This PRODUCTIVITY SYSTEM Will Completely CHANGE YOUR LIFE! | Greg McKeown

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there.

How do you feel about having written a book that requires people to suffer? Thanks James, you terrible human.

One whole component of my business. I literally shut it down within a month of reading the book. Killing a Baby. Like it's something you produced and created.

And you loved it. Killing your baby. It's difficult.

They're suffering.

I just apologize to everyone who's ever read Essentialism whenever I meet them. But there's a certain kind of suffering that's required to get to that level of clarity. Are you going to suffer because you didn't pursue something that mattered?

What would a non essentialist life look like?

Conceptually, I would say it's the undisciplined pursuit of more.

And so Essentialism is an antidote to that problem. One of my colleagues had emailed me and said, Look, Friday between 1 and 2 would be a very bad time for your wife Anna to have a baby because I needed to be at this client meeting and Friday comes along, a daughter's just been born in the hospital and so to my shame I went to the meeting. So it's not really a question will you suffer or not? It's in what way are you going to suffer?

Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion and now international keynote speaker and high performance leadership trainer. Each week I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for helping us be a consistently number one ranked show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I hope you enjoy today's show.

A very special thanks to NZ Mortgages for sponsoring this episode of the Lead On Purpose Podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages Co NZ Today's guest joined me in Phoenix, Arizona to sit down and share insights that will change your life. This will help you get really clear on what's most important. Greg McKeown is known globally as the leader on Essentialism. He wrote the book Essentialism 10 Years Ago now and has sold over 4 million copies worldwide. This is an episode you do not want to miss. I was ecstatic that I got to sit down with Greg in studio. Now. I want to give you a heads up for the first five to ten minutes or so. There's some very minor audio blips. You can still hear everything. There's just a few little moments where the studio engineer had some issues that they didn't know at the time. They only found out post production. So that was a new experience for me. I usually can control the controllables with the equipment that I use, but I promise you, it's worth pushing through that first five or 10 minutes, it levels out and it becomes normal. And so please do listen to this episode. It will transform how you look at your priorities. As Greg says, so many of us are in an undisciplined pursuit of more, and what we need to do is be on a disciplined pursuit of less. Enjoy the show, Greg. A huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

It's just such a pleasure to be with you. Thanks, James.

I'll glad to connect now. We're connecting far away from home. We're here in the middle of the desert in Phoenix and sweating it out. But thank you so much for creating space today.

It's a pleasure, really. This is going to be a good conversation. Thank you.

Well, look, I want to talk just to kind of let the listener know. What we're going to talk about is essentialism. But I know there'll be many listeners now going, what is that? How do I connect with that? Can I start with the opposite of that? What is non essentialism? What would a non essentialist life look like? Look like?

I think it would be familiar to everybody watching or listening to this. It's a life where you feel stretched too thin at work or at home. You feel busy but not necessarily productive, and you have your day perpetually interrupted by someone with their agenda. So you just pulled in a million different directions. You're making just a millimeter progress in all of them. And it's a sort of frenetic, frantic pace. And if you had to summarize all of that conceptually, I would say it's the undisciplined pursuit of more.

And so essentialism is an antidote to. To that problem.

Incredible. As you were describing that, I started thinking about my own life and sometimes it can be chaos and so many opportunities and exciting things and then responsibilities, and I come back to, well, what's most important? How do I define that? And sometimes that's difficult. And sometimes I over commit. I imagine there's a million listeners listening going, emmy Tig, right? So just to go back to it, we're coming up to almost 10 years since you published Essentialism. We're looking at two, probably closer to 3 million copies sold. It's phenomenal. What started you on this journey? What was the sparking point that you go, essentialism is what I need more in my life?

Well, I first noticed a pattern in companies I was working with in Silicon Valley. And I noticed that they fell into what I've now come to call the paradox of success. In the early days of the business, they would become focused, they'd have a moment of clarity by choice or sometimes by luck. And that would lead to success. And with success came options and opportunities. Sometimes extremely broad, fast, overwhelming success and options. And what I noticed is that if they weren't careful that they would fall into this phrase I've already used the undisciplined pursuit of more and that that would lead them to plateau or even fail in their business altogether. So this is an unusual pattern in and of itself because most people are interested in success and most of the things that have been studied about success are all about how to become successful.

