GREG MCKEOWN | Essentialism Explained: How To Focus On What Matters | Modern Wisdom Podcast 175

Greg McKeown is a public speaker, leadership & business strategist and New York Times Bestselling Author. Do you feel busy but not productive? Like you're stretched too thin? Like other people's agendas are hijacking your day? Success breeds options & opportunities, which often undermines the things that lead to success in the first place. Today Greg teaches us the art of Essentialism; how not to fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more, how to avoid the trivial many and instead focus our attention onto the vital few. This podcast could change your life, don't miss it. Sponsor: Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter promo code MODERNWISDOM for 85% off and 3 Months Free) Extra Stuff: Buy Essentialism - https://amzn.to/3bSd8jy Check out Greg's website - https://gregmckeown.com/ Subscribe to Greg's Podcast - https://link.chtbl.com/zXR5Fdfq Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #essentialism #gregmckeown #mindset - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Greg McKeown?

  I was working with high performing executives in Silicon Valley and noticed predictable pattern, which is that in the early days, these companies, they were really focused, that led to success, that success bred it options and opportunities, which if you're not careful, can undermine the things that led to success in the first place. You fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more. You're just doing too many things, and they may all be good things, but just too many different things. And so you start to plateau in your progress or fail altogether. As I've studied this, I find that almost universally, people feel stretched too thin at work or at home, busy but not productive, feel like their day's being hijacked by other people's agenda for them. And this is, this is like the problem essentialism is seeking to address or solve.

• 0:49Chris Williamson?

  Greg McKeown, how are you, my friend?

• 0:52Greg McKeown?

  I'm wonderful. Nice to be with you.

• 0:54Chris Williamson?

  Nice to be with you as well. Could we have dressed any more polar opposite? You've got this beautiful suit on lovely press suit with a white shirt. And I am in a vest because it's the first hot day of May in Newcastle.

• 1:07Greg McKeown?

  Listen, that's what it is. That's the difference is that I'm, I'm in California. So I've got no, no reason to celebrate. Well, I should celebrate, but this, you know, beautiful weather, that's, that's explains it.

• 1:19Chris Williamson?

  It's a rarity, you know, and you know, anybody, all these people on the internet, I'm allowed to wear a vest if I want to wear a vest to podcast with Greg McKeown, you know, if there was an essentialist outfit for today, this, this would be, this would be it. So essentialism is the word of the day. That's what we're going to be talking about today. And I, I fear that I might be the arch nemesis of an essentialist, or at least I was for, for quite a long time. So

• 1:49Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. Okay. Why do you say that?

• 1:51Chris Williamson?

  Um, so I have a very high desire for novelty. I love new things. One of my five core values is adventure, which also pulls me toward that. And another one is curiosity, which pulls me toward that. Um, I tend to work more than I need to. I enjoy work. I enjoy being busy, enjoy doing things. And over time, that has led to me adding an awful lot on my plate. And presuming that

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  I will just be able to upregulate my productivity or downregulate my sleep to slot in these extra things. And to the audience at home, you will know this feeling, right? You will see from the front row seat, you will watch the slippage of your own terrible unproductive, unproductiveness, right? You'll see the inefficiencies in your system firsthand. And you think, well, I can add that that project in and all that will happen is I'll just have to get rid of those inefficiencies. And you just presume that like a, I don't know, like, like a system that the oil will be greased sufficiently more to allow it to go in. And I learned, I learned the hard way over a career of 13 years of running

• 3:06Chris Williamson?

  club nights and being a DJ and being a model and being a podcaster and doing a coaching and being a fitness and all this sort of stuff. I realized that you can't, you can't

• 3:16Greg McKeown?

  You can't do it all.

• 3:17Chris Williamson?

  No. Who knew? Well, I mean, you knew, actually, which is, which is the question. So why, why don't you give us a bit of a background, essentialism and sort of what you do in your, your approach to this?

• 3:28Greg McKeown?

  Look, I was working with high performing executives in Silicon Valley and noticed a predictable pattern, which is that in the early days, these companies, they were really focused that led to success, that success bred it options and opportunities, which, if you're not careful, can undermine the things that led to success in the first place. You fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more. So you're just doing too many things and they may all be good things, but just too many different things get pulled a million different directions. And so you start to plateau in your progress or fail altogether. And as it turns out, this is a pattern that a lot of people, we just said, just describes

• 4:07Greg McKeown?

  it a little bit, feel the same thing. So as I've studied this, I find that almost universally, people will feel stretched too thin at work or at home, busy, but not productive, feel like their day is being hijacked by other people's agenda for them. So this is, this is like the problem that essentialism is seeking to, to address or solve.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Can you pronounce that German word for me, please?

• 4:36Greg McKeown?

  Which German word?

• 4:40Greg McKeown?

  Less but better, yeah, typically you just do the English, less but better.

• 4:44Chris Williamson?

  I wondered if you, I wondered if, because it's quite an ugly word, less but better.

• 4:49Greg McKeown?

  Hold on, hold on, we're gonna find it here now, we're gonna, we're gonna do this.

• 4:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 4:52Greg McKeown?

  Right. Do you know what page it's on?

• 4:54Chris Williamson?

  I, I, I, no, sorry, I'm kindling as well, so on a, uh.

• 4:58Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, you have, you have no idea. I love that you put that on me.

• 5:01Chris Williamson?

  I, look, Greg, I can't, well, I know for a fact that I can't pronounce that German word. And I thought, do you know what it is? See if Greg, see if Greg can pronounce it, you know?

• 5:10Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, and then you put, put it all on me and I can't even find it. It's, uh, it, here's, here's where it is while we're trying to find it. It's, um, it comes from, Dieter Rams is the one that at least is credited with having made this idea. And, uh, and, and he, he's, he's the, I can't find it now.

• 5:27Chris Williamson?

  It's fine, it doesn't matter. We couldn't, we, we're not gonna be able to pronounce it in any case. Even if we do, we'll just garble the words and.

• 5:33Greg McKeown?

  Probably should just move on.

• 5:37Greg McKeown?

  It, it, it's, uh, he's, he's this amazing designer who was the first person to see, one of the first people to see how rubbish it was, the way that we were designing a whole bunch of furniture. So he's working over at Braun and he has this insight, he says, um, I mean, what, it doesn't give an example of this. At the time, if you want to buy a record player, the first record players did not look like the record players that, you know, that if you think of that right now, you know what that looks like. They didn't look like that. They looked like massive pieces of furniture. You know, because it, it takes a while for people to lose the old in any design. And so, and so as soon as you're creating record players, they say, well, it has to look like a piece of furniture.

• 6:22Greg McKeown?

  It has to look like a closet, sort of thing. And so he was the one that said, no, hold on. We get rid of the closet, we'll just have the record player. And at first, when he designed that, people, actually, they were a little hesitant about it. They thought, well, this is, this is, they described it as like a glass coffin, like Snow White's coffin or something. It was so pristine and simple and clear. But what's interesting is that forever afterwards, every design of every record player looked like his. Because he'd stripped away all the non-essential stuff and he'd said, this is, this is how it needs to be. And he did that for many, many products over 35 years. He summarized everything he'd learned into those three words, less but better.

• 7:02Chris Williamson?

  I love less but better. It is, it is phenomenal. So people that are listening, and we've mentioned essentialism, we've said less but better in this chaotic. How can people self diagnose if they're a non-essentialist?

• 7:16Greg McKeown?

  Look, the, the, the questions I already put, I think are the simplest questions, right? Like, have you ever found yourself busy but not productive? Yes or no? Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin at work? Or at home or both? You know, have you ever felt like your day is being hijacked by other people's agenda for you? Are you trying to do too many things and ending up doing them averagely well? Have you ever found yourself making just a millimeter progress in many, many different directions? Someone who says yes to any of the above,

• 7:58Greg McKeown?

  especially if you say yes to all of the above, yeah, pretty good chance. You know, you're operating more as a non-essentialist than an essentialist currently. I mean, the good news about all of this is that it's, people are completely redeemable. This is, the reason that people are non-essentialists, there's a few, but the primary reason is because they didn't know they were choosing that. They didn't know there was an alternative. They didn't wake up in the morning, I just want to be a non-essentialist. I just want to do too many things in too many different directions. They just, they just woke, they just lived in a world that happens to emphasize that. Happens to pursue too many different things and they just went along with everybody

• 8:43Greg McKeown?

  else. And, and so the awakening is where you say, oh, hold on, there are a group of people who aren't operating like that. And that the, the results they get are extraordinary. They're able to produce far, far better results at a lower stress level. So they can break through to a higher point of contribution and enjoy the process at the same time. These are the essentialists. And so, uh, and so learning that is a, is, is a big moment. It's a big change in mindset. And therefore you can change your life quite quickly afterwards.

• 9:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think there's, there's two, uh, main realizations I had when I was reflecting on that particular area of your work. And one of them was, um, to me, busyness was inbuilt into life. And you're right, I didn't know that there was an alternative. I was like, well, this is just what life is, you know?

• 9:35Greg McKeown?

  Yes.

• 9:35Chris Williamson?

  Life is just, life just happens to go a million miles an hour, uh, in, in, in across the galaxy. And I need to-

• 9:42Greg McKeown?

  It's the default setting.

• 9:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what, that's what you, your entry level. Uh, and the other, the other thing was, um, it gave me, especially as a younger businessman, it gave me a, a sense of accomplishment, you know? It made me feel important. It made me feel like I was doing things. Um, because, and it was impressive, low key, it was impressive for me to, so for people to say, what do you do? And for me to have a laundry list and be like, so what do you do? Well, it's an interesting question, actually. I hope you've got about 10 minutes. So I do the modeling, I do the podcast, I've been on reality TV and I do this thing and I do that thing and I do, you know, you've got this big list. So those

• 10:27Chris Williamson?

  are the two things. I was like, I didn't know there was an alternative. And, uh, it made me feel important and, and, and busy and, and valued. And I'd wager a lot of other people feel like that as well.

