Tactics and Strategies for a 2025 Reboot — Essentialism and Greg McKeown

what I have learned is this strange law of inverse prioritization mhm which is I literally believe now that the most important thing in our lives at any given time is the least likely thing to get done which is really strange [Music] when something hits could be a Calamity it could just be something destabilizing could be anything how do you Center yourself so that you don't just end up feeling like you're in the washing machine because I I am very good at getting things done even when I'm internally suffering a lot of turmoil but the last

handful of days has been very very challenging and we don't have to go into specifics but this is a close loved one and a lot of the responsibilities are going to fall on me to figure things out it's also the holidays right so the people I want to get a hold of I cannot get a hold of and I recognize that fretting over it does not fix anything and it makes me less uh it makes my day less peaceful and enjoyable and I'll make a reference to one of our earlier conversations which may have been

on the record may have been behind the scenes but there was I'm pretty sure that you mentioned a piece of artwork called The Listener I want to say yes that's right which is this sort of centered calm person and I have it up on my wall at home with all of this shouting commotion and Chaos around him and in the center he's just perfectly centered and thinking clearly so suppose my question is how do you help get yourself closer to that depiction of The Listener when you realize wow there may be a lot of chaos

around me there may be a lot of Chaos in my head and look I'm meditating like meditating like twice a day it's helpful it doesn't seem to be quite enough and maybe the answer is look you sit with it this is just something you're going to have to weather so don't make a problem out of a problem in a sense but I'm curious what you have found helpful in those circumstances well I think I can respond that I don't think it's just sitting with it yeah and I'm I'm Pro meditation and I'm certainly Pro prayer

but the thing I want to say is sort of distinguishing the noise outside of us and the noise inside of us because they are two different things and I want to sort of share a story sure please and then illustrate the action that comes back from it but but this last summer I was back in England I'm doing this doctorate at the University of Cambridge and so part of the requirement of that is to have residency every year there and this summer I felt really destabilized while I was there and it wasn't the doctorate that

I don't think was particularly major part of of why is because my best friend of 35 years s bridg do is dying of cancer and that's been a long time coming we've known that that would happen mhm but facing it more directly in person but it wasn't even just that because it wasn't like I didn't know before it wasn't that I'd come to a new understanding of the truth or the reality it was I actually for a while I couldn't work out what it was but then I realized oh he has so much mind share

about the reality of my whole life MH we became friends when I was 10 years old and those years those those developmental years I mean I escaped to that friendship and and it was so stabilizing to me at the time to have a relationship that was open and honest in if I'm completely Frank at a little bit of a risk in a way but in a family culture that didn't prioritize that for a whole series of complex reasons right and so suddenly the imminent and certain loss of him it's like my goodness my my whole

sense of reality is is being shaken so it's not just oh it's not just even though this is a lot the loss of such a friendship and and so on it was it tapped right back into this whole sense of what is true and who do you go to to validate that and do I have enough internal sense of Truth to be able to navigate this even because he was the one I would go to oh my goodness this is what's happening this is the reality this is the situation in those most complex relationships and

the idea of like oh I won't be able to go to himh it destabilized something at a different level yeah and all human systems have these levels right from the surface which is secure safe shallow and then you go further closer and closer like to say the onion of human systems at the core are things that are so meaningful that they are inherently blisteringly vulnerable yeah because to mess with them to tweak them even I mean the opportunity is enormous I mean that's where massive transformational change happens but you know if it gets if it

gets shaken by something everything shakes you know it's it's the it's the earthquake because the tectonic plate of Truth inside of you is getting readjusted or rather you're getting a clearer sense of what is true now that's all that's all contextual because I think from your own description if you're using language of destabilization it's because whatever is happening externally isn't just reverberating at the surface or the middle it's hitting something really deep oh sure and so of course then that changes everything nothing works the the same way before everything is been injected with some sort

of degree of uncertainty I just want to come back to this idea of like just meditating like the idea of just sitting with it and and and people that are like more more deeply meditative than I am may say well no that practi is would be the thing to do but I found this summer and I find in general I need to write it out and loudly it's one of the things I try to teach our children about this it's like there's all kinds of prayer there's all kinds of writing scream it out you know

cry it out whatever it is it's like it's like it doesn't have to be a conservative version of this a little example of this was given to me somebody that I have on had on my podcast had just started a new business and that destabilized not all the way to the core but you know suddenly she's waking up she doesn't have a set income as before and she wakes up at like 4 in the morning just hot sweat just what what have I done yeah you know just just super stressed sounds like my warning this

morning yeah well that's it different reasons but yeah viscerally similar different reasons but the dynamic is similar and what she did she she did it all spontaneously which I think is pretty amazing but what she did she grabbed a sheet of paper and I I think it may have been deliberate that she grabbed a sheet of paper rather than a book like a journal or planner because she wanted to SC scream onto the page she wanted to do it with complete abandonment with the awareness conscious awareness I'm going to throw this thing away no one

else gets to see this or no one else has to see it so I can just I see so the sheet had more of a impermanent implication than a journal where you can't tear it you're less likely to tear it out and toss it this is like all right I'm going to scribble Fast and Furious right and then that's the act and then I thought was interesting because without her intent what she experienced in just a few minutes was that she went and maybe this is my restate of of what she experienced but it's she

went from confusion M to Clarity and then naturally on to Creation like without meaning to do that and I thought that that was one of the things that was so interesting in her case study is is that she didn't wake up going okay I need to create a plan of what to do in these circumstances she just went the noise is so loud and it's so overwhelming the emotions are so much I have to give it somewhere but that process of screaming into the page of letting it all out separating ourselves from from that discombobulating

internal State I think is extremely powerful because it I think it helps us to go from prisoner to Observer MH and then from Observer I think once we start observing we're better able to become a Creator so I think that's the the shift this is a good reminder that these best practices are like brushing your teeth you and I know this but I've lapsed in my use of something that sounds very similar which would be morning pages and it's been a while since I've done it I picked up a new habit this meditation and there

are only so many minutes in the morning right so it's tough to do a 27 step boot up especially if you have kids or responsibilities so right the meditation came in other things went out one of them was the morning Pages which is fine but I had forgotten that was in my toolkit right and this is a very good reminder that to me that when in doubt kind of go back to the fundamentals maybe it's something that you've already used doesn't necessarily have to be a brand new shiny thing and in this case you're absolutely

right like while my monkey mind is just running in circles trying to think my way through it is not going to be helpful it is just a fruitless labor I think so I mean I remember this summer because I happened to be doing the research I was I was raging into the page one day for like I don't know a couple of hours and I don't know that anything there was usable you know for the research or for a future book or so on it was too raw for any of that and I didn't I

just definitely wanted to get it all out and I and I thought when I looked at it all afterwards I thought yeah like you know David Allen says yeah your mind is a is a bad office right because it's good at all sorts of things but not that sort of complex organization on its own and when I looked at the page of all this content I thought yeah that's way way too much you know for for the ram of my mind to be able to navigate this is like layers and layers of complexity and intensity

that needs to step over there so I can look at it rather than trying to you know live in it one additional little thing I learned in this conversation in the case today was mentioning is a term I had never heard before and it's instinctive elaboration and and what that is is when you ask a question we've all had this happen if someone asks you a question it is impossible not to think about it right and that's a really powerful thing to learn about somehow her cognitive inheritance because it means if you give yourself a

prompt and then rage about it it's like your mind can't help but go there and and just just recently I I used this instinctive elaboration when I felt overwhelmed not in this in in the same level of destabilization but a very intense last 30 days you know with there was a family wedding there's been funerals there's been you know the holidays Christmas two birthdays and that's just the normal you know that's just high level some of the stuff that's been going on so it's been this you know really intense period And I remember one time

