How To Focus On What Matters Most - Greg McKeown

Greg McKeown is an author, public speaker, and leadership consultant Success requires you to focus on what truly matters. But in the modern world there are more distractions than ever before. So how should you best choose what to prioritise, and what are the pitfalls to avoid? Expect to learn how Essentialism has evolved over the past decade, why saying no is so hard and how to get better at saying it, how to counteract your desire for novelty, why it’s so difficult to cut your losses, how to use boundaries in your life, the challenges you'll face as you become more successful and much more. - 00:00 The Paradox of Success 04:29 Has Essentialism Evolved in the Last Decade? 09:31 Essentialism Has Become More Relevant 13:14 Why is Being Reactive Bad? 19:35 How to Better Work Out Your Priorities 26:30 Why Saying No is So Hard 35:51 Having a Healthy Balance Between Easy & Hard 45:10 Knowing When & How to Slow Down 55:11 Biggest Challenges of Maintaining Essentialism 1:09:33 Discerning Which Advice We Should Listen to 1:16:35 Where to Find Greg - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  When we first spoke nearly five years ago now, I said that I might be your arch nemesis. And in some ways, I've become worse, but in other ways, I've become much better since then. So I can give you up top, I can give you a thank you for at least adjusting my trajectory over the last five years in a positive direction.

• 0:20Greg McKeown?

  Well, one of the things that's interesting about that to me is just in essentialism itself, there's this idea of the paradox of success. You know, so it's five, four stages. You have clarity leads to success, leads to options and opportunities. All of that sounds like the right problem to have, and maybe it is, but it doesn't make them less problems, especially if it leads to the undisciplined pursuit of more. And so I think that the more success somebody experiences, I think the more the case for essentialism exists in their life because they go, yeah, this is the problem I thought I wanted, and maybe it still is, but now you still have to figure out how to be successful

• 1:00Greg McKeown?

  at success and to not have it eat you alive and spit you out. You know, this is, this is sort of the path eventually. And so the antidote, of course, is the disciplined pursuit of less but better. So anyway.

• 1:15Chris Williamson?

  No, I think it's so right as well that I'm aware, talking about success on the internet is one of the least popular things to do because the total addressable market is essentially zero compared with talking about grinding from the ground floor up. But assuming, assuming that the people that are into personal development and work on themselves and read books like yours, that have been hugely formative for me, assuming that their goal is to achieve a level of success, you better fucking future-proof yourself. If the thing that you want to get is there and you know, like I can, maybe it's one of those things that you just don't get to appreciate or believe until you actually arrive there and you're like, no, no, no, that's bullshit. When I get to success, it's all going to be fine.

• 1:58Chris Williamson?

  It's like, look, every single person I've spoken to, every single one of them, the problems don't stop, they get more complex, the higher up the ladder you get.

• 2:06Greg McKeown?

  Yes, that's, that's what it is. And, and, and you, people struggle to believe it if they're in the first phases because those are really complex, challenging issues as well. But what happens is that the opportunities increase. And the the the scale of the impact of those choices increases. And and the the number of people that are impacted by them. And therefore, the number of critics also increases. And so and and on it can go. So you you the reward for getting to the top of the mountain is that there are other mountains.

• 2:46Greg McKeown?

  And in a way, that's a great part of life, that behind every mountain, there's mountains. But it doesn't make it easier. And and I think this is a very poorly understood area of success. People just assume if I get to the top of that mountain, all the problems disappear. Life is just great. And it's like, no, you nobody gets to escape. You know, the mortal experience, however, it's designed, it's designed in such a way that you just can't do that. This is never an option. And sometimes I think as people get higher in their level of success, it becomes much more lonely.

• 3:27Greg McKeown?

  Because there's fewer people to appreciate the new set of challenges. So anyway, I think it takes courage. I think every phase of life and every phase, if you wish to get to a higher point of contribution. You have to take your life into your hands, take responsibility for it and be courageous. Which means that if you want to keep making progress, you're sort of living in a state of. I don't know, like not comfort with discomfort, but you're certainly familiar with it all the time.

• 4:01Greg McKeown?

  And and the alternative is sort of slowly dying. So it's not like, you know, you you're either you're either on the edge of your ability. And facing the fear and taking new risks. So that you can have the great adventure continue. Or or you're just slowly dying in whatever level of success a person happens to be at. So, yeah, it's like, those are two tough choices.

• 4:28Chris Williamson?

  What has changed? In your perspective on essentialism over the last 10 years, it's 10th anniversary, 10th birthday party for what for me is one of the five books that everybody needs to read, this 100 book reading list thing that I've been pushing for forever. Yours is sat in that top five, like absolute, you have to get this done. And I'm interested, you're a decade hence now. What's changed or what's evolved?

• 4:57Greg McKeown?

  It's such a rich question. If I tried to just answer it honestly, I mean, it's obviously been completely life changing for me. You know, it's enabled me to operate in a certain kind of rarefied air. You know, in a quite humbling way, it has become sort of a part of the zeitgeist, a part of Americana in a certain way. And so, you know, there are these, you know, so Steve Harvey gets a copy of it. It's his favorite book. And so we end up doing a bunch of interesting things together. And Maria Shriver, former First Lady of California, you know, she was given a copy and she's giving them out at her famous Sunday luncheons.

• 5:42Greg McKeown?

  And Kanye was missing one time and wherever he was, he had a copy of Essentialism because that's what, you know, that's what he posted on social media. And then when he was on Rogan, he's like, he's like, yeah, I'm an essentialist now, you know? And so, you know, these moments are a bit, you know, some of those are a bit strange, but it's also humbling because, because the movement has just begun. And I can feel that, that every year, there are more people that essentialism reaches than the year before. There are more stories coming of people that really do feel like it's changed their life, which is always a, you know, that's, that's its own sort of strange experience.

• 6:24Greg McKeown?

  And so maybe to your question about what's changed, I mean, let me try and offer two things to that. One thing that's changed is I really believe now that people do need the toolset to go with the mindset. And I wasn't convinced of that 10 years ago. In fact, I was under contract to create, which you know about this, this new, this new tool, the Essentialism Planner. I was under contract 10 years ago to create that, started working on it for a couple of months and just was like, no, I don't think this, nobody needs this. And there's so many planners and journals and this kind of thing out there. I don't want to create it just because, you know, okay, essentialism did well. So now we have to do this.

• 7:07Greg McKeown?

  So I uncommitted from the contract, went away from it, carried on in my own life, like every single day, doing some kind of written in paper and pen journaling and planning. And I don't think I've missed a day in the last, I mean, in the last 10 years, I don't think I've missed a day. And, and in the process, found eventually a, this, this way of using a few minutes every day that I thought was so optimal and so supportive of essentialism. I, I was like, actually, maybe, maybe a planner would, could really help people. And so that's one of the shifts that's happened for me is you need the mindset, but now I actually believe a toolset makes a big difference for people.

• 7:50Greg McKeown?

  Maybe it's for people that aren't thinking about essentialism as much as I am, which is like everybody, uh, you know, for them, they just want the tool. Give me the tool, give me the best of what you've learned. And, and so that, that's, you know, that's one big change, I would say. You said there was a second one. Yeah, I was trying to remember. Oh yeah, I know what I was gonna say about that. So I think we've shifted eras. Okay, so if you say agrarian age, you know, industrial age, information age, I think in the 10 years since I published Essentialism, we've shifted to an influencer age. And that's a non-trivial shift.

• 8:29Greg McKeown?

  So if, if you say, okay, that, that, that lead characteristic of the information age was distraction, then the lead characteristic in this new age is disorientation. And while I think that those are sort of similar in some ways, I think that they are much more, that this new is much more foundationally challenging. And the word that I think would have been relevant 10 years ago, but is different when I talk to people about it now is noise. Everybody's buried in noise.

