Modern Wisdom - #175 - Greg McKeown - Essentialism Explained: How To Focus On What Matters In Life

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

Greg McKeown is a public speaker, leadership & business strategist and New York Times Bestselling Author. Do you feel busy but not productive? Like you're overworked but under-utilised? Do you struggle with information overload? Success breeds options & opportunities, which often undermines the things that lead to success in the first place. Today Greg teaches us the art of Essentialism; how not to fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more, how to avoid the trivial many and instead focus our attention onto the vital few. This podcast could change your life, don't miss it. Sponsor: Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter promo code MODERNWISDOM for 85% off and 3 Months Free) Extra Stuff: Buy Essentialism - https://amzn.to/3bSd8jy Check out Greg's Website - https://gregmckeown.com/ Subscribe to Greg's Podcast - https://link.chtbl.com/zXR5Fdfq  Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is none other than Greg McEwan, New York Times best selling author of Essentialism and today could be pretty life-changing. If you were in the right space to hear this, the message of Essentialism is one that has had quite a profound impact on the way that I see the world and operate within it. So if you ever feel busy but not productive, like you're overworked but underutilized, struggling with information overload and stretched to thin, this could be the antidote that you're looking for. Success breeds options and opportunities. And the problem with that is those options and opportunities often undermine

the things which led to success in the first place. So today Greg teaches us the art of essentialism, how not to fall into undisciplined pursuit of more, how to avoid the trivial many and instead focus our attention on to the vital few. This is a real antidote to the always shiny, novel, new chasing that next thing, format that we all fall into, or at least I certainly have Greg's phenomenal. I really appreciate him coming on. And he has a brand new podcast, which is coming out very soon. If you enjoy the things that we talk about today, then you will love his new show and the link to that to subscribe is available in the show notes below. But for now, it's time to listen to me get Redpilled on my own show about a blog I haven't even started yet. By the wise and wonderful Greg McEwan.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Greg McEwan, how are you my friend? I'm wonderful. Nice to be with you. Nice to be with you as well. Could we have dressed any more polar opposite? You've got this beautiful suit on, lovely press suit with a white shirt, and I am in a vest because it's the first hot day of May in Newcastle. Listen, that's what it is. That's the difference. I'm in California, so I've got no reason to celebrate, but I shouldn't celebrate, but this beautiful weather, that explains it. There's a rarity, you know? And you know, no, no, no, anybody at all these people on the

internet, I'm allowed to wear a vest if I want to wear a vest to podcast with Greg McEwan, you know? Yes. There was an essentialist outfit for today. This would be it. So essentialism is the word of the day, that's what we're going to be talking about today. And I fear that I might be the arch nemesis of an essentialist.

Or at least I was for quite a long time. So I've got to say. Yeah, okay. Why do you say that? So I have a very high desire for novelty. I love new things. One of my five core values is adventure, which also pulls me toward that. And another one is curiosity, which pulls me toward that. I tend to work more than I need to. I enjoy work, I enjoy being busy, I enjoy doing things.

And over time, that has led to me adding an awful lot on my plate. And presuming that I will just be able to up-regulate my productivity or down-regulate my sleep to slot in these extra things. And to the audience at home, you will know this feeling, right? You will see from the front row seat,

you will watch the slippage of your own terrible unproductive, put unproductive-ness, right? You'll see the inefficiencies in your system first hand. And you think, well, I can add that project in, and all that'll happen is, I'll just have to get rid of those inefficiencies in your system first time. And you think, well, I can add that project in. And all that will happen is I'll just have to get rid of those inefficiencies. And you just presume that like a, I don't know, like a system that the oil will be greased sufficiently more to allow it to go in. And I learned, I learned the hard way over a career of 13 years of running club nights

and being a DJ and being a model and being a podcaster and doing a coaching and being a fitness and all this sort of stuff. I realise that you can't, you can't do it at all. No, who knew? I mean, you knew, actually, which is the question. So why do you give us a bit of a background, a centralism and sort of what you do in your approach to this? Look, I was working with high performing executives in Silicon Valley and noticed a predictable pattern, which is that in the early days, these companies, they were really focused, that led to success, that success, breeded options and opportunities, which, if you're not careful, can undermine the things that led to success in the first place.

You fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more. So you're just doing too many things and they may all be good things, but just too many different things get pulled in a million different directions. And so you start to plateau in your progress or fail altogether. And as it turns out, this is a pattern that a lot of people, where you just said just describes it a little bit, feel the same thing. So as I've studied this, I find that almost universally people feel stretched youth in at work or at home, busy, but not productive. I feel like their days being hijacked by other people's agenda

for them. So this is, this is like the problem that essentialism is seeking to address or solve. Can you pronounce that German word for me please? The German word. The less but better. The less but better. Yeah, typically they just do the English less but better. I wonder if you were wondering if it is quite an ugly word. Let's put that up.

Hold on. Hold on. We We're gonna find it here now. We're gonna do this. Okay, great. Do you not page it, son? I'm, no, sorry, I'm kindling as well, so on a, yeah. Yeah, you have no idea. I love that you put that on me. I look, Greg, I can't, I know for a fact

that I can't pronounce that German word. And I thought, do you know what it is? See if Greg can pronounce it, you know? Yeah, and then you put it all on me and I can't even find it. It's, it's, it's, it is where it is where we're trying to find it. It's, it comes from, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it,

it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it It's fine. It doesn't matter. We couldn't, we're not going to be a pronouncer in any case, even if we do, we'll just go all the words and probably should just move on. It's a, he's, he's this amazing designer who was the first person to see one of the first people to see how rubbish it was, the way that we've been designing a whole bunch of furniture.

So he's working over at Braun, and he has this insight. He says, I mean, there's a given example of this at the time, if you want to buy a record player, the first record players did not look like the record players that, you know, if you think of that right now, you know what that looks like. They didn't look like that. They looked like massive pieces of furniture. You know, because it takes a while for people to lose the old in any design. And so, and so as soon as you're creating record plays, they say, well, it has to look like a piece of furniture. It has to look like a closet sort of thing. And so he was the one that said, no, hold on. We get rid of the closet. We'll just have the record player. And at first, when he designed that, people, actually, they were a little hesitant about it. They thought, well, this is, this is the, they described it as like a glass coffin,

like snow white coffin or something. It was so pristine and simple and clear. But what's interesting is that, for ever afterwards, every design of every record player looked like his, because he'd stripped away all the non-essential stuff and he'd said, this is how it needs to be. And he did that for many, many products over 35 years. He summarized everything he'd learned into those three words. Less but better. I love less but better. It is phenomenal.

So people that are listening, and we've mentioned essentialism, we've said less but better in this chaotic, how can people self-diagnose if they're a non-essentialist? Look, the questions I already put, I think are the simplest questions, right? Like, have you ever found yourself busy but not productive? Yes or no? Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin at work or at home or both? Have you ever felt like your days being hijacked by other people's agenda for you? Are you trying to do too many things and ending up doing them averagely well? Have you ever found yourself making just a millimeter progress in many, many different directions? Someone who says yes to any of the above, especially if you say yes

to all of the above, a pretty good chance, you know, you're operating more as an onessentialist and an essentialist currently. I mean, the good news about all of this is that people are completely redeemable. The reason that people are non-essentialists, there's a few, but the primary reason is because they didn't know they were choosing that. They didn't know there was an alternative. They didn't wake up in the morning. I just want to be a non-essentialist. I just want to do too many things

in too many different directions. They just, they just lived in a world that happens to emphasize that. Happens to pursue too many different things and they just went along with everybody else. And so the awakening is where you say, hold on, there are a group of people who don't operate in like that.

