The Jordan Harbinger Show - 429: Greg McKeown | The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Greg McKeown (@GregoryMcKeown) is the host of the What's Essential podcast and author of the New York Times bestseller Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, which challenges core assumptions about achievement (e.g., “more is better”) to get to the essence of what really drives success — on one’s own terms. What We Discuss with Greg McKeown: Essentialism: the antidote to the problems of feeling busy but not productive, stretched too thin in one area of life, and fulfilling the agendas of others but not our own. Learn how to live by design, not by default. Find out how to say “no” effectively without getting in trouble at home — or fired. Discover how to set hard boundaries between work and play. Learn why folks who are originally very good at essentialism can end up ruining their career and their sanity by letting these boundaries slip over time. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/429 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger Show. So here's how it works. Go back to the Silicon Valley companies. You get a few people, small team, focus on the right problem at the right time, and they generate success. What comes with success? Increase in options and opportunities. The idea is that even though it's the right problem to have, it undermines the very focus that led to success in the first place.

And so you find a situation where someone is doing the same things they were doing before. they are still driven, they're still smart, they're still capable, but all of a sudden they are diffused in their efforts. The reason that successful people and organizations don't break through to the next level is success. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. If you're new to the show, we have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional arms dealer, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding

of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. Today, we're talking with my friend Greg McEwen, author of Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. He's also the host of the podcast What's Essential with Greg McEwen. You should listen to this show if you want to learn how you can ensure you prioritize your life effectively so that other people don't do it for you. In other words, how to live by design, not by default. Also discussed is how to say no, effectively without getting into trouble at home or getting fired from work, setting hard boundaries between work and play or non-work, and why folks who are originally very good at essentialism

can end up ruining their career and their sanity by letting these boundaries slip over time. This one's from the vault, and I hope you enjoy it. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors and thinkers every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your own network for free, usually to get jobs, raises, better opportunities, or maybe you'll meet your significant other because of this.

Learn this skill. It is a game changer. Go to Jordanharbinger.com slash course. That course is free there. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course in some way. Come join us.

You'll be in smart company. Now here we go with Greg McEwen. First of all, what is essentialism and how is it different from just being a minimalist? What it is, it's a book about the antidote to the problem. The problem. The problem is that, We are full of the undisciplined pursuit of more.

People everywhere can feel this. So it's a cultural phenomenon. It is feeling busy but not productive. It's feeling stretched too thin at work or at home. It's feeling like other people's agenda kind of hijack your own. Now, that's the experience people are having. And the reason that they're having it is probably a broader conversation. Sure.

But that's like the challenge, the undisciplined pursuit of more. Everybody's just being pulled up into this cultural norm. essentialism is the antidote to that. Right. The discipline, the discipline pursuit of less, as the subtitle indicates. The discipline pursuit of less but better.

It's about quantity versus quality. Instead of just trying to always more, more, more of everything, the key to success, in fact, is doing more and fitting more in. Essentialism says, no, it's about doing less but better, fewer things done better.

That this is really the way to break. And this is different from minimalism because minimalism sort of has a connotation that has to do with possessions, physical items, whereas essentialism is about your working life or about your day-to-day, your calendar, not intangibles, maybe. Yeah, so, I mean, I use the metaphor of the closet to explain the process of essentialism.

Your closet's overloaded, right? And eventually you say, I'm going to tidy it out, and you have to become more selective, thoughtful about what you really want and what you don't want. You have to get more extreme criteria of the things you love versus the things that you just like or you might use eventually. And then you eliminate, you get rid of the stuff

that you don't, isn't as high on your criteria list. There's a question that's been put by Marie Kondo, which is, does it spark joy? Beach item does it spark joy if it doesn't pass it on? So that's a metaphor for essentialism, but the whole idea is essentialism is doing for your life what Marie Kondo's whole approach does for your closet. Right. So essentially, instead of saying, no pun intended, I'm sure that happens all the time, if you're taking things out of your closet or out of your house, you're trying to do the minimalist thing. And it's like, okay, is this something I'm really interested in? Is there something in me that loves this and just, or is it just the anxiety of like, but I might need that serial cable at some point. The fear of missing out,

FOMO, right, is really real. And both with minimalism and now with essentialism, we have to discover the joy of missing out or Jomo. And there really is joy in it, right? There really is value in less. How do you make that transition though? Because it seems like FOMO I can do, right? oh man this person's got this other thing going on should I speak at this event here or should I do that one? Which one's going to be bigger? Which one am I going to regret missing more?

Oh, this person said, this event is amazing. I have to go to it. It's really expensive. But if I don't go, I'll be the only one that wasn't there, right? That I can do. Jomo, joy of missing out. I can't really remember a time where I was like, well, actually, that might not be true.

But it's rare to have a time where I'm laying on my couch with my cat or binging on Netflix or reading a book, even as much as I love reading, going, I'm so glad I'm not at that boat party that my friend's having. I'm so glad I'm not going to this event. I mean, it's pretty rare. Usually, I think, I hope there's nothing there that I really needed to do. I still have that anxiety to back my head. Yeah, you're saying that you've experienced one, but don't experience the other very often. Right. There's a lot of FOMO. I'm low on Jomo. Yeah, so this would be consistent with the

idea that's our normal culture. Like, I'm guessing that you didn't wake up one day and say, I am just going to really worry about all the other stuff that's going on. I'm going to choose that as a strategy. No, no. That's my thing. I want to always worry about what I'm not going to. Even when I'm at something great, I want to be thinking, this isn't a deliberate chosen, conscious strategy.

No, but it does work. 97% of the things I worry about never happen. So obviously it has been effective so far. So this idea, the question I'm putting to you really is, why is it that you and so many people are so tilted? so much towards this strategy. It's a default strategy. It's a default strategy.

