've read, let's say I've read my patriarchal blessing, like, I don't know, like, say, let's say it's 500

• 30:45Speaker 03

  times or something. It's probably more, but two weeks ago, when I read it, suddenly a phrase, a way that it's phrased, suddenly opened up to me. And I was like, oh my goodness, I bet that means that. And it's like, it doesn't matter. The words are just the vehicle. And it's as soon as I'm ready to like, understand something more, that suddenly the particular word is open. However, that sounds, I don't know how it comes across. Nobody else has to believe or think or see it the way I do. But like, it's a fact. That is an experiential fact that that is what happens. Over these years, I got it when I was 13. So whatever, I've had it for, you know, more than 30 years. And even now, I'm like, oh, that's what it means. And this is what I need to do differently in my life. Oh, that's where my weakness lies. And that's how I need to improve.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  And, and so, this is a very century tool to guide all of life. And it's kind of thing that I think, yeah, that's difference between that and trying to read 200 self-help books were all in some century good, taking the same set of potentially terrestrial ideas. It's like, this document to me helps, it's like, better than me. It's better than my book. I, I, I'm trying to figure out a higher set of thinking that's one me and, you know, it's self-transcendent, rather than about self-actualization. It's not me setting a goal for me and I'm going to achieve it. It's, oh, man, I'm, I'm going in the wrong direction. This is what I'm supposed to do. And the whole

• 32:13Speaker 03

  idea, for example, of the biblical term repent, it was translated from a Greek word that doesn't really mean what people think of when they hear the word repent. What it means, it comes from Metanoia, it means see life, yourself, life, God, everything through new eyes. And it's that idea of new eyes and new breath and seeing that it's that newness of sight, that is what the goal is, right? And so the repentance isn't about shame, it's about let go of the old thinking, so that there's something new and better and this higher, we've talked about before, the idea of light and it's lighter and lighter and lighter till, you know, eventually you some perfect day

• 32:55Speaker 03

  in the future. But it's like more light produces more light. And as long as we're following that light, it gives us more and more. And bringing this now back to you for a second, it's like, I, I see you doing this in your life. I see it. You know when it's happening because You feel more light and you know when it's not happening, just like I do because I'm like, yeah, I feel myself that I'm being pulled into the not away from the good into what I want. I have a goal now when I'm doing keynotes. It's probably not the most ideal goal, but I like, I really wanted to work out how to get standing ovations. It hadn't been my journey. It hadn't been my story. I'd get great feedback, really well, but not standing ovations. And I'm like, man, what are you doing? And so like, I feel like I actually know how to do that now. And so that

• 33:38Speaker 03

  just happens. And then the event yesterday was really distinctly different because they'd had everyone read the book ahead of time. And so for the first time, it never happened before. I walk out on the stage and they gave a standing ovation at the beginning. And I've seen that happen to others, but it never happened to me before ever. And I thought, you know, like in that moment, I gave it a really, just the whole conversation was enriching and good. And like I was doing the right thing and it made difference to people and all of that. But imagine if you're just a living in that, breathing that in every day. You could only track your way so easily. And there's a risk of that, right? There's a risk of that for me. There's a risk of that for you. There's a risk of that for anyone in a certain consumed with, what we call, I could

• 34:21Speaker 03

  call it bro culture. That's what I would call it. Where we're just consumed with a certain set of ideas and a certain set of what winning looks like.

• 34:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, just consumed by group think, right? Or sort of group trend, right? Or whatever the success de jour happens to be. Maybe that's going viral on TikTok, whatever the hell the shifting sands of supposed favor and adulation appear to be, right?

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Well, and you just named it, right? Like the shifting sands, like in my lifetime, like in the last, I don't know, is it as short as five years? In the last 10 years, I feel like what success means has changed in some ways and not in a good way, like in a shallower way. And in, and in

• 35:03Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you mean in general, in the world?

• 35:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. I look at it and I go, I go, yeah, I don't, I don't even want these things that are being, being talked about, the influences, you know, influences I'd never even heard of. They didn't, they weren't influences eight years ago. And now they're like, this is what to do in life and this is how to be. And I'm like, this just feels like a bad 1980s motivational speaker or something like that, right? And I'm like, I think I could get really lost if I pursued all of this shifting sands, as you describe it.

• 35:36Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentous offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using Momentous Mag 3-8, L-theanine, and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class

• 36:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 36:53Tim Ferriss?

  Let me come back to the blessing and the two pages, if you don't mind, because I'm really grateful that you brought this up. And it resonates very deeply for me because I actually use different types of poetry for this, but the pages change, which has some upside, I would imagine, but also some downsides. But if you're looking at, say, as I might, the poetry of Hafiz or other, they're generally mystics. They don't need to be from the Islamic traditions. They could be from any tradition, but they resonate a lot with my lived and felt experience for

• 37:33Tim Ferriss?

  multitude of reasons. So, I will flip to a random page, and that is the page, right? That is the page that I use as the mirror, so to speak, or the lens through which I look at my life or whatever I'm contemplating, the goals, the troubles, whatever it might be. And it's incredibly helpful as a way to...

• 37:53Tim Ferriss?

  Grease the skids to get unstuck, right? Because if you're in a pattern of thinking that has not solved whatever puzzle you're trying to solve, then oftentimes more thinking of the same kind is not going to do a hell of a lot. So having this type of jolt of novelty slash unexpected, in my case, words is very helpful. But I do see the benefit of something more comprehensive and more consistent. So maybe the life mission is one approach, I will say, and this isn't something I've talked about, that I've been single, as you may or may not know, for the last year plus, maybe a year and three months, something like that. And I wrote down what I was looking for.

• 38:36Tim Ferriss?

  I also asked my ex, who I'm still very close with, if she could write down what she thinks I need so that I could provide it to, say, a potential matchmaker or people who might want to help. And what I found was that description of what I need certainly applies to a partner, but applies to a lot more than a partner. So I found myself reading that quite consistently. And it applies to much more than, I mean, just isn't an appropriate word, but just the partner piece. It applies to so many other aspects. So indirectly by accident on some level, I've ended up also with some document that I read on a regular basis.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  One of the, not just popular now, but popular forever questions is, okay, you know, like, how do I meet the right person? You know, what would I want in that person? And some questions you lose just by trying to answer them.