And the results they get are extraordinary. They're able to produce far, far better results. Awakening is where you say, hold on, there are a group of people who don't operate like that. And the results they get are extraordinary. They're able to produce far, far better results at a lower stress level. So they can break through to a higher point of contribution and enjoy the process at the same time. These are the essentialists. And so learning that is a big moment, a big change in mindset and therefore you can change your life quite quickly afterwards. Yeah, I think there's two main realizations I had when I was reflecting on that particular

area of your work. One of them was to me, busyness was inbuilt into life, and you're right, I didn't know that there was an alternative. I was like, well, this is just what life is. You know? Life just happens to go a million miles an hour across the galaxy, and I need to. It's not setting.

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

two things. I was like, I didn't know there was an alternative. And it made me feel important and busy and valued. And I'd wager a lot of other people feel like that as well. Yeah, and that right there is interesting. This idea of it being important, that busyness somehow has come to equal importance, is not a necessary human condition or understanding, but it does seem to be this current culture's understanding. And so I remember talking to one more time

and I was asking, yeah, how are you? And she said, oh, I'm so busy. She said, I'm so busy. Greg, I'd tell you, I've slept on average four hours a night for the last two weeks. That's how busy I am, you know? And she's smiling. I mean, first of all, why is she smiling?

Yeah. What? And what did she, she didn't say this, but what I think she was saying was, look, I hate to break it to Greg, I'm just a little more important than you are. You know, you don't get to sleep at normal nights, Rhett, but I am under so much demand, using me as a portal. They're me, I'm exactly, that's how important I am.

And she didn't know, of course, that she was right, you know, speaking to, well, to an aspiring essentialist, you know, so she didn't know that this was not, you know, speaking to, well, to an aspiring essentialist, you know, so she didn't know that this was not, this is not impressive to me. This is not an achievement to me. And so it was, it led to a very genuinely friendly conversation and a couple of weeks after that, she came back to me, said, okay, my gunner's eye have like completely stripped away the way I was

doing it, sleeping properly. I've like made prioritized decisions about what I actually want to go after and don't. And I feel this increase of productivity, right? My stress is going down, my productivity is going up. Like this is the value proposition of essentialism. And in that story, there's also the nonsense of non-essentialism, what a con that it is. I think it's a radial quote that felt like it should have been inessentialism. And it says, a truth in this life is that you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. And accepting that, genuinely, truly, not just going, yeah, yeah, sounds

good. Sounds, sounds, sounds nice, mate. But I'm going to get, I'll get, I'll get the other thing after I've had this thing. So I'll have this anything, then I'll have the next anything. I mean, no, that, that's the everything mentality. Yeah. And I wonder how much of this comes from people not knowing what they want in life? Yeah, absolutely. It comes from people not taking the time to explore that. They're just going along. And the busyness gets busyness. And that's what everyone else is doing. So they're just actually in a way that they're not having to make any decisions. They're just doing what everybody else is doing. Well, they're doing that.

What am I actually doing? I mean, it used to be just, you know, keeping up with the Joneses, but now, of course, it's social media keeping up the Joneses, which is a much different challenge, right? You're getting to compare yourself to everybody's best possible version of themselves, basically, sort of a form of lying, you know, because it's so curated and different than the rest of their

life, and you're comparing yourself against the best of everybody's. So this is really like a recipe for non-essentialism. You know, it's not just opinion overload. I mean, rather, it's not information overload. It is opinion overload. We're just getting crammed with all this stuff. And so, our job is to try and push all of that away and get quiet and ask what, not just even what do I want, although that's not bad.

What am I supposed to do? What is what is my mission? What is the thing I came here to do? What what? What do I what do I come here to do? That is a that is a completely different kind of question. And as you start to explore that you find that you already have more answers than you realize, but it comes from inside of you instead of just from all this outside stuff. And you can start to have quite, instead of the fear of missing out of FOMO, you start

to have the joy of missing out, right? Or JOMO? Wasn't she a singer? And it's Domo's at Dido. Yeah, I don't know, don't know. Yes, you're a programmer. Jomo is, or to be a singer, but we want to make a song to it, you can do that. But Jomo is, you know, you discover, just because of the people, in fact, you like not doing things that other people are doing. You start to go, yeah, that's great for you. You can celebrate it for them,

but that's not what I'm doing. That's what I'm about. It's not what I'm supposed to be doing in my life. And you start to feel this joy and momentum in doing, as I keep saying, what you came here to do. Before we get on to, I want to ask the question, which is how do we do that? What are the steps that we can take toward identifying that and getting rid of the trivial many. But that deprogramming, right, of the existing societal norms, the pathosively resistant, your genetic predisposition, your traumas in the coping

mechanisms you've got with that, is something I'm swimming in at the moment. I've got an amazing blog post that I'm going to send to you after we've finished. And I know that I've just completely teased that to everyone that's listening. However, the author of the blog post is going to come on the podcast in the next couple of weeks. I've got a big announcement about that. It's phenomenal. Just some fella, but wrote the best thing I've read on the internet this year. And one of the things that he was talking about there was about sort of deprogramming the

societal norms and getting rid of all that stuff. And that FOM is Joe Mo paradigm that you've just come up with there. To me, is present in a lot of different areas of life. So for instance, as soon as you see discomfort in training, physical training, as something to actually lean into, as something that is a signal that you're doing something right,

as opposed to a signal that you're doing something wrong. But it takes time to program yourself. You go into the gym for the first time and you do a difficult workout and you feel you're going to die. You're on the floor and you want to throw up and you're sweating and you knees hurt and all this stuff happens. And there's some very real physical adaptations that need to happen before you can go like fully in. But once those have occurred and presuming you're doing it safely, the discomfort is the signal of progress, right? And it's kind of the only way you can do that is by learning, oh, hang on, this is me moving forward, this is me doing the right thing. And the the Jomo as it seems, the joy of missing out. Again, is that, it's like, oh, missing out.

That's fantastic. That means that I'm focusing on what I should be focusing on. I'm not getting swept away with the trivial many. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right to think about those signals that will be new signals so that when other people are zicking yours, agging, you know, when other people are saying, yes, you're saying no, when other people are saying no, you're saying, yes, because you're trying to, you're not trying to be like everybody else anymore.

Yeah, you can't be distinctive at everything. That's such a good call. No, you are very, very right. Okay, so how do we do it? Where do we start? You've got me Greg, I'm here, I'm a nightmare, I'm doing too much. How do I start to bring order to chaos? Okay, so you're asking that question in like still a hypothetical way, or you could be, so we could do it in a literal way, right? So we'll just do, or you could be. So, but we could do it in a literal way, right? So we'll just do it with you right now.

I mean, you can, okay, so tell me first thought, what is something that's essential to you? It's very important to you, but you're under investing in it currently. You might be doing something, but you're under investing. Go, first thoughts. Writing. Go. First thoughts. Writing. Okay. What does success look like for you in writing?

One new article per week. And you're putting out in your blog to your newsletter. That's what you want to do. How are you doing it right now? How much are you managing to do currently? Zero. Okay, good. So good. It is an under-investment. I've warned you that I was afraid to have it tough. No, I like it. I like it honestly very much. Okay, so when you say you're not publishing any, you are not doing any writing at all. So I've been gesticulating over the font size of the website and the tiny little things that I know is really a glorified version

of procrastination to put me off from actually putting in hard work. I have six half finished articles, all of which require two hours of focused work to be really good. And I really like them. But there's just six half finished meals and they're all in the kitchen. Yeah, I like it. I like our practical examples. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Okay, so how long have you been doing those six and a half articles?