• 10:37Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. And that, that right there is interesting. This idea of, of it being important, that busyness somehow has come to equal importance is not an-

• 10:52Greg McKeown?

  It's not a necessary human condition or understanding, but it does seem to be this current culture's understanding. And so, I mean, I remember talking to a woman one time and I was asking, yeah, I said, how are you? And she said, oh, I'm so busy. She said, I'm so busy. Greg, I tell you, I've slept on average four hours a night for the last two weeks. That's how busy I am, you know? And she's smiling. I mean, first of all, why is she smiling?

• 11:26Greg McKeown?

  And, and, and, and what she didn't say this, but what I think she was saying was, look, I hate to break it to you, Greg, I'm just a little more important than you are. You know, you get to sleep a normal night's rest, but I am under so much demand, you see.

• 11:40Chris Williamson?

  You're a mere mortal.

• 11:42Greg McKeown?

  Exactly. That's how important I am. And she didn't know, of course, that she was right, you know, speaking to, um, well, to an aspiring essentialist, you know? So she didn't know that this was not, this is not impressive to me. This is not an achievement to me. And so it was, it led to a very genuinely friendly conversation. And a couple of weeks after that, she came back to me and said, okay, my goodness, I have like completely stripped away the way I was doing it, sleeping properly. I've like made prioritized decisions about what I actually want to go after and don't. And I feel this increase of productivity, right? My stress is going down, my productivity is going up. Like this is the value proposition of essentialism. And, and it's in that story, it's also the nonsense of non-essentialism.

• 12:27Greg McKeown?

  What a con that it is.

• 12:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Uh, I think it's a Ray Dalio quote that felt like it should have been in essentialism.

• 12:36Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Chris Williamson?

  And it says, "A truth in this life is that you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want."

• 12:46Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  And accepting that, genuinely, truly not just going, yeah, yeah, sounds good. Sounds, sounds, sounds, sounds nice, mate, but I'm gonna get, I'll get, I'll get the other thing after I've had this thing. So I'll have this anything, then I'll have the next anything. I mean, no, that, that's the everything mentality.

• 13:03Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, I wonder how much of this comes from people not knowing what they want in life?

• 13:13Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, absolutely. It comes from people, it comes from people not taking the time to explore that. You know, they're just, they're just going along and the busyness begets busyness. And that's what everyone else is doing. So they're just, they're actually in a way, they're not having to make any decisions. They're just doing what everybody else is doing. Well, they're doing that. What my next door neighbor is doing it. I mean, it used to be just, you know, keeping up with the Joneses, but now of course it's social media, keeping up the Joneses, which is a much different challenge, right? You're getting to compare yourself to everybody's best possible version of themselves, basically sort of a form of lying. You know, because it's so curated and different than the rest of their life.

• 13:59Greg McKeown?

  And you're comparing yourself against the best of everybody's. So this is really like a recipe for, for non-essentialism. You know, it's not just opinion overload. I mean, rather it's not information overload. It is opinion overload. We're just getting crammed with all this stuff. And so our job is to try and push all of that away and get quiet. And ask what, not just even what do I want, although that's not bad. What am I supposed to do? What, what is, what is my mission? What is the thing I came here to do? What, what, what would I come here to do? That, that is a, that is a completely different kind of question.

• 14:42Greg McKeown?

  And as you start to explore that, you find that you already have more answers than you realize. But it comes from inside of you instead of just from all this outside stuff. And you can start to have quiet, instead of the fear of a missing out or FOMO, you start to have the joy of missing out, right? Or JOMO.

• 14:59Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't she a singer?

• 15:02Chris Williamson?

  Was that Dido?

• 15:04Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I don't know, don't know, don't know. Yes, I think you're probably right. But JOMO is, uh, it ought to be a singer, but we ought to make a song to it. You can do that. But JOMO is, uh, you know, this, you discover that just because other people, in fact, you like not doing things that other people are doing. You start to go, yeah, that's great for you. You can celebrate it for them, but that's not what I'm doing. That's what I'm about. That's not what I'm supposed to be doing in my life. And you start to feel this. Joy and momentum in doing, as I keep saying, what you came here to do.

• 15:39Chris Williamson?

  Before we get on to, I want to ask the question, which is how do we do that? What are the steps that we can take toward identifying that and getting rid of the trivial many? But that deprogramming, right, of the existing societal norms, the paths of least resistance, your genetic predisposition, your traumas in the coping mechanisms you've got with that, is something I'm swimming in at the moment. And I've got an amazing blog post that I'm going to send to you after we've finished. And I know that I've just completely teased that to everyone that's listening. However, the author of the blog post is going to come on the podcast in the next couple of weeks. So I've got a big announcement about that. It's phenomenal, just some fella, but wrote the best thing I've read on the internet this year. And one of the things that he was talking about there was about sort of deprogramming,

• 16:24Chris Williamson?

  these societal norms and getting rid of all that stuff. And that FOMO versus JOMO paradigm that you've just come up with there, to me, is present in a lot of different areas of life. So for instance, as soon as you see discomfort in training, physical training, as something to actually lean into, as something that is a signal that you're doing something right, as opposed to a signal that you're doing something wrong. But it takes time to program yourself. You go into the gym for the first time and you do a difficult workout and you feel like you're going to die. You're on the floor and you want to throw up and you're sweating and your knees hurt. And all this stuff happens.

• 17:05Chris Williamson?

  And there's some very real physical adaptations that need to happen before you can go like fully in. But once those have occurred, and presuming you're doing it safely, the discomfort is the signal of progress, right? And it's kind of, the only way you can do that is by learning, oh, hang on, this is me moving forward, this is me doing the right thing. And the JOMO, as it seems, the joy of missing out, again, is that it's like, oh, I'm missing out. That's fantastic. That means that I'm focusing on what I should be focusing on. I'm not getting swept away with the trivial many.

• 17:41Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely right to think about those signals that will be new signals. So that when other people are zigging, you're zagging. You know, when other people are saying yes, you're saying no. When other people are saying no, you're saying yes, because you're trying to, you're not trying to be like everybody else anymore. Yeah, you can't be distinctive at everything.

• 18:07Chris Williamson?

  That's such a good call. No, you are very, very right. Okay, so how do we do it? Where do we start? You've got me, Greg. I'm here. I'm a nightmare. I'm doing too much. How do I start to bring order to chaos?

• 18:23Greg McKeown?

  Okay, so you're asking that question in like still a hypothetical way. Or you could be. So we could do it in a literal way, right? So we'll just do it with you right now.

• 18:34Chris Williamson?

  I'm in.

• 18:35Greg McKeown?

  Again, okay, so tell me, first thought, what is something that's essential to you? It's very important to you, but you're under investing in it currently. You might be doing something, but you're under investing. Go. First thoughts.

• 18:49Chris Williamson?

  Writing.

• 18:52Greg McKeown?

  Okay, what does success look like for you in writing?

• 18:57Chris Williamson?

  One new article per week.

• 19:01Greg McKeown?

  And you're putting out in your blog to your newsletter. That's what you want to do. How are you doing it right now? How much are you managing to do currently?

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  Zero.

• 19:16Greg McKeown?

  Okay, good. So good. It is an under investment.

• 19:19Chris Williamson?

  I warned you that I was a very good avatar for this.

• 19:22Greg McKeown?

  No, I like it. I like your honesty very much. Okay, so when you say you're not publishing any, you aren't doing any writing at all.

• 19:31Chris Williamson?

  So I've been gesticulating over the font size of the website and the tiny little things that I know is really a glorified version of procrastination to put me off from actually putting in hard work. I have six half finished articles, all of which require two hours of focused work to be really good, and I really like them.

• 19:57Chris Williamson?

  But there's just six half finished meals, and they're all in the kitchen.

• 20:03Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I like it. I like how practical that example is. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Okay, so how long have you been doing those six and a half articles? How long have they been sort of sitting there getting cold?

• 20:14Chris Williamson?

  Probably since the beginning of lockdown. That's maybe a...

• 20:17Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, okay, so a couple of months?

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:20Greg McKeown?

  You started working on them then?

• 20:23Chris Williamson?

  Started working on one and then did a bit and then I would go, oh, that's a bit, that's enough for today. And then when I came back, I'd go, I'd go do something else. I got a podcast or I got a business call or I got training or I got, you know, life.

• 20:33Greg McKeown?

  Yep.

• 20:35Chris Williamson?

  Come back, start a new one. That one's already, it's kind of done. I'll just, I'll do a new one. Does that illusion, sorry, allure of novelty again gets me in, oh, new, new, new, new idea.

• 20:46Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, you're more excited to start the thing than to finish the thing.

• 20:50Chris Williamson?

  That's, yes, that's it.

• 20:53Greg McKeown?

  Okay, so, so

• 20:58Greg McKeown?

  tell me, tell me one of those articles. What's just one of them that you, what's the first one you worked on, in fact?

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  10 Things I Learned From Speaking To The Smartest People On The Planet For 200 Hours.

• 21:10Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, okay. Well, that's good. That's a good title.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. Greg McKeown says that the title of my articles is good.

• 21:19Greg McKeown?

  Of course it is. That's, you're well on your way with that. Okay, so what is the minimum number of, what is the minimum amount of work that needs to be done to the article in its current format before you can put it out?

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no, I don't, I don't even know, which is embarrassing.

• 21:40Greg McKeown?

  Because you haven't done it.