I'm arguing something about this. I'm saying that we have a culture that's so dominant towards this feeling that it's not just the normal default circumstance of all society forever. We live in a particularly extreme version of society, right? So I think we're in a busyness bubble now. Like a FOMO bubble. Exactly. Whatever the name of it is, it's a bubble of more.

And so what we have all sort of grown up. up in is this culture. I mean, even over the last 10 years, we've gone from being connected to hyper-connected. Yeah, tell me about it. Smart phones. Smart phones, social media, these things have come together to create a kind of unholy alliance. And so people keep on getting dragged into this cultural norm. To find any antidote, we have to understand the environment we're in. Have you heard the phrase, fish discover water last? No, but it makes perfect sense. Makes sense, right? We have to Just like it took you until you were 16 to get classes, you were maybe one of the last ones to figure out what's going on.

It's something that's so normal to you, you don't know that it's even happening. And that's what's going on. So when you talk about FOMO, you're not just talking about your own experience. You're talking about the norm of today. And I think that that's what makes essentialism have the power of relevancy.

The idea is that in this environment, in an environment where not just you, but everybody just about that you know, and everybody that you're interviewing and talking to it, everyone who's watching this, their normal life and all their friends, in that environment, you can't just go with the flow unless you want all the consequences of this cultural norm. So this is the name for this is non-essentialism, right? It's just everyone believes that by doing everything, you will be more successful,

you'll be happier, you'll have more meaningful life. Now, if it's true, meaning if that works for people, great. It might have worked up until the 80s and 90s when you literally could no longer do everything that's coming your way. My dad did everything. My dad did everything. You know, auto worker at Ford, worked his way up the ladder, worked 12 plus probably 14 hour days, six days a week, getting everything done, burned himself out. That was without email. That was without cell phones. That was without social media.

That was without being able to be reachable most hours of the day. And you proposed that at the beginning of that little anecdote by saying it worked. Before the end of the anecdote, he burned himself out. It was physically possible. That's what I mean by it works. It was physically possible. I love the distinction. So you're right, because as the internet.

continues to be the news, right, as it affects so much and it has expanded our options so exponentially, it means it is not even close to being possible. I was talking to a really driven, even successful executive just recently on Sand Hill Road. Where all the venture capitalists are. Exactly. And he said, he was reading the book and he said he realized that this was important for him because he said, it's not like if I had two or three hours extra every day that I'd be okay. He said, I need like 300 hours a day and I'd still not have enough. You wouldn't even make it through your Twitter feed. So he just gets that the expectation has expanded so far, so much. And he's a smart guy. He's a thoughtful person. But still, he has adopted a set of expectations that are, by his own

admission, more than 10 times more than he can possibly do on a daily basis. So there's been this sea change of expectations, sea change of choices and options, this cultural norm. And if we just apply the same basic approach, you know, 20 years ago, even, then I think we will reap a set of rewards that are different than what we've been sold. I do agree, but it's so hard to beat it into yourself, and it must be really hard to beat it into other people, especially if we don't necessarily know what you're talking about just yet. Yeah, I think that people, as they get the language for this, don't argue against the logic of it. So I think the primary value of writing the book essentialism was giving language. There is such a thing as a non-essentialist who is just

driven, capable, successful, but has plateaued in their progress because they're trying to do everything. You state in the book that if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. That's probably been true forever. But now we see it happening when we're home eating dinner and we're on our phone and you see that email and don't pretend like you don't know what I'm talking about. See that email come in from your boss or your business partner and you go, because this happens. What is it? That never happened. This is a recent 10 years phenomenon. That's right. And that little moment of what is it can be so extreme under some circumstances. It is a form of addiction, right? When we check email 150 times a day, which is the average right now, the highest levels is 900 times a day. So that means every minute

on the hour, 16 hours a day. And of course, we have great data on this. Every minute for 16 hours a day, someone is checking their phone at the highest levels. Absolutely. And here's why we have great data on it is because all you have to do is you just measure how many times someone swipes on their phone. This, a Time magazine, came out with this research. I mean, I don't know where they get their batteries from, I mean, all that's a different thing. Sure. But it means that when we used to talk about addiction, we were technology and so on, we were saying it like a metaphor, but it's real.

It's a real addiction. This is happening up there. Is to do with the idea that sometimes something amazing is going to happen, sometimes something terrible is going to happen, and you never know which. Literally is like a slot machine for people. So again, this is the norm. This is the problem. And it's the problem that successful people and organizations and societies face.

So I'm working with Silicon. value companies and trying to understand why is it that otherwise successful people and companies don't break through to the next level of success. Great question. They should. Because if you and I would have a race, for example, right, and you won, which you would. I don't know, you got some good running shoes on. That's just a con for making it look like I'm a runner. And let's say you won by 50 yards. Okay. So then we race a second time and you get to start with a 50 yard advantage right from the beginning. So you win again. Right. By not 50 yards. Yeah. So now. you're 100 yards ahead and we race a third time. So just give me an average approximate percentage

chance you'll win the third race beginning with 100 yards. Give me a number. 99.9%. It's a little bit rude. Barring any injuries, 100%. You're going to win, right? Of course that's what's going to happen. So here's the question that's kept me up at night all through these years of trying to understand is why doesn't that happen? When you look at the data as I have of the successful people and organizations, they don't continue in their success and they don't break through to the next level, which they also ought to do. because they have all the benefits of momentum, they have all the benefits having won the first race and the second race, and they don't continue to do it.

