GREG MCKEOWN: Making the Essential More Effortless

26:55I can give you case study after case study of this and really surprising to a mind saturated in the idea that maximum effort equals maximum results. If you believe that, like I still do, like maybe you still do, a lot of achievers do, then you push back on this idea. It's not very comfortable, but that is so not true. The idea, what is true is that optimal effort equals maximum results. And that shifts the whole scenario. Could you give us an example of some task that you thought was going to require an enormous amount of effort, but you asked that question and it became effortless. While I was writing the book and I was asking myself that same question and I looked around the room and in the room I had this printer.

27:43We'd replaced her printer and the printer that we had worked perfectly well, but we wanted something different. And so it sat there for weeks. Why is it sat there for weeks? It's because there's a cognitive burden, not massive, but enough. I don't want to do it. Do we recycle it? Where do we go to a digital recycling center? I don't know where one is for that. Well, do we give it away? Well, who do we give it to? And do we sell it? Well, then we have to go through the process of selling it. Do we throw it away? Well, that doesn't seem right. And that's just enough of uncertainty that that's why it's still there.

28:10And I started going through that same flow, but I was noticing at this time, you know, that I'm doing it the hard way. I'm making it harder than it needs to be. So I asked this question, well, how could it be effortless? How can it be effortless to have that no longer there in a way that I feel good about it? And I literally look up and I see that down the road, there is some workers and I thought, oh, I wonder if they want it. So I walked out. I said, hey, we've got this printer. It's in good working condition. Do you know anyone wants it? They did. It was loaded into their car within two minutes, actually timed between the time I asked the question and it was completed.

28:41That's a tiny illustration. I'm not saying everything's like that. But here's what I do know. If I hadn't asked the question, I would never have got that answer. So we're priming ourselves with very effortful, draining, exhausting questions that keep otherwise insecure overachievers stuck and not breaking through to the next level. But now I have to give you another case study. Can I give you another case study? Please. So this is a brilliant middle manager, woman, married, children. She's the kind of person who, she told me, I feel guilty if I eat lunch. Not if I take a break to eat lunch, just if she eats lunch, she feels guilty.

29:26You know, she's tuned a certain way. And I don't think she's the only person attuned that way, that if she isn't sacrificing, kind of sacrificing her health or sacrificing something, she's not good. She's not a righteous person. That couldn't be the holy path, that kind of thing. And she was up at 4 a.m. in the morning, photoshopping something for her youth group the next day. No one's asking her to do that. No one's expecting her to do it. The impact of that extra few hours is minimal. She's certainly well past optimal performance. I'm sure that you'd say that's diminishing returns or even negative returns, meaning if you had not done it, you'd be in a better position than by doing it.

30:10So this is the norm of her life. So I give her the coaching. I was like, if it's simple, you ask the question, how can I make it effortless? Let's just ask that better question. Might not always relate, but it might. So use it. So the next day, she gets a phone call from, she works at university and the professor calls, she's in charge of their videography department and some other departments. But he said, listen, I just need you to come and get your team and just record my class for the semester. And in the moment that he asked, she was already thinking like an insecure overachiever. But this time she noticed, the thought pattern was like this.

30:46Okay, I'm going to wow him. That's the first thought, I'm going to wow him. I'm going to, what does that mean to me? In her head, she's like, well, we can bring a whole team in. We can have multiple camera angles. We're going to edit it together to be the optimal video performance. We're going to have music, intro and outro. We'll have some graphics. We'll splice in his slides. These are the things that are already in her mind. This is in the micro moment after the request is made, but she notices this time that she's making it more complicated than it has to be, or she might be. So she just asked a couple more questions.

31:24Well, who is this for? And when do they need it? And when do you need an answer? And she just pauses before offering both a yes and all the extras he hadn't even asked for. And it turns out that it was for one student who was going to miss a few classes because of an athletic commitment. Oh my gosh. And so she's like, how can I make it effortless? She said, well, have you thought about maybe asking someone else in the class just to record it on their iPhone, you know, the audio or the video, and then just sending it to him. And, you know, the professor's like, facepalm moment. He's like, I hadn't thought about any of that.

