The Jordan Harbinger Show - 534: Greg McKeown | How to Make What Matters Effortless

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

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. His latest book, Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most, is out now. What We Discuss with Greg McKeown: If you want 10x the results of any endeavor without putting in 10x the effort, it's important to understand your ROE (return on effort). How the disciplined pursuit of less keeps you from getting overwhelmed with unexpected options and opportunities that come from what should be the good news of success. Why, if you find yourself procrastinating on a project because it's not perfect enough to your liking, you should delay a bad first draft and create a truly awful zero draft. Why "easy" does not (always) equal "lazy" and what you can do to work smarter rather than harder to avoid earning the meaningless badge of honor that burnout has become in the modern workforce. Five questions to ask yourself before taking on a project that's in danger of being overthought, overwhelming, and anything but effortless. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/534 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 next on the Jordan Harbinger show. If you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack. So gratitude is not just a nice thing. It's not just a polite thing. It's not just something that makes you feel a bit better in this moment. All of those things are good. But it's a catalytic thing.

It will help you to see more clearly what to do next. 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. We've got in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional billionaire investor, national security advisor, or economic hitman. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends, about it, we've got episode starter packs. The starter packs are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started with us, which of course we always appreciate. Today, my friend Greg McEwen, author of the classic book on productivity or non-productivity, essentialism, and his new work effortless. Now also the host of the What's Essential Podcast, just like our computer slows down when there's two,

many tabs open. Likewise, our brains slow down when we have too many things going on and we no longer have the bandwidth to deal with what needs to get done. The pandemic has revealed a lot about what is essential and things that we do or have done in the past that lead to burnout. This is sort of a forced lifestyle experiment, right? The pandemic, forcing us to boil things down to actual essentials in many ways and also forcing us to simplify a lot more than we are used to. Some of that is a blessing. I've got so many good things coming in all at once it seems. Sometimes it feels like I'm just being waterboarded by opportunity. I know a lot of you feel the same,

so let's talk about how we can handle everything coming at us in a better way by focusing on the right things. This might sound basic, but I promise you Greg and his work are popular for a reason, and this discussion is worth your time. So let's get to it. And if you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every week,

it is because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests on the show already subscribe to the course, so come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Greg McEwen. The system is the key, right? So there's a lot of people that will say things, and I'm sure you get this all the time with

essentialism or now with effortless, your newest work, which will link in the show notes as well. People go, oh, yeah, I'm pretty good at boiling things down and focusing, or I'm pretty good at not getting bogged down in the details. And you're like, oh, really? because you're not really good at it. Like you're good at it when you're paying attention to it and when you, in the example you're thinking of right now where you were good at it that one time five years ago

or like when you were getting your PhD in 1997. Like yeah, you were good at it then. Now you're 43 and you've got three kids and you've got, you volunteer at your church and you've got this other business that you're running and then you're also helping your brother-in-law with his bike shop and you never sleep. Are you still good at it?

Or is it just you remember this one, You have this like delusion of when you were good at it once with this one very specific thing and then you never did it again. Sometimes people think because they understand a concept that they are therefore good at it. Right. And then there's a difference between being good at something and having a system. And that's really the big shift. You mentioned effortless. I don't normally start at this point with it.

But I am in favor. I'm as in favor as putting in effort as anyone you're ever going to meet. I'm in favor of that. I want my children to put in effort. I want to put an effort myself. I'm a believer in that. The reason that I wrote effortless is because if somebody wants to achieve at the next level, let's call it 10x results, they want 10 times better results.

Can anybody listening to this right now put in 10 times more effort? Nobody listening to this can do that. And I mean by those that are listening to this, they're already self-selecting to be high achievers, part of actually what my brother Justin calls the hit squad, hardworking, intelligent, talented people. That's cool, the hit squad. Yeah, I like that too. Very fancy. Yeah, they're already in this category.

So the question isn't should you put in effort. It's what's your return on effort? What's your ROE? Oh my goodness, I'm an acronym city right now for a second. Yeah, but I love that. I mean, this is the nerd central kind of podcast here where they're like, oh my God, I'm writing in all these actors. Those will be in the worksheet for people who are jogging or because this is the other

thing. We make the worksheets because people are like, I listen to you while jogging or I listen at the gym or I listen while, you know, running or on the elliptical. So it is the hit squad. It's people who are like, I can't just sit down and learn. I need to also be getting physically, They're like digging a, you know, irrigation system in their backyard or something. I like podcasts for that too, though, because you can be doing something that generally can be a little mindless, but you can still be feeding yourself while you're doing. So I like that wherever people are doing it. So now you have to say, well, how do you utilize that effort?

And let's start at the end, which is effortless results. Let's imagine the perfect scenario is that you have used your effort in such a way that results flow to you. because even without additional effort, so I'm giving you an extreme example, but you've set up a system that serves you that stacks the deck in your favor. And that's the ultimate scenario because that means it's scalable. Because if you aren't required to put more effort into getting the same result that you're achieving today, then you have this residual result, then it means you can put the effort that you would normally put into getting the result to get a better result. I'll give you an example that just is so inspiring to me. My friend Jessica Jackley, a years ago, went to Africa wanting to make a difference

with her then husband and a team of friends and so on. And they're trying to help. And they find an entrepreneur. She's making subsistence level money. So she's in the absolute opposite of everything we just talked about. She has to put in effort every day by selling the produce on the street to be able to feed herself and her children. That is how she survives. That's how she has them survive. She cannot take a day off ever. She just has to be there. And if she doesn't, then she doesn't eat. Okay, so that's completely the other end of the spectrum. So as Jessica and, you know, at Al, see that, they say, okay, well, how could we improve it?

How could we help her to create a system? And that looked like a micro loan. $500 would do it because $500 would allow her enough time off to be able to go and negotiate with the fisheries, with the farmers, and set up a process where they'll send the stuff directly to her. And she can cut out the middleman, put profit into her business and start to get ahead instead of just always being a subsistence level. But then they got clever. It's a bit meta, but they said, well, hold on. If that would work for her, what if we created a system to create systems? So what if we could create a way for lots of people like us, they're not big investors,

but you have a small amount of money you'd like to do some good with, and we're going to put it in as a microloan into a platform. They don't know this entrepreneur in Africa, but they would like to be serving them, helping them. And so this is how Kiva got started. I was going to say it sounds like kiva.org. That's what it is. And this is just the backstory, the origin story of Kiva. So instead of $500, this is now up to $1.3 billion of loans that have been given with a 97% return repayment of those loans. That's the difference between linear results and residual results.

So when I say 10x, maybe it doesn't sound realistic to people. But actually, what it is, if you build them right, is it can be 100x, it can be $1,000, In this case, it's significantly above a thousand X return. And it will go on and on as well. So it's not like, you know, that story isn't even over. It's not finished. It can continue to scale and the impact will be enormous as well. So to me, that's not a bad place for us to start.