Is it our wiring? Yeah, why? Why? So here's what I learned. Again, it was sort of this Fish Discover Water last. It was hidden in plain sight. The reason that successful people in organizations don't break through to the next level is success. So here's how it works. Go back to the Silicon Valley companies. You get a few people, small team,

focus on the right problem at the right time, and they generate success. This is natural to be expected. What comes with success, increase in options and opportunities. Sure. That sounds like the right problem to have. Except those opportunities look like email, Twitter and Facebook. It might be email.

It might be Twitter. It just might be more opportunities. The idea is that even though it's the right problem to have, it undermines the very focus that led to success in the first place. And so you find a situation where someone is doing the same things they were doing before. They are still driven. They're still smart. still capable, but all of a sudden, they are diffused in their efforts, and they're trying to do

way too many things. Right. And so you can see this in organizations all over the place. I mean, I often ask people to think through what organizations they know themselves that were once successful and that somehow they became averagely successful, even failed entirely through it. Can you think of any? Yeah, actually, there's a couple of businesses that failed recently, like Zirchal, for example. Or was it Zirchual? I don't know much about surgery. I feel bad if that's the wrong one. But there was one that failed miserably that had a ton of clients. There are some that have problems even now with scaling and what they're doing, culture-wise, zanifits, companies like that that you hear about.

Rumors on the Silicon Valley startup scene. And if you take some that are more established, if you take like a Yahoo, for example, that's very well established, you know, despite best efforts to turn this around. One time, it's like five COs over two years that they had this whole, everyone coming in smart, driven, trying to solve a problem. What's the problem? the problem was success. Early day success, Yahoo was the beginning of the consumer web.

So they are the web for the consumer, right, in the early days. They could do it all. And so they kept on trying to do it all. And that's it. That's the error right there. So as soon as Google comes along specializes, well, now Google is going to be better at search than Yahoo can be at that. They can't be great at everything.

Right. And so, you know, Yahoo has been trying to correct that problem, and it's a very, very tough problem for them to solve because they've got the problem of what we've got, a 5% problem, which means all of their consumers only use 5% of their services, but it's not the same 5%. So there's no easy solution for them now, because it's been built, sort of almost generation-on-generation of leadership with this same challenge.

So here's an example. It's true for companies, but it's also true for the individuals inside of these companies. That's what I found, was that you have also individuals who start off, they're very driven. In fact, I remember an executive I worked with, he was doing award-winning work, partially as a result of that got purchased by a larger, and as it turns out, more bureaucratic firm. It goes into the new regime. He wants to be a good citizen, which means loosely speaking, he starts saying yes to everyone and everything without really thinking about it. So what happens to him? What happens to his stress? Through the roof. What happens to the quality of his work? Down drain. So here is someone who is

high talent individual, who all of a sudden is, I don't know, overworked and underutilized. They're not top talent anymore because of this strategy. Now, What happens in the end, he decides because of some counterintuitive advice, he should retire in role, which is different than stay, quit, and don't tell anyone. It's not that. But he realized, look, this isn't going to work. I've got to act as if I'm only going to be paid for the value I create, not how many emails I respond to, not how many meetings I go to. At the end of all of that experience, he said, I got my life back. He was able to eat dinner with his wife a night, go to the gym every night. So that was good on a personal level. But then on a professional basis, he said,

I found space again on my schedule. And in that space, I found my creative freedom. And in his creative freedom, he found his ability to contribute better. So by the end of the year, he got one of the largest bonuses of his whole career, performance evaluation went up. And there's this success story. That's what's at play between non-essentialism and essentialism. Non-essentialism promises if you can just fit it all in, do it all, say yes to everyone, you will succeed. Essentialism says, it doesn't say essentialism doesn't say say no to everyone at everything. I didn't write a book called noism. Essentialism says figure out what's really essential and put your energies into those less but better. Fewer things done better is a better strategy of breaking true to the next level.

And if we're on Fox News, this is where I would say thank you and we'd wrap your little soundbite review, right? But now we're going to go further. See, as soon as we exhaust the stuff you've said a hundred times, that's when it gets really, really good. Let's do it. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Greg McClain. We'll be right back. Now, back to Greg McEwen on the Jordan Harbinger Show. And I think it is kind of epidemic level. I mean, people are doing this with jobs, careers, school, whatever it is.

I see this in college. I remember for me, at least, I saw it in college where I had to do everything. I had to do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And I remember even in law school asking a professor which classes we should be sure we take. And he listed out what would take about five and a half. years of a three-year program. Right. If you had a really ambitious class schedule.

You need to take all your core classes, but, you know, tax law is a good one, then a corporate law, and then international law for sure, at least one or two of those, and then this one, and then some other extra... And it was just like, how are we going to possibly specialize in anything? And his advice was don't do that, which is terrible advice, in my opinion. But we see this at home, even in our career, saying yes to everything, but even in our personal life at home and our family life, people overcomit themselves because of a little bit of FOMO, but also this sort of thought that if we don't say yes to everything, we're letting

somebody else down. Do we have to just become okay with letting other people down, or are we actually not really letting them down long term? What have you learned about this? Well, one of the things I've learned is that there's a trade-off here, which is do you want short-term popularity or longer-term respect? And if you just are going for popularity all the time, then you'll just end up being very reactive to every request, every possible thing that you could be doing, anything anyone is doing, That strategy is not the same as service. It's not the same as loving people. It's not the same as making a contribution.

It's just being pulled into the social pressure to do everything. On the basis that by doing everything, you will be successful with people and successful in your life and make your best contribution. If that's true, this is the second time I'm saying it, people should do it. If it's working for them, if it's getting them what they want, and if it's making a difference in the world, don't listen to me. Keep doing it.