• 21:41Chris Williamson?

  All, yeah, all 10, all 10 things are done. Each of the common themes, they're kind of fleshed out. A proof, a proof read, it's the unsexy stuff. Go back through, proof read it, make sure that I haven't used too much hyperbole. Check if, ah, well, there's one concept. I'm not really too sure if that should be in. And I think part of me is scared as well that when I reopen that Pandora's box, at the moment, it's, I know it's not done, but it is closed. And when I reopen that, I get reminded of the fact that it's still going. Does that make sense?

• 22:17Greg McKeown?

  Well, it's an interesting point you're saying. You're saying that in its unfinished, closed position, it feels a sort of done.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Greg McKeown?

  That's very interesting, right? You're saying like, stopping working on something has a feeling of closure.

• 22:36Chris Williamson?

  That finishing it can't satisfy.

• 22:40Greg McKeown?

  That is officially undone.

• 22:46Greg McKeown?

  That is, I can check that off. That has been, this is informally procrastinated.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 22:54Greg McKeown?

  Check.

• 22:55Chris Williamson?

  That's it. That has hit.

• 22:56Greg McKeown?

  Well done.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Greg McKeown?

  Move on the next one. Let's quickly get the next article into the same.

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  Finished position.

• 23:03Greg McKeown?

  Formalized procrastinated. Woo. You are working through these at a storm. Okay. So what is, what is really stopping you from publishing an article?

• 23:16Chris Williamson?

  Um, so I think it's, publishing the article is a perfectionist trap. A little bit that I'm like, I, I feel like there's a little bit of pressure. You know, I have a bunch of friends who are all very competent at writing online. And I think, right, it needs to be like fucking war and peace. Um, and then another bit of it's just the, the, the working process of writing isn't yet coming as easily to me as podcasting is. I've never procrastinated on podcasting, never once, because it feels like a high calling. It's something which comes to me incredibly naturally. There's also a very interesting way that, that the format pulls you through because it's like a treadmill.

• 24:01Chris Williamson?

  You know, you don't actually have to overcome your own inertia to do a podcast. I can't now stop talking to you and just give up halfway. I mean, I could, but it'd be really weird. It'd be really weird if I now stopped talking. Uh, so you've got some externalized accountability. You've got some motivation from the person that you're speaking to. Um, so I think that the, the nature of, of a conversation is, is quite different. Um, which is also why book clubs and stuff are successful. I suppose that they give you that external accountability to keep you moving through something and get over your own inertia.

• 24:30Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. So you need to choose a day that your podcast goes out no matter what, right?

• 24:34Chris Williamson?

  Three days, three days a week at the moment, Greg. We are doing three episodes a week.

• 24:39Greg McKeown?

  No, but I mean, I mean with your plot, with your blog.

• 24:42Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Okay. Yes.

• 24:43Greg McKeown?

  I mean, having a set date where you say, okay, uh, I, you know, it goes out on, well, choose your day. What's your day?

• 24:52Chris Williamson?

  May 18.

• 24:55Greg McKeown?

  All right, May 18th, and then every week after that, you put out a blog.

• 25:00Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 25:00Greg McKeown?

  Now, your body language when I said that was like so non-committal.

• 25:05Chris Williamson?

  I knew I should have turned the camera off.

• 25:08Greg McKeown?

  I knew I shouldn't turn the fucking camera.

• 25:09Greg McKeown?

  Inside, you were like, no, I am absolutely not committing to doing that. I'll say I am here because it would be awkward not to in the middle of this podcast, but there's no way I'm doing that. That's what I heard from you.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  Maybe.

• 25:23Greg McKeown?

  I'm wrong.

• 25:24Chris Williamson?

  Maybe. No, I, I, look, the, the, the thing, and for everyone that's listening, you're hearing and watching and feeling me go through the turmoil of something that I think we all experience, which is, I want to do a thing. I genuinely do, or else I wouldn't have started it. I wouldn't have spent my time. I wouldn't have, have, have started learning about the process of writing and spoken to people and stuff.

• 25:48Chris Williamson?

  But there's something, there's something that's happening with that that's getting in the way. And there are so many still now, having started to strip back as much as I can and focus on the, the, get rid of the trivial many and focus on the vital few. There's still a lot of things pulling on my time and the urgent gets in the way of the important a lot, which is a nightmare.

• 26:13Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, well, you're doing three, three podcasts a week. You know, you could say, okay, for until I publish my first article, I'm only doing two a week. I'm not allowed to do the third until I get my first out. That would, that would help the podcast momentum lean, help you, you know, keep you accountable towards this new trade off. Look, I think that, I think what's at the heart of the matter for you with this is that you want the first article to be of the same quality as the other writers that you admire and have read their work from. That's what I think this is about.

• 26:56Greg McKeown?

  And I want to encourage you to have the courage to be rubbish.

• 27:03Greg McKeown?

  To just go, success is posting that first podcast, first blog. And here's how I would recommend you do it. I would recommend that you send it to your list as a link to your blog, rather than the whole content is in the email. Right? And here's why. Because if you do it that way, you can keep updating it as you need to. Right? So the first version you send out on the day you send that link, doesn't have to be the permanent state of that article. That is just how it is now. And own it right there in the, in the email you send out to everybody. You just say, I assume that's how you're sending it to people. Is that how you're going to get, send it out to everyone?

• 27:46Greg McKeown?

  Combination of that and sending it through social media and stuff like that. Same thing. You just have the link to be somewhere where you can keep editing it over time. I'll tell you something that happened to me that's similar to this. I once wrote at like late at night, a very rubbish piece on LinkedIn. And it asked me to be an influencer on LinkedIn. And it was, it was rubbish. And I just was new to that platform. It was the time it was brand new platform that they were using. And they said, and so I post this thing. The number one career mistake capable people make, that's the type I came up with. Post it. And the next morning, when I wake up, 60,000 people have viewed it. And there's a ton of comments and a ton of criticism.

• 28:31Greg McKeown?

  It wasn't all negative, but I had just written this like, you know, just sort of two, three paragraphs. And I like jumped in and started editing it immediately and improved it and improved it. A couple of million people read that too. Maybe more than that in the end. It was like, it was a relatively viral piece at the time. And it was so encouraging that, okay, so it started off as this piece, but we were able to improve it as we went. Now, that's not necessarily how you always want it to be, but you have to get over the hump here. So you have to lower the hump that you're trying to get over. This mental hump of it has to be fantastic, or I can't put it out. Put something out. It's, it's, it's, it's a small amount.

• 29:13Greg McKeown?

  It isn't going to be perfect. I don't even know what that would mean, a perfect article. But you will get feedback and you will learn and you'll be in the same mode before we started this idea. What did you say? I can't find the name, the skill takeoff and that sensation of the skill takeoff. And so maybe what you say is I'm just going to publish, maybe you say I'm going to publish all. Yeah, I don't know. And so I am trying to encourage you to, and here's really my, probably my biggest insight since writing essentialism is that, is that, is that people, people, there's a piece of feedback people often give. It's not the most common feedback, but it is regular enough that I definitely noted it.

• 29:58Greg McKeown?

  And it is where they'll say, oh yeah, it's hard, isn't it? Essentialism though. It's hard that focusing on what's essential and not on what's non-essential. It has to, you know, and in fact, somebody once said to me, they say, look, you know, essentialism should come with a warning. This will be the hardest thing that you will ever do. And for like a year or two, I absorbed that title, that like line. And would share that with people. Well, the thing, problem with essentialism is hardest thing you'll ever do. And what a con that is. That's a totally non-essentialist idea. It's completely wrong. It's only, it's only the harder thing to do because you're a non-essentialist trying to be an essentialist. Like you're, you're trying to be an essentialist in a non-essentialist way.

• 30:39Greg McKeown?

  You're like, I have to do this perfectly. I have to do anything essential right now. This is not what essentialism is about. I think there's a way to do essentialism that's so easy. And that's what we need to do. We just cut away all these layers of, to get in the way of you actually publishing what you've written. You don't need the fancy website. You don't need the article to be perfect, whatever that means. You don't even have to have 10 of them. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be published. And then the feedback will come and then you'll learn something and then you can progress to the next step. You've got to have this, and this is only a couple of the

• 31:24Greg McKeown?

  things one can do to make them easier. But that is my primary learning since essentialism was written.

• 31:30Chris Williamson?

  That's a very cool way to look at it. And I've seen and heard other people as well, say, the challenge of the disciplined pursuit of less, you know, especially, I think relinquishing relinquishing your hand on novelty is something that I want to get into in a second, because I, you know, for the people out there who similarly to me like adventure, like new things, new experiences, it just leads to yeses all over the place. Just because you think, well, that's interesting. Oh, well, that's interesting. Well, that could be fun. Well, that could be fun. Well, I could do that. And then you post hoc rationalize it, right? This is the this is the most fucking insidious way that you post hoc rationalize

• 32:13Chris Williamson?

  it, all the non-essentialists listening, which is everybody. Most, the most insidious way that you rationalize doing too much is by hedging your risk. That's the most insidious way, because it's got a kernel of truth in it. It's got a kernel of truth in it that if you were to do two things instead of one, you half your risk if that one thing goes shit.

• 32:39Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. But you then take it to, well, if I do 100 things, and one of them goes to shit, that's only 1%. Yeah. And you don't realize that the price that you pay for doing 100 things is that you've only gone one unit of distance over 100 things as opposed to 100 units of distance over one thing.

• 33:02Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, that's right. And it also, the other faulty The other false assumption in that is the idea that all opportunities or actions are randomly, like success is randomly assigned to those 100. Like if you couldn't understand any cause and effect between anything, you might be best to just do 100 things and you only make an inch progress in all of them, but at least you'll make an inch progress in one thing that's going to work because it's totally random. That's fine. So you want to believe life is completely random. Fine, you go, you live that one out and see how that works for you, right?

