The Daily Stoic - Greg McKeown on Doing Less and Getting More

Episode Date: May 8, 2021

On today’s podcast Ryan talks to bestselling author Greg McKeown about his new book Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most, how the present moment is the true antidote to uncertainty, how effortlessness actually produces better outcomes, and more. Greg McKeown is a speaker, a bestselling author, and the host of the popular podcast What’s Essential. McKeown’s New York Times bestselling book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less has sold more than a million copies worldwide. Originally from London, England, he now lives in California with his wife, Anna, and their four children.Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase.Box of Awesome from Bespoke Post has a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. To get started, you just take a quiz at boxofawesome.com your answers help them pick the right Box of Awesome for you.Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code STOIC at checkout.Stamps.com is a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic Follow Greg McKeown: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregmckeown Twitter: https://twitter.com/GregoryMcKeown Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregorymckeown/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GregMcKeownSpeaker/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke each weekday We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics Something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage justice up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time.

Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My guest today is the author of one of my all-time favorite books, a book I sell here at the

Painted Porch Bookshop in Vastrop, Texas as well. I'm talking about Greg McEwan, the author of Essentialism. Essentialism to me is a core, stoic concept. Mark's really even says, every day you should ask yourself this question with everything that you do, he says, is this essential? And he says, what you find is that most of what you do is not essential. Most of what you say is not essential. And when you eliminate that, not only do you have more tranquility, he says you get the double benefit of doing fewer things better. So if you haven't read essentialism, you absolutely should.

And Greg is an awesome author, and we had a great conversation in his new book, which just came out effortless. Make it easy to do what matters is a very fitting sequel. You know, I find that his books are just brilliantly designed to. He's got like really cool graphics in them and art. Ironically, these are very simple designs. They're like sort of line drawing, which I think goes to the point, which is that little things can make a big difference. Little things done well, make all the difference.

This is a great interview, one I was very excited to do. And we get personal, he tells a story about some health troubles that he and his daughter had, and how it put everything in perspective for him. I know the last year has done that for me in a lot of big ways.

If you haven't left 2020 and 2021 with a clear sense of what's essential, I'd argue you're probably doing something wrong. And I would also argue if you haven't had at least a fleeting glimpse of what a more effortless life looks like, what life looks like when you strip away the inessential and you really lock into what you should be doing and how you should be doing it.

That's a missed opportunity as well. And I think I'm still kind of wrapping my head around what life looks like with less in it, what life looks like with more focus in it, and what an effortless, tranquil, happy life looks like. Ironically, there's something I tried to write about in stillness, but sometimes you can see your own point reflected back to you, as Emerson said, with a kind of alienated majesty. And so I really enjoyed both these books. I think you'll enjoy this conversation.

You can check out Greg McEwan's new books, anywhere books are sold, but you can also get them from the painted porch at thepaintedporge.com. And I would also suggest you check out Greg's podcast. We did a great interview together. We went really in depth and I enjoyed that as well. Here's my interview with Greg McEwan. So how have you been? I've been really well. How are you? I'm doing pretty good, all things considered. Yeah, all things considered.

You know, there's a lot there. Of course, I don't know. I feel it can feel flippant. I feel like to be like things are amazing. Because although individually they're quite good, you know, it seems like giving everything that's happening in the world. But I think that's sort of the point is, and it's kind of the message of the new book and the other one, which is like,

how do you find a way to do what you need to do inside of all of the craziness that's happening around you? Yes, particularly with the new book, Effortless, the frame is, life is hot. In all sorts of way, in hundreds of different ways, and in unique, in particular ways for people. And the complication is that we make it even harder still, harder than it needs to be. And so the impact of that is that people start to be burned out. And a lot of people are just, it's almost like everybody's burned out now.

And my position is that you can make a different choice that you can discover ways to make today and tomorrow a little easier. And I feel like that just has the power of relevancy right now. Yeah, there's a line from Epictetus where he says, I am at least not a hindrance to myself, meaning that as bad as things might be, you don't make them worse by complaining about them, taking them personally, wishing they were otherwise fighting against them.

You just sort of make, make the most of whatever it happens to be in front of you. Well, and that particular thing is one of the little micro tactics that I think are universally useful. We started in our family a new habit and ritual where we said, okay, after we complain, we say something we're thankful for. So sort of balancing out complaint with gratitude. Well, right, and at first sounded like, well, that's not such a 50-50, that's not a great ratio, but here's what I found when I started doing it,

is that I complained a lot more than I realized. In small ways, I thought to myself was being a grateful person, optimistic, but I noticed that it was just easy to fall into that pattern. And I found the impact immediate that I could see other people just light up around me a little more. I felt a little better myself. And I would have children do the same thing. I remember even once my son Jack, he said, well, I am actually complained. I am so thankful that my dad is making me play this game. And it made us all laugh just as it made you laugh, which is exactly the point.

And it worked. Even a source of sarcastic thank you was still powerful. And it's one of these things that yes, you cannot control so many of the hard things that happen to you. But if you can choose to receive whatever's happening with the spirit of thankfulness, then it does ease some of life's inevitable burdens. And what I've found, and there's some great research on this by Barbara Fredrickson called the Broaden and Build Theory, is that as soon as you get into that state, out of a state of suffering into state,

I'm calling it the effortless state, the whole series of positive things starts to happen in your favor, it improves your relationships, it improves your sense of possibility, and you start to see assets you didn't see before. And I've seen that, even here in the midst of the pandemic, that good things have come whenever we have used, even this small, simple habit ratio.

Yeah, there's an interesting exercise from the Stokes too, where Marcus talks about how much you would want to have the things you take for granted if suddenly you didn't have them, which is something I think about a lot. So, you know, oftentimes, like, you know, I think one's career is a great way to look at this. So, you know, you look at your career and you compare yourself to you know, somebody who's done more than you. In our case, maybe someone who sold way more books or someone who's gotten a certain amount of critical acclaim.

