How To Focus On What Matters Most - Greg McKeown

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 a thank you for at least adjusting my trajectory over the last five years in a a positive direction 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 stage four stage is 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 uh 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 at success and to not have it eat you alive uh and spit you out you know this is this is sort of the path eventually uh and so the antidote of course is the discipline pursuit of less but better so anyway this no I I think it's it's so right as well that um I'm aware talking about success on the Internet is one of the least popular things to do because the 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 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 [ __ ] future proof yourself if the thing that you want to get is there and you know like I can Pro maybe it's one of those things that you just don't get to appreciate or believe until you actually arrive there you're like no no no that's [ __ ] when I get to success it's all going to be fine 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 yes that's that's what it is and and and you 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 on it can go so you you the reward for getting to the top of the mountain is that there are other mountains 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 is designed in such a way that you just can't do that it's is never an option and sometimes I think as people get higher in their level of success it becomes much more lonely 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 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 uh and and the alternative is sort of slowly dying so it's not like you know 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 what has changed in your perspective on essentialism over the last 10 years it's 10th anniversary 10th birthday party um 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 um yours yours is sat in that top five like absolute you have to get this done and um but I mean I'm I'm interested you're a decade hence now what's what's changed or what Evol what's evolved it's such a rich question if I tried to just answer it honestly um I mean it's it's obviously been completely life-changing for me you know it it it's enabled me to to operate in a in a certain kind of rarified air uh you know it it in a quite humbling way it has become sort of a part of the Zeitgeist a part of Americana in in a certain way and so you know there are these you know so 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 shrier former first lady of California you know she she was giv a copy and she's giving them out at her famous Sunday luncheons and uh 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 uh he's like yeah I'm an essentialist now you know and 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 uh 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 tool set to go with the mindset and I I wasn't convinced of that 10 years ago in fact I was under contract to create which you know 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 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 th 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 tool set makes a big difference for people 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 going to say about that so I think we've shifted eras okay so if you say AG Gran age in 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 so if if you say okay the the the 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 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 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 you must feel prophetic like a British Cassandra sort of seeing my brother certainly would call me a Cassandra so I don't know I mean maybe there's something to that go go carry on you know what I mean you know you [ __ ] 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 uh you know like a like a a weather reporter the Mayan calendar or something and uh yeah it's just you know it's that's nice it 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' thought of before but I think it's 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 [ __ ] eons Millennia we wanted more information than we had and then there was one day around about 2011 when we had it and we immediately [ __ ] smashed through it and now we're out just in the the void [ __ ] orbiting orbiting above above the Earth just surrounded by have to through from scavengers of information to being discerners of information you're no longer looking for things you are choosing between things and it's a 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 uh 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 the thing that I want 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 Co all of those that 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 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 it's both but figuring out how to navigate that you know we 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 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 let's say yeah go on let's say let's say that somebody isn't familiar with sort of the essentialist framework yeah yeah 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 well view well I mean let's let's start with this right like I haven't named this law you and I are going to name this law maybe and it's this that the highest priority today is the least likely thing to happen 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 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 well it'll it completely puts you at the mercy of whatever next comes careening into Consciousness right whether it's a notification on 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 the cupboard uh 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 all I 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 no it is it's just somehow other stuff gets in the way 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 no no no and I 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 b 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 a that 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 we have only enough time left to do the 90% and above mhm 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 tradeoff I would probably not make if they were really placed in front of me as choices yeah you know 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 sign 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 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 uh know thinking that you you know lot the productivity um 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 of about what I do is like that but 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 M it's always been a diamond mind 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 you have the noise and trivia at this 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 a you know a little more intimate and then at the very center of it you have things that are so vulnerable and 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 once you understand that I think your life changes completely irrevocably at least that's what happened to me 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 you have to get through the non-important Urgent [ __ ] first then you need to get through the like non-important non-urgent [ __ ] to find the important non-urgent [ __ ] 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 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 an someone I interviewed on my podcast and what happened to her is that she she started a new business and she woke up at like 3: 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 just write free right and she's it'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 