Modern Wisdom - #314 - Greg McKeown - How To Make Life Effortless

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

Greg McKeown is a public speaker, leadership & business strategist and an author. Is the toughest path always the right one? Is the more important a thing is, the harder it has to be? Or is there a way to make the execution of what matters most in your life a little easier? Expect to learn why the usefulness of working runs out more quickly than you might think, how Effortless relates to Essentialism, why burnout is not a badge of honour, how to decide what "done" looks like, how to build the courage to be rubbish, how to get the highest return on the least effort and much more... Sponsors: Get 19% discount, 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Effortless - https://amzn.to/3n5wby1  Check out Greg's Website - https://gregmckeown.com/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/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

Howdy friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Greg McEwan, he's a public speaker, leadership and business strategist and an author. We're talking about how to make life effortless. Is the toughest path always the right one? Is the more important thing is the harder it has to be? Or is there a way to make the execution of what matters most in your life a little easier? That is the topic of Greg's new book, Effortless. So today, expect to learn why the usefulness of working more runs out quicker than you might think. How Effortless relates to essentialism, why burnout is not a badge of honor, how to decide what done looks like, how to build the courage to be rubbish, how to get the highest return

on your least effort, and much more. Greg's first book, Essentialism, is the place to start that I tell people to begin with when they're starting their self-development and productivity learning career. But I do think that that book falls short in certain areas. You can get rid of all of the non-essentials from your life and yet still have too much on your plate. So this is where effortless slots in. It allows you to see that working harder, doing more banging your head against the grindstone isn't always necessarily,

or even often, the correct solution. I really like the stuff that Greg goes through today, and if you're a fan of essentialism, you're going to adore this. If you're not a fan of essentialism, you need to go and pick it up because it is a fantastic book. of essentialism you need to go and pick it up because it is a fantastic book. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Greg McEwan, welcome to the show. It's great being with you, Chris. Thank you. Welcome back.

Welcome back indeed. Last time we were talking you were in workout gear. Do you remember? I kind of live in workout gear. Yeah, that's my, that's kind of my... Yeah, but you were like cut off at the shoulders. Oh, it was boiling hot. That's why it was unbelievably hot.

I couldn't bear the heat in Newcastle for the first time ever. And I was overdressed too. I was in the pandemic, but you can take the Englishman out of England, but not, how do you say that? But not the Englishman out of the man. That's not really a great quip there. But I was dressed like I had a jacket

on. I was like, I overdressed for California and for some reason I was still in that mode. So we were anyway, it's great to be with you. That's what I'm trying to get to. Good. Well, we're talking about a new book today, Effortless, very, very excited for this to come out. I'm a huge fan of Essentialism. It's one of the foundational books that I give to people when they ask what I want to get into personal development, what should I read and Essentialisms there. So, what's the story of how you came to realize that you needed to write this new book? Well, partially it was Essentialism's fault. Essentialism changed everything for me. I'm traveling all over, I'm teaching all over the world. I want to be doing that. I'm not

just the father of Essentialism by that point. I'm father of four children with a lot of responsibilities. And, and I really started finding myself with this question of like, what do you do if there are just too many essentials? If you've stripped away from your life, the non essentials, I mean, I had chosen not to write another book. I had chosen not to do a workshop business. I'd put on high to the Stanford class that I co-created all in the spirit of removing non-essentials. But what happens if what you're left with, in fact, is still more than you can do. And in the midst of thinking about that, I find out that my, one of my daughters is literally having a massive ton of clonic seizure at home while I'm traveling. And that just pushed me over the edge, really. And, you know, felt really like I sort of hit a

wall or rather the walls were closing in around me and I found myself saying, well, now what? Like, essentialism takes you to a certain place. I think it's necessary, but I started to feel it was necessary, but insufficient. first of all just to maintain my own sanity and health and then the same for my own family. For what do you do when life is really hard? Life is hard for everyone and in hundreds of different ways. Well, what do you do in that situation? This important life feels hard. How can you make progress in that situation? Do you just give up on the essentials? Like a lot of people do that. That was attempting thing for me in that environment. Or do you find an easier path? And if I use George Elliott's idea on that for a moment, what do we live for if not to make life

from a moment when what do we live for if not to make life easier for each other? And so at first it was for me, my own family, for our business, but also now for other people. And it turns out that this book is coming out at a time that I think that may be especially timely because of the pandemic, and I just think people are burned out everywhere, or on the edge of being burned out. And so, this other part, this other way of doing things, suddenly seems to have the power of relevancy. I felt like I was maybe before like a like a weightlifter who's lifting with their back or a swimmer who's not breathing properly or a baker who's needing by hand. It's like you can do the right things, but if you do them in the wrong way, things will be harder than they need to be. And so the positive way of saying that is that when you can't push any harder, you can find an easier path, a more effortless path, and there's practical principles and practices for how to do that, and that's what this book is all about. It feels to me a little bit

like effortless is a delivery mechanism. So if you had essentialism as a philosophy as something that was conceptual, perhaps you could call that like the virus But the delivery mechanism still needed to be there a way that allowed you to integrate this as easily as possible into the system Yeah, it's very interesting Thinking about the challenges that you go through in effortless because so many of them are so common to people that live lives of productivity talking about burnout, talking about this bizarre preconception we have that things have to be hard. The right way is the hard way, this period and work ethic, so much stuff. So I want to get into that. You split the approach up into three sections. So you've got effortless state, effortless action,

and effortless results. So effortless state first, what's that? Well, if you put it this way, some of the mystics would describe there being only two states in the world. You either have a state of suffering or what I'm calling here, an effortless state. or what I'm calling here, an effortless state. And really, those are your two options. When the state of suffering is where you're exhausted, mentally, physically, emotionally, you're carrying grudges, you're angry in the world, you're so tired, you start to resent everyone

and anything that's coming at you. And it's just such a, that that state produces a whole set of actions and results. And none of that is optimal. You, you, you end up for a lot of overachievers. They respond to those challenges by pushing even harder. And they just get to the idea that everything in life has to be harder. And if it's not hard, it can't be important. And you just get down this of hyperactivity path,

and it doesn't produce the results that you want. So that's sort of option A. Option B is that an effortless state is when you're physically rested, you're emotionally free. I was talking with Tim Ferriss on his podcast just recently and I asked him, I said, how much, what percentage of your mental and emotional energy have you used, like, have been used up by anger and rudges. And he said, from the age of 15 to 30, he estimates probably between 60 and 70% of his men in clinical emotional energy was used up on grudges and anger. Me and Manchin, I mean, that's just, that is just mad.

But you, you, you can see that's why effortless state is the beginning of the model. That's why this is so vital. Is that you can't control all the hard things that happen to you, for sure not. I've used one example for me in just summary where my daughter suddenly has what turned out to be massive neurological problems

over that like a multi-year experience that change her personality, her physicality, everything, right? Like you can't change that. At first, we couldn't do anything about it. So what you can do is you can make it as easy as possible to handle it. You can make sure that you don't make it worse by the way you respond to it. And I think the first thing you do when those things happen in life, when the challenges come, is that, is that by getting into the right state about them,

you can start to remain in a creative state, an open state, a grateful state, and that will put you in a creative state, an open state, a grateful state, and that will put you in a better position to be able to know the right action to take and therefore increase your chances of getting good results out of it. The biggest identification, the one that really struck home with me, is the fact that people assume that the right way is inevitably the harder one. It's such a common mindset. And I've seen this in myself so much throughout my, as my vintage has increased as an entrepreneur, I've managed to cast it off, but every young entrepreneur knows this. They realize that hard work can get you some success.

Right. Then they, which I agree with. Yeah. Then they associate the success with the hard work itself. Then they get rid of the success and just leave the hard work there. I remember I used to, I used to feel guilty if we'd had a successful event at one of our nights. If it had gone well, but I hadn't suffered, I used to feel guilty if we'd had a successful event at one of our nights. If it had gone well, but I hadn't suffered. I used to feel guilty because I thought, no, it should be more difficult than this. If I haven't stayed up until five in the morning doing the accounts, if there hasn't been some sort of catastrophe that I've had to deal with, I think it, it must have

felt like, I've got headroom above me. I could have done more somewhere. I could have, and it's like, are you telling me that you're complaining because things went well? Looking back with perspective, that's what it was. But yes, so many people assume that the right way is inevitably the harder one. I remember somebody saying to me, a fan of essentialism, they said, essentialism is so great, but it will be the hardest.