And you can feel sort of very small about yourself. You could focus on what you've been deprived of, the lucky breaks you didn't get, or the breaks you should have gotten that were taken from you. And that's obviously one way to go through life is sort of looking at what you didn't get and what there remains to be gotten.

But then of course, you can stop and go, but aren't there people who are dying to break in to whatever it is that I do, that all they want is one shot who'd be happy with 10% of what I have? And so I think part of what gratitude does is it forces you, and complaint is like something didn't go your way,

something you don't have that you want. And I think what gratitude at its core is sort of looking at what you have and being like, this is good too. The best way I've heard that said is I had Benjamin Hardy on the What's A Central Podcast, and he's,'s think just about to co-author a book on this but the term is are you living in the game or in the gap?

Oh sure. That language frame is just such a good one for what we're talking about. If you're in the gap, you're looking at the distance between where you are and what you want to become, achieve, and so on. And is the shortcase way to be in a state of, you know, we would just say unhappiness, but I could call it just a state of suffering. And then the alternative is to be in the game where you are seeing all the progress that you've made, how far you've come, what's going right, what you have already become. And this is a sure way to alleviate some of that suffering in life and to find more of an effortless state in the way that we're describing it. So I'm curious speaking of gaps. So you have a pretty big gap between these two books. What is it? Four or five years, maybe more?

More? Seven years. Which is pretty unusual. So walk me through that process for you. Was that deliberate? Was it a struggle? Were you being intentional about it? Were you waiting? Or did you find that writing this book on effortlessness was harder than expected? effortlessness was harder than expected. The irony that would be. This was intentional, but I can't fully take credit for it. In a way, I think it does deserve some credit, but I probably was ready to write the next book instantly, or within a few months of finishing essentialism. And I just felt when I went sort of internally into that internal listening, I felt, no, you're just supposed to wait. And I just trusted that, you know, that the inner voice, that sense of conscience. And that stayed with me for years. And it was about maybe three years ago, two or three years ago now,

that I felt quite all of a sudden, and without real explanation, it's time. And so I began the process for what has become effortless. And really, I think in hindsight, I'm not sure I know the reasons why, but I think I could not have written this book when I'd first written Essentialism. I needed to go through certain experiences that weren't yet weren't yet coming. And so I mean one of them particularly was

was an experience of let me say on the surface the the greatest example of suffering in my life. And it was the lessons I learned through that and since that, that have allowed me to even write this book. And the basics of the story is we've moved as a family into quite a beautiful, you know, almost idyllic area. It's more horse-w ways than roads. There's no street lamps. It's white picket fences everywhere. Our children just played for hours outside.

We played tennis together. We went on long walks. We did horse riding. I mean, it was just really just a little heaven on earth. And one of my daughters, Eve, especially seemed to thrive. She's just uptrees all the time, walking barefoot everywhere, naming our chickens. Yes, we have chickens. And just, you know, this is her life. She's just such a, she can't stay crushed. She's so, she's such a happy, you know, temperament, laughs about everything, talks about, everything reading, everything. I took her on a trip with me once and she just, she didn't stop talking for an hour. Literally, not non-sob and I texted my wife, I'm like, literally an hour in, this is her, vivacious and delightful to be around. And then she turned 14 and she just slowed down a bit, you know, took longer to do her chores, she taught last,

she seemed a little bit physically awkward and we just said, well down a bit, you know, took longer to do her chores. She taught last. She seemed a little bit physically awkward. And we just said, well, a pretty, pretty age-appropriate behavior here. But then after a routine physical therapy visit, it turned out that she was, you know, he said, look, she failed a reflex test, but none of us are supposed to ever fail. It's automatic. And he said, you might want to see a neurologist. And of course, you know, it won automatic. And he said, you might want to see a neurologist. And of course, you know, I've worn twice. And what it turned out to be when we looked at it through a new paradigm was

there was something very serious going on. And we watched over the next three or four months as her capabilities were massively reduced on like a daily basis with no diagnosis, no neurologist could say a word about any of it. They just literally, they take the tests, everything would come back in the normal range and they just shrug this old. It's literally like, I just don't know what's happening. Meanwhile, she's having a massive tonic conic seizure. She's been hospitalized. Right side of her body has stopped working effectively. There's chances in one word sentences, she's no personality just completely gone as was, not moving, she became effectively

on the way to being fully comatose. And that, as I say, that's the stuff that I think suffering is made of. And we found ourselves faced with almost like visually, my own mind, I could see two choices. One was, and actually this was the tempting choice, was the hard, heavy, endless path, what all we do is think of this and get consumed by it. And all night long, doodling everything, trying to do the research, looking at alternative medicines,

just consumed by it, why us, and getting victimized about or everything. And as I say, that's what we felt like doing, but there was this other path in front of us that was more surprising, and it was just this sense of, but what if you could approach this path gratefully, happily, focus on what you can do something about, a lighter path that looked like, definitely catching each other, doing the right thing, being thankful for anything,

the fact that neurologists even would see her, the fact that friends were interested to supporters, that we would get around the piano and sing, we would laugh together, we'd pray together, we would, there was a different way of doing life. And that is what basically saved us. And, and, and, and, because there was like a magical force of play behind it, that was just a better way of living.

And, and I now would say that that experience, it went on for a couple of years, but I would describe that experience as being punctuated with joy. And I don't even use that term lightly. Like that's what it was. It made as a family, we found a different way of living. And so that's what sort of breathed life into, and it gave me fire for the deed, to do the additional research and then the writing of the book that eventually was called Effortless, because it's just, it's just when life is hard,

what you need to find and what I feel like, in fact, there is an easier path. There is a different way of doing life that might be less traveled, but it doesn't make it less of an option. And so that was kind of the story behind the story. That couldn't have been written before. I just wouldn't have had this understanding.