31:59That's the answer. That will do. I'll just go with that. Sorry for wasting your time. So she hangs up the phone and she's like, what just happened? I just saved four months of time, the whole semester for a whole team and all of the energy going into it that would have been creating something that was completely underappreciated because it didn't address the real issue and extra strain. And for one question, one noticing of how I'm making the decision literally did make the execution effortless, actually effortless for her and practically effortless for the professor as well. That to me was another one of these moments.

32:42I'm not saying you can do it about everything, but if you don't ask the question, then you can't find an effortless answer. I love that because I tend to be somebody that over-engineers things. And when I get a request, it's like, how can I wow them? And it's probably the insecure overachiever part of me. Golly, just pushing the pause button and asking that question. I think there's so many examples of this. You know, I think about a consultant that we've been working with, Brian Harris, from a company called Growth Tools. And I was just recommending him to another CEO friend of mine today. And I was, as I was writing that recommendation, I said, the thing that Brian is brilliant at is making things that are overwhelming and complex, simple and effective.

33:28It's like you slap your head every time you talk to him because you're like, oh, I've been working on this problem for six months and it was actually always this easy. And, you know, I just like what kind of energy and brainpower am I using trying to solve these problems? But I think that you're so right. What I'm taking away from this myself is that we've got to become self-aware about the internal dialogue that we have when we're starting to solve a problem because our kind of default bias around this is going to be really hard, but it's going to be worth it. And I did that earlier today. I'm like, oh my gosh.

34:03I mean, really, like it's not even hard. Like it's not even hard. And in my mind, it's like, I got to like really work up the, you know, enthusiasm to do this thing. And then it takes way longer. It's actually hard because of all the hard I thought it was going to be, not because of all the hard it actually is. No, no, no. It makes perfect sense. Just this morning, I was saying to my daughter, I listened, you know, you need to have your, you know, get your room tidied before A, B and C. And playfully, she fainted on the floor and like overwhelmed at this task. And it was pretty funny. But then I said, listen, literally set a timer, do a little microburst.

34:38You just do 10 minutes, set a timer and at 10 minutes, just you're done wherever you are. And she literally, I audibly heard her response. She's like, oh, yeah, okay. That was something she could sign up for. The thought of like, when are we done? How do we know when we're done? It's another good question to make execution more effortless. How do we know when we're done? Oh my, I wasn't going to share this story, but this is such a fun one too. But this is in Sweden. At the time, it was all about the size of your ships and your armada. And that was how you showed your prowess, because of course, that was your military dominance.

35:12And so the king of Sweden decides he's going to have the greatest ship that's ever been built. And so he starts the building of it. He selects a forest of a thousand trees that's available, opens the coffers and almost unlimited budget, gets the ship builder the best that he can find and lets go. We're going to build this ship. But he just keeps changing all the way along what it is that he wants in the ship. So after they have cut everything for the ship, all the wood, he decides he wants the ship to be twice as long. And so everything they've done has to be redone. Okay. So that's an example.

35:45Then he decides he wants to add cannons and a second set of cannons. Okay. So that's like a whole set of work. Then he says in a truly sort of non-essentialist, unnecessary complexity, he wants to add an unbelievable set of hundreds of ornate statues to it. And so that, of course, apparently one of these, I don't remember which, but one of these changes gave him a heart attack and it killed him. And so the second in command now is in charge of building the ship. And so the story continues unimaginably as changes continue and years and years go by. Well, finally, they get to a day, not a completion.

36:23The Vasa is still not finished, but the king has organized a date in which he wants to show off the ship. And he's brought all the VIPs and the other people from the Scandinavian countries, all of the other royalty and so on, and they bring them out. And so he wants to show it off. Doesn't want to complete it. Doesn't want to actually figure out what done looks like still, but still wants to show off what he has. So it is an untested ship. So it goes out and he wants them to do a gun salute to just, you know, to show off to these VIPs. And in doing that, what happens is that first of all, all of the windows are open, not glass windows, but you know, the wooden windows are open.

37:04And because they haven't tested it and they suddenly put all these cannons on there, it pulls the ship immediately over. And so instantly it's filled with water. it goes basically one mile and lasts one hour. It's actually quite tragic. I'm sort of setting up in a humorous way because like the whole ship goes down with the entire crew. That is such a ridiculous version of what happens if you don't just say done looks like this. This is how I'll know. Everything can be improved. Everything can be changed. Everything. And I'm in favor of doing things in a great way. I'm not suggesting we just accept low standards, but to just add frills and complexity endlessly makes it impossible to finish and it burns us up all of the way.

