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

29:24What is the thing? The number one thing you know you don't want. Okay, well now you basically know what it is you want because it's just sort of the inverse of that. Yeah. Yeah. George, my friend asked this question on the first ever episode, even before you. He was before BG, he was before Greg, and he asked this question, how do you make a miserable person happy? He goes, no idea. He says, how do you make a happy person miserable? You go, I've got a fucking million pieces of advice here. You go, right, okay. So inversion, inversions are useful to and I can find out at least I can avoid the pitfalls by making sure that I don't do the things that I know that are going to make me miserable.

30:06You know, it's probably maybe a mark of why you've gotten to and the fact that I'm receptive to it and actually more receptive to it than you giving me a four step matrix of how I'm supposed to identify the most important thing and all the rest of it because this may be frustrating to people, but fuck it, I don't care. As you get further along in the journey of working on yourself and of identifying how you work best, experience comes along for the ride. So previously everything was very effortful and it was system two. You know, you've got your daily list of affirmations and morning routine and all the rest of the stuff and there's still a place for all of that.

30:47But largely what you're doing is you're forcing all of this water into an ice cube tray so that it sits nice, compartmentalized because you have no idea what to do. It's messy. The world is messy and chaotic and you need to wrangle it into some sense of order. Fantastic. What I've learned that that whatever it is, conscience, Damon, good instinct, habit, whatever it is, that thing that goes off there for the most part is almost always right and it gets more right the longer that you go on and you say, well, that's whimsy, it's imprecision, it's wishful thinking, it doesn't, it's untestable, it's unverifiable, it's unfalseifiable.

31:27I'm like, yep, I am completely there with you and yet when I find myself following that thing, most stuff goes well. Most stuff goes well and it goes better than it would have done. had I have tried to reverse engineer my, what do I want written on my gravestone, broken down into tenure chunks, broken down into one year sprints, broken down into daily action? Like, it's just, what do I want to do? And that again, the reason that it's so cool is that it is a competitive advantage that compounds with experience, which means that as opposed to, it's one of account availing forces to things get more difficult the further along the ladder that you get, because this is one of the things that you can't speedrun.

32:10There is no fucking growth hacking experience, really. It's just, it comes along as a byproduct of time. This your first tour that you've done with the band, you have no idea how you should eat, how you should sleep, how you should train, when you need to go to the bathroom, how you need to pack everything. After a while, maybe you've got a system in place, and then after a while, after that, you just do it by feel. And you're like, fuck, that's cool. And it's not replicable. It means that competition is, and it's more fun because it doesn't feel like it's this prescribed, top down dictatorial world.

32:46It's this sort of emergent bottom -up very uniquely you. And yeah, at least for me, managing that transition has been a difficult one to allow myself to be more free -flowing. But I really appreciate it. I appreciate, and I'm grateful to me, for letting go of some of the more sort of rigorous and rigid and structured ways that I used to do things. to now allow me to sort of tap into that experience. So maybe that resonates. Yeah, well, look, it's seen, I mean, one way to riff on that is to say, look, the Damon is playing an extremely complex game. And, you know, if we use sort of Musk's idea, the simulation idea.

33:27Okay, so in the simulation, we are trying to,

33:36Let's say that part of the purpose, central purpose, is to maximize the growth of people. That people need to use their agency to make choices, including mistakes, so that they can gain that experience that they didn't have before, so that they can become wiser, become better and grow. Okay, so if that's the case, like it is apparent, like it's what I want from my children too. I want them to make mistakes as soon as possible. Being a high rapid learning process. So there's no shame when they make mistakes. I'm never going to shame them because that's what they're supposed to do is make choices and some will go right and some won't and they'll learn about themselves and other people through the process.

34:17What we would want, And optimally is someone like an ironized parents to step there to be able to occasionally say no, that isn't going to work well for you. But to use that very carefully, otherwise everything's a no all the time and like then they don't get the optimal growth path and learning of life. And so I do think that this sort of this dam and approach and paying attention to that. Like, hey, if you're not feeling it proceed, let's keep going. But as soon as you do you never don't never ignore that You just avoid so many of the catastrophic things and in some ways anything but catastrophic failure isn't failure It's like yeah, keep going keep learning just avoid the catastrophic things And I really do believe that if people are paying attention if they're listening They will always have a Damon warning I that's been true in my life And I think it's true and all the people I've talked to as I listened to them and the complex life story and their narratives and I've done quite a bit of that over the last 25 years.