How long have they been sort of sitting there, getting cold? Probably since the beginning of lockdown, that's maybe a, maybe a, yeah. Okay, so a couple of months. Yeah. Yeah. You started working on them then?

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

I'll do a new one. Does that illusion, sorry, a lure of novelty, again, gets me an new, new idea? Yeah, you're more excited to start the thing than to finish the thing. That's... Yes, that's it. Okay, so... So...

Tell me, tell me one of those articles. What's just one of them that you... What's the first one you worked on, in fact? Ten things I learned from speaking to the smartest people on the planet for 200 hours. Yeah, okay, well that's good. That's good title. Okay. First, ladies and gentlemen, Greg McEwan says that the title of my articles is good. Of course it is. That's, that's, you're well, you weigh with that. Okay. So what is the minimum number of, what is the minimum amount of work that needs to be done to the article in its current

format before you can put it out? I don't even know, which is embarrassing. But did you have it done it? Yeah, all 10 things are done, each of the common themes, they're kind of fleshed out, a proofread, it's the unsexy stuff. Go back through, proof read it, make sure that I haven't used too much hyperbole, check if I I had this one concept, I'm not really too sure if that should be in. And I think part of me scared as well, that when I reopen that Pandora's box, at the moment, it's, I know it's

not done, but it is closed. And when I reopen that, I get reminded of the fact that it's still going. Does that make sense? Well, it's an interesting point you're saying. You're saying that in its unfinished closed position, it feels a sort of done. That's very interesting, right? You're saying like stopping working on something has a feeling of closure. Even though finishing it can't satisfy it. That is officially undone.

That is, I can check that off. That has been, this has been formally procrastinated. Yeah, that's it. That is hit. Well done. Move on the next one. Let's quickly get the next article into the same one more nice position.

Almost procrastinated. Woo! You are working through these at a storm. Okay, so what is really stopping you from publishing an article? So I think it's publishing the article is perfectionist trap, a little bit that I'm like, I feel like there's a little bit of pressure.

You know, I have a bunch of friends who are all very competent at writing online, and I think Rani, it needs to be like fucking war and peace. And then another bit of it's just the working process of writing isn't yet coming as easily to me as podcasting is. I've never procrastinated on podcasting, never once, because it feels like a high calling. It's something which comes to me incredibly naturally.

There's also a very interesting way that the format pulls you through because it's like a treadmill. You know, you don't actually have to overcome your own inertia to do a podcast. I can't now stop talking to you and just give up half what I mean, I could, but it would be really weird. It would be weird. It would be really weird if I now stopped talking. So you've got some externalised accountability, you've got some motivation from the person that you're speaking to. So I think that the

nature of a conversation is quite different, which is also why book clubs and stuff are successful, I suppose, that they give you that external accountability to keep you moving through something and get over your own inertia. Yes, so you need to choose a day that your podcast goes out no matter what. Right. You just have days three days a week at the moment, Greg. We are doing three episodes a week. No, but I mean, I mean with your plot with your blog.

Yes. Okay. Yes. I mean, having a set date where you say, okay, uh, you know, it goes out on, which is your day. What's your day? May 18th. Okay, it goes out on what's your day? What's your day? May 18th all right may 18th and then every week after that you put out a blog Correct out your body language when I said that was like so non-committal

You Turn the camera on you are shouldn't turn the camera on. I'm excited, like, I'm a human, you're a turn the fuck inside. You were like, no, I am absolutely not committing to doing that. I'll say I am here because it would be awkward not to in the middle of this podcast, but there's no way I'm doing that. That's what I heard from you. Maybe. I'm wrong.

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

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

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

courage to be rubbish. To just go, success is posting that first blog. And here's how I would recommend you do it. I would recommend that you send it to your list as a link to your blog, rather than the whole content is in the email, right? And here's why, because if you do it that way, you can keep updating it as you need to. Right, so the first version you send out on the day you send that link, doesn't have to be the permanent state of that article. That is just how it is now and own it right there in the email you send out to

everybody. You just say, I assume that's how you're sending it to people. Is that how you're going to get send it out to everyone? Combination of that and sending it through social media and stuff like that. Same thing, you just have the link to be somewhere where you can keep editing it over time. I'll tell you something that happened to me that's similar to this. I once wrote at like late at night, a very rubbish piece on LinkedIn. It asked me to be an influencer on LinkedIn. And it was rubbish. And I just was new to that platform. It was the time it was a brand new platform that they were using.

And they said, and so I post this thing, the number one career mistake capable people make. That's typed by Femme up with, post it. And the next morning when I wake up, 60,000 people have viewed it. And there's a ton of comments and a ton of criticism. It wasn't all negative,

but I had just written this like, you know, just sort of two, three paragraphs and I like jumped in and started editing it immediately and improved it and improved it. A couple of million people read that too. Maybe more than that in the end. It was like it was relatively viral peace at the time. It was like it was relatively viral piece at the time. And it was so encouraging that, okay, so it started off as this piece, but we were able to improve it as we went. Now, that's not necessarily how you always wanted to be, but you have to get over the hump here. So you have to lower the hump that you're trying to get over.

This menpal hump of it has to be fantastic, or I can't put it out. Put something out. It's a small amount. It isn't going to be fantastic or I can't put it out. Put something out. It's a small amount. It isn't gonna be perfect. I don't even know what that would mean, a perfect article. But you will get feedback and you will learn

and you'll be in the same mode before we started this idea. What did you say? I can't find the name. The skill take off. And that sends the nation, the skill take off. And so maybe what you say is I'm just going to publish. Maybe you say I'm going to publish or yeah, I don't know.

And so I am trying to encourage you to, and it is really my, probably my biggest insight since writing essentialism is that, is that, is that people, people, there's a piece of feedback people often give. It's not the most common feedback, but it is regular enough that I definitely noted it. And it is where they'll say, oh yeah, it's hard, isn't it? Essentialism though, it's hard to focus on what's essential and not on what's non-essential.

It has to, you know, and in fact, somebody once said to me, they said, look, you said, look, essentialism should come with a warning. This will be the hardest thing that you will ever do. For a year or two, I absorbed that line and would share that with people, well, the thing you're problem with essentialism

is how does it need you to ever do? What a comment is, that's a totally non-essentialist idea. It's completely wrong. It's only the harder thing to do because you're a non-essentialist trying to be an essentialist. You're trying to be an essentialist in a non-essentialist way. You're like, I have to do this perfectly. I have to do anything essential right now. This is not what essentialism is about.

I think there's a way to do essentialism that's so easy. And that's what we need to do. We're just cut away all these layers of to get in the way of you actually publishing what you've written. You don't need the fancy website. You don't need the article to be perfect whatever that means. You don't even have to have ten of them. Doesn't have to be perfect.

It just needs to be published. And then the feedback will come. And then you'll learn something. And then you can progress to the next step. You've got to have this. And this is only a couple of the things one can do to make them easier. But that is my primary learning since essentialism is written. That's a very cool way to look at it.

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

Most, the most insidious way that you rationalize doing too much is by hedging your risk. That's the most insidious way because it's got a kernel of truth in it. It's got a kernel of truth in it that if you were to do two things instead of one, you half your risk if that one thing goes shit. Yeah. But you then take it to, if I do 100 things and one of them goes to shit, that's only 1%. Yeah.