Like, we want to design systems that create results for us and the things that matter most to us. Yeah. I think creating systems is always something that is, it comes after you get results after a while. And you're like, oh, why doesn't everyone do this? and then you start to maybe become a little bit of an informal coach to other people, and you go, yeah, okay, just do this. And it's like, it doesn't, one in ten people sort of picks it up and is able to do it. And you're thinking, why is it so difficult?

And then you start hammering habits into people, and that kind of works, but then it kind of doesn't or people fall off after a while. And then you realize we don't have the meta system or the system to set up systems, if you will. And then either way, people can't really pick up the system. And it's funny to look at this and then look at our previous conversation, which I went over once again in preparation for this. And a long time ago, I guess you were probably having one of your first kids. I don't know if it was your first child, but you had a client meeting and it was like

over top of the birth of your kid. Am I getting the story right? It was like you had to go to a meeting during birth, something like that. I got an email from my boss at the time that said Friday between 1 and 2 p.m. would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby because I needed to be at this client meeting. And I'm sure at least at some level they were joking, you know, but either because of the way I was wired or the way I read that. I was feeling torn when we were in the hospital. It's Friday. And our daughter's just been born a few hours earlier. And I'm feeling, well, I've got my laptop open. I've got my phone on. And I'm trying to, you know, figure out, I don't know how to do it all. And so my answer to that was to go to the meeting, you know, to my shame. And even afterwards,

I remember my manager saying, well, the client will respect you for the choice you just made. Probably not, though. Yeah, I don't. The look on their face. didn't sort of evince that sort of respect. And even if they had, I made a fool's bargain. It's obvious. And what I learned from that was if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. And that was one of the defining moments in, you know, later creating and writing essentialism. And then teaching those ideas, essentialism really is about looking at your life through the lens of what is essential, eliminating what is not essential. And then, back to the magic word of conversation so far, how to build systems to make execution of what is essential as easy as

possible. So a lot of people are probably thinking, okay, great. So it's a productivity system, but not really because it's been seven years since your last book. And if you were really that productive, you would be candidly shitting out a self-help book like every other author that has a, you know, book in these niches where it's like, okay, essentialism, essentialism too, essentialism for teams, the essentialism workbook, the essentialism for families. the essentialism for entrepreneurs. Like there's, I'm not trying to be too specific because I don't want anybody to get offended. But you know, you've seen this pattern before where it's like you get hyperproductive and then you end up just producing a lot of stuff. I'll leave it at stuff.

Yeah. I mean, I, the subject matter of the book helped me to avoid that if we want to think of it as a trap. I think of it as a trap. It helped me avoid that, you know, because the idea is that people get off the focus on what's essential because they become successful and it breeds so many options. and opportunities, you know, you can do the next book every year and so on and you get into that pattern. And the antidote to that is the disciplined pursuit of less. And so even having that language helped me to say, well, I'm not going to just jump into the next book, you know, just because it's available, just because the agent wants it, just because we're going to wait until we're sure, until we're ready, until the time feels right. And so, yeah, as a result, I haven't done any

of those sort of spinoffs that one could. And I think the world is probably better off. having me not do those spin-offs and certainly not write any of the other books that have been on my mind to do over that period. Yeah, at least you have books in mind. I mean, there's a lot of people that I was talking with Ryan Holiday a couple weeks ago. And I was like, yeah, I don't know if I want to write a book. I mean, I have all these things that I would write about. And he's like, oh, you're not lacking ideas. And I was like, no. And he goes, so it sounds like you only want to write a book when you have something that you really want to say. And I was like, yeah, I think that's it. And he goes, yeah, that's exactly who should be writing books. So thank you for

not just writing a book because you got like a bunch of checks dangled in front of your face and, you know? Yes. Actually, it's advice that is really good advice, right? I had someone on the podcast, I'm trying to remember who now, but she was just basically giving this advice. She's like, know what you want to say. And it sounds so obvious.

I mean, of course, that's true for everyone, but maybe it's especially a warning for people that have already written books because the door is open because they have the relationships. There's fewer gatekeepers involved, or rather the gates are completely. open. And so the risk, they're coming out of the gate and they're trying to pull you in. Yeah. And you're like, nah, I kind of like hanging out with my kids. And they're like, here's a million dollars. You can buy a brand new beach house. And you're like, they're like, it's yours to not take. And you're just like, well, great. Now I feel like a turd. You know, I should be doing this. Like I'm not, I'm deliberately screwing up my life. I could retire five years earlier if I just

write a book and they don't even care what it's about. You sound like you're not speaking hypothetically. You sound like this is actually something you think about quite. Yeah. Yeah, this is something that I've been thinking about. And I will, I don't know the rules of disclosure on these things, but like there are people that have a vested interest, namely a commission on whatever book they sell. And there are publishers that are great to work with. Not like, you know, crappy, oh, we'll print them if you buy them first, sort of, but like real publishers. But I just go, the problem is I know too many people that have written books, right? So they go, yeah, oh, man, I've dedicated the last three years to, oh, and then I've got to do this. And then you got to do the tour.

And then it's the two or five years long. And I was just like, oh, this all sounds like, pretty miserable. I don't know if I really want to be a part of that right now, you know? Yes. Yes. And it's all about this. So knowing what you want to write about course matters, but you don't know what you want to write about yet. Is that right? Well, I have different ideas, but none of them are like, oh, that would be such a fun and great book to write. They're all kind of like, oh yeah, that would probably go over well with my audience. And like, that's good enough. Right it. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, you're going to get to a point. There'll be a tipping point where you feel good enough about the subject itself and you're confident enough about it,

it becomes a definite yes for you. I think that will happen subject-wise. But I think that the real tipping point will come when you think about residual results. Because one of my frustrations in writing effortless, it was a kind of a painful moment for me, was realizing the ratio of my effort, where I've invested my effort, right, the portfolio of effort. too much of my work has gone into things that return a result one time. I do keynotes. I'm very selective about the keynotes I do, but I do them. I've traveled all over the world doing them. The demand is strong. And I love that. That is a business I'm in and grateful for. But every time you do a keynote, you do it one time for that one client with that one audience and you hopefully have an impact. And

you know, you want it to be a home run or at least not to be rubbish. And so that's sort of linear result. You get the return one time. And even if the return is significant and you, you know, it's like satisfying on lots of levels, it's still just one time. And in fact, Stephen Covey, when he decided he would write seven habits, one of the reasons he did that, what sort of pushed him over the edge was that he had a friend who was very successful at the time as a speaker and had ideas and had people that were interested in so on. And then he died prematurely. And And that was it. It was gone. His ideas were gone. There was nothing else left. And that was when he said, okay, well, I've got to create something that is independent of me. When I don't show up for the event,

you know, when I can't show up for the event anymore, this thing carries on. So for me, my goal when writing essentialism and now writing effortless isn't just, hey, have a New York Times bestseller. I'm glad they both have been. But the key is to write something that can exist. exist in perpetuity. So you do put in effort not just to write a certain kind of book, but then the journey, you know, you maybe spend Stephen Covey's marketer said he spent three years, day and night, making that book an overnight success. Yeah, the seven habits of highly effective people. I mean, I remember reading it in like middle school or something. I don't know why I was reading that in middle school, but. Because they created an organization as part of that

organization. There's a school and education arm. They have a teen's book and they have pro, programs for into schools to teach leaders in early age. They built two systems. They built the ideas into books and they built an institute, so to speak, a business that would continue it. Stephen Covey died almost 10 years ago now. The influence continues. So I think that might be, you know, that's where it parallels our conversation as well today is can you build something that starts producing results when you're sleeping and so on. Obviously, the podcast does that in a lot of ways. People can find any of these episodes that you've done for all this time. The weekly viewers, listeners increases, downloads because you have more episodes over time.