• 39:34Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Yeah. Please say more.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Because it's the wrong question. Like, it's framed wrong words. And so you can get, you know, people can spend years and years on a question like that. So let's say a better question is, maybe not surprising, it's like, how can I be the right person? Who do I need to be? And then that means that at some point you attract people like that to you. And so the your probability of meeting somebody that actually is the right person for you increases. But that seems like what's happened to you, like you say, almost without design. But it's like, oh, actually, that list looks a lot like what I need to be and how I need to orient myself in the world.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  So what the patriarchal blessing is to me is the highest possible ideal that I can have. And so I think that that's the question for everybody. It's like, given all the tools that we have, all the insights we've ever heard, all the best and highest wisdom that we have come across thus far. What's that highest ideal and to focus on it and to have mechanisms where you come back to that more often than not, more days than you don't, so that that becomes the guiding force of your life.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  And and so I think that there probably is some process right now where you say, let's take best the poetry or the best this list. And I'm going to try and write down like a, these are the things that it's not what do I want? It's what is the highest truth I've ever come across, even if it's really inconvenient for me? What's the closest thing I can articulate as to the purpose of my life? And I do think that really without doing that, when we don't do that, I don't know, man. I I just don't even know what I'm doing when I don't do that. It's like, I can respond to a lot of emails, I can travel a lot, I can, I mean, when I look back at 2023, I think,

• 41:39Speaker 03

  and I did a lot of things and I just need to be really grateful for all those things. But sometimes I'm like, did you do what really matters the most in the whole year? Did you? And I I don't want that to be true for 2024.

• 41:51Tim Ferriss?

  What comes to mind for me also, actually, I haven't thought about this in a while, but it was from a conversation I had on the podcast with General Stanley McChrystal. And I'm going to paraphrase here, but he said something along the lines, and I've heard this elsewhere since, but the purpose of life is to find the purpose of life, something along those lines. And the reason that that came to mind is I would imagine, I'm just visualizing myself here, that if you have something like the patriarchal blessing, or four or five pieces of poetry, so Wild Geese by Mary Oliver would probably be in my shortlist as an example. If you have a handful of things that you have decided,

• 42:31Tim Ferriss?

  even for a year, even for just say, the next year, are going to be effectively your personal mission statement, something like that.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  Directional documents.

• 42:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, your directional documents. Just having that directional document, I would imagine gives you a certain peace of mind or ability to exhale that makes it less likely that you're going to chase as many shiny objects and get as easily distracted as you would otherwise. Does that make sense? Like, just the act of gathering that and having that, I see having an impact on your state and also your behavior, above and beyond what it does when you check it each week. Does that make any sense?

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, of course. Yeah, because

• 43:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's not like you're lost in the woods. Do you have a compass or not? Like, even if you haven't figured out how to get to where you're going, like, do you have a compass or not? And if you have a compass, you're going to feel a hell of a lot better, even if you don't use it.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  Well, so like, literally, I guess this is actually true, that if you, there's like a piece of research about this, that people were given the task to walk in a straight line. And they, they found that if they were in a wilderness where there was no point that they could look to. They literally walked in circles. They didn't know they were doing that. And so the only way to actually go forward is to pick something on the horizon. There's the mountain. There's a thing. I'm going to that. And then you could walk in a straight line. And so that's so strange because that means that there's nothing inside of us that knows exactly where to go physically. I mean, that's true for me when I'm driving, I'll tell you that. And that's absolutely sure. So I think that it's beyond a goal.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  It's what's the direction? What's it all about? I'm going to fix on that for a while and then I'm going to strive to live that. We're going to see how that goes and whether that reveals another higher insight. You know, so if Wild Geese is your poem of today, maybe in five years, there's a new poem that you go, oh, that's a higher truth for me. I'm going to hold on to that and walk towards that and see how it goes. So. So, yeah, I mean, this could all sound ethereal to people, right? When they say, oh, yeah, but I just got to get on with the actions of today. But man, the risk of skipping this part of the process is you just go in circles for years and years. There's a big difference. I read this a while ago.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  There's a big difference between 20 years of experience and the same year lived 20 times. That you don't learn the lessons because you're just going in circles and you're just rushing, rushing and and actually not getting closer to what the purpose of life really is.

• 45:10Tim Ferriss?

  I have a question for you, Greg, which is self-serving, as a lot of my questions are, I suppose, but. You know, the personal is universal, right? That's my, that's my, that's my, that's my pitch. So. I imagine you've been exposed to thousands upon thousands of people, not just through essentialism and your other books, but also through the church and your various communities. And what I'm very curious to know is when you think about the people who come to mind as secular, but who are good at.

• 45:48Tim Ferriss?

  In some fashion, doing what you're describing. It could be, what do they have in common as the question? Or it could just be, if you think of one or two of these people, how do they approach this?

• 45:59Speaker 03

  The word that comes to mind, a word that might sound, I don't know, almost trivial because it's like, oh yeah, we will, we know that word. But it's like, it's truth. It's like willingness to speak the truth. Meaning not that they or any of us have some monopoly on the truth. Obviously, we don't. Obviously, truth is beyond us and our expression needs to be as close to what we understand the truth to be as possible. Otherwise, it can't be corrected. We can't engage in proper communication with other people. I have a few thoughts about this. One, I think that telling the truth is like whatever the consequence is for telling the truth in the immediate moment.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  It is the path to your best possible future. That speaking the truth and listening to other people like, as soon as you start speaking the truth, you start having truthful conversations with people. And if you can do that in what I would describe as the spirit of truth, which is different than just saying what you think is true. I think this. And then it's like you, you're trying to say the truth, but in a spirit of truth. It's like, am I doing this in the right spirit? Am I just doing this to win the conversation? It's like, there's a, why you're doing it?

• 47:13Tim Ferriss?

  Could you, I understand winning the conversation as a description, but yeah, what would the antonym of that be? In other words, saying it in the spirit of truth, what does that look like? Or feel like?

• 47:24Speaker 03

  It means that the intent of the conversation is to discover together what is really true. Not to make your point to win and so on, right? Like, so the intent of the conversation changes. And so let's describe the absolute ideal of this. The ideal of this is I am trying to speak the truth by the spirit of truth. That is, that is, as soon as I've spoken it, I'm open to being wrong. And I'm open to not just being wrong, but I'm open to learning because like, then you say something back to me and you go, well, this is, well, this is how I see this. And, and, and hopefully me being true makes it easier for the person I'm talking to to be truthful. And so then they share something and I go, oh my goodness, I have not thought about it that way. Oh, that makes me think of this.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  And, and so it's, you are trying to say what you think is true. But now let's see if we can expand.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  The parameters of truth that we together can have previously, like there's more truth is going to come out in this conversation. I think that's what the spirit of truth looks like. And the ideal, of course, is that when the other person speaks, now I want to make this safe so they can speak the truth to me, whatever that is, even if I don't really, you know, want to hear it. So I have to listen with the spirit of truth. And so that becomes the symbiotic communication. And I would say that most people have experienced it occasionally, rarely, but they have experienced it because when you get into this kind of communication, time sort of evaporates and we're not worried so much about ourselves anymore, how we're coming across, who we're not judging them and so on. It's just, you know, it's back to portal communication. It's

• 49:00Speaker 03

  like, and I think what I'm describing now, it's taken me a long time to understand this, to articulate this, but I think this is the one true way of communication. Was Anna Karenina, you know, opened the brilliant line, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way and happy families are happy in one way. There's like a single way of doing it right and a thousand ways of doing it wrong. And I think that's communication too. And I didn't know that until fairly recently, but I think that's right, that every other form, when we're trying to speak to impress, or when we're trying to weasel out of responsibility, right? Like I've done that in my own family. Oh, I, well, no, I meant to do it this way, or I tried that way, you know, defensive. This isn't communication. I don't know what it is. I don't have a word for it,

• 49:44Speaker 03

  but it's, it's anti-communication. I think speaking with truth, the spirit of truth, listening in the spirit of truth, that magic happens then in that you make each other better, you edify each other, you, you understand each other, you can sort of rejoice in it. I mean, I have to assume that you have had moments like, well, many moments of in podcast conversations when they're at their best. It's like, it's beyond any agenda. And so the people that I'm thinking of in my mind have the courage to speak the truth and that's non-trivial. And in my own life, I have to get better at it and having the courage to do it, whatever the consequence seems to be in the moment, and then immediately open myself up to what they're going to say,

• 50:26Speaker 03

  because it'll surely bring a response from somebody else and have the risk it, the real vulnerability.