35:21And as we've gone through literally creating a graphical representation of their life from birth to the moment we're having the conversation, in those big mistake moments, the huge things that have been really, really big, they had a moment of warning. And maybe they're just, we're like, oh, I'm still doing it. Don't let the warnings guide you and then play openly within that lane. This seems something like optimal living to me. Yeah, beautiful. I want to talk about something else that I've been kind of conflicted by this year. So a lot of the people listening to the show will know a good friend of mine, guy called Alex Hormosi.

36:00He is very much hard things are hard. That's why they're hard. Stop complaining about them being hard. And I think his messages is fantastic. And it's resonated with me a lot. And it's given me an awful lot of resilience in times when and I've needed it, but I'm not convinced that it is a fuel that I need to rely on all the time. And I'm interested in alchemizing something different, or maybe just having a couple of different fuel sources, you know, switching between fucking coal and nuclear or whatever. And I came across a really gorgeous quote from you that said, puritanism went beyond embracing the hard.

36:36It extended to also distrusting the easy. And I think for the people who take pride and pleasure, and meaning and purpose from deploying the hard, from leaning into the hard, from dealing with it, and they say, I can do things other people can't. And I can put my nose to the grindstone and I will keep going and I'm gonna carry the boats and so on. That the disc trust of the easy comes along for the ride. So I'm interested in that arc and how a micro David Goggins can learn to trust the easy and have a little bit more comfort when things come along like that. Well, look, all wisdom to me is sort of something like the center between two opposing truths.

37:24They're both true, but if you go too far in one direction, it will no longer be true and wise. So justice and mercy would be like that. But so would I think sort of hard and easy is like that. So if you, for example, if a person is an insecure overachiever, they will tend to operate out of a mindset where if it's not hard, I'm doing something wrong. And so they're always pushing, but they can push too far because they've gained a sort of mindset, something like a bad 1980s motivational speaker slash coach, you know, you've got to do 150 % and if you don't, that's not enough. And you just got to push further.

38:07And that was one of the reasons that I wrote the book, Effortless, was as an antidote to that. You can think about it like an insecure overachiever's guide to healthy productivity. What does that look like? Is there a way that is actually more optimal? Get better results? But without this endless assumption that burnout is the way. Now, you could take it too far, but that's not who I'm writing to. I'm writing to those the only default one way. So there's a case study that blew my mind when I read it. The more I got into it, the more some of these ideas sort of elevated for me. So go back with me to the 1850s and the great expedition of the time, like getting to Mars's hours today, getting to the moon was the 1960s.

38:57This was who's getting to the South Pole. And no one had ever done it in all of recorded history. You have Shackleton that tried and failed. That's sort of the most famous failed attempt at doing it. And then after Shackleton, there are two teams that set off on almost the same day, a Norwegian team, a British team. The British leader, the expedition leader, had as a mindset something like maximum effort equals maximum reward. And so he translates that like this. Day 1 will go 30, 40, even 50 miles if we can. We will maximize the distance because obviously if you maximize the distance each day, you'll get to the South Pole faster than the Norwegian team.

39:40So that's what he starts. Day 1, day 2, day 3 is like that. Then they get really bad weather. They're so burned out physically that they have to stop, set up their tents, and sit it in no progress. So it affects them psychologically. We know this because they wrote in their journals. Oh, we have worse luck than anyone who's ever tried this. We have the worst weather conditions of anyone. And they're wrong about that. In fact, they have better weather conditions than the team they had based their own attempt on. But they felt like it was true. So now they are physiologically and psychologically exhausted.

40:20One entry. We don't think anyone could make progress in weather like this. But one team could, and that's the Norwegian team, who had a different mental model, expedition leader, something like optimal effort equals maximum results. But he got it curiously from the indigenous people in Antarctica who had taught him this, that making maximum progress in those conditions is about sweat management. That is, if you sweat too much, you will burn out the body too soon. You will be colder. You will freeze, and it will have all of this negative consequences. So he translates what they had taught to him into the rule 15 miles a day, one five day one, we could go way further, we won't day two, day three day four, they get the first bad weather day.

