Greg McKeown on Doing Less and Getting More

On today’s podcast Ryan talks to bestselling author Greg McKeown about his new book Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most, how the present moment is the true antidote to uncertainty, how effortlessness actually produces better outcomes, and more. Greg McKeown is a speaker, a bestselling author, and the host of the popular podcast What’s Essential. McKeown’s New York Times bestselling book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less has sold more than a million copies worldwide. Originally from London, England, he now lives in California with his wife, Anna, and their four children. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase. Box of Awesome from Bespoke Post has a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. To get started, you just take a quiz at boxofawesome.com your answers help them pick the right Box of Awesome for you. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code STOIC at checkout. Stamps.com is a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic Follow Greg McKeown: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregmckeown Twitter: https://twitter.com/GregoryMcKeown Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregorymckeown/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GregMcKeownSpeaker/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My guest today is the author of one of my all-time favorite books, a book I sell here at the Painted Porch Bookshop in Bastrop, Texas as well. I'm talking about Greg McKeown, the author of Essentialism. Essentialism, to me, is a core Stoic concept. Marx realist even says, "Every day, you should ask yourself this question with everything that you do." He says, "Is this essential?" And he says, "What you find is that most of what you do is not essential, most of what you say is not essential." And when you eliminate that, not only do you have more tranquility,

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  he says, "You get the double benefit of doing fewer things better." So if you haven't read Essentialism, you absolutely should. And Greg is an awesome author, and we had a great conversation. And his new book, which just came out, Effortless: Make It Easy to Do What Matters, is a very fitting sequel. You know, I find that his books are just brilliantly designed, too. He's got like really cool graphics in them and art. Ironically, they're very simple designs. Or like sort of line drawings, which I think goes to the point, which is that little things can make a big difference. Little things done well make all the difference.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  This is a great interview, one I was very excited to do. And we get, we get personal. He tells a story about some health troubles that he and his daughter had and how it put everything in perspective for him. I know the last year has done that for me in a lot of big ways. If you haven't left 2020 and 2021 with a, with a clear sense of what's essential, I'd argue you're probably doing something wrong. And I would also argue, if you haven't had at least a fleeting glimpse of what a more effortless life looks like, what life looks like when you strip away the inessential and you really lock into what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. That's a missed opportunity as

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  well. And, and I think I'm still kind of wrapping my head around what life looks like with less in it, what life looks like with more focus in it, and what a more effortless, tranquil, happy life looks like. Ironically, something I tried to write about in stillness, but you know, sometimes you can see your own point reflected back to you, as Emerson said, with a kind of alienated majesty. And so I really enjoyed both these books. I think you'll enjoy this conversation. You can check out Greg McEwan's new books, anywhere books are sold, but you can also get them from The Painted Porch at thepaintedporch.com. And I would also suggest you check out Greg's podcast. We did a great interview together.

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  We went really in depth and I enjoyed that as well. Here's my interview with Greg McEwan.

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  So how have you been?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  I've, I've been really well. How are you?

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  I'm doing, doing pretty good, all things considered.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, all things, all things considered. You know, there's a lot there.

• 4:04Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, I don't know, it can feel flippant, I feel like to be like, things are amazing. Because although individually, they're quite good, you know, it seems like, given everything that's happening in the world. But I think that's sort of the point is, and it's kind of the message of the new book and the other one, which is like, how do you find a way to do what you need to do inside of all of the craziness that's happening around you?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Yes, particularly with the new book, Effortless, the frame is, life is hard. In all sorts of way, in hundreds of different ways, and in unique, particular ways for people. And the complication is that we make it even harder still, harder than it needs to be. And so the impact of that is that people start to be burned out. And a lot of people are just, it's almost like everybody's burned out now. And my position is that you can make a different choice, that you can discover ways to make today and tomorrow a little easier. And I feel like that just has the power of relevancy right now.

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a line from Epictetus where he says, "I am at least not a hindrance to myself," meaning that as bad as things might be, you don't make them worse by complaining about them, taking them personally, wishing they were otherwise, fighting against them. You just sort of make the most of whatever it happens to be in front of you.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Well, and that particular thing is one of the little micro tactics that I think are universally useful. We started in our family, a new habit and ritual where we said, okay, after we complain, we say something we're thankful for.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  So sort of balancing out complaint with gratitude?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Well, right. And at first it sounded like, well, that's not such a, I mean, 50/50, that's not a great ratio. But here's what I found when I started doing it, is that I complained a lot more than I realized. In small ways, I thought of myself as being a grateful person, optimistic, but I noticed that it was just easy to fall into that pattern. And I found the impact immediate, that I could see other people just light up around me a little more. I felt a little better myself. And then I would have children do the same thing. I remember even once my son, Jack, he said, well, I am, after he complained, "I am so thankful that my dad is making me play this game."

• 6:48Speaker 01

  And it made us all laugh, just as it made you laugh, which is exactly the point. And it worked. Even a sort of sarcastic thank you was still powerful. And it's one of these things that, yes, you cannot control so many of the hard things that happen to you. But if you can choose to receive whatever's happening with a spirit of thankfulness, then it does ease some of life's inevitable burdens. And what I've found, and there's some great research on this by Barbara Fredrickson called "The Broaden and Build Theory," is that as soon as you get into that state, out of a state of suffering, into a state, I'm calling it the effortless state, that you, that a whole series of positive things

• 7:30Speaker 01

  starts to happen in your favor. It improves your relationships, improves your sense of possibility, and you start to see assets you didn't see before. And I've seen that, even here in the midst of the pandemic, that good things have come whenever we have, you know, used even this small, simple habit ratio.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's an interesting exercise from the Stoics too, where Marcus talks about how much you would want to have the things you take for granted if suddenly you didn't have them, which is something I think about a lot. So oftentimes, I think one's career is a great way to look at this. So you look at your career and you compare yourself to somebody who's done more than you. In our case, maybe someone who's sold way more books or someone who's gotten a certain amount of critical acclaim. And you can feel very small about yourself. You could focus on what you've been deprived of, the lucky breaks you didn't get, or the breaks you should have gotten that were taken from you. And that's obviously one way to go through life is looking at what you didn't get and what

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  there remains to be gotten. But then, of course, you can stop and go, but aren't there people who are dying to break in to whatever it is that I do, that all they want is one shot, who'd be happy with 10% of what I have? And so I think part of what gratitude does is it forces you. Complaint is like something didn't go your way, something you don't have that you want. And I think what gratitude at its core is looking at what you have and being like, this is good too.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  The best way I've heard that said is I had Benjamin Hardy on the What's Essential podcast, and he's, I think, just about to co-author a book on this, but the term is, are you living in the gain or in the gap?