It should come with a warning. This will be the hardest thing that you'll ever do. And for a while, I just absorbed that like, oh yeah, I should tell people that. And actually for a while, I did. And then I thought, what madness this is? Why do I just have to assume that it has to be the hard path? In fact, I was saying that even though

the last quarter of essentialism is already devoted to the idea of how do you make execution of what matters most easier. And I thought that's just an assumption that just lives everywhere. And basically 100% of the time it remains unquestioned. Just started a new, asked to be on a committee, this council, and this new app that they're trying to create for youth or the world, they think it can make a difference to millions of people, positive difference, and at the end they say, well now listen, this is so important,

it's going to be really, really hard to make this happen. And no one said anything. And in previous versions of me, I wouldn't have said anything either, or thought anything. But now with this new mindset, I just, why does it have to be? Does it have to be? In fact, it's interesting because in the same speech, they said when they were asked themselves to lead this effort, the person that had asked them to do it, so how do you feel? And they said, well, yes, I'm willing to do it, but we're like with fear and trembling.

And they said, well, they said, well, hopefully with some joy, though, too, right? And that's the thing is this idea that the more important is the harder it has to be. Think how limiting that is. It's one of the things that I think people can do to immediately start applying essentialism and effortless is basically identify one thing that's essential that you know if you did it consistently would be a game changer for you. And then the second question, there's only two questions, the second is how can you make that effortless? Because it interrupts all the normal mind flow of like, okay, yes, I want to do this, but it's big, hard, lifting up, got to get to the top of Everest. Yeah,

but how do you make it effortless? Oh, you get a helicopter to the top of Everest. Oh, that. Let's just talking to somebody who works in special ops. Well, they did for years. They're out special ops now, but in a military for years and years. I mean, that's a place that emphasizes all the time that you have to work harder, harder, harder to achieve results, right? That is a theme. And again, there's a place for it, but it runs out of its usefulness as a strategy early on.

And he told me this story about when they used to, so he's deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they used to be responsible in the special ops team to get through you know some Metal door to find some value a high-value asset someone on the other side and How they would do that is they would put explosives on the hinges They blow it and that's how you get through where you've got a hole in the wall. You have a lot

of blowback from that. You've let the entire neighborhood know you're there. That could be a very dangerous proposition as well. You can hurt both the soldiers and the people on the other side and the some people can get hurt. So this is the solution, right? That's one way, but then someone else on his team said, well, you know, actually, I'm the son of a carpenter and if you could just get me a small hydraulic drill, I just get those hinges off in like half a second. If you're silent, be easy, there's no risk to anyone. And that idea, just even the idea that there's a more effortless way to achieve your objective, is so rarely advocated for or utilized.

We don't even, we're just not even asking the question. So if hard work equals success, then what happens if you want to be very successful? Well, therefore you have to work very hard. What if you want to be very, very successful? Now you have to work very, very, very hard and so on. And so it goes. And this is what think it counts for a lot of burnout and otherwise well-intended good people entrepreneurs you know Is that they've got this faulty idea and then you look at some of the people that actually aren't incredibly successful You look at a war and buffet How does he approach it does he say well? I want to I want to be very successful therefore. I'm going to you know

Kill myself as approach is that what he says is that what he's done? Does he say, well, I want to be very, very successful. Therefore, I'm going to, you know, kill myself. Is that his approach? Is that what he says? Is that what he's done? No, he says that their investment strategy borders on lethargy. As an amazing statement, lethargy. What is that? That's just another word for like laziness, for effortlessness.

He said, we are not interested in finding seven foot poles, not poles, to jump over, fences to jump over. We're not looking for investment opportunities, we have to jump seven feet in the air. We're looking for investment opportunities that are one foot high that we can step over. And that is like a huge key to their tremendous successes that they're looking for the things that are clear yeses, that are easy yeses, and that they can go big on because it's just right there in front of them. That's what they're looking for. They distrust the other stuff. There's a different way, and you must find it if you want to escape the level

of success you're currently at. If you can't push any harder, don't try to push any harder. Open yourself to a new question, how can this be easier, how could this be effortless, what might, how could we make this more enjoyable? These questions open your mind to new answers and new possibilities. How can people let go of the emotional tether that they have to their pure and work ethic? It's all well and good, me and you sit in here and say, there's an easy way. You don't need to burn yourself out. But what if it's Chris from seven or eight years ago, who has this emotional attachment, it's almost where he gets his sense of self-worth from, he has anxiety when he's not doing that. How did they let go?

I was coaching somebody, Kim, who's a manager at a university. She's responsible for lots of different teams. And she was just like the type of person you're describing. If she felt guilty, if she stopped to eat lunch, no, no, no don't mean stopped. I mean, if she ate lunch, she felt guilty. She was a type of person who she's up at 4 a.m. in the morning, photoshopping for a young woman's activity at church the next day. But she's just like, if she's not exhausted, she feels guilty.

And that's who we're talking to here, but I think a lot of people are in that category Even if they're not quite as extreme as her. They don't do it quite the way she does. There is this deep mentality and One of the things that I would say to you and I said to her is like well, don't over complicate your way out of this Don't assume that the way out of this. Don't assume that the way out of this deep mindset has to be painful, hard, wrenching, difficult, and all of that. That's just reapplying the same logic that got you into the state. What if you all you have to do is ask a different question. What if that's the difference? and that is what I asked to do, I said the next time somebody asked you to do something, just ask yourself, you can write it on a stick, you can put it

on you some way to remember, to ask yourself, look, what would this look like if it was easy? Is there an easy solution? Is there an effort, this way of doing this? So she gets a call from one of the professors at university and he says, look, I'd like you to get your videography team to come and record my class this semester. And she just immediately goes into her overachiever, overthinker, overdeliverer mentality. That's well worn path for her. a mentality. That's well worn path for her. She's thinking, okay, I get the whole team involved. They'll go down there. They can get a couple of different angles. We'll edit it all together. We're going to add music. We've had intros, outroes, graphics. We're going to wow him. He's going to love us. He's going to be so impressed. You know, that's what he's going for. And then she remembers

the one interrupt, the one question, well, how is there an effortless way to do this? Might, might there be an easier way? And so she put that to him, well, what might be an easy solution? Well, as they talk about it, it turns out that it's just one student who has some athletic commitments, which means they won't be able to be in every class, but they need this class to graduate. And he's just trying to accommodate this one student for some of the classes. And so the solution they come up with on the phone is that another student will just record it on an iPhone and send it afterwards whenever he misses. And that totally solves it.

It hadn't occurred to him. Wouldn't have occurred to her. It hadn't at that point. She hangs up and she's just like, what just happened? In 10 minutes, we have solved the problem that would have been four months of work with all those extra bells and whistles. I actually do think that just inverting the question from, why does this have to be so hard or how can I over deliver or how can I, do you just say, how can it be easier? What would it look like if it was easy? What is an effortless solution to this? And what I will say from my own life, my own life feels way more complicated

still than it ought to be. It loads of stuff feels harder than it ought to be. That's why I wrote the book. I wrote for me, I wrote for other people in that situation. That is our life. Right now, but I also think the other side of it is that every day I'm using these questions now, and I personally find them almost magical. I can't just can't believe how often if I pause and ask the question, something will come forward that just is, was always there as an option, but I didn't see it. Silly example is at a printer on my desk, not on the desk on the floor of my office over here, in there two weeks, I like to keep things organized and every time I see it, it was

just enough complication in my mind about, oh, do you sell it? Do you throw it away if I throw it away after a recycling center? I don't know where that is. So there's this whole, that all like two seconds in my head, but it was enough to go, oh yeah, I'm coming back to that later. For two weeks I'd done that. Because again, all the extra stuff in my head, all that noise. And I asked the question, is there an effortless way?