On the basis that it might not be, on the basis that it might be a bit of a con underneath, like malware, that it's sort of, it's pretending to be true, but actually isn't true, then maybe we ought to look at something else, look at an alternative approach. And the alternative approach isn't being less helpful to people. It's being the most helpful you can be. But you get to be the most helpful by being more selective, by being more thoughtful, by saying yes, with these constraints. Yes, under these circumstances. And so you start to be able to utilize yourself, your own resources in the way that makes the best contribution in the world. I'm really eager. It's one of the drivers for writing essentialism was that I'm.

I could and others could live at their highest point of contribution. And you simply can't be utilized at your highest point of contribution if you say yes to everyone and everything that anybody is doing in this environment. You just, that isn't what is produced. Have you seen Cal Newport's deep work? I have, yeah. So that's these kind of dovetail really nicely. And for those who've heard the show with me and him, it's all about getting rid of

some of these extraneous things. You can focus on what really matters and move ahead because of that. It sounds like you learned this stuff the hard way. I mean, I went to law school in part because you have an opportunity, you have an option, you better take it. That was the wisdom when I was growing up. You know I went to law school. I do. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we're both culpable of making that decision. They made the same mistakes. I mean, this conversation is about 17 years almost to the day when I was visiting a friend here in the United States as at law school in England. And somebody said in passing to me, they said, if you do decide to stay in America, then you should come and help us on this project. And I never did help them with that, but the question gave me permission to rethink. permission to say, well, what if I didn't do what I'm doing? What if I didn't stay committed to what I've currently committed to? And so I made this 20-minute brainstorm, what would you do if you could do anything? And when I was finished, I was really struck by the idea, not by what was on it,

but by what's not on the list. And law school wasn't on the list. Of course. So here I am at law school, suddenly with this awareness and also the geographical space to really wonder, well, why are you doing it? Maybe you don't have to. And really from the moment that brought came. I never went back. Never psychologically, never even physically back to the law school. There's a different thing that's inside of me. A different burning yes. And it was right about that point. I remembered I better call my parents. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. By the way, you're still going to help me out with these tuition loans, right? Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me, when I went to North Korea, actually, a few times on a vacation, tourism. And I remember asking one of the guides who lives in

North Korea, where would you go if you could go anywhere? And she said, oh, Mount Pektu up in the north of Korea. And I thought, is this just like hyper patriotism or what are we talking about? I said, no, no, no, anywhere in the world. And she goes, I don't know, maybe somewhere to practice my English. And I was like, anywhere in the whole world, maybe like Africa or something. And she goes, whoa, Africa. Like it never had crossed her mind that you would ever be able to go there and see giraffes and things like that. And we were talking about animals and things like that. And she was just like, it was like saying, where do you want to go on vacation? And someone's like, let's go Mars, you're like, hold on a second. Yeah, yeah. But we're thinking Disneyland or SeaWorld.

I think that what you're saying is such a great example because the number of choices is expanded so fast, but our out-of-date way of dealing with it that maybe got us through in previous generations is discombobulating under the pressure of these options. And the irony is that in the era of so many options, of so many cool things that you could do, instead of being able to select that one thing that go to some different continent. Instead of doing that, we're just consumed with a bunch of okay things, things that aren't great to us. They don't spot joy for us. They aren't our highest point of contribution. In this environment, with all these options, we ought to be able to, with the right level of selectivity, design a life

really matters that really inspires us and blesses other people. That's what essentialism is about. So essentialism isn't really about essentialism. It's not about it as a subject. It's about trying to challenge and inspire people that they have permission to design a life that they really want to pursue. Yeah, I like this. You didn't always follow these rules, right? So I received an email from my boss at the time, and they said Friday would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby.

She was expecting at the time, of course. Otherwise, that would have been an even odder email. And the reason was because I need you to come to this client meeting and so on. And so Friday comes, we're in the hospital. That is when my daughter's born. with. And instead of being able to be focused on that priority event, that clearly important moment, I'm feeling torn. And my question, I wasn't consciously asked at the time, is how can I do both? How can I somehow be here, support my wife, make that okay, be there for my daughter? How can I also be

there? And in the end, to my shame, I go to the meeting. Oh, God, it's such painful to hear. When I read that, I was like, oh, man, this must burn even now. Burns now. Yeah, right. It does. And, you know, so. So I go to the meeting. I remember afterwards they said to me, the client will respect you for the choice you just made. That was their summary. And I don't know about that. I think they probably would have respected you more if you'd gone to your daughter.

I think that's probably true. And they look on their faces did not evince that sort of confidence anyway. But even if they did and even if some amazing thing had come from that meeting, clearly you can see it. It's obvious in hindsight, I can see it, of course, I'd made a fool's bargain. And so I was left with this question of why. And also the learning, if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. That's really where I learned that single idea. And now I have to keep holding on to it.

Now I have to keep coming back to it and anchoring back to that discovery. What's really most important now? And how can I construct my life in such a way that I'm focused on that thing one that's time? I agree. I mean, you write don't major and minor things. However, how do we decide what's important? It's not always really obvious. and sometimes everything looks important.

Well, that's really what the non-essentialist believes. The non-essentials believes that everything's essential, right? And the essentialist believes that almost nothing is essential. I think that the reality is more like the essentialist sees it. That's why it's a powerful idea. It's not just a mind trick. It is the idea that most stuff is noise. Most stuff is just stuff.