• 50:34Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything else that that comes to mind if you had to add something else to the answer of the question of what you see in some of the secular examples to seem to really be able to travel the road less traveled in the way that we've been discussing it? Anything else come to mind? It doesn't have to be specific to any type of patriarchal blessing like document or compass per se, but but just someone who is in general good at operating kind of top down, if that makes sense, as opposed to like, here are the thousand things that I could do in a reactive sense. And then let me try to pick a handful of those as my priorities. People who are very good at operating kind of top down.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  It's hard for me to get out of the thread that I'm on about this because because what I'm learning is that, I mean, we've talked already about this idea of sort of the highest aspiration. You're looking towards something bigger than you, self transcending. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, is wrong. It's wrong. Like Maslow said it was wrong. And nobody updated the documentation.

• 51:44Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I can't wait. This is this is new to me. All right.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. So he so before he died, before Maslow died, he wrote a final book in which he updated his model and just no one, I don't know why, I don't know what was going on precisely, but it just got ignored. And some reason that model just is is in every single psychology book that's ever been written and it's everywhere, everywhere. The highest need is self actualization. And he changed that before he died to self transcendence. But that's the highest ideal. And my goodness, that's a big difference.

• 52:16Tim Ferriss?

  Huge. Yeah, they're not even not even similar species.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  No, then really not. They really are different in kind. Self actualization is like what I was briefly describing before as bro culture. And maybe that's not a precise terminology, but it named something for me of of like, yes, just about you, Greg McEwen.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Looking like he wants to look, really like he wants to feel, getting what he likes to get. You know, it's just more for me.

• 52:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, it's an individual achievement.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:47Tim Ferriss?

  Related.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  It's achievement ethic. And the data shows that achievement ethic as a value has increased in society over the last few decades significantly, more than any of the other, let's say, the other virtues. And of course, I think achievement is a virtue, the desire to achieve, but it's, of course, just one of many. And so self-transcendence is kind of what we're talking about, and it certainly leads me down this path of, yes, it is about the relationships. It really, really is about that because if you have a model of self-actualization and then you try to be in a relationship, well, it's not going to work. That's a summary point. It is not going.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  And it's not going to work because that's not what a relationship is. And by the way, like this is big in my mind, and one could argue that the biggest insight that's, that's come about in psychology and in psychotherapy over the last 50 years, is this growing understanding of what a relationship is, what love is, and particularly the idea of safe attachment and the attachment theory. And so at risk of riffing too long on this subject, let me just.

• 54:03Tim Ferriss?

  I got nowhere to go, man.

• 54:07Tim Ferriss?

  And actually, Greg, just, just so we don't lose track of one thing, for people who may not be familiar with the term self-transcendence, if you could just define that at some point, could be brief, just so people have an idea. And self-actualization, I think people probably can infer, but self-transcendence.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Okay, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go for the attachment stuff and I'll bring it back to self-transcendence. Okay, one could ask a question like, you know, what is a relationship? What is love? What makes a healthy, strong, resilient, successful relationship over decades, right? Like, what does, what does that look like? And it's a really non-trivial question, especially when one considers what for something like 50 years, we have been actually taught. And the data now is increasingly showing that that is wrong. So that really matters. But like what we've been taught, first of all, like go back with me to how people thought about raising children.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  In like, you know, let's say nineteen ten, nineteen twenty like this in England, right? The center of the world probably still in terms of economic power and political power and so on. And like, what would the perspective of that relationship? And John Bowby is in an upper class home, in a gentleman's home. He's allowed to come and eat at the family dinner when he turns eleven or twelve just for dessert. Prior to that, he's not even allowed to eat dessert in his own family. And the reason is because there's this idea that, you know, children should be seen and not heard. That if you were to show emotional connection with your child and are overly loving, you're going to raise namby pamby kids and they're not going to be strong in the world.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  And so in that perspective, the reason it's so non trivial is that that defined policy and behavior in the broadest possible sense. So for example, if you, if your child needed to go to hospital, like I mean, like a two year old, three year old, you are going to drop your child off at the door. You will see them, if you see them, you'll see them once a week for one hour. And all of the nursing staff in the hospital will treat them also in this same regimented way, non emotional, non connected way. In fact, Bowby, who is shipped off to boarding school. And so again, he's separated from his, his family of origin and connection. And he's not safely attached to them. He didn't have that language yet, but that was it. I mean, eventually he goes on this journey.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  He, he creates this documentary, something like, I don't remember the name precisely, but it's like a two year old goes to hospital. It might be a three year old goes to hospital, something like this. And he videos the experience of this child and the separation anxiety that they experience and how terrifying it is for them to suddenly be in this hospital unwell, you know, don't know anybody and so on. And they, they create this video, that video was almost banned. He was almost kicked out of the, whatever the agency was that was managing psychological institutions in the UK. He almost got kicked out of it for having this theory that eventually he calls the theory of attachment. But over time, like more than a thousand studies have been done since on his work.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  And over time, his insights have been really strongly applauded and it's grown. And so now we have attachment theory. What that means is that especially in years one to three, whatever level of attachment we have with our mother, with our father, it finds us in really significant ways for the rest of our lives. And if we were insecurely attached, then it also makes it extremely hard for us to have deep and proper relationships with people all through our lives. It's like massively influenced by those early years. Now, that's phase one, but phase two, he died before he ever got to see this. But another set of researchers picked up the baton and started looking into whether

• 57:53Speaker 03

  the attachment theory that everyone thought applied only to sort of these infants could also be true with adult relationships. And the answer to that question is a resounding yes. And that every argument, every fight that adults have with each other, and in intimate relationships especially, let's say, every fight is about the same blasted thing. And what it's about is described by a different professor as like a primal cry or, you know, primal scream or something. I can't remember the term now, but what that primal desire is, do you really see me? Do you really know me? Do you really, are you really going to be there for me if I'm desperate enough?