• 33:43Greg McKeown?

  But on the basis that, and this is the first principle of essentialism, is to explore what's essential, right? It's to actually create space looking for the thing you feel really good about pursuing, the thing that you feel you're best built to do. And so, and so in that process, you come to a point of view that says, I'm built to do this and not to do that. So I'm going to go strong on the thing that I am good at, passionate about, I think is relevant right now. I mean, all of those things are risk mitigation techniques so that you can then lean into something fully that you're actually, you know, is your highest point of contribution. And one of the things for me about that is writing.

• 34:27Greg McKeown?

  I mean, there's so many career paths I would have been rubbish at and failed at in a sort of capital F way, right? Like just not, that wouldn't have worked well. I went big on something not because I was high, like not because I had a high tolerance for risk, because I'm actually quite risk averse and I wanted to do things that I really felt strong in, good at and so on. And I think that's what we have to do. You have to, yeah, instead of thinking it's all random, you take the time to explore, figure out what you really can make a great contribution in and then go big in it.

• 35:07Chris Williamson?

  What about someone that says, well, I'm not great at anything?

• 35:12Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, so you can start with, I mean, you know, what we're talking about here is criteria, right? What criteria to use to evaluate what to do? And you start off with maybe like, well, what are the things I have no interest in? Well, don't do that stuff. Fishing. You don't like fishing, don't do fishing, right? It is because your mates are doing fishing, doesn't mean you have to go fishing. I have lots of people who love skiing. And I always feel this guilt, like I need to do, I've got to go skiing. Of course, if you go skiing, you ought to be able to go skiing, you know? It's such a fabulous, I love the snow, you love it, you would love it! You would love it up there! This is all, you always feel this, and I'm like, no, I'm not interested!

• 35:57Greg McKeown?

  Not interested, so start with the stuff you're not interested in. Start with the stuff that you go, yeah, I, not only am I not good at that, I could not imagine ever being good at that. That is not my thing. So you should start at the extremes, right? The periphery and move forward. So you don't have to say, what am I great at? But you can say, what am I interested in? What do I think I might have a little bit of talent for?

• 36:22Greg McKeown?

  You know, you, you look on like, you know,

• 36:27Greg McKeown?

  Britain's Got Talent, or whatever the talent show is, and you see these people in these that are just terrible at that thing. And they've got high passion, really low talent for it. And you feel for those people, right? Or you wonder why they don't understand it. What we're looking for is things that have, if you'll, some passion for, that you think you might be quite good at, that you think you could become good at it,

• 36:51Greg McKeown?

  that meets a need in the world, and that overlap, that's where your highest point of contribution can lie. And then over time, you're developing that more and more narrowly.

• 37:03Greg McKeown?

  So that over time, as your competency increases, you aren't just interested in doing the things you're good at, you are looking for the thing you would be the best at, really great at. Eventually, down the journey, it's like, could I be the best in the world at this thing? You know, maybe, maybe there's just a tiny group of people who can do this thing. But that's, that's, you know, that's, you increase your selectivity as your competence increases.

• 37:29Chris Williamson?

  I like the idea of using inversion and a contrasting effect to work out where you don't go. It's the same for, the easiest way to avoid being depressed is to work out not what makes you happy, but how you would make a happy person depressed. I would fuck up their sleep, I'd fuck up with their nutrition, I'd make sure they didn't get any daylight, I'd, you know, do all of the different bits and pieces. And you're like, oh yeah, well, that makes a happy person depressed. And you go, right, okay. What's the, what's the, what's the implication of that? It's also funny that that's, as you were saying about the different things, that sounded to me like a hell no. It's like, would you go, would you go fishing? Hell no. Would you go skiing? Hell no. And as past Modern Wisdom guest

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  and good buddy Derek Sivers says, it's either hell yes, or no. And that ties into something I actually wanted you to run us through, which is the 90% rule. Do you take us through that?

• 38:22Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. So you imagine, you know, everything, every option that you have on, on a, that can be plotted on a continuum from zero to 100, and it's an importance continuum. So an importance continuum of zero is, it's totally unimportant, and 100 is completely important, absolutely essential, right? So everything, you know, whether it's writing this article that you just talked about, or exercise, or doing the next podcast, reading, going on YouTube, like, or every activity can be plotted on this.

• 39:00Greg McKeown?

  Continuum. And what I'm encouraging people to do is to say anything that is underneath 90%, anything that's lower than 90% important, you question and maybe even eliminate. You're looking for just the things that are 90% or above essential, vitally important relationships, you know, absolutely must do before I die projects, habits that I know will make the rest of my life significantly improved and different, might even make a difference to my children and grandchildren. You're looking for those things because every

• 39:41Greg McKeown?

  time you do something that's below 90%, you're taking it away from something that is 90% or above. You're making a trade off. People don't really know about that. They don't see it that way often. So they just think, well, is this good? Well, good might be 40, it might be 40% important, 30% important. Yeah, it's good. It's fine. It's fine. What's wrong with doing that? But they don't aware that they're taking it away from the thing that is absolutely vital. So I'm always encouraging people like, like, look at the extremes, look at the things that are 90% important and invest there. Look at the stuff that's below 10% and just eliminate there. Make the trade off between the two so that

• 40:25Greg McKeown?

  you can actually go further faster on the things that matter.

• 40:30Chris Williamson?

  I think what some people may be concerned about is that sounds like a very totalitarian, disciplined life, right? Well, I'm not allowed to have cake because cake isn't contributing to my highest sense of importance. And I, I used to like YouTube, but Greg and Chris told me that YouTube's only that I really, I looked at the importance of that and that's only 30%. So now I've got to delete the YouTube app. And now I just feel like I'm this kind of robot that's sort of rolling through life. So how do people find that balance between turning it on and turning it off of having the focus on the essential few whilst being able to give us enough kind of leeway to, to, to, to live a life that doesn't feel like it's completely under, under super control all the time?

• 41:16Greg McKeown?

  Well, what it sounds like you just said is that freedom, creativity, exploration is really important to you.

• 41:24Chris Williamson?

  That wasn't me. That's I'm all right without cake. I love it. I love me a bit of cake, but right now it's summertime, you know?

• 41:30Greg McKeown?

  You're just saying other people might find what we described as being really stringent. All I'm saying is that if if somebody feels that, something important to them is probably being violated. So they haven't got their list right yet. When you're working on the 90% and above, you're not, you're not feeling rigid and controlled. You're feeling free and liberated from all this nonsense that you don't value. That's keeping you back from living the things you actually do want. So there's a lot of joy. There's more joy in the 90% and above than there is probably in the rest of the 90% combined. When I'm working on something that's meaningful to me, that's inspiring to me. I mean, I'll

• 42:12Greg McKeown?

  give you an example just this week. So, so it was, it was doing, you know, having an evening with my children, my wife, and we were doing smores, which, which I don't even know if you want to know.

• 42:26Chris Williamson?

  Smores, smores is, I mean, even without the wife and the children, the smores on their own would be in the 90% for me. So.

• 42:34Greg McKeown?

  And so, and so, so we just spent the evening doing that outside over a fire together, enjoying that time. That was a 90% or above for me. That's not stringent and rigid. That's playfulness and joyfulness. And it's way better than me just sort of going, okay, I'll just, I'll just scan social media and just be on my own infinite scanning on that in some room somewhere. Like, that's what we're talking about. We're saying, get rid of all that stuff that doesn't feed you, that isn't joyful, that isn't, that isn't taking you forward. And so I think that there's a bit of creativity and imagination as to what really matters for people to have a good vision of this.

• 43:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting with time, isn't it? The way that time works, because it's, it's the only thing you can't choose to not spend. Like, you can't not spend time. You can choose to not spend your money. And it's the mad thing about people that are able to get in shape or the people that are able to accumulate wealth. Like, they do that by having an asymmetry between what they bring in and what they put out.

• 43:42Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  There isn't an equivalent with time.

• 43:44Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, there's no time bank. You can't say, "Today, I'm gonna just take half of this time. I don't know what to do with it, so I'll put it over there. Wait while I figure this out." Right? It's being spent at exactly the same rate all of the time, no matter what. It's more like a conveyor belt going past. That's moving no matter what you use it for. So it's present. Yeah, what you're saying is true.

• 44:17Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote from Naval Ravikant that I've been playing around with recently, which is, "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."

• 44:25Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. What does that mean to you?

• 44:29Chris Williamson?

  So it's meant a lot. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that as an aphorism. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, to me, means what would be winning the thing that you're doing right now? So for instance, what would be winning always replying to an Instagram DM message within 30 minutes, all day, every day? What's the prize? Play a stupid game, win a stupid prize. The stupid prize doesn't exist. It's the satisfying of some people who wouldn't have cared if you'd waited a week to reply to them, who maybe you're never gonna see again, who you've maybe never met. Play another stupid game, if you want to take it to a kind of a

• 45:13Chris Williamson?

  little bit more vicious degree, play a stupid game which would be have unprotected sex with someone that you don't know after a night out. That is playing a very stupid game. What's the prize that you win for that when you compare it with the alternative of having protected sex? What would be play a stupid game of texting while you drive as opposed to waiting until you get to your destination? That's a very stupid game to play when you win a stupid prize. What's the prize? It's, "Oh, well, the lads in the group chat got that meme off me a little bit quicker than if I'd waited, and I got to have a little bit of a giggle at the lights, as opposed to sit and look out the window," or whatever it is. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes slots into essentialism somehow for me.

