The Food Medic - S7 E1:How to achieve MORE by doing LESS with Greg McKeown

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

In this episode Dr Hazel speaks to author of Essentialism and Effortless Greg Mc Keown on how to pursue less to achieve more and how to make it easier to do what matters most. Most people equate more effort to better results or faster results, but getting ahead doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it - and Greg has a better way. This conversation covers the following topics:- The pursuit of less to achieve more- How to think like an essentialist- Setting boundaries and learning to say no- How to make the most essential activities the easiest ones- Setting goals and holding a sustainable pace - Turning tedious tasks into enjoyable ones If you loved this episode make sure to give it a review, rating (hopefully 5 stars) and share it with your friends and family. Make sure to subscribe so that you are first to hear about any new episodes, and if you would like to submit a question to the podcast - on any topic related to health, fitness, nutrition, or mindset - please send your voice recorded question to [e-mail]. @thefoodmedic/www.thefoodmedic.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. Hello and welcome back to a brand new

season of the Food Medic podcast. I'm your host as always, Dr. Hazel Wallace. I'm a medical doctor, nutritionist, author and founder of the Food Medic and it's so very nice to be back speaking to you again. I can't really believe that we're back on season seven already but I'm so grateful to those who have stuck around from the start and a very big welcome to those who are joining us for the first time. Hello, welcome, come on in. So this episode may have been my, maybe my favourite episode ever. Not only is today's guest someone I really admire and respect but I've learned so much from him through reading his books and even in the short hour that we spoke when recording this episode I felt was invaluable to me in terms of the advice

he provided and the stories that he told he's just full of energy full of wisdom shares so many tips and things to think about and I don't think we could have picked a better guest to help you kickstart the new year. So dear friends, our guest today is author of Essentialism and Effortless, Greg McKeown. Greg is a speaker, a best-selling author and host of the popular podcast, What's Essential. He has been covered by the New York Times, Fast Company, Fortune, Politico and Inc. and has been interviewed by NPR, NBC, Fox and the Steve Harvey Show and is among the most popular bloggers for LinkedIn. He is also a young global leader for the world economic. His New York Times bestselling book, Essentialism, The Disciplined

Pursuit of Less, has sold more than a million copies worldwide. So if you haven't read his books already, absolutely recommend that you do that. But in the meantime, without further ado, here is Greg McKeown. Okay, it's the start of a new year and I know some people are looking to make some healthy changes, be that moving more, eating more greens or taking up running. One switch I made last year was cutting down on alcohol and as a result I swapped in kombucha as the perfect alternative. I used to brew my own and sometimes I still do but it's a bit of a labour of love and so now I have the fridge stocked with Remedy kombucha for times when I fancy something a little bit more exciting than still or sparkling water.

My personal favourites are the ginger and lemon and apple crisp flavours but they have loads to choose from. Remedy is also unpasteurised, raw and jam-packed with live cultures and contains no sugar due to the long age brew. If you want to try some for yourself, use the code FOODMEDIC20 for 20% off your first order on RemedyDrinks.com. Thank you to Remedy for sponsoring the Food Medic podcast. Well, for those who don't know who you are and for people who may not know your backstory, I would love to just start there. If you could tell us a bit more about you, who you are and for people who may not know your backstory, I would love to just start there. If you could tell us a bit more about you, who you are, what you do and kind of what inspires

you. I think that we probably have to take a walk down memory lane into Silicon Valley companies where I'm working with all of these interesting companies that seem to go through a predictable pattern, they would be very focused in the beginning. And then that focus would lead to success. And that success would breed options and opportunities. And all that sounds like the right problem to have. But it does, in fact, turn out to be a problem if it leads to what Jim Collins has called the undisciplined pursuit of more. And if you fall into that pattern, you start to plateau in your progress or even start to fail altogether. And I noticed this happening to companies, you know, small and large at almost every age of their development. But then in the midst of that, I found that it was true, not just for organizations,

but for individuals, not least myself, when I received an email from my manager at the time that said look Friday between one and two would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby because I needed to be at this client meeting and to my shame I went to the meeting and I made a fool's bargain I violated something you know I was falling into the undisciplined pursuit of more and and what I learned was simple enough which is if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. And that, you know, in part set me off on a long journey now of trying to understand why it is that we do what we do and how we can make sure we design lives around what really matters. And that's how Essentialism was born. And then Effortless more recently is all about

trying to help people who are feeling busy, but not necessarily productive, stretched too thin at work or at home. Or since the pandemic, it's changed a little. Those things I think are still totally relevant, but there's something else of like people teetering right on the edge of burnout. They wish they could accomplish more, but there's not enough energy or just the sensation that everything is harder than it needs to be. All of those are sort of litmus tests for where essentialism and effortless can be useful.