And the whole thing is cumulative. But it's still very dependent on you. The book can exist independently of you if you build it a certain way, if you get it to a certain point. And then the returns can be much, much higher than any other, you know, other activity. So that, to me, is the justification for doing it. Yeah, that does make sense. It does make sense. I think the other part of it is the usual fear of failure. Like, oh, what if I write this? And it just kind of sucks, right? Or it doesn't do anything. And, you know, you wrote essentialism. And I remember when it came out, I was like, oh, this guy must be some like super famous author because this book is everywhere. You know, that was what? And you hit the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for a while, I think, if memory serves. Like, that's great. But what if that doesn't happen? And it's like, nobody wants to sort of like start with a squish, right? A stud. Yeah, so, but we can talk about that, right? So one of the principles in effortless, I've started at the end, right, there's

sort of a model here. Effortless results, we've talked a bit about that. Then there's effortless action, and then inside the core of it is effortless state. But let's just talk about effortless action for a moment, because there's a principle that I think is helpful, which is the courage to be rubbish. Unless somebody has the courage to be rubbish, They don't begin. They just procrastinate because they're being too perfectionist about it and they want the first

draft to be perfect. And so there's so much pressure on, oh, this thing has to be so successful from even to begin it. It's like, well, yeah, well, those are at odds. It's fine. Hold the aspiration for excellence. Hold the aspiration as high as you like. I think the highest aspiration is a perennial bestseller, right?

So it's successful for years and years and years, right? That stuff, I can't think of much higher than that when it comes to books. but in order to get there, you have to not only have the courage to write a first draft, but something that I've come to call a zero draft, which is like it's so bad. It's just terrible. But the ideas are there. But you've got to start there. You just start there. You just start with terrible. You just start with rubbish. You don't publish rubbish, but you've got to be willing to stare at rubbish. Just put anything down. You don't ever have to show it to anyone. You just, here's a bunch of stuff. And then in a process, to me, the difference,

between that rubbish and then exceptional. You know, let's say it's on a scale of one to ten. It's just how many iterations you have involved. It's just a process. And that doesn't mean killing yourself, burning yourself out to do it. It means that you start early, as early as possible, and you just keep working on it and getting people involved and very pacing yourself in the journey.

But all the time, you're making it less and less rubbish all the time. And eventually it becomes, And all writing is like this. I can hardly think of any exceptions to what I'm describing here. When you think of the great classics in literature, most of the time there has been this very iterative process. And you just got to see the very final version. And that was the 10th version.

And if it was ended up being rubbish, the one that was probably where you probably got the fifth version or the second version. They just didn't keep going until they were. Yeah, every word is great. That's what Game of Thrones' final season sucked, right? They put down whatever they could. There was no book, and you can tell that that was the first version. That was the zero draft. It's unfortunate that that was what got produced. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I love the idea of having the courage to be able to start with that. And it does go a little bit against sort of coming back to effortless and some of the things that you talked about in the book. It makes sense, but it also somehow seems to go against our obsession with always busting our ass and putting out a ton of war. I don't know if that's an American thing or a Western thing, but culture is sort of implicit method. is that if we're not working so hard that we basically break ourselves and come up with something that's almost perfect every single time,

we're just not working hard enough. Wall Street cultures like this, startup cultures like this, Silicon Valley hustle cultures like this. Burnout is almost the goal. And I know that's a slightly different turn than starting at zero draft. But the workload going into everything, it feels overwhelming because it almost feels like work always has to be so hard

that it's going to be miserable no matter what. Yeah, you know, that's a big driver of effortless, right? I mean, and I think it's not Western. I think it's industrial. Okay. Wherever you have an industrialized nation, you're going to have norms around this. And you have it all through Asia with, you know, work death, overwork deaths. There's like different words for it in each of the languages in Korea, in Japan, in China.

But it's the same idea. And it can be very extreme in those cultures, but it's also true in the United States as well. It can be where people basically, it's a good thing that gets taken. to an extreme and then people just burn out and they still haven't achieved the results that they want to achieve. I think the reason this happens, so it's actually, there's many reasons, but one of the reasons that happens is a mindset thing, which says, you know, it just says effort equals results. So as soon as you say that and you say, well, I'm not getting the results I want, well, what are you going to do in that oversimplistic equation in your head? Well, I need

to put in more effort. Now see what happens as somebody continues to do this. They start running out of space, they're part of the hit squad, they're already running out of space, they want to achieve more still, they're still overachievers, they're still motivated, they double down on it. So now they start to burn out and they think, well, I'm not getting the results because they don't say, well, because I'm burned out, they say, because I'm not putting enough effort in. So you just double down even as you get into burnout. And this can be very damaging. First, of course, to our health, you know, our wellness, but also to our relationships. How well do you turn up in your relationships if you're exhausted, if you're

burned out if all you're doing is Zoom, eat, sleep, repeat, living, where you look at your Fitbit at the end of the day and it says 300 steps. I mean, how well do you turn up in your relationships in that way? So your burnout continues to affect the most important relationships in your life and then eventually even the goals you're trying to achieve. So this is sort of a recipe for a bit of a disaster, but you can't escape it until you change the paradigm. And one of the things that keeps people trapped in this paradigm, this no pain, no gain, effort equals reward paradigm, is that they've also, many of us have been taught to distrust the easy. Yes, because that's for losers looking for the easy way out or the shortcuts. Exactly.

And so you take the other side where you say, well, if it's easy, it can't be the right path. It's going to keep you stuck in one strategy. I've already said I think it's a strategy that can help to a certain degree. it's a finite resource. Effort is a finite resource. Time is a finite resource. So if you want to 10x your result, you have to find a smarter, better, easier strategy. Not cutting corners in any way unethical, I mean a virtuous, moral, good, but easier approach. You know, one way to just state this, to try and break the strategy, the mindset on the other side that's keeping us trapped is just to say, look, easy does not equal lazy. Just to break that in some overachievers minds to say, I mean,

if you literally look up the words in the dictionary for easy and lazy, they're not the same. I'm just stating the obvious, right? Lazy is an unwillingness to work. Easy is just something doesn't require a lot of effort to get it done. That's what we want. We want to make things as easy as possible so that we can do them consistently and even expand our contribution because we've found a smarter path to achieve it. And just to give one example of this, someone in the hit squad, somebody I was coaching, she's the kind of person who's up until four in the morning, photoshopping for her church youth activity the next day. Four o'clock in the morning, yikes. Exactly. And she's telling me about this. And she wasn't boasting about it, I don't think, but she was just trying to say,