• 58:38Speaker 03

  And that's what it's always about. That's the whole, that's every other argument is about the same thing. Would you really see me? Can I be securely attached to you? Are you securely attached to me? And so, okay, now contrast that with self-actualization. There's a whole argument of self-actualization. If you think self-actualization is the highest need in life, and then you get into a relationship, you start creating this kind of language in the psychological industry. You start saying, if you need the other person too much, you're codependent. You create language around it. You say, well, that's just enmeshment, you know, struggling with. What you need is to be independently happy, independently secure, independently invulnerable, independently strong. And then together, then you're going to create this great dynamic relationship.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  I can think of people, I don't really want to say it, even though everybody knows these people, global icons, who are in a relationship that looks about as toxic as a relationship can possibly look, in which they describe that they're in, they say, "We're in this bad marriage, we're in this terrible, but we're gonna stick it out because that's what love is." It's like, "You go make yourself happy, and you go make yourself happy, and then we'll be happy together." It's a global manifestation. I feel so bad for the couple and all the people involved by it, but it's like, it's manifestation of a bad paradigm that we have been taught. What you want is exactly the opposite of that. It's like, no, we need effective dependence,

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  where we actually feel deeply connected, deeply seen, emotionally safe, attached. That's what we're really going for. And so, bringing this now back to the question of self-transcendence. Self-transcendence means multiple things, so I don't want to oversimplify it. It certainly means giving yourself to something bigger than yourself. It certainly means that, transcending yourself, trying to live for something beyond us. And it includes, definitely includes in his definition, being able to be unified with other people in deep relationships. And so that's not the whole

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  sense that he meant by that term, but it's certainly included in it. And that is to say, you can't have self-transcendence if you haven't learned how to... Like, they go together. You have to be quite developed in order to be able to deeply connect with others. You have to be very vulnerable, because my goodness, you have to cry out, as it were, to say, "I feel so unsafe right now in this conversation. I have to speak truth about this, and I'd rather just, I'd rather say, 'Oh, you just don't like me, or you just are like this, or you're...'" Instead of the vulnerability, the truth of, "This is how I feel, this is what's going on. Now let me listen to you, let's fight this out, but let's have as our intent, we're going to actually..."

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Deeply connect with the other person. I see an overlap between these two terms.

• 1:01:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let me hop in with a couple of thoughts that are popping to mind and then a couple of questions. So the first is that if we end up publishing this, for people who are listening, the, I would imagine what you're describing on some level as its core has truth, right? So you can be truthful and communicate your needs and so on without trauma performing or using performative vulnerability, right? Which I think has become very fashionable, especially in places like Austin where you meet somebody, you're two minutes into meeting them at a party and they've already told you about their worst childhood trauma and are just offloading these horrible things as a means of theater almost.

• 1:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's just become like a Portlandia of here are the bad things that have happened to me and let me be vulnerable. But I, I feel like what you're describing is, is very different in the sense that there's a core of truth to it. And you can still be independently strong in a million different ways and effective in a million different ways while still doing that, right? I guess I'm just trying to say that to myself as much to anyone else. Like it doesn't have to be this overly sort of bemoaned, drawn out, protracted confession of weakness or something like that.

• 1:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  It can have a component of vulnerability, certainly, but there's also a core of strength in my mind because it requires a certain core of strength to be consistently truthful and to solicit truth. That's, that is not easy.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Is truth not performance?

• 1:03:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. So, and then the, the question that I wanted to ask is thinking about, say, attachment and self-transcendence and relationships and so on. What order do we put these in for people who are listening or for myself, right? Although I think I've actually made tremendous progress on most of these fronts in the last handful of years. But how would you suggest someone approach this? In other words, if they're thinking, all right, well, self-transcendence is the top of the ladder by Dr. Maslow and his, in his final writings. I'm up for that. That makes sense to me. And they want healthy, interdependent relationships. And they recognize that the sort of Gordon Gekko slash go, go, go achiever

• 1:03:49Tim Ferriss?

  culture in the US, while it produces a lot of GDP and other things, doesn't always, well, actually, very rarely produces stable wellbeing in most people. And the question then comes up, which is, in what order do I tackle these things? Should I read a book on attachment theory and do that first? And then maybe look at Maslow's stuff and then look at something else? From a brass tax perspective, if somebody's like, yeah, you know what? You're right. If I look at myself, truthfully, you know, honestly, I have deficits in these areas and I want to try to make the leap. Like, I want to, I want to work on these things. How would you suggest someone do that? Maybe you can give me your two cents. There is a book. Let me look at the cover really quickly. I think it's just called Attached. Yeah, the new science of adult

• 1:04:34Tim Ferriss?

  attachment, et cetera, et cetera, which has, I guess, two magnets in the form of a heart on the cover. A pretty good cover. I'll give it credit. The new science of adult attachment, how it can help you find and keep love by Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel S. F. Heller, M.A. 19,437 reviews, 4.7 star average. I have not read it, so I can't speak to this, but I know a number of friends have read this and found it helpful. But I'm speculating here. So what would you say?

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  Well, I can start with myself in just being, I suppose, truthful about how I'm seeing it. But the answer to the question, what's my one priority for 2024? It is to help my wife Anna and I to feel safely attached, deeply connected. And I would say,

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  There's a lot more right with with our relationship or marriage than there is wrong with it. And actually, I, you know, like, I think there's a lot of goodness in it, right? You know, we've married 23 years, we have four children, we work together, we're communicating in all sorts of ways, and I think successfully. But I now understand there's this additional gear. And I think, yeah, that's the difference. And so one of the books that was recommended to me is a book called Hold Me Tight by Dr. Sue Johnson. And I would say that she's done maybe more than anyone else to bring this adult attachment theory, I think she calls it EMT, to the therapeutic process. And so I think that's a pretty great place

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  to start, is to is to read what she's written. She has approached a series of conversations.

• 1:06:16Tim Ferriss?

  I want to also suggest Sue Johnson. She's actually been on the podcast and was beyond impressive, exceeded every possible expectation I could have had. So I'm glad that you're mentioning her.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  I think that's that's the place, but I think that is an answer to that question. The only thing I'm concerned about as I try and answer that is, to what degree am I reading my autobiography into other people's lives? You know, like, I mean, I'm sort of coming at this with the, there are a thousand ex-relationships, that is, if there's a purpose to life, it's that. I'm using a quote, and I want to tell you where that's from in a second. But, you know, and so therefore, my most important relationship is Anna. And therefore, as I'm understanding, what really creates these disproportionately great relationships is this attachment. Like, there's a there's a logic that gets me here. But of course, somebody else is coming in their lives just a different mine and different, there's different starting point, they have different ending points. I want to be careful about

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  that. But I don't think what we've talked about today is the kind of thing that people regret, you know, like, if you pursued this, you're not going to use the deathbed test, you're not going to be like, my goodness, I can't believe it. I can't believe that I really figured out the most important relationships, and I really invested in them seriously, and I got attached to them and, you know, struggled with them, but improved them. Like, you're not going to regret that journey, it seems to me.

• 1:07:38Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, definitely not. What was the quote? Was that you alluded to a quote?