I was sitting down my journal is finished is over the holidays so I can't and there so much going on I was like I can't just go and grab another one I thought I had extra and I I didn't have it and I really felt strangely stuck of course there's so many possible solutions but when you feel Frozen or stuck with things you you're not thinking in that creative way and and so I I literally used like an AI tool and I sort of raged into that like answering this question what is going on just

download the what is happening in your life and I I like this structure of what so what now what mhm what is happening let's just get it out and then once I look at it Okay now what's the news what does this mean cuz we're all meaning makers and destabilizing experiences what they're really doing is they're messing with our sense of meaning and orientation and and so then now what is well what do I do about it and and I just downloaded like I literally recorded it and then sent the recording and was like okay

what do you make of that and I didn't really expect that much from it but the restate it gave me back was so so helpful it really put my life in perspective and helped me go oh of course that's why you're feeling all of these things and it even gave me some quite I would say reasonably Advanced suggestions of what to do so you uploaded the audio file yeah that's right what tool did you use just GPT okay that's a good experiment because that's something you can do kind of in between right if I'm walking

around here that's right I could just let it rip and there's no that's right down to it I've done it a couple of times here's a good here's a good little prompt to give to that is I didn't do it this last time but I've asked it before to respond as Carl Rogers would KL Rogers was the psychotherapist who really more than anyone else introduced into into therapeutic processes the idea of powerful deep empathic listening MH I mean actually there's been two studies that were done about rogerian Psychotherapy when I think in like 19 maybe

80 something and then again in like 2000 something I can find the links that found that that psychologists were the questionnaire was sent both times a huge number of psychologists who's the most influential psychologist in in Psychotherapy and both times they identified KL Rogers as the most influential in their View and in their practice I think that's pretty amazing because you know Freud and so and get you know gets a lot more attention but in practice what works is what KL Rogers did and so and of course what he's saying is similar to what we've

been talking about M he says if someone would really listen to me he says whenever someone really listens to me I find that in the process my life starts to make more sense you know the dots start to connect for me and it's not that they're trying to do that for me it's just the nature of the process of being deeply listened to and so he he was the one that sort of really invented the language of of empathic restating and and brought that into practice and his the whole idea I think is that you

are delaying the stuff that isn't the real issue you're right whereas in what normally happens in conversation even everyday conversation is somebody says something and people people just immediately give advice I mean within just instantly they have no idea what's going on inside of you you don't even know what's going on inside of you and yet they're already giving advice and suggestions and adding confusion and I think often a lot of stress and a sense of judgment and all of those things whereas what he found was that if you would listen deeply enough and he

said it takes a lot of courage to do this and he said he said most of us cannot do it we just don't have the courage to listen like this but if we are and we restate back to them and we just keep doing it we'll go deeper and deeper to the central issues and and people it's a sense of like people in the end kind of almost heal themselves because they start to understand what's happening inside of them well I've played around with using GPT to construct that backwards and forwards relationship communication and and

actually I found it to be fairly Advanced at being able to do it amazing I think it can be a very helpful tool I'll give it a shot well thanks for that detour off of our planned programming I appreciate that and yeah why don't we then begin at the beginning we are just about to head into January 1st of a new year and a lot of people are thinking ahead with aspirations goals hopes maybe some trepidation and before we get get into the Bucko tricks strategies and tactics and so on let's back up for people

who don't have much context on your background could you briefly explain what essentialism is and also effortless the titles of two of your books respectively and you know I've thought about it as in part one is what to do the other is how to do it but that's not going to give people enough of a table setting so would you mind just taking a moment to explain what the sort of main kernels are the core concept for these two essentialism in one word would be Focus MH effortless in one word would be simplification mhm another

way of contrasting them is essentialism is figuring out what the right thing is to do and effortless is to do it in the right Right Way mhm and one of the reasons that I wrote both books was because i' covered some of effortless within essentialism but as I've traveled around and taught this now you know I mean all over maybe you know 400 plus organizations around the world over the last decade almost nobody got the second message even though it is in there some of it's in there yeah I know the feeling yeah yeah well

and I can take responsibility for this but it's like people heard the first mindset shift and not the second and I think they're both just as important just as powerful so what they heard in essentialism is you know so essentialism has three elements to it explore eliminate execute explore what's essential as opposed to non-essential as opposed to the trivial many it's like what are the vital few things that make all the difference exploring that identifying that then eliminate is to actually delete the non-essentials to remove them it's not enough just to know what matters what's

essential in your life in your year in your day you actually have to get rid of the stuff that's getting in the way of those Essentials and then execute is literally to make it as effortless as possible to do what matters most so in there there's these two shifts find what's essential and eliminate the non-essential and then once you've arrived at that State or in an ongoing process really you you're then saying okay well how do I set up systems how do I organize myself in such a way that the essential things happen having your

best day or your worst day easiest day or your hardest day yeah right precisely perfect perfect well first of all you I'll recommend both books to everybody essentially m is one of my most highlighted Kindle books that I have effortless is similar and and it's the discipline pursuit of less I would also in my mind it's what to do that is Effectiveness would be essentialism and then how to do it which would be efficiency is effortless and I think for myself if I'm looking back on the past year I think I've been very good at

identifying the essential M and old habits die hard I have been overexerting I have been effting my way through some of those essential things by subconsciously over complicating them or introducing unnecessary complication and obstacles because there is that Mantra that was ingrained in me some at some point which is if it's important and it's not hard you are not trying hard enough right but in a world of noise if you aim to be surgical there's nothing wrong with that applied Focus so let's let's hop into New Year New You type of discussion a lot of

folks listening will Peg things to like a 30-day challenge a 60-day reboot whatever it might be but you have a a different lens through which you look at pegging dates and thinking about these types of landmarks could you elaborate on that please the term for this in the literature is temporal landmarks and so what almost everybody is familiar with this idea of the new year new you we all experienced that oh it's a new chance and it's a what the research on this is distinguishing is it's like any moment that allows you to distinguish old

self to new self and that this is a really helpful sort of cognitive malleability that you have because because oh we have an excuse to become a new version of me to upgrade myself and so the new year new you is obviously a chance for people to do that it gets a bad name in some sense because people say I mean everyone says that you know oh well who here has set New Year's resolutions and then by the 7th of January you're not doing them anymore and I actually think people are really wrong to say

that in a sense to frame it like that what we what we just need is more temporal landmarks so that we say yeah we did the right things and if it was 7 days well that was great cuz that was 7 days you wouldn't have done otherwise how else can you select meaningful sort of tagging Fresh Start moments so of course your birthday is a chance to do that but so could the anniversary and so could your parents birthday or so could your child's birthdays uh you can have the first day of the quarter you

know so that that's an additional four and so identifying meaningful dates and this is more than just a nice idea and I think people would themselves know if they've experienced this in their lives yeah this is this is real you want to increase the number of these you have you know in 2025 so that you have lots of what called The Fresh Start effect you want lots of Fresh Start effects supporting you in getting to the new you m so I think yes celebrate if it's 7 Days great if it's 2 weeks you know into

January you're doing that new thing fantastic build in the next One MH what's the next meaningful date of the year and that's your next chance to be able to have an excuse to improve upon something I think all of us are prisoners to the way our mind currently Works sure and we're prisoners until we become observers to it and so I think these temporal landmarks are a chance to sort of separate ourselves a bit and the moment we get into that Observer role my experience at least is that well I mean it's quite it might

feel a little esoteric to say this but it's like who's observing that that's the real you and that Observer is not so full of not so full of pain not so full of confusion The Observers actually really clear and so anytime you can use different tools to shift into that anytime we can break down projects and anchor them to meaningful dates not arbitrary deadlines but meaningful dates I think is a good accelerating encouraging way of going through the year something that I've done in addition to pegging things to dates I've done this somewhat I suppose

intuitively with the temporal landmarks is creating landmarks that are effectively test for the X that I'm trying to improve so I will have and I already have two or three of these blocked out in 20125 which are let's just say 3 to 10 day events which could be a Meditation Retreat it could be something very physical at altitude that's going to require types of Fitness that I am loathed to cultivate because I find them boring but if I go on this trip with close friends and I am not up to Snuff not only will I

suffer I will be ridiculed and have my balls busted endlessly by my friends who should exactly do that and by having these I don't want to say final exams but these tests yeah that are intended to be enjoyable but they're only going to be enjoyable if I do the work ahead of time there's it builds in a lot of incentive and insurance that I will behave myself on some level and do what I know I should do let's hop into doesn't have to be rapid fire but I want to give people a number of different