• 9:07Greg McKeown?

  And so it's the ability to eliminate noise. It's the ability to not just eliminate though, synthesize noise. So that you can connect the dots through it like it's raw material from which to create something meaningful. These skills now seem to me primary in a way that even 10 years ago, I wouldn't have said that.

• 9:30Chris Williamson?

  You must feel prophetic, like a British Cassandra, sort of seeing.

• 9:36Greg McKeown?

  Well, my brother certainly would call me a Cassandra. So I don't know. I mean, maybe there's something to that. Go and go, carry on.

• 9:41Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean? You know, you fuck, this book came out 10 years ago. This book came out 10 years ago and it's more, it's become more relevant over time. You know, like a, like a weather reporter, the Mayan calendar or something. And, uh, yeah, it's just, you know, it's.

• 9:59Greg McKeown?

  That type phrase, that's nice.

• 10:00Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's true. And, um, whether it was you just catching a trend early that's then sort of ripped a hold and then, and then got further ahead. But I love that idea of going from distraction, disorientation and, um, that, that's not something I'd thought of before, but I think is pretty accurate because it's not just about our attention being pulled away and the optionality of that. It's the sheer volume and you know, I always talk about this, there was one day in 2010 or 2011, maybe like early January 2011 or something. There was one day where humanity had the right balance of available information to information that we wanted. And then we immediately, you know, fucking eons, millennia, we wanted more information than we had.

• 10:45Chris Williamson?

  And then there was one day around about 2011 when we had it and we immediately fucking smashed through it. And now we're out just in the, the void, fuck it. Orbiting, orbiting above, above the earth, just surrounded by information and. It's a fundamental change that humans have had to go through from being scavengers of information to being discerners of information. You're no longer looking for things. You are choosing between things and it's a fundamentally different skill. And I think that, you know, that sort of essentialist mindset becomes even more of a prophylactic against that sort of thing. As you have to be more discerning, as you have to work out, is this relevant or not? Not even how do I get it? Not even can I focus on the thing that I want?

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  But this barrage of different things, stimuli, information, potential goals, potential projects. Am I going to work from home? All of the stuff that happened from COVID. All of those, that's optionality that's been opened up. Hooray, that means that there's lots of different ways you can go. But boo, who has to make the decision? You do.

• 11:49Greg McKeown?

  Well, I think that, the way I think about it is that we are either in or approaching a truly limitless era, right? Like, that's the good news. The bad news is that the obstacle to that is the noise. In some ways, it's both the, it's both the obstacle and the raw material.

• 12:10Chris Williamson?

  The enabler, yeah.

• 12:11Greg McKeown?

  It's both. But figuring out how to navigate that, you know, we're using this disorientation word and noise comes from the Latin nausea. And so when we say, yeah, we feel all this noise in our world, it's like, yes, we actually feel nauseous, you know, it's seasickness. And so when we go on social media and we're absorbing so much information that way, including news, right? So it's not just, it's not just influences in, in the original sense of the word, oh, you should wear these clothes or live this way. It's not just that, it's all of the things, all of the information is getting put through that lens, that process to us.

• 12:56Greg McKeown?

  You know, when we get off social media, it's like, where are we? We don't even know where we are. We don't know what's up, what's down. And so it's like reactivity becomes a lifestyle rather than, yes, well, sometimes I'm reactive. It's like we're just constantly in this reactive state.

• 13:12Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that, yeah, go on. Let's say, let's say that somebody isn't familiar with sort of the essentialist framework.

• 13:18Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  Why, and we can do a little brief in a second, but just that reactivity point, what's, what's bad about being reactive? Why does that not fit into an essentialist worldview?

• 13:30Greg McKeown?

  Well, I mean, let's, let's start with this, right? Like, I haven't named this law. You and I are gonna name this law, maybe. And it's this, that the highest priority today is the least likely thing to happen.

• 13:45Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 13:47Greg McKeown?

  So that's the strangest thing, and I stand by that. I believe that's a law, at least, at least a law in this era. It might be that it's a natural law and it's just a human bias that's, you know, just really challenging to overcome. But when I go through a planning process in the day and I've identified the priority, when I look at it, I think, there's no way that would have happened today. It doesn't even always happen after I've defined it. I might not even make any progress on it today. But I'm like, if I hadn't defined it, there's no way I would have made any progress. Like, we react to either complete trivia, right? The trivial many, or maybe to important things, or maybe to urgent things.

• 14:31Greg McKeown?

  But the essential, the most important thing, the most important relationship, that is never the thing that happens first, unless you make it so. So that's one reason that I think living reactively is suboptimal.

• 14:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, it'll, it completely puts you at the mercy of whatever next comes careening into consciousness, right? Whether it's a notification on your phone, whether it's a fear that you've had, whether it's memory of the fact that you don't have any bread in the cupboard. You know, that's, that, it's the most salient thing. And, you know, the Eisenhower matrix of sort of urgent versus important, the urgent will always, I mean, when I think back to, you know, when I was really, really obsessive about the sort of working on productivity. When I think back to that, the amount of time, months, months that I would put off, the important thing, months that I wouldn't do it for. Like, the most important thing, which evidently not that important. Well, no, it is. It's just somehow other stuff gets in the way.

• 15:32Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, you know, if you're not careful, and this is something I'm sort of realizing as I grow up and get a little bit older. You don't have an unlimited amount of time to do the important things in your life. You don't have an unlimited amount of time.

• 15:46Greg McKeown?

  No, no, no, I'll say it further, and this would come close to another law. Is that, I mean, I call it, in essentialism, I call it the 90% rule. And it is, I mean, the 90% rule says, focus only on those things that are 90% or above important. That is, if it's not a clear yes, it becomes a clear no. So it's, that's like an extreme rule to try and help us escape the tendency to do just the good stuff or the middle stuff, is be more selective. But over the last 10 years, something I have come to observe and believe is that

• 16:27Greg McKeown?

  we have only enough time left to do the 90% and above. And that's, that's the tougher aha. Because you say, oh, every time I'm doing something that's just good or completely trivial, I am, I am making a trade off I would probably not make if they were really placed in front of me as choices.

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I mean, nobody on their deathbed says, oh, I just should have spent a bit more time scrolling on Instagram. You know, that's what I wish I'd done, like, it's obvious. But the, but the, this is the nature, I think, of the noise and the deafening nature of it is that we, we don't see the sig, we don't hear the signal in the noise. And so everything starts to seem equally important, where the reality is always, always that a very few things are, I mean, like, something like this, infinitesimally small things, but infinitely important. And that, that's in every human system, in every set of data, in every set of tasks,

• 17:37Greg McKeown?

  there is something that is so much more important than everything else. But you have to really work to get to it. You know, it's, it's, it's a little like the, you know, thinking that you, you know, a lot of the productivity

• 17:52Greg McKeown?

  language and focus has been around, how do you do more? How can you be more efficient and so on? And fine, okay, I don't think about what I do as like that, but.

• 18:02Greg McKeown?

  That's more like thinking you're in a coal mine your whole life and then waking up one morning and going, "Oh, I've never have been in a coal mine. It's always been a diamond mine." "Well, how would that shift all of your behavior? I have to operate differently now. I have to figure, get really good at finding the diamonds, pausing, thinking, reflecting, exploring, pushing everything aside that isn't the diamond. Well, that's just not, I'm not going to focus on that. I need to find the thing that really matters." And, and I, I, I don't know why it's the case, but I absolutely observe like it's a, a, a reality in all human systems and all circumstances that you have, I think about it now like an, an onion of human systems.

• 18:44Greg McKeown?