I me 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 hm well maybe what what would I do about that what what could I do that would be healthy so it like started to turn into 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 she The Prompt was something like what's going on in your head what is happening you know what 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 and what instinctive elaboration is is that if you ask yourself a question or I 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 asked 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 so every time I'm writing 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 so what now the 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 just trying to now connect the dots a little bit and then the now what I have a really clear structure for this call it the one 123 method the highest priority item for the day that's the one you might spend two hours on that ideally uh 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 Mo 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 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 and if you can get in 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 the getting where it's supposed to get to is that it has an automatic get back on track function yes and so in a disorienting world what we need is a reorienting process and that's why I think this daily process is such a helpful tool for living essentialism in a noisy world I had a conversation with guy called Nick Pollard the people displeasure and uh he used a a not too dissimilar analogy uh 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 um you know again so much of the sort of the essentialist mindset is around the elimination uh it's around the notd 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 they're the things that 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 seat belt on it's like hey guess what game over uh so those are the things that really come in and and make step changes to the quality of what you're doing so just going actually speaking on Nick's work people pleasing I think there's a lot of um parallels with what you do talk to me about why saying no to new more things is so hard Nick came at it from a an emotional health perspective but I'm interested to hear it from a a a work life purpose productivity perspective from yourself basically why saying no is so hard and how people can learn to say no more effectively 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 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 Damon with me and he says this Damon 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 this yes I suppose conscience but it felt very separate to him he said he said my Damon never tells me what to do what to do but he always tells me what not to 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 ceiling 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 out you know cuz 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 impossible but they said if you just walk straight down that road and the water it didn't look like it was too bad uh you know looked a little like it was um 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 I heard like my own Damon do not do this that was exactly the word 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 night there I don't know what would have happened I've gone down that path I'm glad I don't know but I do think that there's something in this you know 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 you know yeah George George my friend uh asked this question on the first ever episode even before you he was before B BG 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 [ __ ] million million pieces of advice you go right okay so inversion inversion is 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 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 [ __ ] 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 to you were you know you've got your daily list of of of affirmations and and and morning routine and all the rest of the 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 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 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 it doesn't it's 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 what do I want written on my gravestone broken down into 10e chunks broken down into one-ear Sprints broken down into daily action like I it's just what do I want to do and that again the reason that it's so cool is that 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 speedrun there is no [ __ ] 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 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 [ __ ] that's cool and it's not replicable it means that competition is and and it's more fun because it doesn't feel like it's this prescribed top down dictatorial world it's this sort of emergent bottom up very uniquely you and um yeah that at least for me managing that transition uh has been a difficult one to allow myself to be more free flowing uh but I really appreciate it I appreciate and I'm I'm you know grateful to me for letting go of some of the more sort of rigorous and 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 yeah I well well look it see I mean one way to Riff on that is to say look the the Damon is playing an extremely complex game and you know if if we if we use sort of musk's idea that the simulation idea uh okay so so so in in the simulation we are trying to let's say that part of the the purpose Central purpose is to maximize the growth of people the 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 uh and and and grow okay so if that's the case like as a parent like that's what I want for my children too I want them to make mistakes as soon as possible uh being 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 what we would want optimally is someone like Anar 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 there sort of dis 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 way is anything but catastrophic failure isn't failure it's like yeah keep going keep learning 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 I 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 and as we've gone through literally n 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 though let the warnings guide you and then play openly within that lane this seems something like Optimal living to me yeah beautiful I wanted talk about something else that I've been kind of conflicted by this year so a lot of the people listening to the show know a good friend of mine guy called Alex hosi uh 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 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 uh 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 [ __ ] coal and nuclear or whatever uh and I I I came across a really gorgeous quote from you that said puritanism went beyond embracing the hard it extended to also distrusting the easy and I think for the people who take pride and pleasure uh 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 dis Trust of the easy uh comes along for the ride so I'm interested in I'm interested in that Arc and how a uh you know a micro David Goggins can learn to trust the easy and and have a little bit more Comfort when uh things come along like that well look all 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 and you know so Justice and mercy would be like that but so would so would I think I I think sort of hard and easy is like that so if you for example if a person is an insecure overachiever they will tend to operate out of a mindset where if it's not hard I'm doing something wrong and so 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 coach you know you've got to do 150% and if you don't then you that's not enough and you 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 