Almost nothing has been written about what you should do once you are, and that is a non trivial thing, because everything I've just described sounds like the right problem to have in one sense. You know, options, opportunities, success. But that doesn't make it less of a problem.

And so that was the context. But then in the middle of that, one of my colleagues had emailed me and said, Look, Friday between 1 and 2 would be a very bad time for your wife Anna to have a baby. Because I needed to be at this client meeting and I'm sure at some level they were just joking about that. But nevertheless, Friday comes along, our daughter's just been born in the hospital, everybody's fine. But instead of me being focused on what was obviously essential, I've got my laptop open, I've got my phone on, and I'm trying to do it all on the basis that if you can do it all, then you can have it all. And so to my shame, I went to the meeting and even afterwards I remember my colleague saying, oh, the client will respect you for the choice you just made. And I don't know that they did, because I'm not sure that the look on their faces evinced that sort of respect. But even if they had, it's obvious just to everyone, of course, including me, that I Made a fool's bargain. I violated something important for something non essential. And what I learned from that lesson was simple and it's this. If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.

So what I'd observed was originally seemed like a business phenomenon, but really it's just a human phenomenon. And so that was an important catalytic moment, at least in hindsight, for being able to try to understand better why it is we do what we do, why it is that so many successful, driven, capable, curious people end up in this paradox for success in their own life, not just in their business.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates, to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Caroline jlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

Well, thank you for sharing that. And can I go back to that moment where your child was just born and work was kind of right there and you had the laptop out. When you reflect back on that, how do you feel?

I feel a bit embarrassed really, because.

I mean, it's obvious to me and I think it is to anybody who is the story that it's really a story of my own failing. It's not a story about the colleague, it's not a story about the client. It's a story about how I was choosing.

To prioritize my time in that moment. And yes, it's easy to in a sense hide behind the idea of, well, there's just so many different things and you know, you just get turned up and turned around in modern life. And that's all that was happening to me. It wasn't really a value or prioritization that was on display. It was a reactive thing. And sure, there's got to be some of that. That's true for all of us and me in that moment.

But at the same.

Time we reveal our values in the trade offs we make.

So you can put everything aside and you can say, well, in that moment.

All that's being revealed is that I valued achieving those things and Being in that meeting and how that would appear and more than being where I needed to be, that's the harsh part of it. And that's why I still feel.

Sense of embarrassment, even though the moments.

Produced more good overall than bad. Nevertheless, when I am answering your question of how it feels, that's how it feels.

Thank you for sharing that. These idea of values. Often when I'm chatting about values with high performers or organizations, it's a fixed thing. It remains the same for life. What you've just said is actually no. You can choose to change your values and where you place your focus, your energy that reflects your values. It's amazing. So what would you say you value the most?

In my whole life?

So many different ways to try to answer that question.

I mean, like not the answer that you want or that others probably want me to say, but in a sense, I think my highest value is independence, you know, to protect my ability to have agency, to choose. I don't want to wake up in the morning and feel like it's all been chosen for me, it's all acting upon me. I want to be able to have enough space, enough, buffer, enough.

The word isn't really control, but that's all right, to be able to go after the things that I feel inspired to do, guided to do that day. So, I mean, behind the answer of independence, there's, I suppose, another value that's becoming clearer in the moment is, is to be able to pursue conscience, to choose. We have, we have an official and unofficial family motto. The unofficial family motto is, is Try not to be rubbish.