concepts and tools that they can hopefully contemplate using yes and I'll let you choose which in which order you want to tackle these personal quarterly offsite which is something that I've long been fascinated from your toolkit I've been fascinated by that for a while so the personal quarterly offsite the power half hour or half an hour and then the one 123 method H where would you like to go first that order I think is good actually all right the personal quarterly offsite if I put it just conceptually for a second it's speed over Direction MH

because we live in a time where it's so easy to have what I would describe as counterfeit agility so you're moving fast life feels fast life is fast and you're you're taking messages you're sending messages you're doing things but actually they don't add up to a lot of progress towards what matters it's a millimeter in a thousand directions precisely right so the speed over direction is what you don't want that's right the matter for to go with it right you could say well a plane is off track 90% of the time it only gets to

where it's supposed to get to at the right time because it's adjusting constantly so it's what is the forcing function in our lives to make sure we don't go too far off track and then find oh my goodness EO it's been it's been 5 years that I've gone down this path when really I shouldn't have even been on this journey right I thought I was going to Arizona I'm in North Korea what happened right right right that would be a moment wouldn't it and so personal quarterly offsite I mean you can take it all the

way literally I mean Anna and I have done this where we'll travel to somewhere and take a weekend or take a few days possibly and really talk big picture I mean there's three main questions that I think need to be addressed in a personal quarter the offsite even though it's more than these three but this is the core of it is one what are the essential things that we're under investing in the second question is what are the non-essential things we're over investing in and then perhaps not surprisingly how can we make it as effortless

as possible to be able to make that shift within this next 90 days now there's more sub questions to it than that but I think that's the that's the tension that is so important to identify clearly M and so it doesn't have to be as major as this though I mean I think you could still make meaningful progress in an hour or two on your own or with someone else I like doing it with an accountability partner but even there I think the best practice is you fill out this process you answer these questions yourself

they do it and then you bring them together and start talking and get into not negotiation exactly but exploration and working through things MH and I think that's one of the primary benefits of a personal quarterly offsite is really facing the reality that we all of us are lost all of us are going in the wrong direction until we pause think about it get clear again I do not feel like I'm a better essentialist or better at applying these ideas in one sense than anybody else certainly not inherently but I think I admit to it

faster than maybe the average person and I think that's that's the key could you give an example of ideally a real example but it doesn't have to be particularly number three so there's the what's the essential that you're underinvestigated perhaps of how you've navigated that or seen others navigate it we could do it with me or with you right now sure yeah great I'm game to try it we'll see if my brain cooperates but I'm happy to give it a shot so let's just ask these questions you know with you right now let's do like

a little essentialist intervention maybe I shouldn't call it that but let's try it sure so let's say over the last well let's do it for the whole year you know MH what are candidates for things that are essential that you feel like you've been underinvestigated I've had this chronic pain for let's just call it 2 years it's probably longer with these brief Windows of respite and there was a period of time where I was doing this training very consistently and having intermittent progress and then about let's just call it a month ago I had a

injection in a very particular place which helped the back pain tremendously and I could give a a Litany of excuses family sort of medical situation and various things I have been neglecting that H in part because I'm having this window of relief from the lower back pain so it's not an immediate pressing issue but I know it will be so let's just say that and it's something essential that I'm under investing in even though I am going to be doing this particular training as soon as we finish this recording so it hasn't completely left the

arena but it's something that I've I've been inconsistent with that I know is fundamental to my well-being so that would be that would be one well first of all it's a great example because when I ask people what's essential that you're under investing in there are some really predictable answers and one of them is certainly will be health related fitness related is something they already know about their conscience is already tapping them about M but what I have learned is this strange law of inverse prioritization mhm which is I literally believe now that the most

important thing in our lives at any given time is the least likely thing to get done which is really strange it's sort of squares with what I see and what I've experienced at points why do you think that is I think one of the reasons is because it's so important the risk of failing at it is much higher than anything else in your life so it adds to this procrastination feeling performance anxiety yes in a sense very high performance anxiety around that important thing because doing something about it shows that you can fail or might

show that it doesn't work it doesn't work and now we'll be back to the beginning on this thing that so high stakes and then the more important the thing is the more vulnerable it is so then you know you want to avoid we all know we should that courage is a virtue but courage always feels terrible I mean like it is an awful feeling MH it's not like you imagine when you see other people being courageous well courage doesn't exist without the prerequisite of fear right like courage does not it's you feel fear and you

do the thing anyway like without the fear courage as a word and concept doesn't apply there's lots of layers of reasons that add on to that one is you know perfectionism sort of pretend perfectionism mhm that drives procrastination well unless I'm going to do this perfectly you know unless I'm really ready to do this unless I'm in the perfect situation is unless I'm going to do it for the full amount of time you know so all of these additional rules I think I've set up basically set myself up to fail with the number of check

boxes right like the perfect length and as we're talking about this just in terms I'm skipping to the end we we're not hitting we haven't hit number two which which I'm sure I've got plenty but in terms of making it effortless it's just like and I I've done this in other areas too it's just scale it down right don't eliminate the session if it's 10 minutes it's 10 minutes instead of an hour but don't put a lot of zeros on the calendar in terms of missed training sessions it's like if it's got to be 5

minutes it's got to be 5 minutes but like 60 can be the ideal but what's not allowed is zero it's having a maximum and minimum like it's a a lower bar but also the higher bar like a limit on both and and when I hear you say oh well an hour would be perfect or I think that's what you said I felt overwhelmed for you yeah literally I'm like an what an hour that is you know like oh I can't add an hour of physical therapy even though I'm sure there are things I should be

doing too and and so like I like the term microburst for this mhm that's an environmental reality right like these storms that are just these 10 minute storms a microburst but actually setting a timer for 10 minutes and the key is that you end at the end of the 10 minutes that's what you're using the discipline for and you say okay I'm going to do that 10 days in a row 10 minutes and when it hits 10 minutes I'm done so that the next day you know this is small yeah I really will end when

it says so and therefore I'll carry it on and there's almost no end to the application of that I was just reflecting on this as I was finishing this journal I need to get the next one you know this is like in January that will be 14 years that I've kept a journal and I don't think I've missed a day I might have done you know if I went through it all but I don't think I have but the reason is because my upper bound when I first started was five sentences and my lower bound

was one sentence and even now I'll be like okay one sentence again I'll just do a tiny amount then we'll be back on board and what normally happens with journals is the exact opposite first day people write three pages and by day two that it's done by day two because on day two they're like I don't have an hour for this yeah so then they go I'll do it tomorrow and then day three now they got to do two hours in their mind and so it's over before they've begun mhm so I literally think like

that's one key thing for you is like the 10 minutes done at 10 minutes until I have done 10 days in a row I'm doing 10 minutes it's way way better to do that little than than to not do any because you want to do it perfectly that's a good advice there's so many things that you could do to make this more enjoyable right like what is a certain book could be a podcast but could be a book or some other thing audio thing that you only going to get to listen to or a movie

you know fun show this is the only time I get to watch that is the 10 minutes I'm going to do this and so you you link it together I I've gone through so many Classics this year because while I'm running while I'm doing exercise while I'm traveling I'm listening to some I mean some of the most some of the greatest literature ever written and I I just almost feel like I'm it is like cheat code I'm cheating the system I am just having wisdom and knowledge and entertainment poured into me while I'm doing something

else I really am getting two for the price of one and so that's another way to do it you know you could have a forcing function where if you don't do it you know we' we've heard these things before but if you don't do it then you have to you know pay a pay a certain amount to to a charity or to a political party not of your choosing or you know you can you can create these these forcing function bets I had somebody who had a really important trade-off they were trying to make and

and their penalty for not making the tradeoff would be their favorite wine was $300 a bottler is some I I don't know why but and they he would have to pour down one glass of it if he didn't complete it on this day that was his forcing function and that was so painful for him that it really gave him an excuse I mean it's a fun excuse but an excuse to be on track and to be consistent so there's all sorts of things that we can do even you publicly talking about it here okay well