look, it just, it's got too extreme. But she's again driven by all the things we've already been described. She's the type of person who if she eats lunch, she feels guilty. But I don't mean take time out for lunch. I mean, if she even eats it, she feels guilty because it just, it's about sacrifice. And that's how you achieve better results. But of course, that isn't. That's how you plateau when you start to fail altogether. My dad was like that. Like, he'd come back and he'd be beat up, you know, tired, working at Ford. And he'd be like, I haven't eaten in two days. And my mom's like, yeah, why? You know, what are you doing? And he's like, oh, I've been too busy. And you could tell he was kind of like, yeah, I haven't eaten in two days. But he was also like, okay, I'm 50 and I haven't

eaten in two days. Like, this is not good. But that was like what he was raised with, right? He was raised, I guess, this like German kind of, you just got to work so hard that your eyes balls fall out. I don't know. You know, just that. And it doesn't work long term. Totally. If we said it succinctly, we could simply say burnout is not a badge of honor. Yeah. But for a lot of driven people, they do want it to be. And a lot of cultures can even make it a badge of honor by celebrating heroics instead of consistently working at the stuff that matters so that you can get all the cumulative advantages. So with this particular person I was mentioning, I say, look, from now on, you're going to ask a new question to get you into this new mindset.

So you stop distrusting the easy. So you stop just leaning into a strategy that's burning you out. Just ask, how can it be effortless? The next time you're doing something, you know it's important, but how can you do it in an easier, more effortless way? So she gets a call. She works at a university, a professor calls, says, I want you to be at this. I need my class to be videoed for the semester. And she just jumps in mentally. She just starts going through. Okay, we'll get a whole team there. We're going to have, we're going to do intros and outros. We'll add music. We'll put graphics in, edit the whole thing together. I'm going to wow him.

Three angles. Right. Get a drone footage of the class. Yes, yeah, whatever. This is how she's thinking, right? And then she paused and she's like, okay, hold on, who's this for? What does Dunn really look like? What's the simplest way to achieve it? And what it turns out is that this is for one student who's going to miss a few classes because of an athletic commitment.

So the solution they come up with together is another student will record it on an iPhone whenever he's going to miss and send it to him. Right, like set up a little tripod in the front of the classroom, record it, save it in 1080P and email it. The professor's delighted. She hangs up the phone. She's been on for 10 minutes. She's saved four months of work for an entire team.

That's the power of this. I'm telling you, it's so true that people make essential things, important work, so much harder than it needs to be, so much more complicated than it needs to be for a variety of reasons. And this is one question that can invert the situation and suddenly reveal a whole bunch of helpful strategies and tactics to be able to achieve more without actually putting in more effort. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Greg McEwen.

We'll be right back. Now back to Greg McEwen on the Jordan Harbinger Show. It sounds like, oh, he just found the perfect example, but I recently, I guess last year now, had an animator come on and then quit after a few rounds. And finally, I was like, hey, why did you leave? You know, this was really good. And he goes, well, I'm just so not used to working in, I can't remember exactly what it was. It was like this aspect ratio.

So like, I'm used to working on phones that are being flipped over and you wanted them in the portrait mode. And I was like, oh, I don't really care which one you work in. And he was like, oh, well, it's easier for me to do them this other way. And I was like, so if we do it this way, then when people do flip their phone, there's going to be like a black line on each side. And he's like, yeah, and that just looks awful. And I was like, oh, no one's going to care. And he was like, oh, all right. So we ended up trying him again.

But it's like, you just lost a year of income working for me because you didn't want black boxes on the side of the animation because you thought. that was unacceptable when really it's just a test to see if anybody even gives a crap about us having these so it doesn't matter like no today receive we posted a few zero emails and complaints about the black boxes on the side of the end no one's even noticed it i didn't even notice it till he pointed it out and it kind of goes along with overthinking things i mean do you find that it's the people that are over the chronic overthinkers slash procrastinators sometimes are the people that or just the overthinkers. Let's keep it to one vice at a time. Are these the people that also find it impossible to be effortless or essentialist in many ways? Yeah, I think that's right. Absolutely.

And, you know, there are five questions that I would encourage people to ask if they're trying to take on a project, especially if they're procrastinating it because of overthinking. So we could put those two together. They're overthinking it in a way that makes it overwhelming to start or they've started, but they're overthinking and adding all the time to it and making that more complex than it needs to be. So it's hard to make. progress or they haven't really got clear about what completion looks like so they can't get it over the line. All of that is a version of procrastination. One stops you starting, one stops you progressing, one stops you being able to get it done. And so these questions cut through, I think,

the clutter on this and help action to be more effortless. So next time you have what seems to be an overwhelming project, this is what you do. It's important. It has to be important. If it's not essential, you're talking to the wrong person, right? You don't do it. But once you think it's important and you're going to do it. Question one is just like, what does done look like? A lot of people are dealing with such vague goals, such vague sense of a project that they haven't actually defined visually in their mind. Like, what does it look like when we're finished with this? Okay, we talked about a book before. Finished is, I've given this to my editor and she has looked through all of the chapters and said every one of them is solid and great and I'm really happy with them.

Maybe that's what done looks like for the book. Question number two is just what steps can I delete? How can I just, don't streamline each step. Streamline the steps themselves, get rid of steps that aren't necessary. Just because someone else took all of these steps doesn't mean you have to. Just because you think you have to add all the bells and whistles somebody else has done, doesn't mean that you have to do it. What can you delete?

Or even better, Steve Jobs was especially good at this, but there are some others that I could point to. that they don't just take complex processes and remove steps. They say, let's start with zero and add, can we do it in one step? And if not one, can we do it in two? But they start with zero. So that's question two. What steps can I delete? Three, question three is, what is the obvious first action?

So stop worrying about the thousandth action. Stop worry about the hundredth or even the tenth. It's just like literally, what is the next actually obvious? first action I can do. As soon as people identify that, as soon as they have that clear, it's like their whole physiology changes and they're like, I can do this. I can do this. And they know they can and they can get that first thing done. The fourth question, what gradual pace can I sustain? So once you've begun, you need to have not just lower bounds. So like, okay, so every day I'm going to open the Google Doc that has my book manuscript in it. That's the lower bound. But you also have to

have an upper bound. What I found is that it needed to be something like no more than three hours of working on the book. If you work on it for five, six, seven hours, you end up getting to diminishing returns or even negative returns, or you become very intermittent in your action because it's just too much. And you sort of your brain gets sore and then you put it off for a week or two. And so what you want is sustainable so that you can do it day and day out. So that's question four. And question five is what can I be grateful for? You know, it doesn't matter what the job to be done is. If you end up getting into a complaining cycle, you make something harder than it needs to be. And so simply looking for what can I be grateful for in the process will help alleviate the burden

along the way. Well, I'm grateful that I have a team of people that we're working together well on this project. I'm grateful that my editor's pleased with this section. You know, like if you can get into that mode of thanking them, of thank you, being grateful yourself, it eases the whole process, improves the sense of energy and culture on the team. And it helps you to be able to keep. going on your journey. So those are five questions that I think help to make it easier to get a project that matters done. Let's break these down a little bit because you did a great job there. That's an awesome overview. I know in the book you go over each of these steps in great detail. We don't have to do that. But defining what done looks like in the case of, well, first of all,