I love it. Which is. Which I came up with. And it's really for me entirely. But then something closer to our real family motto is, Anna and I selected this very early on in our marriage that what we wanted for our children and for ourselves was that we could feel, recognize and follow the voice of conscience. And so it's having enough independence to be able to do that. Now, putting that first, having that as the priority does matter because you can build from that. You can say, well, the highest priority in life is the ability to prioritize. And that's what I'm describing here, I think in different terms is having enough independence and space to be able to. To feel, recognize and then follow that voice of conscience and then to be able to enable my wife to do the same and support her in that and my children the same. You know, there was a simple logic to that, especially with the children, which is that as soon as they develop that skill, grow into That I won't say just principle, like grow into that competence. The primary job of parenting is finished. And that's great because then you can move into a slightly different version of parenting. A different role, a coaching role, a listening role, just a different supportive role. You're not trying to guide them. They have something better than you to guide them. And as all of our children, our youngest is 15 now, oldest is 21. And as I watch them launching, there's plenty of times when they will give me counsel now that they'll be able to listen to something, think through something with me. And I think, yes, that's what you want. You want it so that they're wiser, certainly than they were before. Or maybe they're wiser than me or they bring a different perspective than me because they're answering not to the beat of the drum that I or my wife laid out directly. Our opinions, our views of the world. There's something inside of them. They're. They're listening to the music and then, you know, the adventure of their lives are just beginning. And it will be amazing to watch as they continue to.

Fulfill the measure of their creation. So to me, that's. That's one way of thinking about highest value.

Incredible. It's interesting you mentioned something and it made me think about priorities and the ability to prioritize our priorities. That is something that I know is incredibly important. However, sometimes I get busy being busy and I'm doing a million things and I go, why have I got to this point? Why does my calendar look like that? Why do I feel overwhelmed? And I go back and I go, well, actually on Sunday, when I usually sit down for an hour and plan out my priorities for them, I didn't do that.

This. Right.

And so it's the simple things done. Well, when I read essentialism for the first time, it was about less but better. How do we do less things, less activity, but actually have better results?

Right.

How do we do that? How does a human go about saying no to lots and getting down to the critical, vital few committing to that?

Well, this.

There's three pillars of essentialism. You've got to create space to explore what is essential, got to eliminate the non essentials and then try to create systems to make it as effortless as possible to do what matters most. That is the ongoing process. If the problem is the undisciplined pursuit of more than the antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less but better. And so that's the process for applying essentialism. But I sort of Want to step one.

Degree removed from it and then come back to the tactical answer that people can just immediately start doing, but to step away from it prior to being on air. We're trying to find the location that we're in. And.

I struggled to find it.

Likewise.

Yeah.

And that just, I mean, I grew up, my father used to, we were driving, would say we would be lost. We were often lost. And it was pre gps. And he would say, I just feel it's down here. I mean, he said that so many times. And I just came to distrust that whole sensation. Whatever he was feeling, it wasn't the right direction. And he was, of my parents, the one that was far more aware of where things were. So there was like, this is what we could call intergenerational.

Directionally challenged. And this is all just to lead up to this point, which is, I think in some ways there's two kinds of people in the world. There are people who are lost and then there are people who know they are lost.

And it's quite literally true in a sense because as soon as my dad was a little hypothetical, this. But as soon as he would stop and get proper directions, well, you're not lost anymore. As soon as you know you're lost, you're not lost because you know what to do. You just, you stop and ask somebody or a GPS if you're lost, you stop and okay, let me put the directions in. Let's make sure, let's call someone, let's see it. Like, it's not hard to solve once you admit the problem. But if you don't admit the problem, then you can't get on to fixing it. Now that is all the same with living as an essentialist or as a non essentialist. An essentialist. You know, I'm certainly an aspiring essentialist in my life. I just think I admit it faster than the average person. I'm lost this morning. You know, I don't know, there's so many things coming at me. There's so much that happened yesterday that can be because of just general news and updates in the world. It can be because of challenges that you didn't have the day before. It can be because of great successes and it's just moving fast and there's just lots of good things that are happening. But all of that still combines that in that moment when you wake up in the morning, there's those few seconds, there's a few seconds of calm and then all the noise hits you and you can either just react to that, okay, I got to get to it in whatever order or you expand that space a little with a process to actually deal with the noise. And I can offer that very specific process.

This is, this is so simple what I'm about to describe, but it has, it has taken a long time to design this, like starting, I probably started designing what I'm about to describe. It won't sound impressive once we get to the thing, but when I was like a young teenager, because that's when I first started using planners, Franklin planners. At first I was using those way younger than the average person, you know, and a bit, a bit strange for most people seeing that in England, but, but I, from there to now, like I've written a journal probably.