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is something, man. So, okay, so I'm writing a new book, doing new research, doing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge inadvertently. And so what I've learned is something like, like this, it's, we live in the loneliest era on record. More surface interactions is not going to help at all. So we have to learn to connect deeply with vital few people and that that is sort of the work of life. Okay, so that's part of what I've come to as I've been doing all this research and this thinking. So I posted something about that in these subjects on social media and one of the people, one of my friends that follows this said, you know what, this is

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  something I just read that's right on that theme. So that's how I got connected to it. I think it's Eric Newton, I think is his name. And Eric took to Twitter, Eric took to X and he wrote up a story of what's happened in his life recently, which is heartbreaking, but also life changing. And he says, he starts off basically saying, look, this is, I've wrestled with whether I should share publicly something that's so private, it's a bit tacky to do that, but still really glad that he did it. Okay, so I just pulled it up. I'm just gonna read a few little bits from it. He said, I lost my wife to cancer last month. Our daughter lost her mother. I'm hesitated sharing any of

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  this, but there is something I want to record. Fair warning, this is mostly about love. I'm devastated. A hole has opened where I thought my identity lived. Our daughter is doing the same in her toddler way, asking questions, slowly understanding what's happened, grieving in stages. We had a delightful life together, full of intense highs and lows, but two elements that were vastly more important to us than any of this are extraordinary little daughter and the quality of the time we all spent together. Aubrey and I fell in love early and fast, but we fell more in love during the time she was convalescing than I thought was possible. Facing death every day allowed us to set aside the silly things and focus on what matters.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  The privilege of knowing and loving her so deeply outpaces every other experience I've had is the one thing that matters. Okay, I've considered whether to share any of this. Obviously, it's tacky to make personal tragedy into a public spectacle, but I wanted to capture something that I've learned. Okay, I'm skipping here. She says that he says this. "We had an epic love affair, and yet we reached a depth of intimacy while Aubrey was on her deathbed that we'd never had access to before. That depth of love wasn't available to us any earlier for whatever reason, but it is available. I want to make it available to everyone by reminding you it exists. Aubrey shifted into a deeper love about six weeks before she died.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  During her time in the hospital, her one regret was that she hadn't spent more time deepening relationships with the people she cared about. She said, "The only thing that matters at all is the quality of the relationships with the people we love. Focus on that. I know it sounds trite in a tweet, but I can guarantee you with absolute certainty that when you're dying, and you will die, these are the only things you will care about. Aubrey realized this deeply in the most fundamental way because she was running out of time, so she put it into action. It was mostly instinct at first, but by the end, her deeper way of loving had become very conscious and intentional. Her change was palpable. She softened and opened. She began to be with those around her in a kind of total surrender.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  We all felt that she was experiencing us without a filter somehow. We were seen and loved. It was beautiful. It was overpowering. It was humbling beyond measure. As she did all this, those around her began to learn how to do it as well. I learned, being loved that completely is overwhelming in the best way. It's probably all any of us ever crave. I've tried to carry that love forward ever since. Loving that deeply is a practice. It's like anything. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's very hard, but it's always worthwhile. The key to this kind of love is necessarily different for everyone. I only know one way: complete surrender to the inevitable death of yourself and those you love. I'm not writing this to proselytize any given path.

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  I simply want to say out loud that it is possible to love with a depth and breadth that I used to think was fiction. Progressively deepening love is the goal, an end in and of itself. If there is a point, it's that."

• 1:12:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. I'm just sitting with that for a minute. What a gift to write that down for people also to absorb. Well, to read.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I I reached out to him and so he's already responded. We're just gonna schedule a time and I'm gonna try and get, you know, more of that story and and the details of it because I think that deserves to be told, you know, like. When I read that, that sort of is reinforcing and crystallizing of all these other themes I've been describing. It's like, yeah, he just, he said it. And he said it out of his suffering produced that level of clarity. And it's like, look, if I don't understand that and then I make my goal list, if I don't understand that and then I just go to email. If I don't understand that and I just react and just do what I think of the people think is cool or good.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  Oh, they think, I mean, I shouldn't use this example. I don't know why I'm using this example. I love skiing and so do you, but like, oh, I if I'm just going skiing because other people think it's cool to go skiing. If I'm traveling because other people, I think other people think it's cool to travel, I could spend my whole life doing that. And really just miss it all, miss this, miss what Eric stated.

• 1:13:28Tim Ferriss?

  Quick, maybe mundane recommendation, get off social media for a while, folks. Or ask yourself before you post, or actually, let's rewind. Before you do something, if you could never tell anyone about it outside of maybe your family or closest friends via a phone call, if you could not post it. If you could not put this on social media or in a newsletter or on a blog or pick your channel, YouTube. Would you still do this? And if the answer is no, don't do it. As an exercise, you can always go back to the the heroin feed of fake social reinforcement on social media. That's always available, but at least as an exercise. Ask yourself that question. I've done that and

• 1:14:10Tim Ferriss?

  part of the reason I have no social apps on my phone and that's been largely true for two or three years now. If you don't have, as you mentioned, like if you don't have these sort of foundational directional documents or tools. Given the tools at hand, given the information deluge that is only going to accelerate exponentially with AI and disinformation and so on.

• 1:14:36Tim Ferriss?

  That is going to, this year, 2024, it is going to at least 10x, probably 100x. I mean, it is going to multiply so unbelievably. If you do not have these guardrails and these sort of operating principles in place, you are going to lose, right? What you'll lose is personal, like you are going to lose whatever then that could apply in a lot of different domains, but the technology has you completely diagrammed and defeated before you ever step into these domains. There's like billions upon billions of dollars of data science and research and so on that has gone into ensuring that your willpower will not be sufficient, particularly if it

• 1:15:19Tim Ferriss?

  doesn't have a trained fixed point in the distance to come back to the being lost in the wilderness analogy. As my job interview, some of the, I mean, top performers in the world, hundreds of them, and the change that I have seen for those people in that subset who are already, I think most people would agree, in the top 1% of 1% in terms of worldly achievement, the dramatic handicap that I've seen, the dramatic reduction in productivity that I've seen among those people who have succumbed to the siren song of social media specifically is jaw dropping, is truly unbelievable.

• 1:16:00Tim Ferriss?

  Just in the last 12 months, what I've observed, it really seems to be going parabolic. So in any case, I'm going to stop giving my centipal woman's speech.

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  Hey, listen, I like that speech and I think first of all, that's right. And you know, it's the system, right? Like, I mean, I don't even love the term like matrix for various reasons, but it's still helpful too. But like the matrix is so consuming and it's so much bigger than me and it's so much in that sense, more powerful now. It's not if I. I'm conscious of it and can step out of it and can, you know, make it, you know, like all of this AI and all of it perhaps makes a good servant, but it certainly makes a poor master. And if I'm not conscious that it is either already my master or is trying to be, then I, so it's already over. You know, like if I, my, ah, it's fine. It's

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  easy. It's like, okay, well then you, I already lost the game, the battle.