it sounds like every startup or software project where it's like, oh, this is going to be this. And then it's like, oh, we need to add this and we need to do this. And there's feature creep and scope creep and things like that and the goalposts keep moving. And in the book, you told the story about, I think it was in the book, you told the story about this like Swedish warship. Yep, the Vasa. Yeah, yeah. The Vasa is, the king of Sweden is really concerned about all of the naval powers around him. And he decides that one of the things he can do about this is to build one massive warship, you know, the crem de la creme of the region. And he picks out his person, Henriksson, who's going to be the lead shipbuilder, he set some of, he says that you have unlimited funds, a whole forest with a thousand trees, and I want you to build this, you know, whatever, 75-long ship. Then after they'd cut the, I can't remember if it was 75 or not, but after they cut the wood, which is a huge project, he changes his mind. He says, actually, I want it to be 135 feet, which means they have to recut all this wood. Then he changes mindy, actually, let's do it 165 feet. Okay, and now let's have 32 cannons.

But then he changed actually 64 in two levels. No, let's change that. And he just keeps on going like this. After he's done all of this for like a couple of years, he changes his mind again on something massive. And it's said to have killed the shipbuilder, like the shock of it gives him a heart attack and he's gone. So he literally kills off this guy. He's not just, didn't fire him or they didn't just leave. I mean, he killed him with his endless ambiguity and vagueness. And so then the number two comes in. So he's now trying to help in an example of just tremendous like non-essentialism. He says, well, actually, what I now want is to add 700 statues. They'll go all along the side of this, the ship. They'll go just everywhere. This is a glorious looking thing from his point of view.

And a totally, totally non-essential for the original purpose of what he was trying to achieve. Yeah, I was going to say highly impractical at this point. Highly impractical. So here it is. Now, he hasn't had time. He can see. because he hasn't defined clearly what the real end goal is, but to actually test the ship. But he has had time to set up a VIP showing of the ship to the other people from the other regions. He wants to show this thing off. And so they set the ship off for the maiden voyage.

They're about to do a gun salute so all the cannons are out. A gust of wind comes along, pulls the Vasa over just enough that all the cannons go into the water. So water starts flowing into the Vasa. and filling up the center. Well, within one hour of that time, the whole ship goes down. 53 sailors with it to their deaths. Oh, that's awful. And it's totally, absolutely horrific.

And so in the maiden voyage, this ship has gone not more than one mile. And that is the end, the tragic end of the most expensive ship in Swedish history. It has been fairly recently found. I was going to say, it's got to still be there. And if there were statues, then they're still there, right? And it does look beautiful. I mean, you can't knock it for that. It's a pretty impressive looking thing, but it was not fit for purpose. And all of that, because really, he had not defined what done looks like. I love that story. I think it's such a dramatic example of how expensive and complicated and unnecessarily hard we make it to achieve goals sometimes.

And so if you can just define really clearly what does done look like, you can cut out many of the non-essential things. things that keep you from getting it over the line. Ironically, his goal was accomplished in many ways, right? He was remembered for a long time, just not for the reason that he wanted to do. Yeah, it depends what his real goal was, but it certainly was a very costly way to approach what he was doing. And I can't imagine that he ever felt that he'd achieved his purpose. No, it's like next time.

As he watches this thing sink. Right. Can you imagine that moment? Okay, there it goes. Yeah. Okay, a bad day. Yeah. Next time I'm just going to build a library.

This was not a good use of fun. It's not good use of funds. So that's like question one, but you can use all these questions for different projects. I mean, I remember my son came to me, he was about 12 years old and he decided he wanted to get his eagle in scouting, but before he turned 14. Oh, that's really. I got mine at like 17.95 years old. Ah, I see.

You'll relate to this story, you see, because what happened is that we did everything, we did it together. It was a great bonding stuff. We had to go through the steps, you know. there's loads of hoops to jump through. He finished his Eagle project, 175 foot fence with a whole team of people. The whole thing felt great. And then there's the final write-up. There's the final report you send in. And we just died both of us. I mean, it's on him, but still both of us are like procrastinating. And we think of it. We need to work on that. And we're just doing nothing. And a few weeks go by, then it's a couple of months. And I know someone myself who did everything for that Eagle, but then procrastinated the final report. And handed it in the day after he turned 18, which is totally like, didn't work. It wouldn't accept it. They're absolutely sticklers on that. And so he never became an eagle because of this. That's pathetic. Isn't that pathetic? But you can see that people just sometimes don't get it

over the line for a variety of reasons because of things we talked about. So what we did with this is we started to see the procrastination slipping in is we literally went through the questions we've just talked about, right? What does done look like? The scouting office says yes. What steps can we delete? There were a lot of steps to delete because we had seen very glossy, facet, you know, really expensive looking wooden boxes with reports inside that took, you know, 100 hours of probably parental time to make happen. And we suddenly were like, just because they did all that, we don't have to do all of that. What steps can we delete? What is the minimum, you know, process for a successful completion of this? And, you know, what's the first obvious action? Well,

just go get the three ring binder. What's the pace we can sustain? Well, we'll work on it, you know, every day, I can't remember what we said now, but let's say it's even one hour a day until this is done. What can we be grateful for us we're going through the process so we can enjoy this. And he got that in within a couple of weeks of us starting the process. So we know more procrastination, get it done. And he graduated as an Eagle Scout one week before he turned 14. To me, these questions are very practical. They can be utilized immediately on some important project.

And they really do help us to get started, continue in making progress, and actually get the important thing done. That's impressive. I mean, the Eagle, I think, had to be like 100 man hours. And then I remember getting up to like 60 and being like, this thing is almost done. And they're like, oh, remember, you can count the man hours that you assume, fairly that you assume other people in the school, like ordering this. Because we had done like playground renovation.

And you could say like, oh, it probably took them an hour to order, at least an hour to order the woodchips. And then the driver had to come with the woodchips and dump them. Right. Like, you can count that. And then I was like, okay, I think we're close enough. My scoutmaster was like, this is probably fine. Like the idea is to do the project, you know, not have every second meticulously accounted for.

But like I said, I think I needed tons of parental help at age 17 and a half to get it going. And so to do it before age 14 is really something else and speaks to the power of these questions and of doing, of having a system in place of any kind because I definitely did not do it for one hour a day, for 100 days. It was more like, oh crap, I've got a very limited amount of time to do this. I'm spending all day for the next six days during the summer doing only this until I fall asleep, you know, on a pile of wood chips or like with paint covering me on the ground and sunburn. But you got it done, so well done for that.

It did get done, yeah. Looking at the second question, when trying to simplify something, you mentioned don't just go from the complex to the simple, actually start at zero and use the minimum number of steps to get the result. And you mentioned before Steve Jobs. Yep. And in the book, you talk about this DVD burner that had like a thousand page manual and cost $35,000. And actually, I was trying to envision what this could even look like.