• 9:26Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, sure.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  And that language frame is just such a good one for what we're talking about. If you're in the gap, you're looking at the distance between where you are and what you want to become, achieve, and so on. And is the surecase way to be in a state of, we would just say unhappiness, but I could call it just a state of suffering. And then the alternative is to be in the gain, where you are seeing all the progress that you've made, how far you've come, what's going right, what you have already become. And this is a sure way to alleviate some of that suffering in life and to find more of an effortless state in the way that we're describing it.

• 10:09Ryan Holiday?

  So I'm curious, speaking of gaps, so you have a pretty big gap between these two books. What is it, four or five years, maybe more?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  More, seven years.

• 10:19Ryan Holiday?

  Which is pretty unusual. So walk me through that process for you. Was that deliberate? Was it a struggle? Was it, you know, were you being intentional about it? Were you waiting? Or did you find that writing this book on effortlessness was harder than expected?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  The irony that would be, the, no, this was a, this was intentional, but I can't fully take credit for it. And in a way, I think it does deserve some credit. But I probably was ready to write the next book instantly or within a few months of finishing Essentialism. And I just felt when I went sort of internally and did that internal listening, I felt, no, you're just supposed to wait. And I just trusted that, you know, that the inner voice, that sense of conscience. And that stayed with me for years. And it was about maybe three years ago, two or three years ago now,

• 11:19Speaker 01

  that I felt quite all of a sudden and without real explanation, it's time. And so I began the process for what has become effortless. And really, I think in hindsight, I'm not sure I know the reasons why, but I think I could not have written this book when I'd first written Essentialism. I needed to go through certain experiences that weren't yet, weren't yet coming. And so, I mean, one of them particularly was, was an experience of, let me say, on the surface, the greatest example of suffering in my life.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  And it was the lessons I learned through that and since that that have allowed me to even write this book. Uh, and the, I mean, the, the basics of the story is we'd moved as a family into quite a beautiful, you know, almost idyllic area. It's uh more horseways than roads. There's no street lamps. It's white picket fences everywhere. Our children just played for hours outside. We played tennis together. We went on long walks. We did horse riding. I mean, it was just really just a little heaven on earth. And one of my daughters, Eve, especially seemed to thrive. Uh, she's just up trees all the time, walking barefoot everywhere, naming our chickens. Yes, we have chickens. Uh, and, and just,

• 12:43Speaker 01

  you know, this, this is her life. She's just, she's just such a, she, she can't stay crushed. She's so, she's such a happy, you know, temperament, uh, laughs about everything, talks about everything, reading, everything. Uh, I took her on a trip with me once and she just, she didn't stop talking for an hour. Uh, literally not non-stop. And I texted my wife. I'm like, literally an hour in. This is her, vivacious and delightful to be around. And then she turned fourteen and she just slowed down a bit, you know, took longer to do her chores. She talked less. She seemed a little bit physically awkward and we just said, well, look, pretty, pretty age appropriate behaviour here. Uh, but then after a routine physical therapy visit, it turned out that

• 13:25Speaker 01

  uh, she was, uh, you know, he said, look, she, she failed a reflex test, which you, you know, none of us are supposed to ever fail. It's automatic. Uh, and he said, you might wanna see a neurologist and of course, you know, I've worn twice. And what it turned out to be, uh, when we looked at it through a new paradigm was that, that there was something very serious going on. And we, we watched over the next three or four months as her capabilities were, were massively reduced on like a daily basis with no diagnosis. And no, no neurologist could say a word about any of it. Uh, they, they just literally, they'd take the tests, everything would come back in the normal range and they'd just shrug their shoulders, literally like, I just don't know what's happening.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, she's having a massive tonic-clonic seizure. She's been hospitalized. Uh, right side of her body stops working effectively. There's, she answers in one-word sentences. She's, uh, no person, her personality just completely gone as was, uh, not moving. She became effectively on the, on the way to being fully comatose. And, you know, that, as I say, you know, that's the stuff that I think suffering is made of. And we found ourselves faced with, almost like visually in my own mind, I could see two choices. One was, and actually this was the tempting choice, was the hard, heavy, endless path where all we do

• 14:50Speaker 01

  is think of this and and get consumed by it and, you know, all night long Googling everything, trying to do the research, looking at alternative medicines, just consumed by it. Why us and getting, you know, victimized about or everything. And as I say, that's what we felt like doing, but there was this other path in front of us that was more surprising. And it was just this sense of, yeah, but what if you could approach this path gratefully, happily, focus on what you can do something about, a lighter path. It looked like, you know, I mean, definitely catching each other, doing the right thing, being thankful for anything. The fact that a neurologist even would see her, the fact that friends were interested to support us.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Uh, that we would get around the piano and sing, we would laugh together, we'd pray together, we would. There was a different way of doing life. And that is what basically saved us. Uh, and and and because there was like a magical force at play behind it, just a better way of living. And and I now would say that that experience, it went on for a couple of years. But I would describe that experience as being punctuated with joy. And I don't even use that term lightly, like that's what it was. It made us as family, we we found a different way of living.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  And and so that's what sort of breathed life into, and it gave me fire for the deed, to do the additional research and then the writing of the book that eventually was called Effortless. Uh, because it's just, it's just when when life is hard, what you need to find, and what I feel like, in fact, there is, uh, is an easier path. There is a different way of doing life that's that might be less traveled, but it doesn't make it less of an option. Uh, and and so that was kind of the story behind the story. That couldn't have been written before. I could, I just wouldn't have had this understanding. And so I think that there was in some way a wisdom I couldn't articulate for why the wait and why now.

• 16:58Ryan Holiday?