• 1:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  If you don't realize you're in a game, you've already lost the game. But let me ask you, when you're talking about the priority, your priority, top priority, the one priority, and I'm, I'm going to make mistakes with the wording, but it was along the lines of fostering and cultivating secure attachment with your wife, if I remember correctly. For a lot of people who may be listening, certainly for me also, when I think about that, I'm like, yes, yes, and yes. And also typically, if I had a primary goal, let's just say I'll pull out something that's less, uh, lower to the ground, in a sense, that makes it easier to use as an example, write a screenplay. Let's say I want to write a screenplay this

• 1:17:42Tim Ferriss?

  year. That's one of my top goals. Okay, great. Then I can work backwards from that and say, okay, well, what are the sort of antecedents? How long do those take? Who do I need to interact with? How should I block those out in the calendar? And then I can execute something resembling a blueprint, right? Or a Gantt chart or something like that. With your top priority, how do you ensure that you're taking meaningful action related to that top priority?

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  I know exactly what you're saying. I mean, this is the advantage of a concrete goal is that a concrete goal almost immediately presents the plan or elements of a plan almost immediately start to arrive. Okay. Well, if we're doing this, we would have to do A, B, and C and so on. And that's one of the reasons goals are so powerful and, and so scary too, because if you get your mind set on the wrong goal, then, then you'll be consumed with it and maybe going in the wrong direction. Okay. So how do you do it? If, if the goal is a relationship, it's really different, isn't it? Because it's not about achieving checkpoints and the very nature of the relationship is that it's symbiotic. But I, I think that the way I've been thinking about this is like this. It's, I like this intent, the

• 1:18:55Speaker 03

  language that I've chosen, cause it's something that. It's a metric in and of itself. And so it's an immediately testable metric. Do I feel that right now? Does Anna feel it right now? And then, of course, you could go from that to each of my children. Do we feel it right now? And if we don't, let's talk about that, because now we're having the real conversation.

• 1:19:16Tim Ferriss?

  Is that feeling one of calmness, lack of fear, that you are not withholding? What are the characteristics of feeling the yes?

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Safely attached.

• 1:19:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, right.

• 1:19:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I'll give you the words that comes to mind, and then maybe I maybe by the end of the year, I'll have better, more precise ways of describing these things. But yes, I think it's really safe, not just sort of safe, really safe. I'm safe to say what I really think. It's safe enough to hear what you really think and not take it personally. So that there's just space somewhere in the world to be able to express all of that, that we don't express in any other situation. It's a little bit like this idea that you want your, like, remember somebody, a psychologist describing this, they said, if your children

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  are acting out at home, but not at school, like they're doing well at school, but not at home, you know, the teachers are going, oh, they're so great here. And you go, geez, they're not so great with us. It's actually just exactly what you want, because they're safe to be able to act out at home so that you don't have to be everywhere else.

• 1:20:24Tim Ferriss?

  Didn't see that coming. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  And and so it's a similar way, I think, in a safely attached relationship is like you can act out a bit. Because you need somewhere to be able to do that. You can say all your fears, you can say all the nonsense. So I think that's sort of a test of it. If you want to build beyond there, like, I I think it's, and this is, this is, I would say, the biggest test for me is, can I create enough time every day for that? So that it's not just a bit here and a bit there, you know, like, normally happens, in fact, because just in the same way as. If you leave exercise and you leave your relationships, it's just like, well, we'll just let that happen however it does, then you end up with bad relationships and ill

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  health. And that's what normally happens. I mean, that's like when I ask people what's essential that they're under investing and those are like basically the two most frequent answers. It's not exercising, not eating well and my relationships are, you know, my most important relationships are struggling in some way. So it's how do I create like, let's say one to two hours per day, not watching TV, not together, not doing things, not even just talking about, hey, what happened today and what's going on and updates and there's loads of that, but enough time, uninterrupted time. So you actually get to get to the other subject. Because whenever I do that, whenever we do that, it works. I mean, the difference

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  is conversation. It's, it's, you know, conversation starts at a pit, right? It's trivial, it's present. It's like, okay, this has happened in the news and Jack's going to work right now and he just got back and I just, it's updates. And then as you go down, it becomes more vulnerable, but it also becomes more essential. And so you have to have enough time to have those conversations. So that's, that's the piece that I'm like, and I, I have to really be willing to make the trade off.

• 1:22:19Tim Ferriss?

  For distinction, this is a question, because I've developed this, as I'm sure some listeners have this acute allergic reaction to the word processing. You've heard this word, I'm sure, used when it's let's talk about all of the difficult emotional things. I would imagine what you're referring to is some version of what people might call quality time where you're getting past just the triage of updates, right? For instance, a friend of mine, he's been on the podcast quite a few times, Seth Godin, has found that preparing meals, he had cooked for his family as his kids were growing up a lot and his kids would help with some of the prep where they'd just stand around the kitchen island. And that's when the kids would volunteer a lot, right? And it was in that type of

• 1:23:04Tim Ferriss?

  setting. So they were doing something or he was doing something, but it kind of provided a safe container for all of that to happen. But it wasn't like sitting down in two chairs opposite each other. Plumbing the depths of like deep emotions as a conversation, if that makes sense. So I'm wondering, when you say making the time, like what forms that time takes?

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

  It's quantity and quality. It really is actually making a sacrifice, making the trade off. So examples, yes, yes, what you're saying, Seth, that example, I think is included. Okay. So, so with my children and with Anna, when I travel, I will take somebody with me. And so that just provides a lot of potential for, you know, riffing at the

• 1:23:47Tim Ferriss?

  Lot of surface area.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  Exactly. And then, and then suddenly kind of spontaneous, I mean, conversations are like that. There's a random and then, but there's method in the madness too, that suddenly something more sensitive comes up. And now you're talking about that real subject. And so I think it is, there is a structural piece too. For me with Anna, it's okay, there's the date night, actually structurally insisting it happens once, or even maybe you get to twice a week and you, you're sort of forcing the space to exist possible conversation. And it can be all sorts of things, but it's a structural piece. And I think that that's non trivial. Space never happens in our life.

• 1:24:27Tim Ferriss?

  No, never.

• 1:24:29Speaker 03

  You know, if I go back into like 1820 kind of timeframe, like so pre industrial revolution, and I'm not trying to romanticize it. I think that must have been so hard to live then. I cannot even imagine surviving was so, so, so hard.

• 1:24:44Tim Ferriss?

  You mean, you don't want your five year old being a chimney sweep?

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, honestly though, right? And, and but what they did have an advantage over us is that the sun went down and there wasn't electricity. And so you could not escape the people in your life in the way we can. It wasn't default, it was defaulted in favor of You're facing each other. There's not a phone to face. You got a few books, maybe. Probably have the Bible if you have a book and then you have a few other books and you're going to read from those books and you're going to talk about them because once the sun is down, that's what you have. That was a forcing function that we've just completely lost. I talked to somebody one time.