It seems like now, now that our exposure to DVD burners is the Steve Jobs Apple example, where you put a disc in and it says burn and you drag a file into there. I can't even imagine making it more complicated, but obviously did start extremely complicated and almost nearly impossible to use. Well, that's what it was. It was a Mike Evangelist, was the engineer that, I talked to about the whole experience. And so he worked for this company separate from Apple.

And at the time, it was very industry specific. It was, as you mentioned, expensive machines. And it was just, you know, you had to be in the recording industry to be able to afford one of these. And so they just kept adding functionality and functionality and complexity to it. And so when the company got purchased by Apple, they had two weeks to prepare for a meeting with Steve Jobs. And they knew they'd been given the direction, you've got to simplify everything.

This is supposed to be an app that's going to go on the Mac as standard. The whole thing has to be simplified. And that's what they did. They said, we've got a thousand page manual. Let's keep reducing and reducing and reducing. So they did. By the time they get into that room with him, they are really proud of what they've brought together.

Their 200 page manual, right? Yeah. They've got a slide deck. They feel it looks slick. They feel it's going to be terrific. It's so, and you can imagine why they felt that because they're going from the complexity. They're going from. Steve walks into the room and he walks up to the,

whiteboard, this is the part that if people know this story, they've heard this piece of it. And he just draws his rectangle and he goes, here's what we're going to do. You drag your file to one button that says burn and then you click burn. That's the app we're going to build. And the moment he said it, Mike and the other people in the room just were like so uncomfortable now. They didn't want to show their slides at all. They had no interest in showing that. And that was, he said the lesson was that they had gone from complexity trying to get to simplicity.

Steve was starting from ultimate simplicity, zero. and add, can we do it in one step? And by the way, that's not just Steve. I mean, there's other examples of people that are, you know, terrifically good at this. I mean, you think about over at Amazon as well, not a dissimilar time period where Jeff Bezos is having a meeting with a lead engineer that had been asked to simplify the shopping process.

Now, this is a time when the internet is still new. People are uncomfortable buying in an e-commerce environment. You know, there's a lot of reasons for them not to do it and just go to a traditional store. And at the time, the checkout process was like so many clicks. Put your name in, clicks, second name, click, address, click. You're putting it everything every single time. And each page is a separate page.

And he'd been assigned to simplify it. And he'd spent two months simplifying each step in the process. He goes for this meeting at this brewery in Seattle. He's got the first employee of Amazon there. He's got Jeff Bezos there. And they're talking at some point in the conversation, Jeff goes to listen. I don't mean how to simplify each step. Jeff Bezos says, can we do it in one-click? And that's how one-click shipping existed for Amazon, still does to this day. But for 20 years,

they had a patent on that, which I'm sure some people could say, well, that's an unfair thing to have a patent on. But that's what's impressive about going from zero and valuing this level of simplicity and frictionless, effortless e-commerce, is that nobody else in any e-commerce industry was doing it. And that's why there's so much power in it, is that there is competitive advantage in your life, in your career, or in your business. If you can take something that used to take 20 steps, and now it takes one every time afterwards,

you have produced an actual advantage over the effort other people have to put elsewhere. So yes, I mean, this is the value of starting from zero and maximizing the steps not taking it. So don't just, So starting from zero means don't just simplify each step. You start from zero steps and then you build up from there. And this is important, this difference, because originally I didn't get it when I was reading

the book, but you're not just chiseling away complexity. You start without the complexity there at all in the first place. And then you build the minimum viable method or product on top of that. Because otherwise you go, oh, okay, that's how we ended up with. Is your billing address the same as your shipping address? If so, click here. But you've already entered an address and you're like, why am I doing this? versus one click where it goes, we shipped it here last time, you used this credit card last time,

if those are the same and these are the items you want, just click that button. And you're like, okay, great. They just built that step on top of everything, not trying to go, oh, we don't have to enter the address twice if they click that box. And then if their email is the one they're logged in with, they can click that box. You're still just reducing down complexity. And then you end up with something that looks like the least amount of complexity that you can have, but still has 10 times as much complexity as you really need. Exactly. We all experience this when we're working with other companies. And there's a great advantage that those companies can have if they can simplify it significantly for us, because we're already overworked, already have too many things,

too many steps in our lives. But we can also apply those same strategies ourselves to remove from our lives things that are making it harder than it needs to be to get things done. Complexity grows over time. We add something and we often don't take it away. You see this happening even in some areas with what's happening with COVID. You had a variety of steps in place to protect people. Then as the threat changes and the CDC rules change and so on, some of these steps, at least here in California, are still there, even though they sort of break with common sense that they should still exist. And that's just a small example. I'm not making any political point. I'm just making a point about complexity grows over time. So it takes a certain approach, an essentialist, someone who cares about

making the process as simple and effortless as possible to come along and start removing those things and say, well, did these serve anymore? Or are they things that we would actually increase the value by removing them now? That's a particular approach and one that I advocate for. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Greg McEwen. We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our sponsors is what keeps the lights on around here. And all of those codes, all those special URLs and discount codes, we threw those all on one page for easy access. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find that.

Please do consider supporting those who make this show possible. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for many episodes if you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show in one easy place. That link is also in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Greg McEwen. There's another couple, yeah, steps slash questions to find the first obvious step and what gradual pace can I sustain. people can grab those in the book, but I want to jump down to number five, which is what can I be

grateful for? And usually I just hate this kind of positive psychology nonsense, but I actually really like this one because it does have a practical element to contributing to the effortless state. Can you take us through this? Yeah, I mean, let's just start at the top. I want to disagree with you about positive psychology, but that's not going to be helpful. You can, but you're right. It's probably like a kind of a tangent, right? It's not helpful. One thing that I found that you can do immediately to apply gratitude in a practical way is to simply say this. After I complain, I will say something I am thankful for. That's an important behavioral shift using BJ Fogg's habit recipe approach, because it's not just being grateful once in a while, not even once a month or once a year at

Thanksgiving. It's in the in-between. It's in the normal experiences of life. And when I started that practice, I found at first that I complained a lot more than I realized. That was my first takeaway. And I think of myself as a positive, grateful person. But I just found it was just, I just slipped into it in itself a very easy way. Oh, yeah, that meeting took longer than I thought. Oh, yeah, I'm feeling a bit cold right now. Oh, I'm hungry right now. I mean, you just see the children. And why are you doing that? Why aren't you doing this? And you just find that it's in fact a flow of complaining. And that just adds a tax for yourself and for everyone around you. It doesn't make any better. It takes whatever's going on, however hard it is and makes it harder. What I found

once I started this is I immediately lightened my own state. I felt better and other people around me feel better. It gets them into a better state themselves. And from that, a whole slew of positive momentum takes place. For example, let me summarize this in a single idea. If you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack. So gratitude is not just a nice thing. It's not just a polite thing. It's not just something that makes you feel a bit better in this moment. All of those things are good. But it's a catalytic thing. It will help you to see more clearly what to do next. In fact, I now advocate also for positive prioritization. So in addition to that first practice, I would recommend that once a week people prioritize using gratitude. So you say, okay, what are the five things that I'm most thankful for from this last week? So that at first seems just like gratitude, but you're also prioritizing because you're thinking,

what are the important things? What are the things that really mattered to me? And then from that, you can say, of each item, you say, well, why does it matter so much? And then what's the next obvious action I can take to improve and to build on the momentum that's already there? Now, that's the really the deeper idea here with gratitude, is that if you can splice it into your state, into your culture, into your processes, then it just increases the speed of progress. Personally, you feel that sense of satisfaction. I'm making progress with your relationships. They feel, oh, I'm doing well. I'm being encouraged instead of only pointing out what I'm doing wrong.