  And is this a struggle you guys are still in the middle of as a family? Or have you come out of the other side of it?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  So as of this conversation, I would say that Eve is back, fully back. I would say back psychologically, mentally, emotionally, physically, like the whole thing. And so we are cautiously optimistic that we're really on the other side of this now. But there were multiple, there were two, twice she returned to the original symptoms. And if we'd taken the harder, heavier, you know, getting in our own path way of dealing with this, we wouldn't have had, I think, even the energy, never mind the positive culture in the family, to hack the second time.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And I think that's one of the lessons of effortless is that, is that when you, when things really matter, when they are really essential, you've got to approach it not in a, let me burn everything I've got right now. You've got to be, live in such a way that you can be around for the next challenge, whatever it is, even when you don't know what it is. So there's great value in, in living in a way that is sustainable for whatever the thing around the corner is that you don't yet even have to find, whether it's a pandemic or whether it's some other thing that comes along.

• 18:23Ryan Holiday?

  And, and, and it, what, what was the sort of underlying cause that, that sort of sent you down this, this, this path?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Well, you mean in terms medically, is that what you mean?

• 18:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, she, she was suffering from, from brain inflammation. And that was really as, as close as we could ever define to a causation of it. So that we, we don't know what the actual driver of it was. And, but that was, you know,

• 18:54Speaker 01

  This is, this is what was going on.

• 18:57Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  There's only a few ways you can treat that and you have to find real, uh, specific expertise in the neurological field to, to find anyone who knows what to do. Uh, and, um, and, and fortunately we, we were able to, to find really only two neurologists that, that had any experience with this in children or in teenagers. But, but one of them just, just was able to identify really not, not even the causation. There's no test for this, uh, but just based on the symptoms, based on the experience, they say, okay, we're going to treat in order to diagnose. Uh, and, and this was kind of the, the key for, for getting out of it.

• 19:35Ryan Holiday?

  What I, what I imagine must have been so hard about that is, and, and I'm sorry to hear that you guys went through that is, you know, we, we can sort of wrap our heads around, you know, okay, uh, so and so has cancer or so and so, uh, you know, is dealing with this or that, where it's a very sort of specific defined thing. I've got to imagine the uncertainty and the contradiction and the, uh, the unknowing of it was, was what made that such a difficult maze to get through. And, and, and your point about sort of not sort of singularly focusing on, you know, and becoming consumed with fighting it, that's probably your, in some respects, the only

• 20:17Ryan Holiday?

  option that would have gotten you guys through because it's not like, uh, I don't know, fighting a war and you're like, this is the enemy. That's where all our energy is focused because there was no real center of gravity to focus on.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  I, that's absolutely right. And I think when you're dealing with uncertainty, which I think in some ways is probably the, the primary word of what's made the last year for people difficult is the uncertainty. You know, you can't plan a vacation. You can't plan where you're going to get together with people. You can't decide when are they going back to school? What, what, when do I invest in this next thing? And the pandemic's affected everyone in different ways and, and, and of course there's lots genuinely to be grateful for through the experience, but I think everybody lost something. And and one of the things that pretty across the board was was this, you know, this sense of certainty, the sense of what was going to happen around the corner.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And so in those environments, I mean, I think that this might be, there's many lessons you learn from, from, of course, any experience in life, and we've learned many lessons. But one lesson we've learned is that, you know, whatever uncertainty you're facing, whatever has happened to you, whatever hardship, whatever pain you're going through, whatever the uncertainties of the future is, all of this pales in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now. And in each this, it's like each moment we have that choice. Do I choose the heavier or the lighter path?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  You know, in a sense, that's sort of one of the main takeaways for this experience, but also for this new book, Effortless, is, is that we all have promises to keep. We all have miles to go before we sleep, as Robert Frost said. But but whatever we're going through, if we can just, in this moment, what's the lighter path? And I don't mean the the path of really the lazy path. It's not that. It's a virtuous, easier path, where we don't burden ourselves and make things more complicated than they need to be, where we we don't, for example, hold grudges. That's, holding grudges just just makes everything harder.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  It just consumes us. I was just talking with Tim Ferriss on his podcast, and I asked him, what percentage of a mental and emotional energy have you spent on grudges and anger and so on? And he said, well, he said, honestly, he just laughed at first. He said, between age of like fifteen and thirty, that period of my life, I literally probably spent sixty to seventy percent of my mental and emotional energy holding grudges and being angry. And and you just think about what the rebate is from that. And how, again, when these things, when life comes at you, when challenges come at you, you have that moment, do I want to carry this burden for one second, for one minute? Or do I want to carry it for like, for the rest of my life?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Uh, you you have a choice in each new moment, what to give attention to, what to hold on to, what to let go. And so I see, I see really, if if essentialism was about prioritization, I see effortless about simplification. But it starts by simplifying, I think, some of these uh, these emotional burdens and emotional complexities that we hold on to unnecessarily keep us in this suffering state instead of an effortless state.

• 23:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the Stoics talk about how everything has two handles and you choose which handle you're going to grab. There's sort of the good handle and the bad handle. Um, and and it it sounds like you have a lot of practice grabbing, grabbing the right handle. I I was thinking too, and I I've sort of struggled with this during the pandemic, but I've got to imagine it jives with your experience. You were talking about with your family, which is that, you know, essentialism as a philosophy, I think, as you write about, on the one hand, it's sort of figuring out, you know, what's important and working on what's important. Um, I I found during the pandemic that one of the things that happens when, you know, a lot of inessential things are eliminated, you know,

• 24:37Ryan Holiday?

  inessential work things, because suddenly you're not traveling.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:40Ryan Holiday?

  People can't get together for meetings, you know, certain things are shut down, so on and so forth, is that what is revealed is what's actually essential to you. So so, um, you know, I think, I think one of the things I discovered is just like that I can do what I do in less time. Right? And that and that when I, you know, am. Doing less, I'm at home more. And actually, that's where I want to be and where I get the most enjoyment. So it's this kind of thing where, and Marcus Rios talks about this in Meditations, about how when you do less, you get the double benefit of doing more better or things twice as good.

• 25:23Ryan Holiday?