now everybody knows I mean all of these things are to try to stack the decks in your favor MH and to try to remove those things that make it hotter than it needs to be I'm already thinking about a few things I mean it's it's very basic but for instance you know I'm staying due to the circumstances with the family stuff I'm not at home I'm staying in hotels and I need to travel to a location and sign in and sign waivers and so on just to do any of this and so it's like all

right look I've fortunately got the budget I should just go out later today get a reasonably thick yoga mat and just stick in my hotel room yeah that's right I don't actually need need anything else and currently because it's a concrete floor I can't do what I would intend to do because it'll be brutally unpleasant on the joints and okay like that's a solvable problem right yeah and obviously I'm trying to sort of Stack effortless ideas one does not have to do any of these things the question is the key how do you make it

effortless I mean I can see you're okay in a hotel somebody in that hotel can go do that for you like you could find somebody to to pay to to do it and that all sounds like oh yeah champagne type of solution but it's like well that also makes it effortless yeah it's all about trying to ask that question and giving your brain enough time to do a Google search looking for easy solutions yeah and and I I think there's such a in the insecure overachiever there's such a push back about this in the mind

well what's the easy solution oh no no that can't be it that we don't even allow the search to take place also as the insecure achiever which is a label I've grown quite fond of while we've been talking that probably characterizes me pretty well you and me both we're both in this these achiever types often have a modicum of success in any number of ways because they are good at solving problems so the inclination is to ask how can I do X but that's not how the sentence needs to start right the sentence could be

who could do this besides me right or who knows maybe instacart could go get me a yoga mat right it doesn't necessarily have to be you know Claude the butler I'm not suggesting that's like well I'll just take my you know seven story hovercraft down to right Scrooge mcduck's office and we'll take some gold coins out of his swimming pool but reframing and rephrasing the questions that habitually ask yourself this is something I do try to pay attention to but my go-to is typically like all right look it's going to take me too long to

get somebody up to speed on all this [ __ ] I'm just going to do it myself how can I do this as easily as possible but that still presents a hurdle and especially in this this current day of automation getting someone else or someone else Visa an app or or retailer Visa an app to do something like this is available to any almost anyone who's listening to this podcast practically speaking Warren Buffett described it this way he said to be alive today in the developed world you have more opportunity more means more chances for

Learning and for travel and so on than Rockefeller did yeah and that was such a good reframe for me because you're talking about instacart and there are so many ways to make things happen now and almost all of us do have access to those things and I'm not trying to I'm not trying to minimize this it's the way of thinking that's outdated M that's where the cluster is the execution ability in our societies are really pretty unbelievable right now now there's one more tactic worth considering here one of the principles in effortless is the courage

to be rubbish and doing it a shorter period of time I that's one of the things you could say well that's the rubbish version but but you know you're saying the yoga mat and and I and I think well yeah I can see why that works but you could also use something else it doesn't have to be a yoga mat on the first time today if we wanted to scale that down to like dirty prototype it's like okay well let me just grab some of the like towels or something else yeah literally and it's going

to kind of be a pain in the ass but it's better than nothing right it's better than doing a zero so love to hear your thoughts on doing a premortem right because I I found that this this seems to be something you've given quite a bit of thought to and the reason I bring it up is I think a lot of people fumble sort of right before the touchdown so to speak and that's because they don't think about what could go wrong and there are lots of questions maybe they've answered right and I just came

from a company offsite we were chatting earlier today before recording where we talked about where have we been where are we now where do we want to be we covered a lot of that ground but one of the questions that we didn't really think about as much right we we did maybe in some nominal way ask like are there any blockers but we didn't explicitly ask you know what are the most likely things to stop us from getting there meaning where we want to go that's something I really want to hone as a skill and

which I've done intermittently but maybe you could just lay out what that looks like if if people aren't grasping the example that I'm giving but what is this this premortem I think if you want to make optimal progress on what's essential then using a strategic narrative is a really helpful way to go about this mhm I just did a session like this with the leadership of the Navy Seals and this wasn't the only thing that we did but this was part of it was to not to write out but to draw where have you been

where are you now where do you want to be and then this fourth question that you're focusing on what is going to keep us from doing it what's stopping us what's in the way and so you have all of these you know commanders and above drawing and then we're looking at all the drawing the drawing is not just be a fun or gimmick it's another forcing function to get to Clarity it's easy to hide behind numbers and too many words and too many bullet points like if you have to create an image you it forces

a certain part of your your brain to to light up and so they did that but then what it enables us to do to look at in this case an image of what's going to keep you from achieving your outcome is that it becomes first of all it becomes tangible so that you can actually prosecute it well that might not really be the issue you know that that it's a thought that you have but that thought is actually outdated thought that's not really what it is it's based in an assumption so you need to prosecute

it before you try to solve that obstacle you need to say well is it really an obstacle is that just the way we've been doing it in the past how have we over complicated it every organization every single organization follows a predictable pattern with over complicating every society does the same thing it's a brilliant book written about this by Joseph tainer called the the collapse of complex Societies in which he says look all societies become fragile because they solve problems that add too much complexity and then there's no mechanism for reducing that complexity other than

failure the most fragile state for society in his analysis is that it requires all of the resources you have available ailable to maintain the current level of complexity and so then it doesn't matter what the next massive problem is he said dozens of different societies that have collapsed ones for famine and ones because of war and ones because of civil unrest I mean every cause looks different but he's like they're the same thing it's just another massive problem and you don't have any resources to handle it so the first thing to do once you've asked

the question what's getting in the way is to just pause on it why do I think that's getting the way is that really the problem and it's back to this falling in love with the problem not the solution and high performance people and high performance Executives and in this case that high performing commanders and major commanders I mean they are built to execute man I mean they they're the elite of the elite at being able to make something happen but the problem is how do you challenge that strength so that you first go have we

identified the right problem is this really the issue why do we think this is the thing why do we think this is getting in the way that's really non-trivial part of the thought process if you really think you've pinpointed and unlocked the real issue which as I say that's the part most most people with the curse of competence make the mistake of not Prosecuting it then of course now you're saying okay well we really do think this is the obstacle we do think this is the problem then it's creating it's really creating a lot of

buffer for that to expect the unexpected to know that things will come up I mean your example that we've started this conversation with right like let's say I assume two months ago you didn't know this was going to happen and here it is and it's having all its effect and it's it's like we don't know what will happen in 2025 but I I I'll bet anybody almost any amount of money that they will have such things come up in 2025 that they're not yet prepared for MH if you think about the future as only perfect

best case scenario you are setting yourself up for very for really frustrating stressful poor execution yeah the best performance think of Phelps think about Phelps process so when they're creating the coach Bob Bowman and Phelps effectively their strategic narrative right effectively they don't literally do it but drawing out where they've been where they want to go what's get what could get in the way mhm the list is a long list longer than I realized because of course he's performed so many times at Elite level well what really can get in the way at the Olympics

other than the other competitors so no they got a long and complex identification of possible problems one of the things that they said which is was interesting to me when I talked to Bob about this he said well the conditions in China or in any Olympics is that they will be worse than the conditions he's used to training in and i' had never that never occurred to me before because I just sort of always looks so extraordinary you know you just assume that that the athletes are having great experiences you know off camera and he's

like that's never how it is it's always much more chaotic there's always many more problems things the conditions aren't ideal so here goal was how can I make Phelps experience as normal as possible in really abnormal circumstances so some of the things that they do okay they have a set routine so that they're there he's there 2 hours before every race that's a lot of buffer especially for me who can be quite time blind you know like it's easy to just show up right at the time or a couple minutes late 2 hours ahead of

time why because the no matter what happens you have buffer now they're in the pool following a normal routine so that he can feel normal even though everything's abnormal so they're doing the same thing until 45 minutes when he sits on the massage table never lies down because it's routine you routinize everything you can routinize when he comes to the call time he sits down puts a towel next to him on one side his goggles on the other so that no one can sit next to him you just don't you just don't need another detraction