And that's where I spend my life. Yeah, and such important work because I think you made, I mean, you made so many important points there. And I do think the pandemic has created this almost pandemic of burnout because a lot of us feel especially if we're working from home that we're not doing very much or we don't feel as productive but actually we're probably working longer hours we're not putting in as good quality work but we just feel like we need to be there all the time, putting in the hours

and not getting that respite that we would get if we were commuting from work and back again. And of course, you're dealing with the external stresses of the news and the things that are going on around you. Yes, what you're saying is right. I think there's a sort of a bit of a perfect storm here and a sort of Zoom, eat, sleep, repeat life, right? That's sort of the, you know, that was part of the inheritance of the pandemic. Any sense of boundary that we had before is gone because of the digitization of everything. There's no natural beginning and end to anything. So if you have a device, then you're on and it goes to six, seven, 10 o'clock at night, 11 o'clock, it just keeps going. And it's

not that we're necessarily being more productive, but it's just a relentlessness. And then you've got to add in, you know, there's, there are all sorts of threads to this, there's an isolation that causes burnout, I think that might be one of the main factors of burnout. It's not just doing more, it's doing it more alone, is's being less heard. It's having less connection with people. And actually, I think that's exceedingly painful for people. I think it causes mental health challenges. I think it causes, you know, increases all these senses of strain that we're talking about. All of that filters up into the headline, right? The news, so to speak. And that said something like this, that there's just two kinds of people in the world right now. There are people who are burned out,

and then there are people who know they are burned out. And it's better to be in the second category because you could do something about it. But nevertheless, we have, you know, we have this the burnout problem. Let me share one more layer to that problem, which is that for people listening to this, right, a lot of the people listening to this are achievers and overachievers, and maybe even insecure overachievers. That's one of the reasons they're listening is because they want to improve. And so even though they're, you know, maybe they're exercising right now, but they're also listening to this podcast, this conversation, or they're cleaning up and they're doing this as well. I mean, they're trying to get a lot out of life.

And here's where it becomes what I call a 10x dilemma. And that is that the people listening to this, it's like everybody listening wants better results. Let's call it even 10x results. They want 10x. They want to get to that next level. But nobody listening to this can work 10 times harder. So that's the dilemma. And the moment you face that dilemma, as soon as that becomes clear, the whole premise of my latest published research, this AKA Effortless, it becomes relevant. Suddenly you go, oh, I've got to find a different, better, simpler, easier way to get results. Because otherwise, I'm going to keep burning out and I still won't have actually got the results I want.

So my position is that what got us here won't get us there. And so we have to learn a new way of doing, a new way of working, a new way of living in order to be able to break through to the next level, but without burning out. And it just seems to have the power of relevancy right now. And in a sense, that's a shame. It's good for the book, maybe, but it's not it's not great for for perhaps uh you know as individually yeah no absolutely i completely agree but i think when we don't feel like we're getting the results that we want it's very easy to just feel like we need to push more and try harder and put in more hours when actually a lot of what you say in your book especially in in Effortless, is that, you know, there's an easier path. And actually, it's trying less hard, almost. And I think that's, you know, it's a conundrum for people to get their head around. So mostly, I definitely want to come back to that. But for

those who don't have your books, or have not read them, I've got them here beside me. What are the key differences between Effortless and Essentialism, if you can summarize them? Yes, I mean, essentialism, there's a few ways to think about them. Essentialism is like about figuring out what are the right things, and effortless is about doing them in the right way. And it really matters, right? I see those as equally important now. Another way of thinking about essentialism is about, you know, one word might be prioritization. What are the essential few things? Effortless is in one word is simplification. How are we making this harder than it needs to be to get the thing done?