I look outside, they're happy to be a couple of workers out there. I don't know them, but they just out there and I'm like, I wonder if they want it. So've walked outside. Hey, I've got this printer. It's working, but it's been replaced. Do you want it? Yes. I've walked inside. Guess it. Give it to them. Within literally two minutes of asking the question, I don't just have the solution that solution is executed, done. And that, that, you can say it's a silly example, but a small example, But that is life is made up of those things, just harder than they ought to be. And we make them harder than they need to be.

And it's because we're asking the wrong questions, and if we can change the question, if we can invert it, you may be amazed at what is possible, that isn't possible if you're doing it the harder way. Trying to just book end what we said there there and give people a scalable take away from that section. Each of the different solutions that you need are because each situation is different, that the guys that you need to give the printer to aren't the solution to the lady that needs to film the video stuff. But the scalable solution is inverting the question. Instead of saying, why is this so hard,

why is this uncomfortable? What would it look like if this was easier? What would this situation look like if it wasn't so hard? If it wasn't going to be painful, if it wasn't going to be a slog, what would this situation look like? Yes, it is simply in many instances in your life, when something, when you have something that's expensive, that you weren't expecting something to be expensive for something, so somebody gives you some proposal for something, so much more than you are hoping it would be just ask the question,

well, is there an effortless solution? What might be an effortless solution to this problem? That happened to Southwest Airlines, the low cost carrier, they're trying to be careful on how they spend money. Everyone else at the time is using a complex expensive ticketing system and it's going to cost them two million dollars to install it. They don't want to spend that two million dollars, but they're worried that they're going to go out of business if they can't be competitive in. And then suddenly somebody says, what's an easy solution?

We said, well, I guess the effort, the solution would be we don't care what anyone else thinks a ticket is. We don't care what continental thinks a ticket is. And they're like, yeah, we don't care. We don't are interested in that. And so they got rid of that complexity, that that clutter by asking that question. And what they came up with is they said, well, we already give people receipts. So we'll just print on the receipt. This is your ticket. And we'll skip the whole $2 million system, all that complexity, all that time, all that effort, just resolve. It's just done. So the question, yes, the takeaway is ask a better question, ask an effortless question,

and you open yourself up to possibilities and solutions that will come to you that won't otherwise come to you. That is the takeaway, yes. If you roll it forward over time, if you spend too much time doing effort full, living effortfully as opposed to effortlessly, you end up with burnout and you have a quote in the book that's burnout is not a bad jivonner. And that is an absolute bar. That's so correct when I think about some of the young entrepreneurs that I know who see it as a right of passage, who see the late nights and the early starts as a right of passage. And it takes time to get, I don't know whether it's a byproduct of the fact that when you get towards your 30s, you become chronically aware of your own mortality in the late night, just annihilate you. But there is an awakening, like a manopause for the men, that occurs around that time, and you think, God, at this sucks.

And I've had those periods, I've had those burnout periods. For the type A go getters or the people that like to overwork, how can you deliver them the red pill on burnout? And also what are some of the signals, the early signals of burnout and the warning signs that you notice and take heed of? Yeah, so first of all, that last point, one of the trickiest things about burnout is that the closer we get to it, the worse we are at discerning it. And because the problem with burnout is it's affecting your own ability to think, it changes the way you are experiencing your life. So that's where the research shows.

The closer you had to burn out, the less like you are to actually notice it. So this is one of the reasons that you sort of need to develop a heightened awareness. Things that you can do. I mean, one test that I like is, am I used, did I use up more energy today than I can recuperate today? Similar question, can I, did I use up more physical emotional energy this week

than I can recuperate this week? Because some days you are going to and even some weeks you're going to, and even some weeks you're going to, you know, there are rhythms to life. Of course, there are times that there is a sort of big push moment, but you don't want to live your life in that place. Because then you won't be, you won't get to choose when you have to stop. There will eventually be chosen for you, but you'll also be choosing the highest cost path. By the time you stop, you just look at what your relationships

look like with the people that matter most to you. You look like, look at what your overall health is. You look at what your overall life quality is. You won't be happy with the results of that by the time you're forced to stop. So I think that's one test about it. I think a second test that I like for burnout is like when you start to resent people, when any request that comes to you just irritates you, bothers you, my goodness, just another thing, another thing, That's a good signal that you are burned out.

You know, when somebody's moved something in your home and you can't find the thing that you wanted to find, and that just drives you, you can't believe it's so frustrated about this, you feel impatient and so on. This is a pretty good sign that you're burned out. If you feel like you're using a lot of nervous energy, you know, that's the fuel that you're burned out. If you feel like you're using a lot of nervous energy, that's the fuel that you're using is nervous, anxious energy, stress energy. Again, that can help to get you through certain things, but you don't wanna be running on that fuel all the time

because that has all sorts of negative externalities. So yeah, those are maybe two or three tests that I think you can use to kind of start to assess, you know, am I on the edge of burnout or even way past it? If you've got any strategies for how people can bounce back from burnout quickly, well, I think that the principle is we should start with is that relaxing is a responsibility. So that's a different frame. It's not like a nice thing to do after the fact. It's like real relaxation is is as important responsibility as any other venture that you have in your life. What I would recommend

that people do on this is that I think that they should start a little list somewhere between 10 and 20 items. And at first, your average overachiever might not even be able to put one thing on that list, but the list is what things relax me. What is relaxing for me? My wife and I have both done this and it's a list of completely different. It was very helpful for us to have for ourselves but also for each other. So that if I'm trying to support her, same you could do it with the members of your team, so that if you're trying to create an environment that is that supports a proper balance between work and relaxation that you actually can have signature experiences created for them. So I know some of my wife's birthday, for example, or if I'm

just saying, hey, you know, I can see she's starting to get a bit burned out. I can look at the list and actually construct an evening or a day or try and, you know, instead of just going, oh, you know, you should take the day off. You should relax. Well, that's quite stressful for overachievers. They don't know what to do with that space. It's not going to, you don't want blank space. A lot of people don't. So you actually have to learn relaxing as its own capability. And as they say, for overachievers, they're more comfortable setting a goal to run a marathon than they are to take a nap. As they say, for overachievers, the more comfortable setting a goal to run a marathon than they are to take a nap.

All right, take a nap is like, what? I don't know about that. I don't know if I can do that. I don't know how. Yeah, that's the mission impossible. And in fact, is one specific thing. I think people, you know, if people understood the actual research around the value, the return of investment on taking an effortless nap, I think it would be, they would lean into it more,

more easily. I'm not always greater getting the number of hours of sleep I need at night, but I am like a champion nap. And I don't, I don't even, honestly, for a long time, I didn't even know that people thought of that as a bit childish, you'll take a nap. But I think that was a, that was like, sleep time for my three year old. It's like, I don't know where I picked it up, but I just 100% believe in it.

As soon as I feel that sleep pressure building, is it does through the day naturally. Somewhere in the afternoon, I'm so happy to go take a nap. I recognize I will be twice as productive in the rest of my day. Desirment way better. My state can be restored. It even just literally half an hour of lying down. Yeah, it's just talking to somebody that the day and they said, oh, yeah, if I ever worked from home, I used to say, if I ever worked from home, I'm going to take a nap every day. And in one year of working from home from pandemic, they've never done it. The opportunities there now, but the mindset is still, is still built around some other, I would say industrial age view of productivity where we treat ourselves like a, like a,

you know, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a times of concentration and times of relaxation, and that is optimal performance when you can get those two together. Moving on to the next section, which is effortless action. What's that? How does that integrate with where we're at so far? Effortless state is just always come back to. So that when you're out of that state, as we most of us are most of the time, we just need to keep coming back to it. Oh, I need to take a nap or physically check in. I need to eat something. I haven't eaten anything. I need something healthy. That's about the sort of constant adjustment. But as we get into that effortless state, what we want to do is to simplify the action itself. So I see a lot of the times that the action itself is not really the problem. The problem is getting to it, but all these assumptions, it has to be hard, you're over complicating, you're overthinking and so on. But then when you get to

the task itself, people still can approach that in a way that the action is harder and more overwhelming than it needs to be. So there's a few things here I think that you can do. You can say, you can say, well, let's do it with you. Are you game? Are you game to do? You lived doing this. You did it to me last time. Let's do it again it again I did but I want to do it a little differently today so so you know back to this question I asked at the beginning I could what now starting now in your life what is something yeah important game change or something that you you know you want to get done you you you know if you did it especially if you did it consistently it would it would make a big impact. It would be business, personal, anything.