37:54And how many times have we done that on things that don't even matter to us? Or we take something that does matter, but we've now made it twice as challenging. And I can put this all to you in two questions. Who wants 10x results, both in terms of quantity and quality? Yes, everybody wants that. So then the corollary question is, who can work 10 times harder? And for any insecure overachiever, the answer is no. No one can do that. And so if you put those two questions together, you have the 10x dilemma. That's why I wrote Effortless. We cannot just do what we've been doing 10 times more. We can't just over-engineer or overcomplicate 10 times more to get to where we want.

38:33We need a different, simpler path to be able to achieve what matters to us so that we can achieve what matters but without burning out. It's easy to complicate things. It takes a lot of effort to make things simple. I think that this is one of the things that I loved and admired about Steve Jobs. He would persist on product design until he got this simple, elegant solution. And at the time we're recording this, the iPhone 16 has just come out and we have yet another button. You know, Steve didn't want any buttons, right? He wanted it elegant and simple. And now they've got this other camera control button.

39:13And so now it's getting more complicated and it's just more to learn. And I was showing Megan the button today because she has a new iPhone 16 and she says, I didn't even notice that. What is that for? Probably something I like. It's solving a problem I didn't even know that I had. So let's stay on Steve Jobs for a second, because this is important. If we say it like this, if we say essentialism equals focus, effortless equals simplification. That's how to think of them differently. If essentialism is about doing the right things, effortless is about doing them in the right way. And it really matters.

39:48So Steve Jobs' story about this, do you remember when he first returns to Apple and they're creating the eMac, which is the very colorful machine? It looks really different to the PCs at the time. He wanted to add the iDVD software to that. So this allows you to burn a DVD. Okay, so obviously it's almost a generation ago now, or at least it feels like it. And at the time, DVD burning was a very specialized industry. And so your typical machine would cost maybe$60 ,000 just to be able to burn DVDs. So they buy a company that specializes in DVD burning. And their manual for using that software was 5 ,000 pages long.

40:31So you can kind of get a sense of what period we're in. They're given a certain amount of time, I think only a couple of weeks, but they're given like two weeks to prepare for their first meeting with Steve Jobs to review the product and to try and show. And so they know ahead of time they have to simplify this and significantly simplify it. And so they create. I talked to one of the engineers that was involved in the whole process and was in that meeting when they met with Steve. And they prepared their slide deck. And they had just spent the whole time removing features after features that they thought were just necessary only for a very specialized audience and so on.

41:07And they were really proud of what they had. I mean, they could see it and they could feel that sense like we were saying with the closet. we've got rid of a lot of the clutter and you go, oh, this just feels so much better. And we do this before. This is just a much better product already here. And when Steve comes in, he doesn't look at the presentation, doesn't do any of it. He walks to the whiteboard and he just draws one rectangle. And so that's the Emacs screen and one button on the screen, which he writes burn. He says, you drag your item into the rectangle and you press burn. That's the app we're going to build.

41:46So in that moment, everyone in the room, like they said, they never shared that presentation. They never shared any of the stuff because they were immediately embarrassed about all of it. But he said, but I learned a lesson forever. This is literally true of all of the great simplifiers that I read about, researched, or interviewed, this is the difference. They don't take the complexity and cut off a bit of the unnecessary complexity. They start with zero. And that's the difference. And it's a really important inversion. You don't say, hey, it takes 20 steps. How can I do it in 19? You say, if we're starting today, how can we do it in one step.

42:28How can you make it effortless? How can you make it so easy? It's just mind-blowingly different than what everyone else is designing. Anyway, Start With Zero seems to me to be a helpful sort of tool when we're thinking about simplification.

42:48We've been talking about the arena kind of of work mostly, but our personal lives are more complicated. One of the things that I've noticed as a grandparent now is how not essential that world is. You know, it's like every teacher thinks you've got full time to work on their home. That's so true. Every sport thinks you need to, you know, be doing that and only that. And it can be crazy what happens to your personal life when you say yes to all these opportunities. So how do you think about it in the arena of sort of family and personal stuff? I'm thinking first in my own life about the extent to which we've done this or not been able to do this.