I mean, those are those are two quick ways of thinking about the difference between essentialism and effortless. And when you bring them together, I mean, now this is a presumptuous example, maybe too presumptuous. But like if you think about like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, you know, they both created music separately. But when they came together, it created something, you know, greater than the sum of their parts. And I think of essentialism and effortless like that, that together it becomes, somebody said it this way to me recently, they said it sort of becomes healthy productivity. And I thought that was not a bad description, you know, as an umbrella idea, that there's a different way to do life. And you've got to focus on the essential versus all the trivial, but then you've also got to do it in a humane way. Otherwise, you'll just be sort of a perfectionist who's pretending to be an essentialist. You know, you're still just

wear yourself out and overthink and overexert and therefore underperform. And this is territory that you sort of have to be an overachiever to really have the problems we're talking about, but that doesn't make them less of a problem. No, absolutely. And I think let's start with essentialism. And that was your first book. And like you said, it's about like prioritizing what is the essential. So how does an essentialist live? Well, an essentialist thinks and does and gets really different things than a non-essentialist, the enemy, so to speak, of our story. An essentialist thinks almost everything is non-essential. Only a few things really matter, whereas a non-essentialist thinks that almost everything is essential. And so even just that single mindset shift means that they act really

differently. An essentialist, it's the disciplined pursuit of less. It's less but better. Whereas in a non-essentialist, and I used the phrase before, but it's the undisciplined pursuit of more. So what do their behaviors look like? Well, an essentialist is figuring out what really is essential, creating space to think, to actually prioritize. Everyone knows kind of what prioritization means, but my experience is that actually people react to their email living in their inbox, react to the latest urgent thing in their life, hitting them, the latest Zoom meeting, the latest request, text, whatever, the collaboration tool that's hitting them. And so they're not really prioritizing in a sense other than I'll just do whatever is hitting me most right now. What do they get? I mean, an essentialist gets a life that satisfies. They know the right things got done. There's some joy in the journey.

A non-essentialist gets to the end of the day. They're lying in bed. They don't even know. They've been busy all day, but maybe all night, but they don't know if the right things got done. It's just a very unsatisfying way to live, exhausting way to live. There they don't know if the right things got done. It's just a very unsatisfying way to live, exhausting way to live. There's not the joy in the journey. There's a, you know, it's a sense of I'm successful in some ways, but so unsatisfying. I'm like winning at

the wrong game maybe in life or something like that. And so that's kind of a breakdown of the contrast, an essentialist versus a non-essentialist. Yeah. And I think with kind of that non-essentialist mindset, you end up chasing down a to-do list. And it's often someone else's to-do list. Like you said, it's emails, it's other people's agendas. And then you just spend your entire day doing that. You get to the end of the day, you may have ticked off most of those things, but have you achieved what you wanted to achieve to kind of move the needle forward? And oftentimes that's not the case.

And so, yeah, you're getting the work done. You're probably like, you know, a very successful employee, but like, are you satisfied, like you said? And so what I think people find difficult as well is deciphering what's essential and you know what's trivial what's just a distraction and how do you decipher well you know one one thing to say is I mean like let's just start at the most obvious basic level most people if you ask them hey write down everything that all the projects and tasks are just all the stuff that's in your head, they could probably do that. They might not have done that, but they can do

that. But then if you say, okay, now just go through and prioritize it. It's not that it's impossible task. It's just that they're not doing that right now. So they don't have a prioritized task list. If I say, give me your prioritized task list for the day, just show it to me. Most people don't have it. If I say, give me your prioritized task list for the day, just show it to me. Most people don't have it. If I say, give me your prioritized projects list for the month, most people can't pull it out. Oh, here it is. I'll print it up for you. Here's my list in priority order.

And so one of the simplest things one can do is to just spend just a few minutes every day, and you make that list. And what you're trying to discern is a couple of ways of thinking about this. You're trying to apply the 90% rule. You're trying to say, okay, of all these tasks, which things are 90% or above essential? Which are the really vital things? And they're hidden from view often by all the busyness. Yesterday, my wife and I were trying to do this. We felt completely overwhelmed. So many things going on, right? It's the holiday season. We've got all these different commitments and plus some major projects that are coming in. I totally felt like I was falling into non-essentialist type, certainly the type of experience I've been

describing. And at first it was all quite frustrating. And then we sat down and really wrestled with all these different things. We didn't quite make a list as I've just described, but we were talking through that list. And it became clear through the process of talking about it. Oh, this is the major thing we need to do. And we weren't even working on it. And we spent almost the rest of the day working on that single, I mean, there were multiple parts to it, but a single project we knew was the essential thing. And by the end of the day, we were confident we did the most important thing we could have done today. We did it. And so, you know, that's what it looks like.

I mean, I think the process can feel a bit messy if you're really doing this right. You're wrestling with incomplete information and all sorts of tasks, and you're trying to discern between them going, look, if I could only do one thing today, what would it be? And most of the time, there really is something that is disproportionately important. And in the wrestle, and maybe you have to talk about it with someone else who's not so in the clutter with you. If somebody a little far removed from it, and as you wrestle with it, you're going to go, oh, that's really the thing. Anyway, that's a kind of a process.