And you don't realize that the price that you pay for doing 100 things is that you've only gone one unit of distance over 100 things as opposed to 100 units of distance over one thing. Yeah, that's right. And also the other false assumption in that is the idea that all opportunities or actions are randomly, like, successes randomly assigned to those 100. Like, if you couldn't understand any cause and effect between anything, you might be best to just do 100 things, and you only make an inch progress in all of them, but at least

you'll make an inch progress in one thing that's going to work because it's totally random. That's fine. So you want to believe life is completely random. Fine, you go, you live that one out and see how that works for you, right? But on the basis that, and this is the first principle of essentialism, is to explore what's essential, right? It's to actually create space looking for the thing you feel really good about pursuing the thing that you feel your best built to do.

And so, and so in that process you come to a point of view that says, I'm built to do this and not to do that so I'm'm gonna go strong on the thing that I am good at, passionate about. I think is relevant right now. I mean, all of those things are risk mitigation techniques so that you can then lean into something fully that you're actually, you know, is your highest point of contribution. And one of the things for me about that is writing. I mean, there's so many career paths

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

Yeah, so you can start with, I mean, you know, what we're talking about here is criteria, right? What criteria to use to evaluate what to do? And you start off with maybe like, well, what are the things I have no interest in? Well, don't do that stuff. Fishing. But you know, like Well, don't do that stuff. Fishing. But you don't like fishing, don't do fishing, right?

It is because you're makes it doing fish. I mean, you have to go fishing. I have lots of people who love skiing. I always feel this guilt like I need to do skiing. Of course, if you go skiing, you ought to be able to go skiing. You know, it's such a fabulous, and I love the snow, you love it, you would love it. You would love it up there.

This is what you always feel this. And I'm like, no, I'm not interested. Not interested. It's a start with this stuff. You're not interested in start with the stuff that you go, yeah, I, not only am I not good at that, I could not imagine ever being good at that. That is not my thing.

So you just start at the extremes, right? The periphery and move forward. So you don't have to say what am I great at, but you can say what am I interested in? What do I think I might have a little bit of talent for? You know, you look on like, you know, Britain's got talent or whatever the talent show is and you see these people in these that are just terrible at that thing. And they've got high passion, really low talent for it. And you feel for those people, right?

Or you wonder why they don't understand it. What we're looking for is things that have, if you're some passion for it, you think you might be quite good at, that you could become good at it, meets a need in the world and that overlap, that's where your highest point of contribution can lie. And then over time you're developing that more and more narrowly. So that over time is your competency increases, you aren't just interested in doing the things

you're good at, you are looking for the thing you would be the best at, really great at. Eventually, down the journey, it's like, could I be the best in the world at this thing? Maybe there's a tiny group of people who can do this thing, but that's a, you know, that's, you increase your selectivity as your competence increases. I like the idea of using inversion and a contrasting effect to work out where you don't go. It's the easiest way to avoid being depressed is to work out not what makes you happy, but how you would make a happy person depressed. I would fuck up with the sleep, I'd fuck up with the nutrition,

I'd make sure they didn't get any daylight, you know do all of the different bits and pieces. And you're like oh yeah, well that makes a happy person depressed and you go right okay. What's the implication of that? It's also funny that that's as you were saying about the different things that sounded to me like a hell no. It's like would you go would you go fishing hell no? Would you go skiing hell no and as past modern wisdom guest and good buddy Derek Sivers says, it's either hell yes or no. And that ties into something I actually wanted you to run us through, which is the 90% rule. Do you take us through that? Yeah, so you imagine everything, every option that you have on a, that can be plotted on a continuum from zero to 100,

and it's an important continuum. So an important continuum of zero is, it's totally unimportant, and 100 is completely important, absolutely essential. Right, so everything, you know, whether it's writing this article that you just talked about or exercise or doing the next podcast, reading, going on YouTube, like, or every activity can be plotted on this continuum.

And what I'm encouraging people to do is to say anything that is underneath 90%, anything that's lower than 90% important you question and maybe even eliminate You're looking for just the things that are 90% or above essential vitally important relationships, you know absolutely must do before I die projects before I die projects. Habits that I know will make the rest of my life significantly improved and different might even make a difference with my children and grandchildren. You're looking for those things because every time you do something that's below 90%, you're taking it away from something that is 90% above. You're making a trade-off. People don't really know about that. They don't see it that way often. So they just think,

well, is this good? Well, good might be 40. It might be 40%. Important. 30% important. Yeah, it's good. It's fine. It's fine. I'm wrong with doing that. But they don't aware that they're taking it away from the thing that is absolutely vital. So I'm always encouraging people like look at the extremes, look at the things that are 90% are important and invest there, look at the stuff that's below 10% and just eliminate there, make the trade-off between the two so that you can actually go further faster on the things that matter. I think what some people may be concerned about is that sounds like a very totalitarian, disciplined life.

Well, I'm not allowed to have cake. His cake isn't contributing to my highest sense of importance and I used to like YouTube, but Greg and Chris told me that YouTube's only, that I really, I looked at the importance of that and that's only 30% so now I've got to delete the YouTube app and now I just feel like I'm this kind of robot that's sort of rolling through life.

So how do people find that balance between turning it on and turning it off of having the focus on the essential few whilst being able to give us enough kind of leeway to live a life that doesn't feel like it's completely under super control all the time. Well, what I sound like you just said is that freedom, creativity, exploration is really important to you. That wasn't me.

I'm all right without cake. I love me a bit of cake, but right now it's summertime. You know, you're just saying other people might find what we're described as being really stringent. What all I'm saying is that if somebody feels that something important to them is probably being violated, so they haven't got their list right yet. When you're working on the 90% and above, you're not feeling rigid and controlled. You're feeling free, liberated from all this nonsense that you don't value, that's keeping you back

from living the things you actually do want. So there's a lot of joy. There's more joy in the 90% and above. Then there is probably in the rest of the 90% combined. When I'm working on something that's meaningful to me, that's inspiring to me, I mean, I'll give you an example just this week. So it was doing, you know, having an evening with my children, my wife, and we were doing smores, which I don't even know if you would know.

It's not that it's smores, it's smores. Yeah. I mean, even without the wife and the children, the smalls on their own would be in the 90% for me. And so, we just spent the evening doing the outside over a fire together enjoying that time. That was a 90% above for me. That's not stringent and rigid.

That's playfulness and joyfulness. And it's a way better the me just sort of going okay I'll just I'll just scan social media and just be at my own infinite scanning on that in some room somewhere like that that's what we're talking about we're saying get rid of all that stuff that doesn't feed you that isn't joyful that isn't that isn't taking you forward and and and I think that things are a bit of creativity and imagination as to what really matters. For people to have a good vision of this. Yeah, it's interesting with time, isn't it? The way that time works because it's the only thing you can't choose to not spend.

Like, you can't not spend time. You can choose to not spend your money, and it's the mad thing about people that are able to get in shape or the people that are able to accumulate wealth. Like they do that by having an asymmetry between what they bring in and what they put out. Yeah. There isn't an equivalent with time. Yeah, there's no time bank. You can't say today, I'm going to just take half of this time, I don't know what to do with it,

so I'll put it over there, wait, while I think of this app, right? It's being spent at exactly the same rate all of the time, no matter what. It it for. So it's present. Yeah, what you're saying is true. There's a quote from Naval Ravacant that I've been playing around with recently, which is, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And what does that mean to you? So it's meant a lot.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about these little, that as an aphorism. Play stupid games win stupid prizes to me means what is the, what would be winning the thing that you're doing right now. So for instance, what would be winning always replying to an Instagram DM message within 30 minutes all day, every day? What's the prize? Play a stupid game when a stupid prize. A stupid prize doesn't exist. It's a