43:30And we ended up homeschooling for almost a decade. We've just come to a close with that. That's sort of definitely overcomplicated our lives. Like in one sense, it's like a huge mistake. And on the other hand, it was sort of a radical move and I haven't regretted it in any strategic sense. I know that's not really the answer that you're looking for in that way, but I'm just trying to think about, I think one of the things that happened, we were in Silicon Valley and we would go to these public school meetings with the other parents. And there was such a range of conversations and questions. And we think of ourselves as being fairly high achiever and driven and so on.

44:11But we would want to say, I don't think we ever really asked, but like, hey, can we just do less homework? I mean, you know, like they're in kindergarten, they're in first grade. Like, I mean, really, we want a lot of time for play here. That's what we really want. That's the work for young children. But lots of other parents would say that we need more homework. Are we going to get more homework? I mean, it was real. I'm not exaggerating. And so there was just this growing pressure on our eldest daughter, especially. And we just thought, can we not just extend childhood a little? Can we not just believe that there's a natural growth process that she'll be able to adopt.

44:45And so we decided, well, one year for one child, and then she wanted to carry on and the next child wanted to and so on. So we ended up in this unexpected adventure. But what it allowed for was a very different way of doing life. So when I traveled about maybe 80 % of the time, I would take one of my children with me. and I knew that was a good move. I didn't think that was like a, I knew that was aligned with my values and my purpose in life. But now that we're sort of coming towards the end of that, I just think, oh my goodness, I could have so easily not have done that. But trade-offs work best when they're reinforcing an overarching strategy because they, instead of thinking about trade-offs as like, oh darn it, we've got this trade-off to make.

45:32You start to embrace them because you go, yeah, I'm, I want to do something different. I want to end up somewhere different. I want a different type of experience. I want a different kind of relationship. And so now when our children talk and they just, they've got one on a mission in Brazil, one on a mission in Chile for like a long time, not for a couple of months, for like a couple of years. And one's at college at BYU. But I just saw them, I was listening. I was running actually. And I was listening to them all chat on Monday. And the sound of the feeling between them was so rich and funny and sometimes talking over each other, but in order to laugh together and so on.

46:07And I thought, you know, this is rich, Mike. This is what I want. This is what Anna and I wanted. And it has come to be, but it took tradeoffs to get there. I'm not saying that the way we did it is what everyone else has to do or should do. I could see a lot of reasons people shouldn't do it the way we chose to do it. But I'm saying that the way of the essentialist, you're going to find yourself saying no when other people are saying yes and yes when other people are saying no because you are trying to be a different kind of thing. You are smilingly saying no, happily saying no. Watch people running past you.

46:47Okay, yeah, you look very, very stressed doing that. And maybe we're making a mistake in what we're doing, but what you're doing isn't calling out to me that that would be a better way to live. I know that's what I just gave you was the opt out answer, you know, and there's downsides to what I'm describing, but the upsides have been many and rich. I mean, for a start, my children have read so much and I feel a little emotional about it, but they've read so much more than I read when I was a teenager. And in fact, they've become the worst of all possible things, which is book pushes. So I never talk to them in which they don't guilt me about books I haven't read.

47:26But it has encouraged a pretty deep dive now into reading the classics. I love that. We have, Greg, three questions that we ask every guest. This is our lightning round. Okay, so are you ready? Okay, let's go. First question is, what is your biggest obstacle right now in getting the double win, winning at work, and succeeding at life? My biggest challenge is just that we've been in a transition. So instead of the children being with us all the time and traveling with me and so on, they're now dispersed. And so I have to build new routines to be available when they call. That can be random. There's a randomness to it, which isn't especially convenient, to be perfectly honest, right?

48:10I mean, so I have to figure out how do I create enough buffer that when that call comes in, I'm not just picking up. I'm not just being available. I'm recognizing this is the rich stuff. Yeah. These are the thousand X relationships. I'm right there. We have a, our oldest is 23 and he always likes to call us about 30 minutes before we're going to bed. So we're like getting, we're getting towards that, but it's always worth it. That's a trade-off, you know, it's, and it's a trade-off. Okay. Second question. How do you personally know when you're getting the double win? What's been happening over the last two, three months as we've gone through this transition, Anna and I, my wife and I have found ourselves without intentionally trying to have time to talk and connect again.

