Modern Wisdom - #880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most

Episode Date: December 21, 2024

Greg McKeown is an author, public speaker, and leadership consultant Success requires you to focus on what truly matters. But in the modern world there are more distractions than ever before. So how should you best choose what to prioritise, and what are the pitfalls to avoid? Expect to learn how Essentialism has evolved over the past decade, why saying no is so hard and how to get better at saying it, how to counteract your desire for novelty, why it’s so difficult to cut your losses, how to use boundaries in your life, the challenges you'll face as you become more successful and much more.. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Greg McEwan. He's an author, public speaker and a leadership consultant. Success requires you to focus on what truly matters. But in the modern world, there are more distractions than ever before. So how should you best choose what to prioritize and what are the pitfalls to avoid? Expect to learn how essentialism has evolved over the past decade, why saying no is so hard and how to get better at saying it, how to counteract your desire for novelty, why it's so difficult to cut your losses, how to use boundaries in your life, the challenges you'll face as you become more successful and much more.

Greg is a legend. Essentialism was superbly formative for me. If you've downloaded the modern wisdom reading list, you will know it's in the top five. It's stayed there for as long as I can remember. It's a wonderful redress to a lot of the problems that those of us that like to try and achieve things face, which is namely putting more on our plate than our work capacity can handle. And it's just so great.

And it's become more useful over the last 10 years since he released it. So yeah, so much to take away from this one. This episode is brought to you by the RP hypertrophy app. This app has made a huge impact on my gains and my enjoyment in the gym over the last year. It's designed by Dr. Mike Isretel, one of my smartest, most science backed evidence based friends and probably the number one fitness content creator in the world right now. And it comes with over 45 pre-made training programs

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Plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they'll give you your money back. Right now you can get all of that by heading to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. If you're still using an old face shaver from three Christmases ago, please join us in the modern world. Manscaped brand new Chairman Pro brings a professional shave directly to your home. It comes with two interchangeable skin safe blade heads, whether you want to go completely clean or leave some stubble.

Plus both heads are designed to help reduce razor burn and irritation. So your skin feels smooth and comfortable after every shave. Best of all, it can run for up to 75 minutes on a single charge and it's waterproof so you can use it in the shower or if you've got a particularly hairy face right now, you can get 20% off and free shipping worldwide by going to the link in the description below or heading to manscaped.com modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 20 a checkout that's manscape.com modern wisdom and modern Now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Greg McEwen. When we first spoke nearly five years ago now, I said that I might be your arch nemesis.

And in some ways, I've become worse, but in other ways, I've become much better since then. So I can give you up top, I can give you a thank you for at least adjusting my trajectory over the last five years in a positive direction. Well, one of the things that's interesting about that to me is just in essentialism itself, there's this idea of the paradox of success. You know, so it's five stages, four stages. You have clarity leads to success, leads to options and opportunities.

All of that sounds like the right problem to have, and maybe it is, but it doesn't make them less problems, especially if it leads to the undisciplined pursuit of more. And so I think that the more success somebody experiences, I think the more the case for essentialism exists in their life because they go, yeah, this is the problem I thought I wanted. And maybe it still is, but now you still have to figure out how to be successful at success and to not have it eat you alive and spit you out. You know, this is sort of the path eventually.

And so the antidote, of course, is the discipline pursuit of less but better. So anyway, this thing. No, I think it's so right as well that I'm aware talking about success on the internet is one of the least popular things to do because the total addressable market is essentially zero compared with talking about grinding from the ground floor up. But assuming, assuming that the people that are into personal development and work on themselves and read books like yours, that been hugely formative for me. Assuming that their goal is to achieve a level of success, you better fucking future-proof yourself. If the thing that you want to get is there and you know, like I can pro, maybe

it's one of those things that you just don't get to appreciate or believe until you actually arrive there and you're like, no, no, no, that's bullshit. When I get to success, it's all going to be fine. It's like, look, every single person I've spoken to, every single one of them, the problems don't stop. They get more complex. The higher up the ladder you get. Yes, that's, that's what it is.

And, and, and you, you, people struggle to believe it if they're in the first phases, because those are really complex, challenging issues as well. But what happens is that the opportunities increase and the scale of the impact of those choices increases. And the number of people that are impacted by them and therefore the number of critics also increases. And so, and on it can go. So the reward for getting to the top of the mountain is that there are other mountains. And in a way, that's a great part of life that behind every mountain, there's mountains. But it doesn't make it easier. And I think this is a very poorly understood area of success.

a very poorly understood area of success. People just assume if I get to the top of that mountain, all the problems disappear, life is just great. And it's like, no, nobody gets to escape, you know, the mortal experience. However it's designed, it's designed in such a way that you just can't do that. This is never an option. And sometimes I think as people get higher in their level of success, it becomes

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

and facing the fear and taking new risks so that you can have the great adventure continue or, or you're just slowly dying in whatever level of success a person happens to be at. So yeah, it's like, those are two tough choices. What has changed in your perspective on essentialism over the last 10 years? It's 10th anniversary, 10th birthday party for what for me is one of the five books that everybody needs to read this hundred book reading list thing that I've been pushing for forever.

Yours is sat in that top five, like absolute, you have to get this done. And, um, but I'm, I'm interested. You're a decade hence now what's, what's changed or what's evolved? Uh, it's such a rich question. If I tried to just answer it honestly, um, I honestly. I mean, it's obviously been completely life-changing for me. It's enabled me to operate in a certain kind of rarefied air. In a quite humbling way, it has become sort of a part of the zeitgeist, a part of Americana in a certain way. And so, you know, there are these, you know, so Steve Harvey gets a copy of it. It's his favorite book.

And so we end up doing a bunch of interesting things together. And Maria Shriver, former First Lady of California, you know, she was given a copy and she's giving them out at her famous Sunday luncheons and, uh, Kanye was missing one time and wherever he was, he had a copy of essentialism because that, you know, that's what he posted on social media. And then when he was on Rogan, he's like, uh, he's like, yeah, I'm an essentialist bit, you know, some of those are a bit strange, but it's also humbling because the movement has just begun. And I can feel that, that every year there are more people that essentialism reaches than the year before. There are more stories coming of people that really do feel like it's changed their life, which is always a, you know, that's, that's its own sort of strange experience.

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

there. I don't want to create it just because, you know, okay, essentialism did well, so now we have to do this. So I uncommitted from the contract, went away from it, carried on in my own life, like every single day doing some kind of written in paper and pen journaling and planning. And I don't think I've missed a day in the last, I mean, in the last 10 years, I don't think I've missed a day in the last, I mean, in the last 10 years, I don't think I've missed a day. And, and in the process found eventually this, this way of using a few minutes every day that I thought was so optimal and so supportive of essentialism.