41:15Well, they have sufficient energy to be able to continue making the progress. So they just, they go maybe 13 miles, but it's somewhere within the range, you know, 13 to 15 miles, even on those bad weather days. They avoid completely the boom and bust approach to execution that the British team has. But the plot thickens when when they get within 45 miles of the South Pole. Because now they have to choose, you know, what to do because they have perfect weather conditions and perfect sledding conditions. So they could, if they break the rule one time, make it to the South Pole in a single day. And to make the decision harder, they don't know where the British team is for all they know the British team is ahead of them.

41:57And so that's like a good moment to sort of pause and just reflect on our own mindset. set. What would we do? What does the insecure overachiever do? Do you push? Do you pace? I've asked audiences this all over. 85 % or above will admit, including me to push. Why? Because that's the mindset. Because we really genuinely believe maximum method equals maximum results. Okay, well, they don't. They pause. They pace it still, take some three days, they get to the South Pole, they beat in the British team by more than 20 days. That's not what should happen. Every insecurity of an overachiever knows that's not what should happen.

42:43That's not how the world works and yet it is. Eventually, the British team make it there as well, but they're so burned out, not one of them make it home alive to England. They all die on what would have been the journey home, whereas in the Norwegian team, their approach allowed them to make the non -trivial 16 ,000 mile journey home. And when I read the biography of this, the race to the polls, the biography chooses to describe the progress being made by the Norwegian team with words that I find even to this moment outrageous. He said, they made progress with, this is his words, without particular effort.

43:21What can you say? What can you say about that? It almost knocked me off my chair when I read the words. I mean, I'm in the middle of writing effortless so it supports the case I'm making, but it's still an outrageous moment. It is the most arduous physical challenge known to humanity. That's why it was so exciting. That's why people were trying to do it. And yet their progress was defined, of course, not no effort. But that wasn't the distinguishing quality of their advancement. And in that, I think there is something so real to challenge the thinking that has been absorbed, swallowed almost through the pores of our skin if we're interested in success and achievement, that we have to be going beyond the max.

44:05When no one is admitting that when you go beyond the max, what's actually happening is that you're setting yourself up for the bust. No one's talking about the bust. I'm training right now for an Iron Man and there's literally a way that you can track your sort of actual power over time. And yeah, you wish it was higher than it is and there are things you can do to push that number up over a long period of time, but it's what you have. And so the reason you want to know this is that when you actually do the Iron Man, you never want to be above your average in the entire race because every time you think, you're, oh, I look at making all this progress.

44:44See, look at me and passing people and this is what I need. It's like, no, what you're doing is making yourself slower later. Are you drawing the problem from a tank? Yeah. What's that? Yeah, you're drawing from the tank right exactly. And so this idea of finding what is your maximum, your op, and going back a little ways, like the 85 % rule, go 85 % and you'll find you can go further and faster and for longer. Yeah, it's fascinating. I've been, this has been something that's really captured me this year that I think most people probably need to hear David Goggan screaming in their face to go harder as opposed to Greg McEwan whispering in their ear that they're already enough on average.

45:25And you know, reliably working harder will make pretty much all problems go away in one form or another, but they will make problems go away in the only way the problems can be judged outwardly. It'll achieve more success. it'll get you more renowned, it'll get you all of these things, but you might be totally fucking miserable and joyless when you're doing it. And what happens over a long enough timeline? What are the prices that you need to pay for that? What relationships blow up? What's the risk of burnout? How quickly do you manage to reach the stars? But then you explode upon reentry. You have no ability to do reentry because you are never able to switch off.

45:57I'm going to Jamaica for a Sakoku retreat early in the year. So I'm going to do seven days, no phone, no internet, no nothing. And that to me, it sounds lovely in advance, but I get the sense that it's maybe going to be like a Navy SEAL hell week when I get the most opulent version of a Navy SEAL hell week because I mean, Jamaica. But I'm really, really obsessed with this idea that not only the distrusting of the easy, not only the sort of inculcation of the hard, but that for the insecure overachiever, it's the precise opposite piece of advice. And on average, maybe more people need to hear it.

46:38Maybe more people need to hear somebody telling them that they're lazy and that they're sad on the couch and they need to get, you know, go to the gym and do the things. But for the sort of people that read your work and that listen to this podcast, I really, I really, really want to be a redress to that kind of energy. Look, you need to be able to turn it on and you need to be able to build your capacity to turn it on. That's what training is, right? That's what doing the Wattage hours on the bike and sitting on there and all the rest of it. But you more than being able to turn it on, you need to turn it off.