it's another thing you can control the routine he's listening to the same music when he gets up to the to the board to jump off he's getting on always from the left hand side always dries it before he gets up there all of this is as a result of having identified previously problems that could come up and if you do it in this sequence then you've mitigated all those execution problems when he stands to jump into the pool he flaps his arms in a very particular phelian way every time that's just the physical preparation in

advance he also had mental preparation processes that included for example for 10 years before the Beijing Olympics he is every night and every morning told to put in the videotape you can see how long it's been going on for put in the video tape and it means to imagine the perfect race from end to end in slow motion mhm but it also includes exercises like what will you do if your goggles fill with water to imagine Stroke by stroke perfect race even though your goggles are filled with water and so on like lots of different

mental preparation cycles and in fact that is what happened in one of the races is is goggles did fill with water which you could just imagine how if if you have never anticipated that never thought through it psychologically mentally that that that's it that's over forget a race forget the Olympics I would hate to try and do that for even a couple of length would be not at all enjoyable and he still is able to win because he's he's literally prepared for these scenarios when it came down to those Olympics Bob Bowman said to me

he said I knew it was feasible to happen but I couldn't believe that it happened as effortlessly as it did it just everything clicked every time one after another he says at the end he stood like a like in the movie The Miracle he stood in the hallway and just on his own just had this moment of sort of Exquisite meltdown of like here I have I've been speaking with confidence but the thing actually executed so beautifully so well no one had ever done it before you know like uh described somebody described him if he

wins seven gold medals he'll be like the first man on the moon if he wins eight he'll be like the first man on Mars and he does the eight when I went to the cube in China I was reflecting on this how did he make the execution look so effortless it's like that's why you know that's why I went ended up interviewing Bob about this because I was like uh you got to explain it what went on what's behind the scenes it's not just the moment that looks like the moment of execution it's what are

all the problems what are all the mitigating things we can do we'll build that into the routine he added this final thought which I think is interesting he said if you ask Phelps about this mhm he might not even tell you there is a routine it's so normal now and and it was built so deliberately that's just life and yet all of it was built in place as anticipation for challenges and problems so that then the whole thing feels effortless fluid but really it's because of all of this anticipation planning and it's also it strikes

me not what is holding this back it could be present tense but you know what could yeah that's right prevent this I know one very very successful one of the most maybe the most successful consumer packaged Goods investors he's also a seral Founder so he invests in if you go into Whole Foods everything there is cpg all right he will ask co-founders he said three years from now you guys have had a huge dispute and one of you wants to leave what are the most likely reasons that's his question like what are the most likely

reasons and I mean there's a lot that can uncork obviously if there's if there's if there are already tensions or finger pointing at play then right he'll get to see it but it often will unearth other things that might be problematic right maybe there's an equity split that one person feels is unfair maybe there's a power Dynamic where they're both trying to split CEO duties 50/50 which I've never seen work and so on and so forth right but having those come up early allows him as an investor to say okay great and I'm role playing

here but he might say I want to invest here are the terms and will willing to agree to but a condition of that will be that we fix a b and c that you guys brought up and that's it right so that's a way of sussing out a premortem and in my case to yeah focus on my like lower back rehab it's very simple it's like okay well if I'm traveling what happens right because sure if I'm at home and I have all of my toys and tools and my routine is already established so there

isn't a lot of Heming and ha or figuring out how to order food from room service or whatever that's great but you need to develop systems and plans and contingencies so that you do what you're supposed to do on your worst days The Good the best days will hopefully take kind of take care of themselves but the the world doesn't always serve you up perfect days right so in the case of the low back stuff it's like okay well I should have yoga mat I'm just using the yoga mat example right could be like pre-

shipped to every hotel room maybe we choose hotels based on which ones have gyms or yoga mats already in the rooms which is true for some places dot do dot dot dot do dot but basically put that into a template right maybe that's a Google doc yep for me or for someone else where it's like okay I have to book a hotel for for location X like what are the rules what what's the template and then that's it it's just it's just done hopefully it's a set it and forget it type of operation where it's

like okay identify possible problem identify solution to possible problem build that into every time x is done right whatever that X might be yeah you're absolutely right and the word that you use that isn't a new word to any of us but brings to mind an extreme and amazing case of this is the word systems mhm and I don't know if you know Rob Dear I don't think so yeah he's an MTV star have you seen the show Ridiculousness you've seen it I don't think I have you haven't maybe maybe yeah I'll have to look

it up it's a kind of American Home Videos you know crazy crashes and terrible things and hilarious that that's one of the shows that he's most famous for now big MTV show before that he he was famous first his first big show was Robin big and then and then before that he was famous as a skateboarder mhm lots of people listening to this know already who Rob Dear deck is but in Persona he's this skateboarder you know like I mean he's funny and he's a certain kind of version of him but as I've got to

know Rob he absolutely blows my mind in the intentionality of the system he's building I think he's the second best paid skateboarder in America among many other things I want to try and capture this because he sent to me a document it's called the rhythm of experience mhm I've I've had a lot of people send me kind of Life Plan tools and documents and versions of things right like you know his his vision statements and mission statements and goals and roles and all sorts of things you might expect to have in there this is 50-page

document that is like seeing the future every single thing he learns about himself about a system about a problem they just build it into this same single document everything so when he got married you know as soon as he has therapy I think he does it either every week or every two weeks from this from the time they got married he's he's like it's like a Ferrari we're just we're just updating the Ferrari it's not because there's a problem it's just anticipation of course there'll be problems so we just build it into the routine so

anything that comes up in those conversations he doesn't just go oh yeah that's good I really try and going to work on that can to improve on that he goes okay right I'm not communicating well about what my schedule is okay so it builds it into the routine every single morning an email of my routine will be sent every day forever going forward to my wife so that she never has to have that that specific problem again everything he learns he builds into the system so that he isn't learning the same lesson you know like

living 20 years but actually you're you're just living the same year 20 times he's actually gaining 20 years of experience so let me ask you a question about his document the rhythm of experience y because it sounds like there are two things at least to confirm that I'm understanding this he has a document that contains learnings and various things he also has very rapid action after let's just say wife gives feedback I don't know what your schedule is I want you to communicate love for you to communicate better about that he's like great from this

point forward daily email to wife regarding schedule but it sounds like that goes into action how that's implemented I don't know but what does the document do right because if the document is 50 pages long or however long it is presumably there would have to be some scheduled time for reviewing that or using it my takeaway is that he basically creates a rule and systematizes things so that he doesn't have 100 oneoff Band-Aid Solutions right there's like some sort of recurring semi-permanent or permanent policy that he puts in place to address various things but how

is the document actually used everyone on his team has access to the same document so it's not just for him to remember M and and so everybody everyone this is the brain right like this is what you're going to first like you're not coming to him hey how should we handle this and that unless it's not in that document I mean we all sort of know the difference between working in your business and on your business MH but he's just applying that to his life in a more sophisticated developed way than anyone I have seen