I was like, actually, maybe, maybe a plan of wood could really help people. And so that's one of the shifts that's happened for me is you need the mindset, but now I actually believe a tool set makes a big difference for people. Maybe it's for people that aren't thinking about essentialism as much as I am, which is like everybody, uh, you know, for them, they just want the tool. Give me the tool, give me the best of what you've learned. And, and so that that's, you know, that's one big change, I would say. You said there was a second one.

Yeah, I was trying to remember. Oh yeah, I know what I was going to say about that. So I think we've shifted eras. Okay. So if you say agrarian age, industrial age, information age, I think in the 10 years since I published Essentialism, we've shifted to an influencer age and that's a non-trivial shift. So if you say, okay, the lead characteristic of the information age was distraction, then the lead characteristic in this new age is disorientation.

And while I think that those are sort of similar in some ways, I think that they are much more, that this new is much more foundationally challenging. And the word that I think would have been relevant 10 years ago, but is different when I talk to people about it now is noise. Everybody's buried in noise. And so it's the ability to eliminate noise.

It's the ability to not just eliminate though, synthesize noise so that you can connect the dots through it like it's raw material from which to create something meaningful. These skills now seem to me primary in a way that even 10 years ago, I wouldn't have said that. You must feel prophetic like a British Cassandra sort of seeing. Well, my brother certainly would call me a Cassandra. So I don't know. I mean, maybe there's something to that.

Go on, go carry on. You know what I mean? You know, you fuck this book came out 10 years ago. This book came out 10 years ago and it's more, it's become more relevant over time. You know, like a, like a, a weather reporter, the Mayan calendar or something. And yeah, it's just, you know, it's, I praise that's nice. It's, it's true., whether it was you just catching a trend early, that's then sort of ripped a hold and then, and then got further ahead, but I love that idea of going from distraction to orientation. And, um, that's not something I'd thought of before, but I think it's pretty

accurate because it's not just about our attention being pulled away and the optionality of that, it's the sheer volume and you know, I always talk about this. There was one day in 2010 or 2011, maybe like early January, 2011 or something. There was one day where humanity had the right balance of available information to information that we wanted. And then we immediately, you know, fucking eons, millennia, we wanted more information than we had. And then there was one day around about 2011 when we had it and we immediately fucking smashed

through it. And now we're out just in the void, fucking orbiting, orbiting above the earth, just surrounded by information. And it's a fundamental change that humans have had to go through from being scavengers of information to being discerners of information. You're no longer looking for things. You are choosing between things and it's a fundamentally different skill. And I think that, you know, that sort of essentialist mindset becomes even more

of a prophylactic against that sort of thing, uh, as you have to be more discerning, as you have to work out, is this relevant or not? Not even how do I get it? Not even can I focus on the thing that I want, but this barrage of different things, stimuli, information, potential goals, potential projects. Am I going to work from home? All of the stuff that happened from COVID, all of those, that's optionality that's been opened up.

Hooray. That means that there's lots of different ways you can go, but boo, who has to make the decision, you do. Well, I think that the way I think about it is that we are either in or approaching a truly limitless era, right? Like that's the good news. The bad news is that the obstacle to that is the noise. In some ways, it's both the obstacle and the raw material.

The enabler. So it's like, it's both, but figuring out how to navigate that, you know, we're using this disorientation word and noise comes from the Latin nausea. And so when we say, yeah, we feel all this noise in our world, it's like, yes, we actually feel nauseous. It's seasickness.

And so when we go on social media and we're absorbing so much information that way, including news, right? So it's not just influences in the original sense of the word, oh, you wear these clothes or live this way. It's not just that, it's all of the things, all of the information is getting put through that lens, that process to us. When we get off social media, it's like, where are we? We don't even know where we are. We don't know what's up, what's down. And so it's like reactivity becomes a lifestyle rather than, yes's like, where are we? We don't even know where we are. We don't know what's up, what's down. And so it's like, reactivity becomes a lifestyle rather than,

yes, well, sometimes I'm reactive. It's like, we're just constantly in this reactive state. Let's say that somebody isn't familiar with sort of the essentialist framework. Yeah. Yeah. Why, and we can do a little brief in a second, but just that reactivity point, what's bad about being reactive?

Why does that not fit into an essentialist's worldview? Well, I mean, let's start with this, right? Like I haven't named this law, you and I are going to name this law maybe. And it's this, that the highest priority today is the least likely thing to happen. Hmm. So that's the strangest thing. And I stand by that. I believe that's a law, at least a law in this era.

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

or maybe to urgent things, but the essential, the most important thing, the most important relationship. That is never the thing that happens first unless you make it so. So that's one reason that I think living reactively is suboptimal. Well, it'll, it completely puts you at the mercy of whatever next comes careening into consciousness, right? Whether it's a notification on your phone, whether it's a fear that you've had, whether it's memory of the fact that you don't have any bread in the cupboard. You know, that's that it's the most salient thing. And, you know, the Eisenhower matrix of sort of urgent versus important, the

urgent will always, I mean, when I think back to, you know, when I was really, really obsessive about the sort of working on productivity, when I think back to that, the amount of time, months, months that I would put off the important thing, months that I wouldn't do it for, like the most important thing, which evidently not that important, well, no, it is. It's just somehow other stuff gets in the way. And, uh, you know, if you're not careful and this is something I'm sort of realizing as I grow up and get a little bit older, you don't have an unlimited amount of time

to do the important things in your life. You don't have an unlimited amount of time to do the important things in your life. You don't have an unlimited amount of time. No, no, no, I'll say it further. And this would come close to another law is that, I mean, I call it in essentialism, I call it the 90% rule. And it is, I mean, the 90% rule says focus only on those things that are 90% or above important. That is, if it's not a clear yes, it becomes a clear no.

So that's like an extreme rule to try and help us escape the tendency to do just the good stuff or the middle stuff is be more selective. But over the last 10 years, something I have come to observe and believe is that we have only enough time left to do the 90% and above. And that's, that's the tougher aha. Because you say, oh, every time I'm doing something that's just good or completely trivial, I am making a trade-off I would probably not make

if they were really placed in front of me as choices. Yeah. I mean, nobody on their deathbed says, oh, I just should have spent a bit more time scrolling on Instagram. That's what I wish I'd done. Like it's obvious, but this is the nature, I think, of the noise and the deafening nature of it is that we don't

hear the signal in the noise. And so everything starts to seem equally important where the reality is always, always that a very few things are, I mean, like something like this, infinitesimally small things, but infinitely important. And that's in every human system, in every set of data, in every set of tasks, there is something that is so much more important than everything else, but you have to really work to get to it. It's a little like thinking that you love the productivity language and focus has been around how do you do more? How can you be more efficient and so on and fine. Okay, I don't think about what I do is like that, but that's more like thinking you're in a coal mine your whole life.