What's the first thing? Let me think. Write a new lead magnet for my email newsletter. I know that if I do that, that it will massively bump the number of subs that I have on my newsletter, I'm already doing the newsletter, so I'm already doing part of the work and there is a bottleneck. There's a rate limiting step on the number of subscribers that I've got. If I release a new lead magnet, then I know what I want to do.

I just haven't started because I just think it seems like a really big task. It's going gonna take ages. Okay, lead magnet for what you're describing is literally a particular type of article. It will be a PDF. An offer. PDF, just a free PDF, downloadable PDF, sign up to the newsletter and get your PDF. Got it.

And so now that's it, we've already identified that. Now the question is everything else is about effortless. So the big question, as I've already mentioned, is how could we make this effortless for you? You know, some of the questions that could help us answer that question, well, what does Dunluck like? PDF completed, edited, finalized, and uploaded onto landing page integrated with email

client ready to go. Yeah, okay. So it's, it's, it's, it's uploaded in the schedule on your email client. Yeah. Um, what is the first physical, obvious action you can take, the very first one towards that goal. Open the note in Apple Notes on Notion, which I'm going to create the outline of the content of the lead magnet. Okay, so it's just opening the app.

That's the first step. What can you achieve in a 10 minute microburst on that? You spent 10 minutes, the next 10 minutes, you're in there, you've got 10 minutes, what could you achieve? The lead magnet is going to be a hundred books that I think everybody should read. And I could go through my existing Amazon shopping list which is already on the internet

and I could run through that and take off the highlights from there. I've already done some of this work. Yep. So within 10 minutes, you're not going to get all 100 in there, probably, but you're going to get, you know, you're going to get number. 20, 20, between 10. I mean, they're there. I've got, there's tons on that list, so it would be pretty easy.

Yeah. So, um, so next question. So we've identified 20, we've identified a 10 minute thing. Um, if you worked on it, is this something you would generally want to work on in one big push? Or is it, if you worked on this, let's say every day, and you were going to add 20 per day If you worked on this, let's say every day and you were going to add 20 per day over a five day period, does that feel sustainable to you? Does that feel like, yeah, I could imagine doing that in that way, was that uncomfortable in some way? That would probably be fine. I'd be tempted to batch it in a different way.

I'd probably get all 100 listed in one go so that I'm in one mode of thinking. And then the next one will be to actually fill out why I think people need to read this book. And then perhaps another one after that would be getting the Amazon short links and doing that across or sending that to someone in the team and getting them to do that. And then any of the other bit, maybe an intro. So just trying to batch those together, but I think given that they're quite discrete different tasks I'm pretty certain I could sit down and blast through and get all of the books listed and then maybe the big chunk will be writing why I think they're good so maybe we do you know a couple of hours each day or a couple of hours every couple

of days for a little while. So what I'm exploring with you is whether there's an upper bound that would be helpful. The lower bound is that you open this app. Like every day you open the app till it's done. Maybe the lower bound even is the 10 minute microburst that we just talked about. We say, okay, for 10 minutes, I'm gonna work it. And you literally time yourself with that 10 minutes. But here's the key part is that you have an upper bound. And I'm not sure what that is yet for you, but that you say, okay, at this point I'm done.

Because the temptation is, and you already used it, blast through it. And that was the language, right? I'm gonna blast through it. Well, I know you have that capability on days that you don't really have the time, space, energy to do that. You think that's the way to make it happen. So then you go, well, I can't do it today because I can't blast through it. I can't get those hundred than today. So therefore, you don't do it. And you're in the situation that you are describing. So if you have

an upper bound, and I like the timing bound for you on this because then you say, well, listen, I have podcasts that I'm recording at this time, that is in 20 minutes, but I will, I can succeed my goal for the day because it's a timed amount of time. No matter how many books I get done or not, it's done by the end of that 20 minutes. That is my goal. So I don't know quite what it is for you with this, but it's an upper bound so that you pace yourself. It's one of the biggest errors I think of the sort of the exhausting path is that people push themselves and power through.

And what that means is that they can only do it for a short burst. They can only, by day two, by day three, you're just like, I don't have an hour or two to do on this today. So I've got to wait until I have a full hour or two to do it, and I have the energy to do it. And I know someone who pushed on a project like this, the whole weekend, they push, push, push.

And then they just like, they couldn't even think about that project for two more weeks after that. They didn't get it done, and they couldn't even think about it, because it was too much, it was too overwhelming. It's just exhausted their mental interest in that subject. And so that's what I would be suggesting for you is like a little bit of pacing. Okay. So what's the right pace for you, by the way? What is the upper bound that sounds right? I think any more than an hour in between all of the other stuff that I'm doing, especially for the big chunk, which is writing out the descriptions of the books, I think any more than an hour in between all of the other stuff that I'm doing, especially

for the big chunk, which is writing out the descriptions of the books, I think much more than an hour would probably, I'd start to have a flinch effect away from it. Just to interject on what you said there, it feels like the rev limiter that you have on a car. So just, it just allows you to bounce off the ceiling, but what you can do as opposed to letting yourself get into that red is you can actually bring that down. And if you're sufficiently experienced with how your ebb and flow of energy works, and what you know that you can tolerate

without getting into burnout, you can take, okay, I don't wanna hit burnout, which is a particular distance over a particular amount of time. Let's rate that down from a macro aggregate into a micro daily. And okay, well, okay, so maybe I think, maybe I think I could get away with adding maybe like half an hour in, or maybe I could get away with adding an hour in. So I like that. I like a lot of what we're going to talk about when we get into the final section is that next action.

It's what's the physical thing that you can do. But this is a integrating the what does done look like, which is super important. Give yourself license to say that you have done the work for today. It gives you more freedom by putting it into a time constraint. It liberates you from what could be a really difficult piece of work. I might get to 95 books and think, oh God, I need to find the rest of the books. If I'm working for two hours, I've worked for two hours. That's two hours of good work. I'm not working to a deadline.

If there's an outright deadline and it's three days away this is a little bit different, but when it's for most people ongoing tasks that are need to be completed as and is, you know, I've done two hours on it. Should I not feel satisfied with my two hours of hard work and by defining done, which I absolutely love you, have to decide what done looks like. By doing it within a time window, you always liberate yourself. I feel like this insight, I've seen from a couple of different people yourself and some of my friends that have it too. And it is the thing that all of those people having common is they've got quite strong family lives. thing that all of those people have in common is they've got quite strong family lives. I feel like it's a supporting function.

Absolutely. Whereas, yeah, I'm sure when you were young and didn't have those responsibilities quite so much and sort of still where I'm at now where I don't have a misses or kids or a dog that's knocking on the door saying, we've got such and such as barbecue tonight. That's when you can just keep nose on grindstone and just continue to go away in a way. So I love that. Define what done looks like.

Give yourself a window and use windows of time as little mini extrapolated or reverse extrapolated burnout indicators and use that as a little rev limiter. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think for you, I'm not I'm, I'm not saying an hour, you said an hour before you flinched is what you described. Like, I have an hour more, I started to flinch with that. I think for you, it's like half an hour. It's tops on this assignment. You can do a lot in half an hour. I know you can. If you start doing this with that half an hour,

you'll have a whole thing. And that's fine. You leave it there and you move on. You know, you see that the benefit, I took on a big project six months ago. And I knew if I forced it, I could get it done. No, actually, I thought if I forced it, I could do it in maybe three months. But I didn't. I said, no, it's going to give yourself the time. It's a six month project. It was a major project. At the end of that six months, I got it done. It felt effortless. The journey was effortless.

It was really rewarding and really great. And there's other people I know that would like to do it, it's overwhelming to even start. And other people I know that started, pushed too hard at the beginning, exact same challenge that we're taking. And they're halfway through now. It's still taken six months, but they pushed hard for three months, didn't get it done,

and now if semi-given up. And so this power of pace is not obvious to overachievers. We want to get it all done now. We're going to force it. We're going to push it. You pace yourself. You go slow to go smooth, and then smooth turns out to be fast. That's the military phrase, right? Go slow to go, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. So that's on the pacing thing, but for you, now this is a good transition for effortless results and the distinction because effortless action in the book is really about how you take one project, one activity, and you make it as easy as possible to complete.