• 45:56Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, well, I think that's right, because I remember working with maybe like 50 of the top leaders from American industry. And as I walked into the room...

• 46:11Greg McKeown?

  It was a very dark oak room. It was this very secretive meeting, actually. It was quite interesting. There was nothing bad being done there, but it was just like very kind of elite feeling as you walked into the room. And I liked all the people I talked with there, but the overwhelming sensation I had in that room was here is a group of people that won at the wrong game.

• 46:34Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 46:35Greg McKeown?

  Well, one of them was vulnerable at one point and just said, "Look, my relationship with my teenager is completely shot right now. It is almost ready to leave the house and I just don't have a relationship with him." So everything's rough between us.

• 46:50Greg McKeown?

  And so here he is. He's got up the corporate ladder, but he's won at a game that now he realizes didn't matter, or certainly didn't matter in comparison to these relationships that he's taken for granted over those same years. And so I just think there's many of the prizes that people think are the most important things. So I don't mean the total trivia. I think there's many goals people set that actually, if they spent a little longer pondering them and thinking about them, they would find, "That's the wrong game. I won at the wrong thing.

• 47:35Greg McKeown?

  I achieved it. I got there. But then it was like, you know,

• 47:43Greg McKeown?

  it was unsatisfying when I actually arrived there. That wasn't what it was actually... That is not what the... It was an unsatisfying achievement. That's what I mean by it.

• 47:54Chris Williamson?

  And that's where the explore before you exploit importance comes in, at the beginning of looking at your options, of assessing the things that you want.

• 48:06Greg McKeown?

  Yes, and there's a few ways of thinking about exploration, right? One is just intellectually, "Here are my options. Let me evaluate the options in front of me." A second way of thinking about it is what I think one's highest priority is, which is... To protect our ability to prioritize, protect our ability to discern. All of us have many, many non-essential voices outside of us and inside of us, right? Just all different, a mind just telling us a million things, "Oh, you're gonna do this and that matters." And "Look how you compare to that person," and "Look at competitions and comparisons and complaining voices." And all these voices, right? There's all of this noise.

• 48:49Greg McKeown?

  And then there's another voice. One of my friends in England says it this way, he says, "There's a scared voice and then there's a sacred voice." My distinction would be, I think there's many, many scared voices and one sacred voice, right? And we all know that other voice, I think. I think almost all of us have experienced it. Where we just go, "That's right, that's wrong," and you just know. And nobody else had to tell it to you. You didn't learn it from someone. You just know. "That's the right thing to do in this moment. That's the wrong thing to do in this moment." And if we are quiet enough, that voice becomes the voice that leads us. So exploring what is essential to me at its highest manifestation means

• 49:34Greg McKeown?

  tuning into, amplifying that voice of conscience that really guides you in the right direction. If you do that today in small ways, you don't wake up 20 years from now and go, "Oh, my goodness, I've just given myself 20 years to the wrong goal."

• 49:53Greg McKeown?

  That's what I think it means.

• 49:56Chris Williamson?

  That's scary, you know? I tweeted something, I can't even remember where I found it, but it's stuck with me for years. I tweeted this the other day, "True hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have been."

• 50:09Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, that's, you know, I like that sentiment. It is a bit scary, like you say.

• 50:17Greg McKeown?

  I want, I want, I'll give you a story. So I was staring at myself in the mirror,

• 50:29Greg McKeown?

  dressed from head to toe in a stormtrooper costume.

• 50:33Chris Williamson?

  Good luck. It's good luck.

• 50:36Greg McKeown?

  Well, it was a moment. That's certainly what it was. And I was thinking about buying it. This was like a, you know, pretty close to movie level quality suit.

• 50:49Greg McKeown?

  Right, and I'm in my, I'm in like late 30s, looking at myself in this mirror. And I look, it was for Halloween, right? And I still kind of, I think I get why I thought that was a cool thing, why it might have been a fun idea. But as I'm staring at the mirror, I'm struck by two things completely at the same time. One is, there's not one part of me that wants this anymore.

• 51:13Greg McKeown?

  Right, like, why am I even thinking about it? I do not want that, I do not want this. And the second, in the same moment, I realised that for 30 years, I've had in my mind, the idea that one day I would buy this.

• 51:28Greg McKeown?

  Because 30 years previously, that's when Return of the Jedi had come out. And my older brother, one of my older brothers had said to me, "Wouldn't it be so cool to own like a costume right from, you know, from the movies? Like movie level quality costumes, stuff." And my little, like, young self, influenced by my brother saying this, just, it just like caught on. And that little goal stuck with me for all of those years. Now, this is the power of goals, we get that, goals are really powerful. That, one of my professors once said, "They're the theory that works." But what he was saying is that they work too well. Once you have a goal, you can get on autopilot, and now you're racing down some path to get something

• 52:12Greg McKeown?

  that really, you didn't stop to question. So, what I'm saying here is be careful that some of the goals that we set aren't storm, are they stormtroopers?

• 52:24Greg McKeown?

  You know, should we just have eliminated them already? Could we give up on them halfway because we go, "No, that doesn't even matter." Someone else wanted to do that, Schwarzenegger wanted to do that, I don't have to do that. You know, just because The Rock's doing it, doesn't mean I have to do it.

• 52:40Chris Williamson?

  The rock is cool. I am, I absolutely love that. I had Tucker Max on and he is a man who has gone through about as big of a 180 as you can imagine from this, uh, what, what was it called? Uh, frat, frat literacy or something. He created an entire new literary genre, which was like party boy, party boy stories type thing. And he, uh, he'd gone through this big, and then he's done a decade of psychotherapy and a ton of internal work. And this guy is so, so fucking aware now and just completely present, speaking his truth forward, just stripping away ego left,

• 53:22Chris Williamson?

  right and center, really, really delivering. He's phenomenal. I love the person he is now. I would have hated the guy that he was back then, but I love the person he is now. And, um, you see when someone makes such a change like that and you've got these weird like epochs in your life, right? You've got like the, the kid, then the teenager, then like the young kind of twenties, then like the mid twenties, then they, you know, da, da, da, da, da. And, um, it takes a lot of work, you know, it takes a lot of work to realize that you thought that having a faster car than your mates when you were 19 was a big deal. But now you're 32 and your wife loves you and you've got two kids and a dog that you care about. And because you never questioned whether or not still

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  having a faster, bigger, better car was, it's just, it's like, it's just there. It's just a modus operandi, right? And it's just running below you and you kind of don't really realize and the stream just takes you along. I absolutely love, I love that concept. You touched on something actually that I had, I had in my notes and wanted to bring up, which is why is it so hard to cut losses? Is it just sunk cost fallacy? Is it just, ah, well, I've, I've, I've got this far with the huge tech company, which is destroying my relationship with my teenager. Uh, I might as well, I might as well go all the way. Is that why people have a fear? Or is there anything else?

• 54:36Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, because you, you're having to face the potentially poor decision of not having cut it off yesterday or the day before, the day before that. And so you're more, the longer it goes. The harder it is to admit that we weren't wise in the previous scenario. And so, so yes, of course, we want to, well, you've heard the old metaphor, right? Of the, the, how do you catch a monkey? You've heard this, right? How do you catch a monkey? You, you, there's a trap and you, the monkey puts their hand in the trap. You never heard this. You put, the monkey puts their hand in the trap and, and they can't, once they, once their hand is in the trap, they're holding on to the, you know, the, the nuts in there or the fruit or whatever's in there.

• 55:21Greg McKeown?

  And that, because their hand is clenched, they can't get their hand out. Right? Cause it's small enough they can put their hand in, but not big enough that they can get their hand out. So they want to hold on to it. And I, I thought for a long time that this was, uh, this was just sort of a, you know, made up metaphor, whatever. But you can go on YouTube and there's somebody who's actually done this. And it's actually, it's really brilliant little video. And, and, and they just, first of all, they just will not let go. And he's completely trapped and the man's coming over to get him. And this will not let go of this, of this thing. And then right as the man actually takes hold of the monkey, he does let go and he gets focused on something else. And that's the key to letting go is we have to focus on the next, something that's more important to us. Something that actually is, that is a deep, better version of what we want to be.

• 56:07Greg McKeown?

  So that we can let go of these old, these old things that don't matter anymore. Let them go. I mean, this idea of not growing up, holding on to the, the 20 year old version of us, then holding on to the 25 year old version of us and not, it's a failure to mature, it's a failure to thrive. We're trying to win yesterday's battle, trying to win yesterday's version of the, of the world. And so, and so I think that, I think that it's, I, I, we got onto the, onto the monkey and catching monkeys, didn't we? So that's, I'm not sure I'm answering your question, but

• 56:37Chris Williamson?

  I know you are.

• 56:38Greg McKeown?

  I feel like that, we, we, we holding on to all this investment we've made in something. And we've just got to look to the next thing that's actually better. And it gives us the courage to let go of the thing that we're, we would keep holding on to.

• 56:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a story from Kamal Ravikant, who's Naval's brother. And I had him on the podcast just before Christmas. And he lost pretty much all of his blood in an operation accidentally. The, it's the sutures burst on his artery and he basically bled out and he was anemic. And all this stuff happened in terrible pain and, um, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It was just about to come out, the second version, and he'd sold tons, self-published, and he was like the, the perfect patient zero for who needs drugs. And the doctors are like, if anyone ever needed opiates, it's you. Like you are the guy for drugs. So he's taken them and he gets the first proof, uncorrected manuscript, whatever it is back. And he realizes that because of the drugs that he's on, that

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  he can't view the punctuation with enough dexterity and that resolution that he needs to, because he wants every word, it's quite a short book. It's only like maybe 70 pages or something. And he wants everything. He needs to craft every single word, every line break, every piece of punctuation, all the rest of it. And he realizes he can't do it. So he just stops taking the drugs. And he's in pain, but he has something which is greater than his pain. He has the book and the book allows him to transcend what it is that he's suffering with, right? And I loved that story. And I wouldn't have, I would have never heard, and I've never heard him tell it on a different, any other podcast. It's just because I was being like a bit nosy about the pain that he'd gone through in this recent near death experience.