And so I think that there was in some way a wisdom I couldn't articulate for why the weight and why now. And is this a struggle? You guys are still in the middle of as a family or have you come out of the other side of it? So as of this conversation, I would say that Eve is back, fully back.

I would say back psychologically, mentally, emotionally, physically, like the whole thing. And so we are cautiously optimistic that we're really on the other side of this now. But there were multiple, there were two, twice she returned to the original symptoms. And if we've taken the harder, heavier, you know, getting in our own path way of dealing with this, we wouldn't have had, I think, even the energy, never mind the positive culture in the family, to hack the second time. And I think that's one of the lessons of effortless is that is that when you, when things really matter, when they

are really essential, you've got to approach it. Not in a, let me burn everything I've got right now. You've got to be living such a way that you can be around for the next challenge, whatever it is, even when you don't know what it is. So there's great value in living in a way that is sustainable for whatever the thing around the corner is that you don't yet even have to find, whether it's a pandemic or whether it's some other thing that comes along. And what was the sort of underlying cause that sort of sent you down this path? Well, you mean, to him medically, is that what you mean?

Well, you mean, in terms, medically, is that what you mean? Yes. Yes. I mean, she was suffering from brain information. And that was really as close as we could ever define to a causation of it. So that we don't know what the actual driver of it was. And, but that was, you know, this is what was going on. And there's only a few ways you can treat that. And you have to find real specific expertise

in the neurological field to find anyone who knows what to do. And unfortunately, we were able to find really only two neurologists that had any experience with this in children or in teenagers, but one of them just was able to identify really not even the causation. There's no test for this, but just based on the symptoms, based on the experience, they say, okay, we're going to treat in order to diagnose. And this was kind of the key for getting out of it.

When I imagine us have been so hard about that is, and I'm sorry to hear that you guys went through that, is, you know, we can sort of wrap our heads around, you know, okay, so and so has cancer, or so and so, you know, is dealing with this or that, where it's a very sort of specific defined thing. I've got to imagine the uncertainty and the contradiction and the the unknowing of it was what made that such a difficult maze to get through and

and your point about sort of not sort of singularly focusing on you know and becoming consumed with fighting it. That's probably your in some respects the only option that would have gotten you guys through because it's not like, I don't know, fighting a war and you're like, this is the enemy, that's where all our energy is focused because there was no real center of gravity to focus on. I guess absolutely right.

And I think when you're dealing with uncertainty, which I think in some ways is probably the the primary word of what's made the last year for people difficult is the uncertainty. You know, you can't plan a vacation, you can't plan where you're going to get together with people, you can't decide when are they going back to school. What when do I invest in this next thing? And the pandemic's affected everyone in different ways. And of course, there's lots genuinely to be grateful for through the experience. But I think everybody lost something.

And one of the things that pretty across the board was this sense of what was going to happen around the corner. And so in those environments, I mean, I think that this might be, there's many so in those environments, I mean, I think that this might be, there's many lessons you learn from, from, of course, any experience in life and we've learned many lessons, but one lesson we've learned is that, you know, whatever uncertainty you're facing, whatever has happened to you, whatever hardship, whatever pain you're going through, whatever the uncertainty of the future is,

all of this pales in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now. And in each moment, we have that choice. Do I choose the heavier or the lighter path. In a sense, that's sort of one of the main takeaways for this experience, but also for this new book, Effortless, is that we all have promises to keep. We all have miles to go before we sleep, as Robert Frost said. But whatever we're going through, if we can just, in this moment, what's the lighter path? And I don't mean the path of really the lazy path, it's not that. It's a virtuous, easier path, where we don't burden ourselves and make things more complicated than they need to be, where we don't, for example,

We don't, for example, hold grudges. That's holding grudges just makes everything harder to just consume. I was just talking with Tim Ferriss on his podcast and I asked him, what percentage of a mental and emotional energy have you spent on grudges and anger and so on? And he said, well, he said, honestly, he just laughed at first. He said, between age of like 15 and 30, that period of my life, I literally probably spent 60 to 70% of my mental and emotional energy holding judges and being angry. And you just think about what the rebate is from that. And how again, when these things, when life comes at you, when challenges come at you, you

have that moment, do I want to carry this burden for one second, for one minute? Or do I want to carry it for like, for the rest of my life? You have a choice in each new moment. What to give attention to, what to hold on to, what to let go. And so I see, I see really if essentialism was about prioritization, I see effortless about simplification, but it starts by simplifying, I think some of these emotional burdens

and emotional complexities that we hold on to unnecessarily keep us in this suffering state instead of an effortless state. Yeah, the Stoics talk about how everything has two handles. And you choose which handle you're going to grab this sort of the good handle and the bad handle. And it sounds like you have a lot of practice grabbing the right handle. I was thinking too and I've sort of struggled with this during the pandemic, but I've got to imagine it dries with your experience. You were talking about with your family, which is that, you know, essentialism as a philosophy,

I think, as you write about in the one hand, it's sort of figuring out, you know, what's important and working on what's important. I found during the pandemic that one of the things that happens when, you know, a lot of inessential things are eliminated, you know, inessential work things, because suddenly you're not traveling, that people can't get together for meetings, you know, certain things are shut down, so on and so forth, is that what is revealed

is what's actually essential to you. So, so, I think, I think one of the things I discovered is just like that I can do what I do in less time. Right? And that when I am doing less, I'm at home more. And actually that's where I want to be and where I get the most enjoyment. So it's this kind of thing where Mark Sures talks about this in meditations about how, when you do less, you get the double benefit of doing more better, or things twice as good. And I think one of the things that pandemic should have revealed is sort of what is essential