I'm curious because I have not surprisingly spend a lot of time thinking about systems I come up with rules and policies and this this and this that I have found to be the easy part I create a document or someone else creates a document there's a Google doc it's shared with everyone on the team but by the way in the process of doing business week to week month to month year to year there are hundreds of Google documents and aside from for specific documents saying if they're short enough right let's just say there's a short

which there is I have a sort of like a 12 Commandments of Tim's calendar type of document so it's like okay like every Wednesday morning review this or something okay you can have somebody put in a recurring calendar item to do that but otherwise I'm most interested in how the team uses the document because there's a search and Discovery challenge sort of inherent with Google Docs and so on now if it's single doc that's interesting but that presents its own challenges if it becomes kind of unwieldy and he's like he's like hey my wife didn't

get the reminder on the calendar they're like what reminder on the calendar whatever and they're like oh it's on page 47 buried under miscellaneous why didn't you find it and it's like because no human can would ever think to find that quickly there so I don't know if there's any light you can shed on that while we're sort of thinking about that I'm just remembering of other Precision things that he has on there right so he gets his haircut once a week at exactly the same time because he likes his hair just to be never

have think about that never have to schedule it and every time I schedule an appointment to get my haircut every time I think you're doing this wrong Greg because there's a way to systematize that and I know someone who's done it and I haven't done it yet I mean what we're talking about is the difference between linear results and residual results right so if a linear result is one way you say well it only happens today if you take action to do it today right so linear income right you get paid you know per hour

per day and so you get paid when you work today right and residual income would be okay income that rolls to you you know through any all sorts of Investments that can do that when you're sleeping so it just is happening automatically it's such a GameChanger to shift one's mindset between the two let's talk about if you're open to it and feel free to to defer this and continue on a different thread if you like but defining done this is also something that has captured my attention yeah I'll let you open that in any way

that makes sense but why is it important to Define what done looks like because insecure overachievers can endlessly complicate any task to a infinite degree right so just asking the question what does dun look like and then sticking to it knowing when this thing has happened when we've reached that point that is what dun will be on this project this goal it of course is an accelerating thing to do and then maybe just saying it a different way it's almost like a natural law like you cannot if you don't know what done looks like you

cannot be done mhm even defining a done for the day list I think is really helpful so as part of a a tool that I actually never thought I would do it I was under contract to create an essentialism planner 10 years ago and after I worked on it for a few months with a team I just concluded yeah I don't think I think I would just be creating something just just totally non-essential which you know would be too ironic and I just not helpful enough to anyone this is just like every other planner like

this or Journal so I uncommitted got out of the contract and then a couple of years ago after I'd carried on trial and error in my own life applying these ideas I finally was like no actually I think I think I have something now that special and it works and it's so helpful to me I think I'm ready to to actually you know get into contract and do it so we did that went through again more iterations removed loads of stuff you would normally have in a planner so that it really is sort of just

the the heart of it has a personal quarterly offsite in it has a weekly process you go through and then a daily process and the output of the daily process is a done for the day list it doesn't mean when you've done these six items and it's a particular it's called the one two three method so there's six items total when you've done those six things you can feel you're done for the day and maybe you don't do anything else but you know you have done important things urgent things key things for tomorrow and there's

a method to get to that but a for the day list is I think helpful psychologically for removing unnecessary cognitive strain on our minds when we're just perpetually doing yeah there's no doing and then not doing times there's just endlessly looping endlessly doing semi- tasks or semi distractions in a digital world so the one two three method you mentioned that that is the one most essential thing two essential and urg things and three maintenance items equals done for the day yeah that's right okay could you give an example of what that might look like in

your own life what that one two three yeah has looked like or might look like I'm going to back up just for just a second just to say okay this is part of the daily process there's solid science behind the structure of this protocol and nobody needs to know that you know what all that research is but it's helpful just to know that that's the case it follows this structure I call it the power half an hour mhm because I basically think look for most people maybe everyone including me it's unrealistic to say oh take

control of your whole life but if you could take control of half an hour of your life that will improve every other minute of the other 23 and a half hours okay that's that's a pretty high return on effort and and there a micr version you can do at the minimum I would suggest I think you can do this well you know still have a valuable experience it's like six minutes and that's sort of a backup lower bound mhm but you're answering three questions I've mentioned them previously but you do it in a daily basis

what so what now what that's the structure so that every day you take that noise so instead of it building up for days and weeks at a time you're like you you're just spending that immediately just getting the noise out what's going on download so what what's the news in your life try to find the headline the key why does this matter what does this mean and then the third thing the now what is the one two3 method what does it look like for me okay the priority for the day so I'm thinking about Saturday

priority for the day on Saturday uh my niece is getting married Clara and John a shout out to them and so that's the priority and that's an obvious one I suppose on that day because you know certain things it's already structurally built in I still find it helpful to identify it because it helps me go okay that's the mission that's the the priority singular mhm if I only do one thing today if I only need to give my attention to one thing today this is what I need to give attention to then underneath that you

have okay two things that are essential and Urgent these I sort of described this as like the taxes of our life and and that was kind of literally true on Saturday right like we're coming to the very end of the year any final Financial things I need to have sorted out retirement taxes anything this would be the last day to check you know so I think those were the items that that were on there maintenance items I describe as like the laundry of our life which can be literally the laundry but I have a car

that has one of the tires is just losing air on it you know obviously it's not normal simple thing but if I don't take care of that which doesn't mean I have to execute it the task is schedule this or have this organized so that you know it's done the three maintenance items per day are the things that make tomorrow a lot harder if you don't resolve them today your future self is always grateful that you took care of the maintenance items and and of course this is all just a rule of thumb this one

two three but I have just found it so helpful and I don't do it every day I I still wish I did but what I notice is that when I don't do it my day is more frenetic more frantic I don't have a clear sense of the day it's not nearly as satisfying because even though I can still be productive in a kind of more forced way you don't know if you're doing the important the most important thing you don't know yes I have selected these things you don't have something to come back to going

back to the plain analogy of okay well all these things happened that I didn't expect it happen yes that's normal that's life but you don't have a chance to go okay coming back to the most important thing let's work on this again and so that's you know that's a that's an example from this you know just literally this weekend of how I would think about it and I mean it just allows you on the days that I've done it to enjoy enjoy the experience and also and I suppose maybe this is the most important benefit

is that you actually know and work on the most important thing which as previously stated is actually the least likely thing to happen and then that that's a that's of course a very satisfying way to live cuz if if you go through 2025 and you literally every day did if you and I if everyone listening to this does the most important thing every day if they did nothing else different in 2025 there's no question that would change both trajectory and momentum you know the whole velocity of the year would be different oh for sure because

of our tendency not to do the most important thing and of course the other things add to that sense of of a more effortless approach to doing the things that matter most I would also add to that that working on the most important thing gives you a sense of mission and purpose that smaller things do not so it's it's not purely the clinical moving of the needle on important things because really there's there's nothing outside of your psychological experience of reality but the feeling of being mored and pointed in the right direction with the bigger

thing psychologically is really really really valuable it's not just about whatever the points might be sure the points are nice but really psychologically and psycho emotionally knowing that you're working on something that matters however you've defined that is I have just found you know this past year I think I've done a very good job of that and it's remarkable what that does for your mental health well just describe that a little more in detail so you're describing the impact of meaning you know of practically knowing each day each week and so on I'm pursuing something

that means something to me yeah but what difference has it made for you psychologically sure well I would say that there's a bit more to it just in terms of maybe characteristics when choosing that important thing mhm so for instance for me there has to be a making or Mastery component one or the other so either creating something or I am trying to master something not just this is on the flip side like manage or mitigate right so for instance even though doing the PT for the low back and so on is incredibly important if

I decide that is the most important thing per se it's depressing there's no winning there right it's doing something not to lose right it's there's a lot of fear associated with it it is not an inspiring headp space to inhabit now it doesn't need to be like doing you know back PT in the goog by candl light I mean it it doesn't have to be miserable but it doesn't have the requisite payoff that I would want in a most important thing it still needs to get done which which means that it's maybe the maintenance two

essential energent things or one of the maintenance things right but it's a non-negotiable maintenance this is not nice to have right but for instance been working on my my first book in seven years which is making fantastic progress shocker it's become absurdly long but one day I'll write a short book it's going to be of an accomplishment by the way someone was just raving to me last night about tools of titans this is the groom who just was married oh amazing I was talking to him he was like he's like yeah I normally I would

try to read he said 20 minutes a day but I I like sat down and it it I was just gone for like two hours working through it there's so much in it oh that's nice to hear so anyway that was literally yesterday they just out the blue said that so carry on anyway yeah thanks that makes me feel good that was that was a fun book to write which isn't always the case and so that is one at the top which feels very good to get back into as I feel like much of what

is online most of what is online increasingly is just becoming ephemera like very short halflife it's just like you could put out the best thing imaginable in most formats that are available today and it will have vanished from the minds of the people it passed in front of within 24 hours that's so true books still hold an interesting place they have a certain durability might not last forever but there's a certain durability that I think is really important no there's a deep cache about it within deep deep not just oh that's impressive this it holds