  You have the noise and trivia at the, at the edge. As you move in, you get towards a bit more important. It's a little more, um, it's a, you know, you have to be a little more careful around it because it's, you know, a little more intimate. And then at the very center of it, you have things that are so vulnerable, so disproportionately important, they're everything, that this, this is how I think it is. I think that's true in a personal life. I think it's true in a relationship. I think it's true on a team, an organization, a country. At every level of a human system, this strange phenomenon seems to exist. And, uh, and so, once you, once you discover that, once, once you understand that,

• 19:30Greg McKeown?

  I think your life changes completely, irrevocably. At least that's what happened to me.

• 19:35Chris Williamson?

  How can people better work out their priorities? It sounds all well and good if it's not above 90% important, but you've just admitted yourself that we're living in an age where everything feels important. Not only does everything feel important, but the most important things are often the least urgent. So there's a, you have to get through the non-important urgent shit first, then you need to get through the like, non-important, non-urgent shit to find the important, non-urgent shit that sits at the bottom. How, after all of this time, teaching people, doing courses and all the rest of it, what's the best framework that people can use to work out what they need to work on?

• 20:09Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I can teach people how to do it in six minutes, which is really cool. And, um, but, I mean, not, not to teach them in six minutes. I mean, they can learn to do it themselves every day in six minutes. And I learned it in some ways from someone I interviewed on my podcast. And what happened to her is that she she'd started a new business and she woke up at like three in the morning, hyperventilating. Oh my goodness, what have I done? I've just quit this job. I'm not yet earning sufficient income. She's just in that panic mode. And quite spontaneously, what she does is she grabs this huge sheet of paper that she plans to throw away. So it's just like, maybe if I just get all of the noise out of my head and

• 20:52Greg McKeown?

  just write, free write, and she's just messy and it's crazy and it's chaotic and it's, you know, let's say she's swearing all the way through it. And it's just like, you know, it's not for anyone. Not even in a sense, it wasn't even for her. She's just like pouring it out. And what she noticed happening, and she's learned, and even I think the first time she did it was like the six minute process. It was like nothing. But then she has learned since then, it's like, in six minutes, what happens is she went from confusion, I don't know if this was her language, but this is my language now, right? She went from confusion to clarity to creation. First, she's just confusion, noise. Then she starts going, hmm, well, maybe what would I do about that? What could I do that would be healthy? So like, started to turn into

• 21:35Greg McKeown?

  questions that were relevant for her. And then, and then within just these few minutes, she's like, looking like, okay, well, here are some plans. This is what I could do. And she was able to go back to bed at peace with the sense that, okay, I, I still know what the problems are, but I, I've worked through it. It's not just spinning in my head. What is she writing? What was she writing? Yes. What is she writing? Well, the prompt was something like, what's going on in your head? What is happening? You know, so the prompt is quite a simple prompt. And she taught me this, too. I've never heard anyone share this, and I love this. It's called instinctive elaboration.

• 22:15Greg McKeown?

  And what instinctive elaboration is, is that if you ask yourself a question or asked a question, there is an involuntary mental process that takes place. You cannot not think about it, which is a pretty powerful phrase. And, and I think we've all experienced it. Somebody asks you an interesting question, and it just like hijacks the way that you were thinking and what you were thinking about. And so you can use this to your benefit by having good prompts. So after this, I started the following process. What? So what? Now what?

• 22:51Greg McKeown?

  So every time I'm writing in my journal, I say, okay, what is going on? And that's the free writing. That is just all the noise. It doesn't matter. No judging. Maybe you plan on throwing it away if that helps. I don't care keeping it. I don't mind who reads it. I want the noise.

• 23:09Greg McKeown?

  So what? Now the prompt now is not what's going on, but like, well, what does it mean? You know, what, like, let's just try and look at that noise as if, let's imagine, imagine I was, someone else showed me their writing and I'm looking at and going, oh, I wonder what that says. What does that mean? And so you're just trying to now connect the dots a little bit. And then the now what? I have a really clear structure for this. I call it the one, two, three method. The highest priority item for the day, that's the one. You might spend two hours on that ideally.

• 23:45Greg McKeown?

  The two is two things that are urgent and essential and the three are maintenance items. That's like the laundry of our life. If we don't do it, tomorrow gets a lot harder. And that together becomes what I think of now as my done for the day list. And it doesn't mean that I won't do anything else. But if I get those one, two, three things done, I know I have done the most important thing. Some urgent things and some maintenance items that will help my future self be thankful to me. Yeah. And, and I say, okay, well, if I just do those things every day, life is going to be better. And it's going to help me orient my way through this noise.

• 24:25Greg McKeown?

  And that's what we need because it seems to me that there are just two kinds of people in the world now. There are people who are lost and there are people who know they are lost.

• 24:37Greg McKeown?

  And if you can get the second category, that's really helpful because if you, if you're lost and you know you're lost, you're actually not lost anymore because you know what to do. You know, you can stop. I don't know what I'm doing. Let's write this all out. This is where I'm at. This is some confusing. Okay, what does all that mean? Okay, what am I going to do about it? Like, the problem is when we don't realize we're lost and we just keep barreling ahead without pausing and reflecting and getting, you know, it's like a plane is off track 90% of the time. The key is to getting where it's supposed to get to is that it has an automatic get back on track function. And so in a disorienting world, what we need is a reorienting process.

• 25:19Greg McKeown?

  And that's why I think this daily process is such a helpful tool for living essentialism in a noisy world.

• 25:26Chris Williamson?

  I had a conversation with a guy called Nick Pollard, the people displeaser. And he used a not too dissimilar analogy, which was a missile doesn't hit the target. The missile doesn't hit not the target. And that's the way that missiles work. This is not the target, avoid it. This is not the target, avoid it. And after you've not avoided all of the not the targets, you end up hitting the thing that you meant to hit. And, you know, again, so much of the sort of the essentialist mindset is around the elimination. It's around the not doing. I'm completely obsessed with the idea that success in life is at least probably 90% avoiding catastrophe as opposed to expediting success. Because the catastrophes are the things that knock you out of the bottom.

• 26:10Chris Williamson?

  They're the things that cause game over. You know, you spend, you spend your entire life caring about your health and eating organic and ensuring that you don't have seed oils. And then one day you drive your car without your seatbelt on. It's like, hey, guess what? Game over. So those are the things that really come in and make step changes to the quality of what you're doing. So just going, it's actually speaking on Nick's work, people pleasing. I think there's a lot of parallels with what you do. Talk to me about why saying no to new, more things is so hard. Nick came at it from an emotional health perspective. But I'm interested to hear it from a work, life, purpose, productivity perspective from yourself.

• 26:53Chris Williamson?

  Basically, why saying no is so hard and how people can learn to say no more effectively?

• 26:59Greg McKeown?

  Well, there's sort of one way you could go with that question, but I'm sort of wanting to answer it a different way because of how you set the question up. And it's like Socrates was described as like the wisest man in the world. And he said, well, I don't know if I am, but if I am, it's because I have this daemon with me. And he says, this daemon, so this sort of, I mean, it sort of, we don't really use that term now, and it's not the same as a demon, but this sort of entity. It's like conscience. Yes, I suppose conscience, but it felt very separate to him. He said, he said, my daemon never tells me what to do, what to do, but he always tells me what not to

• 27:39Greg McKeown?

  do. And I thought that that was such a, you know, consistent idea with what you were just sharing. And I remember when Storm Ida came through, I was stuck in the airport. And I mean, the storm is completely consuming the airport. There's water coming through the ceilings. People are already starting to lose their minds. And I've been in these situations enough in airports to know, like, like, you just don't want to be there through all of that. Like, if you can possibly just get somewhere else away from the storm, that's better. And I knew that there was a hotel about 10 minutes from the airport. I'd stayed in it before and I could physically see it. And I thought, look, if I just get there, it's just 10 minutes over there. And I try all these things and everything's not working

• 28:22Greg McKeown?

  out, you know, because they've shut everything down because there's water pouring everywhere. And finally, I even tried to rent a car and they were like, no, this is impossible. But they said, if you just walk straight down that road and the water, it didn't look like it was too bad. You know, it looked a little like it was slowing down the rain. They said, it's a 10 minute walk, just go there and you'll be fine. And I took like a few paces and I heard like my own daemon, do not do this. That was exactly what it was. And I carried on walking for about another four or five steps and it was louder. Do not do this. And that's it. That's sort of the end of the story. I went back, I tra- retraced all my steps, went back to the airport, stayed there for a while until things were calm enough that, uh, that I was able to get to the hotel and spent the

• 29:05Greg McKeown?

  night there. I don't know what would have happened had I've gone down that path. I, I'm glad I don't know. But I do think that there's something in this, you know? You, you could say, okay, what's the most essential thing in my life? What's the very best use of me? I do think those are helpful questions, but they can be overwhelming. And so if you ask the opposite, it's like, what don't you want? What is the thing, the number one thing you know you don't want? Okay. Well, now you basically know what it is you want, because it's just sort of the inverse of that.