I don't know.

I don't think I've missed a day in at least 13 years now. You know, like I, you know, it's important for my, for so many reasons. But.

Out of all of that iterative process, this is what I think works every day. I now think of it as the power half an hour.

And in this half an hour, instead of being on the phone, maybe you check your phone because you're just too stressed about that and you do that. But you get back to this.

You're answering three overarching questions. What, so what now? What. What is going on in my life? That's the free flowing part. There's no order to this really. It's just what is the noise in my head? It can be things that happened yesterday, partially. It's sort of journaling. It can be things I'm stressed about, is things that are coming up today. I mean, it's just a, you can even time it and you say, okay, six minutes seems to be about the magical number and you are just free flowing. You're writing it all out. So the noise is not in your head. You can look at it. There's a separation. Step two is so what and the so what. That's the hardest thing for people to do in this process. But I love it the most. It's the, it's. What's the news? What does it mean? What is all of. What are all these updates and noise and everything? What does it mean? And you're sort of being an old time journalist about your own life. What's the headline? What is it? Maybe the headline. Sometimes the headline for me is you need a break. You know.

Maybe the headline is.

You got to get really focused today, you know, on a particular task. But it's, it's just trying to connect the dots. Why does this all matter? What's going on? And then the now what has a very particular structure.

Under now what. There's. I call it the 1, 2, 3 method. So this is like approximately the last 10 minutes of this half an hour. You identify one priority for the day, two things that are essential and urgent, and three things that are maintenance items.

And that's it. The one thing, the priority for the day.

Approximately, as a rule of thumb, you want to be able to spend two or three hours on that thing. It's more of a project. It's something that if you don't define it, you probably won't work on it today. You have to act upon it. The other stuff acts upon us. But often, most often, the most important thing in our lives on a given day, we have to act on, we have to do it. The essential and urgent. Well, the very fact that they're urgent, they're going to act upon us. There's a deadline, there's something on it, but still you want to be disciplined about it. And then the maintenance items are things that maybe they don't seem very important today, but if you don't do them, they're going to make life a lot less effortless tomorrow and the next day. So these are things. I mean, I literally think about it as the laundry. It's just the inadvertent commas to it. It's the stuff. If you don't do it, it becomes a problem. So that's the half an hour. I do not do this every day, but I do it a lot. And the difference between the days I do it and the days I don't is so you can feel the difference and the output is different because when you don't do it, you just frenetic and frantic in the way that we described. When you do it, you have something to keep coming back to. Just like the airplane metaphor, right? An airplane is off track 90% of the time it gets to where it's supposed to get to when it's supposed to because it keeps coming back on track. And that's to me all full circle back to this idea that there are two kinds of people in the world lost or those that know they are lost. If you know you're lost, you can course correct. That's what the power half an hour every day is about. And I'm really keen to try and take this tool and put it to the world.

Me too. Greg, you are so refreshing for a couple of reasons. You've said something in the last five, ten Minutes one. I'm an aspiring. Essentially you're the author of this amazing game changing book. And so many authors are like, hey, I'm a monk and I am a book. You know, I'm trying to do it, I'm doing my best. That's really refreshing. Second thing with this process, you say I try and do it most days, that's really to me reachable for most of us humans to go, cool. Well, he's not doing it every day, but he's doing it some days. Yeah, I think I could do that too.

Right.

And it's three simple things. Now, we chatted before we went on air and I'm super excited because when I read Essentialism, be great to have something I can practically use and go with. You've got a tool coming. Actually you can pre order it today. Yes, the planner. It's the Essentialist Planner or Essentialism.

Essentialism Planner, yes. And I only found out yesterday that was available now.

It comes out officially like you on December 31st this year, just in time, sort of new year, new you.

Which does seem symbolically important date. And like how do you do it? It's a 90 day planner. So it starts off with holding a personal quarterly off site. And that is something that I do again, not absolutely every 90 days, but very frequently.