  And I think one of the things that pandemic should have revealed is sort of what is essential in your life, because you've taken away so much of what is inessential.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  I think that the pandemic offered that particular opportunity. I've sometimes thought about it as the Great Reset. And the Great Reset was like an involuntary essentialism. We were all told to go, you know, collectively, go to your room, have a good think about this and don't come out until you're ready. And we've had, I would say, an unparalleled opportunity, certainly in our lifetimes. And maybe it will be the most important moment like this of our whole lifetimes. Certainly as a collective, to have literally half the world actually in shutdown, actually pausing all these things we thought before we have to do them.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Suddenly, well, we're not going to. Is it okay? Oh, actually, life goes on. Okay, some of these things weren't as pressing, as important as they seem to be, as necessary as they seem to be. I think that's the great advantage of the pandemic, even with all of its downsides. What I have also noticed, however, is that the pandemic seems to have revealed ways of working and assumptions that we have about working that have led people the world over to be either teetering right on the edge of exhaustion or fully burned out or even way past that.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  And I was just talking to CEO of a fairly major tech company, and he just said, look, everybody's burned out. That's where they are now. And so whereas in the past, this sort of wellness and a certain approach to life was a nice to have, he now sees it as we have to crack the code on this or like our whole organization can't function.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  You know, it's mission critical because of the ways that we've been working. And so, so it's interesting. I, I was just talking to, to a colleague of mine recently. He said, I always used to say, I would take a nap. If I had a, you know, if I had the, if I ever worked from home, I would take naps. He said, it's been a year I've worked from home. I haven't taken one nap. It, it illustrates that it's, it's that there's a mindset here that says you have to, if you're not exhausted, you're not doing enough. There's a mindset here that says if hard work produces results, then super duper crazy hard work must produce incredible results, 10x results.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  And, and, and that, you know, all of that to me is, is false and unhelpful. And it means that people here, a year into this experience, I, I think that people are feeling, even your most highly engaged people are now, are now exhausted. So there's this, there's this new opportunity that this gives us, a, a chance to say, is there a different way to do this? That was the chance we got with this situation with Eve and this neurological disease, undiagnosed and so on, is an opportunity to say, okay, well, given these challenges, is there a different way to see life? Is there a different way to get results? Is there a different way to operate?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I think everyone's having like what I would call the second great reset as we think about going back a little more to life as normal over these next few weeks, next few months, we hope. There's, there's a chance to say, well, what, well, we can't keep doing what we've been doing because we're already burned out. We've already used our deep resources. So now what can we do? And, and there are even beyond what we've talked about today, some very practical, specific things that people can do to, to start making today and tomorrow a little easier.

• 29:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I've talked about this before on the podcast. I sort of see the last year, among other things, as being sort of the largest forced lifestyle experiment in human history. And we're figuring out a bunch of stuff. We're testing a bunch of assumptions, not voluntarily, of course, but we're discovering some things are the way they are for a very good reason, and we need to get back to them as soon as possible. Let's say, I don't know, kids going to schools versus sort of remote schooling or everyone homeschooling. Hey, it turns out there's massive efficiencies, all the kids going to one school, being around each other, so on and so forth. And then we're also being exposed to how preposterously unnecessary a good chunk of the things that we used to

• 30:09Ryan Holiday?

  do were, whether it was, you know, random coffee meetings, or a lot of business travel, or even, you know, one of the things we did relatively early in the pandemic thing that was going to take for a long time was we bought a, like, a small camper trailer, and we've sort of gone on vacation, but we haven't had to go to the airport, we haven't had to stay in any hotels. You know, we've been able to, like, do stuff as a family, and, by the way, it's much cheaper. You know, it is this sort of strange experience of like, oh, we never would have tried this under ordinary circumstances, but we were forced to try it. And hey, there's, there's something good about it.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Well, I think that that takes me to sort of a practical part of the model of effortless. So there's, there's three concentric circles that make up the model that I researched and then wrote about. The first circle is what we've been talking about, effortless state. The second is effortless action. And the third we can get to. But the second one, effortless action, is really just about simplification around execution. It's just all the things that we think we have to do, all the overthinking, all the extra steps we've added, all the bells and whistles we've joined and then said, oh, well, that's all just part of the process. And, and the people, like, the, the great simplifiers, you know, I'm thinking

• 31:28Speaker 01

  business titans like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos at various stages of Amazon's development, really took a different approach to simplification. What, what they seem to do is start with zero, rather than...

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Start with the current complexity and reduce each step in the process, which would be one way to do simplification. They're just going like, let's just start from zero, right? Steve Jobs' example, they bought the company that eventually went on to create I D V D software for the Mac. Okay, when they bought that company, DVD burning was like, no one was doing it unless you were a professional in the industry. These are $60,000 machines and the handbook to learn how to use it is 5,000 pages long.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Okay, so they get purchased by Apple. They have a few weeks to prepare for a meeting with Steve, and they know this has to be simpler. And so they start to simplify their product and they simplify their, you know, let's remove this feature, that feature, and so on. And they're very proud of what they've done because again, they're going from 5,000 pages down to the simpler thing and they're ready to show it. Steve walks in, he says, listen, this is what we're doing. We need an app that, it's got two options. You just drag, drop there, there's one button says burn. That's the app we're going to build. I want you to make that happen. He said in that moment, first of all, he felt completely embarrassed, like he didn't want to show any of his slides, any of the preparation.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  They were like, no way we're going to share that now. But secondly, the positive thing is he learned that principle of like, start with zero. They'd started with 5,000 pages, reducing it down. He started with nothing. How do we do it in one step? And we could go through all of the illustrations, the same idea, but deep simplifications always starts with zero. And again, the pandemic offers that opportunity. So in whatever you're trying to do, you go back to nothing and you say, what's the easiest way we can do this? Our family decided we'd go on a vacation, just, you know, within our bubble seats and family members. We would normally have a whole series of steps for what to do for that. We said, okay, well, we're going to apply it, start from zero.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Well, what are the minimum things we would need? If we just had nothing and we had to go, what would we really need? And we suddenly were like, we hardly need to do anything. We really just need to be physically in the car and go. Maybe we just packed just each of us just a few things for the weekend. And it just removed what would normally be quite a burdensome process with four children, whole family going on a trip. It was like we just, we just did it and it was, it was gone. Was it as perfect? Uh, in, in one sense, no, it didn't need to be. That's the power of start with zero.

• 34:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you know, I, I think you have this great line in the book where you're talking about how people seem to be doing twice as much work and getting half the results or half as effective. I've had this weird experience in the pandemic where I, I feel like I'm actually working half as much and I'm getting twice as much done. Like because of the constraints of no childcare, really, uh, you know, wanting to give my wife a break, having, you know, sort of less traffic, you know, all the, all, so many things went away that I found that, and, and so, but also so much stuff I needed to get done. And I'm, I've almost feel a little bit of nostalgia for where we were exactly this time last year because there was this sort of overwhelming clarity of what could not happen.