• 29:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. George, George, my friend, uh, asked this question on the first ever episode, even before you, he was before B, BG, uh, he was before Greg. And, um, he, he asked this question, how do you make, uh, a miserable person happy? You go, no idea. He says, how do you make a happy person miserable? You go, I've got a fucking million, million pieces of advice for you there. You go, right. Okay. So inversion, inversion's a useful tool and I can find out at least I can avoid the pitfalls by making sure that I don't do the things that I know that are going to make me miserable. You know, it's probably maybe a mark of where you've gotten to and, and, and the fact that I'm receptive to it and actually more receptive to it than you giving me a, a, a four step

• 30:15Chris Williamson?

  matrix of how I'm supposed to identify the most important thing and all the rest of it. Because this may be frustrating to people, but fuck it. I don't care. As you get further along in the journey of working on yourself and of identifying how you work best, experience comes along for the ride. So previously everything was very effortful and it was system two. You were, you, you know, you've got your daily list of, of affirmations and, and morning routine and all the rest of this stuff. And there's still a place for all of that. But largely what you're doing is you're, you're forcing all of this water into an ice cube tray so that it sits nice, compartmentalized, because you have no idea what to do. It's messy. The world is messy and chaotic and you need to wrangle it into some sense of

• 30:59Chris Williamson?

  order. Fantastic. What I've learned that that, whatever it is, conscience, Damon, gut instinct, habit, whatever it is, that thing that goes off there, for the most part.

• 31:14Chris Williamson?

  Is almost always right and it gets more right the longer that you go on. And you say, well, that's whimsy. It's imprecision. It's wishful thinking. It doesn't, it's untestable. It's unverifiable. It's unfalsifiable. Like, yep, I am completely there with you. And yet, when I find myself following that thing, most stuff goes well. Most stuff goes well and it goes better than it would have done had I have tried to reverse engineer my, what do I want written on my gravestone? Broken down into 10 year chunks, broken down into one year sprints, broken down into daily action. Like, it's just, what do I want to do?

• 31:53Chris Williamson?

  And that, again, the reason that it's so cool is that it is a competitive advantage that compounds with experience, which means that as opposed to, it's one of a countervailing forces to things get more difficult the further along the ladder that you get, because this is one of the things that you can't speed run. There is no fucking growth hacking experience, really. It's just, it comes along as a byproduct of time. This your first tour that you've done with the band? You have no idea how you should eat, how you should sleep, how you should train, when you need to go to the bathroom, what, how you need to pack everything. After a while, maybe you've got a system in place and then after a while after that, you just do it by feel. And you're like, fuck, that's cool. And it's not replicable.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  It means that competition is, and it's more fun because it doesn't feel like it's this prescribed, you'd top down dictatorial world. It's this sort of emergent bottom up, very uniquely you. And yeah, that, at least for me, managing that transition has been a difficult one to allow myself to be more free flowing. But I really appreciate it. I appreciate, and I'm grateful to me for letting go of some of the more sort of rigorous and rigid and structured ways that I used to do things, to now allow me to sort of tap into that experience. So maybe that resonates.

• 33:10Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, well, look, it's, I mean, one way to riff on that is to say, look, the Damon is playing an extremely complex game. And, you know, if we, if we use sort of Musk's idea, the simulation idea. Okay, so in the simulation, we are trying to.

• 33:36Greg McKeown?

  Let's say that part of the purpose, central purpose is to maximize the growth of people. That people need to use their agency to make choices, including mistakes, so that they can gain that experience that they didn't have before, so that they can become wiser, become better and grow. Okay, so if that's the case, like as a parent, like it's what I want for my children too. I want them to make mistakes as soon as possible, be in a high rapid learning process. So there's no shame when they make mistakes. I'm never going to shame them because that's what they're supposed to do is make choices. And some will go right and some won't. And they'll learn about themselves and other people through the process.

• 34:17Greg McKeown?

  What we would want optimally is someone like Anna and I's parents to step there to be able to occasionally say, no, that isn't going to work well for you. But to use that very carefully. Otherwise, everything's a no all the time. And like then they don't get the optimal growth path and learning of life. And so I do think that this sort of this Damon approach and paying attention to that, like, hey, if you're not feeling it, proceed, let's keep going. But as soon as you do, you never don't, never ignore that. You just avoid so many of the catastrophic things. And in some ways, anything but catastrophic failure isn't failure. It's like, yeah, keep going, keep learning.

• 35:02Greg McKeown?

  Just avoid the catastrophic things. And I really do believe that if people are paying attention, if they're listening, they will always have a Damon warning. I, that's been true in my life. And I think it's true in all the people I've talked to as I listen to them and their complex life story and their narratives. And I've done quite a bit of that over the last 25 years. And, and as we've gone through, literally narrate, literally creating a graphical representation of their life from birth to the moment we're having the conversation. In those big mistake moments, the huge things that have been really, really big, they, they had a moment of warning and maybe they just were like, oh, I'm still doing it. Don't let the warnings guide you and then play openly within that lane.

• 35:46Greg McKeown?

  This seems something like optimal living to me.

• 35:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, beautiful. I want to talk about something else that I've been kind of conflicted by this year. So a lot of the people listening to the show will know, a good friend of mine, a guy called Alex Hormozi, he is very much hard, things are hard, that's why they're hard, stop complaining about them being hard. And I think his message is fantastic and it's resonated with me a lot and it's given me an awful lot of resilience in times when I've needed it. But I'm not convinced that it is a fuel that I need to rely on all the time. And I'm interested in alchemizing something different, or maybe just having a couple of different fuel sources, you know, switching between fucking coal and nuclear or whatever. And I came across a really gorgeous quote from you that said, puritanism went beyond embracing

• 36:35Chris Williamson?

  the hard, it extended to also distrusting the easy. And I think for the people who take pride and pleasure and meaning and purpose from deploying the hard, from leaning into the hard, from dealing with it, and they say, I can do things other people can't, and I can put my nose to the grindstone and I will keep going and I'm going to carry the boats and so on, that the distrust of the easy comes along for the ride. So I'm interested in, I'm interested in that arc and how a, you know, a micro David Goggins can learn to trust the easy and have a little bit more comfort when things come along like that.

• 37:17Greg McKeown?

  Well, look, all wisdom to me is sort of something like the center between two opposing truths. They're both true, but if you go too far in one direction, it will no longer be true and wise. And, and, you know, so justice and mercy would be like that. But so would, so would, I think, I think sort of hard and easy is like that. So if you, for example, if a person is an insecure overachiever.

• 37:45Greg McKeown?

  They will tend to operate out of a mindset where if it's not hard, I'm doing something wrong. And so they're always pushing, but they can push too far because they've gained a sort of mindset, something like a bad 1980s motivational speaker slash coach, you know, you've got to do 150% and if you don't, then that's not enough and you've just got to push further. And that was one of the reasons that I wrote the book Effortless was as an antidote to that. You can think about it like an insecure overachievers' guide to healthy productivity. What does that look like? Is there a way that is actually more optimal, get better results, but without this endless assumption that burnout is the way?