I know that sounds a little messy, but that's the kind of process. I think if you're doing that day in and day out, that's really the discipline pursuit. And that's what you're trying to do each day. And you can either be in the wrestle and get to clarity you know that's the disciplined pursuit or you just you don't get in that wrestle and that's the undisciplined pursuit of more you'll just be doing more and more all the time reactively and frenetically and frantically yeah i agree and i think the writing down process is so important so i'm a doctor and when I work in the hospital, you know, after a ward round, you have your list of patients, you have loads of jobs,

you need to get done. So and so needs blood, so and so needs a scan, discharge paperwork, blah, blah, blah. And then the nurse is calling you, someone else is on the phone. And it's so overwhelming. Like, regardless of how many days I've worked or how many years I've been working it's still overwhelming but every day I need to sit down and I write out my list and then I star the most important things so I know like this is life-saving discharge paperwork can stay to the end although I know that you know other people in the hospital will kind of move around their own priorities and that's what keeps me really level headed. And it's so simple. It's just a piece of paper and a pen. And when I'm working from home, and I'm organizing podcasts and things like that, I still do the same thing. I'm still sitting down

in the morning, what are my most essential tasks? What does my day, like a completed day look like for me? And then these are kind of the tasks I can add on as a bonus if I find that I've got time. Yeah, you know, and as simple as that sounds, I mean, that's the practice. That's a habit. And to do it daily, and then to do it weekly, and then to do it monthly and quarterly, right, to have this flow of prioritization. It took me a long time to realize that this wasn't happening. I thought, you know, people are doing it, but not much. But actually, now I find like a lot of people just aren't doing it at all. Maybe they do. Sometimes they'll do it at work, but not in their personal life. Yeah. Or this too, because let's just extend our conversations with a little bit to interpersonal

essentialism, right? Like to be able to do it with others. Let's say you've got your list now, right? And that's your, and that helps, my goodness, it helps because that gives you something to keep coming back to. But let's say you've got the list, then you still have to interact with other people. Most people, if not everybody has some kind of boss, somebody they're answering to. And then you have to figure out how to have the conversation. And my experience with this is that a lot of people think that they either can give a polite yes or a rude no. And it's just to discover and remember, develop a heightened awareness for that third option of negotiating. I was trying to persuade my

daughter to read a book all in one day. It was an important book and it wasn't too long. And I just say, oh, you should read it today. You could get the whole thing done. She was pushing back and then she wrote a note. I came back into the office and she wrote a note to me. Let me read it to you. She wrote, I already expressed my unwillingness to read this book, but I'm willing to make a counteroffer. I am not willing to read it all in one day today, but I'd be happy to explore the possibility of reading it in the future over the course of a few weeks. I believe it would be best to wait till the end of my literature assignment. If you would like me to read this book

in place of a separate assignment and over the course of a few weeks i'm sure that can be made possible what a counter argument amazing yeah she's used 14 when she wrote that note and i you know i was impressed by the precision of what she said and the fact that she knew she had a voice and she did it also respectfully and thoughtfully. There's a lot of right stuff going on there. And it's just an example of this. You've got to then develop the skills of negotiating with other people's prioritization. There's a self-empowerment element. She was self-empowered to some degree.

There's a leadership element to that story where on the downside, I'm like, I should have made it safer or listened better when she first was pushing back. Maybe she was already saying this to me. I just wasn't hearing it till the note came through. So that's a note for me to improve. Also, there was enough safety in the relationship. She felt she could communicate this. So there was, you know, you have to keep creating safety because safety is really the space we have

with which to creatively collaborate around what's most important and to be able to have that conversation. And what I said about like people not prioritizing daily themselves, what I've learned for sure is that people are not having these prioritization conversations between each other. Because you just say, oh, well, you do this as if they aren't doing anything. What about, well, what are you working on? And let's make sure that this is the most important thing I'm talking about here. And let's like, prioritize about this in your book and you kind of offer some alternatives of how to go about doing this or advice for people who struggle to say no.

Yes, I mean, there's a whole repertoire of no, that's literally what I caught in the book. I think nine different ways of saying no and just even pausing. One of the nine is just pausing and creating some space before you reactively say yes. If somebody's catching you in person, you can simply say, oh, let me just check my calendar and I'll get back to you. And that's not just a line. Go check your calendar. There's probably more going on in your life than you're thinking about. And you might be able to

do that thing. Of course, I'm not advocating people saying no to everyone and everything without really thinking about it. You know, that's not the point. It's essentialism. And it's just creating enough space, again, for yourself to be able to think, is this the right thing for me to be doing? Is this the best use of me? It might be, yes. I mean, I'm fully in favor of service.