in your life because you've taken away so much of what is essential. I think that the pandemic offered that particular opportunity. If sometimes you thought about it, it was a great reset. And the great reset was like an involuntary essentialism that we were all told to go collectively go to your room, have a good think about this and don't come out until you're ready. And we've had it, I would say, an unparalleled opportunity, certainly in our lifetimes. And maybe it will be the most important moment like this, of our whole lifetimes. It certainly is a collective to have literally half the world actually in shutdown,

actually pausing all these things we thought before we have to do them. Suddenly, well, we're not going to. Is it okay? Actually life goes on. Okay, some of these things weren't as pressing as important as they seem to be, as necessary as they seem to be. I think that's the great advantage of the pandemic, even with all of its downsides. What I have also noticed, however, is that the pandemic seems to have revealed ways of working and assumptions that we have about working that have led people the world over to be either teetering right on the edge of exhaustion

or fully burned out or even way past that. And I was just talking to the CEO of a fairly major tech company and he just said, look, everybody's burned out. That's where they are now. And so whereas in the past, this sort of wellness and an assertive approach to life was a nice to have, He now sees it as we have to crack the code on this or like our whole organization can't function. It's mission critical because of the ways that we've been working. And so it's interesting.

I was talking to a colleague of mine recently, he said, I always used to say, I would take a nap. If I had a work from home, I would take naps. He said, it's been a year I've worked from home. I haven't taken one nap. It illustrates that there's a mindset here that says, you have to, if you're not exhausted, you're not doing enough. There's a mindset here that says,

if hard work produces results, then super duper crazy hard work must produce incredible results, 10 extra results. And all of that to me is false and unhelpful. And it means that people here are year into this experience. I think that people are feeling, even your most highly engaged people are now exhausted. So there's this new opportunity that this gives us. A chance to say, is there a different way to do this? That was the chance we got

with this situation with even this neurological disease undiagnosed and so on. It is an opportunity to say, okay, well given these challenges, is there a different way to see life? Is there a different way to get results? There are a different way to operate. I think everyone is having what I would call the second great reset, as we think about going back a little more to life as normal over these next few weeks, next few months, we

hope there's a chance to say, well, we can't keep doing what we've been doing because we're already burned out, we've already used our deep resources. So now what can we do? And there are, even beyond what we've talked about today, some very practical specific things that people can do to stop making today and tomorrow a little easier. Yeah, I've talked about this before on the podcast. I sort of see the last year, among other things, as being sort of the largest, forced lifestyle experiment in human history.

And we're figuring out a bunch of stuff. We're testing a bunch of assumptions, not voluntarily, of course, but we're discovering some things are the way they are for a very good reason. And we need to get back to them as soon as possible. Let's say, I don't know, kids going to schools versus sort of remote schooling or everyone home schooling. Hey, it turns out there's massive efficiencies. All the kids go into one school being around each other, so on and so forth. And then we're also being exposed

to how preposterously unnecessary a good chunk of the things that we used to do were, whether it was random coffee meetings or a lot of business travel. Or even one of the things we did relatively early in the pandemic thing that was gonna take for a long time was we bought a, like a small camper trailer

and we've sort of gone on vacation, but we haven't had to go to the airport. We haven't had to stay in any hotels. You know, we've been able to like do stuff as a family and by the way, it's much cheaper. You know, it is this sort of strange experience of like, oh, we never would have tried this under ordinary circumstances, but we are forced to try it. And hey, there's

something good about it. Well, I think that takes me to sort of a practical part of the model of effortless. So there's three concentric circles that make up the model that I'm researched and that roads about. The first circle is what we've been talking about effortless state. The second is effortless action. And the third we can get to. But the second one effortless action is really just about simplification around execution. It's just all the things that we think we have to do, all the overthinking,

all the extra steps we've added, all the bells and whistles we've joined and Ben said, all that's all just parts of the process. And the people, like the great simplifiers, thinking business titans like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, various stages of Amazon's development, really took a different approach to simplification. What they seem to do is start with zero. Rather than start with the current complexity

and reduce each step in the process, which would be one way to do simplification. They're just going, like, let's just start from zero, right? Steve Jobs example, they bought the company that eventually went on to create IDVD software for the Mac. When they bought that company, DVD burning was like, no one was doing unless you were a professional in the industry. He's a $60,000 machines and the handbook to learn how to use it is 5,000 pages long. OK, so they get purchased by Apple.

They have a few weeks to prepare for a meeting with Steve. And they know this has to be simpler. And so they start to simplify their product and they simplify that, you know, that let's remove this feature, that feature, and so on. And they're very proud of what they've done. Because again, they're going from 5,000 pages down to the simpler thing, and they're ready to show it.

Steve walks in, he says, listen, this is what we're doing. We need an app. It's got two options. You just drag, drop there. There's one button says burn. That's the app we're going to build. I want you to make that happen. He said in that moment, first of all,

he felt completely embarrassed. Like he didn't want to show any of his slides, any of the preparation. They were like, no way we're going to share that now. But secondly, the positive thing is he learned that principle of like start with zero. They'd started with 5,000 pages reducing it down. He started with nothing.

How do we do it in one step? And we could go through all of the illustrations the same idea, but deep simplifications always starts with zero. And again, the pandemic offers that opportunity. So in whatever you're trying to do, you go back to nothing and you say, look, what's the easiest way we can do this? Our family decided we'd go on a vacation, just, you know, within our bubble see some family members,

we would normally have a whole series of steps for what to do for that. We said, okay, well, we're gonna apply it, start from zero. Well, what are the minimum things we would need? If we just had nothing and we had to go, would we really need and we suddenly were like we have to do anything. We really just need to be physically in the car and go maybe we just packed just each of us just a few things for the weekend and it just removed what would normally be quite a burdensome process with four children, whole family going on a trip. It was like we just did it and it was gone. Was it as perfect in one sense? No, it didn't need to be. That's the power of some with zero. Yeah, you know, I think you have this great line in the book where we're talking about