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

human systems and all circumstances that you have. I think about it now like an onion of human systems. You have the noise and trivia at the edge. As you move in, you get towards a bit more important. It's a little more, you know, you have to be a little more careful around it because it's a little more intimate. And then at the very center of it, you have things that are so vulnerable

and so disproportionately important. They're everything. This is how I think it is. I think that's true in a personal life. I think it's true in a relationship. I think it's true on a team, an organization, a country. At every level of human system, this strange phenomenon seems to exist. Once you discover that, once you understand that, I think your life changes completely, irrevocably. At least that's what happened to me. How can people better work out their priorities?

It sounds all well and good if it's not above 90 percent important, but you've just admitted yourself that we're living in an age where everything feels important. Not only does everything feel important, but the most important things are often the least urgent. So you have to get through the non-important urgent shit first, then you need to get through the like non-important, non-urgent shit to find the important non-urgent shit that sits at the bottom.

How, after all of this time teaching people people doing courses and all the rest of it, what's the best framework that people can use to work out what they need to work on? Yeah, I can teach people how to do it in six minutes, which is really cool. And, um, but I mean, not, not to teach them in six minutes. I mean, they can learn to do it themselves every day in six minutes. And I learned it in some ways from someone I interviewed on my podcast. And what happened to her is that she, she'd started a new business and she woke up at like three in the morning, hyperventilating, Oh my goodness, what have I done?

I've just quit this job. I'm not yet earning sufficient income. And she's just in that panic mode. And quite spontaneously, what she does is she grabs this huge sheet of paper that she plans to throw away. So it's just like, maybe if I just get all of the noise out of my head and just write free, right. And she's just messy and it's crazy and it's chaotic.

And it's, you know, let's say she's swearing all the way through it. And it's just like, you know, it's not for anyone. Not even in a sense, it wasn't even it. And it's just like, you know, it's not for anyone, not even in a sense. It wasn't even for her. She's just like pouring it out. And what she noticed happening and she's learned, I mean, even I think the first time she did it was like the six minute process. It was like nothing, but then she has learned since then it's like in six

minutes, what happens is she went from. Confusion. I don't know if this was her language, but this is my language now, right? She went from confusion to clarity to creation. First she's just confusion, noise, then she starts going, hmm, well, maybe what would I do about that? What could I do that would be healthy? So it started to turn into questions that were relevant for her. And then within just this few minutes, she's looking like, okay, well, here are some plans. This is what I could do. And she was able to go back to bed at peace with the sense that, okay, I, I still know what the problems are, but I I've worked through it.

It's not just spinning in my head. What is she writing? What was she writing? Yes. What is she writing? Well, the prompt was something like, what's going on in your head? What is happening? You know, so the prompt is quite a simple prompt. And she taught me this too.

I've never heard anyone share this and I love this. It's called instinctive elaboration. And what instinctive elaboration is, is that if you ask yourself a question or asked a question, there is an involuntary mental process that takes place. You cannot not think about it, which is a pretty powerful phrase. And I think we've all experienced it. Somebody asks you an interesting question and it just like hijacks the way that you were thinking and what you were thinking about. And so you can use this to your benefit by having good prompts. So after this, I started the following process.

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

I don't mind who reads it. I want the noise. So what? Now the prompt now is not what's going on, but like, well, what does it mean? You know, what, like, let's just try and look at that noise as if let's imagine, imagine I was, someone else showed me their writing and I'm

looking at and going, Oh, I wonder what that says. What does that mean? And so you're just trying to now connect the dots a little bit. And then the now what I have a really clear structure for this. I call it the one, two, three method, the highest priority item for the day. That's the one. You might spend two hours on that, ideally. Uh, the two is two things that are urgent and essential. And the three are maintenance items. That's like the laundry of our life. If we don't do it tomorrow, it gets a lot harder.

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

And that's what we need because it seems to me that there are just two kinds of people in the world now. There are people who are lost and there are people who know they are lost. And if you can get in the second category, that's really helpful because if you're lost and you know you're lost, you're actually not lost anymore because you know what to do. You know, you can stop. I don't know what I'm doing. Let's write this all out. This is where I'm at. This is some confusing. Okay, what does all that mean? Okay, what am I going to do about it? Like the problem is when we don't realize

we're lost and we just keep barreling ahead without pausing and reflecting and getting, you know, it's like a plane is off track 90% of the time. The key is to getting where it's supposed to get to is that it has an automatic get back on track function. And so in a disorienting world, what we need is a reorienting process. And that's why I think this daily process is such a helpful tool for living essentialism in a noisy world. I had a conversation with a guy called Nick Pollard, the people displeaser. And, uh, he used a not too dissimilar analogy, uh, which was a missile doesn't hit the target, the missile doesn't hit not the target. And that's the way that missiles work.

This is not the target avoided. This is not the target avoided. And after you've not missiles work. This is not the target, avoid it. This is not the target, avoid it. And after you've not avoided all of the, not the targets, you end up hitting the thing that you meant to hit. And, um, you know, again, so much of the sort of the essentialist mindset is around the elimination. Uh, it's around the not doing, uh, I'm completely obsessed with the idea

that success in life is at least probably 90% avoiding catastrophe as opposed to expediting success, because the catastrophes are the things that knock you out of the bottom. They're the things that can cause game over. You know, you spend, you spend your entire life caring about your health and eating organic and ensuring that you don't have seed oils and then one day you drive your car without your seatbelt on, it's like, Hey, guess what?

Game over. Uh, so those are the things that really come in and make step changes to the quality of what you're doing. So just going, it's actually speaking on Nick's work, people pleasing. I think there's a lot of, um, parallels with what you do. Talk to me about why saying no to new, more things is so hard. Nick came at it from an emotional health perspective, but I'm interested to hear it from a work, life purpose,

productivity perspective from yourself. Basically, why saying no is so hard and how people can learn to say no more effectively. Well, that's one way you could go with that question, but I'm sort of wanting to answer it a different way because of how you set the question up. And it's like Socrates was described as like the wisest man in the world. And he said, well, I don't know if I am, but if I am, it's because I have this daemon with me.

And he says, this daemon, so this sort of, I mean, it sort of, we don't really use that term now and it's not the same as a daemon, but this sort of entity. This, yes, I suppose conscience, but it felt very separate to him. He said, he said, my daemon never tells me what to do, what to do, but he always tells me what not to do. And I thought that that was such a, you know, consistent idea with what you were just sharing and I remember when storm Ida came through, I was stuck in the airport and I mean, the storm is completely consuming the airport.