satisfying of some people who wouldn't have cared if you'd waited a week to reply to them, who maybe you're never going to see again, who you've maybe never met. Play play another stupid game, if you want to take it to a kind of a little bit more vicious degree, pay a stupid game which would be have unprotected sex with someone that you don't know after a night out. That is playing a very stupid game. What's the prize that you win for that when you compare it with the alternative of having protected sex? What would be play a stupid game of texting while you drive as opposed to waiting until you get to your destination? That's a very stupid game to play when you win a stupid prize. What's the prize? It's, oh well, the lads in the group

chat got that meme off me a little bit quicker than if I'd waited and I got to have a little bit of a giggle at the lights as opposed to sit and look out the window or whatever it is. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes slots into essentialism somehow for me. Yeah, well, I think that's right because I remember working with maybe like 50 of the top leaders from American industry. And as I walked into the room, it was a very, it was a very, so dark oak room. It was this very secretive meeting actually. It was very interesting. I mean, it wasn't, there was nothing bad being done there, but it was just like very kind of a leap feeling

as you walked into the room. And I liked it. I liked all the people I talked with there, but the overwhelming sensation I had in that room was, here is a group of people that won the wrong game. What's that mean? Well, one of them was vulnerable at one point and just said, look, my relationship with my teenager is completely shot right now. It is almost ready to leave the house, and I just don't have a relationship with him. So it's everything's rough between us. And so here he is, he's got up the corporate ladder, but he's one at a game that now he realizes didn't matter,

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

I achieved it. I got there. But then it was unsatisfying when I actually arrived there. It wasn't what it was actually, that is not what the, it was unsatisfying achievement. That's what I mean by. And that's where the explore before you exploit importance comes in at the beginning of looking at your options, of assessing the things that you want. Yes, and there's a few ways of thinking about exploration, right? One is one is just Intellectually here are my options. Let me evaluate the options in front of me a second way of thinking about it is when I think one's highest priority is which is

To protect our ability to prioritize Protect our ability to discern Yeah, all of us have many many non-essential voices outside of us and inside of us, right? Just all different minds, just telling us a million things, oh, you're going to do this and that matters. And how do you look how you compare to that person and look at competitions and comparisons and complaining voices and all these voices, right? There's all of this noise.

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

amplifying that voice of conscience, that really guides you in the right direction. If you do that today in small ways, you don't wake up 20 years from now and go, oh my goodness, I've just given myself 20 years to the wrong goal. That's what I think it needs. That's scary, you know, I tweeted something, I can't even remember where I found it, but it stuck with me for years. I tweeted this the other day, true hell

is when the person you are meets the person you could have been. Yeah, that's, you know, I like that sentiment. It is a bit scary like you say. I want, I want, I'll give you a story. So I was staring at myself in the mirror, dressed from head to toe in a stormtrooper costume. Good luck. Good luck.

Well, it was a moment. That's certainly what it was. And I was thinking about buying it. This was like a, you know, pretty close to movie level quality suit. Right. And I'm in my, I'm in like late 30s, looking at myself in this mirror. And I look, it's for Halloween, right? And I still kind of, I think I get why I thought that was a cool thing. Why it might have been a fun idea. But as I'm staring at the mirror, I'm struck by two things

completely at the same time. One is, there's not one part of me that wants this anymore. Right? Like, why am I even thinking about? I do not want that. I do not want this. And the second, in the same moment, I realized that for 30 years, I've had in my mind the idea that one day I would buy this. Because 30 years previously, that's when return of the jet I had come out. And my older brother, one of my older brothers had said to me, would it be so-called own like a costume right from, you know, from the movies, like movie level quality costumes, and my little like young self influenced by my brother saying this.

Just it's just just caught on. And that little goal stuck with me for all of those years. Now this is the power of goals. We get that. Goals are really powerful. That they're one of my professors once said they're the theory that works. But what he was saying is that they work too well.

Once you have a goal, you can get on autopilot and now you're racing down some part to get something that really you didn't stop to question. So what I'm seeing here is be careful that some of the goals that we set aren't storm, are they stormtroopers? You know, should we just have eliminated them already? Could we give up on them halfway because we go, no, that doesn't even matter. I just someone else wanted to do that.

Swatch, nigga wanted to do that. I don't have to do that. You know, just because the rocks do it, I mean, I have to do it. Yeah, the rock is cool. I absolutely loved that. I had took a max on and he is a man who has gone through, about as big of a 180 as you can imagine from this.

What was it called? A Frat-frat literacy or something. He created an entire new literary genre, which was like party by party by stories type thing. And he had gone through this big. And then he's done a decade of psychotherapy and a ton of internal work. And this guy is so, so fucking aware now, and just completely present, speaking his truth forward, just stripping away ego,

left, right, and center, really, really delivering. He's phenomenal, I love the person he is. Now I would have hated the guy that he was back then, but I love the person he is now. And you see when someone makes such a change, that and you got these weird like epochs in your life, right? You've got like the the kid then the teenager then like the young kind of 20s then like the mid 20s realize that you thought that having a faster car than your mates when you were 19 was a big deal. But now you're 32 and your wife loves you and you've got two kids and a dog that you care

about. And because you never questioned whether or not still having a faster, bigger, better car was, it's just, it's like it's just there. It's just a modus operandi, right? And it's just running below you and you can't even really realize and the stream just takes you along. I absolutely love that concept.

You touched on something actually that I had in my notes and wanted to bring up, which is why is it so hard to cut losses? Is it just sunk cost fallacy? Is it just, ah, well, I've got this far with the huge tech company, which is destroying my relationship with my teenager. I might as well go all the way.

Is that why people have a fear? Is there anything else? Yeah, because you're having to face the potentially poor decision of not having cut off yesterday or the day before that. And so you're more, the longer it goes, the harder it is to admit that we weren't wise in the previous scenario. And so, yes, of course, we want to, well, you've heard the whole metaphor, right, of the, how do you catch a monkey? You've heard this, right? How do you catch a monkey?

You, there's a trap and you, the monkey puts their hand in the trap. You never heard this. You put the monkey puts their hand in the trap and they can't, once their hand is in the trap, they're holding onto the nuts in there or the fruit or whatever's in there. And because their hands is clenched, they can't get the hand out, right?

Because it's smaller if they can put the hand in, but not big enough that they can get the hand out. So they wanna hold onto it. And I thought for a long time that this was this is just sort of a you know made up Mass or whatever, but you can go on YouTube and there's somebody who's actually done this And it's actually it's really really a little video And and and they just for first of all they just will not let go and he's completely trapped and the man's coming over to get him And this will not let go of this of this thing and then right as the man actually takes hold of the monkey, he does let go and he gets focused on something else. And that's the key to letting go is we have to focus

on the next, something that's more important to us, something that actually is a deeper better version of what we want to be, so that we can let go of these old things that don't matter anymore. Let them go. I mean, this idea of not growing up, holding on to the 20 year old version of it, then holding on to the 25 year old version of it, it's a failure to mature, it's a failure to thrive. We're trying to win yesterday's back all, try to win yesterday's version of the world. And so, and so I think And so I think that it's, we've got onto the monkey, and catching monkeys, isn't it?

So I'm not sure amount of your question, but I know you are. I feel like that. We holding on to all this investment we've made in something, and we've just got to look to the next thing. It's actually better, and it gives us the courage to let go of the thing that we'll keep holding on to.