how people seem to be doing twice as much work and getting half the results or half as effective. I've had this weird experience in the pandemic where I feel like I'm actually working half as much and I'm getting twice as much done. Because of the constraints of no child care really, wanting to give my wife a break, having less traffic, so many things went away that I found, but also so much stuff I needed to get done. I've almost feel a little bit of nostalgia for where we were exactly this time last year because there was this sort of overwhelming clarity of what could not happen. My life got sort of radically simpler and And I had, you know, from a productivity standpoint

in a immensely successful, you know, last 12 months where I finished a book, I did a kid's book, I started another project. Because everything was so radically simplified, you know, it's been great. And I think when people hear this phrase effortlessness or effortless, they think not doing anything. It's actually when you really see a master at work or someone who's in a zone, it's that

they're only doing the few essential things and they're doing them so well that it almost appears like no effort is being expended, but in fact, just the right effort. I just had Oprah's right hand person for years and years on the Oprah show on the what Central podcast. And she said she didn't know about the new book. And she just said spontaneously, she was talking, she said, you know, the last year of the Oprah show, year 25, she said, it was, it was just in flow. It was with ease. It was effortless. She literally used all of those.

And then I was like, okay, well, we're throwing out all the questions I was going to ask you because like, this is where my head is so at. And that's the whole conversation was a riff on that. Because people who have experienced it, know it's possible, know it's not just some kind of crazy thing, know it's not just a laziness, it is a different way of doing. And it just, I think, is timely right now

because a lot of people are not like what you just described. A lot of people have not had the experience you've just described. They have achieved what they've achieved over the last year through grinding effort. And it's come at a great cost to them. And so, I mean, I definitely relate to what you're saying. I personally, other than for the insensitivity of it, would say very similar things about the last year. I've said many times to my children, this, we are living the good old days right now.

Yeah, this is it. This, this time of being together, this, yes, involuntary, but this, going on walks together, this, these memories, these being together, and also productively. I mean, that's when this, I mean, honestly, every day I worked on this book, he used to laugh, like, what was your plan, Greg?

You know, like, how were you gonna get this done by the deadline without the disruption and the forced, the forcing functions that were required? So I completely agree, part of effortlessness is focusing on what is just essential and doing the things that you're built to do and are supposed to do. But I think it's also, I've learned things about,

for example, pacing. I've learned that if I, well, I'm interested about your view on this. Every writer has a different experience, but I was, if I wrote two hours a day, I would highly product it for those two hours. I could get a lot done. If I wrote three hours a day,

I would still be able to produce more in three hours than two hours, but there's no question I was starting to experience the finishing returns in that third hour. And if I went to four, five, six, seven, whatever longer, I experienced even negative returns where I started messing with the manuscript in such a way that it would make the whole thing worse than if I stopped. And that to me is an example of being aware that there is a sort of sweet spot in effortless way of executing.

And the actionable thing there for me beyond writing, right? Not everyone's trying to write a book, but is having upper bounds to the work that you do. So that you say, okay, if you want to do something great, something big, something that would otherwise seem overwhelming to you, if you can break it down and say, yes, there's a minimum bound, okay,

I'm not going to write less than 500 words, but I'm not going to write more than 1,000, or I'm going to write, in my case, not more than two hours, but I'm not going to write more than four hours. It helps you to be able to sustain the pace of work over a longer period of time. I just, again, on another project that there was a, you know, I could have forced it in three months, but instead did it steadily had an upper bound. I couldn't read more

than 20 references that I was trying to do. It's actually scriptural pursuit, wisdom literature, literature I was trying to read, and there was 2400 references. It was big, but I really felt like I was supposed to do it. And I just said, okay, no more than 20 per day. That reduced the input to being like a 20 minute exercise each day and no more. So even when I was, had a lot of other things going on, I still said, okay, I can do this. I'll still do it. I'll be done at 20, even when I feel like doing 50.

It meant that the whole thing just felt smooth and effortless, and I got to the end, completed it within the six-month target, and I just had, again, it was genuinely productive, insightful, helpful, enjoyable efforts. Yeah, I think you have to figure out, and this requires some self-awareness, some ability to sort of zoom out and watch your own output. But you have to figure out where the point

of diminishing returns are. And it's at that point that you switch, right? So in the same way that you kind of delegate things that you're not very good at to other people, you have to realize you kind of have different versions of yourself. And so, the Ryan, who's writer at from 9am to 11am is performing at a certain level. And then the Ryan who comes after from 11 to 1230 is not as good. And so I don't

hire that person. I stop. And I go and then so from 11 to 12 30, that's Ryan who's recording a podcast or Ryan who's eating lunch or Ryan who's doing my phone calls. I switch tasks when I hit that point of diminishing returns rather than as you're talking about which is this idea of like gutting it out. Like look, if there was a gun to my head or I had to finish it by a certain date

or I wouldn to finish it by a certain date or, you know, I wouldn't get paid, you know, if there were some actual pressing reason, of course, you know, you can gut it out long enough and get where you need to go. But if you don't, then, and you're trying to get to this effortless place that you're talking about, you have to switch at those points of diminishing returns. And you have to be invested in it for a long enough timeline that you get the benefit of that switching. And so for me, it's not just am I getting this stuff done,

but I, but you know, having the sense that you're in this for the long haul that you're about sustainability, you realize, like, hey, if I wanna do this again and again and again, I can't afford to be, like, if I want to do this again and again and again, I can't afford to be like, you can't afford to say push through an injury to use a sports metaphor, because you're going to hurt yourself and then be out longer than you would be taking yourself out of the game because your quad is sore.

Yeah, that's it. And so much, so, I mean, basically all progress is not created equal. Some, some comes at a higher price than others and still produces less, less for the, so you're cost to going up, your results are going down. I love what you just said about like actually why wouldn't higher the second version of me to do this. And I'd fire the third version, right? Like that version, making it worse. And I think just recognizing that you can apply it to a lot of third version, right? Like that version, making it worse. And I think just recognizing that you can apply it to a lot of different areas, right?