• 35:12Ryan Holiday?

  That, that, that my life got sort of radically simpler. And I, I had, you know, from a, from a productivity standpoint and an immensely successful, you know, last 12 months where I finished a book, I did a kid's book, I started another project. Because everything was so radically simplified, uh, you know, I, it's been great. And I think when people hear this phrase, effortlessness or effortless, they, they think not doing anything. It's actually what, when you really see like a master at work or someone who's, who's in a zone, it's that they're only doing the few essential things and they're doing them so well that it almost appears like no effort is being expended, but in fact, just the, just the right effort.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  I just had Oprah's right-hand person for years and years on the, on the Oprah Show, uh, on, on, on the What's Central podcast and, and she said she didn't know about the new book and.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  And she just said spontaneously, she was talking, she said, you know, the last year of the Oprah show, year twenty five, she said, it was, it was just in flow, it was with ease, it was effortless. She literally used all of those. And then I was like, okay, well, we're throwing out all the questions I was gonna ask you, because like, this is where my head is so at. Sure. And, and that's, the way, the whole conversation was just a riff on that, because people who have experienced it, know it's possible, know it's not just some kind of crazy thing, know it's not just a laziness, it is a different way of doing. And, and it just, I think, is timely right now, because a lot of people are not like what you just

• 36:55Speaker 01

  described. A lot of people have not had the experience you've just described. They, they have achieved what they've achieved over the last year through grinding effort. And, and, and it's come at a great cost to them. And so, so I, I mean, I definitely relate to what you're saying. I, I, I personally, other than for the insensitivity of it, would say very similar things about the last year. I've said many times to my children, this, we are living the good old days, right now. You know, this is it. This, this time of being together, this, yes, involuntary, but this going on walks together, this, these memories, these being together, and, and also productively. I mean, that's when this,

• 37:37Speaker 01

  I mean, honestly, the, every day I worked on this book, I used to laugh, like, what was your plan, Greg? You know, like, what, how were you gonna get this done by the deadline? Without the, without the, you know, the, the disruption and the, the forced, the forcing functions that were required. So I, I completely agree. Part of effortlessness is focusing on what is just essential, and doing the things that you're built to do and are supposed to do. But I think it's also, you know, I've learned things about, for example, pacing. I've learned that, that if I, if I, well, I'm interested about your view on this. Every

• 38:17Speaker 01

  writer has a different experience, but I was, I, if I wrote two hours a day, I was highly productive for those two hours. I could get a lot done. If I wrote three hours a day, I would still be able to produce more in three hours than two hours, but there's no question I was starting to experience diminishing returns in that third hour. And if I went to four, five, six, seven, whatever, longer, I experienced even negative returns where I started messing with the manuscript in such a way that it would make the whole thing worse than if I stopped. And, and that to me is an example of being aware that there is a sort of sweet spot, an effortless way of executing. And the actionable thing there for me beyond writing, right?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Not everyone's trying to write a book,

• 39:05Speaker 01

  but is having upper bounds to the work that you do. So that you say, okay, if you want to do something great, something big, something that would otherwise seem overwhelming to you. If you can break it down and say, yes, there's a minimum bound. Okay, I'm not going to write less than 500 words, but I'm not going to write more than a thousand. Or I'm going to write, in my case, not more than two hours, but I'm not going to write more than four hours. It helps you to be able to sustain the pace of work over a longer period of time. I just done it again on another project that there was a, you know, I could have forced it in three months, but instead did it steadily, had an upper bound. I couldn't read more than 20 references that I was trying to do.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  It was actually Scriptural Pursuit Wisdom Literature I was trying to read. And there was 2,400 references. It was big, but I really felt like I was supposed to do it. And I just said, okay, no more than 20 per day. That reduced the input to being like a 20 minute exercise each day and no more. So even when I was, had, had a lot of other things going on, I still said, okay, I can do this. I'll still do it. I'll be done at 20, even when I feel like doing 50. It meant that the whole thing just felt smooth and effortless. And I got to the end, completed it within the six month target. And I just had what, again, it was genuinely productive, insightful, helpful, enjoyable, effortless.

• 40:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think you have to figure out, and this requires some self-awareness, some ability to sort of zoom out and watch your own output. But you have to, you have to figure out where the point of diminishing returns are. And it's at that point that you switch, right? So in the same way that you kind of delegate things that you're not very good at to other people, you have to realize you kind of have different versions of yourself. And so. You know, the Ryan who's a writer at from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. is performing at a certain level. And then the Ryan who comes after from 11 to 12:30.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  He's not good.

• 41:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's not as good. And so I don't hire that person. I stop and I go and then so from 11 to 12:30, that's Ryan who's recording a podcast or Ryan who's eating lunch or, you know, Ryan who's doing my phone calls. I switch tasks when I hit that point of diminishing returns rather than sort of as you're talking about, which is this idea of like gutting it out. Like, look, if there was a gun to my head or I had to finish it by a certain date or, you know, I wouldn't get paid, you know, if there was some actual pressing reason, of course, you know, you can gut it out long enough and get where you need to go. But if you don't, then and you're trying to get to this effortless place that you're

• 41:50Ryan Holiday?

  talking about, you have to switch at those points of diminishing returns and you have to be invested in it for a long enough timeline that you get the benefit of that switching, you know? And so for me, it's not just, am I getting this stuff done? But I, but, you know, having the sense that you're in this for the long haul, that you're about sustainability, you realize like, hey, if I want to do this again and again and again, I can't afford to be like, you can't afford to say push through an injury to use a sports metaphor.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:24Ryan Holiday?

  Because you're going to hurt yourself and then be out longer than you would be taking yourself out of the game because your quad is sore.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's it. And so much, so, I mean, basically, all progress is not created equal. Some comes at a higher price than others and still produces less for the, so your costs are going up, your results are going down. I love what you just said about like, actually, well, I wouldn't hire the second version of me to do this and I'd fire the third version, right? Like that version.