• 58:21Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 58:22Chris Williamson?

  It's so powerful. It's like allegorical almost. You're like, look, you've got this, this thing which occurs, which is greater than your suffering. And it allows you to transcend the difficulty of just existing, of just getting through your day to day life. And that's kind of like the monkey thing, right? It's like, you know, if, if only you could let go of the thing that you, you thought you wanted to move on to the thing which you truly want. And one of the best ways for that to happen is to have something which you know that you truly want so much more, because it makes letting go an awful lot easier.

• 58:57Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I was, as you know, I've just, just about to launch a podcast. And one of the reasons I did it was because I was talking to one of my podcasting friends and, and he has this great line. He says, he says, success traps are harder to get out of than failure traps.

• 59:17Greg McKeown?

  And that to me is such a brilliant illustration of the problem you're describing. And the cure of it is higher purpose. It's always something, it's serving someone else. It's doing something more meaningful. So you get out of the trap of being so self-centered in life, where we're worried constantly about how we'll appear and what we'll do and how we, you've got to get rid of, I think that's probably the ultimate monkey trap, is just that we haven't got past ourselves yet. And this is where all the suffering is. This is where all of the non-essential habits lie. As soon as we step out to serve somebody else, I think a lot of that non-essential stuff

• 59:59Greg McKeown?

  starts to fall apart, fall away, and we can get out of the trap.

• 1:00:04Chris Williamson?

  Scott Barry Kaufman's new book, Transcend, is precisely about that. He talks about, he re-does Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and he talks about, you can't, he literally believes that you can't reach your fullest potential without serving others.

• 1:00:15Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. Well, so did Maslow, you know?

• 1:00:18Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah, he was talking, he said-

• 1:00:21Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, go on.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  This story about Maslow, do you hear about his mother-in-law? I think it's his mother-in-law.

• 1:00:27Chris Williamson?

  And he said that, he said that his mother-in-law was the most actualized person that he'd ever met. And she was like just a mum, just a mum living at home. You know, it wasn't the picture of the guy on the top of the mountain, you know, just slaying businesses and driving fast cars and doing all that stuff. But he said she was the most actualized person that he'd ever met.

• 1:00:50Greg McKeown?

  Well, and towards the end of his life, he rebuilt his own model, but it was just too late because it was already like become popularized and everybody, no one's updated it. So the top of his model was not self-actualization. By the end of his life, it was self-transcendence. And that distinction makes all the difference, doesn't it? I have met so many people trying to pursue a self-actualized life. And you can feel the absence of what matters so much more than self-actualization. As important as self-actualization is and sort of going after goals and just achieving them, but self-transcendence, where you really are in contribution mode, where you really are in

• 1:01:31Greg McKeown?

  service mode to a calling to a purpose that's higher and more important than our own sort of proximate concerns. This is such, this is the big distinction to me. This is the difference that I'm always looking for in people. This is the difference I want to see in myself to transition to be, to live a life of contribution, not just one of productivity or just of, you know, sort of external worldly success. That's, that's really what I want. So I think, I think Maslow did appreciate that distinction for the end, but then got misquoted in a sense.

• 1:02:05Chris Williamson?

  What are you, do you feel like you're moving in the right direction? Are you still getting yourself towards the top of this newly extended hierarchy of needs?

• 1:02:17Greg McKeown?

  I mean, for, for me, for me, when I think about, you know, it's an ongoing journey, but when I think about the last almost 20 years now, that journey, that essentialist journey, not just the book and all of that, but I mean, the, the journey of my own life has been all about that transition. So for me, it looks like, it looks like investing primarily in my relationship with Anna, my wife and our four children, and really seriously investing in it. Not saying lip service, oh yes, they're the most important people in my life, but actually building those relationships. So when I travel, for example, about 80% of the time, I'll take

• 1:03:01Greg McKeown?

  one of my children with me. So that we have that one-on-one time. It, it means that, it means that instead of joining that book club or going to that lodge or the golfing thing or the tennis tournament, you just say no to all of that and you just try to make your own children like, not just your best friends, but also your best friends, people that you really want to be with and spend time together with. And the effect of all of that has been that the culture that has been created. Is something really special. So even as my children now are like, you know, three of them are teenagers.

• 1:03:40Greg McKeown?

  Uh, I could not have believed 10 years ago that my relationship now would be what it is. With teenagers. Now, I was a teenager. I know lots of teenagers. I understand that journey. I've worked with lots of teenagers over the years. And I've got a lot of respect for, for, for, obviously for young people. I'm not knocking them. But it isn't, this is just completely not like any of the stereotypical descriptions. You know, the worst problems are like my, one of my teenage son is like, he reads too many books. So he reads like late into the night. He reads fiction and he loves it. And that's like, that's my biggest problem with him. And I'm not kidding either. I'm literally, I'm not kidding. They said they got delightful.

• 1:04:24Greg McKeown?

  And they played together and they spent time together. They did, they just spent five hours. This is like a week ago, five hours, uh, upon a hill close to where we live. We live up in the hills and they were filming for my eldest daughter wants to be a director and she's taking a film class at university right now and um, and she's just, I mean, she's 17, but she's like, you know, really like focused about what she wants to do and her highest point of contribution. And so she went up there and led a, they took, um, they took a, uh, what is it called? A Princess Bride. You know the movie Princess Bride? Yeah. So she had to redo a scene from any movie and they chose a scene from that movie. The eye of cane powder scene, for those that know this cult classic.

• 1:05:08Greg McKeown?

  Uh, and, uh, and they redid it absolutely scene by scene. It took them five hours to do it. We didn't hear of one problem the whole time. We weren't there. We didn't oversee any of it. The video is brilliant. It's like frame by frame, the same as the original. They were all the actors. They had, did the whole costumes. They fulfilled it. Whatever, I think it was fit out 50 points. She got 50 points for this. She just got the results back a couple of days ago. That to me is like illustrative. That's like a version of what essentialism looks like.

• 1:05:36Greg McKeown?

  It was the natural outgrowth of investing in something 90% are important for years and years. And it just now bears this fruit all the time. There's just this flowing of it. And, and so, you know, I just share that story because, because I think that this is, this is what you just said about Maslow and his mother is not, is no throwaway comment to me. Right. It's, it's like, this is where my relationships with my family aren't a little more important than the next most important thing. Like, this is it. This is, this is miles above the next most important thing. And I think most people know that. But they

• 1:06:20Greg McKeown?

  get very busy and consumed with other voices as telling them something else and giving them, you know, immediate feedback and positivity. But those relationships, I mean, at the end of my life, it's completely obvious to me that on my deathbed, I will not be saying, wow, how many books did I saw? How many people did, how many, how many books I pub, right? That isn't going to be, it's just going to be those people around you at the, at the table, right? Like those people in the room, that small group, that's who it's going to be about. And so I want to invest now with that clarity, the clarity I will have then.

• 1:06:57Chris Williamson?

  That's a beautiful story. The premier other essentialist that I know, Ben Bergeron, Matt Fraser's CrossFit coach and the very, very well-known and great podcaster who I'll be sending this episode to. He has a number of tools, I think, that you suggest as ways that people can actually instantiate the essentialist mentality. And one of the ones that he has is a 5pm every day, he's home. And I want to say, I want to say it's 5pm every day that It might be 5pm every day that he shuts his laptop, but apparently there's like, he's got a ton of really hilarious stories of like, they'll be in the middle of this crazy,

• 1:07:40Chris Williamson?

  important business meeting and Ben will just start packing his bag and it'll be with someone who doesn't know that Ben leaves at five or whatever it might be. And Ben will start sort of packing his bag and they'll still be talking and they'll still be talking and then he'll be sort of walking, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good." Getting his phone, getting his water bottle. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really good." Walking away and then he's like, "Okay, that's me, I'm off, bye bye." Like it's 4:59. Like, and then he's in the car and that's, that's one of his very, very hard points of conversation.

• 1:08:10Greg McKeown?

  I love that story. Love that story. Now I want to meet him.

• 1:08:16Chris Williamson?

  You would adore him, man. He is him and Pat, the other, the other half.

• 1:08:23Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, but as you see, that's, that's what it is. And, and, and I, I struggle with that a little myself because I enjoy the conversation of what I'm doing. That's the sunk cost bias. "Oh, you want to be in here?" Instead of just, you know, that's like permission, a story like that helps to give us permission. All of us could do that. We think we can't, but it's because we haven't tried it. We don't know, or rather, it might be that we can't do it in the sense that there may be some negative repercussion to suddenly behaving that way.

• 1:08:52Greg McKeown?

  But we don't know because we never, we don't try it. How can we say it can't be done? We don't, we didn't do it. Try it, see what happens. I have, I have a nephew, every, every week, I call my extended family, they're all, nephews in New Zealand and people all over the world and they join in. And he, he comes on and whenever he's done, he's just done. He's very friendly, but he's just like, "Oh yeah, go, go." And he's out.

• 1:09:20Greg McKeown?

  There's no like, there's no like false, you know, like false landings. "Okay, I really gotta go." And another 10 minutes goes by, "I really gotta go." I do that all the time. I'm, I'm like professional notlander of like conversations.

• 1:09:36Greg McKeown?