And it can have a very powerful upward trajectory. I did like this one. You know, a lot of times I feel like some. of this stuff is a little hokey, but this is highly practical, especially for me, because there's always, I'm one of those people who's like, oh, this is 99% good, there's 1% things that we could improve upon. But I don't mention all the other great positive things that have worked out. I only focus on that 1%, so it can come across as like, oh, well, you just don't appreciate anything, you know, oh, we set up this whole thing and everything works great except for this one little thing, and you're just focused on that. You know, it comes across is quite negative,

and it's not great for leading a team or a family, that's for sure. because it's kind of like those parents that go A-minus in physics, and it's like a straight-A report card. And the kid's like, really? You know, straight A's A-minus in physics? You're focused on the A-minus? Right. Come on. Right.

Exactly. And what do you want more of? I mean, you mentioned parenting. And the principle we're talking about here is truer in parenting than in any other setting. There's a great book, I swear by this, is it's a manual. You don't read it cover-to-cover, but it's called the power of positive parenting. And Anna and I just sworn by this, whenever we've, found ourselves struggling and parenting, whenever we found ourselves going, well, we know it's

important. That's never the question. It's essential to us. But we are just, this thing is hard. This thing is painful. This thing isn't working. We pull this out. And he repeats the same principle all the way through, which is just what you focus on, you will get more of. If you focus on the thing they're not doing right, you will get more of that. If you focus on what they're doing right, you'll get more of what you're giving attention to. He has like all these examples of how to go about this. And of course, it isn't just to parenting. It applies to all leadership interaction. You've got to be clear about what you want. And a very good way to do that is to emphasize what people are already doing right to get there. Catch your team doing things

that are right. Start the next meeting that you have by simply asking what's gone right since the last time we met. When you ask for a report from someone on your team, say, listen, I always want your report to start with like, hey, what have the success has been since you last sent your accountability? report. You build it into the culture. Barbara Fredrickson's done some great research about this, and she calls it the broaden and build theory. And it basically means that if you get into positive state and gratitude is the fastest way to do it, then it increases immediately your creativity, your sense of optionality. So instead of fight, flight, or freeze, you have this sense of possibility. You can do lots of different things. And the same

is true in your relationships. They start to become more productive and creative as well. And so this actually builds your network. It actually changes the assets that you have at your disposal. So whatever the next challenge is around the corner, you are in a better position to handle it. That is a different way of saying it will be easier to handle if you have this kind of culture, this kind of system and these kinds of assets at your disposal. It's an upward cycle. That's what she's saying when she says, broaden and build. So what about people like me who feel bad or useless when we aren't working, right? Like I've been trying to remap what it means to be useful or get rid of the need to be constantly doing something useful, but it's not easy.

Like playing with my son, right? I shouldn't have to be justifying it in my head as useful or worthwhile. I find myself saying things like, okay, I'm at the sandbox, but it's okay. Don't worry about finishing that other thing right now because the sandbox and, you know, playing with Jaden, that's important too. Like, that's crazy. I should be saying, forget everything else. I'm playing with my kid.

This is the most important thing. But instead, in my head, I'm like, no, no, no, this is the most important thing. So it's okay that I'm not working on the show prep for tomorrow. I can finish that later after he goes to bed. How old is he? He's two. Right. So you're raising two problems as far as I can see.

One is the challenge of interacting as an adult with a two-year-old. Yeah. Right? That's a particular challenge. And then the second is just the more general question of how can you be more comfortable with not working, right? And I think those are two things. So let's deal with that second one first, because overachievers, as a general rule, are very bad at relaxing. Yeah. They are much more comfortable for all the reasons we've talked about with just doing more work. That's a capability. It's a

competence. And they've taken it sometimes to the point that it's unhelpful. But when it comes to relaxing, somebody says, hey, you've got to relax, you've got to recuperate, you've got to rest. And they go, okay, I'm doing it now. And then they get into that. moment and they're like, well, this is very awkward for me. It's very uncomfortable. They are not in any way enjoying it. And it's because their competency in it is zero, right? They do not know how. They've not been taught how. They have never developed knowledge in it. And it sounds like a strange thing that you would have to teach somebody how to relax or that you would have to learn how to relax. But you absolutely do. That's what I've learned is that you have to learn how.

And so I would recommend people to do the following, to start paying attention in their lives and make a list of 10 or I did 20 things. My wife Anna did 20 as well of things that relax us that rejuvenate us. And at first, those are quite generic things. But over time, they've become more and more precise as we've paid more attention to them. And so we find that there are things that we go, yeah, I'm enjoying that. When I go to, you know, when my wife, we have a garden and she likes to work in the garden. that when she's working in there, in lovely weather, outside, maybe working with one of the children, if I'm out there helping it, she loves this. This is relaxes her. This is recuperating.

That's a very signature thing. That might not be the same for anyone else listening to this, but you come up with these building blocks of rest and relaxation, and they work for you uniquely. And so then you can say, how can I now build in rituals of relaxing and recuperating with other people? And you start to be able to build them together so that you aren't so. pulled back to the thing that you, you know, everyone who's good with a hammer thinks everything is a nail, right? Like you just go, I just need to go back at that because I'm good at that. I'm competent there. I don't feel competent at relaxing because you're not. So you have to build it from zero and build it up and build it up. It's really necessary. Now, let's give the

why it's necessary for an overachiever because we are not machines. We are held back significantly by an always work, always on approach. This idea that we're just, we're machines as part of the Industrial Revolution, it's a carryover from that where it was just efficiency-based, and all you need is the machine to be on 24-7 and you'll increase productivity significantly. But we're not a machine. We're biological creatures who are rhythmic. And so if you want to propel forward, it's like a slingshot,

then you need to have a done-for-the-day list. These are the things I'm going to be done. When I'm done, I'm going to be done for the day. day, a time when you're done for the day, minus five o'clock. We need a done for the day list so that you know, hey, I'm not just going to do an endless to-do list. When I'm done for this, I'm going to be done. You need a time to be done for the day. So you build in that boundary, minus 5 p.m. people can choose whatever they want in their circumstances. But that makes it a lot better with my family experience afterwards if I can be there to help set up dinner, help gather

everyone while people aren't too hungry, too tired, including me. But it also means that you, you have this slingshot experience whereby having these boundaries by the time you're working again, you're better able to discern what to work on, the essentials, and how to approach it to make it as easy as possible. Greg, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. It's hard to find a unique angle for a lot of this, because, of course, you've talked about these things in a lot of places. But I think we did that today. I think we managed, which is always nice. And I appreciate the expertise. It's also tempting to overcomplicate doing things. in a simple way. And that wouldn't be a good look for you, I think, right? To overcomplicate effortless and essential. Yes. Yes. I mean, you know, it's in the eye of the beholder as to

whether I've achieved that or not. But it didn't matter to me to try when I was writing effortless to write a book that could be effortless to listen to or to read. And so it, you know, it is story-based and it's, I think it's a simple process, right? You've got just to summarize, effortless state is the core of it. You want to try and remove all the complexity from your brain. The gratitude is a fast way to do it. Resting as a way to do that. Having boundaries is a way to do that. But then you also want to simplify the process so that you have effortless action. Right. And then the final thing, effortless results so that the results eventually have a systematic way and they return to you. Yeah. Thank you very much. I'm imagining a book, Effortless, 750 pages. It's not really.