I think life is contribution. And essentialism is supposed to help people make their highest point of contribution. Yeah, that's it. I mean, easier said than done. But like you said, there's so many different ways of doing it and reframing it and taking that moment. So important. And so we've kind of focused on how to find out what's essential and focus on what is essential. But moving on to what makes it effortless or what makes the work easier or even enjoyable.

That's what you cover as well. What is the effortless state? Well, let me just step one inch back and then come back to the question. I mean, you said in passing, it's just a turn of phrase, but you just used it a moment ago. You said, I mean, that's easier said than done. That's what you said when talking about prioritization and essentialism and so on. I mean, that's the whole point right there. You're not wrong to say, oh, yeah, well, that's easier said

than done to be an essentialist. In a sense, you're not wrong. And in a sense, it's like, yeah, but like what if there are ways that make it a lot easier? What if we are caught up in a mindset that makes it harder than it needs to be to be an essentialist? This is like non-trivial, right? Because let's say, right, so we've talked about one mindset shift, essentialist and non-essentialist, right? There's that one mindset. But then there's another, right? You say, okay, I'm going to be an essentialist now.

There's a hard way and an easier way to go about doing that. And that's, I keep saying it's massive, but that sounds like hyperbole. But it's like a lot of overachievers believe that not only hard work is a virtue, it goes further to the point of unhelpfulness by saying, well, ease is something to be distrusted. And for a lot of people, they have a little model in their head. They don't know they have this until it's expressed for them a certain way, but it's like they believe that easy equals lazy. And the thing about that is that it literally doesn't, right? Like those are not the same word and they don't have the same definition. Easy is that something doesn't require a lot of effort. Lazy is that you're not willing to put in effort. Easy does not equal lazy.

We don't want to be lazy. Fine. Great. Move that aside. But we do want to find the easiest, simplest, best ways to do what's essential. We do want that. That is virtuous. That is good. That is noble. That is right. Because then you can actually do those things and you can do them consistently. And so then you can break through to the next level. I mean, one of the examples I know that you wanted to state, and we'll have to come back to that in a different answer, but like, you know, I'm thinking about you as a doctor and I'm thinking about the whole idea of ways to make results, patient results easier. And the whole, you know, the checklist manifesto and the idea that the simplest tool of just having checklists for when you're, you know, you're coming in and everyone washes their hands and they're following a checklist, instead of letting that be a mental process. If you live in a world that is increasingly complex with incredible amounts of knowledge as the information age has created in medicine and

beyond, and then you try to process that life and deal with that life through mental exertion, which is what we really mean when we say effort. So mental exertion is what we mean by effort. And if you put complexity and exponential increase of knowledge on your head, it will fry your brains and you still won't get great results. And so this is why doctors and nurses forget to wash their hands. They're not trying to be foolish in their work. It's just there's so much to process. And so you need an easy solution that removes some of that mental exertion and helps you to perform better. So there's an example, and we don't have to go into it in depth, but there's an example of like, we can have to go into it in depth but there's an example of

like we can do that in our lives we can create checklists for almost everything that's essential in our life so that we have to think less protect our ability to think for the things that have not yet been solved in our lives and so i mean that there's a way of getting to your question about effortless state. Effortless state is where we have removed those burdens mentally and physically and mental fogginess that comes from just constantly thinking the only way to get better results is to exert more mental effort on doing it that leads to a state of mental exhaustion a state of exhaustion uh and and is not optimal in getting great results no i completely agree and i'm so glad that you kind of took what I said and turned it on its head because we say these things, but you're absolutely correct. And it's almost about streamlining and making things automated so that you don't suffer from decision fatigue of like thinking about all of these things you need to do. And you're able to really focus your attention on what's important. And I guess that was my question,

like how can we make it easier to focus when we've got all of these distractions and things to worry about? Yes, and look, now that we're riffing on, or at least I am on the medical profession, I mean, like the data is pretty strong that like if you have exhausted doctors, you get worse patient outcomes.

And that data-driven observation in a culture within medicine that encourages exactly the opposite behavior, it's very intuitive as soon as you think about it, really, because you say, well, if you're about to go into surgery, do you want an exhausted surgeon or do you want a well-rested surgeon? Which do you think is going to get you better results? And so we have got to shift this mindset. And the term I like for this is just invert. Invert is to see something in an opposite way. And insecure overachievers and then the cultures they create often almost exactly opposite of what they should actually be.