There's water coming through the ceilings. People are already starting to lose their minds. And I've been in these situations enough in airports to know like, like, you just don't want to be there through all of that. Like if you can possibly just get somewhere else away from the storm, that's better. And I knew that there was a hotel about 10 minutes from the airport, I'd stayed in it before, and I could physically see it. And I thought, look, if

I just get there, it's just 10 minutes over there. And I try all these things, and everything's not working out, you know, because they've shut everything down because there's water pouring everywhere. And finally, I even tried to rent a car and they were like, no, this is impossible. But they said, if you just walk straight down that road and the water that it didn't look like it was too bad. Uh, you know, it looked a little

like it was, um, slowing down the rain. They said it's a 10 minute walk, just go there and you'll be fine. And I took like a few paces and I heard like my own Damon, do not do this. That was exactly what I would. And I carried on walking for about another four or five steps and it was louder. Do not do this.

And that's it. That's sort of the end of the story. I went back, I've retraced all my steps, went back to the airport, stayed there for a while until things were calm enough that, uh, that I was able to get to the hotel and spent the night there. I don't know what would have happened if I'd have gone down that path. I'm glad I don't know.

But I do think that there's something in this, you know, you could say, okay, what's the most essential thing in my life? What's the very best use of me? I do think those are helpful questions, but they can be overwhelming. And so if you ask the opposite, it's like, what don't you want? What is the thing, the number one thing you know, you don't want. Okay. Well now you basically know what it is you want because it's

just sort of the inverse of that. Yeah. Yeah. George, George, my friend, uh, asked this question on the first ever episode, even before you, he was before B B G, uh, he was before Greg. And, um, he, he asked this question, how do you make, uh, a miserable person happy? And you go, no idea. He says, how would you make a happy person miserable?

You go, I've got a million, million pieces of advice for you. Then you go, right. Okay. So inversion, inversion is a useful tool and I can find out, at least I can avoid. The pitfalls by making sure that I don't do the things that I know that are going to make me miserable. It's probably maybe a mark of where you've gotten to

and the fact that I'm receptive to it and actually more receptive to it than you giving me a four-step matrix of how I'm supposed to identify the most important thing and all the rest of it, because this may be frustrating to people, but fuck it, I don't care. As you get further along in the journey of working on yourself and of identifying how you work best, experience comes along for the ride.

So previously everything was very effortful and it was system to you. You will, you know, you've got your daily list of affirmations and, and, and morning routine and all the rest of the stuff. And there's still a place for all of that. But largely what you're doing is you're, you're forcing all of this water into an ice cube tray so that it sits nice, compartmentalize because you have no idea what to do, it's messy, the world is messy and chaotic and you need to wrangle it into some sense of order.

Fantastic. What I've learned that that, whatever it is, conscience, daemon, gut instinct, habit, whatever it is, that thing that goes off there, for the most part, is almost always right. And it gets more right the longer that you go on. And you say, well, that's whimsy, it's imprecision, it's wishful thinking, it's untestable, it's imprecision, it's wishful thinking.

It doesn't, it's untestable. It's unverifiable. It's unfalsifiable. Like, yep, I am completely there with you. And yet when I find myself following that thing, most stuff goes well. Most stuff goes well and it goes better than it would have done had I have tried to reverse engineer my, what, what do I want written on my gravestone broken down into 10 year chunks, broken down into one year sprints broken down into daily action.

Like I, it's just, what do I want to do? And that again, the reason that it's so cool is that it is a competitive advantage that compounds with experience, which means that as opposed to it's one of a countervailing forces to things get more difficult, the further along the ladder that you get, because this is one of the things that you can't speed run, there is no fucking growth hacking. Experience really. It's just, it comes along as a by-product of time. This your first tour that you've done with the band.

You have no idea how you should eat, how you should sleep, how you should train, when you need to go to the bathroom, how you need to pack everything. After a while, maybe you've got a system in place, and then after a while after that, you just do it by feel. And you're like, fuck, that's cool. And it's not replicable. It means that competition is, and it's more fun

because it doesn't feel like it's this prescribed, top-down dictatorial world. It's this sort of emergent bottom-up, very uniquely you. And yeah, at least for me, managing that transition has been a difficult one to allow myself to be more free-flowing. But I really appreciate it. I appreciate and I'm grateful to me for letting go of some of the more rigorous and rigid and structured ways that I used to do things to now allow me to tap into that experience. So maybe that resonates. Well, look, one way to riff on that is to say, look, the Damon is playing an extremely complex game. And if we use sort of Musk's idea, the simulation idea. Okay, so in the simulation, we are trying to,

let's say that part of the purpose, central purpose is to maximize the growth of people. That people need to use their agency to make choices, including mistakes, so that they can gain that experience that they didn't have before so that they can become wiser, become better and grow. Okay, so if that's the case, like as a parent, like it's what I want for my children too. I want them to make mistakes as soon as possible, be in a high rapid learning process. So there's no shame when they make mistakes. I'm never going to shame them because that's what they're supposed to do is make choices and some will go right and some won't and they'll learn about themselves and other people through the process. What we would want optimally is someone like Anna and I's parents to step there, to be able to occasionally say, no, that isn't going to work well for you. But to use that very carefully. Otherwise everything's a no all the time and like then they don't get the optimal growth

path and learning of life. And so I do think that this sort of this daemon approach and paying attention to that, like, hey, if you're not feeling it, proceed, let's keep going. But as soon as you do, you never ignore that. You just avoid so many of the catastrophic things. And in some ways, anything but catastrophic failure isn't failure.

It's like, yeah, keep going, keep learning. Just avoid the catastrophic things. And I really do believe that if people are paying attention, if they're listening, they will always have a Daemon warning. That's been true in my life. And I think it's true in all the people I've talked to as I listen to them and their complex life story and their narratives.

And I've done quite a bit of that over the last 25 years. And as we've gone through literally now, literally creating a graphical representation of their life from birth to the moment we're having the conversation in those big mistake moments, the huge things that have been really, really big, they, they had a moment of warning and maybe they just were like, oh, I'm still doing it, don't let the warnings guide you and then play openly within that lane. This seems something like optimal living to me.

Yeah, beautiful. I wanted to talk about something else that I've been kind of conflicted by this year. So a lot of the people listening to the show will know a good friend of mine, a guy called Alex Hormozi, uh, he is very much hard. Things are hard. That's why they're hard., he is very much hard. Things are hard. That's why they're hard. Stop complaining about them being hard.

And I think his message is, is fantastic. And it's resonated with me a lot and it's given me an awful lot of resilience in times when I've needed it, but I'm not convinced that it is a fuel that I need to rely on all the time and I'm interested in alchemizing something different or maybe just having a couple of different fuel sources, you know, switching between fucking coal and nuclear or whatever. And I came across a really gorgeous quote from you that said, puritanism went beyond embracing the hard, it extended to also distrusting the easy.