• 38:28Greg McKeown?

  Now, you could take it too far, but that's not who I'm writing to. I'm writing to those that only default one way. So there's a case study that blew my mind when I read it. The more I got into it, the more some of these ideas sort of elevated for me. So go back with me to the 19, so the 1850s and the, the, the great expedition of the time, like getting to Mars is ours today, getting to the moon was the 1960s. This was who's getting to the South Pole and no one had ever done it in all of recorded history. You have Shackleton that tried and failed, that's sort of the most famous failed attempt at doing it. And then after Shackleton, there are two teams that set off on almost the same day, a Norwegian team, a British team.

• 39:13Greg McKeown?

  The British leader, the expedition leader had as a mindset, something like maximum effort equals maximum reward. And so he translates that like this. Day one, we'll go 30, 40, even 50 miles if we can. We will maximize the distance because obviously if you maximize the distance each day, you'll get to the South Pole faster than the Norwegian team. So that's what he starts. Day one, day two, day three is like that. Then they get really bad weather. They're so burned out physically that they have to stop, set up their tents and sit in no

• 39:54Greg McKeown?

  progress. So it affects them psychologically. We know this because they wrote in their journals. Oh, we have worse luck than anyone who's ever tried this. We had the worst weather conditions of anyone. And they're wrong about that. In fact, they have better weather conditions than the team they had based their own attempt on. But they felt like it was true. So now they are physiologically and psychologically exhausted. One entry, we don't think anyone could make progress in weather like this. But one team could, and that's the Norwegian team, who had a different mental model. Expedition leader, something like optimal effort equals maximum results. But he got it curiously from the indigenous

• 40:37Greg McKeown?

  people in Antarctica, who had taught him this, that making maximum progress in those conditions is about sweat management. That is, if you sweat too much, you will burn out the body too soon. You will be colder, you will freeze, and it will have all of this negative consequences. So he translates what they had taught to him into the rule, 15 miles a day, 1.5. Day one, we could go way further, but we won't. Day two, day three, day four, they get their first bad weather day. Well, they have sufficient energy to be able to continue making the progress. So they just, they go maybe 13 miles, but

• 41:22Greg McKeown?

  it's somewhere within the range, you know, 13 to 15 miles, even on those bad weather days. They avoid completely the boom and bust approach to execution that the British team has. But the plot thickens when they get within 45 miles of the South Pole. Because now they have to choose, you know, what to do because they have perfect weather conditions and perfect sledding conditions. So they could, if they break the rule one time, make it to the South Pole in a single day. And to make the decision harder, they don't know where the British team is, for all they know, the British team is ahead of them. And so that's like a good moment to sort of pause and just reflect on our own mindset. What would we do? What does the insecure overachiever do?

• 42:07Greg McKeown?

  Do you push? Do you pace? I've asked audiences this all over. Eighty-five percent or above will admit, including me, to push. Why? Because that's the mindset, because we really genuinely believe maximum effort equals maximum results. Okay, well, they don't. They pause, they pace it still, takes them three days. They get to the South Pole. They beaten the British team by more than 20 days. That's not what should happen. Every insecure overachiever knows that's not what should happen. That's not how the world works and that, and yet it is. Eventually, the British team make it there as well, but

• 42:49Greg McKeown?

  they're so burned out, not one of them make it home alive to England. They all die on what would have been the journey home. Whereas in the Norwegian team, their approach allowed them to make the non-trivial 16,000 mile journey home.

• 43:03Greg McKeown?

  And when I read the biography of this, the Race to the Poles, the biographer chooses to describe the progress being made by the Norwegian team with words I find even to this moment outrageous. He said, they made progress with, this is his words, without particular effort. I mean, what can you say? What can you say about that? It almost knocked me off my chair when I read the words. I mean, I'm in the middle of writing Effortless, so it supports the case I'm making, but it's still an outrageous moment. It's the most arduous physical challenge known to humanity. That's why it was so exciting. That's why people were trying to do it. And yet their progress was defined, of course, not no effort,

• 43:44Greg McKeown?

  but that that wasn't the distinguishing quality of their advancement. And in that, I think there is something so real to challenge the thinking that has been absorbed, swallowed almost through the pores of our skin, if we're interested in success and achievement, that we have to be going beyond the max. When no one is admitting that when you go beyond the max, what's actually happening is that you're setting yourself up for the bust. No one's talking about the bust. I'm training right now for an Ironman, and there's literally a way that you can track your, your sort of actual power over time. And yet you wish it was higher than it is. And there are things you can do to push that number up

• 44:29Greg McKeown?

  over a long period of time, but it's what you have. And so the reason you want to know this is that when you actually do the Ironman, you, you never want to be above your average in the entire race. Because every time you think you're, oh, I look, I'm making all this progress. See, look at me, I'm passing people and this is what I need. It's like, no, what you're doing is making yourself slower later.

• 44:51Chris Williamson?

  You're drawing, you're drawing from a tank.

• 44:53Greg McKeown?

  What's that? Yeah, you're drawing from the tank. Right, exactly. And so this idea of finding what is your maximum, your up and going back a little ways, like the 85% rule. Go 85% and you'll find you can go further and faster and for longer.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. I've been a, this has been something that's really captured me this year. That I think most people probably need to hear David Goggins screaming in their face to go harder as opposed to Greg McEwan whispering in their ear that they're already enough on average. And, you know, reliably working harder will make pretty much all problems go away in one form or another. But they will make problems go away in the only way the problems can be judged. Outwardly, it'll achieve more success, it'll get you more renown, it'll get you all of these things, but you might be totally fucking miserable and joyless when you're doing it. And what happens over a long enough timeline? What are the prices that you need to pay for that? What relationships blow up? What's the risk of burnout? How quickly do you manage to reach the stars? But then you explode upon reentry.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  You have no ability to do reentry because you are never able to switch off. I'm going to Jamaica for a Sakoku retreat early in the year. So I'm going to do seven days, no phone, no internet, no nothing. And that to me, it sounds lovely in advance, but I get the sense that it's maybe going to be like a Navy SEAL hell week when I get that like the most opulent version of a Navy SEAL hell week is I'm in Jamaica. But I'm really, really obsessed with this idea that not only the distrusting of the easy, not only the sort of inculcation of the hard, but that for the insecure overachiever, it's the precise opposite piece of advice. And on average, maybe more people need to hear it.

• 46:38Chris Williamson?

  Maybe more people need to hear somebody telling them that they're lazy and that they're sat on the couch and they need to get, you know, go to the gym and do the things. But for the sort of people that read your work and that listen to this podcast, I really, I really, really want to be a redress to that kind of energy. Look, you need to be able to turn it on and you need to be able to build your capacity to turn it on. That's what training is, right? That's what doing the wattage hours on the bike and sitting on there and all the rest of it. But you more than being able to turn it on, you need to turn it off. And I'm a living example of this, man. Like I'm somebody that has not stopped for seven years doing this project and I'm now working harder to learn how to not work hard than I ever learned how to actually work hard.

• 47:22Chris Williamson?

  Because working hard came easily to me. Working not hard is a, it brings up all manner of problems, you know, all manner of challenges. Who am I? Am I falling behind? Does this matter anymore? What if people forget me? What if I forget me? My self-worth was wrapped up in how much I achieved this day and I haven't achieved that much. Well, you meant to not achieve that much. Ah, yeah, I know, but maybe I can go harder. Is this the difference between me being a bitch or me actually taking some well-deserved time off? And then you go even deeper than that and you say, well, no. Am I taking time off simply so I can come back harder? That doesn't seem like time off. That's not me actually enjoying joy. That's me using joy as an instrumental good toward another instrumental good. I want an inherent good. I want to be able to go away and enjoy this thing for the sake of enjoying this thing,

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  not because I think that Andrew Huberman said a seven day fucking Sakuca retreat is going to allow me to do, you know? And these are the challenges. These are the challenges that happen as you get further down the sort of self-growth, self-development journey. And it's, yeah, they don't get easier. They just get more complex.