A bit like George Cost costanza in in seinfeld you remember that episode of the way that do the opposite no george costanza is you know total failure just about just about everything he ever does and every decision he makes exactly what you shouldn't do and so then he has this idea like to do the opposite, to do the opposite of his intuition every time. And then everything starts working for him, at least for like one episode worth, right? And in a sense, that's what I'm challenging people to do with Effortless is as a high performer, it's like, do the opposite of what your intuition says. Your intuition is good. Your impulse, I won't say intuition, your impulse is, okay, I'm not getting the results I want. I have to work harder. And you say, no, don't work harder. Find an easier path. University manager who I was mentoring, this is like someone who was up till 4am in the morning photoshopping for the youth program at church the next day. You know, like no one's asking you to do that.

She's not being paid to do it. It's not a job. It's not a family. And yet this is what she thinks is the way to better performance. She's the kind of person who doesn't eat lunch. And there's many high performers that feel somewhere close to that. You know, they feel if they do eat lunch, it's quickly while they're doing something else,

while they're doing a Zoom call. It's not dissimilar, but she wouldn't even take lunch. And I said to her, OK, next time someone asks you to do something, I want you to invert your normal response to look at it from the opposite perspective. So she gets a call from a professor who says, I want you to come and video my class for the semester. She's like, I know how to do this. You know, like I'm going to bring a whole team of, you know, team with me. We'll video this from multiple angles. We're going to then edit it all together. We're going to add music in the beginning. And at the end, we'll add some graphics

and we'll put his slides in between. And we'll just, we're just, wow, this could be the best thing he's ever seen. And then she remembers, she's like, oh, hold on. That's my normal way of being like, let me invert it. Let me do almost the opposite. And she she remembers, she's like, oh, hold on. That's my normal way of being. Let me invert it. Let me do almost the opposite. And she says, how could I make this effortless? And so since she just pauses with him for a minute and she starts asking a few more questions, try and see, could there be a strategy, a simpler strategy? It turns out it's just for one student who's going to miss just a few classes. And the solution they come up with is to have another student in the class to record it on their iPhone and just send it after the class

whenever he's going to miss. The professor's delighted with that solution. He hadn't thought about it. He's overcomplicating it. She hangs up. It's taken her 10 minutes versus four months for an entire team's worth of work. And he's happier with this solution than what she would have produced, because that was overproduction. In that little simple story is the power here, right? I've already mentioned the question, but let's ask it one more time, right? How am I making this harder than it needs to be? That's the idea of inversion. And people can start doing that right now, immediately. And so that's a power question, I think, in Effortless. Yeah, really powerful question. And kind of second to that question, which is something that you also

cover is like, how can I make it enjoyable? And I think this also resonates with a lot of the work that James Clear does with Habit Building. And so how can we make kind of essential work enjoyable? I mean, even the question itself can be a disruption, right? When something is something really important, but it's a chore to you, which is true for many of the essential things we procrastinate. You just asked a different question about it. So it's not just, oh, how can I just get myself to do this chore? You just ask yourself, how can I make this enjoyable?

And this is the thing. I mean, it's not just to create a habit is to create a ritual. And that's one of the ways where this strategy is a little different than just the habit formation. Habits are repeatedly what you do. The ritual is how you do it. And that there can be pleasure in the way you do a thing. You know, in the pattern for habit formation, right? You know, there's a cue and there's an action and there's a reward and so on. But in that, there's generally a space between the thing you're doing and the reward you get for doing it. You get the reward afterwards. You get the dopamine hit afterwards. But this strategy that I'm advocating is where it's the way you're doing

it that produces the joy. That's the ritual. A ritual is a habit with a soul. You know, I mean, one of the good examples that people can relate to if they've managed to apply it in a helpful way is like think of Marie Kondo when she's teaching the world suddenly. Think of that life-changing magic of tidying up. I mean, it's so counterintuitive right on the face of it. Nothing about tidying up sounds life-changing or magic, right? Especially the way that we've done it in the United States from the Western world. It's like, that is a pure chore. But what she introduced that I thought was so clever is the art of tidying up. There was a way to do it that even in the doing you go, I'm enjoying this, this ritual,

