Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #258 BITESIZE | The One Important Question You Should Ask Every Day | Greg McKeown

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 183 of the podcast with the writer, speaker and podcast host Greg McKeown. In this clip, Greg describes what we can all do to avoid burnout, and the one simple question we should ask ourselves every day so that we focus on the things that are truly important. We begin with an excerpt from his wonderful book, Effortless.

Starting point is 00:01:58 Strangely, some of us respond to feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by vowing to work even harder and longer. It doesn't help that our culture glorifies burnout as a measure of success and self-worth. The implicit message is that if we aren't perpetually exhausted, we must not be doing enough. Greg, I think that says it all. There's this constant pressure. It's almost like a monkey on your back. If you stop, if you want to just chill out and smell the roses, listen to the birds, there's something at the back of you. I don't know if it's modern technology, but there's something that's constantly talking to us saying, no, you shouldn't stop. You should be doing more.

Starting point is 00:02:35 And of course, that's leading to burnout, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you said succinctly, burnout is not a badge of honor. It's something we have got to, maybe we can't take responsibility for the whole society, but individually, we can say, look, I'm done playing that game. We've been sold a bill of goods. And it's time to take responsibility for this and to recognize that we can protect the asset that we need to protect the asset that is us uh that we need to be careful not to just

Starting point is 00:03:14 thoughtlessly get into these zoom eat sleep repeat cycles where people barely know even what day it is uh where they just you know it is, where they just, you know, it is literally endless. Days just seem to flow into each other. And there's no sense of boundaries. Whatever boundaries existed before the pandemic, and I don't think there were many boundaries there dividing work and personal life and health, but whatever they were, you know, now I think they're completely obliterated. And this is why people say, well, I'm not working from home, I'm living at work. That tells you where things were,

Starting point is 00:03:53 where the balance of power was before. And it's just accelerated now. So we have to do some things to try to avoid this, just burn out as a lifestyle, that we can reclaim our life, take our life back and say, let's say, for example, let's start with having a done for the day list, where you say, I'm not just going to have an endless to-do list. And I'm not going to have my inbox be my default to-do list so that again, it just is perpetually flowing to us. I'm actually going to make a list at the beginning of the day. These are the things that really

Starting point is 00:04:32 matter today. And when I'm done with them, I'm done. I'm not going to carry on after that. I'm going to create space after it to relax, to recuperate, so that I can slingshot into the next day and feel that energy because we've got a good rhythm of life going on. The challenge, I think, is to treat competing priorities as somehow equally valuable. It's where you start to say it's all essential, it's all important, it's all a priority. this is one of my favorite little tidbits of research, but the word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. And according to Peter Drucker, it stayed singular for the next 500 years. wasn't until the industrial revolution where people started speaking with no sense of irony at all saying, here are my 34 priorities, and they all have to be done now or even yesterday. And so that shift in our language, I think, illustrates a weakness in our thinking and our logic that says, look, if I can just fit it all in, somehow I can have it all.

Starting point is 00:05:48 If I treat everything as important, then it will all work out. And in fact, life isn't even close to, that doesn't approximate reality at all. What is far closer to reality is that a few things are essential and almost everything is trivial noise. And so it's more like waking up, you know, you've spent your whole life thinking you were in a, I don't say this in any way disparaging, but you think you're in a coal mine and you've lived your life in that way. It's just productivity, get more stuff done. And then you wake up and you say, I've never been in a coal mine. It's all the time it's been a diamond mine. And so actually my whole job is different

Starting point is 00:06:32 than I thought it was. The whole job of life is different. It is to actually explore what is essential. Find those diamonds. That's the most important thing. All the rest doesn't matter. Find those things, invest in them, protect those things. As I think about your work and you know, I see, where do I see people commenting on this on social media? A lot of it has been people in

Starting point is 00:06:57 the business world or the productivity world. But I actually think your work goes far beyond that, because what you're asking, what you're writing about are fundamentally existential human questions. And actually, I think there's almost a spiritual undertone. I think that on one level, you need self-awareness to be able to apply the principles in your books. But at the same time, I think simply by applying those principles in your life is going to give you a lot of self-awareness. So I think it works both ways. It is about your spiritual life and about what is guiding you. As a friend of mine put it, are you being led by your scared self or your sacred self? The scared self will tend to operate in a certain way,

Starting point is 00:07:59 endlessly the fear of missing out and what other people are doing and competing and comparing and living in that state. But the sacred self will guide you differently. And so asking better questions will help reveal better answers. I'm thinking now of somebody, of a working mum in England who reached out to tell me her story. So she, after reading some of the stuff I'd written, started asking this question every day. What is the most important thing I need to do today? That's a simple question.

Starting point is 00:08:39 But she asked it every day. She wrote it up and she asked it every day. At first, the answers she got were to do with the business that she was trying to run, which key client to work with, what project was due, and so on. But over time, the answers evolved, as she evolved, and it became, well, self-care. Actually, you need to sleep better because you're not sleeping enough. You're not protecting yourself. You are burning yourself out. But then one day, she gets a call from her dad. And he said, look, nothing to alarm you here. Mom's in the hospital again. You know,

Starting point is 00:09:17 it's nothing serious. Just wanted to keep you in the loop. And she said in that moment, she asked the question that day, she knew exactly what the answer was. It was so clear to her. It was almost like time stood still. And she remembers the weather and the room she was in. And she just knew she had to go to the hospital that day. That was the priority. And so she did. Now that's like a two hour drive. So she's really committing the rest of the day to this. It's not trivial i'll just go across the street the 10 minutes thing and she goes and she sees her mom she says mom i love you i'm glad to be here mother says oh you know i love you too um an hour after that conversation her mother falls falls into a coma and very unfortunately, never recovers from that.

Starting point is 00:10:10 Joe has the unfortunate job of turning off the life support machine. And she reached out to me, just wrote to me to tell the story, because she said if I had not been an essentialist that day, how differently things would have worked out. I wouldn't have had that moment. I would have missed that and for something inane. And so that was, to me, a very encouraging moment because I felt like, well, I can't change the hospital moment. But for her, she was able to make a better trade-off. And so as people ask better questions, as they change and evolve, the answers will change and evolve. ask better questions. As they change and evolve, the answers will change and evolve. When people look from anything like a long-term perspective, they recognize that only a few things matter. At the very end of people's lives, when they're looking at the totality of their

Starting point is 00:10:56 life, they don't say, oh my goodness, I wish I'd spent more time on email. Oh, I wish I'd spent more time on social media and so on. No one thinks that. No one says that. They can see with a bit more perspective a few things mattered. There's a story that I came across in the researching of Effortless that didn't make it into the book. It might be my one regret of what didn't get in. It's the story of a woman, a mother,

Starting point is 00:11:26 who is in hospital with her very ill son. And he's on his deathbed. Everybody knows this is the end and she knows it. And so she gets up and actually lies in the bed next to him at the very end because she just knows. And of course, you know, and I've been there with people at the very end. And sometimes you do know this is going to be it. You don't know if it's a minute or if it's an hour, but you know it's here.

Starting point is 00:11:57 And so that was the situation. So she gets in just to be close to him. And then right at the end, right in between, you know, that in-between place where somebody isn't fully here, but they're not fully there, he opens his eyes and he just suddenly says, oh, moment, it's so simple. It's all so simple. and those were his final words to her then he died and that offers us this soundtrack for our lives it's all so simple really hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip I hope you have a wonderful weekend

Starting point is 00:12:43 and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #258 BITESIZE | The One Important Question You Should Ask Every Day | Greg McKeown

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