And that's just helping you look at the big picture of your life so that you don't get into this situation where you're constantly doing, but you're actually completely off track. You're in the play metaphor. Yeah, you're busy and you're working and you're sacrificing even, but you're just way off. The 90 days is very deliberate choice. So it's a quarter and then every day, every week and every day there's a process. But the daily page is the one that the number of iterations we've gone through over the years to get to it. But I just find it so useful. And so that's all pre built.

And yeah, I'm really excited about it. It's already been picked up by publishers all over the world already, which I didn't really expect it to be be. So it's like there's already an energy around it, but I think people need it if they're serious about becoming an Essentialist or more to the point, actually pursuing a life around what matters most to you.

Yeah, I agree. Look, I'm going to just let the viewer and the listener know. You can pre order that today. So down in the show notes you can Pre order that right now so that when the new year starts, it's going to be there with you. And look, Greg, I have to be honest, I'm a pretty disciplined person. I'm very focused generally. But I need things to be made very simple. If they are complex, I don't do them. So what you've done is literally made this for a person like me who can go, hey, I need instructions and I need some structure around what to do. So thank you for actually doing that.

Kind of. You say, well, you know, we, I'm sure most people have heard this before. There's two kinds of simplicity, right? The simplicity on this side of complexity and the simplicity on the far side of complexity. And simplicity on this side of complexity isn't very valuable because it's just, I don't know, it's sort of like the slogans of our lives and just poorly thought through decisions and ways of seeing the world. It's limited. But if you can get to simplicity on the other side of complexity as you've wrestled down with it, and it's deep thinking and deep understanding and deep practice, suddenly simplicity will emerge. And what I've learned.

I used to wonder why is it that more people, teams, organizations, don't go for simplicity and focus? Like, why not? I mean, I remember when I was first really writing Essentialism, I thought at the time Apple was in this complete resurgence, becoming, I mean now, of course, depending on the day, the most valuable company in the world. But even at that time, it was so evident that this type of approach to decision making and product development and leadership clearly works. And I thought, why don't people do it more? It's just so self evident that this matters. And over the years since I get it more now, it's like there is a price to pay to get to that simplicity. There's a. I don't want to be too dramatic about it, but there's a certain kind of suffering that's required to get to that level of clarity. And so this is one of the reasons, I think, that Steve Jobs talked about how so much about trying to create something wonderful, because I think that it was that type of aspiration that allowed him to justify the process that he knew he'd have to go through to get there. You know, you have to see how great it is on the other side of complexity and how special that is, which is all a way of just responding to your question about your response to the Essentialism Planner.

It's been a long journey. In fact, I was under contract Years ago to create one. And I pulled out of it because I just what I was looking at, what I was working on, I was like, it's just not good enough. It's not, it won't work. It'll work to fulfill the contract, but it won't work in real life. And I needed to get to the point where I was using the system myself organically, really, and finding real advantage in it. And that's been a much longer process.

That's worth it. You know, you say that because I feel sometimes I see products in the world that are pushed by individuals saying this will fix X problem. But actually you look at the individual who's written it and you know, and you can see that they're not using the thing that they're promoting.

It's so easy to do that though. I mean, all product, not just in this subject, but I mean even as I've been going through the planning, the planner development process, I remember working with the team on this, both the publisher and the in house team, and, and saying, look, we have got to get to the point that we're all using this and if we aren't using it, we haven't done it yet.

There's such a big difference between creating a product for someone out there versus I'm going to create something, I'm going to use myself and enjoy and find useful. And there's so many things that in the original version of this or one of the versions of it that, that sounded good and then as soon as I would use it or someone in the team would use it, they'd be like, that's just annoying. Why is that even on the page? Why do we even have that? For example? And some people listening to this won't agree with this, but we don't have, on almost every planet you've ever seen, ever, ever, every day they have the calendar for the day. So we don't have that on it because most people now already have a calendar. So if you have a calendar in a paper planner now, you're either asking somebody to do it twice or do this odd thing of going to a digital source and then writing it over. And then you're like, well, that's a waste of time. So this whole real estate just isn't used and it just, it's just, it's an example of something that isn't obvious till you're doing it every day. So it's been, it's been a pleasure to do it and it's, it's, I am really let's say low, low key. Proud of it. Yeah.