  And he just, I'm out. That's it. We could do that. We, we do have a choice to operate that way. But sometimes we need to hear other people's stories to really feel like it could be possible for us.

• 1:09:48Chris Williamson?

  I think that's the importance of examples. You know, that's, that, that's the, the importance. And we were talking about this before because your new podcast, which will be linked in the show notes below. And you should absolutely go and subscribe to because I'm sure it'll be great. And you've got some fantastic guests that I'm incredibly jealous of on there. And we were talking about that and talking about just how important sort of fiction stories and tales and stuff like that are, you know? You can take from me telling you about the fact that Ben walks out of meetings of his CrossFit gym.

• 1:10:16Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Chris Williamson?

  Whatever, whatever time, and it's kind of like semi awkward, but semi funny, uh, but wholly respectable. Like the fact that you know that you're like, hang on a fucking second. Like if that is a habit, and there's two ways to look at it, actually. I think a lot of people might discount that and say, well, yeah, that's fucking Ben Bergeron, you know? Ben can do what he wants. He's, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you think, right, okay, but maybe you're putting the cart before the horse there. Maybe you're saying Ben Bergeron is Ben Bergeron, therefore Ben Bergeron can do Ben Bergeron stuff. As opposed to this is the strategy that is implemented by him, which has allowed him to become the person that I think of as being so impressive.

• 1:11:01Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. Well, which do we really think it is? Like what really is logical about that? We really think that somebody became something impressive and then became disciplined.

• 1:11:19Greg McKeown?

  Rather than became disciplined and then became successful. Yeah, but I tell the people say this sort of thing to me all the time. Well, you essentialism is all right for the people that are like already at top performers or even CEO or even the this or even the that. And I think. Yeah, man, you this is this is you got correlation and causation backwards here. You this of course, this is how people achieve what they do. And the moment they stop being selective, thoughtful and disciplined is the same point they plateau and can't break through and continue to contribute.

• 1:11:54Chris Williamson?

  Awesome. So I want to finish off so that the listeners have got some some tacit takeaways about how we can how we can execute and how we can make sure that the vital few things are effortless and the trivial many just, you know, they they they stay in the shed.

• 1:12:11Greg McKeown?

  Oh, you just want me to do that?

• 1:12:12Chris Williamson?

  I would love to find out. I mean, if you could do it for me, that would be better. But if you could give us some some ways that we can instantiate it, that would be that'd be wonderful.

• 1:12:23Greg McKeown?

  Here's one thing people can start with. They can start with a reverse pilot right now. A reverse pilot, like what is a pilot? A pilot is trying something out and seeing what happens. A reverse pilot is stopping doing something and seeing what happens. Just just stop. Choose one thing that you normally have. Look on your calendar. You take one thing and you you just cut it off. I'm not going to do that.

• 1:12:47Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 1:12:49Greg McKeown?

  Um, you you can look. Okay, I'll do it right now.

• 1:12:55Greg McKeown?

  Don't know if I can.

• 1:12:57Greg McKeown?

  I have I have a meeting Sunday morning. It's not a it's not like a business meeting. I'm not I'm not failing this. It's like a it's like a actually, it's a church meeting that I do. But that that's out of date. I shouldn't be still having that at that time. And it's gone.

• 1:13:16Chris Williamson?

  But maybe maybe it could be maybe it could be checking your phone in the morning.

• 1:13:21Greg McKeown?

  Of course, it could be checking your phone in the morning. Take your phone out of your bedroom.

• 1:13:26Chris Williamson?

  You are among friends here.

• 1:13:28Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Chris Williamson?

  Greg, you are among very good friends here.

• 1:13:32Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, there's actually, there's, you know, we should send a link out with this with a 21 day challenge that I put together. It's 21 day little things that people can do. It's better than me trying to go from memory right in the second. But one of them is that, right? You have a tech free room. Certainly, your phone shouldn't be there. I once worked with a lady who is doing a Steve Harvey had a TV show and he was, he'd asked me to work with one of his guests and I went to her home and going around her home, looking at where she's at, where she's too busy and cluttered. And then I asked her, okay, where do you put your phone? And well, in my bed, in your bed, I mean, by your bed. Oh, actually, in my bed, you're under, under my, you know,

• 1:14:11Greg McKeown?

  under my pillow at night. She sleeps with it under her pillow. And there's two things I love about that. But one is like, of course, it's horrendous. I mean, she really wakes up in the middle of the night. True. If anyone texts or emails, she wakes up, responds, puts it back. So this is literally true. That's the first thing. But the second thing that I think is equally horrendous is, is the rest of us are self righteousness about it.

• 1:14:42Chris Williamson?

  Feeling it, I'm feeling it burbling in me at the moment and going.

• 1:14:45Greg McKeown?

  You're probably all right, because I know you don't do this. But, but there's so many people I've shared that story with who say, oh, it's outrageous, shocking. And I'll say, well, where do you put your phone? And they say, well, you know, my bedside table.

• 1:15:01Greg McKeown?

  Their self righteousness is built upon 12 inches of difference between that story.

• 1:15:08Greg McKeown?

  And so what's the difference? There's hardly a difference in that story. I mean, take the phone out. It doesn't, you do not, you know, people, people had alarm clocks before they had phones. That's no, it wakes me up in the morning. Yeah, you can solve that problem in an analog solution. You have a little alarm clock and the first thing you do in the morning doesn't have to be checking your phone. Last thing at night, first thing in the morning. You know, who's, who's owning who?

• 1:15:32Chris Williamson?

  Are you listening? Are you listening, everybody out there? This is Greg McKeown telling you what I've told you for two years. And if you didn't listen to me, please, for the love of all that is holy, listen to him.

• 1:15:46Greg McKeown?

  You know, another thing I think is put a little nap in your day as often as possible, even if it's an eight, 10 most 20 minute nap every day.

• 1:15:57Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:57Greg McKeown?

  Every day.

• 1:15:57Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:15:58Greg McKeown?

  You are because because people are sleep deprived. And when you're sleep deprived, doesn't it make you tired? When you're sleep deprived, you're the executive function of your brain goes down. So you can't discern properly between what's important and what's not important. So the business cycle continues. So sleep is, of course, it's restorative and all of these things, but high performers, as a general rule, and also as the research supports Eric Anderson's research about top performers suggests that not only do they spend more focused time working on like one area of expertise, but he also found that the number two, in fact, most correlated item to distinguish the most, the top performers from the average performers is the amount of sleep they got.

• 1:16:43Greg McKeown?

  Though the top performers slept on average eight and a half hours in every 24 hour period, eight point four, if I remember right, and they took more naps as well.

• 1:16:55Greg McKeown?

  Because every moment they were actually practicing or doing their work, they were really focused and that's what the sleep and the naps allowed them to do. So it's not just the number of hours you're doing a thing. It's the number of focused hours you're doing that thing. And so, yeah, yeah, take a nap for sure.

• 1:17:15Chris Williamson?

  I have.

• 1:17:16Greg McKeown?

  It's another thing. I got more.

• 1:17:17Chris Williamson?

  I've got, I've got a, what would you say, a confession to make before you do that? I was listening, I was listening to you and Tim Ferriss in the garden today, having a little sunbath, which is why I'm just slightly pink. So I'm going to get video guy Dean to bring the saturation down on my, my side of the video. And I fell, I fell asleep for a roundabout sort of, it was beautiful. It was real engaging, really interesting. It was just a 15, 15, a little 15 minute, and then I got, I got woken up by the ice cream van. So it was perfect, but you know, I just felt, I'll put it in there. So.

• 1:17:50Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Chris Williamson?

  What else we got?

• 1:17:51Greg McKeown?

  No, but that's, that's the whole point is of course you needed that little sleep. Of course that was better. That's better use of your time, of your preparation, was taking that nap than spending those 20 minutes just listening to more stuff. You are more alert, more able to be here. Okay, next thing, every day, make your list of like, you know, whatever, six things, main things you're gonna do, three things business, three things personal. Make that list every day. Don't work from a to-do list from yesterday, that won't do. There's so much has already changed over the last 24 hours. Every day, write it out, put it in priority order, and then I only joke, half jokingly say this, cross off the bottom five.

• 1:18:32Greg McKeown?

  Right? Like, that top thing is, if you've done it right, is so important, you really need to spend the energy on that until that's done. And once you've got that resolved, then of course you can move on to item number two. That simplest prioritization process, it's not like that's so hard. Actually, it's pretty relatively easy, but people don't always do it. And if you're not doing it, start doing it. Because the return on investment of getting the most important thing done every day, over a period of even three months or six months, or of course, then of course 50 years, is immensely different. That's one more practical thing that people can do.

• 1:19:07Chris Williamson?

  That's like a microcosm, a to-do list, microcosm of the essentialist philosophy, I guess, isn't it? Brought right down to, although it would be, it would be 10 things, it'd be 10 things and cross off the bottom nine, I guess, technically. You've overlapped a little bit with.

• 1:19:21Greg McKeown?

  Oh, yes, if you went 90% to 10, yeah, I, that's right. I like that. Okay, I can say it. 10 things we'll do down to, down to the one. That's the idea. And that, that simple, that simple stab each day is like essentialism at the cutting edge of execution. Because what you want to know each morning when you've gone through that process is what's important now. You know, that's the win. What's important now, and it's the top item on that list, and you work on it. And then, once you've done it, you have permission to move on to the next item. Every day, every day, every day, you go through this process. You'd be amazed at how much you can accomplish of the things that matter, if you aren't trying to go from some very generalized list, or even just a mental list that you have, all

• 1:20:06Greg McKeown?

  this clutter that's in your mind, you're just actually working. I mean, I literally have mine, I won't show it because it's personal things, but I literally have it. I'll show it very briefly.