• 48:23Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, one way to think about what you just said is, is I call it the onion of human systems. And that's, I mean, it's consistent with something we talked about before, but in all, in any human system, right? So a person is a human system, right? That's one way to think about it. A relationship is a human system. It's all of the interaction and it's, it's highly complex. I mean, take a single person and try to understand everything that's in their mind and how it's all connected. That is unbelievably complex. So the complexity, like we live in a ridiculously complex world. And so human systems are ridiculously complex.

• 49:05Greg McKeown?

  The problem is if we operate in a way that we only ever at the outer edges of the onion, then we're dealing with the relatively safe and relatively trivial. And so, I mean, I think what you're describing in your journey this last year is, is I've been moving closer to the center in my own life. Circumstances are such that it's happening and some of it is just the success itself and going, okay, well, what does it mean? And if, if I don't have to work for the same reasons I used to have to work, then why do I do that?

• 49:48Greg McKeown?

  And so it, it, it raises questions that are closer to the highest level of vulnerability and highest level of impact possible is at the center. I sometimes think about this as like the red button, the center. And there's all sorts of protective measures that people employ to avoid going there.

• 50:13Greg McKeown?

  And and I used to think that was sort of fundamentally, you know, pretty much just bad. But I understand it more now because it's like you mess with that thing, you're resetting, you know, that red button's like that there can be unbelievable resets. And so if you if you rest, reset it stupidly or or reactively or something like that, then yeah, you could, I suppose you risk blowing up your life. But let me just describe what I think is down there. What I've found down there is that that at the center of the center, like the holy of holies of our mind and heart and life, it's a meaning frame. Of course, it's not just one, but there are meaning frames. That is, well,

• 50:54Greg McKeown?

  what things mean to us, how we, when when we're looking at a set of data or circumstances, how we interpret it. And we are, whatever we are, we are meaning machines. I mean, we are constantly sort of trying to make sense of where somebody said it that way. What does that mean? You know, oh, they said it with a slightly different tone of voice. What does that mean? You know, like, well, constantly trying to map meaning in others and ourselves. Now, here's the thing. It's not just a meaning frame. It's what I've come to describe as a frozen meaning frame. And this is how it works. You have a true

• 51:34Greg McKeown?

  frame, there's a meaning frame that's based in truth, that has got locked like two magnets with something not true. And then, because it's happening so deep in us, and so subconsciously, we then just move forward in life with that, that being locked. And we don't even know that that's operating us. It's an, it's an operating system, and it's shaping 100 decisions, 1000 decisions. And we don't even know why. And so then people at the surface are trying to say, oh, that habit's not really the habit I want. And let me, let me read a book about habits, and and then I'll be able to change it. And I can move the food out, and I can get rid of all the rubbish food. And yet somehow I'm always eating food, you know, sometimes somehow, even though I know all those stuff, I can't

• 52:19Greg McKeown?

  stop doing it. Why? Because they're operating at the surface. You have to get to the center. Let me give you a single illustration of this. I was working with a very intelligent PhD student, great husband, great father, great in his faith. But in his actual career work, he just can't get any motivation. And he's doing really well. He's at one of the top universities. So on the surface, again, it looks fine, but he knows inside there's no meaning here. And I can't seem to thrive in this environment. And he doesn't know why. So we go through this rapid listening process to be able to go from the surface down, down, down, always knowing, at least I know there's something at the center. We don't know what it is yet. And we find

• 53:04Greg McKeown?

  what it is together in about an hour. So it was quite rapid. His sister had died when he was young. And when she died, his young version of making sense of this world he's in is the only things that matter in life are my family and my faith. Now, that makes perfect sense as a 10 year old or something trying to make sense of his world. And it's not that that's totally false, but it's a set of truths mapped like those magnets with something not true. He doesn't even know it's there. But here he is as a PhD student at the top university, struggling. As soon as he worked it out, we were able

• 53:46Greg McKeown?

  to zoom in and begin a process of starting to look at it, untangle it, gently separate it, and enable him to operate at a completely different level. And that's one illustration. But I have spent the last, I mean, I don't even talk about it in either essentialism or effortless, not really not at all. But that's really been the story of the last 25 years of my life have been unbelievable moments like that with people, one on one, sometimes in bigger groups, where you are listening in a way that gets to the heart of the matter. These vulnerable but valuable unlocks at the center. This is the process

• 54:29Greg McKeown?

  I think you're going through. And it'll be feeling really messy and really vulnerable.

• 54:36Greg McKeown?

  Partially because the closer you get, the higher stakes it is. But also because perhaps there hasn't been like a structured process to try and make sense of this journey. But I think if you think about it more in terms of this onion system, it will help you to go, okay, of course, this feels vulnerable. Of course, this is weird and you know what you're looking for. What are those meaning frames inside way down truths matched with untruths? That I can start to identify, unlock, and then be able to release a new way of living and operating.

• 55:11Chris Williamson?

  Let's just revisit that now again, five years on. Everyone can go back and listen to the first first episode we did, which is great on essentialism. Second episode we did, which was on effortless. And, um, you know, a lot of things have changed for me since the first time that we spoke. And I'm interested to get your perspective, having also presumably watched people be introduced to the approach and then grow over time and end up in different sorts of places. What are the challenges in remaining an essentialist as your career progresses? As everything gets more, as you get closer toward the outcomes that you want, maybe you surpass the outcomes that you want. Take me through the things that people are going to encounter.

• 55:57Greg McKeown?

  Well, let's just, let's level set by saying this, that almost everything that has been written and published, both in the popular press and in academic circles, and certainly online are about our advice for how to become successful. And almost nothing has been written about what to do once you are. But that's a problem. And, and, okay, you can say, well, well, most people are trying to make the journey from zero to one. So maybe the idea is, well, there's a smaller market for the, you know, the one to infinity market. Uh, but I've spent so much of my life working with people in that category.

• 56:38Greg McKeown?

  Um, that, that I feel a lot of sympathy, uh, and even compassion. I would, yeah, I would say compassion better even than sympathy because.

• 56:48Greg McKeown?

  Because there's a, there's a lot of misjudgment, really a low, low quality judgment of people that are successful. Yeah, because, because if you're trying to go from zero to one and somebody's up there and they're in three, four, five, 10, it's like, ah, that, yeah, they're all right. They're fine. They'll be okay. And it's like, that's because they actually don't understand what it is. Once you start to get there.

• 57:19Greg McKeown?

  So what is someone going to experience? They're going to experience, what's that word where you're, you're standing on a high building? You're looking over. Vertigo. Vertigo. You definitely, the success vertigo is definitely part of the problem.

• 57:34Greg McKeown?

  It's just like, whoa, why, where even am I now? You know, I've just been trying to get up here, you know? And now I got up here and now this just feels so strange. And the number of people up here, there's like, you know, down there on level one, there was like a million people. And then as I got up, as I carried on walking up and going up and up and up, you know, the numbers start siphoning out. And now up here, it's like, there's like, there's three people up here and they're all really busy doing their thing. And, and I don't know who to talk to or how to operate. And so like the loneliness of leadership and the loneliness of success is, is huge. And this is one of the reasons that you see the psychological discombobulation of people that achieve success. In a sense overnight, even though they almost have always been working for years to get there.

• 58:19Greg McKeown?