this way of folding this item, the way that as I fold it, it sits up perfectly. So that's satisfying in the work. And that's what we're trying to do with this strategy is to say, don't just let something be essential and, okay, I'll muscle my way through it. Say, well, if it's essential, let's create a ritual that I can actually start to enjoy. And maybe that seems a bit much, but in our family, tidying up after dinner was a complete chore, impossible task, frustrating. It's important work. It needs to be done every day, otherwise you live in chaos. And it was only when we, you know, it's only when we made enjoyable ritual music going on when I made Dorsey's and put on Disney songs, which some people are like, I'm glad I'm not in their family, you know. But it was creating an experience, a a ritual and you can do that in other ways too so so you're creating rituals and then you can you can enjoy them and enjoy them doing

them consistently yeah and i think like you said you can apply this to so many other things and thinking about when this podcast will come out um like new year everyone's thinking about new year's resolutions and goals. What kind of advice can you give people who are starting with something new and they don't know like, how to like keep consistent or set off at the right pace? Yeah, well, look, consistency is the whole thing, right? Like this is this is the problem with human performance. We have boom and bust execution. We go big on something, and it's not sustainable. Then we're discouraged about it. There's a little self-loathing,

and there's like distraction to get away from that. And this is the pattern until eventually something else sparks us, and we go through the whole pattern again. So boom and bust execution is our general challenge. So what do you do? I mean, there's a story people may be familiar with, but maybe not familiar with, the whole backstory of the race to the polls. So back in the 1800s, the great age of exploration, everybody was interested in who will be the first

to get to the South Pole, because no one had ever done it. And so people kept trying and failing. And then finally, two teams set off to try and do it. One team, the British team, has one approach. That's what we're saying, boom and bust. And what that looked like is they said, we're going to max out on the good weather days. We're just going to go as far as we possibly can. The problem with that approach, they didn't realize they were also creating the bust part, which is the bad weather days. They were so tired already,

so fatigued and mentally burned out that when the bad weather came, they couldn't make any progress. So they were just stuck in their tents, which of course was not good for morale. And they would write in their journals. That's how we know about it. No team could make progress. I couldn't imagine anyone may make progress in weather like this, the expedition leader wrote. But one team could, and that was the Norwegian team. And the Norwegian team, the expedition leader had a different approach, and that was 15 miles a day, even in good weather. And that doesn't have to be the case in all human performance, but that's how he chose to do it. The plot thickens as their team got within 45 miles of the South Pole.

They don't know where the British team is. So for all they know, the British team could be ahead of them. And the weather conditions are perfect and the sledding conditions are relatively flat. So one huge push, one big push will get them to the South Pole. And they may achieve this thing that no one has ever achieved before. The question is, you know, to you and to me and everyone listening is, what would you do? And it's so obvious, I think, that we would just push through. Yeah. And if I'm honest, I absolutely have to say the same thing. It's just like, yeah, of course, you just would, you just push, finally you do it. But he still doesn't.

He still has the restraint. It takes them three days, averaging 50 miles a day for the last 45 miles. So what happens? The counterintuitive thing is that they arrive 30 plus days before the British team. So this steadiness is far, far, far faster than boom and bust. And we don't realize that. That's how we're somehow conned into thinking that the highest performance looks a certain way, and it doesn't. The highest performance looks much closer to this steadiness.

And so not only that, not only did they get there, they win. The rest of the story really matters because the British team was so demoralized and so burned out by that approach that none of them make it home alive. They all die on the way home. Whereas in the Norwegian team make it the 16,000 mile journey back to Norway. And so it's like kind of a perfect illustration of this contrast between one team that burns out, you know, completely as much as you can burn out and still doesn't achieve their result, or another team that achieves their result, but without burning out. And let me just cap this off with a phrase that's in the biography, the brilliantly written biography called The Race to the Polls, in which the biographer says, the Norwegian team

achieved their progress, achieved their goals, and here's his phrase, without particular effort. That's unthinkable. That's unimaginable. It still blows my mind to this day that he did, because what kind of a thing is that to say? It was the most physically arduous challenge that the world could conceive. He achieved it without particular effort. What is he contemplating? How could he possibly make such a phrase? But then nevertheless, that was sort of in comparison to the other team, in comparison to the other team, in comparison to the approach they might have taken. It was without particular effort. In our own lives, we can do the same. Create upper bounds when we're setting our goal. Fine.