47:07And I'm a living example of this, man. Like I'm somebody that has not stopped for seven years doing this project. And I'm now working harder to learn how to not work hard than I ever learned how to actually work hard. Because working hard came easily to me. Working not hard is a, it brings up all manner of problems. You know, all manner of challenges. Who am I? Am I falling behind? Does this matter anymore? What if people forget me? What if I forget me? My self -worth was wrapped up in how much I achieved this day and I haven't achieved that much. Well, you meant to not achieve that much. Yeah, I know, but maybe I can go harder.

47:44Is this the difference between me being a bitch or me actually taking some well -deserved time off? And then you go even deeper than that and you say, well, not. Am I taking time off simply so I can come back harder? That doesn't seem like time off. That's not me actually enjoying joy. that's me using joy as an instrumental good toward another instrumental good. I want an inherent good. I want to be able to go away and enjoy this thing for the sake of enjoying this thing, not because I think that Andrew Hedeman said a seven -day fucking psychoker retreat is going to allow me to do. These are the challenges.

48:14These are the challenges that happen as you get further down the self -growth, self -development journey. They don't get easier. They just get more complex. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, one way to think about what you just said is, is, I call it the onion of human systems. And that's, I mean, it's consistent with somebody who talked about before, but in all, in any human system, right? So a person is a human system, right? That's one way to think about it. A relationship is a human system. It's all of the interaction, and it's highly complex. I mean, take a single person and try to understand everything that's in their mind and how it's all connected.

48:56That is unbelievably complex. So the complexity, like we live in a ridiculously complex world. And so human systems are ridiculously complex. The problem is, if we operate in a way that we only ever at the outer edges of the onion, Then we're dealing with the relatively safe and relatively trivial. And so, I mean, I think what you're describing in your journey this last year is, is I've been moving closer to the center in my own life. Circumstances are such that it's happening and some of it is just the success itself going, okay, well, what does it mean? And if I don't have to work for the same reasons I used to have to work, then why do I do that?

49:48And so it raises questions that are closer to the highest level of vulnerability and highest level of impact possible. Is it the center? I sometimes think about this as like the red button at the center and there's all sorts of protective measures that people employ to avoid going there. And I used to think that was sort of fundamentally, you know, pretty much just bad. But I understand it more now, because it's like, you mess with that thing, you're resetting, you know, that red buttons like there can be unbelievable resets. And so if you, if you rest reset it stupidly or or reactively or something like that, that yeah, you could, I suppose you risk blowing up your life, but let me just describe what I think is down there, what I've found down there, is that at the center of the center, like the holy of holies of our mind and heart and life, it's a meaning frame.

50:49Of course, it's not just one, but there are meaning frames. That is, well, what things mean to us, how we, when we're looking at a set of data or circumstances, how we interpret it. And we are, whatever we are, we are meaning machines. I mean, we are constantly sort of trying to make sense of where somebody said it that way. What does that mean? You know, oh, they said it with a slightly different tone of voice. What does that mean? You know, like, well, constantly trying to map meaning and others and ourselves. Now, here's the thing. It's not just a meaning frame. It's what I've come to describe as a frozen meaning frame.

51:28And this is how it works. You have a true frame, there's a meaning frame that's based in truth that has got locked like two magnets with something not true. And then because it's happening so deep in us and so subconsciously, we then just move forward in life with that being locked. And we don't even know that that's operating us. It's an operating system and it's shaping 100 decisions, 1000 decisions. And we don't even know why. And so then people at the surface are trying to say, well, that habits not really the habit I want. And let me read a book about habits and then I'll be able to change it and I can move the food out and I can get rid of all the rubbish food and yet somehow I'm always eating food.

52:16You know, sometimes somehow, even though I know all those stuff, I can't stop doing it. Why? Because they're operating at the surface. You have to get to the center. Let me give you a single illustration of this. I was working with a very intelligent PhD student, great husband, great father, great in his faith, but in his actual career work, he just can't get any motivation. And he's doing really well. He's at one of the top universities. So on the surface, again, it looks fine, but he knows inside. There's no meaning here and I can't seem to thrive in this environment and he doesn't know why.