Yeah, there's a story from Kamal Rava Khan, who's Navar's brother, and I heard him on the podcast just before Christmas, and he lost pretty much all of his blood in an operation. Accidentally, the sutures burst on his artery, and he basically bled out, and he was in knee-making, all this stuff happened in terrible pain, And love yourself like your life depends on it. It was just about to come out the second version and he'd sold tons of self-published. And he was like the perfect patient zero for who needs drugs. And the doctors are like, if anyone ever needed opiates, it's you. Like you are the guy for drugs. So he's taken him and he gets the first proof, uncorrected manuscript, whatever it is back. And he realizes that because of the drugs

that he's on, that he can't view the punctuation with enough dexterity and that resolution that he needs to, because he wants every word, it's quite a short book, it's only in that maybe 70 pages or something. And he wants everything, he needs to craft every single word, every line break, every piece of punctuation, all the rest of it. And he realizes he can't do it. So he just stops taking the drugs and he's in pain, but he has something which is greater than his pain. He has the book and the book allows him to transcend what it is that he's suffering with,

right? And I loved that story. And I would have never heard And I wouldn't have, I would have never heard it. And I've never heard him tell it on a different, any of the podcasts, it's just because I was being like a bit nosy about the pain that he'd gone through in this recently a death experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so powerful. It's really like allegorical almost. You're like, look, you've got this, this thing which occurs, which is greater than you're suffering. And it allows you to transcend the difficulty of just existing, look, you've got this, this thing which occurs, which is greater than your suffering, and

it allows you to transcend the difficulty of just existing, of just getting through your day to day life. And that's kind of like the monkey thing, right? It's like, you know, if only you could let go of the thing that you were, that you thought you wanted to move on to the thing which you truly want. And one of the best ways for that to happen is to have something which you know that you truly want so much more because it makes letting go and awful lot easier. Yeah, I was, as you know,

I just, just about to launch a podcast and one of the reasons I did it was because I was talking to one of my podcasting friends and he has this great line. He says success traps are harder to get out of the failure traps. And that to me is such a brilliant illustration of the problem you're describing,

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

As soon as we step out to serve somebody else, I think a lot of that non-essential stuff starts to fall away and we can get out of the trap. Scott Barry Kaufman's new book, Transcend, is precisely about that. He talks about it readers, Maazal's hierarchy of needs and he talks about, you can't, you literally believe that you can't reach your fullest

potential without serving others. And it's spent. What's your name? You know, yes. Yeah, he was talking to me. He said, yeah, go on. This story about Maslow, do you hear about his mother-in-law? I think it's his mother-in-law.

And he said that, he said that, his mother-in-law was the most actualized person that he'd ever met. And she was just a mum, just a mum living at home. You know, it wasn't the picture of the guy on the top of the mountain, just slaying businesses and driving fast cars and doing all that stuff. But he said she was the most actualized person that he'd ever met. Well, towards the end of his life, he rebuilt his own model, but it was just too late, because it was already like become popularized and everybody, no one's updated it.

So the top of his model was not self-actualization by the end of his life, it was self-transcendence. And that distinction makes all the difference, doesn't it? I have met so many people trying to pursue a self-actualized life, and you can feel the absence of what matters so much more than self-actualization. As important a self-actualization is, and it's sort of going after goals and just achieving them, but self-transcendence where you really are in contribution mode, where you really are in service mode,

to a calling, to a purpose that's higher and more important than that are own sort of proximate concerns. This is such, this is the big distinction to me. This is the difference that I'm always looking for in people. This is the difference I want to see in myself to transition to be, to live a life of contribution, not just one of productivity or just of, you know, sort of external worldly success, that that's really what I want. So I think, I think Maslow did appreciate that distinction for the end, but they got misquoted, in a sense. What are the red ones? Do you feel like you're moving in the right direction? Are you still getting yourself towards the top of this newly extended hierarchy of needs? I mean, for, for me, for me, when I think about, you know, it's an ongoing journey,

but when I think about the last almost 20 years now, that journey, that senseless journey, not just the book and all that, but I mean that the journey in my own life has been all about that transition. So for me, it looks like it looks like investing primarily in my relationship with Anna, my wife and our four children and really seriously investing in it. Not Anna, my wife, and our four children, and really seriously investing in it. Not saying lips serves, oh yes, they're the most important people in my life, but actually

building those relationships. So when I travel, for example, about 80% of the time, I'll take one of my children with me so that we have that one on one time. It means that instead of joining that club or going going to that large other golfing thing or the tennis tournament, you just say no to all of that and you just try to make your own children like not just your best friends but also your best friends, people that you really want to be with and spend time together with. And the effect of all of that has been that the culture that has been created is something really special. So even as my children now are like,

three of them are teenagers, I could not have believed 10 years ago that my relationship now would be what it is with teenagers. Now I was a teenager, I know lots of teenagers, I understand that journey, I've worked with lots of teenagers over the years, and I've got a lot of respect for, obviously, for young people, I'm not knocking them, but this is just completely not like any of the stereotypical descriptions. You know, the worst problems are like, like, one of my teenage son is like,

he reads too many books, he reads like, late into the night, he reads fiction and he loves it. That's like, that's my biggest problem with him. And I'm not kidding either. I'm literally, I'm not kidding, they said they got delightful and they played together, they spent time together, they did, they just spent five hours. This is like a week ago, five hours upon a hill close to where we live. We live up in the hills. And they were filming for my eldest daughter wants to be a director. And she's taking a film class at university right now. And she's just, I mean, she's 17, but she's like, you know, really like focused about what she wants to do and her highest point of contribution. And so she went up there and led a, they took a, what is it called, a

Princess bride, you know, the movie Princess. Yeah. So she had to redo a scene from any movie and they chose a scene from that movie, the Iocaine powder scene for those that know this cult classic. And, and it absolutely, seen by scene, took him five hours to do it. We didn't hear of one problem the whole time. We weren't there. We didn't oversee any of it. The video is brilliant.

It's like frame by frame, the same as the original. They were all the actors. They had the whole costumes. They've fulfilled it. Whatever, I think it was fit out of 50 points. She got 50 points for this. She just got the results back a couple of days ago. That, to me, is like illustrative. That's like a version of what the

essentialism looks like. It was the natural outgrowth of investing in something 90% are important for years and years. And it just now bears this fruit all the time. This is just flowing of it. And so, you know, I just share that story because I think that this is, this is what you just said about Manzlo and his mother is no throwaway comment to me. It's like, this is where my relationship with my family aren't a little more important than the next most important thing. Like this is it. This is this is miles above the next most important thing. And I think most people know that, but they get very busy and consumed with other voices, is telling them something else and giving them, you know, immediate feedback and positivity, but those relationships, and at the end of my life, it's completely

obvious to me that on my deathbed, I will not be saying, well, how many books did I sell? How many people did you have? How many books do I have? Right, that isn't going to be, it's just going to be those people around you at the table, like those people in the room, that small group, that's what it's going to be about. So I want to invest now with that clarity. The clarity I will have then. That's a beautiful story. The premier other essentialist that I know Ben Bergeron, Matt Fraser's CrossFit coach and the very, very well-known and great podcast who I'll be sending this episode to. He has a number of tools, I think, that you suggest as ways that people can actually

instantiate the essentialist mentality. I'm one of the ones that he has at a 5 p.m. every day he's home. Now, I wanna say to 5 p.m. every day that, every day that it might be 5pm every day that he shuts his laptop. But apparently there's like, he's got a ton of really hilarious stories of like, there'll be in the middle of this crazy, important business meeting.

And Ben will just start packing his bag. And it'll be with someone who doesn't know that Ben leaves at 5 or whatever it might be. And Ben will start sort of packing his bag and they'll still be talking. And they'll still be talking. And then he'll be sort of walking, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's good to get his phone,

get his water bottle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really good. Walking away. And then he's like, okay, that's me, I'm off. Bye bye, like it's $459. Like, and then he's in the car. And that's one of his very, very hard points of conversation. I love that story. Love that story.

