Achieve Your Dreams By Working Less Hard | Greg McKeown EP 825

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11Essentialism is about rethinking prioritization, what really matters, and figuring out what is essential. Effortless is a cousin to that, and that's about rethinking simplification, which is that sometimes we just make getting great results, breaking through to the next level, harder than it needs to be. Yeah. So it's not saying, hey, you should never work and you should never work hard and you should never put an effort. I believe that you're supposed to put an effort. The point is, if you can't work any harder, you've got to find an easier path. And yet in a grind culture, sometimes people start to get burned out and their answer is push even harder rather than think different, think smarter, find an alternative route.

0:56The book structure, the model is to have an effortless state, like three concentric circles, effortless state, effortless action, and effortless results. Right. And that's sort of like three books in one. Each of them can make your life and the results you get easier to get. You want to first remove all the complexity in your mind, in your heart that makes life more frustrating than it ought to be. So simplifying your state, I think, is a huge return on investment. If you can let go of a grudge, if you can let go of something that you keep on draining you, there's just more of you on offer. And that's not through grinding effort.

1:37That's through just removing burdens. You don't have to be hauling up the mountain at all. So you're simplifying all of your, basically all of that clutter that's in your mind. So it makes it easier to focus on what matters. One of the things that I've learned specifically on grudges is that we have to ask an unusual question about grudges. And that is, what did we hire the grudge to do? Every grudge we hold, we hold for a reason. We've hired the grudge to do something for us. Maybe we hire the grudge to make us feel powerful. See, I am one up. I'm above that person. See, they did this bad thing.

2:14I'm holding on to that. See, I'll show that I'm superior. We hold on to it for a sense of superiority. Or maybe we hold on it because we like that we get to tell a story of being a victim. And people go, oh, yes, we get sympathy for doing it. Well, we hire grudges to do certain jobs. And what I think is that if we simply evaluate grudges, like we say, how are you doing in your job performance for me? Are you actually protecting me? Are you actually making me powerful? Are you actually getting people to build a stronger relationship with me? Or if you evaluate them, and in the book, there's a section specifically, one by one, you can do this.

2:52You actually find, well, actually, it's not making me powerful. It makes me more vulnerable. It makes me vulnerable with everyone because I'm carrying this wound still. I'm not letting it heal. Is it helping me to build relationships? No, if you pay attention, you notice that when you tell these stories, you kind of have to find new people to tell them to because people get bored of it. Right. And so you're not building deeper trust relationships. you're actually kind of wearing them out along the way. And you can go one by one to suddenly discover that this is like a bad employee. A grudge is like, you've hired them to do this.

3:26They aren't doing any of those things. They're using you. Grudges use you. They burn you up. They waste you out. They make you weaker. And so just through this process, you start to find like, I'm ready to fire my grudges. Ready to be free of it so that I can actually recuperate whatever the percentage is, 60 to 70 % with him, maybe it's different for other people, get all of that back. And we can start putting that into the stuff we really wanted to do in the first place. There's a story that I came across in the research that I love of a man who was productive in his community. And then one day he saw what he thought was a piece of string on the ground.

4:05And it was a piece of string. He gets it. He's like, oh, I can put that to use, puts it in his pocket. On that same day in the marketplace, someone else had lost a wallet. and lost some money. And they thought that they had seen him pick up the wallet and take it, accused him of it publicly. There was no way for him to prove his innocence. And so the word went out, this person has acted dishonestly, dishonorably, and so on. Now, at this point in the story, he has a choice. He can't prove his innocence, but he could have, in this moment, let go of the accusation of the harsh judgment. And he would have suddenly had all that energy back to be able to get back onto, well, what can I do something about?

4:47How can I serve? How can I make a contribution? How can I be successful again? But he doesn't. He gets fixated on it. Everywhere he goes, he talks about it. He nurses the grudge. He explains it's a piece of string. Don't you see it was wrong? A piece of string, a piece of string. People started laughing about this guy. All he ever wants to talk about is a piece of string. And it makes him ill on his deathbed. Final words of the story, you know, a little piece of string, a little piece of string. Now that is a fictionalized account, but it illustrates the point of where are you putting your mental energies?

5:19If we put him on grudges, if we put them on things that have happened, we wish they hadn't happened, or even on our own mistakes where we go, I wish I'd been different. We're beating ourselves up for past mistakes. We're just putting tons of effort onto things that will exhaust us and burn us out. I was staring at myself, dressed head to toe in a Stormtrooper costume. Yeah. You know, I'm in a store of Halloween. This is like an expensive suit. It's like a movie quality Stormtrooper outfit. And as I'm staring back at myself in the mirror, like, should I buy this? I'm like, how am I even here? Like for 30 years without realizing it, I'd had this goal of buying a Stormtrooper costume.

5:58Yeah. So when I reflect on it, it goes back to like when Return of the Jedi comes out and my older brother says, oh, wouldn't it be cool to have a movie quality suit? You know, wouldn't that be great? And I'm like this, you know, whatever, 10 year old kid just amazed by this. Like, yes, that would be cool. Forget about it entirely. But here we are 30 years later, still pursuing that goal. It's still a part of me has been working on achieving this. No part of me wanted that costume. I'm like, why am I even, what am I even doing here? Let's get out of this. I don't want this costume. And it became like a shorthand.

6:30My wife will say to me now, like, if I'm pursuing something that she's like, I don't know, that has a certain vibe about it, she'll be like, is this a stormtrooper? And I think you can use that for goals that no longer serve you, but also for grudges that no longer serve you. Could be relationships that no longer serve you. It could be any mental clutter, any assumptions that are simply like they were true to a point, but they don't serve you now. And one of those stormtroopers, I think, is the idea that any problem can be solved by working harder. That alone is a really limiting idea. It'll get you only to here.

7:06It won't get you to there. So it's a good principle as far as it goes. But then we need to invert that question. Instead of say, how can I work harder? We say, look, is there a more effortless way of doing this? And so as you rid your mind of this old paradigm, you open yourself up to a new option, a new question. And suddenly, I mean, I almost think it's almost like magic. There's so many cool options once you're free of the idea that anything worth doing has to be exhaustingly difficult.

7:45Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:34Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.