52:52So we go through this rapid listening process to be able to go from the surface down, down, down, always knowing, at least I know, there's something at the center we don't know what it is yet. And we find what it is together, about an hour. So it was quite rapid. His sister had died when he was young. And when she died, his young One version of making sense of this world he's in is the only things that matter in life are my family and my faith. Now that makes perfect sense as a 10 -year -old or something trying to make sense of his world. And it's not that that's totally false, but it's a set of truth mapped like those magnets were something not true.

53:37It doesn't even know it's there. But here he is as a PhD student at the top university struggling. As soon as he worked it out, we were able to zoom in and begin a process of starting to look at it, untangle it, gently separate it, and enable him to operate at a completely different level. And that's one illustration, but I have spent the last, I mean, I don't even talk about it in either essentialism or effortless, not really not at all, but that's really been in the story of the last 25 years of my life have been unbelievable moments like that with people, one -on -one, sometimes in bigger groups, where you are listening in a way that gets to the heart of the matter, these vulnerable but valuable unlocks at the center.

54:28This is the process I think you're going through and it'll be feeling really messy and really vulnerable partially because it can be close to you get the higher stakes it is, but also because perhaps there hasn't been like a structured process to try and make sense of this journey. But I think if you think about it, war in terms of this onion system, it will help you to go, okay, of course this feels vulnerable, of course this is weird, and you know what you're looking for. What are those meaning frames inside, way down, truths matched with untruths that I can start to identify, unlock, and then be able to release a new way of living and operating.

55:11Let's just revisit that now. Again, five years on. Everyone can go back and listen to the first episode we did, which is great on essentialism. Second episode we did, which is on effortless. And, you know, a lot of things have changed for me since the first time that we spoke. And I'm interested to get your perspective, having also presumably watched people be introduced to the approach and then grow over time and end up in different sorts of places, what are the challenges in remaining in essentialist as your career progresses, as everything gets more as you get closer toward the outcomes that you want.

55:49Maybe you surpass the outcomes that you want. Take me through the things that people are going to encounter.

55:57Well, let's just, let's level set by saying this that almost everything that has been written and published both in the popular press and in academic circles and certainly online are about our advice for how to become successful and almost nothing has been written about what to do once you are. But that's a problem. And okay, you can say, well, most people are trying to make the journey from zero to one. So maybe the idea is, well, there's a smaller market for the one -to -infinity market. But I've spent so much of my life working with people in that category that I feel a lot of sympathy and even compassion.

56:43I would say compassion, better even than sympathy because there's a lot of misjudgment, really low quality judgment of people that are successful. If you're trying to go from zero to one and somebody's up there and they're in three, four, five, 10, it's like, ah, yeah, they're all right, they're fine, they'll be okay. And it's like, that's because they actually don't understand what it is once you start to get there. So, what is someone going to experience? They're going to experience, what's that word where you're standing on a high building and you're looking over it. Vertigo. Vertigo. You're Success vertigo is definitely part of the problem.

57:34It's just like, whoa, why, where are you, am I now? You know, I've just been trying to get up here. You know, and now I got up here, and now this just feels so strange and the number of people up here, there's like, you know, down there on level one there was like a million people. And then I got up as I carried on walking up and going up and up and up, you know, the numbers are siphoning out. And now up here, it's like, there's like, there's three people up here and they're all really busy doing their thing. And I don't know who to talk to or how to operate. And so like the loneliness of leadership and the loneliness of success is huge.

58:08And this is one of the reasons that you see the psychological discombobulation of people that achieve success in a sense overnight, even though they almost have always been working for years to get there. But then suddenly it pops, they get into this movie. I had Matthew McConaughey on my podcast and we've remained friends since. and he's like, you know, the day after his big break happens and the movie comes out, he's like, he's, I walked down the same road the day before and there was like two or three people that looked at me and maybe they weren't even really looking at me. He says afterwards there was two or three people not looking at him and they might have been looking at him.

58:43The difference was so different and one of the things he ended up having to do not immediately but he like took a year or two out of bit just to go, okay, I don't want to, I don't even know where I am anymore. And I don't just want to be the rom -com guy. So I had to, he like took a sort of connect the dots year or two. And I thought that was pretty, pretty, um, prescient of him, pretty, showed it, a pretty strong degree of foresight to not just become a function of the machine. And that's, that, that's basically what I think it is, is that as you're moving up the levels, you're building a machine that's going to produce the thing you want to produce the success and building that system, I think, is key to getting from zero to one and even beyond.