I look forward to using it and I look forward to other people using it and give feedback on how it impacts them.

Yeah.

You mentioned a word I want to explore a little bit. So suffering. You mentioned the word suffering. So I had a young client who was a professional athlete. His dream was to become an All Black, which is New Zealand's rugby team.

Sure. Phenomenon. Like, they're the best in the world.

And the women's team, too, at the Olympics.

Phenomenal. Yeah. They've got an even better track record than the men's when it comes to the world championships. So this young fellow comes to me and says, look, James, all I want to do is become an All Black. Why am I not there yet? Well, a couple of questions for you. One, what is it that you really want? I want to become the greatest All.

Black of all time.

I said, okay, you're very clear on that. Great. So how badly do you want it?

That's the second question. Oh, my God.

More than anything. Like, I'll just do anything for it. Okay. Third question. This is the most difficult one. How much are you willing to suffer?

Excuse me?

I said, simple question. You want to be the greatest All Black of all time? You're going to have to suffer a lot. Let's explore that. And when we started exploring it, that suffering came in the form of saying no more, being really clear on priorities, working out, being an expert in a very small amount of things, saying a lot about a little rather than a little about a lot. And so we started to get clear on what that looked like.

Right.

And in the end, he's now an.

All Black, is he?

Yes. And he did it in a much faster time because he knew very clearly what he wanted to do, why he wanted to do it, and how much he was willing to suffer. He paid the price. So suffering, when we look at it, because you mentioned, and I know some viewers will hear that, and it will trigger them going, no, no, I'm going to read this book because it will end my suffering.

Right.

Suffering one is essential in life because we're here to live and pain comes our way, so we will suffer. But also, I look at it as something that could be a beautiful experience. It's not just necessary, but it can actually be helpful. So in reading this, I had to suffer a little because I had to say no to things. In fact, one whole component of my business, I literally shut it down within a month of reading the book. I was like, that's nonsense.

Sorry.

About that.

No, I'm thankful.

Not. I just apologize to everyone who's ever read Essentialism. Whenever. Whenever I meet them, especially if they're in a corporation and somebody required them to read it, like, everybody there's read it. I'm always like, sorry, my apologies, Mea culpa. But anyway, so you're saying you read it with it immediately you cut off something from your business, right? You're cutting off, you know, your arm, so to speak, to killing a baby.

Like it's something you produced and created.

And you love killing your baby.

It's difficult. They're suffering. So how do you feel about suffering in terms of.

How do you feel about having written a book that requires people to suffer? Thanks, James, you terrible human.

What's your thought on suffering in terms of achieving great outcomes?

Well, first of all.

Let'S just go a little deeper on suffering for a second. Because as far as I can tell.

Everybody, almost everybody is suffering almost all of the time.

And I didn't know that. I didn't always know that.

And even now it sounds bombastic to say it.

But I do believe it now.

And most of the time, when we don't know that it's about someone else, it's because we don't know enough about them. So it's very shallow understanding of what somebody else is going through and what their life is about and what's hidden from view. But the more you know someone, the more you find that it's there and it's universal. So the question is not so much.

In a sense, it's not even, is someone willing to suffer? You're going to suffer. The question is, have you found something.

That will justify the suffering of your life? Have you found something meaningful enough that you're willing to suffer through it and for it? And that's completely different. So it's not really a question, will you suffer or not? It's in what way are you going to suffer? You're going to suffer on behalf of something important, meaningful, essential. Are you going to suffer because you didn't pursue something that mattered? Because you sacrificed? You had all this potential inside of yourself, and you're not doing it.

You're not.

I just came back from England. I spent the summer there with my family. And.

There were some really beautiful moments in it, really amazing moments. I don't want to completely mischaracterize it, but it was really a stressful, exhausting trip. And among the reasons, my best friend for all of my life is dying of cancer, and it will die of cancer. One day we know the end. We don't know when, but we know the end game. And I mean, he's been my best friend since I was 10 years old. So other than my wife, Anna, Right. Like, and my children, he's the next most important person in my life. And.