A salesperson can say, we'll never less than five calls a day, but enough about never more than 10 calls a day. You can say, well, I'm gonna call my family every week. This is true for me actually, you know, say, never less than five minutes. Actually, I normally say, I know it's more than that. It's my extended family. But also you could say, we're never more than an hour.

And I've got to go beyond that. But that's the problem is when you go beyond it starts to be unsustainable for the different people involved and you don't get a habit going with it. We managed to get to the point where it's relatively routine now. And so we pretty much haven't missed a week and two or three years with my extended family living all over the world.

And so that's, you know, but you can do it for, you want to complete some new online class, you say, okay, never less than signing into the class every day. You just sign in, that's your minimum, but you also have enough abound, you know, never more than 50 minutes taking one practice test each day. If you can find, obviously you do need self-knowledge as you say to know what that right bound is,

what feels right and achievable and doable, but it helps you to avoid the sort of hype cycle where people get excited for one moment. I'm gonna write a book, I'm gonna call my family, and they just go so big right at the beginning beginning that it's almost over before it's begun. I'm going to write a journal. Yes, the first day one, they write three pages. They write a veritable essay, but by day two, they'll go, I don't have to two hours. I just don't have the time. So now it's over before it's begun. Much better. Okay, I mean, journal literally for me, okay, I said, I'm not gonna write less than one sentence,

not more than five sentences, until I've got this down as a, I never miss it, have it. And that's like 10 years ago. And, I mean, I got lots of failure stories, but that has been a success story, where I just don't miss a day now. And, it started with having enough of bound. If you want to go for the long run,

you need to make it more sustainable and find what I would just describe is this effortless pace. Yeah, I forget where I got it from, but someone said never underestimate the power of moderate gains day to day, or a string of average days. Like, I think people think books or movies or, you know, these projects are the results

of these sort of fits of inspiration or genius, these sprints, when I actually found it's the opposite, it's a lot of mundane, you know, if you make the thing one percent better every day for an extended period of time, it gets good pretty quickly. But that's hard for people to do. I think especially because we sort of maybe we think in terms of cinematic images or stories like, I don't think I've ever taken, I've never pulled an all nighter in my entire life. Not a working one. I mean, I've been up all night, but I've never had to work all night. I don't think if I had, anything that would have been produced there would be particularly

impressive. And the few times I've gotten really upset with people who've worked for me is when I've found out that like, I'll be like, hey, where's this thing or something? They'll be like, you know, it's late, but I was up all night working on it, and I actually get upset because to me, this is such a, it's like, wait, why did I get you the material you needed for this project two weeks ago if it was gonna result in you spending all night

on a Friday finishing it? Like, it means I wasted my time, you wasted your time, was going to result in you spending all night on a Friday finishing it. It means I wasted my time, you wasted your time, you turned in an inferior quality thing because you're sleep deprived and you're not happy. Nobody's happy at a job where you have to pull all nighters. So I think I often see the sort of heroic stories that people have about their work ethics as really failures of systems and failures of discipline. This heroic stuff is seriously a problem.

Yes. When you celebrate in media and in just even inside of companies, I mean I have worked with the companies that literally have the heroics awards and they're called heroics awards. And it's for the person who basically pulls the old might as them and pulls it, oh, we had this client, but they spent four days flying over this and they saved it. And that's what they're celebrating. And it's like, well, that's fine. If that's the culture you want, if that's who you want working for, if you want people who want actually thinking about great results over a long period of time, then keep rewarding that.

But I think it tells a really false story because what it implies is that that's the only way to produce great results. And I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that that is the predominant way to achieve great results. And so one of the heroic stories that I like because it teaches exactly the opposite message is this, you know, the race to the polls. It's been covered by other people, but I still just love the story. This is, you know, Amin's son, the last Viking. This is, you know, this is the midst of the great age of exploration. It's the early years of the 20th century, and the most sought after goal in the whole world

is to reach the South Pole. So it's like the space race of its era. And like no one's ever done it in all of human history, right? Not by Pythias, the first polar explorer, not by the Vikings in a thousand years of traveling the world, not by the Royal Navy, it's like it's never been done and everyone is going like this is the big achievement. If you want your name in the history books, this is how you're going to do it. You've got Amundsen, the last Viking, from Norway, you've got Captain Scott from Great Britain and they're both

setting off almost the identical day to try and race against each other to get there. Okay, how do they approach it? It's such a great story because you've got Captain Scott with all of his heroic thinking and on the good days what they do is they push through with like just just crazy and overpowering through. They'll go 50 miles on a day of good weather. As soon as they get bad weather, they're like hunkered down in their tent, one because they're exhausted from the big push. And so the bad weather seems more impossible for them to continue on. And so they just sit there and complain, he writes in his journal,

we have the worst weather. None of my predecessors have ever dealt with weather like this. Actually, he had slightly better weather than any of his predecessors, but he didn't feel that at all. He's seeing what's not going right and so on. The other team meanwhile, Amin Sun, he says 15 miles. Good days, 50 miles, bad day, 50 miles. That's the deal. And so it meant that like within a certain range, right, if it was truly blizzards, they would maybe not go.

But basically, even on bad weather days, they'd do it. He wrote this journal, well, maybe not 15, but 13.5 miles today, you know, we had a good day on a beautiful weather. They could go 50, they could go certainly 30, no, still 15. So the plot thickens right as they're getting close to their goal. They are within 45 miles of reaching the South Pole. They don't know where Captain Scott and his team are. So they could be one mile behind them, one mile ahead of them. They don't know. So the competitive juices could draw out your dominant assumption

of what to do in this moment. Do you do your power through or do you trust the pace, the pace to pace? Well, even there with 45 miles left, even with perfect weather, the best weather of their trip, they could do it in one big push. He still insists we're going to do the 15 miles. And he averages on that three, takes him three more days for their team to get to the South

Pole. They still maintain the pace within a basic range. They average that entire journey is 15.5 miles per day and hardly any ups and downs on that based on weather. Well, he beats the other team by 30 days. They make it out alive. And his biographer says of this. He said, they achieved the goal.