59:28But there's a certain point at which the machine is working so well. It's like who's serving who? Did I become the cog? You know, I'm I now the node in the system, my built and I'm just answering to it or I'm I still the creator. And the gravitational pull of success is so strong that it is harder to escape it. I mean truly success traps are harder to escape than failure traps. Failure traps are incentivized to change success traps are incentivized to carry on. And so it takes a greater self -awareness to be able to push apart and and and not be a cog in the system but separate and look at the system.

1:00:14Okay, what is happening here? What is the state of affairs? How's it all working? And do I want to enter that system again? Or how would I now want to change it for the next 10 years of my life? Are the next in your case, you're saying five years, that sort of a keen metric the last five years where you were now for the next five years. So I think it's that it's the escape from it so that you can start to look at it, not be in the system you've built, but to be able to observe the system. I think about it like the observers advantage because we can build really successful, complex prisons if we're not careful.

1:00:58And so yeah, we built it. It did what we wanted. But then we get it, And you're like, maybe that isn't what I wanted, but I'm still in it now. And everyone else seems to want it. So maybe I should want it. And so it's all this very confusing sort of multi mirrored experience that we're having. And so to be able to escape it, to be able to say, look, that is not me. That system, that success, that way of working, that way of operating, that is not the real me. The real me is the observer. And that I really think is literally true, right? the observer, the fact that we can, for example, if we're having a panic attack, whether because of failure or success, because they can both produce it, the fact that we, it is, that psychologically possible to actually observe yourself having a panic attack means that the observer isn't having a panic attack and the observer is you.

1:01:53It's a great, it's such a discovery at any phase of success to discover, oh, I'm not my thoughts and I'm not my life. That's just where I am and what's happening right now, but I can observe it. I just think in some ways it's harder to do that as success becomes its own form of noise. It's so loud and there's money involved and there's fame involved and there's people involved and there's criticism involved and there's opportunity involved involved and there's more involved in all of those things. It's so loud. It's like how do I get myself to observe again? How do I not just get to the next party in the next moment and the next opportunity and the next flights and the next?

1:02:40That's the journey, I think, to help become successful at success. If you think about some of the horror stories of success in the past and there's a lot to pull from. You can see why success can become such a catalyst for failure, because it takes us away from the observer role where we can actually get clarity about our life. What's happening? So what? Now what? That question from the observer position seems to be the right process at all levels of success, but man, it's harder at the highest levels. Well, the other element is you're learning to say know to things that previously would have begged to have had the opportunity to say yes to.

1:03:25Yeah. And for every unit of effort that you put in now, however many years hence, the impact that you have is a thousand times or a hundred times what it would have been in the beginning. So you're telling me that the pressure and the implications are greater than it's ever been. And the temptation for distraction is greater than it's ever been. right and my resilience is going to be pulled on more by more things than it's ever been. Right. And I need to do, I need to do all of this. I need to spin this thing in a neutral bolt up to make something that's actually what I want. And yeah, it's a fascinating challenge.

1:04:04It's a really fascinating challenge. Alex talks about, you know that scene in the matrix where the woman in the wedged red dress walks past them and Morpheus says, Neil, you're looking at me are looking at the woman in the red dress turn around and he says, you know, you have to learn on the come up to be able to ignore a hypothetical 10. He says, what about a hypothetical 1000? Or what about 1000 hypothetical 1000s? And that's this ever, it's like reverse habituation, you know, you've got the sort of hedonic treadmill, this is like the hedonic no. You need to be able to ever, ever more sensitively say no to ever more attractive things that look ever more enticing.

1:04:45but you need to continue to be able to say no. And then, you know, you actually need to be able to pull the trigger and say, well, maybe this is such a step change. Maybe this speaks to me so much. This is the opportunity that I've been looking for. And all of this needs to occur at once and to put the icing on the top of the cake, you need to do all of it while no one gives you sympathy. While everybody says, well, that's a champagne problem. Oh my God, you do too many options. How I would have touched, you know, it's so unrealistic. You not know that people are dying. You're not other people in poverty, you go, dude, if you are the sort of person that wants to be successful, this is precisely the sort of problem that you are going to face.

1:05:21The only issue is that you're not facing it right now. So yeah, that altogether, that thousand hypothetical 1000s more impacting you've ever had before, more distraction you've ever had before, more options you've ever had before, playing it a level that you've never been at, and you still need to be able to say no, it's not easy. Well, one thought that comes to mind or two thoughts, I guess. One is Elon Musk mentioned at one point that for every minute he spends on Tesla, that's worth a million dollars. That's what he has to raise. So think about that, right? Like, it's so easy to be... I mean, if a culture gets infected with envy and...