There's very practical section in the book. The third section of the book is about how can you use effort in a certain way to make the results you want flow again and again and again. So that's the difference between linear results. That is one effort equals one reward versus residual results, which is you maybe even put in a little more effort at the beginning, takes a little more to set it up, but it flows to you again and again and again after that.

So I'm not going to give you the challenge because I've just started to learn this myself of a one click solution for what you gave to me. This lead magnet article. Right now we've talked about how to make it simpler for you to do it. But what I want to know is could you construct it to the point? You've already got members of your team,

you already talked about that, but could you construct it to the point where You already got members of your team, you already talked about that, but could you construct it to the point where all you have to do is one click. It's a huge challenge. It's way beyond where you are right now with it. So it's not that you're going to be able to do that immediately, but that you construct the right people in your team and you empower them in the right way. But when you say, listen,

I want to do a lead magnet article on the top 100 books, that they have access to your Amazon page yourself, themselves, that they can go through and curate all of that yourself and bring to you 120 books. And, or even they, even they look at your podcast, who you've had on what they know about you, they've done all of that evaluation for you,

they bring you 100 books. They've already written a few thoughts about each of them based on what you've said on your podcasts. They've done all of that evaluation for you, they bring you 100 books. They've already written a few thoughts about each of them based on what you've said on your podcasts. They've done all of that work so that they bring it to you. Now, based on my own experience with this, you probably have to do this a few times on a few projects before they know your voice, know what you're doing, know how you'd, so that, but again, there could be a point where in the future you have the lead magnet and it's a one-click solution. They send it to you and all you're doing is approve or not. And the whole thing has been done. So that's that's the

difference between effortless action and what I'm describing as effortless results. And that is the, for me personally the hugeest thing in this book. It's like, I spent too much of my life trying to make it better, easier, simpler to get a thing done myself, and not nearly enough time focused on how do you get results just to flow to you, whether you're sleeping or not, whether you're thinking about it or not. And that, that's the difference between being able to make a 2x contribution in your life, and a 10x or 100x,

is if you can construct systems, hire the right people, get the right teams in place, empower them in the right way, they can produce results while you're sleeping or not. Whether you're focused on it, to nail or not, whether you're taking the day off, whether you're relaxing today, stuff still happens. Amazing things can happen. And so I just put that to you. How can you get to a one click solution? That would require me to finally make the decision

to hire an assistant at full time EA, which I haven't done yet. I don't think it's too ridiculous. All of the structures are there, the root content that the team would need is there. One thing that you may be proud of me for is I've now outsourced the production of pretty much all of my social media content. So we have these beautiful trailers that are being made by social media guide Joe, who has come on full time now. And he's just phenomenally listened to the show for ages so he understands my voice. He's doing recreationally what he needs to do

for his research for work in any case. So today, listen to the John Peterson episode on the route down to London to go see his girlfriend. And while he's driving down, I'm getting voice notes from him saying, dude, like this bit, at 13 minutes and 45 seconds, I know I'm gonna do with that and do this. And it's just, I don't need to, it's just hands off. He just makes this beautiful content from all of the stuff that I already do. Then he takes my

newsletter because he gets delivered and use that every week. And then he repurposes that in a tweet storms for the following week because he knows that it's timely and he knows that it is in my voice. And then he every time he reads the news, that's my equivalent. I probably would have said to you a year ago, I want to be able to scale my exposure on social media and you would have said what would have been a one-click solution. For me now it's maybe a voice note in a WhatsApp chat solution. So technically, it is one click. There's maybe some words, but hey mate, got this new episode coming out with Greg.

Really think that we can dig some great content out of this. Just put it on your list for next week. Beep! Done. And it'll appear on the internet. So that is one of the things. Something that... It's a great...

Now go, go, carry on. Just something that is probably lurking in the back of some people's minds is they don't have a team. And maybe they're a one-man band or maybe the tasks that they have to do, they can't outsource to other people. What's the effortless results solution for someone that can't outsource? Well, effortless results is, you know, you can apply it in any situation that you're in. It's really just to do with the mindset. I mean, in your particular instance, what would a one-click solution look like for you without hiring people? Is that the question you're asking me?

For other people, not for me, particularly. So you just mean in general, how can a person achieve residual effortless results if they don't just have a team that they can hire? That's what you're asking. Yeah, I mean, I would say that no matter what somebody's situation is economically, they ought to lean into the idea of, you know, of network. I know when I first came to the United States, I mean, I literally had no money at all. So it wasn't like I could have solutions that looked like, oh, I'll hire that person. So exactly as you're saying, that definitely wouldn't have been an option.

But I did reach out to, I built, I started building it, you know, just, I would knock on people's doors, so to speak. I would call them up and just network and tell people, this is what I'm trying to achieve. I want to teach, I want to speak. I would call them up and just network and tell people this is what I'm trying to achieve. I want to teach. I want to write. And so by getting to know people beyond your normal group, you are, you know, to say it this way, I had Benjamin Hardy on the what's his central podcast. And he said, he just wrote a book called Who Not How?

Awesome episode. And I really enjoyed that. Thank. Awesome episode. I really enjoyed that. Thank you, Chris. I really liked that too. I walked away, kind of changed by myself, and again aware of how often I was doing, you know, making my own action easier rather than, well, it is fine somebody. There is a huge network of people now. You certainly don't have to be hiring someone full-time, but taking networking seriously so that you can start to think about how you can serve them.

Maybe the way that you will serve other people in great value for them is introducing them to someone else in your network. So you are still serving them. You're still creating exchange of value. And that's all money is, is an exchange of value. So even if you don't actually have pounds of dollars and so on, you still can create value for people, you can still make yourself wealthier, you can still connect with through other value creation. And as you're doing that, I think you are still looking for people who follow what Warren Buffett, he has these three words. They all start with I, so I call it the three-I's test now. It's like who you're looking to work with is people that have high integrity, high intelligence

and high initiative. And I wish I had had that test 20 years ago. That's such a simple clear test. And so I just look now for people that are high, high in all three eyes. And when I find them, I just, it's just so such a pleasure to work with them because you don't have to worry and, you know, integrity issues. I don't know if they're going to be honest with me, they're going to say one thing and do something else. I mean, that's exhausting if you're not integrity issues. I don't know if they're going to be honest with me. They're going to say one thing and do something else. I mean, that's exhausting if you're working with somebody in that capacity.

You find somebody that's high intelligence. That means they can figure things out. It means that there's high processing abilities. I don't mean what the resume says they went to school on. I mean, can they do stuff that are capable? And then the third, in some ways, it's the thing I most long for, is high initiative, because that's that's so much more effortless if you're working with somebody

that's got high initiative, because really what effort is is mental exertion. It's having to think about something with your article. It's like you have to think, you have to think about which articles to get, think about what you want to say about each of these books. Think about, all of that is the effort is mental exertion. If you've had some with high initiative, they're doing the thinking for you. So, I mean, I suppose I've just given a list of how to find people that you want to work with, but I'm just wanting to distinguish that you don't have to pay the person. You certainly don't have to hire them full time. And that's a more unusual step for people,

especially as they're starting out. But there's so many services available now that weren't before, you can go on Fiverr, you can go somewhere else, somebody that are very low price point, you can test, you can see, is this a good fit? Is your starting, you know, launching your business? I spent the only other thing I wanted to say about effortless

results is that, is that you can apply, I mean, I'll give you another entrepreneurial application, is a way you learn. If you learn as, like there's two different ways of learning, one way of learning is what you were almost, almost all of us have been taught in school, which is, here's the content, it's going to be a test, you're going to be tested on approximately this stuff, so review that stuff, try and memorize that stuff, try and, you know, reproduce that for a moment. This is not, I'm not like all negative about that. You are going to learn if you do that, but it is limited value because you are really learning something once to apply it once. You know, you memorize the stuff, you go take the test, that is your reward for having learned it. And then you forget