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 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 to 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 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 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 will go 30 40 even 50 mil 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 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 have the worst weather conditions of anyone and they're wrong about that in fact they had 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 people uh 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 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 15 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 Mi but it's somewhere within the range you know 13 to 15 mil 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 do you push do you Pace I've asked audiences this all over 85% 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've beaten the British team by more than 20 days that's not what should happen every insecure achiever 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 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 M journey home and when I read the biography of this the race to the polls 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 and then 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 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 Iron Man and there's literally a way that you can track your your sort of actual power over time and yeah you wish it was higher than it is and there are things you can do to push that number up 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 Iron Man you you never want to be above your average in the entire race because every time you think you're oh I look I making all this progress see look at me I'm passing people and it's this is what I need it's like no what you're doing is making yourself slower later dra you're drawing from a tank yeah what's that yeah you're drawing from the tank right exactly and so this IDE IDE of finding what is your maximum your op 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 yeah it's fascinating I've been uh this has been something that's really captured me this year that I think most people probably need to hear David goggin screaming in their face to go harder as opposed to Greg mccuan whispering in their ear that they're already enough on average and you know reliably work 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 that 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 [ __ ] 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 re-entry you have no ability to do re-entry because you you are never able to switch off going to uh I'm going to Jamaica for a soku Retreat uh early in the year so I'm going to do seven days no phone uh no internet no nothing and um that that to me it sounds lovely in Advan but I get the sense that it's maybe going to be like a Navy SEAL hell week when I get that like the the most the most opulent version of a Navy SEAL hell week as I'm in Jamaica um but I 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 maybe more people need to hear somebody telling 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 you you need to be able to turn it on and you need to be 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 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 because working hard came easily to me working not hard is a a it brings up all manner of problems bring 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 [ __ ] 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 like I want an inherent good I want to be able to go away and enjoy this thing for the sake of enjoying this thing not because I think that Andrew hubman said a 7-Day [ __ ] sakoku retreat's going to allow me to do you know and uh these are the challenges these are the challenges that happen as you get further down the sort of self-growth self-development Journey and uh it's yeah they don't get easier they just get more complex 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 and that's I 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 it unbelievably complex so the complexity like we live in a ridiculously complex world and so human systems are ridiculously complex 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 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 if if I don't have to work for the same reasons I used to have to work then why do I do that and so it it it raises questions that are closer to the highest level of vulnerability and and highest level of impact possible is at the center I sometimes think about this as like the red button at the center and there's all sorts of uh protective measures that people employ to avoid going there 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 buttons like there can be unbelievable resets and so if you if you res reset it stupidly or 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 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 mean 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 we're 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 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 operation system and it's shaping aund decisions a thousand decisions and we don't even know why and so then people at the surface are trying to say well that habit is 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 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 university 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 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 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 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 10year 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 Truth mapped like those magnets with something not true he doesn't even know it's there but here he is as a pH student at a top university struggling as soon as he worked it out we were able 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 and and that's one illustration but I have spent the last I mean I've 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 oneon-one sometimes in bigger groups where you are listening in a way that gets to the heart of the matter the the these vulnerable but valuable un loocks at the center this is the process I think you're going through and it will be feeling really messy and really vulnerable 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 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 is 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 Ed 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 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 well 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 as 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 um that that I feel a lot of sympathy uh and and even compassion I would yeah I would say compassion better even than sympathy because because there's a there's a lot of misjudgment really uh low low quality Judgment of people that are successful because because if you're trying to go from zero to one and somebody's up there and they're in 3 4 5 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 so what is someone going to experience they're going to experience what's that word where you're you're uh standing on a high building you're looking over and Vertigo Vertigo you definitely the success vertigo is definitely part of the problem um 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 these psychological discombobulation of people that achieve success uh in a sense overnight even though they almost have always been working for years to get there but then suddenly it pops they get into this movie I had Matthew mccon 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 have 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 I don't want to I I don't even know where I am anymore and and I don't just