Now I want to meet him. You would adore him, man. He is him and Pat the other half. Yeah, but you see that's what it is. And I struggle with that a little myself because I enjoy the conversation of what I'm doing. That's the sun cost bias. All you want to be in here instead of just, you know, that's like permission. A story like that helps to give us permission. All of us could do that.

We think we can't, but it's because we haven't tried it. Who we don't know or rather, it might be that we can't do it in the sense that there may be some negative repercussions to suddenly be aiming that way. But we don't know because we never, we don't do it in the sense that there may be some negative repercussions to suddenly be aving that way. But we don't know because we never we don't try it. How can we say it can't be done? We don't we didn't do it. Try it. See what happens. I have a nephew. Every week I call my extended family. They're all, nephew is in New Zealand and people over the world and they join in. and people over the world that he joined in. And he comes on, and whenever he's done, he's just done. He's very friendly, but he's just like, oh yeah, go go, he's out.

Ha ha ha ha ha. That's so good. There's no like, there's no like false, you know, like false landings. Okay, I've really gotta go, oh no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, to really feel like it could be possible for us. I think that's the importance of examples. You know, that's the importance. And we were talking about this before because your new podcast, which will be linked in the show notes below,

and you should absolutely go and subscribe to it because I'm sure it'll be great and you've got some fantastic guests that I'm incredibly jealous of on there. And we were talking about that and talking about just how important sort of fiction stories and tales and stuff like that, you know? You can take from me telling you about the fact that Ben walks out of meetings of his CrossFit

gym, whatever time and it's kind of like semi-orquid but semi-funny but wholly respectable. The fact that you know that, you're like, hang on a second. Like if that is a habit and there's two ways to look at it, actually, I think a lot of people might discount that and say, well, yeah, that's fucking Ben Burjeron. You know, Ben Burjeron can do what he wants. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you think, right, okay.

But maybe you're putting the cart before the horse there. Maybe you're saying, Ben Burjeron is Ben Burjeron, therefore, Ben Burjeron can do Ben Burjeron stuff. As opposed to, this is the strategy that is implemented by him, which has allowed him to become the person that I think of as being so impressive. Yeah, well which do we really think it is? Like what really is logical about that? We really think that somebody became something impressive and then became disciplined. Rather than became disciplined and then became successful. Yeah, but I tell that people say this sort of thing to me all the time, well, you know, essentially

is in Zorripe for the people that are like already at top performers or you see, you know, already the this or any of that. And I think, yeah, man, you, this is, this is, you've got correlation and causation backwards here. Of course, this is how people achieve what they do. And the moment they stop being selected, thoughtful and disciplined is the same point they plateau and can't break through and continue to contribute. Awesome. So I want to finish off so that the listeners have got some tacit takeaways about how we can execute and how we can make sure that the vital few things are effortless and the trivial many just, you know, they stay in the shed. Oh, you just want me to do that. I would love to find out.

I mean, if you could do it for me, that would be better. But if you could give us some, some ways that we can, um, instantiate it, that would be, that would be wonderful. Here's one thing people can start with. Uh, they can start with a reverse pilot right now. A reverse pilot, like, what is a pilot? A pilot is trying something out and seeing what happens. A reverse pilot is stopping doing something and seeing what happens.

Just, just stop. Choose one thing that you normally have. Look on your calendar. You take one thing and you just cut it off. I'm not going to do that. What like? You can look, okay, I'll do it right now. I don't know if I can.

I have a meeting Sunday morning. It's not a business meeting. I'm not fairly this. It's actually a church meeting that I do. But that's how to date. I shouldn't be still having that at that time. And it's gone. So now maybe it could be checking your phone in the morning. Of course, it could be checking your phone in the morning.

Take your phone out of your bedroom. You are among friends here. You are among very good friends here, my friend. Yeah, there's actually, you know what we should send it, a link out with this with a 21 day challenge that I put together. It's 21, a lot of things that people can do, especially to be trying to go from memory right in a second.

But one of them is that, right? You have a tech free room. Certainly your phone shouldn't be there. I once worked with a lady who was doing a Steve Harvey at a TV show and he was, he'd asked me to do one of his guests and I went to her home and going around her home looking at where she's at, where she's too busy and cluttered. And then I asked her, okay, where do you put your phone and, well, in your bed, in your bed, in your bed, in your bed, in your bed, in your bed, in my bed, under my pillow,

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

I'm feeling it, burbling in me at the moment and going, well, you're probably all right because I know you don't do this, but there's so many people I've shared that story with who say, oh, it's a razor's shocking. And shocking and I'll say well where do you put your phone? and they say well you know my bedside table this our frankness is built upon 12 inches in different and so what's the difference is hardly a difference in that story.

I mean, take the phone out. It doesn't know. You do not, you know, people, people had alarm clocks before they had phones. So that's notes, oh, it wakes me up in the morning. Yeah, you can solve that problem in an analog solution. You can have a little alarm clock. And the first thing you did in the morning doesn't have to be checking your phone. Last thing at night, first thing in the morning.

You know, who's, who's owning who? Are you listening? Are you listening everybody out there? This is Greg McEwan telling you what I've told you for two years and if you didn't listen to me, please for the love of all that is wholly listened to him. You know, another thing I think is put a little nap in your day as often as possible, even if it's an 8, 10, most 20 minute nap every day. Interesting. Why? Because people are sleep deprived.

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

most the top performance from the Ampriced Performance as they matter sleep they got. The top performance slept on average eight and a half hours in every 24 hour period, 8.4 if I remember right. And they took more naps as well. Because every moment they were actually practicing or doing their work, they were really focused. And that's what asleep and the naps allowed them to do. So it's not just the number of hours you're doing a thing. it's the number of focused hours you're doing that thing. And so, yeah, yeah, take a nap for sure. I have. There's another thing.

I got more. I've got, I've got a, what would you say, confession to make before you do that. I was listening to you and Tim Ferris in the garden today, having a little sunbathe, which is slightly pink, so I'm gonna get video guide Dean to bring the saturation down on my side of the video. And I fell asleep for around about sort of, it was beautiful, it was real engaging, really interesting, it was just a 15,

a little 15 minuteer, and then I got walking up by the ice cream van, so it was perfect, but actually, you know, I just felt, I'll put it in there. So, yeah. What else we got? No, but that's the whole point. Is it, of course, you needed that little sleep.

Of course, that was better. It's that's better use of your time of your preparation was taking that nap than spending those 20 minutes just listening to more stuff. You were more alert, more able to be here. Okay, next thing, everyday make your list of like, you know, whatever, six things, main things you're going to do, three things, business, three things personal. Make that

list every day. Don't work from a to do list from yesterday. That won't do. There's so much has already changed over the last 24 hours. Every day, write it out, put it in priority order. And then I only joke half jokingly say this cross off the bottom five. Right, like that top thing is if you've done it right, it's so important you really need to spend the energy on that until that's done. And once you've got that resolved, then of course you can move on to item number two. That's simplest prioritization process. It's not like that's so hard. Actually, it's pretty relatively easy, but people don't always do it.

And if you're not doing it, start doing it. Because the return on investment of getting the most important thing done every day over a period of even three months or six months, so of course, then, of course, 50 years is immensely different. That's one more practical thing that people can do. That's like a microcosm to do this microcosm of the essentialist philosophy, I guess,

isn't it, brought right down to, although it would be 10 things, it would be 10 things and cross off the bottom nine, I guess, technicals. You've over laughed a little bit with those. Oh, yes, have you 90% to 10, yeah, I hit, that's right, I like that, okay, I can say it. 10 things will do down to the one.