It doesn't matter one way or another. So the trick of life is to create enough space to figure that out. I think that when people create space, it becomes very clear to them. By create space, you mean get off the hamster wheel of busy crap for a second to realize that all the stuff you're doing is you on the hamster wheel. Yeah, that's right. I mean, practically, I think about it being every course of someone should hold a personal quarterly offsite. Oh, I like this. You schedule somewhere between half a day and a day. I tend to take a full day. And you're asking all the big questions. So what are my three to five most important life goals? Actually, I've gone even further than that.

sometimes I'm asking, what's my three to five hundred year vision goals? 100 year vision? Yeah, yeah. Like legacy, you're already gone type stuff? Yeah, definitely beyond oneself. What do I want my grandchildren's life to be like? What do I want their learning to have been? And when I can think in those very, very long-term perspective, it helps to distinguish

between the vital few and the trivial many that on a daily or even minute-to-minute basis can be very hard to discern between because it's all just coming at it. So a hundred year vision really pushes one to think clearly. Can you believe your grandpa wore this crap on camera? Exactly, right? I want that. I want that moment for them to be, and me to be thinking about my own role

within a much longer intergenerational story. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is then you break that down, as you can imagine, right? So like, okay, what are some of the three to five goals you want to achieve this year? What do you want to do over the next 90 days? A chance to celebrate.

I definitely always take the time to go through a list of gratitude, like what has happened, what have been the biggest wins over the last 90 days. So I'm reviewing the last 90, planning for the next 90, and you come out of that session with a clear sense of here, are there just the few goals that are the ones I really want to achieve at this next 90 days. Do you then outline those goals, like how you're going to do that, or is it more of a broad overview? No, there's a whole set of different things I've done on this.

I don't do it the same every time, but I normally go through those goals and then say, what are the obstacles? And not how do I work around those obstacles, but how do you learn from every obstacle? because an obstacle is really just your brain's best effort to articulate the problem that must be solved to achieve your goal. I think this is a really important thing to do. It's so easy to skip it thinking, I've got this, right? It's like using a calendar. No, I can remember everything I have to do next week.

But you really, you're not able to do it. And actually, it's a great segue because I think the second thing people need to do to create space is a weekly design session. So every week, you're using each week as like perfect design period. I have a preference for a week over a day or over a month. If you're doing monthly planning, it's still quite long term. You're not dealing with decisions you're about to really have to do. If you're doing it daily only, then I think your life will become reactive. I've noticed that myself anyway.

If I'm just doing it day at a time, then it's just hitting me too randomly. Okay, what's on my calendar? Oh, that's on my calendar. So a weekly design session, you're really now translating the work you've done on the course of the offsite into this week's essential plan and you're trying to remove things. that are no longer relevant, and no longer the most valuable things. I think those combination, those two things, work quite well in starting to move a life from a non-essentialist, reactive life to an essentialist proactive life. I think this is a really good idea. However, a lot of people

are thinking right now, great, okay, tell my boss, I'm going to do an offsite where I'm going to remove parts of my job and then not somehow get fired, right? Yeah. So it doesn't feel realistic. Right. It's easy for like two essentially self-employed guys to see. talk to everybody about how they should remove duties from their life that they feel are non-essential. Yeah, for a lot of people it's not like. Right. How do we even start to say no to things without just getting straight up fired? So we've been talking about non-essentialism on the one hand and essentialism on the other. And you could walk all the way from being very undisciplined, more, very extreme on one side to very disciplined on the other. That's one continuum. There's a second continuum. And that is between

things that we have no control of at the bottom and things that we have total control. at the top. And so what I always say to people is, yes, you want to be moving towards the essentialist side, but you've got to start with the things you control. What often I hear people hear when they hear essentialism, they get that continuum, but they start with thinking about the things they have almost no control over. So they start by saying a little bit like your question, how could I say no to my boss's boss? If they come to me directly asks, you need to do this, and I say, no, that's a career limiting move. That's a fireable offense almost. I am agreeing with that, right? This is the nature of hierarchical institutions. So don't start there, right? Don't start by

saying no to your boss's boss. What is something you have complete control over? For example, what about the first three to ten minutes of your day? Surely we have higher control over that than we have over our boss's bosses' decisions. So start there. Start moving towards the essentialist and the things you do have control over. Build your essentialist muscles there. So slowly over time, as you start to understand better your own decision-making process. You can add to it skills of how to negotiate non-essentials and influence those things that you don't have control over, but maybe can start to influence. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Greg McEwen. We'll be right back. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going.

To learn more about who supports this show so you can support them in turn, go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. We keep all the deals, all the codes there. Please do consider supporting those who support us. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for today's episode. Those worksheets have some of the takeaways, some of the drills and exercises, so you don't have to write them down. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now the conclusion of our episode with Greg McEwen. This is great, because otherwise what happens, right, is instead you face this insurmountable wall and you're just thinking, how am I going to climb this mountain? All right. First, First step, go to my boss's boss and tell them no more TPS reports.

It's just not going to work. It's not essential for me. But if it's kind of like, well, I can get up in the morning and just not check my social media and maybe look for urgent emails or even put an auto-responder that says it's only check in the afternoon or whatever is acceptable in your office calls. You start small on the things you can control. Get the phone out of the bedroom. Get it out.

Right. Get one of these old. Timex clocks. Yeah, right. Little clock and get the phone out of there. Get your computer out of that. Indigo. control over that space. If you don't create boundaries there, there won't be any, you know this.

Yeah. Now, if you have your phone by your, and I'm not going to ask you, I'm going to put you on the spot. Most people have their phones right there by their best. Hell yeah, I got my phone next to my bed. And this allows this. Airplane. Okay, good for you. This allows other people to always be in your space. It totally does. And the risk of that is that our whole life does become a function of other people's agenda for us. Add to that our own anxiety around checking a phone and being connected. That's not other people doing that to us sometimes. It's just, just our choice. Start where you have a bit of control. Put the phone away, get rid of it in that morning. Those first 10 minutes, I recommend people when they wake up in the morning. It's the first

few minutes is, what are you grateful for? What are the important things that your gratitude? Number two is what are the two or three goals you've identified as being really important to you over the next quarter or more so that you're just getting to tuning yourself to that? Oh, so not the day, the longer term, longer term. So you're now moving into things that really matter to you. And then third is like, how can I make my best service today? How can I love the best? How can I serve the best? Because essentialism has nothing whatsoever to do with being more selfish. It just has to do with more essential things. To me, that practice is so much better than just first thing, okay, check my phone. Now I'm into that reactive mode already. And it's the start of the day.