• 42:55Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Making it worse. And I think just recognizing that you can apply it to a lot of different areas, right? A salesperson can say, Uh, well, never less than five calls a day, but an upper bound, never more than ten calls a day. Uh, you know, you you could say, well, I'm gonna call my family every week. This is true for me, actually, you know, you say never less than five minutes. Actually, I normally say, I I know it's more than that, it's my extended family. But also you could say, well, never more than an hour. And I can't go beyond that. But but that's the problem is when you go beyond it, it starts to be unsustainable for for for the different people involved. And you don't get a habit going with it. We've managed to get to the point where it's it's relatively routine now. And so we pretty much haven't missed a week in two or three years with my extended family living all over the world.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  And and so that's, you know, but but you you can do it for, you you wanna cr- complete some new your online class, you say, okay, never less than signing into the class every day. You just sign in, that's your minimum. But you also have an upper bound, you know, never more than fifty minutes taking one practice test each day. If you can find, obviously, you do need self knowledge, as you say, to know what that right bound is, what what feels right and achievable and doable. But it helps you to avoid the sort of hype cycle where people get excited for one moment, I'm gonna write a book, I'm going to, I'm gonna call my family. And they just go so big right at the beginning that it's almost over before it's begun. I'm gonna write a journal. Yes, they the first day one, they write three pages.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Uh, they write a veritable essay, but by day two, they're like, oh, I don't have the two hours, I just don't have the time. So now it's over before it's begun, much better. Say, okay, I mean, journal, literally for me, okay, I said, I'm not gonna write less than one sentence, not more than write five sentences until I've got this down as a as a I never miss it habit. And that's like ten years ago. And and and, I mean, I've got lots of failure stories, but that has been a success story where I just don't miss a day now. And and it started with having an upper bound. It, you know, if you want to go for the long run, you need to make it more sustainable and find what I would just describe as like this effortless pace.

• 45:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I forget where I got it from, but someone said, sort of, never underestimate the power of sort of moderate, you know, moderate gains day to day, or sort of, you know, a string of average days. Like, I think people think books, or movies, or, you know, these projects are the results of these sort of fits of inspiration, or genius, these sprints. When I actually found it's the opposite. It's a lot of mundane, you know, if you make the thing 1% better every day, for an extended period of time, it gets good pretty quickly. But that's hard for people to do. I think, especially because we sort of, we sort of,

• 45:48Ryan Holiday?

  maybe we think in terms of cinematic images, or stories, like, I don't think I've ever taken, I've never pulled an all-nighter in my entire life. Not a working one. I mean, I've been up all night, but I've never, I've never had to work all night. I don't think, if I had, anything that would have been produced there would be particularly impressive. And the few times I've gotten really upset with people who've worked for me, is when I've found out that like, you know, I'll be like, hey, where's this thing, or something, they'll be like, you know, it's late, but, you know, I was up all night, you know, working on it. And I actually get upset, because, to me, this is such a, it's like, wait, why did I get you the material you needed for this project, two weeks ago, if it was going

• 46:32Ryan Holiday?

  to result in you spending all night, on a Friday, finishing it? Like, it means I wasted my time, you wasted your time, you didn't, you turned in an inferior quality thing, because you're sleep deprived, and, and you're not happy. Like, nobody's happy at a job, where you have to pull all-nighters. So I think, I often see the sort of heroic stories that people have about their work ethics, as, as really failures of systems, and failures of discipline. This heroic stuff is seriously a problem.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  When you, when you celebrate in media and in just even inside of companies, I mean, I have worked with the companies that literally have the heroics awards and they're called heroics awards and it's for the person who basically pulls the almitism and pulls in, oh, we had this client, but they spent four days flying over this and they saved the, and that's what they're celebrating. And it's like, well, that's fine. If that's the culture you want, if that's who you want working for you, if you want people who aren't actually thinking about, you know, great results over a long period of time, then keep rewarding that. But I think it tells a really false story because what it implies is that that's

• 47:47Speaker 01

  the only way to produce great results. And, and, and I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that that is the predominant way to achieve great results. And, and so one of the heroic stories that I like because it teaches exactly the opposite message is this, you know, the race to the poles. It's been covered by other people, but I still just love the story. This is, this is, you know, Amundsen, the last Viking. This is, this is, you know, this, this is the midst of the great age of exploration, right? It's the early years of the 20th century and the most sought after goal in the whole world is to reach the South Pole. So it's like the, the space race of its era. And like,

• 48:30Speaker 01

  no one's ever done it in all of human history, right? Not by Pythias, the first polar explorer, not by the Vikings in a thousand years of, of, of traveling the world, not by the Royal Navy at all. Like, it's never been done. And everyone is going like, this is the big achievement. If you want your name in the history books, this is how you're going to do it. You've got Amundsen, the last Viking from Norway. You've got Captain Scott from Great Britain, and they're both setting off almost the identical day to try and race against each other to get there. Okay. How do they approach it? It's so, it's such a great story because you've got Captain Scott with all of his heroic thinking. And on

• 49:09Speaker 01

  the good days, what they do is they push through with like, just, just crazy overpowering through. They'll go 50 miles on a day of good weather. As soon as they get bad weather, they're like hunkered down in their tent. One, because they're exhausted from the big push. A- a- and, and so, you know, the, the bad weather seems, seems more impossible for them to continue on. Uh, and so they just sit there and complain. He writes in his journal, we have the worst weather. None of our, my predecessors have ever dealt with weather like this. Actually, he had slightly better weather than any of his predecessors, but he didn't feel that at all. He's seeing what's not going right and so on. The other team meanwhile, uh, Amundsen, he says fifteen miles.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Good days, fifteen miles, bad day, fifty miles. That's the deal. And so it meant that, like, within a certain range, right? If it was truly blizzards, they would maybe not, not go. But basically, even on bad weather days, they do it. He wrote in his journal, well, maybe not fifteen, but thirteen point five miles today. You know, we, we had a good day. Uh, on, on a beautiful weather, they could go fifty, they could go certainly thirty, no, still fifteen. So the plot thickens right as they're getting close to their goal. They are within forty-five miles of reaching the South Pole. They don't know where that, where, where Captain Scott and his team are. So they, they, they could be uh, one mile behind them, one mile ahead of them. They don't know.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  So the competitive juices dr- could draw out your dominant assumption of what to do in this moment. Do you, do you power through or do you trust the pace, the pace, the pace? Well, even there with forty-five miles left, even with perfect weather, the best weather of their trip, they could do it in one big push. He still insists, we're gonna do the fifteen miles. And he, he averages on that three, takes him three more days for their team to get to the South Pole. They still maintain the pace within a, a, a basic range. They averaged that entire journey i- is, is fifteen point five miles per day. Uh, and, and the, the hardly, hardly any uh, ups and downs on that based on weather. Well, he beats the other team by thirty days.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  They make it out alive and his biographer says of this. He said, they achieved the goal, and this is his phrase, it's breathtaking when I read it. He said, without particular effort. Even as I say that right now, I just think it's just bonkers. Like, how is it possible that the description of the thing that had never been done before, of the thing that had beaten all the great explorers before them, was done without particular effort? And meanwhile, Captain Scott, with all his heroics, arrives, of course, thirty-plus days late, demoralized, and the people are totally exhausted and burned out to such a