Set a significant goal. Great. Set an amazing goal. Something that's, you just can't believe, would be incredible to achieve by all means. But then set your standards a minimum, but also a maximum, a lower bound and an upper bound on your daily work. And when you get to your upper bound, you stop. You show restraint because you need something in the tank for tomorrow and the day after and the day after. And you'll win not because you were the fastest on a given day, not because you did more, because you'll be doing it when everyone else has quit. It's the most reliable form of competitive advantage that exists is that you are steady when others are burning out. And here we are in a podcast. The number one thing to do to win at podcasting is that you are consistent and that you keep doing it when all the competition fails. There's millions of podcasts

now, and most of them don't make it through three episodes. The advantage is tremendous if you just carry on. You just figure out a path at anless pace and if I if I just had one more rule to this I'll say it this way I'll say you know don't do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow yeah what yeah what an incredible way to kind of round up the podcast but before you go I've got three questions I ask all my guests. The first one is your number one takeaway from this episode that you want the listeners to go away with. It's hard to beat that last one. As I repeat it again, which is don't do more today than you can recover from by tomorrow. Don't do more this week than you can recover from this week and so on.

Don't do more this month than you can recover from this month. I'm making that additional distinction because some days there will be exceptions to that rule, but you don't want to make the exception to that rule be your rule because then you will burn out and you won't always know it. You'll burn out your mental discernment. You'll burn out your physical health. You'll burn out your relationships around you. You'll burn out your physical health. You'll burn out your relationships around you. You'll burn out the culture on your team. And you just start to think it's everybody else.

You won't even know that it's you. And so that's, you know, I think that rule over time is the right rule. Yeah, I agree. The next question is, if you could go back in time and give your 18 year old self one piece of advice, what would it be? thing to say, but I still spend too much of my life with a fear of, okay, if you don't make this happen, if you don't do this, then it might just not work out or you're going to lose it or you're going to, I don't know what exactly the fear is, but a sense of that. And that isn't how it's going to be. That's not what the last 25 years has taught me. And so what that phrase means to me, it's all going to work out better than you think doesn't mean you don't

focus, it doesn't mean you don't care. It just means you get to just relax a bit, you know, so that you don't overexert. You just go from that point of overexertion back into the into the sweet spot. And then you kind of enjoy the journey because it's going to be great yeah I completely agree and the last question other than your own books what one book would you recommend people read and why I just uh just finished reading crime and punishment and I just everyone should read crime and punishment I mean that's you asked me who, everyone should read Crime and Punishment. I mean, that's, you asked me who everyone should read. It's that, in Effortless, I have a whole chapter specifically about reading and about how, you know, reading a book might be the highest leverage activity on earth. You can have access to the best thinking that's ever been written. And one of the ways to know what the best literature is to read is to use what's called the Lindy Law. Basically,

that which has been in print longest, you start with that. It's a kind of citation rule. It's like, it's going, okay, whatever book has been cited by most people over time, whatever, start there. As a result, if you use that criteria, you're going to read the classics. And Crime and Punishment is so readable. When I heard that term crime and punishment it's like oh that's going to be a heavy book you know like that's got to be you know that's that's that's like a legal text and it isn't at all it feels like it was written yesterday is so it feels so and in a sense so modern. Brilliant narrative about a man dealing with, let's say, a tremendous dilemma. And it captures the way people really think. That messiness that we think, that's captured in a way that almost no literature captures.

Most literature, when you hear the inside voice of a character in fiction, they're normally thinking very smoothly. But in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky captures this idea that our thinking is circular and messy and complicated and ridiculous sometimes. And he delivers. He delivers. I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but that is a superb book. Amazing.

That's one of my favorite questions to ask because I feel like you pick up so many good recommendations and I wasn't expecting that one from you but if people do want to go and read your books and I really hope that they do because for me they there's something that I read not just I haven't just read them once I've read them several times and they will remain on my bookshelf and which I can't say about all of the books that I have. So where's the best place to get them? Where can people find more from you? If people are going to do one thing, they should go to gregmckeown.com and sign up for the free one minute Wednesday newsletter. So the one minute thing is trying to keep people sharp on these

ideas, try to be the best, you know, most succinct minute of content online each week. You know, from there, there's other free resources. There's a podcast, the What's Essential podcast. People can sign up and listen to that. Again, an ongoing conversation that they can be a part of. And yeah, I think I would say just, you know, those two. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time. I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this conversation. It's been really great to connect. It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, guys, what an absolute episode. I wrote down so many great quotes and snippets from that episode. I'm not sure about you. So thank you so much for tuning in today. Make sure to subscribe if you haven't already so that you're first to hear about any new episodes and actually in this season we're going to be dropping some mini episodes throughout the season answering your listener questions if you would like to submit a question to the podcast on any topic related to health fitness nutrition or mindset

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