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  Here's what he was doing. I was working on a TV show based on essentialism. And so we were doing like the trying to kind of create the pitch deck for it and and we'd selected these people and we're talking to her. She's very professional together woman and like maybe even non-emotional, even in the interaction and the conversation, the coaching session, we were having this speed coaching session. And then quite unexpectedly, completely unexpectedly for her. She burst into tears just right in the middle of conversation. It surprised me too, but it shocked her. He's like, does not do emotion like. And it was because she was reflecting on her relationship with her husband, I think, and how basically that

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  their relationship had become both of them in the bed on their phones and that that had become so consuming, not an exception, but the rule of the relationship. And it was like, goodness, there's no connection. It's just you know, that's so different than what you would have had in 1820, you know, like there's no phone, there's no technology, there's no it's not there that that whole system was was gone. So, so anyway, I do think, you know, right, that never exists. Now you have to create basin. And so that's the structural element, I would say, for me is that I travel with my children and I've started saying, okay, like once a quarter we go away ourselves and it's not just

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  hey, we're going on a little vacation. It's like we we are trying to go deliberately, let's talk, really, we're here to talk, let's talk beyond. The things we get to normally. And and look, we got miles to go, but we just got back from the last one. And it was, I mean, that was an amazing, it was an amazing trip, but it was so helpful. And so we scheduled the next one and it wasn't three months later. It's probably about six months later that we'll, we'll go to that specific location again as it worked so well. And so it's, you know, I think it's, it's the daily, the scheduling. It's the, the week structure, the monthly structure, quarterly structure, right? And all of these things, I think, once you start exploring them, you're like, okay, well, that's what you would do with other goals as well.

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  But, but it's not getting it done. You're not trying to get done as you are with other goals, right? Checking it off the list, project is complete. This relationship is not, is not a means to an end. Relationship is the end, is the end in and of itself. And, you know, so that's how I think it's.

• 1:27:55Tim Ferriss?

  So if you mentioned, you know, the eighteen, twenty, and I just wanted to say that. I have spent a lot of time in South America and Africa and some very rural locations. And I've then gone back and visited these places after cell phones and very slight broadband penetration. And then post broadband, I've been able to see what has happened. So those places have resembled in probably more ways than not. The eighteen twenties you described, right? Tight social bonds, in part because that is the entertainment they have.

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:28:33Tim Ferriss?

  And very little electricity. So also, life tends to slow down. People are communal at night, they wake up, they go to the farm very often. And then as things are introduced, for instance, I went to two different villages in northern Ethiopia. And chatting with one of the interpreters who is helping. This group and he was mentioning that one town was really unhappy. And the other town was very happy because I was commenting how I found Ethiopian people in general to be very upbeat and to smile easily and so on. And I asked him why that one village was unhappy. And he said, well, they got satellite television introduced and

• 1:29:14Tim Ferriss?

  now they see the Kardashians in reality TV and they know how much they're missing. Literally, that's what he said, not in those exact words, but more or less that. And, and then if I look at, for instance, some of these places in South America as, as another example that I've visited, which now have, say, Starlink and other means of readily accessible, easily accessible 24/7 broadband. They're suffering from all of the same distractions and issues now, the fracturing of social bonds, the isolation, not to the extent that you see in a city like New York City, of course, but you're seeing the same phenomenon. And so much like sometimes people have heard

• 1:29:57Tim Ferriss?

  the expression, you know, it's the economy is stupid. On some level, like it's the tools stupid. Like you, you, you don't assume you are fundamentally flawed. There's, there's always a lot of self-work to do and there's, the project is never finished. But also, let's look at the Occam's razor contribution here to a lot of these issues and so much malaise and sense of discontent, which is the tools. So like turn off the tools, or at least ration the tools and see what happens. And then I would say, just to kind of bring this full circle, that this conversation's been super, super helpful for me. It's given me a lot to think about. Also, I'm, I'm still thinking about the patriarchal blessing and what my version of that could be, something that I revisit on a regular

• 1:30:42Tim Ferriss?

  basis. So I'm actually fortunate that I'm spending time right now with a friend of mine, my only male friend who is incredibly well-versed with poetry, or at least younger male friend. So his, I can, I can visit his lot, mental library to see what he matches for me. So I'm thinking about that. And then also, once again, about systems and structure for not just busy CEOs, but for almost anyone who is barraged with the sensory overload and uninvited inputs and stimuli that anyone listening to this is.

• 1:31:16Tim Ferriss?

  Without structure, without putting things in the calendar, without a plan, the most important things are not going to take care of themselves. You're not just automatically going to have time and a program for self-care, for the gym, for your most important relationships. It's not going to happen accidentally, or at least the odds are against it. So the better plan is to plan.

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  That's it right there is how do you stack the decks in your favor? Because they're currently stacked against you. And I'm not making a plug, I'm just expressing the reason I did it, right? The reason I wrote Effortless after essentialism is because I'd be like, you have to build a system that makes it the default that you'll do the essentials and not do the non-essentials. And I already said that in essentialism, actually, but it was like, it didn't get, people didn't hear it. They just heard, oh yeah, you're going to do the essentials versus non-essentials. And then I hear the feedback over years and years, well, that's so hard to do. And it's like, it's like, yeah, you aren't doing it because you figured out what's essential. You figured out what's non-essential, but then you didn't maybe realize the system is so built to make the non-essential easy,

• 1:32:25Speaker 03

  immediately at your fingertips, addictive and so on. So now you go, how do I? It's not easy to build the system, but you build a system that then makes the execution easier than it would otherwise be.

• 1:32:39Tim Ferriss?

  So on that, strongly recommend that everybody read Effortless. I'm going to reread it. And I will also say that there's a corollary to what you just said that I've found helpful. And that is, one way to make the default easier is to make not doing the default harder slash painful.

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. You want to make the, you want to make the non-essential hard to do precisely.

• 1:33:04Tim Ferriss?

  So in my case, for 2024, and I've done this for a few years now, but looking at my top relationships, right? I don't have my own nuclear family right now. I mean, I don't have progenies, I'm trying to say. So I'm looking largely at my, at my, yes, yes. So I'm looking at my family, my mom and my immediate family, but parents and so on, siblings. Then I'm looking at my closest friends and I'm blocking out time in the calendar, getting commitments for, say, trips or people coming to visit, et cetera.

• 1:33:37Tim Ferriss?

  Making it happen and putting in, in my case, right, let's just say these are trips, sunk costs so that it is actually painful for me to undo the thing that I know is good for me. Does that make sense? And I might write a blog post on this because it's been on my mind for six months now. I've been talking to friends about it. It's just like choosing the right sunk costs, like sunk costs and sunk fallacy can steer you in the wrong direction, but you can actually use it to steer you in the right direction. And that's, that's something that I've thought a hell of a lot about.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  No, I like that so much because you're right. And you know, I generally talk about it in the, in the worst sense. But if you were going to design humans for, for success, you probably would want it to be true that the thing you've committed to, you want to stay committed to. Right? Like you probably would want to design where people tend to continue to do the thing that they've been doing because they have invested so much in it. In a way, it's like when they changed divorce law in the UK originally, of course, it was intended in a certain way. And, and I think it was maybe even well intended, I would say, because you don't want people to be desperately stuck. And certainly you don't want anyone ever to be in an abusive relationship and then they

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  just cannot get out because the laws are so strict. So there's obviously scenarios in which that helps, but the disadvantage is that it incentivizes this kind of like no fault divorce. It's like, hey, I'm just, I'm out now. And because self-actualization is the priority, it's always, always easy to think that's going to lead to greater happiness, even though the data suggests that people that are divorced, like five years later, the majority wish they weren't and that they hadn't and that they could go back and change it, but it's obviously too late now. And, and so it's just interesting to think about what you're saying about like, yes, committing, doing things where you, you go, I know it's the right thing. How can I commit in a way that I will be following through even when I?