And I think for the people who take pride and pleasure and meaning and purpose from deploying the hard, from leaning into the hard, from dealing with it, and they say, I can do things that the people can't and I can put my nose to the grindstone and I will keep going and I'm going to carry the boats and so on. That the distrust of the easy comes along for the ride. So I'm interested in, I'm interested in that arc and how I think about it. that the distrust of the easy comes along for the ride. So I'm interested in that arc and how a micro David Goggins can learn to trust the easy

and have a little bit more comfort when things come along like that. Well, look, all wisdom to me is sort of something like the center between two opposing truths. They're both true, but if you go too far in one direction, it will no longer be true and wise. And, you know, so justice and mercy would be like that. But so would, I think sort of hard and easy is like that.

So if you, for example, if a person is an insecure overachiever, they will tend to operate out of a mindset where if it's not hard, I'm doing something wrong. And so they're always pushing, but they can push too far because they've gained a sort of mindset, something like a bad 1980s motivational speaker slash coach. You've got to do 150%. And if you don't,

then that's not enough and you just got to push further. And that was one of the reasons that I wrote the book Effortless was as an antidote to that, you can think about it like an insecure overachievers guide to healthy productivity. What does that look like? Is there a way that is actually more optimal, get better results, but without this endless assumption that burnout is the way? Now you could take it too far, but that's not who I'm writing to. So I'm writing to those that only default one way. So there's a case study that blew my mind when I read it.

The more I got into it, the more some of these ideas sort of elevated for me. So go back with me to the 1850s and the great expedition of the time, like getting to Mars is ours today, getting to the moon was the 1960s. This was who's getting to the South Pole. And no one had ever done it in all of recorded history. You have Shackleton that tried and failed that sort of the most famous failed attempt at doing it. And then after Shackleton, there are two teams that set off on almost the same day, a Norwegian team, a British team. The British leader, the expedition leader had as a mindset something like

maximum effort equals maximum reward. And so he translates that like this. Day one will go 30, 40, even 50 miles if we can. We will maximize the distance because obviously, if you maximize the distance each day, you'll get to the South Pole faster than the Norwegian team. So that's what he starts. Day one, day two, day three is like that. Then they get really bad weather. They're so burned out physically that they have to stop, set up their tents, and sit in no progress. So it affects them psychologically. We know this because they wrote in their journals, oh, we have worse luck than anyone who's ever tried this. We have the worst weather conditions of anyone. And they're wrong about that.

In fact, they have better weather conditions than the team they had based their own attempt on. But they felt like it was true. So now they are physiologically and psychologically exhausted. One entry, we don't think anyone could make progress in weather like this, but one team could and that's the Norwegian team who had a different mental model, expedition leader, something like optimal effort equals maximum results. But he got it curiously from the indigenous people in Antarctica who had taught him this, that making maximum progress in

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

They avoid completely the boom and bust approach to execution that the British team has, but the plot thickens when they get within 45 miles of the South Pole. Because now they have to choose, you know, what to do because they have perfect weather conditions and perfect sledding conditions. So they could, if they break the rule one time, make it to the South Pole in a single day and to make the decision harder. They don't know where the British team is for all they know the British team is ahead of them.

And so that's like a good moment to sort of pause and just reflect on our own mindset. What would we do? What does the insecure overachiever do? Do you push? Do you pace? I've asked audiences this all over. 85% or above will admit, including me, to push. Why? Because that's the mindset. Because we really genuinely believe maximum effort equals maximum results. Okay, well they don't. They pace it still, takes them three days, they get to the South Pole, they've beaten the British team by more than 20 days. That's not what should happen. Every insecure overachiever knows that's not what should happen. That's not what should happen. Every insecure overachiever knows that's not what should happen. That's not how the world works and yet it is.

Eventually the British team make it there as well, but they're so burned out, not one of them make it home alive to England. They all die on what would have been the journey home, whereas in the Norwegian team, their approach allowed them to make the non-trivial 16,000 mile journey home. And when I read the biography of this, the Race to the Poles, the biographer chooses to describe the progress being made by the Norwegian team with words I find even to this moment outrageous. He said, they made progress with, this is his words, without particular effort.

What can you say? What can you say about that? It almost knocked me off my chair when I read the words. I mean, I'm in the middle of writing effortless, so it supports the case I'm making, but it's still an outrageous moment. It's the most arduous physical challenge known to humanity. That's why it was so exciting. That's why people were trying to do it. And yet their progress was defined, of course, not no

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

And yeah, you wish it was higher than it is. And there are things you can do to push that number up over a long period of time, but it's what you have. And so the reason you want to know this is that when you actually do the iron man, you never want to be above your average in the entire race. Because every time you think you're, oh, I look, I'm making all this progress. See, look at me. I'm passing people on this. This is what I need. It's like, no, what you're doing is making

yourself slower later. Or you're drawing from a tank. Yeah. What's that? Yeah. You're drawing from the tank. Right. Exactly.

And so this idea of finding what is your maximum, your optimum, and going back a little ways, like the 85% rule. Go 85% and you'll find you can go further and faster and for longer. Yeah, it's fascinating. I've been, uh, this has been something that's really captured me this year. That I think most people probably need to hear David Goggins screaming in their face to go harder, as opposed to Greg McEwen whispering in their ear that they're

already enough on average. And you know, reliably working harder will make pretty much all problems go away in one form or another, but they will make problems go away in the only way the problems can be judged outwardly. It'll achieve more success, it'll get you more renowned, it'll get you all of these things, but you might be totally fucking miserable and joyless when you're doing it. And what happens over a long enough timeline? What are the prices that you need to pay for that? What relationships blow up? What's the risk of burnout? How quickly do you manage to

reach the stars, but then you explode upon re-entry. You have no ability to do re-entry because you are never able to switch off. I'm going to Jamaica for a Sukoku retreat I'm going to Jamaica for a Sokoku retreat early in the year. So I'm going to do seven days, no phone, no internet, no nothing. That to me, it sounds lovely in advance, but I get the sense that it's maybe going to be like a Navy SEAL Hell Week when I get that. The most opulent version of a Navy SEAL Hell Week is I'm in Jamaica. But I'm really, really obsessed with this idea that not only the distrusting of the easy, not only the sort of inculcation of the hard, but that for the insecure overachiever,

it's the precise opposite piece of advice. And on average, maybe more people need to hear it. Maybe more people need to hear somebody telling them that they're lazy and that they're sat on the couch and they need to go, you know, go to the gym and do the things, but for the sort of people that read your work and that listen to this podcast, I really, I really, really want to be a redress to that kind of energy. Look, you need to be able to turn it on and you need to be able to build your capacity to turn it on.