• 1:20:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep, got you. I can see it.

• 1:20:18Greg McKeown?

  I do it on huge pieces of paper, actually, always, in sharpies. That's my method.

• 1:20:23Chris Williamson?

  I imagine, do you hold the pen like this as well? That's the way, like a spear.

• 1:20:28Greg McKeown?

  Very basic, very essential.

• 1:20:29Chris Williamson?

  One, two.

• 1:20:31Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I love having it and I love throwing it away at the end of the day, doing it again the next day, so that you're always actually focused on what's important now, not what was even important yesterday or a week ago.

• 1:20:44Chris Williamson?

  I noticed you haven't used the word urgent once there.

• 1:20:47Greg McKeown?

  Yeah. Yeah, well, I'm not, I mean, I want to give urgency to the things that are important, not let the urgent things, regardless of their importance, consume me. So, uh, so yeah, I, I, that's true. Um, maybe to a fault, uh, but I, I definitely distrust the urgent things in general.

• 1:21:14Greg McKeown?

  Um, if other people are doing them, if they're urgent, I just have a, you know, my spidey sense is like, ah, don't think so, probably not for me. Uh, I, I want to take, I want to take the path less traveled. I want to take the path that only I can take, right? I want my children, my, I want each of my children to take the path that only they can take, a unique and essential mission in life. And, and, and I think that can be introduced at any age. So even though it's not that tactical, I think the question is, I was just talking to David Allen on, on my podcast and this week, and he said, uh, we talked about all sorts of things.

• 1:21:58Greg McKeown?

  He, he has this thing and he says, um, there are six horizons of import, like, you know, six horizons of, of prioritization. Number like highest level, number six is your life's goals. And then it goes down all the way down to like zero is like what you do right now. So it's just a time horizons. And then we got talking about this, and, and I started realizing there might be a seventh horizon, you know, above life goal.

• 1:22:29Greg McKeown?

  And we got talking about that, we'll get into all the, the interesting conversation behind it, but in the end, his endpoint was, he said, he said, yeah, he said, the real questions we need to ask aren't, uh, horizon six, basically agreeing that there is horizon seven, that he's never addressed in any of his books or anything. And he summarized those two questions as who am I and why am I here?

• 1:22:50Greg McKeown?

  And as I listen to those questions, I think, yeah, if you never ask those questions, the stuff on your to-do list, the stuff in your mental list could be completely wrong directional.

• 1:23:02Greg McKeown?

  So essentialism isn't just about doing more stuff efficiently. It's about doing more of the right things. And so it presupposes that first you are actually asking those questions, that you're not doing it once in a blue moon when you, you know, you have some deep conversation around a fireplace somewhere and you're three hours and oh, who am I, what am I here and then forget it all. No, actually, you're like leading with that. That's the work of life. Every day you're going, what am I supposed to do? Who am I? And I, we taught that to our children. So our children, when our eldest was, she figured out she wanted to be a director when she's like 10 years old. Maybe she was 12, but she was really got it by that point. And she'd spent a couple of hours one night answering, asking these questions. Well, who am I? And why am I here? And what do I want to do?

• 1:23:46Greg McKeown?

  And what's my 100-year vision? Literally, because that's like what we were talking about with her. Really, that's really legit. And, and she, she wrote, she wrote this whole note and put it under our bedroom door. We got it the next morning. It's just all this. She knew she'd figured it out. This is what I want to do. And she's been just able to focus so much on that ever since. Think of how fast you would accelerate if you knew that from the time you were 10, 11, 12 years old. So she's done internships. I mean, she's at university by the time she's 16, 16 years old. She's graduated high school early. She's at university 16, 17. She's taking classes in, she's, think of how focused that clarity has allowed her to be and how much she's learning and understanding.

• 1:24:29Greg McKeown?

  Internships for all sorts of companies and stuff, being on set, learning, helping to see from shots and angles. Anyway, I just think that that's like a pretty, it feels very high level, but it's a very practical thing to start asking those questions now and tying it to your to-do list each day. And look what you can become. Well, that is how you spend your life.

• 1:24:51Chris Williamson?

  Right? The actions that you take every single day will contribute to the micro achievements, will contribute to the medium sized achievements. And that over time compounded is how you are spending your life. And to loop it back to one of the first things that we said is you don't have the choice to not spend your life. Your life is going to be spent for you, whether you choose to do it consciously, or whether you allow the societal norms and your predispositions and your genetic heritage and you're dealing with trauma and all of those sorts of the baggage and the things that you've brought with you to determine that for you. And the best that you can hope for is to be the smartest rat in the room. If you don't work out what's going on,

• 1:25:32Chris Williamson?

  you can be, you can be a rich, successful or famous slave. And that is the best that you can hope for.

• 1:25:42Greg McKeown?

  Smartest rat in the room. It's brilliant. I think, I think one of the highest praises, but also one of the things I've found least, so saddest too, since writing essentialism is how many people will write to me or make a comment online saying, I wish I'd read essentialism 20 years ago, 30 years ago, as much as 50 years ago. Isn't that, there's something very, you know, sad about that.

• 1:26:09Chris Williamson?

  You're quite an empathetic person.

• 1:26:12Greg McKeown?

  Am I?

• 1:26:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:14Greg McKeown?

  Um, I certainly, I certainly feel for people. I certainly, uh, I certainly care about people. Um, and my wife is, is an empath. So she's like, very, very strong in this regard. And so I've always got like a high standard, uh, to sort of if I'm comparing against, but, um, but I certainly feel for those people. Uh, and, and the sense of, the sense of how early could we get to the point where we're asking these questions? We're never going to regret that. We may regret lots of things, but we're never going to regret having started as an essentialist right now.

• 1:26:58Greg McKeown?

  You know, you're not going to get to the end of our lives. Oh, I just should have spent more time on Facebook.

• 1:27:05Greg McKeown?

  You know, I just, I should, I should have worried what everybody thought about me. I should have spent more time judging everybody else, just spent more time in email. Oh, I want my, I want my tombstone to read, he checked email. Yeah, we're never, these are like all ridiculous, aren't they? But, but so I, I really want, you know, on that day to have decided on this one to live and lead more as an essentialist.

• 1:27:36Chris Williamson?

  Amazing, phenomenal, man. Thank you so much. This has been amazing. I, I am real excited for your podcast to come out. Tell us about that. When, when are you intending on launching it? And can you tell us who the first episode's gonna be?

• 1:27:49Greg McKeown?

  Well, the first episode, I can tell you, the first episode will be with my wife.

• 1:27:53Chris Williamson?

  That's cool.

• 1:27:54Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, because she's the most important person. That sounds very, that sounds very cliche now or something saying it out loud. It's the first time I've said that. But, but really, it's, it is the episode, you know, I want it to be called, uh, the birth of essentialism.

• 1:28:10Greg McKeown?

  Because there is no essentialism without Anna. There's a key story in the book, we'll get into it now, but the key story in the book as to what launched essentialism that relates to my wife. And, and so it's just, and it's the story behind all of that. You know, essentialism is something we're trying to live in our lives. It's not something that we just talk about elsewhere. So I just wanted the priority person to be the first interview and actually like really insisted on that with my production company, with the production company I'm working with. So that's the first person. I don't know who the second is yet, actually, but it, you know, could be, could be Tim Ferriss, could be Ryan Holiday, could be Erin Huffington.

• 1:28:55Greg McKeown?

  There's a whole bunch already recorded, done. I'm not sure the order that'll come out. And we're just, I'm just really enjoying doing it. It's the first time I created a class at Stanford called Designing Life Essentially. And, and it just, for the longest time, I have not had a way of sharing those practical things with other people. Just recently, I finally tried, started to change that. So there is a Skillshare class I just launched through Skillshare called Simple Productivity. Take some of those practical things and just that I've learned, you know, that makes that available for anybody who wants to learn about the how to and this and the podcast, that's what it's about. It's about talking to people, having meaningful conversations and trying to give them, you know, like you were saying with

• 1:29:40Greg McKeown?

  Ben, stories and examples from people's lives about how they are wrestling with what really matters.

• 1:29:45Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. So what's the name of it going to be? People want to search?

• 1:29:49Greg McKeown?

  Um, the current working title is Essentialism with Greg McKeown.

• 1:29:53Chris Williamson?

  Got you. I mean, if one of those words goes in.

• 1:29:57Greg McKeown?

  It should be all right.

• 1:29:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And you don't come up. There's something, something drastic's gone wrong. Yeah.

• 1:30:05Chris Williamson?

  So that'll be linked in the show notes below. I will find the Skillshare course as well. And then is the 21 day thing, is that part of Skillshare? Is that somewhere else?

• 1:30:13Greg McKeown?

  No, it's not in the Skillshare thing. If you reach out to me, we'll, my, my office will get that to you so we can make that available too.

• 1:30:20Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal. Thank you so much, man. I mean, I, I love these conversations. I have to say, this is, I could spend all day doing it. And I think increasingly over time, as I've done more and more of the podcasts, this feels as I, I sort of low key keep saying the closest thing to a highest calling that I've ever found.

• 1:30:39Greg McKeown?

  Yes.

• 1:30:40Chris Williamson?

  And.

• 1:30:41Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, you're built to do this, Chris. Yeah.

• 1:30:43Chris Williamson?

  I hope so. I think so. And I think, I think, you know, if, if I keep on doing, if I keep on doing what I'm doing, I really think that me and the little, little tribe of people that we've got coming along at the moment could, could go quite far. And I appreciate you giving me your time and, and being a big, a big part of it. It's phenomenal, man. Thank you so much.

• 1:31:02Greg McKeown?

  Been a real pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

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

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

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

• 1:31:30Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  And Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

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