No. What did it come out to? I listened to it. It was relatively short. Well, my rule was it needed to be shorter than essentialism. And it is. So I set a goal on this book, and I think it was probably the wrong goal, but it could have been worse. One of my goals for this book was to not write a rubbish book. That's a low bar. Well, maybe not these days. But that's the thing.

Yeah, but the thing is, is that there is a huge, there is very often that authors write a rubbish book after a book that's done. really well. That is really, really often done. And I don't mean by like not as good book. I mean a rubbish book, a book that is 450 pages long, a book that had many different books shoved together into it. Because everyone goes, oh, well, it'll be fine. Everyone's going to buy what Greg McGuiners reads next. And it isn't like that. And so my goal was to put certain safety rails on the process so that, okay, it can't be longer than essentialism. That's one thing. Okay, the graphics have to be at least approximately equivalent inside and outside. Some of these things were surprisingly challenging to get approved and to work through, but it just meant, okay, you know, the goal I'm working on the next book already right now, and my goal is different for the next book, is to write an exceptional book, and that is different. But I don't feel the fear I felt on this second, on effortless now. I just feel like, okay, great. You know how to write a not rubbish book competently now. You're not worried about that. Now, just write something that's absolutely the best thing you can possibly write.

And that is the goal. What's the concept of the new book? On the record or off the record. On the record, yeah, on the record. Okay, on the record, the book. I see now I have to think about what you're allowed to say. Well, I mean, I want this book to be around the themes of deep empathy and the power of really understanding other people, fast, accelerated understanding.

Let me answer it this way. The deepest human need is to be understood, to be accepted, to be known. The complication is that we're really bad at understanding each other and certainly bad at helping people to feel understood. The result of that is that everybody's misunderstood most of the time, clamoring to be understood. And so my position is that we can learn exactly how to do this and to do it really well. And if we do, we can increase our influence significantly, maybe even a 10x increase of influence and fast.

That's kind of the premise of the book. Great. Sounds right up my alley. When does it come out? Seven, seven years? I think sooner than seven, but I don't know. Oh, okay. Hopefully not a seven year process. We should see what the journey is. But I think it's an important book. I think it may be the most important book that I've worked on so far. Your conversation on the What's Essential podcast was brilliant. I loved that. And I have been myself changed by it. I've not been terrible at networking in my life. But I found the conversation we had. I'm like, oh, yeah. But that's not the same having a system for it. Yeah. That's the difference. And so I've, in fact, I would say that sort of the

people that know me normally, family, friends and so on would be like, oh yeah, you know, he's great at getting to know people working, even helping other people and so on. But system, once you have a system, it's a whole 10x possibility without actually more effort going into it. It's been a real game changer. I'm glad to hear that. And for those of you who are listening and wondering what he's talking about. He's talking about the six minute networking thing that I talk about in every episode of this show, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Thanks for letting me plug my own thing organically. That's cool. That's cool. Greg McKeown, thank you so much. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, I wanted to give you a quick bite of the episode I did with Mark Cuban of Shark Tank and Dallas

Mavericks fame. Mark gives advice to entrepreneurs and founders in these uncertain times, tells us how he stays on top of trends and technology and how the U.S. can compete with China. When everybody's afraid, the best way to deal with it is by coming together. It certainly seems a lot bigger than anything we've seen, you know, in my lifetime. And the combination of the protests and looting and the pandemic, all these things combined together to make it for really uncertain times. And when people are uncertain about their future, that's why people rebel. Martin Luther King said,

Riding is the voice of the unheard. The only surprise is that it's taken this long. Capertic did even bring the focus to himself. You know, he just happened to be taking a knee and somebody caught him with a phone camera. What would you have done in that moment, if that time, if he were your player, would you, how would you have handled that? I'd hug him. Yeah? Yeah, absolutely.

If you were president, how would you improve race relations? I mean, I'd hug a few people. Yeah. You know, I'd walk out there and listen. You know, I'd take advice. I wouldn't think I had all the answers. This piece you wrote, dear white people, we're the ones that need to change. This is probably controversial.

I would imagine you get some blowback from something like that. A lot of people. I felt I was calling them out as racist, which I wasn't doing. In order for things to change, then people need to take measures and understand, be very self-aware about what's going on with them and how people are living their lives. A lot of people don't seem to have much to look forward to right now. What do you think we should be looking forward to as a nation? I mean, look, there's no better time ever to start a business than right now because

all businesses are effectively going through a reset. And so there's a lot of advantages. and with the protests and the riots, that gives us just one inkling a hope that maybe we'll make progress. Maybe this time we'll listen. For more with Mark Cuban, including the future of the technology economy,

check out episode 362 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Always fun here with Greg. A couple of practical things. One, never do more in a day or a week than you can recover from that day or that week, right? If you do too much work and then you need three days to recover or another day and a half to recover, you're burning out. So how do you lower that workload? You build in essential work times and breaks. I know that seems

obvious in some ways, but many of us borrow from future energy to do work right now. And then we simply never make up that debt. That is a recipe for burnout. I learned this the hard way. I force myself now to go to bed early and sleep later. And that has actually upped my work quality and quality of life way more than working more ever could have. I used to be the opposite. I used to work till I burned out, burn the midnight oil, force a vacation. I'd feel guilty the entire time for not being productive and then get back to work. It was miserable. Speaking of overwork, we also talked about overthinking in this episode. Our episode with John Acuff on overthinking is episode 495. And BJ Fogg, the episode on Habits that we mentioned is episode 306. That's all going to be linked in the show

notes along with the What's Essential podcast that Greg now does as well on these subjects. So definitely check that out if you're interested in his work. Big thank you to Greg for coming on the show. His newest book is called Effortless. Links to his stuff will be in the website in the show notes, please use our website links if you buy the book. It does help support the show when you use our website links to buy books from Amazon or elsewhere. Worksheets for the episodes are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes, and there's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. We've also got a brand new Clips channel with cuts that don't make it to the show or just highlights from the interviews you can't see anywhere else.

Jordan Harbinger.com slash clips is where you can find it. 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, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show subscribe to the course. Come join us.

You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who is burning the candle at both ends,

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