That's the idea. And that simple step each day is like essentialism at the cutting edge of execution. Because what you want to know each morning when you've gone through that process is what's important now. You know, that's the win. What's important now, and it's the top item on that list, and you work on it. And then once you've done it, you have permission to move on to the next item. Every day, every day, every day, you go through this process. It'd be amazed at how much you can accomplish of the things that matter. If you aren't trying to go from some very generalized list,

or even just a mental list that you have, all this clutter that's in your mind, you're just actually working. I mean, I literally have, man, I won't show it because it's personal things, but I literally have it. I'll show it very briefly. Yep, okay, I can see it. I do it on huge pieces of paper, actually, always in Sharpies, that's my method.

I imagine, do you hold the pen like this as well? I imagine, that's the way, like a speed. Very big, very big, very big. Very big. And one, two. Yeah, I love having it and I love throwing it away at the end of the day, doing it in the next day, so that you're always actually focused on what's important now, not what was even important yesterday or a week ago. I noticed you haven't used the word urgent ones there. Yeah. Yeah, well, I'm not, I mean, I want to give't used the word urgent once there. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, I want to give urgency

to the things that are important, not let the urgent things, regardless of their importance, consume me. So yeah, that's true. Maybe to a fault, but I definitely distrust the urgent things in general. If other people are doing them, if they're urgent, I just have a, you know, my spidey sense is like, don't think so, probably not for me. I want to take the path less traveled. I want to take the path that only I can take.

I want my children, I want each of my children to take the path only they can take. They're unique and essential mission in life. And I think that can be introduced at any age. So even though it's not that tactical, I think the question, I was just talking to David Allen on my podcast and this week. And he said, we talked about all sorts of things, he has this thing and he says, there are six horizons of, you know, six horizons of prioritization. Like highest level, number six is the life goals.

And then it goes down all the way down to like zero is like what you do right now. So it's just a time horizons. And then we got talking about this, and I started realizing there might be a seventh horizon, above life goal. And we got talking about that, I won't get into all the interesting conversation behind it.

But in the end, his endpoint was he said, he said, yeah, he said the real questions we need to ask aren't horizon six. Basically agreeing that there is horizon seven, that he's never addressed to any of his books or anything. And he summarized those two questions as, who am I, and why am I here? And as I listen to those questions,

I think, yeah, if you never asked those questions, the stuff on you are to do list, the stuff on your mental list could be completely wrong directional. So, essentialism isn't just about doing more stuff efficiently, it's about doing more of the right things. And so, presupposes that first you are actually asking those questions that you're not doing it once

in a blue moon when you you know you have some deep conversation around a fireplace somewhere and you're three hours and oh wow where am I? I'm here and then forget it all. Now actually you're like leading with that. That's the work of life every day you're going, what am I supposed to do? Who am I? We taught that to our children. Our children went when I, Ellis, she figured out she wanted to be a director when she was like 10 years old. Maybe she was 12, but she was really got it by that point. And she'd spent a couple of hours one night asking these questions, well, who am I? Why am I here? And what do I want to do? And what's my hundred year vision? Literally, because that's like what we were talking about with her.

Really, that's really legit. And she wrote this whole note and put it under our bedroom door. We got it the next morning. It's just all this, but she knew she'd figured it out. This is what I want to do. And she's been just able to focus so much on that ever since. I think of how fast you would accelerate if you knew that from the time you were 10, 11, 12 years old. She's done internships. I mean, she's at university by the time she's 16 years old. She's graduated high school early. She's at university 16 and seven. She's taking classes in, she's, think of how focused that clarity has allowed her to be and how much she's learning and understanding internships for all sorts of companies and stuff

being on set learning helping To see from shots and angles Anyway, I just think that that's like a pretty it feels very high level But it's a very practical thing to start asking those questions now and tying it to your to-do list each day and Look what you can become. Well, that is how you spend your life, right? The actions that you take every single day will contribute to the microachievements, will contribute to the medium-sized achievements, and that over time compounded is how you are spending your life. And to loop it back to one of the first things that we said is, you don't have the choice to not spend your life.

Because your life is going to be spent for you, whether you choose to do it consciously, or whether you allow the societal norms and your predispositions and your genetic heritage and your dealing with trauma and all of those sorts of the baggage and the things that you've brought with you to determine that for you. And the best that you can hope for

is to be the smartest right in the room. If you don't work out what's going on, you can be a rich, successful, or famous slave. And that is the best that you can hope for. I love that. Smartest right in the room, it's brilliant. I think one of the highest praises, but also one of the things I've found least

so saddest too since writing essentialism is how many people will write to me or make a comment online saying I wish I'd read essentialism 20 years ago, 30 years ago as much as 50 years ago. Isn't that something very you know sad about that. Be quite an empathetic person. Am I? Yes. I certainly feel for people. I certainly care about people.

And my wife is an empath. So she's like very, very strong in this regard. And so I've always got like a high standard to sort of if I'm comparing against, but I certainly feel for those people and the sense of how early could we get to the point where we're asking these questions? We're never going to regret that. We may regret lots of things, but we're never going to regret having staffed it as an essentialist right now. You're not going to get to it any of our lives.

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

Phenomenal one. Thank you so much. This has been, I mean, I am really excited for your podcast to come out. Tell us about that when, when are you intending on launching it? And can you tell us who the first episode is going to be? Well, the first episode I can tell you, the first episode will be with my wife. That's cool. Yeah, because she's the most important person. It sounds very, it sounds very cliche now or something saying out loud the first time I've said that, but really, it's the

episode, you know, I want it to be called the birth of essentialism because there is no essentialism without Anna. There's a key story in the book, but get into it now, but a key story in the book has to launch to essentialism that relates to my wife. And so it's just, and it's the story behind all of that, you know, essentialism is something we're trying to live in our lives. It's not something that we just talk about elsewhere. So I just wanted the priority person to be the first interview and actually like really insisted on that with my production company, with the production company I'm working with. So that's the first person. I don't know who the second is yet

actually, but it could be Tim Ferris, it could be Ryan Holiday, it could be Erin Huffington, there's a whole bunch already recorded, done, not sure the order that will come out. I'm just really enjoying doing, it's the first time I created a class at Stanford called Designing Life Essentially. Just for the longest time, I have not had a way of sharing those practical things with other people. And just recently, I finally tried started to change that. So there is a Skillshare class, I just launched through Skillshare called Simple

Productivity, take some of those practical things, and just I've learned, you know, makes that available for anybody who wants to learn about the how to and this and the podcast. That's what it's about. It's about talking to people, having meaningful conversations and trying to give them, you know, like you were saying with Ben, stories and examples from people's lives

about how they are wrestling with what really matters. Amazing. So what's the name of it going to be? People want to search. The current working title is Essentialism with Greg McEwan. Got you. I mean, one of those words goes in. It should be all right. Yeah, and you don't come up. There's something. Some new drastic's gone wrong. Yeah. So that'll be linked in the show notes below. I will find the Skillshare course as well.

And then is the 21 day thing? Is that part of Skillshare? Is that somewhere else? No, it's not in the Skillshare thing. If you reach out to me, my office will get that to you so we can make that available to phenomenal. Thank you so much. I mean, I love these conversations.

I have to say, this is I could spend all day doing it. And I think increasingly over time, as I've done more and more of the podcasts, this feels as I sort of low key keeps saying, the closest thing to a highest calling that I've ever found. And yeah, you built to do this, Chris, yeah. I hope so. I think so. And I think, I think, you know, if I keep on doing, if I keep on doing what I'm doing, I really think that me and the little tribe of people that we've got coming along at the moment could go quite far. And I appreciate you giving me your time and being a big part of it. Phenomenal man, thank you so much.

It's been a real yeah, offends.