1:06:08you know, then what you produce is a lot of like moral pride looking up. Of course, of course, you can have pride looking down. You can be one up because of success and achievement. But there is a different kind of pride, right? There's a different kind of ego looking up, going, well, they look at them there or writes and it's easy for them. And if only I had that, than I'd be. So that happens too. And I think that's as blind as the opposite because it lacks all the empathy and the complexity of what life is like. Why is it that not 100 % of the time, but a very high percent of the time, people that win the lottery, discombobulate?

1:06:55Why is that? It's worth pausing about because everyone who plays the lottery presumably wants to win and believes that if they win, life will immediately be better for them. And it's not what happens. So that's worth thinking about because whether you win the lottery or you just achieve something more than you expected to or things work out for you, you're still in the same situation. And it's like, if you can't manage level one, why do you think you can play a level a thousand? You If you're in a computer game and you can't do level one yet, if someone just gives you some hack and now you're in a level 100 at the same game, why do you think being at the level means you can perform at the level?

1:07:47And so it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a, I would say it's a slightly tragic thing to wake up to and go, oh, I got to this level, whatever that level is now. And now I have to learn a new set of skills and a new way of thinking. Oh, I've got to do it again. No arriving. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. Absolutely. And like so, so there's, I've mentioned it previously just with the six minute planning process of going from confusion to clarity to creation, but of course it applies way beyond a daily process. this, this, I think the acceptance that everybody faces confusion and a level of chaos every day of their lives.

1:08:37And I was talking to a very successful entrepreneur investor recently who said, Apple, Google, all of the top brands in the world, all of these companies that we think operate at a certain kind of way is as when you work there, that this is true. When you work, that you're just dealing with confusion and chaos every day. That's still what you're managing. And so you are presenting to the world a certain brand, and that's not that that's a lie, but somehow in the way it's presented, people can easily assume, well, behind the curtain, everything's smooth, everyone's, no, you know, Tim Cook and the executives there, and I've worked with enough of the executives to know what I'm talking about with it.

1:09:17but they're just dealing constantly with the unknown of that next level of success. And so upgrading yourself for the current level you're at. Yeah, it's not what we expect. It's not what's expected. Just going back to what we were talking about before this sort of arc from distraction to disorientation. Obviously we're in a world where technology, social media gives us a lot of access to information. It's very easy to make comparisons about what you should be doing versus what others are doing. And it's kind of like option anxiety in a way. How do you recommend sifting through the bullshit and determining what information and advice is actually good or bad for us?

1:10:01Should people just turn it all off? Basically, to what degree should we be seeking external influence to determine what's right for us to be putting our efforts into? to. I think what you begin with is this assumption that every single person watching this, right? I suppose it's happening in this moment, right? They're watching, they're listening to this is two more people sharing thoughts and so on. It's like, if you're alive today, you are having more opinion inputs. It's not information overload anymore, right? It's opinion overload. You have more opinion inputs than anybody ever. And it's from people that know you less well than in any other previous era.

1:10:47So the gap and possibility for, you know, for relevance is really high. You know, like if my daughter comes home from school today, and before I even listen to her, I just play a podcast for her. Or I just, you know, of X, you know, some statement that someone made, you know, just read it to them. Like, what are the chances that what I'm going to share is going to be the most relevant thing that could be said to her in this moment, right? That's very, very low. And that's sort of the problem. So I think you begin by just assuming, ah, you could be below average in your consumption of opinions today and you'd still have an opinion overload problem.

1:11:35So, I think with that, I mean, maybe one thing I would recommend to your question, what do you do? I think if you fast from social media, you know, for a certain period of time, you know, let's say even if you do it once a year, you say, okay, five days, no social media. Cut out that noise. You don't have to go to Hawaii to do it, right? Like you just go, okay, for one week, I'm just not going to do it. and notice the difference. Notice what happens to your thinking. Notice what you notice. That to me is one good rule of thumb. I think a second thing that I would recommend is that people... Maybe again, it's like a once a year spring cleaning, but go through everybody you're following.