That's what training is, right? That's what doing the wattage hours on the bike and sitting on there and all the rest of it. But you, more than being able to turn it on, you need to turn it off. And I'm a living example of this man. Like I'm, I'm somebody that has not stopped for seven years doing this project. And I'm now working harder to learn how to not work hard than I ever learned how to actually work hard.

Because working hard came easily to me. Working not hard is a, it brings up all manner of problems, you know, all manner of challenges. Who am I? Am I falling behind? Does this matter anymore? What if people forget me? What if I forget me?

My self-worth was wrapped up in how much I achieved this day and I haven't achieved that much. Well, you meant to not achieve that much. Yeah, I know, but maybe I can go harder. Is this a difference between me being a bitch or me actually taking some well-deserved time off? And then you go even deeper than that. And you say, well, no, am I taking time off simply so I can come back harder?

That doesn't seem like time off. That's not me actually enjoying joy. That's me using joy as an instrumental good toward another instrumental good. I want an inherent good. I want to be able to go away and enjoy this thing for the sake of enjoying this thing, not because I think that Andrew Huberman said a seven day fucking Sakoka retreat is going to allow me to do, you know, and these are the challenges. These are the challenges that happen as you get further down the sort of self-growth, self-development journey and it's, yeah, they don't get easier. They just get more complex.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, one way to think about what you just said is, is I call it the onion of human systems. And that's, I mean, it's consistent with some of you talked about before, but in all, in any human system, right? So a person is a human system, right? That's one way to think about it. A relationship is a human system, right? So a person is a human system, right? That's one way to think about it. A relationship is a human system.

It's all of the interaction and it's highly complex. I mean, take a single person and try to understand everything that's in their mind and how it's all connected. That is unbelievably complex. So the complexity, like we live in a ridiculously complex world. And so human systems are ridiculously complex. So the complexity, like we live in a ridiculously complex world. And so human systems are ridiculously complex. The problem is if we operate in a way that we only ever at the outer edges of the onion, then we're dealing with the relatively safe and relatively trivial.

we're dealing with the relatively safe and relatively trivial. And so, I mean, I think what you're describing in your journey this last year is, I've been moving closer to the center in my own life. Circumstances are such that it's happening and some of it is just the success itself and going, okay, well, what does it mean? And if I don't have to work for the same reasons I used to have to work, then why do I do that? And so it raises questions that are closer to the highest level of vulnerability and highest level of impact possible. Is it the center? I sometimes think about this as like the red button at the center. And there's all sorts of protective measures that people employ to avoid going there.

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

frames. That is what things mean to us. When we're looking at a set of data or circumstances, how we interpret it. And we are, whatever we are, we are meaning machines. I mean, we are constantly sort of trying to make sense of where somebody said it that way, what does that mean? You know, oh, they said it with a slightly different tone of voice, what does that mean? You know, like we're constantly trying to map meaning in others and ourselves.

Now, here's the thing. It's not just a meaning frame. It's what I've come to describe as a frozen meaning frame. And this is how it works. You have a true frame. There's a meaning frame that's based in truth that has got locked like two magnets with something not true. And then because it's happening so deep in us and so subconsciously, we then just move forward in life with that being locked. And we don't even know that that's operating us.

It's an operating system and it's shaping a hundred decisions, a thousand decisions. And we don't even know why. And so then people at the surface are trying to say, well, that habit's not really the habit I want. And let me read a book about habits and then I'll be able to change it and I can move the food out

and I can get rid of all the rubbish food. And yet somehow I'm always eating food. You know, sometimes, somehow, even though I know all those stuff, I can't stop doing it. Why? Because they're operating at the surface. You have to get to the center.

Let me give you a single illustration of this. I was working with a very intelligent PhD student, great husband, great father, great in his faith, but in his actual career work, he just can't get any motivation. And he's doing really well. He's at one of the top universities. So on the surface, again, it looks fine, but he knows inside.

There's no meaning here. And I can't seem to thrive in this environment. And he doesn't know why. So we go through this rapid listening process to be able to go from the surface down, down, down, always knowing, at least I know, there's something at the center. We don't know what it is yet.

And we find what it is together, in about an hour. So it was quite rapid. His sister had died when he was young. And when she died, his young version of making sense of this world he's in is the only things that matter in life are my family and my faith. Now that makes perfect sense as a 10-year-old or something trying to make sense of his world. And it's not that that's totally false, but it's a set of truth mapped like those magnets with something not true.

He doesn't even know it's there. But here he is as a PhD student at the top university struggling. As soon as he worked it out, we were able to zoom in and begin a process of starting to look at it, untangle it, gently separate it, and enable him to operate at a completely different level. And that's one illustration, but I have spent the last, I don't even talk about it in either essentialism or effortless, really not at all, but that's really been the story of the last 25 years of my life have been unbelievable moments like that with people one-on-one, sometimes in bigger groups where you are listening in a way that gets to the heart of the matter,

sometimes in bigger groups where you are listening in a way that gets to the heart of the matter, these vulnerable but valuable unlocks at the center. This is the process I think you're going through and it will be feeling really messy and really vulnerable partially because the closer you get the higher stakes it is, but also because perhaps there hasn't been like a structured process to try and make sense of this journey. But I think if you think about it more in terms of this onion system, it will help you to go, okay, of course, this feels vulnerable, of course, this is weird. And you know what you're looking for.

What are those meaning frames inside, way down, truths matched with untruths that I can start to identify, unlock, and then be able to release a new way of living and operating. Let's just revisit that now. Again, five years on, everyone can go back and listen to the first episode we did, which was great on essentialism, second episode we did, which was on effortless. And a lot of things have changed for me since the first time that we spoke and I'm interested to get your perspective, having also presumably watched people be introduced to the approach and then grow over time and end

up in different sorts of places. What are the challenges in remaining an essentialist as your career progresses, as everything gets more, as you get closer toward the outcomes that you want, maybe you surpass the outcomes that you want. Take me through the things that people are going to encounter. Well, let's just, let's level set by saying this, that almost everything that has been written and published both in the popular press and in academic circles and certainly online are about our advice for how to become successful and almost nothing has been written about what to

do once you are. Well, that's a problem. And okay, you can say, well, most people are trying to make the journey from zero to one. So maybe the idea is, well, there's a smaller market for the one to infinity market. But I've spent so much of my life working with people in that category that I feel a lot of sympathy and even compassion. Yeah, I would say compassion better even than sympathy because there's a lot of misjudgment, really low quality judgment of people that are successful. Yeah, because if you're trying to go from zero to one and then somebody's up there and they're in three, four, five, 10, it's like, ah, yeah, they're all right.