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  Feel like getting out, feel like I would would would rather not do this thing now. It's like, no, you do want to be locked in.

• 1:35:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure, man. Well, Greg, this has been so much fun. It's nice to hear your voice. And where can people find you if we end up publishing this and we'll talk more about it?

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  You know, there is a single thing. It took me, it took us way longer than I thought it was going to take to to build this. It's totally free. It's like, literally takes people 10 seconds to sign up for it. It is where to start with essentialism and with effortless. And it's, you go to gregmckeown.com. It's right there on the homepage. It's a 30 day email program. You get a whole workbook that goes with it, completely free, easy, 10 seconds to sign up. And it answers that question, where do you start?

• 1:36:16Tim Ferriss?

  And how do you, how do you spell your name, dear sir?

• 1:36:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's fair enough. G R E G, Greg McKeown is M C K E O W N. So G R E G M C K E O W N dot com, right there on the homepage, people can sign up. And they'll get an email every few days, but they can also just get the workbook, print it up and work through 10 lessons, carefully curated, combining the best, all of that published written work.

• 1:36:41Tim Ferriss?

  Beautiful. And I'm going to dig back into your writing as well. That's, that's on my to do list. And successful experiment. I enjoy doing this. I appreciate you being game to mess around with it.

• 1:36:52Speaker 03

  No, I love it. I think it's, I think it's a really smart move for you to do it. You got so podcast right. I mean, I have my podcast too. I know like it hits you. It comes at you so fast to see your content. You're always in trying to create content, you know, mode. And it's nice if you can, if you can walk and just build it into your natural routine.

• 1:37:10Tim Ferriss?

  This is actually an example of trying to do the thing that is unlikely to happen by itself or on its own. And that is, I've realized a lot of my constraining physical issues, right? My principal physical ailment that affected my last year was this pericarditis at L4, L5, just some lower back issues. I mean, there is no just to it. It's been kind of cataclysmic and its implications for my sleep and for many other things. However, what, what I've concluded, I'm on the mend, but what I've concluded is it's directly, the pain is directly correlated to sitting time. So the more I sit, the more it hurts, the more consistently it hurts, the longer it hurts.

• 1:37:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I looked at the, the driving forces or the different converging trends related to, say, podcasting.

• 1:38:00Tim Ferriss?

  Several of which lead to the creation of basically fixed television studios. Right? Most podcasters, if they're aiming to be highly competitive and to feed growth are building studios, legitimately building what would be recognized as television studios. And that is antithetical to my reasons for starting the podcast, number one. Right? So the, the characteristics, including mobility, sort of ease and ease of lightweight production, those are the opposite of what is, what is happening and what I on some level feel driven to do because I am competitive. So I have to be aware of that. It doesn't always serve me. It can serve me, but it doesn't always serve me. And so I asked myself this

• 1:38:42Tim Ferriss?

  question. I asked myself a lot. I should probably ask myself more often, frankly, which is what if I did the opposite? Not just what if I did 20% less, not doing TV studio light, but what if I actually did the opposite? So the opposite, what would the opposite look like? Well, instead of sitting in a fixed location, I would be moving. And I would double down on lightweight so that my production would actually become more lightweight, not more heavyweight. And let me test that for a month and sprinkle it in and see what happens, right? Because I can always go back to the other, but from the perspective of trying to think for myself and not succumb to group think and also just

• 1:39:25Tim Ferriss?

  external pressure, but also trying to not just avoid pain, but produce wellness in my life. This is an experiment worth running. So.

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  I have thoughts on this now. Number one is, and I'm not trying to be commercial in saying this, you are describing an effortless strategy, right? Like it's inverting it, saying it's like literally, it's like Judge, Judge Castagne will do the opposite. We literally think there is seriously this idea that better is harder. So therefore, okay, we, oh, well, look at all these people. Look at what they're all doing. Oh, I have to have the studio. Mine needs to be better than their studio and cooler than their studio. We have to have all the, it's like, well, that's one strategy. And maybe that is, that maybe that's the way, but what if, is there an effortless way to do this that actually supports what I really want in my life? I love that you're doing, I love you're going in the other direction. And the other thing is, do you have a walking desk yet?

• 1:40:17Tim Ferriss?

  So I do have a walking desk and I really want to be outside and or around people.

• 1:40:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:28Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm messing with that. But but yes, I do have a walking desk.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  I love my walking desk. I'm on it right now. This whole conversation, I've been doing it. That way we can have good audio on my side, but I'm still going. I don't want to work unless I'm walking now. I literally just think it's so much better for my mind. Of course, it's better for your body, but it's just I feel healthier mentally when I'm doing it. So.

• 1:40:48Tim Ferriss?

  Kudos. Yeah.

• 1:40:52Tim Ferriss?

  What fun, man. It's really nice to hear your voice. And this has been also very personally helpful for me to think about the upcoming year. So I really do. I really do appreciate it.

• 1:41:03Speaker 03

  Tim, it's been a genuine pleasure.

• 1:41:05Tim Ferriss?

  Really, man. Well, all thanks to your proactive outreach. So.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  Final thought on that is like, what I want you to feel, forget like all the self, they sound like attachment stuff, but like what I want you to feel about me really is like this. Like, I just feel a sense of like, I want to be there just Tim for Tim. This is spawned in this fun thing and having this conversation in a way that's that's helpful to your podcast and also, of course, is is is helpful to me. I'm sure in various subjects and various ways, right? Reach of your audience. Like, I get that this is spawned into this. But like, I want you to feel that amongst your group, right? You've got your group of people and your people that Greg is like one of these people in your world who's not looking for something from you, but is concerned about you.

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  And that's really for real, for real for me. Like, that's my intent, and that's what I want you to to think. The day you feel the worst,

• 1:42:04Speaker 03

  you text me. I want you to be able to feel safe on that day to go. Greg, I'm here. This is the worst.

• 1:42:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, thanks, man. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I take that to heart. So thank you very much.

• 1:42:16Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:42:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:17Speaker 03

  We'll talk again soon.

• 1:42:18Tim Ferriss?

  Talk soon, man. Take care. Bye bye.

• 1:42:21Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 1:43:04Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids.

• 1:43:47Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:44:30Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:45:12Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:45:57Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:46:42Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:47:26Tim Ferriss?

  That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So, part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances.

• 1:48:09Tim Ferriss?

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