a certain place in people's minds still and and and for good reason I mean yeah you know books have lasted longer than almost anything else yeah so for me if I'm among other things trying to impact lives I feel like that feels like time very well spent yep I understand that so all of that is on the making side right then I also have been spending a lot of time on archery specifically which is every bit as frustrating as golf in a lot of respects I don't play golf but I've talked to a lot of

golfers and people that that's the closest comparison it's when it's when it's going well man is it beautiful and when you can't figure out what you've changed to make things go sideways it's very frustrating but it's become this constant that I can work on with in some cases incremental gains and some cases big gains but H I don't want to imply that I'm going to master archery but I'm I am practicing as if that is my goal and there's an article let me just pull it up I want to give credit where credit is due

that I'm reading right now on Mastery and it is on readr tng.com and the name of the piece which I recommend to folks it's actually a fantastic read is and read tr.com is a reference to trun fan who is the writer Jerry Seinfeld ichido Suzuki and the pruit of Mastery notes from the 1987 Esquire magazine issue that inspired Jerry Seinfeld to quote pursue mastery because that will fulfill your life end quote Yeah so we'll put that in the show notes but it basically makes the point that if you choose a discipline or something to approach

through the lens of deliberate practice and Mastery which it never ends right this may be something you do for an incredibly long period of time and it also highlights different archetypes and why they fail to pursue Mastery which I found very helpful that that art that sport that film the blank could be your most constant companion you have in life and there's something very reassuring about that so to have that as a through line also as identity diversification so that if something goes sideways with the podcast or something goes sideways in family life that you

have Diversified your psychological Health on some level because it's not totally invested in in one basket so I would say that speaks a bit to how I've been choosing things right it's it's make making your Mastery versus like mitigating like mitigating risk or managing that's how I've been thinking about it for myself and I feel for myself I need something that is inspiring as the most important thing now that's not always going to be the case right if you're if you have a family member has an acute Health Emergency it's like okay that may be

the most important thing but if you have the flexibility if you have the ability to choose I want something that's inspiring because that inspiration that breathing in generates energy it generates the excitement and the life force for lack of a better term that then trickles down to everything else but if the thing I choose is kind of depressing or it's avoiding something bad it's running away from something as opposed to towards something M then it doesn't work for me it really doesn't you said a few different things there but one thing that stands out to

me is is just this idea that meaning isn't a nice to have that is describ this way to me once and I I liked this that because life is suffering you you need to pursue meaning that justifies that level of suffering 100% I've been thinking a lot about this as well so let's say the most famous person you know in the world about meaning would be Victor Frankle in his in his creation of logo therapy out of the Nazi Germany con conentration camps he's a psychologist and a Jew and he's going through those experiences and

he he you know crafts his story and man search for meaning MH but just building on that it's like he sometimes would try to if he was in therapy with somebody he would say you know they would say I just want to die you know I'm like I'm I've got no reason to live and he's I don't know precisely the words he would use but he's effectively saying okay well then you sort of why haven't you done that like what what is it that actually keeps you here then yeah and the meaning could be as

and I don't mean it's trivial but it might sound trivial it could be well I have a cat and I need I need to feed the cat and he's like those answers were not nothing to him at all he would he would use that as sort of a gateway to be able to reconstruct a life of meaning because there's something that some meaning that can be built upon and so I I really think this is an this is an under taught and underappreciated idea and and I think it it distinguishes itself considerably from productivity because

you you could be productive at all sorts of things like that you shouldn't even be doing or don't really motivate you don't drive you you can you could be doing task execution all day long and feel really meaningless in your life mhm finding something meaningful Something Beautiful something creative as you're describing in not consuming changing the ratio of consumption to Creation I think is one really kind of self-evident shift I think a lot of people would benefit in you consuming it does not fill you with meaning creating anything even if it's not very good at

first it just being in the Act of Creation I think is closer to meaning mhm so I struggle a little bit in the just generally the IDE like people will describe what I'm into oh yeah here's a productivity thing and I never I never self-identify that way because like essentialism for example is about it's not about doing more things it's about doing more of the right things essential the very word it means very important it's trying to craft your life around the the highest meaning activity you can currently conure mhm I think it's about as

good an antidote to the psychological traumas and and taxation of Our Lives that exists maybe it's the only one really this idea like of radical gratitude radical gratitude is expressing thanks for things you're not thankful for because that's what gratitude actually is I mean if you look up the definition of gratitude I did not know this for like till till just a few years ago I thought gratitude was a life changer game Cher and it meant be grateful for the good things in your life that is remember them Express them focus on them that's not

the definition of gratitude if you look at a definition of gratitude in the dictionary what you find is that it's living with a spirit of thankfulness and that's not the same thing because that's not just for the quote unquote good things that's for everything and as I was thinking about this I was like well well that was a game changer for me when my daughter Eve was very ill with a undiagnosed neurological condition she Free Falling in her EXA function I found that radical gratitude was a way out of sort of The Madness of not

being able to control the situation and watching some of the picture of Health suddenly become mentally and physically hugely incapacitated on the way to being in a coma so I learned it there but as I was talking about yesterday when I was sharing this with someone I thought well it's so easy to point back to that because it all worked out in the end right like you know years go by and things right okay it's resolved so I can point back to radical gratitude there but can I do it now and and I thought can

I express this idea out loud because it sticks in my throat as I even as I go to talk about it now can I say out loud I am thankful that my best friend of 35 years is fatally ill with cancer because and it I want to rage against that that phrase that idea it feels it feels so I won't say wrong because that's not quite right but it there is something sort of violating about that expression but it's in the expression of it that you open yourself it's like it's like an act of faith

that opens meaning that's invisible until you express the first half of the equation because opening oneself to the idea that there could be meaning in this suffering and there's such a gift that so it's sort of hidden behind this this action I don't want to take the expression of it I'm grateful for this challenge because and like one of the thoughts that came to me just yesterday about this was because because now I need to live I don't mean in a guilt way but like I need to live double now like I cannot just go

through life I must live it alive in a sense living it doubly because he he can't do that now so the 40 to 50 years hopefully maybe that we could have had together that that just not happening now that that's not going to be the story and I I still find that unimaginable that is almost impossible for me to get my head around that but but if that's the reality if that's now that is the reality what's the possible meaning in it this I think is like something like the actual test of life is to

is to open oneself to the possibility that there is meaning in suffering that suffering isn't because God is a vivisectionist that CS Lewis's language for it like you have to decide is got a vivis actionist does he take pleasure in suffering or is there meaning in our suffering and that's only one answer to this question but to take responsibility for my life in a different way to Value the remaining years and hopefully decades differently it's like I have a responsibility burned into me like like a scar yeah and like like a scar I wouldn't I

don't think I could have it taken away from me I don't think so but I certainly don't want it to be it's like no that scar stays I need that Scar and I want to live out of that understanding and and just try to make good on the years I get that he doesn't get and there's something about that it's it's I'm obviously still living in the grief of all of this but but I I I think that's one way to detect meaning that can save us you know yeah thank you for sharing that I

know that can't be easy to think about and feel but I do appreciate the opening oneself to the possibility that you can be grateful not just for the obviously uplifting and positive things but to tag on that I am grateful for X difficult thing because dot dot dot to cue the mind to hopefully produce something that engenders meaning even when overwhelmed with suffering um yeah plenty for me to chew on there too that's my own lived experience with it but is also you can go back and follow the trail of of research about this you

know the whole post-traumatic growth literature that is those people that go through trauma and don't just first of all there sort of three options right you can collapse through it you can there are some people that return to level as before that would be kind of the resilience mindset and then there's this other phenomenon happens less often but it does happen and has been identified characterized codified and and studied is people that move to a higher level post the trauma M we've all been very familiar with PTSD but post-traumatic growth is less referenced which is

just too bad because I think that's really the thing you want to understand yeah there is a way that we can in tangible ways have Beauty for Ashes you know that that it it's not just a poetic idea and it's not just nice to have it's like if the so much suffering and those are the raw materials through which we can actually build a life of meaning it's like oh okay so now I need to embrace it differently not not spend my whole life just trying to avoid it or to or to you know in