They're fine. They'll be okay. And it's like, that's because they actually don't understand what it is once you start to get there. So what is someone going to experience? They're going to experience, what's that word where you're, you're standing on a high building, you're looking over at Vertigo. Vertigo.

You definitely, the success Vertigo is definitely part of the problem. Um, it's just like, whoa, why, where even am I now? You know, I've just been trying to get up here, you know, and now I got up here. And now this just feels so strange. And the number of people up here, there's like, you know, down there on level one, there was like a million people. And then as I got up, as I carried on walking up and going up and up and up, you know, the numbers start siphoning out. And now up here, it's like, there's like, there's three people up here and they're

all really busy doing their thing. And I don't know who to talk to or how to operate. And so like the loneliness of leadership and the loneliness of success is huge. And this is one of the reasons that you see the psychological discombobulation of people that achieve success in a sense overnight, even though they almost have always been working for years to get there. But then suddenly it pops, they get into this movie. I had Matthew McConaughey on my podcast

and we've remained friends since. And he's like, you know, the day after his big break happens and the movie comes out, he's like, I walked down the same road the day before and there was like two or three people that looked at me and maybe they weren't even really looking at me. He says afterwards, there was two or three people not looking at him and they might've been looking at him.

The difference was so different. And one of the things he ended up having to do, not immediately, but he like took a year or two out of it just to go, okay, I don't want to, I don't even know where I am anymore and I don't just want to be the rom-com guy. So I had to, he like took a sort of connect the dots year or two. And I thought that was pretty, pretty, um, prescient of him. Pretty, showed a pretty strong degree of foresight to not just become a function of the machine.

And that's, that's basically what I think it is, is that as you're moving up the levels, you're building a machine that's going to produce the thing you want to produce the success and building that system system I think is key to getting from zero to one and even beyond. But there's a certain point at which the machine is working so well. It's like who's serving who? Did I become the cog? Am I now the node in the system I built and I'm just answering to it? Or am I still the creator? And the gravitational pull of success is so strong that it is harder to escape it.

I mean, truly, success traps are harder to escape than failure traps. Failure traps are incentivized to change. Success traps are incentivized to carry on. And so it takes a greater self-awareness to be able to push apart and not be a cog in the system, but separate and look at the system. Okay. What is happening here? What is the state of affairs?

How is it all working? And do I want to enter that system again? Or how would I now want to change it for the next 10 years of my life? Or the next, in your case, you're saying five years. That's sort of a key metric, the last five years where you were now for the next five years. So I think it's that, it's the escape from it

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

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

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

and all of those things are so loud. It's like, how do I get myself to observe again? How do I not just get to the next party in the next moment and the next opportunity in the next flight in the next? That's the journey, I think, to help become successful at success. And if you think about some of the horror stories of success in the past, and there's a lot to pull from, you can see why success can become such a catalyst for failure because it takes us away

from the observer role where we can actually get clarity about our life. What's happening? So what? Now what? That question from the observer position seems to be the right process at all levels of success, but man, it's harder at the highest levels. But the other element is you're learning to say no to things that previously you would have begged to have had the opportunity to say yes to. And for every unit of effort that you put in now, however many years hence, the impact that you have is a thousand times or a hundred times what it would have been in the beginning.

So you're telling me that the pressure and the implications are greater than it's ever been and the temptation for distraction is greater than it's ever been. And the temptation for distraction is greater than it's ever been. Right. And my resilience is going to be pulled on more by more things than it's ever been. Right. And I need to do, I need to do all of this. I need to spin this thing in a neutral bolt up to make something

that's actually what I want. And, um, yeah, it yeah, it's a fascinating challenge. It's a really fascinating challenge. Alex talks about, you know that scene in The Matrix where the woman in the red dress walks past them and Morpheus says, Neo, are you looking at me or are you looking at the woman in the red dress? Turn around.

And he says, you know, you have to learn on the come up to be able to ignore a hypothetical 10. He says, yeah, but know, you have to learn on the come-up to be able to ignore a hypothetical 10. He says, yeah, but what about a hypothetical 1000 or what about 1000 hypothetical 1000s? And that's this ever, it's like reverse habituation. You know, you've got the sort of hedonic treadmill. This is like the hedonic no, you need to be able to ever, ever more sensitively say no to ever more attractive things that look ever more enticing,

but you need to continue to be able to say no. And then, you know, you actually need to be able to pull the trigger and say, well, maybe this is such a step change, maybe this speaks to me so much, this is the opportunity that I've been looking for. And all of this needs to occur at once. And to put the icing on the top of the cake, you need to do all of it while no one gives you sympathy. While everybody says, well, that's a champagne problem.

Oh my God, you too many options. How out of touch, you know, it's so unrealistic. Do you not know that people are dying? You don't know that people are in poverty. You go, dude, if you are the sort of person that wants to be successful, this is precisely the sort of problem that you are going to face. The only issue is that you're not facing it right now. So yeah, that altogether, that thousand hypothetical

one thousandth more impact than you've ever had before, more distraction than you've ever had before, more options than you've ever had before, playing at a level that you've never been at, and you still need to be able to say no, it's not easy. Well, one thought that comes to mind, or two thoughts, I guess, one is Elon Musk mentioned at one point that for every minute he spends on Tesla, that's worth a million dollars.

That's what he estimates. So think about that, right? Like it's so easy to be, to, I mean, if a culture gets infected with envy, and then what you produce is a lot of like moral, immoral pride looking up. Of course, you can have pride looking down. You can be one up because of success and achievement. But there is a different kind of pride, right?

There's a different kind of ego looking up going, well, they look at them, they're all right. And it's easy for them. And if only I had that, then I'd be, you know, so that happens too. And I think that's as blind as the opposite because it lacks all the empathy and the complexity of what life is like. Why is it that not 100% of the time, but a very high percent of the time, people that win the lottery discombobulate?

Why is that? It's worth pausing about because everyone who plays the lottery presumably wants to win and believes that if they win, life will immediately be better for them. And it's not what happens. So that's worth thinking about because whether you win the lottery or you just achieve something more than you expected to or things work out for you, you're still in the same situation. And it's like, if you can't manage level one, why do you think you can play at level a thousand? You know, if you're in a computer simulation or if you're in a, if you're just in, you know, if you're, if you're playing a computer game and you can't do level one yet.

If someone just gives you some hack and now you're in a level a hundred at the same game, why do you think being at the level means you can perform at the level? And so it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a, I would say it's a slightly tragic thing to wake up to and go, Oh, I got to this level, whatever that level is now. And now I have to learn a new set of skills and a new way of thinking. Oh, I've got to do it again. No arriving. I've got to do it again.