it because it served its purpose. That is linear learning. Residual learning is completely different. I remember Elon Musk was once interviewed and asked, I mean, it was a bit of a leading question, but he was basically asked, look, how have you learned so much so fast? Because what people don't know about Musk is that he, you know, before he started SpaceX and Tesla, he had no background in mechanical engineering. Just think of that. He had no background in, you know, in rocket science. So, people don't know that. They assume that that was his background. He didn't know anything about those subjects. Exactly. He certainly didn't have degrees in them. He has managed to upgrade his thinking enormously in order to be able to then not just be in those fields, but in fact, you know, push the limits and expand the knowledge within those fields. And he was asked, how have you managed to do that so fast? And so he said,

he said, well, I like to think about this as a semantic tree. He said, it says, it says knowledge is a semantic tree. And he means by that, that the trunk of the tree are the first principles, the things that the core principles of this new industry. It says, you've got to get really clear on that. If you can get the trunk of the understanding of the, if you can get the principles, clear once, you have a structure to add all the other learning to. Now that's where he's saying it's a tree, you've got the trunk and the branches and the leaves, you can add little new things you learn onto a structure you have learned and a confident in. But what I want to add to his answer is that what it really does if you can get to the principles that you, like if you can understand the

principles of whatever you're trying to do, you can apply hundreds and hundreds of times into the future. And so that's an example of like, you invest once to understand it deeply, but then you can apply it in a thousand other situations. You don't need money to do that. You can achieve that result simply by saying, okay, I'm going to study this, but I'm looking for the core principles so that I can adopt them, absorb them into my mindset. And then we have, you know, same as Munga, you talked about, maybe it was before we started with the interview, but the idea that you've got to get a worldly wisdom that you get, if you've understood the principle deeply you can apply it in

smart ways and whatever entrepreneur eventually you're pursuing. What are some of the most important principles that you use? That's good question. One principle for me is... One principle for me is, well, the principle is that if you want to be 100 times more successful in life, you need to be 100 times more grateful. As soon as you say the word gratitude, I think people go, oh, yeah, yeah, I think I've heard that before. And it's like they say that because they haven't even scratched the surface of it, if they react that way.

They think, oh, yeah, I've done a little gratitude in my life, and I make people a little better. And it's like, yeah, that isn't at all. If you can be grateful in everything, in everything that happens to you, you will get a hundred X return of like the results you want in life. I don't even hesitate to say that. Gratitude is, gratitude will make, gratitude probably is one of the key themes that runs like a golden thread through the state action and results. If you can be one of the tactics for this,

developed after getting to know BJ Fog of tiny habits, and he develops these habit recipes for the Stanford Design Behavior Lab. And a habit recipe in a simplest format is after I X, then I will Y. And for this practice, I have said, okay, after I complain, I will say something I'm thankful for. And what I noticed when I first started that is I complain a lot more than I realized. Like I really couldn't believe it because I think of myself as being quite positive and being quite grateful and optimistic and those things. But I just was amazed.

I just was like all day long just complaining about things. Walk into the room or you know children, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? Wait, you know, just check, check, without it, well, this meeting took longer than I thought, and this thing happened. This is what I'm leading with. As soon as you add on, like, I wasn't, I didn't say, okay, I'm going to eliminate all complaining in my life. That seemed overwhelming, but every time you complain, you just say something you're thankful for, say something positive afterwards. And, and we started then after just, it had an amazing force about it. It just immediately had an impact on everyone I would talk to.

Just their life was better. They would be, they would be more energized. They would enjoy talking to me a bit more because it's not, you know, no one wants to talk to someone who's complaining. You know, they want to talk to someone who's got, who's grateful and grateful for them. And it just started this whole positive self-fulfilling cycle of good. And even with that

children, sometimes they'll play the game and they'll say, I remember my someone saying, if you complain, okay, something you grateful for, yeah, I'm so grateful. My dad is making us play this game, you know, just like that, like sarcastic gratitude. And well, that's the thing about gratitude is you can't beat it. Is that we all laughed. It immediately changed the feeling. And we were already, we were already in the positive state. And so it just made it easier to then carry on with everything else in life that we wanted to do. Yeah, I mean, I could really go a long time on this,

but like you can't overdo this principle. It's good, it's the right, it's the state to be in in good times and bad. If things are really, really hard right now, somebody who listens to this is really hard, gratitude will help you. If somebody is in a state of amazing success, right? Which definitely these seasons come for people

that can have more good happening to them. There's a huge risk when those things start to be good. Do you start becoming arrogant? You start to be full of yourself. You still compar massively comparative, because there's always someone to look to. So always someone who's got more followers, more bigger podcasts,

and bigger book, more money, there's always something. So being more successful doesn't suddenly make you more happy. It's great threat and fact success. So being grateful in times of success is a great antidote to the sort of the pride cycle of life where we get to full of ourselves. So in good times and bad gratitude is likely the optimal state. And if I had to really say simply what I think the effort the state is, I think this is

it. It's a state of gratitude. And there's a whole theory by Barbara Fredrickson called the Broaden and Build Theory, where she's identified that basically state produces better relationships and better results rather than the other way around. People think if I have great results

and I have great relationships, then I'll be in a good positive state. And it's exactly opposite. You change the state and it starts to change the relationships and the results you're producing around you. This is why I think it's just come back to it again and again. I can summarize this principle. I should have started with this because this is the best way of saying it.

This is the principle. If you focus on what you lack, you'll lose what you have. And if you focus on what you have, then you'll get what you lack. That's the principle. I love it. I think it was you that told me the last time that we spoke about an example that was very similar to that, and it stuck with me for so long just thinking about the effect that being grateful has on us, thinking about just how much of a... it's so polarized to so much bad thinking, so much

of the malaise and the ambient anxiety and the external comparison game and I could be here and all of it goes away. Every time that I learn a little bit more about it and you said it before it's like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, gratitude, yeah, journals on the morning pages, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard it. And every time that someone else comes back up, I had Susanna Hallinan on the podcast, the happyologist, positive psychology expert. She's like episode 32, so she was 10% deep into this journey. She said, happiness is built upon a foundation of gratitude. Without gratitude,

you cannot have happiness. Still now, episode 32 coming back to bite me in the ass. And before you go, I want to go back to something that we actually spoke about before we started recording. You talked about the courage to be rubbish. And particularly why I love it is that rubbish is a word only British people are going to understand. So every American that reads it's going to go, what's rubbish? Does he mean trash? Yeah, I love it for that reason too, that it's such a nice British world. I know it's nice, yeah. Yeah, I love it for that reason too.

Yeah, so I got to comment on what you just said though, about like, there just reminds me of another phrase that Benjamin Hardee used when he was on the podcast. And he said, it was based on a book I think he hasn't, it's his co-author in, but it hasn't out yet, but it's on this principle of... So, have gap, isn't it? Are you in, yeah, he says, are you in the gap or the gain?

That's it. I can't wait Ben. I can't wait all the game. Ben, if you're listening, I listen to that episode. And it's one of those things where an author drops a book that they're going to bring out. And this concept was so interesting. And the book's still not here.

So I mean, you are on the same team. You were both pissed off that Ben hasn't hurried up and written. Exactly. Get on with it now, Ben. So just on that, his point about it, so it just supports what you were just saying it entirely, is that like, if you want to be happy, you need to be in the game. You have to look at what progress have I made, what's gone right, what, who have I become that I've grown, is like, you look at the progress if you want to be happy. If you want to be unhappy, you just look at the gap.