1:12:23And just start from zero. Like right now, imagine you didn't work following anyone. Who would you select to follow? Who are the people now that you think are going to give you the most relevant insight for your life today? I think that that idea of starting from zero is is a better is a better mindset Switch than Let's look at the whole list and remove one or two people It's like start the other way round go to zero and see what might be relevant see who now is going to be helping you Go forward. What are the impact of these voices been on you on the last year that they help you? Did they just add more clutter to your life?

1:13:04The things you really care about better? I Had Brad Smith on on on my podcast. He's the president of Microsoft. He is one of the only technologists who openly admits to the That what will he wrote a book about it? It's called tools tools and weapons. And just the, just the admission that all technology can be both, all of it. I've worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years now. It is so rare that anyone admits that, especially if they're being paid not to admit it. So, so you just always seeing only the upsides. Anyway, one of the things that he has said about this, he said for a hundred years, all of the technology that we have has made it easier to connect with people who live far from us at the cost of the people who live closest to us.

1:14:01And so you can take that and turn it into a sort of algorithm for life because you can say, oh, right, they only make money if I'm not spending time listening to my wife or my daughter or my son. That's the only time any technologist is making money. is if I am not doing that communications work, that face -to -face work. And as soon as you see that, you're like, oh, well, that makes everything for, well, he's saying 100 years, but let's just say the last 10 years, that makes the last 10 years make a lot of sense. Yeah, what's happened to the gen, you know, deep friendships have gone down in all, in every single category, male, female, and all age points.

1:14:43But over the last 10 years, as the biggest drop off has been in men, I think sort of age 30 plus. Now that doesn't mean that they have, that they're worse than anybody else, but the drop off has been higher over that period of time. It's like, well, why is that happening? Well, because simultaneously, technology, gaming, social media has had, it's heyday, uncontrolled growth. So you're making a trade off. And so, you know, I think that if you put sort of all of those together, like maybe give you one more rule, I think it's like technology offered a set time per day. I'm not always great at that, to be honest, but we went through a period over this summer when I really was doing it.

1:15:33And immediately the quality of my life went up immediately. Because what happened is it was like, okay, we're gonna, you know, let's get around and talk and we'll just laugh and Maybe we'll go swim and we'll swim together and then we'll just make memories together and it was the quality of life was immediately improved And it's because we don't we aren't properly aware of this trade off the technology companies Have made effortless for us. You know, whatever that device is enough pockets It's not a phone, right? Like that's not what it is Jordan Peterson talks about that like whatever it is, it's not a phone.

1:16:08So I did some thinking after that, well, what is it? And I think about all my experience in Silicon Valley. And I'm like, oh, right, okay, it's a $3 trillion military grade disorientation machine that makes certain people a lot of money at the cost of connection between humans that live together and are close together. That's what it is. And I'm not saying it's only that, or all the time that that's what I think it is right now. One apocalyptic way to end, I love it. Greg McKean, ladies and gentlemen, did, honestly, you've been a huge influence on me. It's so great to have you in my life. It's so great that you put this stuff out and I love the fact you've revisited it.

1:16:43You've got, what have you got? You've got new things, new books, new bits and pieces. What should people go and check out? Look, essentialism, 10 -year anniversary, that's updated. Of course, the essentialism planner. If people, depending when this wears, if they go to essentialism .com, there's a whole set of additional tools and tools that couldn't make it into the planet that people can get and so on, totally free. And a really high quality course, if you go to GregMakuen .com, in 10 seconds you can sign up, it's called LesbapBetter, and it takes the best of essentialism and effortless into these 30 -day course, these 10 classes spread out over that time.

1:17:26And it's just Where do we begin? Here we are, we've talked about so many things, it's totally overwhelming, but where do you begin start with this last but better course? I think those are three things to go with. Yeah, I think going into the New York, that planner is great timing. I think a lot of people, everyone should go back and listen to the first episode that I did with you, just such Greg McEwing, Modern Wisdom, and it'll come up. It'd be kind of funny to see how much both of us have changed. You haven't aged. I don't know whether I've read the rest of I think it's a good time. I think it's really, really good timing.

1:17:58New year, some structure. I'm a big fan of the planner. I've used them a lot and I've got your new one, downstairs, so that'll be the first 90 days of next year. We'll be used with that Greg. Until next time, mate. I'm really excited to see what you're right next. Like I say, I'm genuinely so thankful that you're in my life. I'm so thankful for the work that you do. Likewise. Thank you, Chris.