I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. Absolutely. And, and, and like, so, so, so there's, I mentioned it previously just with a six minute planning process of going from confusion to clarity to creation, but of course it applies way beyond a daily process. This, I think the acceptance that everybody faces confusion and a level of chaos every day of their lives. And I was talking to a very successful entrepreneur investor recently who said, Apple, Google, all of the top brands in the world,

all of these companies that we think operate in a certain kind of way, he says, when you work there, that this is true, when you work there, you're just dealing with confusion and chaos every day. That's still what you're managing. And so you are presenting to the world a certain brand, and that's not that that's a lie, but somehow in the way it's presented,

people can easily assume, well, behind the curtain, everything's smooth, everyone's, no, you know, Tim Cook and the executives there, and I've worked with enough of the executives to know what I'm talking about with it. They're just dealing constantly with the unknown of that next level of success. And so upgrading yourself for the current level you're at.

Yeah, it's, it's not what we expect. It's not, it's not what's expected. Just going back to, you know, what we were talking about before this sort of. Arc from distraction to disorientation. Obviously we're in a world where technology, social media gives us a lot of access to information. It's very easy to make comparisons about what you should be doing versus what others are doing. And it's, it's kind of like option anxiety in a way. How do you recommend sifting through the bullshit and determining what information and advice is actually good or bad for us?

Should people just turn it all off? Basically, to what degree should we be seeking external influence to determine what's right for us to be putting our efforts into? I think what you begin with is this assumption that every single person watching this, right, and I suppose it's happening in this moment, right? They're watching or listening to this, it's two more people sharing thoughts and so on. It's like, if you're alive today, you are having more opinion inputs.

It's not information overload anymore, right? It's opinion overload. You have more opinion inputs than anybody ever. And it's from people that know you less well than in any other previous era. So the gap and possibility for, you know, for irrelevance is really high. You know, like if, if my daughter comes home from school today and,, and, and before I even listened to her, I just play a podcast for her, or I just, you know, I just read, I just read off of, of X, you know, some statement that someone made, you know, just read it to them.

Like what are the chances that what I'm going to share is going to be the most relevant thing that could be said to her in this moment, right? That's very, very low. And that's sort of the problem. So I think you begin by just assuming, oh, you could be below average in your consumption of opinions today and you'd still have an opinion overload problem.

So I think with that, I mean, maybe one thing I would recommend to your question, what do you do? I think if you fast from social media, for a certain period of time, let's say even if you do it once a year, you say, okay, five days, no social media, cut out that noise. You don't have to go to Hawaii to do it, right?

Like you just go, okay, for one week, I'm just not going to do it. And notice the difference. Notice what happens to your thinking. Notice what you notice. That to me is one good rule of thumb. I think a second thing that I would recommend is people, maybe again,

it's like a once a year spring cleaning, but go through everybody you're following and just start from zero. Like right now, imagine you didn't work following anyone, who would you select to follow? Who are the people now that you think are going to give you the most relevant insight for your life today?

I think that that idea of starting from zero is a better mindset switch than, let's look at the whole list and remove one or two people. It's like, start the other way around, go to zero and see what might be relevant. See who now is going to be helping you go forward. What have the impact of these voices been on you on the last year?

Did they help you? Did they just add more clutter to your life? Are the things you really care about better? I had Brad Smith on my podcast. He's the president of Microsoft. He is one of the only technologists who openly admits to the, well, he wrote a book about it. It's called Tools and Weapons.

And just the admission that all technology can be both, all of it. I've worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years now. It is so rare that anyone admits that, especially if they're being paid not to admit it. So you just always seeing only the upsides. Anyway, one of the things that he has said about this, he said for a hundred years, all of the technology that we have has made it easier to connect with people who live far from us at the cost of the people who live closest to us.

And so you can take that and turn it into a sort of algorithm for life because you can say, oh, right, they only make money if I'm not spending time listening to my wife or my daughter or my son. Like that's the only time any technologist is making money, is if I am not doing that communications work, that face-to-face work. And as soon as you see that, you're like, oh, well, that makes everything for, well, he's saying a hundred years,

but let's just say the last 10 years, that makes the last 10 years make a lot of sense. You know, what's happened to the gen, you know, deep friendships have gone down in all, in every single category, male, female, and all age points. But over the last 10 years, the biggest drop off has been in men, I think sort of age 30 plus. Now, that doesn't mean that they're worse than anybody else, but the drop off has been higher over that period of time. It's like, well, why is that happening? Well, because simultaneously, technology, gaming, social media has had its heyday, uncontrolled

growth. So, you're making a trade-off. And so, I think that if you put sort of all of those together, like maybe give you one more rule, I think it's like technology offered a set time per day. I'm not always great at that to be honest, but we went through a period over this summer when I really was doing it and immediately the quality of my life went up immediately because what happened is it was like, okay, we're going to, you know, let's get around and talk and we'll just laugh.

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

of money at the cost of connection between humans that live together and are close together. That's what it is. And I'm not saying it's only that or all the time that that's what I think it is right now. What an apocalyptic way to end. I love it. Greg McKeown, ladies and gentlemen, honestly, you've been a huge influence on me. It's so great to have you in my life.

It's so great that you put this stuff out and I love the fact you've revisited it. You've got, what have you got? You've got new things, new books, new bits and pieces. What should people go and check out? Look, Essentialism 10 year anniversary, that's updated. Of course, the Essentialism planner, if people, depending when this is, if they go to essentialism.com, there's a whole set of additional tools and tools that couldn't make it into the planner that people can get and so on.

Totally free and a really high quality course. If you go to gregmcuhin.com, in 10 seconds you can sign up. It's called Less But Better and it takes the best of essentialism and effortless into these 30- day course. It's 10 classes spread out over that time. And, and it's just, where do we begin? You know, here we are, we've talked about so many things. It's totally overwhelming.

Uh, but where do you begin? Start with this less, but better course. I think those are three things to go with. Yeah. I think the, you know, going into the new year, uh, that planner is, is, is great timing and, um, you know And I think a lot of people, everyone should go back and listen to the first ever episode that I did with you,

just search Greg McEwing, Modern Wisdom, and it'll come up. It'd be kind of funny to see how much both of us have changed. You haven't aged, but I don't know whether either of us have aged actually. But I think it's a good time. I think it's really, really good timing.

New year, some structure. I'm a big fan of a planner. I've used them a lot. And I've got your new one downstairs. So that'll be the first 90 days of next year. We'll be used with that. Greg, until next time, mate, I'm really excited to see what you write next. And like I say, I'm genuinely so thankful that you're in my life.

I'm so thankful for the work that you do. Yeah, likewise. Thank you, Chris.