And that's it. You can probably be successful either way, but you definitely will not be happy if you're looking at the gap all the time. And so it's about a ratio question. What percentage of your life are you in the gap? What I haven't achieved yet? What I haven't accomplished? What I haven't become? And how much of you, the time you're looking at what you have achieved and have succeeded and so on. The gain or the gap, I think, is a great summary of what we're trying to talk about here. But the good news is about what we're saying about state today is that the moment you get into an effortless state, the moment you are in a grateful state, for example, you immediately are not in a fearful, angry, grudging, comparative state. It's instant. You can only be in one state in a moment. So, the moment you are grateful, even where my son is sort of, yeah, I'm ecastically

grateful, it's already happened. It's already moved. And of course, in any moment, you could go back to complaining and so on, but we've been emphasizing it just as a family just this last couple of days, this week, spring break for us. And so we've at the ante, It's like, yeah, you can criticize complain, but after three things you're thankful for. And it's amazing to me. It's amazing to me that it works. It just works. It's not getting into arguing about anything. You can argue about anything in life, can't you? It's most ridiculous things. You get all focused on. And it's what does it? It's brings the whole state of the culture that you're in, the environment, you're in, it gets bring down, you've got some of these toxic on your team, it just brings everybody

down, it's everything. But as soon as you have that person starting to say something they're thankful for, it reenergizes the room, people just start smiling and laughing. It's an amazingly fast fix. You know what? Sorry, I'm good, I'm good. I'm going to go on. Yeah, we'll riff on this, keep riffing on this. So I started doing gratitude journaling probably about four years ago, something like that, three or four years ago.

And what I found was my natural state wasn't massively grateful. I think if you haven't done formal gratitude practice, it's actually quite weird. Like to do it, if you're not naturally, if that's not your inclination, and if you're a, you know, a bloke from the north of the UK, then that perhaps might be saying this isn't the normal thing. Yeah, it's just it's the normal thing. You know, that's interesting. So what I found was that after a while when

I, it's supposed to only take three minutes and a morning and three minutes at night, but when I got to the three great things that happened to me today section, yeah, it was taking ten minutes because I couldn't think of anything. And then what really? What I found over time was that I during the day was finding things to be grateful for as a gift to my future self that night so that I didn't feel like an idiot when it came time for me to write them down.

So actually formalizing the gratitude made the present experience of things in the moment different as well because it made me accountable to myself. I was like, look, I need to have this thing and I think that's that little story. I often use that as a justification for a formalized practice. Now you've actually managed to formalize the practice into a way that rides the crest of now that's actually it's always happening,

but an equivalent would be to have some sort of accountability, whatever it might be. The accountability can be your wife or it can be a diary or it can be something else, but you need those triggers. Yeah, and I subscribe to all of everything you just said. I've been doing it at Gratitude Unil too daily. I do it. It's like mental health for me. It's like no matter what, I really need it to do it at night. And I'm amazed at how forgetful I can be. And I'll sit there, okay, what are the big things I'm grateful for today?

And in that process, at first, I can say, not just, oh, I don't know what to write, I just forget that that morning, that same morning, something great happened at 9 a.m. 10 a.m. and I was some meeting, some events, some news, something great happened. And I just couldn't even remember it. The same day when I come to write about it. So the practice, I think, is enormously important. Something that I used to do every week before the pandemic I had it built into my routine was actually, it was a church thing. I would do it there, which isn't great, but I would do it at church. I had to like it and and and then pandemic no one's going, no one's meeting, no one's doing so I removed that routine at my life and just recently I've got back to doing it each week where you summarize it for the week and I've been really surprised the researchers supports this that

you'll get a bigger bump of benefit if you do gratitude lists on a weekly basis than even on a daily basis. I do both now. I don't think they're mutually exclusive at all, but doing it on the week, what that does is you get to sense, I think, a bigger set of progress. You get to see a bigger sense of, wow, yeah, look at all those things and they they added up and look at this So you have a more satisfying sense of progress. I think Yes to all of these

I don't know that you can overdo this principle. I don't I don't see it. I believe thoroughly That if you want to achieve a hundred times the results you have in your life You just you just say okay, I going to be that much more grateful. Right, but the gratitude. Yeah, to everyone, to everything, in the bad things too. When things happen that are bad, well, I'm glad I've done this before. I'm thankful that I survived this thing today. I'm thankful that this thing is done and over. I'm thankful that somebody, this

happened yesterday, somebody sent me a private message on LinkedIn that was negative. It's like pretty harsh actually about something I just posted. And when I come to write about that, I'm thankful that they wrote to me and said this, said something that was critical. And sometimes as I'm writing for the things that you wouldn't necessarily normally think to be grateful for, I don't know what I'm gonna say for why. But thankful this happened because,

it's always an act of faith to write the first census because you don't know why. But in the moment you start to go, yeah, because I hadn't talked about that angle before. I'm not a sense of enough to that. And so I was able to, which I did, rewrite the post that I'd just done with more context to it. And even though I didn't enjoy in the first moment of that, it was teaching and it was an opportunity and being grateful for it just means that you see the learning and the benefit from it. I mean, you can't control so many of the things that happen to your life, but if

you can be grateful in whatever comes the good and the bad, I mean, you're like, it's like a superpower. I'm a person who can turn a negative into a positive, can never be defeated. That's what the effort the state gives you. Whatever comes, fine, the next big challenge, you're all right, because we know how to turn it into something good. Do you know what it feels like? So people use Nassim Talab's anti-fragile principle for things like this, but I actually don't think that that's necessarily perfectly correct. I actually think that this feels a lot, not softer, it feels more fluid than that. And a good example of this actually is what's happening, what will be happening

right now is where recording this. So I had Jordan Peterson on the show last night. Earlier on this week, Marvel Comics featured someone that looks suspiciously like his philosophy as the principles beneath Red Skull, the magical super Nazi that's the enemy of Captain America. So basically, Tana Hasse Cotes, that was the particular author of the comic book, was saying Jordan Peterson is,

he has some analogies between this philosophy and that. So today, Jordan has released a bunch of Hale Hydra, which was the thing from Captain America, which looks like the Hydra head from above, but he's changed it into a lobster and put Hale lobster. He's released them on posters and t-shirts that are limited edition and all the proceeds go to charity. And he put a tweet out yesterday that had 40,000 likes on it, something like that. So what he's done is he's taken something which has happened and said, okay, well, not only how can I perhaps deal with this, but how can I find gratitude that this is now an opportunity for me to do it? And yeah, there's some particulars with regards to his platform that permit him to have more degrees of freedom with things like this, but presumably somebody lower down the status

hierarchy or the cloud hierarchy, their challenge would similarly be down-regulated in kind. So yeah, it seems stuff like that when people take something that ostensibly should be quite a bad day, being called out by the biggest comic on the planet for being the underlying philosophy behind a magical supernazi. Probably doesn't rank on every author's, like, this is a good day. But now it seems really charming, based on what I'm seeing online, it looks like the public opinion is massively in his in his favour and whatever he's chosen, charity, some homeless, homeless children in Canada, something they're going to get some insane amount of donation. So yeah, that's for a tacit example there. Right, courage to be rubbish. What does the courage to be rubbish mean?

Yeah courage to be rubbish is um well I've got to share a story about it. There's a British industrialist Henry Kramer's 1959. He wants to support and accelerate progress on a human powered flight. So this is like 50 years after the right brothers have actually successfully flown in an engine powered plane, but no one's done human power flights. So basically a bike inside of a plane and he thinks this is going to be doable. I mean, this is only like 10 years before Neil Armstrong is on the moon, so it doesn't seem crazy to him that they can do this. So he sets this in 50,000 pounds with quite a lot of money even now, but it's sort of a lot in 1959 go. All sorts of teams get involved, well-funded, impressive brains, all this, and for 17 years, they fail. Just know just nothing.

Enter Paul McCready, who comes in, he's in debt. He doesn't have money for a team. He has just basically his friends and family. In fact, he has his young son become his test pilot. He's a hard one. We're doing today. No, don't worry. Don't worry. So just keep your helmet on.

It's going to be all right. It's going to be all right, son. So he's staring at the problem. Why haven't people been able to make more progress on this? And he suddenly realizes everyone's been trying to solve the wrong problem. They're all trying to build these really beautiful machines, elegant, you know, wooden ribs, plastic casings, all this just beautiful things, great teams, great minds on this.

In order to, you know, they have to do this half a mile flight, two mile flight, something around these two pylons without stopping, And that's what they're focused on. And he goes, no, it's exactly opposite. What you need is an ugly as they come thing that can crash and be rebuilt, cheap and fast. That's the real problem to be solved. If we can solve that,

then we'll be able to learn so much faster and then be able to figure out how to do this. So they built this thing totally ugly. Looks amateurish, it's really light. They go, they try to fly it, it would crash, they just grab some broom handle, you know, stick it back on and within five, they'd be back up in the air. He said that the competitive teams would take six months from that sort of setback. They'd try to fly the plane. It would crash. Okay, ship it back. We'd take it back to the university, take it back to the institute, rebuild what we're doing, six months of downtime between their learning cycle compared to him with five minutes.