49:01And it's not like we haven't been doing that for 10 years, but there's just a higher density of it. And what we both have experienced and have believed is that when we do that, we end up being successful in the professional areas. As soon as we're aligned, as soon as we're united, it helps us in a way that we feel connected, but then the decision making quality increases. And so we end up being successful personally and professionally, if we're making the space to talk, reflect, make the trade-offs and so on. That to me has been, you know, what I've been learning about that. Beautiful. I love that.

49:38It makes sense to me too. What is one ritual or routine that you regularly practice that helps you do what you do? So, You talked about the one, two, three method, but beyond that, like what is one ritual or routine? One of our daughters, Eve, is just like this buoyant personality, rock climbing, voluminous reading, talks a thousand words a minute until she turns 14. And then she sort of slows down on all of that. And we think age appropriate behavior, but it wasn't. It was what turned out to be a massive neurological condition that removed her executive function at a breathtaking rate. So at first it was just sort of shorter sentences and then it became like literally one word answers.

50:25All of that emotional range was now locked. The right hand side of her body stopped working at the same rate. So she's literally working at two different rates. took literally hours to eat one meal, took a minute to write her own name and on and on. And all the way through this, no neurologist can even give us the beginning of a diagnosis. One just shrugs his shoulders because all the tests are coming in in the normal range. And in the midst of all of that, one of the things I learned was, well, that everything we've been taught about gratitude is wrong in quite a literal way. like from a definition point of view if you say what is gratitude what people will say is is being thankful for the good things in your life but if you look it up in a dictionary that's not the definition of it and that that's i don't know why that's so interesting to me but it is because what it actually says is to live in a spirit of thanksgiving and that's not the same thing because what gratitude is isn't for the good things it's for all of the things now that includes the middle things and the, you know, the not good things, and then the definitely absolutely awful, miserable things.

51:37And so then the practice starts to look like this. And this will test, I think anyone, but it certainly tested me to be able to say out loud the following, I am thankful that my once perfectly healthy daughter is collapsing on the way to running into a coma and dying with an undiagnosed neurological condition because. So nobody wants to say that. It will stick in your throat. It will test you. It will test your muscle. It will make you question, in a sense, your own sanity. That is a huge difference. And around the Thanksgiving table, not that I'm against any of that gratitude either, but it's very different than saying what you're thankful for in the normal sense.

52:21But here's what is revealed in the process, you don't know how to end the sentence at the beginning of the sentence. So you're opening yourself up to the possibility that it's happening not to her, but for her, not happening to her, but for us. It opens the window to maybe. Suddenly gratitude isn't a feeling, it's an action, like an action of faith. You are beginning that sentence and you don't know how to end it. And what that does, among many things that it does, it instantly and neurologically has to change your state. It cannot not. It's an involuntary shift. You cannot in that moment both be in a state of suffering, misery, stress, and gratitude.

53:04You can't be in those two different states. Now, I'm not saying it lasts forever, but what we started doing is we started being grateful for everything. What I now think of as radical gratitude, even though actually it's just gratitude. Now, as I think of radical gratitude, it instantly changed our state It protected our family culture. We were singing again around the piano. We're laughing again. We're praying together. And that took out this threat to go down rabbit holes of awfulness because every possible disease, so many of them are fatal and so on. And instead of being consumed by that, we could think clearly again.

53:43And my wife was able to go, you know, I just have this sense that this particular neurologist is the one to go and see. and we got to see him even though it was an eight month waiting list and we didn't have eight, nine months, but we got in it on a cancellation and he was the one that saw and just a glimpse, just saw something no one else had seen. He saw all the reports, he went through all of that, but then he said, just take this dopamine pill, go have lunch, come back and I'll test you again. He comes back, we can't see anything different, but he does and he turns on his heels. He says, I suggest the immediate hospitalization for Eve for treatment for her encephalitis, which is inflammation of the brain.

54:19And I asked him later, I said, what did you see? And he said, well, when she came back, her eyes were blinking at a slightly faster pace. And so literally in the blink of an eye, she was treated and successfully for encephalitis. And so that was the beginning of a two-year journey that as of now, she is back, she is whole, she is healthy, she is well. And so when we dropped her off, so she's in Brazil right now. When we dropped her off, she's going to be there for a year and a half. And I thought this is just going to be so happy moment. She's so excited and she's ready for it. And we're ready for it.