I'm priming myself for distraction if I spend the first 10 minutes on the phone. Right. Going through the Long-term goals keeps you away from the shorter-term stuff. It's hard to think about going through your inbox if you're trying to knock down a book proposal. That's interesting. You mentioned a book proposal because that's just the kind of thing that people aren't emailing us about. You have to act upon those things. And these goals, this is what helps us then move a weekly planning and our daily experience from this very reactive non-essentialist norm.

And what's the result of that? What's the reward of that? You can actually do something that matters. You're going to actually move forward on a goal that you feel like will make a big difference in the world. That's the right tradeoff. You can do a bunch more email of just reactive constantly. And it's not just even email, it's social media. It's just endless like cycles.

It's being a news junkie. It's whatever we get sucked in on the phone versus achieving something that we have identified as meaningful. Basically, we have to live by design and not by default, which I think is so written explicitly in the book. And that's kind of a novel concept. It sounds so simple, like, yeah, okay, whatever. It's really easy to brush it off. But when we look at our day and we ask how much of it we actually have, designed, it's usually a pretty small percentage.

Even for those of us that are self-employed, we think we've designed our whole day. Again, about the idea of being self-employed, you have control of your schedule. Only if you choose to, you can still be as reactive in any environment. In fact, this is one of the funny things about essentialism, is that sometimes people will say things like, well, this is okay for the CEO, but not for me. But that's only true until you talk to the CEO. And the CEO says to me, well, it's okay for everybody in the organization, but not for me. I've got so many people expecting things from me.

It's easy for them, but not for me. Everyone has a set of reasons that they have bought into non-essentialism. But what I think it all comes down to ultimately is that people don't know they have chosen non-essentialism. They just have adopted it. They got washed into the drain of non-essentialism. Completely because it's such a monopoly view right now. Until we sort of wake up almost like a matrix moment to, oh, wow, this is not the normal state of things. This is just the state of our culture at the time we happen to be here.

And so when people wake up to it, it's almost like what I want for people is to discover how revolting non-essentialism actually is. And we're swimming in this. Successful. Yeah, it is. This thing that is a lie. We're swimming in it. And it's having such a cost. I mean, sometimes I joke about all of this, but sometimes it makes me feel.

furious, to think of the cost in individuals' lives as to what they wish their life could be, what it could be, in fact, if they made different trade-offs, and what they've been conned into believing. I mean, we've been sold a bill of goods, and the consequences are serious and significant. Do you see this as being primarily caused by technology, or is there a greater sort of work culture that has creeped in and now is being exacerbated by that? I don't think it's been created by technology. I mean, that sounds like a contradiction, but I don't. don't think it is. The idea of non-essentialism has been with us for a long time. And I think we can trace it back with a little history lesson. If you go back to the 1500s, the word priority came

into the English language. What does it mean? The prior thing, meaning the very first thing. It is by definition singular, the first thing. And for the next 500 years, it stayed singular, which is pretty amazing. That means that nobody in the English speaking language, No one talking like we are today for half a millennium actually use the term priorities. Because there can only be one by its own definition. So why did it change? What happened? I think it was in response to the Industrial Revolution, where we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Lots of change for the better. Some change is not for the better.

And so as we started talking about priorities, so now we're sort of 1900s, you can see there have been then phases of non-essentialism ever since then. So waves of it. So the Industrial Revolution was the first. The post-second World War was the second phase where we come back from this most discombobulating experience the world's known, the industrialized world is ever known. And what do we do? Like when was the morning period? When did we take the year or the decade to adjust to this experience to go through a sort

of cathartic process? We didn't do a thing. I mean, we didn't take a year. We didn't take a month. We barely took a minute. So what did we do instead of dealing with that? We followed what the Romans called a Panem strategy, Panem. It's Latin for bread and circus.

Panem was a strategy that was deliberately used in Rome and as part of the Roman Empire to distract the masses from the problems that were starting to be unaddressable in this society. So they were so significant. And so instead, you just distract people, right? You build the Coliseum, you have people distracted by bread and circus. That's what we did after the Second World War. So everything became about, when we became consumers for a start,

We weren't consumers. The family fathers didn't build a constitution for consumers. They weren't thinking of themselves as consumers. They thought of themselves as citizens. So a fundamental change took place in the post-World War. So this is the second wave of the non-essentialists. And the third is the one we've all lived through the last 10 years. So what I'm saying is that technology has exacerbated the challenge.

It's been built on top of a non-essentialist assumption. But the assumption, that malware is still the problem. It's been withers growing. And now it's at a sort of fever pitch, but it's actually been with us all the time slowly taking its toll on individuals. If we start to create different habits, we start to edit things out, we start to, as you outline in the book, make suggestions for our employer rather than telling them I'm not doing this. First of all, how do we get our family maybe to do this with us? Because I feel like it could be one of those issues where if I solve it, but my wife and three kids and mother-in-law, they're still doing things the old way. I'm just getting sucked into it.

It's like Scarface. Every time I try to get out, they suck me right back here. So they're non-essentialism. Yeah. So what I've learned is this. I've learned that essentialism is either done collectively or not at all. Ah, interesting. Okay. So I've learned that you have to do it with other people. In fact, I recommend people the most realistic step. The very first thing to become an essentialist is probably to read the book. Get the language yourself so you can start seeing non-essentialism for what it is because it starts to name it. And then you say, okay, who is somebody else who I want to take this journey with and you read the book together. So now there's two people that have new language. And in the language, the language is such an important thing because without language, you can't talk about a problem. With language, you can talk about this.