  But then suddenly it pops, they get into this movie. I had Matthew McConaughey on my podcast and we've remained friends since. And he's like, you know, the day after his, the big break happens and the movie comes out. He's like, he's, I walked down the same road the day before. And there was like two or three people that looked at me and maybe they weren't even really looking at me. He says afterwards, there was two or three people not looking at him and they might've been looking at him. The difference was so different. And one of the things he ended up having to do, not immediately, but he like took a year or two out of it just to go, okay, I don't want to, I don't even know where I am anymore. And, and I don't just want to be the rom com guy. So I had to, he like took a sort of connect the dots year or two. And I thought that was pretty, pretty.

• 59:03Greg McKeown?

  Um, prescient of him pretty showed a pretty strong degree of foresight to not just become a function of the machine. And that's that that's basically what I think it is, is that as you're moving up the levels, you're building a machine that's going to produce the thing you want to produce the success and building that system, I think, is key to getting from zero to one and even beyond. But there's a certain point at which the machine is working so well, it's like who's serving who? Did I become the cog? You know, am I now the node in the system I built and I'm just answering to it?

• 59:43Greg McKeown?

  Or am I still the creator? And the gravitational pull of success is so strong that it is harder to escape it. I mean, truly, success traps are harder to escape than failure traps. Failure traps, you're incentivized to change. Success traps, you're incentivized to carry on. And so it takes a greater self-awareness to be able to push apart and not be a cog in the system, but separate and look at the system. Okay, what is happening here? What is the state of affairs? How's it all working? And do I want to enter that system again? Or how would I now want to change it for the next 10 years of my life? Or the next,

• 1:00:28Greg McKeown?

  in your case, you're saying five years, that's sort of a key metric, the last five years where you were now for the next five years. So I think it's that it's the escape from it. So that you can start to look at it, not be in the system you've built, but to be able to observe the system. I think about it like the observer's advantage, because we can build really successful, complex prisons if we're not careful. And so, yeah, we built it, it did what we wanted, but then we get it and you're like, maybe that isn't what I wanted, but I'm still in it now and everyone else seems to want it. So maybe I should want it. And so it's all this very confusing sort of multi-mirrored experience that we're having.

• 1:01:12Greg McKeown?

  And so to be able to escape it, to be able to say, look, that is not me, that system, that success, that way of working, that way of operating, that is not the real me. The real me is the observer. And that I really think is literally true, right? The observer, the fact that we can, for example, if we're having a panic attack, whether because of failure or success, because they can both produce it.

• 1:01:38Greg McKeown?

  The fact that we, it is that psychologically possible to actually observe yourself having a panic attack means that the observer isn't having a panic attack and the observer is you. It's a great, it's a, it's such a discovery at any phase of success to discover, oh, I'm not my thoughts and I'm not my life. That's just where I am and what's happening right now, but I can observe it. I just think in some ways it's harder to do that as success becomes its own form of noise. It's so loud and it, there's, there's money involved and there's fame involved and there's people involved and there's criticism involved and there's opportunity involved and there's

• 1:02:23Greg McKeown?

  more involved and all of those things are so loud. It's like, how do I get myself to observe again? How do I not just get to the next party and the next moment and the next opportunity and the next flight and the next? That's, that's the journey, I think, to help become successful at success. And, and if you think about the sort of some of the horror stories of success in the past and there's, there's a lot to pull from, you, you can see why success can become such a catalyst for failure. Because it takes us away from the observer role where we can actually get clarity about our life. What's happening? So what? Now what?

• 1:03:08Greg McKeown?

  That, that question from the observer position seems to be the right process at all levels of success, but man, it's harder at the highest levels.

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, the other element is you're learning to say no to things that previously you would have begged to have had the opportunity to say yes to.

• 1:03:25Greg McKeown?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Chris Williamson?

  And for every unit of effort that you put in now. However, many years hence, the impact that you have is a thousand times or a hundred times what it would have been in the beginning. So you're telling me that the pressure and the implications are greater than it's ever been. And the temptation for distraction is greater than it's ever been.

• 1:03:46Greg McKeown?

  Right.

• 1:03:47Chris Williamson?

  And my resilience is going to be pulled on more by more things than it's ever been. And I need to do, I need to do all of this. I need to spin this thing in a Nutribolt up to make something that's actually what I want. And yeah, it's, it's a fascinating challenge. It's a really fascinating challenge. And Alex talks about, you know, that scene in The Matrix where the woman in the red dress walks past them and Morpheus says, Neo, you're looking at me or you're looking at the woman in the red dress, turn around. And he says, you know, you have to learn on the come up to be able to ignore a hypothetical 10. He says, yeah, but what about a hypothetical 1000? Or what about 1,000 hypothetical 1000s?

• 1:04:29Chris Williamson?

  And that's this ever, it's like reverse habituation. You know, you've got the sort of hedonic treadmill. This is like the hedonic no. You need to be able to ever, ever more sensitively say no to ever more attractive things that look ever more enticing, but you need to continue to be able to say no. And then, you know, you actually need to be able to pull the trigger and say, well, maybe this is such a step change. Maybe this speaks to me so much. This is the opportunity that I've been looking for. And all of this needs to occur at once. And to put the icing on the top of the cake, you need to do all of it while no one gives you sympathy. While everybody says, well, that's a champagne problem. Oh, my God, you do too many options. How out of touch. You know, it's so unrealistic.

• 1:05:13Chris Williamson?

  Do you not know that people are dying? You don't know that people are in poverty? You go, dude, if you are the sort of person that wants to be successful, this is precisely the sort of problem that you are going to face. The only issue is that you're not facing it right now. So yeah, that altogether, that thousand hypothetical 1000s, more impacting you've ever had before, more distraction you've ever had before, more options than you've ever had before, playing at a level that you've never been at, and you still need to be able to say no. It's not easy.

• 1:05:38Greg McKeown?

  Well, one thought that comes to mind, or two thoughts, I guess. One is Elon Musk mentioned at one point that for every minute he spends on Tesla, that's worth a million dollars. That's what he estimates. So think about that, right? Like, it's so easy to be to, to, I mean,

• 1:05:59Greg McKeown?

  If a culture gets, if a culture gets infected with, with envy and, and you know, then, then what you produce is a lot of like moral, immoral pride looking up. Of course, of course, you can have pride looking down. You can be one up because of success and, and, and achievement. But there is a different kind of pride, right? There's a different kind of ego looking up going, well, they, look at them, they're all right and it's easy for them. And if only I had that, then I'd be, you know, so, so that happens too. And, and I think that's as blind as the opposite because it lacks all the empathy and the

• 1:06:43Greg McKeown?

  complexity of what life is like. Why is it that not a hundred percent of the time, but a very high percent of the time, people that win the lottery discombobulate? Why is that? It's worth pausing about because, you know, everyone who plays the lottery presumably wants to win and believes that if they win, life will immediately be better for them. And it's not what happens. So that's worth thinking about because whether you win the lottery or you just achieve something more than you expected to, or things work out for you, you're still in the same situation.

• 1:07:21Greg McKeown?

  And it's like, if you can't manage level one, why do you think you can play at level a thousand? You know, if, if you're in a computer simulation or, or if you're in a, if you're just in, you know, if you, if you're playing a computer game and you, you can't do level one yet. If someone just gives you some hack and now you're in a level a hundred at the same game, why do you think being at the level means you can perform at the level? And so it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a, I would say it's a slightly tragic thing to wake up to and go, oh, I got to this level, whatever that level is now. And now I have to learn a new set of skills and a new way of thinking.

• 1:08:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again.

• 1:08:05Greg McKeown?

  I've got to do it again.

• 1:08:07Chris Williamson?

  I've got to do it again.

• 1:08:08Greg McKeown?