54:55It's just, think of how life could have been different. And so we just think, this is all just good up until 10 minutes before dropping her off. And suddenly it just hits me like a Christmas carol moment, you know, the Christmas of Christmas past. And I suddenly, her life just flashes before me. And I think, and it's really awful. It wasn't a happy moment. It wasn't like a nice walk down memory lane. It was just horrendous for me for that 10 minutes. And the question that's welling up inside of me is, did you miss it? Because if you did, it's too late for that. Like, of course you can, you could be different going forward.

55:37You could be at any point, you can make a better decision and you can invest differently. but her childhood, that is over. So did you miss it? You know, did she get her life back and then you missed it anyway? And so it was really raw and really awful. And, and I came out of it, that sort of experience with the conclusion, no, I did not miss it. We traveled together. We went on just she and I together. We went on many separate dates together. We listened, we talked, I know her. She knows me. And so that was relieving. But what was left with me was this sort of two realities. One, that life is pathetically, absurdly short.

56:18I could feel that, right? Those years had gone by so fast. And I know that the days don't always feel like that, but life is going to go by fast. And then the second is that life isn't divided into 1X tasks. there's one X tasks and a thousand X relationships and to not get those confused and that Eve was a thousand X relationship for me. And there's just a few of them that can be that in my life. Right. And so to try and live the rest of my life with the awareness of that reality, it was always the reality, but I can live in such a way that I can miss that, not see it. And so I think to me, this is the spirit.

56:59I mean, this is a renewal of the spirit of essentialism and radical gratitude is in there for somewhere as a practice. Man, I feel another book coming on for you. Greg, thank you so much. I still appreciate your vulnerability and your thoughtful answers to our questions. I just felt like this was a real conversation. So thank you so much. Well, right back at you. It's really a genuine pleasure to spend some time together. So thank you. Thanks, Greg.

57:30That may be like the fourth or fifth conversation I've had with Greg over the last 10 years because, you know, I've been on his podcast. We've run into each other a few times. But I can still remember back when he was in Nashville about 10 years ago. We all went and had lunch together. I remember that. And he really challenged us on a lot of things. He did. On this essentialism idea. Yeah. At the time, I'll just speak for myself, I was kind of like offended a little bit. You know, like, you don't really know us that well. Well, you know, I'm thinking, you know, you're just charming and British, which he is charming and British.

58:00But he was really right. And I think that what I know now, 10 years later, that I didn't know then is that we just needed time. I think essentialism and knowing what's important is a process of maturity. And I think in some ways we had to mature in our business to be at the place where we had the clarity that we needed to be in a place of essentialism, which now we are. I mean, we are about the double win, period, the end. Like, we want to make it nearly impossible for people not to get the double win. And that is our mission. And we're fully focused on it. Yeah. You know, the thing that has always struck me about essentialism is the subtitle of the book, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.

58:44Now, when you think about that, and Greg talked about that, you know, basically the culture we're in emphasizes more and more. You know, you just think about how easy it is to go on to Amazon and order more stuff. I don't know what you're talking about. And I've had so many situations where I just like mindlessly order stuff. Yeah. And you forgot you ordered it. I know. Or worse, my wife Gail will say to me, what did you order? Yeah. I said, I don't know. It's like in my Facebook feed, it looked cool. Yeah. You know, and then I never use the thing. Right. And sometimes I never open the thing. Yeah.

59:17And I think this really takes intention and discipline to pursue less. I agree. And I think you kind of nailed it in the interview when you talked about saying no to yourself. Like I think I pretty mastered, pretty much mastered, not 100%, but pretty much mastered saying no to other people. Right. Because I've got my priorities. I know my time's limited. I know it's trade-offs. I know all that. But saying no to myself, and I feel like oddly in this season of my life where I feel like I have less runway in front of me, it's almost like I'm greedy. Yeah. Like I keep wanting to do these things, you know, more experiences.

59:52is I want to take on more because I see time running out. Yeah, that's so interesting. It's a scarcity mindset, I have to confess. It is a scarcity mindset. And I think that being self-aware, I mean, like I said in the interview, I think one of my biggest takeaways is just this self-awareness of the questions you're asking yourself. And I think that is a big thing. But, you know, one of the things I couldn't help but think as he was talking, when you compare what's different about now compared with 10 years ago, And that's like a relatively short amount of time. We live in a time that is all about optimizing every single part of your life.