want to be the wrong guy so I had to he like took a sort of connect the dots year or two and I thought that was pretty pretty um preent 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 or am I still the Creator and the gravitational pull of success is so strong that it it 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 and and not be a 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 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 prison if we're not careful and so yeah we built it it did what we wanted but then you 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 uh experience that we're having 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 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 does 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 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 more involved and all of those things is 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 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 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 what 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 yeah 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 100 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 uh for distraction is greater than it's ever been right 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 neutr bolt up to make something that's actually what I want and um yeah it's it's a fascinating challenge it's a really fascinating Challenge and Alex talks about um you know that scene in The Matrix where uh the woman in the W red dress walks past them and morphus says Neo are you looking at me or you looking at the woman in the red dress turn around and he says yeah you know you have to learn on the comeup to be able to ignore a hypothetical 10 he says yeah but what about a hypothetical 1 th000 or what about 1,000 hypothetical 1000s and that's this ever it's like reverse habituation you know you've got the sort of honic treadmill this is like the honic 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 this it's so unrealistic do you not know that people are dying you not 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 together the Thousand hypothetical 1000s more impact than 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 well you and 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 to be to to I mean if a culture gets um if a culture gets infected with with envy and and you know then then what you produce is a lot of um like moral IM 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 and achieve 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 complexity of what life is like wh why is it that not 100% 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 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 or if you're in a if you're just in you know if you if you're playing a computer game and you can't do level one yet if someone just gives you some hack and now you're in a level 100 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 dis 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 oh I've got to do it again I've got to do it again I've got to do it again do it again I've got to do absolutely and and and like so so so there's I mentioned it previously just with a six-minute planning process of of going from confusion to Clarity to Creation but of course it applies Way Beyond a daily process th 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 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 is as when you work there this is true 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 a 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 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 [ __ ] 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 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 um you know for irrelevance is really high you know like if if if if my daughter comes home from school today and you know 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 EX 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 ah 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 to your question what do you do I think if you fost 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 5 days no social media cut out that nor noise you don't have to go to Hawaii to do it right like you you just go okay for one week I'm I'm just not going to do it and notice the difference notice what happens to your thinking notice what you notice uh 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 maybe again it's like a once a year spring cleaning but go through everybody you're following and just start from zero like 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 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 clutch at your life are the are the things you really care about better I had Brad Smith on on on my podcast he's the president of Microsoft he is one of the only technologists who openly admits to the the well he wrote a book about it it's called tools um tools and weapons and just the just the admission that all technology can be both all of it I i' 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 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 100 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 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 I think sort of a age 30 plus um now that doesn't mean that they have that they're worse than any body else but the drop off has been higher over that period of time it's like why is that happening well because simultaneously technology gaming social media has had it's Heyday you know un uncontrolled growth so you're making a tradeoff 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 put 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 because what happened is it was like okay we're going to 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 tradeoff that techn ology companies have made effortless for us you know whatever that device is in our pockets it's 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 all right okay it's A3 trillion military grade disorientation machine that makes certain people a lot of money at the cost of connection between humans that live together uh and 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 what an apocalyptic way to end I love it Greg MC 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 uh you've got what have you got you've got new things new books new bits and pieces what what should people go and check out um look essentialism 10 year anniversary that's uh that's updated of course the essentialism planner uh if people depending when this airs if they go to essentialism decom there's a whole set of uh of additional tools and you know uh tools that couldn't make it into the planet that people can get and so on totally free uh and a really high quality course if you go to uh Greg mcu.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 uh 30-day course is 10 classes spread out over that time and uh 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 but better course I think those are three things to go with yeah I think that you know going into the new year uh that planner is is is great timing and um you know I think a lot of people everyone should go back and listen to the first ever episode that I did with you I just search Greg MCU and modern wisdom and it'll come up it' be kind of funny to see how much both of us have changed you haven't aged I don't don't know whether either of us have age actually but um uh 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' I've used them a lot and uh 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 uh like I say I'm genuinely so thankful that you're in my life I'm so thankful for the work that you do yeah likewise thank you Chris thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode there is something else you will absolutely love right here go on give it a tap