This is his phrase. It's breathtaking when I read it. He said, without particular effort. Even as I say it right now, I just think it's just bonkers. Like how is it possible that the description of the thing that had never been done before, of the thing that had had beaten all the great explorers before them was done without particular effort. And meanwhile, Captain Scott with all his heroics arrives, of course, 30 plus days late, demoralized, and the people are totally exhausted

and burned out. So such a degree that on their way home, they can just barely make any progress, and they actually die on the way home, or the whole team. The only reason we know about their stories is that they wrote about them in the journals on the way home.

So that's the difference. One team succeeds and incredibly successful, make it home alive 15 miles a day. The other team goes for heroics, they're going huge and back and forth and so on and they all die on the way home. I mean, that and fail in their goal. This is, you know, this is to me a better showing

of what most of the heroics actually does for people. Most of the all-nighters do not produce great results. I'm completely with you here that the all-nighters and the powering through and the forcing it is just false economy, is just false economy. It's false economy. Well, and some of the sports teams that I've spent time around, there's this sort of weird dichotomy that sort of illustrates what you're talking about.

On the one hand, you know, we get this understanding, we have this impression that athletes are like the hardest working people in the world, that they're lifting weights all the time that they have these grinding schedules are working so hard. Actually, they're napping and they're resting and the practices are pretty short and they spend a lot of time at home, a lot of time sort of lounging around because they especially lately have come to understand the importance of rest. Tom Brady being one of the biggest examples of this, he basically lifts like no weights.

He does some light resistance training, but part of the reason he's still playing is because he's figured out sort of a sustainable way to stay in shape and focus is so much on recovery. So you have this idea that athletes must be, if you're intense about whatever you do, trading stocks or selling insurance, you go, oh, the pressure at that level must be intense. And it turns out that it's not. But then the really weird part that I've had a lot of conversations about that I've remained fascinated with, then you talk to these coaches. And they're like, oh, yeah, we got here at 4 a.m. this morning and we'll probably leave, you know, around 11 or 12 or night. And I remember I interviewed a sports reporter not long ago and she was saying, I asked her, I was like, okay, here's the situation. All the coaches unionize and just like the players have certain limits of like how many OTAs they can do in the summer, how many practices are allowed.

They put in place some sort of restrictions that say, you know, coaches have to work bankers hours. Like coaches can only work from nine to five and you're not allowed to be at the facility, you're not allowed to draw up plays at home. You can only work from nine to five. And I said, would you notice a difference on the field in any way? And she was like, absolutely not. It would be the actual product that the fancy would be indistinguishable. And so there's this interesting thing in sports where you have some people that have really begun to understand rest and effortlessness as you're talking about and essentialism.

And then the people who are actually supposed, ironically supposed to do this, you can coach till you drop dead, they are operating on the least sustainable version of doing the job. It's a very strange industry. Everything you're saying relates to me. I just talked to an owner and a manager, excuse me,

of an NFL team. And I just asked him this. I said, all the speeches that you have either given yourself or heard of the people give when they say, hey, we need to get better results. And how are we going to do this? How often has it been, we've got to work harder, we've got to power through, we've got to stress more,

we've got to versus, let's got to power through, we got to, you know, stress more, we've got to, versus, let's find an easier path to achieving this. And this is like, he laughs, he's like, literally, it's 100% to zero, 100% to the first, zero to the second. And there's just a madness to it truly. And this idea, I love this phrase, bankers hours. There's even bankers, it's completely unproductive to be doing it this way. There's no justification for doing bankers hours in banking.

There's no justification for doing it in medicine, where you say, well, yes, but through these certain years, as we, you know, the last couple of years before you become a physician, you've got to do the 80, 90, 100 hours. You just have to do that. There's no evidence to support that that produces better outcomes. There's a lot of evidence to support it producing worse outcomes. And it's just its psychology and its presumption and it's holding on to all assumptions about how what produces top performance. And I really do think it's back to these sort of heroics in which stories you tell and so these become greater in our minds and a sense of what is,

and then it becomes the culture and so that everyone you saw did it and you did it yourself. So you pass it onto other people, they need to do it. And when I hear people talk about this, it's like there's not science, they're not quoting data, they're not quoting evidence, they're just quoting assumptions. Yeah, no pain, no gain.

Well, I mean, that's one way to go. That's an idea. There's some evidence to support that approach, but there's a lot of evidence to support. How did John A. Kuff just came up with a new book called A Sound Tracks. I love this book. And he says in it one of his ideas, he said, he's a light and easy. He said normally every, he said, he said, my wife came to me and she said, listen, the two years that you write a book, you're like the worst to be around.

And then the two years after you write a book, you're like the worst to be around. And then the two years after you write the book and you're marketing it, you're the worst to be around. And it's just like, you know, that's his life. So he chooses a new soundtrack. Instead of, I mean, you've heard these things, right? All you have to do if you wanna be a writer is, is, is, is, you know, how's the phrase go?

Is, just pull up to a tight right, plug it in and bleed. You know, it's like, it's like this assumption, it has to be hard, it has to be miserable. Well, that's a soundtrack. He says we're overplaying. He chose a new soundtrack for this last book, and he called it light and easy, light and easy. And he had all these symbols like he got,

you know those shoes that Nike puts out for passing the two hour marathon, like breaking the two hour marathon miracle, anyway, he bought those shoes and he only wears them when he writes. And it's just as a symbol to remember, this is light and easy. You don't have to do it,

the blood, sweat and tears approach. You can do it, light and easy. You don't have to do it, the blood, sweat, and tears approach. You can do it, the light and easy approach. I love the blood, sweat, and tears speech that Churchill gave in the middle of the Second World War when bombs are dropping on London. If you're in that situation, you can preach, blood, sweat, and tears will fight them on the beaches. We will never give up, we will never surrender.