There'S so many reasons that that's true, but among them is he has this enormous mind share about my life and I have an enormous mind share about his. So we can talk about almost anything with a great deal of immediate understanding. And so the loss of that isn't just the loss of, hey, having. Not that they have just been nice conversations, but the loss of nice conversations. It's destabilizing to my whole under. To the whole framework of my whole life. Well, that's just part of what this summer's experience was about. And by the time I came back to the US I just felt, I continued to feel this sense of disorientation because of it.

And some other things that are related, but we don't have to explore all of that. And my wife, just in passing a couple of weeks ago, as we were going to sleep, just used the phrase, I don't remember in what context, but this idea of just taking responsibility for your life now that is not a new term to me. It's not like I think anybody listening to this or watching this is going to think that's some profound idea they've never heard. But it, something about it.

Was like a seed as I was going to sleep that night. And I woke up the next morning with that thought more fully formed, sort of swelling in me. And I just suddenly become, in a sense, myself again. But more than just myself again. It's like it's rebirthed something I think I've been missing for quite a while.

And I say all of this because I think.

That'S the spirit of.

Dealing with suffering. Do you want to face it.

Or do you want to pretend you're facing it or do you want to coast along in your life? I mean, I could say as a sort of backdoor brag, that my life, career wise.

I could say something like this. And it would be true that I could say, well, I don't really have to do anything now. I just can carry on with my life. I can carry on doing keynotes, I can carry on the book, carry on selling. I don't mean that. I don't mean that at all arrogantly, but it'd be easy to do that.

But there's no adventure in that. There is suffering in that.

And so we have at every moment of our lives this choice. Are you going to take responsibility for your life, for what you really think you're supposed to do? Are you going to be willing to take the choices and make the trade offs and that that take courage to do, to cut off the parts of the business to decide. It keeps happening to me. In fact, it happened with the Essentialism Planner that there was a certain point in the process where I went, this is all wrong. This is, we've done this all wrong. And that doesn't mean that anyone really was intentionally doing that. But this is the wrong direction. We got to do something about that. That takes courage in that moment, but it feels clear and good. And then I just was writing an article that I'd been asked to write for a university. BYU studies had asked me just out of the blue to write an article on essentialism, but how it, how it relates in a more, in a more gospel kind of context. And I started writing that and they kind of basically accepted it. And I literally in the last couple of weeks woke up in the middle of the night just like, this is all wrong, you got this wrong, you got to redo it, you got to change it. And I spent the next few days working on that and now it's done. And it's so different, the feeling the same thing's happening. I'm working on a new book and the same thing has happened within these couple of weeks. I've gone. You're like pretending to do this to some pretense in you. Oh yes, I'm writing this book and I am. But there's a difference. When you are saying, I'm really taking responsibility for my life, I'm really going.

To.

Take responsibility for the choices I'm making. I could be wrong, but I'm going to be willing to be making them. Somebody could look and say, oh, that was a silly thing. I look at myself, oh, that wasn't the right thing to do. But I'm still making them. I'm not just going along, I'm not waiting for somebody else, I'm not looking for other people's opinion. What do you think I should actually do? You can ask the feedback, but the choice is mine. And so I feel like I've had this kind of renaissance with.

One of the core.

Axioms of essentialism. We haven't covered it all. It's the mindset of essentialism. There's three axioms of essentialism, like the beliefs behind it. And one of them is this difference between I have to and I choose to, and.

That'S not nothing.

Choosing your life and not blaming anybody else and not saying, oh, my parents did this, or my grandparents did that, or my spouse did the other, or my children, my friends or my circumstances. Not blaming your life's choices on anyone. You make the choices. That takes courage. And I didn't really ever mean to write a book about courage, but I think that because behind the rock of essentialism sits courage.