1:00:30And you can make yourself absolutely crazy, literally, by trying to optimize everything. And I was just thinking about probably about two months ago. Actually, it's about the time I started using our Full Focus Wellness Planner, which is relevant to what I'm about to say. I quit using my Oura Ring. and I like loved my Oura Ring. I thought it was so great. First thing I did every day to the point that our five-year-old daughter, Naomi, who always gets up and snuggles with me, she would always say, mom, did you have a good night's sleep? Because I would check my app to see what's my sleep score.

1:01:03You know, and she would always say, is it good? You know, and I'm like, ah, I don't know. And what I realized was I was feeling so anxious as a result of, did I win or lose sleep? Sleep, like literally the most foundational thing about being a human, you know, We have all these wearables and you can have the best drinking glasses. I have these glasses that I love that don't break. They're made of glass, but they're super durable. Some kind of Japanese glass. I don't know. It's from a company called Fable if you want to look it up. This is not an essentialism plug, by the way, me telling you this.

1:01:36But we are optimizing our drinking glasses. That's where we are right now. When you think of all the things you use every day, the decisions you have to make, it is a tsunami. And so I think for me, one of my takeaways was we have to decide what we're not going to care about because you literally cannot care about everything because people that make products and marketers are forever thinking of more things that you should care about. So it's more things that you should buy. I'm just thinking that I've gotten into this deep dive on AI this year. Right. And so I started accumulating tools. Well, I have about 18 and I'm not making this up and I'm not proud of it, but I have about 18 different AI tools.

1:02:16And it's just like, there's always a new one in my Facebook feed, or there's always a new one that somebody tells me about. Yeah. And it's just like, well, I don't want to miss out, so I get that thing. But I think the disciplined pursuit of less means just saying, no, I've got enough tools now, enough software apps, enough things. I don't need anything else. And I kept thinking when he was talking also, the Amish have a point. You know, they're kind of frozen things in time. But at some point they said, this is enough technology. You know, we're good. We don't need any more new shiny things. And there's a point at which you have to say, enough is enough.

1:02:53Do I really need that new iPhone? You know, do I really need that new app? Well, because all of those things, everything you introduce, and I think this is true in our personal lives, it's maybe the easiest to see there around things that we consume. but it's also true in our business, you know, in our professional lives, in our businesses, whatever, everything we bring in has to be dealt with. It requires maintenance or a decision or, you know, like he was talking about the printer that you have to get rid of. You know, now you got to figure out where do you get rid of a printer? I don't know.

1:03:24Can I just throw it in the trash or do I have to go find, you know, a special place that it goes? And, you know, do I have to do anything? And will they're only open certain days a week? And now I got to look at my calendar, you know, just something that is so small and you shouldn't even have to spend any brainpower on your printer, now could take up half of a day or, you know, at least a couple of hours trying to deal with it. I just think there are too many things like that. And we just have to decide what are we not going to do? What are we not going to care about? Because it is literally impossible.

1:03:53It's like you always say, a version of this is, you always say you can have anything you want or you can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you want. You know, it's like you can care about anything you want, but you can't care about everything. You just can't. I did this with David Allen quote, just to give him credit. You know, one of the interesting things to me is I've gotten fascinated by these tiny houses. I clicked on one somehow in my Facebook feed, and now I'm getting all these posts, suggested posts on tiny houses. But something about that downsizing and less decisions to make and fewer things to keep up with is really attractive to me.

1:04:29So I don't know how this is all going to play out in my life, but I feel like these are two books, Effortless Essentialism, are two books that I need to reread every year because they're so countercultural. And the cultural current is flowing in the exact opposite direction that you've got to work to keep it effortless and to keep focused on the essentials. Yeah. So just as a reminder, you can get that course that Greg talked about at Greg McEwen, and McEwen is M-C-K-E-O-W-N, gregmckewen.com. You can get that for free, which I think would be a great place to start and definitely order both of these books on Amazon or wherever you like to get books.

1:05:07Guys, thanks so much for joining us. We'd be so grateful if you would go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts, rate the show. And if you could give us a review, it doesn't take long, but it makes a big difference in terms of getting more visibility to show so that we can get this message of the double went out. We like to think that we're starting or participating in a movement where there really is work-life balance. And we feel like you guys are partners with us in that. And your part of it is if you could review the show, if you could rate it, that would help us to get the message out.

1:05:42So thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.