You can actually start to address it. And so that's where I'd start with next. And maybe your whole family does it. And it works the same. Who's someone who's safe? Maybe your boss is safe and you share it with them. Maybe the whole team is safe. You all read it together.

Don't even worry about changing a thing. Just read it together. The language itself is a change and allows you to slowly over time, as the journey is definitely a long journey, allows you to have different conversations. And if you can change your conversation, ultimately you can change decisions and a culture. But you can't change decisions or culture if you don't change the language. So don't read the book and then try to execute it on your own. Because everyone else is still swimming in a different logic.

There are people that contact me all the time now about this. They've done it. They've read it. They've got the people in their organization to read it. They've got their family to read it. And then they're able to make tremendous cultural shifts in how they operate, how they work together, breakthrough to the next level personally and professionally. Really amazing success stories that have come along. But you just got to do it together. What about boundary setting? I mean, you make kind of a big deal about this in the book, personal life, work life. There needs to be a hard stop, a hard line between that. Why does that work? Why is that important? And how do we it? Well, because boundaryless living, which is centered in non-essentialism, believes something that's not true.

What it believes is that there are no trade-offs. If there were no trade-offs, just be a non-essentialist. In fact, if there's no trade-offs, we all ought to be. Because if there's no trade-ers, you can just do everything all the time, and therefore, we'll achieve everything you want. That's what non-essentialism keeps saying is true. If it's true, like I keep saying to you, if it's true, if it works, keep doing it. If it doesn't, then you have to start accepting, well, there are tradeoffs I'm making every time I make a choice to check my phone at home. Every time I do that, I'm not paying attention to one of my children. Every time I'm talking to my wife and I suddenly get pulled into an email or a text,

I'm suddenly disrupting the experience there. So I've got to start facing the tradeoffs that non-essentialism lies about. start seeing what the actual costs are to the decisions I'm making. And look, you can multitask, right? That's really proven. You can definitely multitask. What you can't do is multi-focus. And so if I care at work or at home about focusing,

if I believe that my relationships are better when I focus on them and aren't distracted, then there will be a benefit to doing it and there'll be a trade-off to not doing it. Longest I think I've been without my phone at all was like, two and a half weeks on a family vacation in Costa Rica, right, we get out there into the jungle. My children still talk about that trip. They still noticed what a difference it made to have their dad totally unplugged from this just constant tapping. Yeah. Must make you feel a little bit bummed that you didn't do it earlier, that it's difficult to do even now. We're going to be off track 90% at the time. You're just like any flight that you're on, you go from San Francisco to New York,

your flight is off track 90% at the time. It gets to where it's supposed to get to because it keeps coming back on track. And that's key for essentialism. To try and be an essentialist, like with a perfectionist mindset, is trying to be an essentialist with a non-essentialist approach. Does that make sense?

It does. It's like trying to roll a boat in two directions in the same time. I like that metaphor. It's trying to say, unless I can be a perfect essentialist, meaning unless I can do everything perfect, perfect now, then I shouldn't even bother. An essentialist doesn't see that or say that at all. They say there's a few things that matter. I'm going to get off track. I'm going to keep coming back

on track. There's a lot of stuff I'm going to get wrong. I'm not going to get this perfect. I'm going to keep coming back. And so I have all sorts of things built into the routine and structure of my life that keeps me coming back. So every Monday night is a family night. But no matter what, no matter what, that night is already siphoned off. Holiday are kids? So I've got four children, not very essentialistic. Yeah. 13, 12, 10, and 7. So right now you're in the point where you can still say Monday night is family.

Yeah, that's right. I did the same thing as well, right? So this was a church recommendation. This is years ago, 40 years ago. And so my family all growing up did this. We weren't perfect in our family by any means. We were off track 90% of the time, same. But every Monday, as sure as I was going to eat on Monday, we were going to have a family.

That's great. And so there are things that you can build routines and structures that make execution of what's essential easier. And so while you're not going to get it right, well, I know I don't get it right. I'm trying to build a system that supports the things that matter most. You mentioned in the book that essentialism has to be at the center of every decision that you make. So it sort of seems like I'm trying to reconcile the off-track 90% of the time with every decision you make has to have essentialism at the core.

Why can't we just kind of weekend warrior this thing? Well, I think that the idea that I'm trying to explain in the book is that it needs to be a mindset shift. So sometimes when I'm teaching about essentialism, someone will come up to me afterwards and I say, look, this is so great. This is a great reminder of one more thing I need to do. As if essentialism is just one more thing that becomes an irony. It's not one more thing. It's not another thing to add into the overstuffed closet of our lives. It's a different way of doing everything. So it's not that we're going to have our behaviors correct every time all the time. But what we can keep coming back to is a mindset shift. But we start to have to have our behaviors correct. We start to have our behaviors correct. We start to have a mindset shift. We start to have. think about the world differently. We start to think like an essentialist. Then over time, the behaviors become instinctive, spontaneous. And then we start to build new routines around that new insight. So the work itself, real work is the mindset, to get the mindset of an essentialist. Making it something that you are instead of something that you just do sometimes.