  And, and, and like, so, so, so there's, I mentioned it previously, just with a six minute planning process of going from confusion to clarity to creation, but of course it applies way beyond a daily process. This, this, I think the acceptance that everybody faces confusion and a level of chaos every day of their lives. And I was talking to a very successful entrepreneur and investor recently who said, Apple, Google, all of the top brands in the world, all of these companies that we think operate at a certain kind of way, he says, when you work there, this is true.

• 1:08:51Greg McKeown?

  When you work there, you're just dealing with confusion and chaos every day. That's still what you're managing. And so you are presenting to the world a certain brand, and that's not that that's a lie, but somehow in the way it's presented, people can easily assume, well, behind the curtain, everything's smooth, everyone's, no, you know, Tim Cook and the executives there, and I've worked with enough of the executives to know what I'm talking about with it, they're just dealing constantly with the unknown of that next level of success. And so, and so upgrading yourself for the current level you're at. Yeah, it's, it's not what we expect. It's not, it's not what's expected.

• 1:09:33Chris Williamson?

  Just going back to, you know, what we were talking about before, this sort of arc from distraction to disorientation. Obviously, we're in a world where technology, social media gives us a lot of access to information. It's very easy to make comparisons about what you should be doing versus what others are doing. And it's, it's kind of like option anxiety in a way. How do you recommend sifting through the bullshit and determining what information and advice is actually good or bad for us? Should people just turn it all off? Basically, to what degree should we be seeking external influence to determine what's right for us to be putting our efforts into?

• 1:10:14Greg McKeown?

  I think what you you begin with is this assumption that that every single person watching this, right? And I suppose it's happening in this moment, right? They're watching or listening to this is, you know, two more people sharing thoughts and so on. It's like, if you're alive today, you are having more opinion inputs. It's not information overload anymore, right? It's opinion overload. You have more opinion inputs than anybody ever. And it's from people that know you less well than in any other previous era. So the gap and possibility for, you know, for irrelevance is really high. You know, like if if if my

• 1:10:57Greg McKeown?

  daughter comes home from school today and you and and before I even listen to her, I just play a podcast for her. Or I just, you know, I just read, I just read off of of X, you know, some statement that someone made, you know, just read it to them. Like, what are the chances that what I'm going to share is going to be the the most relevant thing that could be said to her in this moment, right? That's very, very low. And that's sort of the problem. So I think you begin by just assuming, oh, you could be below average in your consumption of opinions today, and you'd still have an opinion overload problem. So I think with that, I mean, maybe one, one thing I would recommend to your

• 1:11:40Greg McKeown?

  to your question, what do you do? I think if you fast from social media, you know, for a certain period of time, you know, let's say, even even if you do it once a year, you say, okay, five days, no social media, cut out that noise. You don't have to go to Hawaii to do it, right? Like, you you just go, okay, for one week, I'm just not going to do it. And notice the difference. Notice what happens to your thinking. Notice what you notice. You know, that that, to me, is one good rule of thumb. I think a second thing that I would recommend is people, you know,

• 1:12:18Greg McKeown?

  Maybe again, it's like a once a year spring cleaning, but go through everybody you're following and just start from zero.

• 1:12:26Greg McKeown?

  Like right now, imagine you didn't weren't following anyone. Who would you select to follow? Who are the people now that you think are going to give you the most relevant insight for your life today? I think that that idea of starting from zero is is a better is a better mindset switch than let's look at the whole list and remove one or two people. It's like, start the other way around. Go to zero and see what might be relevant. See who now is going to be helping you go forward. What have the impact of these voices been on you on the last year? Did they help you? Did they just add more clutter to your life? Are the things you really care about better? I had Brad Smith on my podcast.

• 1:13:11Greg McKeown?

  He's the president of Microsoft. He is one of the only technologists who openly admits to the, well, he wrote a book about it. It's called Tools, Tools and Weapons. And just the, just the admission that all technology can be both, all of it. I've worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years now. It is so rare that anyone admits that, especially if they're being paid not to admit it. So, so you're just always seeing only the upsides. Anyway, one of the things that he has said about this, he said, for a hundred years, all of the technology that we have has made it easier to connect with people who live

• 1:13:55Greg McKeown?

  far from us at the cost of the people who live closest to us. And so you can take that and turn it into a sort of algorithm for life because you can say, oh, right, they only make money if I'm not spending time listening to my wife or my daughter or my son. Like, that's the only time any technologist is making money is if I am not doing that communications work, that face to face work. And, and as soon as you see that, you're like, oh, well, that makes everything for, well, he's saying a hundred years, but let's just say the last 10 years, that makes the last 10 years make a lot of sense. You know, what's happened to the gen, you know,

• 1:14:36Greg McKeown?

  deep friendships have gone down in all, in every single category, male, female, and all age points. But over the last 10 years, the biggest drop off has been in, in, in men. I think sort of age, age 30 plus.

• 1:14:52Greg McKeown?

  Now, that doesn't mean that they have, that they're worse than anybody else, but the drop off has been higher over that period of time. It's like, well, why is that happening? Well, because simultaneously, technology, gaming, social media has had its heyday. You know, uncontrolled growth. So you're making a trade off. And so, you know, I, I, I think that if you put sort of all of those together, like maybe give you one more rule. I think it's like technology offered a set time per day. I, I'm not always great at that, to be honest, but we went through a period over this summer. When I really was doing it and immediately the quality of my life went up immediately.

• 1:15:37Greg McKeown?

  Because what happened is it was like, okay, we're gonna, you know, let's get around and talk and we'll just laugh. And maybe we'll go swim and we'll swim together and then we'll just make memories together. And it was the quality of life was immediately improved. And it's because we don't, we aren't properly aware of this trade off that technology companies have made effortless for us. You know, whatever that device is in our pockets is not a phone, right? Like, that's not what it is. Jordan Peterson talks about that, like, whatever it is, it's not a phone. So I did some thinking after that, well, what is it? And I think about all my experience in Silicon Valley and I'm like, oh, right. Okay. It's a $3 trillion military grade disorientation machine

• 1:16:18Greg McKeown?

  that makes certain people a lot of money at the cost of connection between humans that live together and are close together. That's what it is. And I'm not saying it's only that or all the time that that's what I think it is right now.

• 1:16:33Chris Williamson?

  What an apocalyptic way to end. I love it. Greg McKeown, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, honestly, you've been a huge influence on me. It's so great to have you in my life. It's so great that you've put this stuff out and I love the fact you've revisited it. You've got, what have you got? You've got new things, new books, new bits and pieces. What should people go and check out?

• 1:16:49Greg McKeown?

  Look, Essentialism 10 year anniversary, that's updated. Of course, the Essentialism Planner. If people, depending when this airs, if they go to essentialism.com, there's a whole set of additional tools and, you know, tools that couldn't make it into the planner that people can get and so on, totally free and a really high quality course. If you go to gregmckewin.com, in 10 seconds you can sign up. It's called Less But Better and it takes the best of Essentialism and Effortless into these 30 day course, these 10 classes spread out over that time. And it's just, where do we begin? You know, here we are, we've talked about so many things, it's totally overwhelming. But where do you begin? Start with this Less

• 1:17:34Greg McKeown?

  But Better course. I think those are three things to go with.

• 1:17:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that, you know, going into the new year, that planner is great timing. And, you know, I think a lot of people, everyone should go back and listen to the first ever episode that I did with you, just search Greg McKeown, Modern Wisdom and it'll come up. It'd be kind of funny to see how much both of us have changed. You haven't aged, but I don't know whether either of us have aged, actually. But I think it's a good time. I think it's really, really good timing. New year, some structure. I'm a big fan of a planner. I've used them a lot and I've got your new one downstairs. So that'll be the first 90 days of next year. We'll be used with that. Greg, until next time, mate. I'm really excited to see what you write next. And like I say, I'm genuinely so thankful that you're in my life. I'm so thankful for the work that you do.

• 1:18:14Greg McKeown?

  Yeah, likewise. Thank you, Chris.