a kind of positive toxicity you also can't avoid it you cannot avoid it yeah impossible it's just like all right I want to drive for the rest of my life without hitting any red lights it's like it's not going to work so you might as well figure out how to handle red lights yeah it's a great metaphor for it Anna will say to me you know from time to time that the like no one gets out without a mortal experience and there's a term for this it's called s and it's it's a term for that

the experience of of sort of remembering and knowing that other people's life is as complex and emotionally challenging and so on as our own and it's not obvious all the time because it's easy to come up with shallow stories about other people and I I mean I hear them I hear it quite a bit from people oh well that person's all right you know because they're maybe that person has money or because that person's famous or because that person's you know appears to be above The Fray and it's like I actually think it's a sort

of sort of a limit of imagination certainly limit of empathy but but to realize like no not one of those people is Escaping The Mortal experience of suffering that that all of us are yeah yes maybe they have different set of problems or maybe they have things possible solutions that you wish you had access to I mean obviously people are in different positions in life but man I have never met a person that could Escape even close to escaping it it's like you can't it's hardwired into I don't want to call Life a simulation but

like if you say it is for a moment it's like yeah it's hardwired into this you cannot Escape it yeah this is why I think so many people try to actually pursue distraction of any number number of Kinds because of an attempt to avoid the pain and suffering yeah and I think I think most addictions really are that at the core to avoid the experience of of being alive and that's because it's so painful to be alive yeah yeah it can be and so an alternative to that is to is to open yourself to the

meaning well this is happening for me not to me yeah and I don't know any other I don't know a faster way to get there than radical gratitude yeah thank you for that Greg and just to reiterate something you said earlier about you know how we can turn the stories of others into these NPC like extras in video games oh yeah where they just you know simply explained in one sentence whereas we have this this raging torrent of nuance in our lived experience and few things come to mind one and I wish I had the

attribution on this but someone said you know everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about number one number two I interviewed Chris Bosch very well basketball player on the podcast and I'm pretty sure it was him who said somebody else had said this to him you know if if you're sitting at a table and everyone else put their problems on the table you did the same he's like you pick your problems right back up he's like once you saw actually what everyone was contending with we should just underscore that because I think that's such

a strange phenomenon at Stanford University at the Stanford Memorial Church if you go into that is a non denominational Church from the very beginning but they carve in stone all of these key ideas and one of them is basically what you just said so I won't repeat it but that is a strange that is a strange phenomenon mhm that there's something meaningful there is something that that gives me a glimpse of you know a sort of glitch in The Matrix in in that illustration that even for the discomfort and the uncomfortness and the and the

pain and the frustration of our problems something about them it's I think it's beyond just they're familiar to us I think they are connected to us yeah if we're going really philosophical I would say something like maybe we knew we'd have these mhm like we actually did have a chance to choose them or not like prehar yeah and it certainly has that kind of vibe to it to me when you share it and and I'm sort of just having it hit me again it's like yeah we we actually do want these problems oh wow there

is something in them that there's something like stepping stones to becoming what we uniquely need to become next you know to become more and more of who we really are and lessen less of who we really aren't which is you know that's the real essence of essentialism it's not tasks and todos and even goals it's like a becoming process and that these are the raw materials for doing it it's not toxic positivity because it's not pretending there aren't problems and not pretending there aren't challenges it's it's to open oneself to the possibility that there's no

other way mhm that this is the way to becoming who we're supposed to become mhm and and I'm not saying every single thing in life is like that I'm not saying the flat tire is the thing I'm not saying it like that but these tests of Life are actually some of them in my life have felt signature yeah that they really are built to be in a sense particularly excruciatingly hard for me but even in that if you can Glimpse the other side of it like no but that means it was done with a certain

a high degree of care of thought even it's a really different way to live and I'm still obviously just learning in that Journey it's a disciplined pursuit of meaning a discipline pursuit of meaning maybe that's your next book so we've covered a lot of ground I think this will give folks a lot of Grist for the mill things to chew on for the next year where they want to point themselves how they want to think about meaning suffering Mastery choosing the most important thing we've covered a lot is there anything else we are going to

talk about where people can find the essentialism planner and also perhaps get started learning more about the principles that we've covered in brief here but is there anything else that you'd like to cover whether Concepts or closing words anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind to a close I had a really interesting conversation with Eric Newton who took to social media I didn't know him before to list what he' learned from the biggest suffering in his life which was well fatal diagnosis of of his wife he he described their relationship prior

to this as having lots of ups and downs you know once he described it as a sort of fantastic love affair but then also like he describes all the problems and challenges I had in my my podcast once I'd read this because someone sent it to me like hey this is similar to the kinds of things you're wrestling with and and what's particularly interesting about the story is that it wasn't just when she got this diagnosis that things changed it was post that where she got into what turned out to be the last 6 weeks

of her life that she hit a regret and the regret was not having been deeply connected enough with the people closest in her life and I thought that was such a distinct kind of insight he said she suddenly unlocked a level of vulnerability and intimacy that he literally didn't know existed not just in their relationship he just didn't know it existed in life to have someone be so honest so open so without all of those layers of the onion that you know to go back to that metaphor and so for six weeks he just he

was like okay this actually is love you they've been married for years and all of these ups and downs everything he's like this is what it actually means and he summarized it something like this he's like look if there's a purpose in any of it it is to have ever deepening connection with the people who matter most to you right of course and I mean I was touched by that I was touched by his story I was fascinated by that story but the question I walked away with was how do you live like that normally

yeah is there a skill set to it or is it just one of those things that you would have to have that extremity to be able to access that it links back to some of this research I've been doing on Carl Rogers because I think that I do think that there's a way that we can at least get a lot closer to that ideal in normal living and it is a kind of well palpably better form of listening than almost anybody experiences in life it's learnable it's teachable it's learnable like it's there it's available but

almost nobody's trained in it the only people that are really trained in roarian listening is like psychotherapists if they have been and if they haven't been the risk is enormous that they will make problems worse in their attempt to make them better because they simply won't be addressing anything like the right issue they'll be attacking the leaves of the problem not the roots of the problem and they will do that and they'll build in their own mental models of solutions instead of getting to what the real stuff is but that's and that's the people that

are trained in it or to some extent trained in it but think about like all the doctors that aren't trained in it mhm that's what happened with Eve it's just unreal that's a story for a different day but like there were doctors with all this training that just completely had a they just thought they knew what was wrong with her if we had done what they had said she would be dead yeah and it's not about their expertise in a sense it's their expertise was the problem is that they didn't have the humility to to

be listening properly and so I think that's the thing I want to say is that I do think that there is a form of listening that we can provide for each other that is so powerful that's so Curative and I do sometimes think it's the primary thing missing in Modern Life my son just said it to me recently I mean there so many things I've got wrong as a parent as a person but he just said Dad if there was ever a problem I knew I could come and I knew you would listen so even

if it was something you were doing that was frustrating I knew you would listen that's not passive listening it's a very particular kind and man I want to teach that man I really really want to help people learn how to do this with each other where should people go to stay informed of your now pending class related to reran listening I really want to do this the easiest single thing go to Greg mcu.com homepage they can get right now what what we do have right now is a less but better course they get it for

free they can sign up in 10 seconds and then we will send information about this you know like Apex listening or for one of a better term courses on there and we'll do them live and and like we'll learn together how to do this because it's everything thank you Greg really appreciate the time Greg and the flexibility with scheduling it's always a pleasure to have a conversation with you and for everybody listening as always we'll have everything that we've discussed linked to in the show notes tim. Blog podcast and if you search Greg so mchan

certainly you can also try with the MC ke o w n you nailed it and this will be the most recent episode as of right now and until next time first of all thank you for tuning in everybody and be just a bit Kinder than is necessary not just to others but also to yourself as you're looking forward to the next year don't beat yourself up over last year just see if you can plan for not just a better but more joyous New Year how can you not just do the important things but do the

joyous things how can you not just do the hard things but find ways to make those important things a little less effortful effortless even these are all questions worth considering thanks everybody