• 52:04Speaker 01

  degree that on their way home, they can just barely, can barely make any progress, and they actually die on the way home, all of them, the whole team. The only reason we know about their stories is that they wrote about them in their journals on the way home. So, that's the difference. One team succeeds and incredibly successful, make it home alive, fifteen miles a day. The other team goes for heroics, they're going huge and back and forth and so on, and, and, and they all die on the way home. I mean, that, and fail in their goal. This is, this is, you know, this is, to me, a better showing of what most of the heroics actually does for people. Most of the all-nighters do not produce great results.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  I, I, I'm completely with you here, that, that the, that the all-nighters and the powering through and the forcing it is, is just false economy. It's false economy.

• 53:01Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and some of the, the sports teams that I've spent time around, there's this sort of weird dichotomy that sort of illustrates what you're talking about. On the one hand, you know, we, we get this understanding, we have this impression that, that athletes are like the hardest-working people in the world, that they're, they're lifting weights all the time, that they, they have these grinding schedules of working so hard. Actually, you know, they're napping and they're resting and the practices are, are, are pretty, pretty short and they spend a lot of time at home, a lot of time sort of lounging around, because they, especially lately, have come to understand, you know, the, the importance of rest, Tom Brady being one of the, the biggest examples of this. He basically lifts like no weights, he does some light resistance training, but part of the reason he's still playing is because...

• 53:47Ryan Holiday?

  You know, he's figured out sort of a sustainable way to stay in shape and focuses so much on recovery. So you have this idea that athletes must be, if you're intense about whatever you do, trading stocks or selling insurance, you go, oh, the pressure at that level must be intense. And it turns out that it's not. But then the really weird part that I've had a lot of conversations about that I remain fascinated with, then you talk to these coaches and they're like, oh yeah, we got here at 4am this morning and will probably leave, you know, around 11 or 12 at night. And I remember I interviewed a sports reporter not long ago and she was saying, I asked her, I was like, okay, here's

• 54:30Ryan Holiday?

  the situation. All the coaches unionize and just like the players have certain limits of like how many OTAs they can do in the summer, how many practices are allowed, they put in place some sort of restrictions that say, you know, coaches have to work banker's hours. Like, coaches can only work from nine to five and you're not allowed to be at the facility, you're not allowed to draw up plays at home, you can only work from nine to five. And I said, would you notice a difference on the field in any way? And she was like, absolutely not. It would be indistinguishable. The actual product that the fans see would be indistinguishable. And so there's, it's this interesting thing in sports where you

• 55:11Ryan Holiday?

  have some people that have sort of really begun to understand rest and effortlessness as you're talking about and essentialism. And then the people who are actually supposed to, ironically supposed to do this, you know, you can coach till you drop dead, they are operating on the least sustainable version of the, you know, of doing the job. It's a very strange industry.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Everything you're saying relates to me. I just talked to an owner, a manager, excuse me, of an NFL team. And I just asked him this. I said, of all the speeches that you have either given yourself or heard other people give, when they say, hey, we need to get better results, and how are we going to do this? How often has it been, we've got to work harder, we've got to power through, we've got to, you know, stress more, we've got to... Versus, let's find an easier path to achieving this. And he's like, he laughs, he's like, literally, it's a hundred percent to zero. A hundred percent of the first, zero to the second. And, and there's just a madness to it, truly. And, and this idea, I love this phrase, bankers' hours. Because even bankers, it's completely unproductive to be doing it this way.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  There's no justification for doing bankers' hours in banking. There's, there's, there's no justification for doing it in medicine, where you say, well, yes, but through these certain years, as we, you know, the, the last couple of years before you become a physician, you've got to do the, the eighty, ninety, hundred hours, you just have to do that. Well, there's no evidence to support that that produces better outcomes. There's a lot of evidence to support it producing worse outcomes. And, and it's just, it's psychology and it's presumption and it's holding on to old assumptions about how, what produces top performance. And, and I really do think it's back to these sort of heroics and which stories you tell. And so these become greater in our minds and a sense of what is, and then you, it

• 57:04Speaker 01

  becomes the culture and so you, that everyone you saw did it and, and you did it yourself. So you pass it on to other people, they need to do it. And, and, and when I hear people talk about this, it's like, this is not science, they're not, they're not quoting data, they're not quoting, quoting evidence, they're just quoting assumptions. Yeah, no pain, no gain. Well, I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's one way to go, that's an idea. Uh, there's some evidence to support that approach, but there's a lot of evidence to support, uh, how did, uh, John, uh, John Acuff, uh, just, uh, just came up with a new book called, uh, Soundtracks, I love this book. And, uh, and he says in it, one of, one of his ideas, he said, he said, light and easy.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  He said, normally every, he said, he said, he said, my wife came to me and she said, listen, the two years that you write a book, you're like the worst to be around. Yeah, my wife says the same thing. Then the two years after you write the book and you're marketing it, you're the worst to be around.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  This is like, you know, that's his life. So, so he chooses a new soundtrack instead of, I mean, you've heard these things, right? All you have to do if you want to be a writer is, is, is, is, is, you know, how's the phrase go is just pull up to a typewriter, plug it in and bleed, you know? It's like, it's like the assumption it has to be hard, it has to be miserable. Well, that's a soundtrack, he says, we're overplaying. He chose a new soundtrack for this last book and he called it Light and Easy, Light and Easy. And he had all these symbols, like he got, you know, those shoes that Nike put out for the, for passing the two-hour marathon, like breaking the two-hour marathon miracle. Anyway, he bought those shoes and he only wears

• 58:50Speaker 01

  them when he writes and it's just as a symbol to remember, this is light and easy. You don't have to do it the blood, sweat and tears approach. You can do it the light and easy approach. I love the blood, sweat and tears speech that Churchill gave in the middle of the Second World War when bombs are dropping on London. If you're in that situation, you can preach, blood, sweat and tears, we'll fight them on the beaches, we will never give up, we will never surrender. If that's your situation, by all means, apply that principle, but don't apply that principle to writing a book in peacetime on your own agenda because you want to do it. One thing doesn't meet the other. If you're a professional sports player, you don't have

• 59:34Speaker 01

  to kill yourself, blood, sweat and tears, save the world from Nazi Germany. That's not your situation. It's not the right metaphor.