Something you become, not something that you are adding on top of a non-essentialist mindset. Because that won't work. That's the problem. If you think like a non-essentialist and try to behave as an essentialist, he is still going to end up trying to efficiently do way too many things. And so you're still going to get the same results. The mindset has to shift. The tools, for example, we've been talking about technology. I'm not a ludite. I'm not anti-tools. I'm not anti-technology. I work and spend my life in Silicon Valley. But it makes a very poor master, good servant, poor master. That's why the mindset shift is the one that has to happen first. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, I wanted to give you a preview of my conversation with the

legendary Dennis Quaid. We got into rejection both in Hollywood and outside and how he brings his characters to life on screen. This is really a fun episode. I think you're going to dig it. I didn't know at the time if I wanted to be an actor. That was back during the time where I wanted to be a veterinarian or a forest ranger. Forest ranger. You'd be fighting fires right now. Yes, I would. I'm evacuated from my house right now. Are you really? I saw the smoke. I flew in this morning. And our flight originally was canceled, and I was like, you got to give me to L.A.

I got Dennis Quaid coming here. I can't stand him up for this bullshit fire. You use a lot of different accents in many of your films. I'm curious how you learn and practice those. My brother and I grew up doing impersonations like Ed Sullivan and John Wayne and, you know, everybody that was around us. So I big up on accents badly even. You know, like in India, I would be talking just the way.

Are you the guy that hears one on TV, and then spends the rest of the week annoying everybody in the house. I prepare a secret. So, like, you're in the shower going, one more gin in. One more, gin. I can't get her to cool, captain. That one's awesome.

That's definitely good. There's a reason you get paid the big bucks for these, and I don't. That's for sure. I know music's a big part of your life. You wrote a few songs for three of your films. Been in a band for, like, 20 years? Same guys. Same guys.

For 19 years this Halloween. Oh, happy. Bandiversary. Well, that's really good. I like that. You can steal that. I definitely think I just made that up just now. Really?

Yeah. I've never heard. I've also never heard. Wow, it just came out. Yeah, see what happens when you relax. Is it true that you play with your band in Bear Feast? Yes, when we first started out, the Beastie Boys, they don't wear shirts. I won't wear shoes.

For more with Dennis Quaid, including how he uses fear to stay motivated, check out episode 279 right here on the Jordan. Harbinger show. Thanks to Greg. Don't forget he's got his own podcast. What's Essential with Greg McEwen. That's the name of the pod. We'll link it in the show notes. Greg also has some really interesting writing.

If you haven't read essentialism, I do recommend it. One concept, for example, is the endowment effect. You've got to get things out of the closet of your mind. We value things more because we have them. So that leads us to overvaluing things we don't need. There's a story he tells that's quite humorous. He almost bought a full body, like life-size story. storm trooper suit?

Because he thought it was cool and he didn't have one and he would have loved it as a kid. And he's like, wait a minute, what am I doing here? Are you pursuing stormtroopers in your own life? Don't go after things you think you once wanted. So how do we identify stormtroopers in our own lives? Think about this. This will be in the worksheets as well. What do we do about those stormtroopers in our own lives?

How do we identify them and how do we get rid of them? Also, when we're faced with opportunities and this is something that I deal with a lot, just dealing with, do I do this? do I have FOMO about that? Don't ask, how will I feel if I miss this opportunity? Instead, ask, if we didn't have this opportunity, how much would I pay to get it? This is a great reframe. So instead of thinking, oh, I'd be disappointed if I didn't get to speak at this free internet summit, it's like, well, okay, would you? All right, fine, fair, you're going to have a little FOMO. How much would you pay to speak at that internet summit? Zero, then you don't really want to do it, okay? And that's

the same thing for any meeting. It's the same thing for any opportunity. You want to write a book or do you? How much would you pay if you had to pay to write the book? Nothing? Okay, you don't really want to write a book. This is a really, really useful reframe. If you've got too much opportunity and, you know, bless you if you're one of those people, then this is a great question to start asking yourself. And if you feel like you lack opportunity, I still think you should use this and get into the habit of it, because it will keep you from doing a bunch of stuff that you don't want and that you later resent. kind of reminds me of Dan Ariely, how he said don't agree to something just because it's far off in the future. Imagine that it's next week or even this week and you have to rearrange your whole life in order to do it.

Do you still want that opportunity? The answer is almost always no. Another technique I thought was great from essentialism, flip the script so that when people ask you for things, flip it so that they have to do something instead. So, for example, if you say, hey, Jordan, can you write a blurb for the back of my book? I'll say, all right, why don't you write the blurb for your book? and then you send me a couple of options, and then I will pick one that's in my own voice. This is much more useful,

because otherwise people can say, hey, can you review this? Can you do that? Can you do this for me? If you flip it around on them, a lot of those people will sort of fade away. And that becomes very, very useful because people are asking you for stuff all day.

And if they have no skin in the game, then it costs them nothing to ask you for it. If you make them jump through a hoop or two, just a small little hoop or two. And they do it? Good. Okay, you can do what they ask if you want to. but if they won't do that, then you're off the hook. So you put the monkey back on their back.

It's extremely useful. I find myself using this a lot in my business and in my personal life. Last but not least, remember, every time you're doing something that isn't essential, you're giving up something that is essential. That goes for your time with your family, that goes for everything at work, everything in your business. I really love Greg McEwen's book. Essentialism, of course, as a book will be linked in the show notes along with his podcast. I hope you enjoyed this. Those links, by the way, on our website in the show notes, please do use those to buy books or whatever it is.

That does help support the show. I know a lot of people just want to go directly to Amazon. It would be great if you would click through on our links. The worksheets for the episode are in the show notes, all those drills and exercises you just heard throughout the show, throughout the clothes, those will be in the worksheets there. Transcripts are in the show notes as well. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram,

or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits. over at our six-minute networking course, and that's free, over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig that well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. Come join us. You'll be in smart company.

This show is created in association with Podcast One. And my amazing team, that's Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, Millie Ocampo, Josh Ballard, and Gabe Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into productivity or needs to be more productive or set boundaries that they actually keep, share this one with them. Hopefully you find something great in every episode of the show, so please share the show with those you care about. In the meantime,

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