If that's your situation, by all means, apply that principle. But don't apply that principle to writing a book in peacetime, own agenda, because you want to do it. One thing doesn't meet the other. If you're a professional sports player, you don't have to kill yourself, blood, sweat, and tears, save the world from Nazi Germany. That's not your situation. It's not the right metaphor. But what's so great about that, and I tell the story of Churchill in my book on stillness, is that during the Second World War,

Churchill's taking maps every day, and what I mean, why is an old man. But his wife knits him, his wife knits him, this suit that he wears, that he can nap in without getting wrinkled. You know, like, like he would, there was never a person, like, I think what is actually a great example of Churchill, and it's a controversial figure for many reasons. But Churchill's a great example of someone who accomplished a whole hell of a lot who is as ambitious and as driven and as powerful as they come. And what you don't get a sense of in Churchill that's common in so many of us who are far less busy and far less accomplishment is you don't get that sense of burnout.

You don't get that sense of like anger and resentment and frustration. It wasn't coming from a white knuckled place. It was coming from a place of ease almost and an effortlessness. Again, as you talk about, and I think that's why he's such a memorable figure is that, you know, he, it didn't seem like it sucked the life out of him to do all the things that he did.

And I mean, I love this. And maybe one of the connection points here is that he knew of his, he seemed to have known of his destiny. I came across this once and I don't have it. My finger tipped right now, but he came across at 16. he talked to one of his classmates that Harrow and he said, look, you might think I'm crazy about this, but I believe that I will be called upon to save London in the world from an impending doom that we don't know what it is yet. Anyway, he wrote in some specific detail about what he believed was coming, and it's written up in a book about his Churchill as destiny. And so he had this sense of mission coming, and I wonder whether, I don't know, maybe it was a temperament thing, I'm going maybe a step too far

here, but I wonder whether he recognized this like, oh, you're going to have to find a way to go through life in a sense of ease so that you can do the impossible. And that's what I love we're getting to sort of crescendoing in the conversation together is that this idea of effortlessness, of being at ease isn't the lazy path. It's the path to achieve the impossible. If something is impossible right now, you've got to find an easier way to do it. If something is going to be incredibly challenging down the path, you need to prepare by not being so burned out under normal circumstances, you can't hack

what the unexpected is around the corner. You've got to find a way of being in a good and healthy state even when the emergencies are going on all around you. So, it's not that you want to be in a state of ease and find an effort as path because you don't want to achieve things. The idea is that you can achieve far, far more and still do it without burning out. That's the value proposition that's so exciting to me. No, I think that's right.

I think that's where the book's important. And I guess I would add to that. Let's say that burning yourself out and grinding yourself down to the bone and white knuckling it was marginally more effective or more efficient. The problem with that is what good is the success, what good are the accomplishments? If you're miserable, if it destroys your quality of life, or, and this goes to the sort of rabbit in the hair store you were kind of telling earlier, which is like, would you rather be 10% more efficient, but have 10 or 15 years cut off from your career, cut off from your life,

that, you know, I very much relate to what you're talking about with John A.Cuff, where, you know, my wife said something similar to me about, you know, sort of not being super fun to be around as I'm writing a book. Well, I would like to stay married and I would like to continue writing books. So it became imperative for me to figure out a way to do this in a healthy balanced way for two reasons. One, so I could continue doing it. And two, that the success wouldn't sort of turn to ashes in my mouth. It wouldn't be a pure victory where you get what you wanted, but it's so ruined your quality of life or your health or your relationships.

That, you know, you get to the success and you look around and there's nobody and nothing and you're sort of going well that doesn't make much sense. Yes, as Ariana Huffington puts it, success is supposed to feel better than this. Yes, totally. When she wakes up in a pool of blood and she's hit a head after passing out and she goes to the doctor, I think probably slightly hoping there was something really wrong with her. And he's like, well, the good news and bad news is that all that's going on is you're

exhausted. That's good news, but it's also bad news. You're just choosing this. You're just choosing this way of living, this way of doing it. And it's sent her down this whole path that she's been on to try and articulate that they're well, first to discover and then to advocate for a different way

of being successful. And I think that's at the very heart of this, is that I found myself in a position mostly because what I just said about with with Eve and the family and and the health things, but also just a certain way of doing life where I was focused on the essentials. I'd never been more selective. I wasn't writing the next book as I already mentioned. I put on hey to the class I co-designed at Stanford. I'm not building a workshop business as would be so maybe normally expected. Or I'm saying, I'm being highly selective.

I'm doing the things that I think are essential, but I still found myself going, yeah, but it's still too much. And in hindsight, what I realized is not enough just to do the right things, you've got to do them in the right way. And I was, I think I felt somewhat like the weightlifter who's lifting everything with their back, the swimmer who hasn't learned

to breathe properly, the baker who is needing everything by hand. In all cases, you may be doing the right thing, but you aren't doing it in the right way yet. And so that's another way of kind of contrasting essentialism. It's doing the right things effortless. You've got to do it in the right way. And that is as important as the right thing. Because if you do the right thing in the wrong way, you still end up with results that don't look like the ones you want. Your health got sacrificed,

area and a huffington, that your family gets sacrificed, I won't say names, but we got plenty of examples. Of course. You've got what you wanted, but it cost much more than you relaxed. And that's taking the exhausting path, the effortful path. And there is a different path, there is a different way. And I just feel a sense of mission to share it with people because I think there's a lot of people in pain right now because they're not doing it in the right way. Well, I'm very glad you did and it's always fun to talk and we'll catch up soon. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Ron. Thanks so much for listening.

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