• 59:42Ryan Holiday?

  But what's so, but what's so great about that, and I tell the story of Churchill in my book on stillness, is that, you know, during the Second World War, Churchill's taking naps every day, is what I mean, when he's an old man. But he, his wife knits him, his wife knits him this suit that he wears that he can nap in without getting wrinkled, you know, like, like he would, there was never a person, like, I think what is actually a great example of Churchill, and he's a controversial figure for, for many reasons, but Churchill's a great example of someone who accomplished. A whole hell of a lot who is as ambitious and as driven and as powerful as they come.

• 1:00:21Ryan Holiday?

  And what you don't get a sense of in Churchill that's common in so many of us who are far less busy and far less accomplishment is you don't get that sense of burnout. You don't get that sense of like anger and resentment and frustration. It wasn't coming from a white knuckled place. It was coming from a place of of ease almost and an effortlessness. Again, as you talk about, and and I think that's why he's such a memorable figure is that, you know, he it it it didn't seem like it sucked the life out of him to do all the things that he did.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  And and and I I mean, I love this and and maybe one of the connection points here is that he knew of his, he seemed to have known of his destiny. I I came across this once and and I don't have it in my fingertips right now, but he came across at 16, he talked to one of his classmates at Harrow and he said, Look, you might think I'm crazy about this, but I I believe that I will be called upon to save London and the world from an impending doom that we don't know what it is yet. Anyway, he wrote in some specific detail about about what he believed was coming. And it's in a it's written up in a book about his Churchill's destiny. And so he had this sense of mission coming. And I wonder whether, I don't know, maybe it was a temperament thing.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  I'm going maybe a step too far here, but I wonder whether he recognized this like, are you going to have to find a way to to go through life in a in a in a in a sense of ease so that you can do the impossible? And and that's what I love. We're getting to sort of crescendoing in the conversation together is that this idea of Of of effortlessness, of being at ease, isn't the lazy part. It's the path to achieve the impossible. If something is impossible right now, you've got to find an easier way to do it. If something is going to be incredibly challenging down the path, then you need to prepare by not

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  being so burned out under normal circumstances, you can't hack what the unexpected is around the corner. You've got to find a way of being in a in a good and healthy state, even when the emergencies are going on all around you. So it's not that you want to be in a state of ease and find an effortless path because you don't want to achieve things. The the idea is that you can achieve far, far more and still do it without burning out. That's the value proposition that's so exciting to me.

• 1:02:56Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think I think that's right. And I think that's why the book's important. And and I guess I would add to that. Let's say, let's say that that burning yourself out and grinding yourself down to the bone and white knuckling it was marginally more effective or more efficient. The problem with that is what good is the success? What good are the accomplishments if you're miserable? If it destroys your quality of life? Or, and this goes to sort of rabbit in the hare sort of story you were kind of telling earlier, which is like, would you rather be 10% more efficient, but have 10 or 15 years cut off from your career, cut off from your life?

• 1:03:38Ryan Holiday?

  That, you know, I very much relate to what you're talking about with John Acuff, where, you know, my my wife said something similar to me about, you know, sort of not being super fun to be around as I'm writing a book. Well, I and I would like to stay married and I would like to continue writing books. So it it it became imperative for me to figure out a way to do this in a healthy, balanced way for two reasons. One, so I could continue doing it. And two, that that the success wouldn't sort of turn to ashes in my mouth. It wouldn't be a Pyrrhic victory where where you get what you wanted, but it so ruins your quality of life or your health or your. Your relationships that you know, you get to the success and you look around and

• 1:04:19Ryan Holiday?

  there's nobody and nothing and you're sort of going, well, well, that doesn't make much sense.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yes, as Arianna Huffington put it, you success is supposed to feel better than this.

• 1:04:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, totally.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  When she wakes up in a pool of blood and she's hit her head after passing out and, and she goes to the doctor, I think probably slightly hoping there was something really wrong with her, you know, and he's like, well, you know, the good news and bad news is that all that's going on is you're, you're exhausted. That's, that's, that's, yeah, that's good news, but it's also bad news. You're just choosing this. You're just choosing this way of living, this way of doing it. And it sent her down this whole path that she's been on to try and articulate that they're well, first to discover and then to advocate for a different way of being successful. And I think that's at the very heart of this is that, is that I found myself in a, in a position, mostly because of what

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  I just said about with, with Eve and the family and, and, and the health things, but also just a certain way of doing life where I was focused on the essentials. I'd never been more selective. I wasn't writing the next book, as I already mentioned. I, I, I put on hiatus, the class I co-designed at Stanford. I'm not building a workshop business as would be sort of maybe normally expected or, I mean, I'm saying no, I'm being highly selective. I'm doing the things that I think are essential, but I still found myself going, yeah, but it's still too much. And in hindsight, what I realized is not enough just to do the right things. You've got to do them in the right way. And, you know, I was, I think

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  I felt somewhat like the weightlifter who's lifting everything with their back, you know, the, the swimmer who hasn't learned to breathe properly, the baker who is needing everything by hand. Like in all cases, you may be doing the right thing, but you aren't doing it in the right way yet. And, and so that's another way of kind of contrasting essentialism. It's doing the right things effortless. You've got to do it in the right way. And that, that is as important as the right thing. Because if you do the right thing in the wrong way, you still end up with results that don't look like the ones you want. Your health got sacrificed, Arianna Huffington, that your family gets sacrificed.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  I won't say names, but we got plenty of examples.

• 1:06:44Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  You know, you got what you wanted, but it cost much more than you realized. And that's doing it, that's taking the exhausting part, the effortful part. And there is a different, there is a different path, there is a different way. And I just feel a sense of mission to share it with people because I think there's a lot of people in pain right now because they're not doing it in the right way.

• 1:07:14Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'm very glad you did, and it's always fun to talk, and we'll catch up soon.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Ryan.

• 1:07:25Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference, and of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.