They would maybe have more crashes in one day than some of their competitors would have in the lifetime of the machine. And so it's on their 223rd attempt that they succeeded. They won the first Kramer Prize and went on to win two years later across the English Channel they won the first Kramer Prize and went on to win two years later the cross-English channel and won the second Kramer Prize for £100,000. I mean, this is like this huge breakthrough, but the breakthrough wasn't an aeronautics breakthrough primarily.

The primary breakthrough was that you've got to make failure as cheap as possible. And there's a whole variety of ways that you can do that. I mean, you can make failure cheaper by protecting it from the critic in your head. Is the way you talk about your own performance when you make a mistake. You can have a friend's supers, you know, high capability, high intelligence, he did his JD, maybe JD MBA. I can't remember now at Stanford went on and did another PhD at Princeton.

I mean, super smart teachers, Spanish to other people. And he just says, listen, you get, it's like you've got to imagine you have a thousand beads. And every time you make a mistake, try to speak Spanish, you get to take a bead out. And once you've done a thousand beads out, you're going to be level war and mastery in Spanish. You just got to go out there and make mistakes. Whereas some people want to, I've got to learn it really good before I ever use the what

I know. The courage to be rubbish is in that that you learn everything starts rubbish. Every masterpiece started rubbish. They just started, they had the courage to do the bad version of the article. There's so many people, I meet so many people who say, oh, I want to write a book.

But this idea, they have in their heads, I think, that they're trying to do the wrong thing, they're trying to solve the wrong puzzle, they're trying to be perfect out the gate. It's like the perfect, beautiful machines, or they think, oh, everything I do needs to be, I call it baby Yoda perfect, right from the beginning. It's all cute and polished and so on, but actually, like at Pixar, for example, to play a little on that metaphor, that they believe in and articulate ugly babies. We love ugly babies.

Because the first sketch of any idea, the sketch is bad, the idea is bad. You can go and see, I've seen them at Pixel and I've worked with the company, they have enshrined these early versions of Toy Story and so on. And they are rough and they do look bad, genuinely. But they're saying, of course, you've got to protect those, you've got to look after those things so that you can ever get into better performance later. So you want to make failure

as cheaper as possible. Actually, one of the things that we've talked about already just following through that thread is one way to make failure cheaper. It's just be grateful along the way. I was talking to John Aikuf who's just come out with a book called Soundtracks. He's basically saying, we have all these negative soundtracks in our mind that get in the way and we have to choose a better playlist and play it a lot. So they become our most played soundtracks. One of the soundtracks that he said, he just picked up this, you either succeed or you have a story.

I love that, right? You just succeed or you have a story, meaning, like he gave me this story. He said that when he was early starting off and trying to market, he hired space at a conference. He wasn't even speaking at. And he just thought, he just had this idea that because of his success of his blogging,

so on that loads of people would come and meet him there and whatever So he got a thousand flyers made up that he would have to be when they arrived and he sits there Is expecting all these people and literally two people come And one of them is a friend of his that he knew was coming and they I think the other one was the person he brought with him And so he has a photograph of this now and he's put it on his blog, this is from years back, but he just tells the story. And that's what he's saying.

He says one of the most popular blogs he's ever written. Either succeed when you take an action or you have a story. And so this is all about trying to make it cheaper so you can fail, but it becomes cheaper. I said a little little differently. It's how to make life into an asymmetric bet So that there's low downside and high upside and If you can make your life like that if you can again to use the phrase if you can make it a little more effortless Then then you can keep taking action a little more effortless, then you can keep taking action. My mother was especially good at this. You know, she has, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, but she was really good at encouraging,

well, try it. What's the worst that can happen? It's okay. And so it reduced the emotional burden of, what if I do this and I fail, I look stupid and I'll be terrible, I was worse than dying. And a lot of people feel like that. It's rather diving, then look stupid or do something. And I just didn't grow up with that burden. And I'm sure that meant that I actually did look a bit more stupid than, you know, than the average person more times. I didn't care. And I don't care now either.

And so it means what I think it produces, speaking from personal experience for a moment, is that it produces a sense of I'm game for that. Let's try it, let's go, let's go, and then we'll learn, and we can pivot fast, but we're gonna learn, let's go. And you're just not gonna learn or progress. If you're so worried about being perfect, that you can't even take the first step.

Imagine if a baby really, literally, somehow was embarrassed that they, that first attempt they have to move, to crawl, to sit up, to stand, they were being punished for that. Imagine how ridiculous that would be. They get praised for it, encouraged for it. We need to do that for ourselves. We need to do it for other people.

If we want progress, and we do, and if we want progress to be even easier, which we really do. What I love is the idea of seeing failure as the end in itself and almost the thing that you're aiming to get to, not that the outcome I want from this experiment is failure, but that you repurpose failure, you rebrand it, as, okay, failure is not a bug, it is a feature of this undertaking that I'm going through now. And every single time that I fail, one of those beads comes off on the podcast string or on the, I wanna be a dancer

or I wanna be a rugby player, I wanna go to the business, I wanna get an MBA or I wanna get PhD or I wanna get a college degree, I wanna be, get a job, I wanna do whatever. Every time that I don't get a job, because you're going to get rejected from more interviews than you're going to be accepted, cause're only ever going to be accepted once.

Right. Every time you get rejected, okay, cool. So what did I learn from this? What a privilege it is. How fortunate am I to be able to now be even better than that? And it removes the emotional attachment that we have to the desire to always be correct and moving forward and looking cool and not blundering and falling over. Take, no, no, no, no, everybody's blundering and falling over. Blundering and falling over

is it built into the source code of what you're going to do. In fact, you're probably going to blunder and fall over far more than you're going to succeed. And every single time that that happens, you can be grateful for it, you can be thankful for the fact that you now get to come back. And perhaps be a little bit better at avoiding that blunder. When I was reading that courage to be rubbish section, it reminded me of a tweet, a couple of tweets actually that I saw this year. He reminded me of a tweet, a couple of tweets actually that I saw this year, and this one's from Tiago Forte, and he says, a paradoxical thing about people who consistently choose the most high leverage activity is that efforts have a rough edge, half-assed quality, because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity.

And someone replied to it and said, perfectionism is a nice way to hide from shipping at a pace necessary to find what works. Well, that's exactly it, right? The co-founder of LinkedIn, Reed Hoffman. First of all, he says, if you aren't embarrassed by the first product you ship and you waited too long. And he applies that not just in sort of startup strategy, but he hired a new chief of staff, Ben, and he said to Ben, And he said to Ben, I'm comfortable with a 10 to 15% foot fault rate. If it allows us to move fast, I accept that you will make decisions plenty of times that wouldn't be what I would do in that situation, but I want us to be moving fast. That's the value. And Ben is on record saying, well, that just freed me,

just liberated me to go forward, to not be so hesitant, not waiting all the time. And that's really what, one of the things that people, that I think keeps people back from doing what's most essential in their lives, doing the things that really matter to them, that they feel actually a pull towards,

is that they have another counterweight pulling them back, which says, yeah, but don't do anything stupid and don't do anything that could make you uncomfortable or don't do anything that could be a failure along the way. And so then they just don't do anything. They don't go anywhere. And that, I think, is a far bigger risk. I mean, we're talking about progress, progress over perfectionism every day of the week. I love it. Greg, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Effortless is out on April 27th. April 27th, the link to either pre-order or purchase right now will be in the show notes below. Where should people go? You've got so much stuff going on at the moment, why is best for people to keep up to date with everything?

I think if they sign up for the newsletter, they definitely not lose anything. We have a one minute Wednesday. You can sign up at Greg McEwan.com, g-r-e-g-m-c-k-e-o-w-n.com. Also, essentialism.com, that's where the whole academy is getting launched. There's a 21-day challenge that just tries to make it really micro-byte-sized master classes each day, but it's just like little vignettes to help people make progress on what really matters most to them. And there's a whole series of classes coming there that people can take and be part of.

I think I would go with those. Greg McEwen, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks Chris. you