100% agree. What you've said is so refreshing because in the last few weeks, as you and I chatted earlier, I've been writing a book. First book. The last few weeks, I've been looking at it going, what on earth is this? Is this even right? Does this make sense? Like, so set on this is what it was going to be. But now I'm going back going, God, no, that could be better. That could be simpler. Cut that off and just focus on that, right? And I'm actually going through with an essentialist mindset in writing this book. What can I cut? And I can. Can cut a lot. You know, I want to have a. I want to say almost a little about a lot, but that's not going to work. I need to say a lot about a little. And it's like, I need to just hone it down.

There's a lot of books that have been written a little about a lot. Yeah, of course, you know, like just general summary, you know, here. Here are a bunch of things that I have picked up from other people in my life. You know, like, you know, I don't. We don't need another book like that. It reminds me, even though I don't. I love and don't love the scene. But you remember in Walk the Line, did you watch that movie? And we know the scene, right? It's the scene where they go to try and record a song first, his first record. And the would be producer goes, interrupts and says, no, no, no. Do you have anything else? And he goes, what do you mean? And he says, well, I just don't believe anything you're singing. And he was singing about God and he was singing about how you're gonna. You're gonna love it. And, and, and he says, he said, what do you mean? You mean you don't think I believe in God? And he's getting to the defensive. And, and he goes, he says, you are just going through the motions. This is the spirit. It's great. You know the scenes.

Yeah, no, exactly.

And, and, and he goes, well, I do have something else. He says, you got a problem with the military? And he says, he says, he says, no. He says, well, I do. And, and, and it's not that. The entire message of that scene, I'm like, yes, that's what. That's true. It speaks to me. But there is something that is true in that scene for me, which is, which is truth. What do you really believe? What do you really want to say rather than, rather than, I don't know, you know, safe, general, other things. So I'm excited about that, that you're describing with your book.

What you're saying to me is a life well lived. To me, a life well lived is you don't sit on a fence. If you sit on the fence and agree with everyone, to me, that's not a life well lived. Mandela comes to mind for me, when I think of the ultimate essentialist. This is the one thing that I'm going to commit my life to, willing to die for. It went to prison 27 years. And right until the day he died, he stayed focused on what was most important. Now he suffered. It was difficult. That's essentialism to me. And it's like almost on a global scale. How does the everyday person, because we're not all Mandelas, how does the everyday person move towards essentialism? What are those core ingredients, those axioms that you speak of?

Well, then that just took me in two different directions. I got a riff on the, on the big part, the zoom out. And then I can zoom into some tangible things people can do. But like on the. Well, first of all, the Mandela, the Gandhi, the Mother Teresa, these names are used.

There's a part of me that hates it, even though I think I talk about all three of them in essentialism.

There's a part of me that hates it in the sense that people just call upon these names so lightly, like forgetting how radical they had to make their lives.

This is.

Talk about trade offs. I mean, the trade offs involved with Gandhi. He lived in, in South Africa for 2020 something. Forgetting the number of years, 20, 23 years. I think he, he didn't intend to even be there.

When he goes back to India. People wanted him to run for office because they'd been following his story in South Africa, and he says no to that. Imagine that, people meeting you, crowds of people at the train station. We want you to run. You know, you're the hero. And how.

No. And what he did instead. He spent one year on a listening tour. I mean, you can call it a listening tour. That feels too political in itself. But listening to the people in India trying to work out why it was possible that so few British could control so many Indians so effortlessly, and they found that the answer was salt. He could never have discovered that if he hadn't spent the time trying to understand what's under the surface. Salt. The British controlled the production of salt and therefore the whole food chain. And it was only as he understood that sacrificed to discover that, that he then came up with the idea to walk across India in a demonstration of civil disobedience, to make salt at the beach. And it became known as the Salt March because of the tens of thousands, some accounts hundreds of thousands of people that followed him all the way across India. He makes salt on the beach that day? Well, he sort of did because the police. I just was reading recently some detailed reports about it, and. And the police had gone there before him and had stamped the salt into the sand so that he. To make it harder for him to do this. And it's. But in the act of taking up some. That he found, in the very act of picking it up, he had broken the law and was arrested for it. And that alone reveals the whole point. It's not about the salt. The level of control, the level of reaction in the system showed that he'd identified something that was disproportionately important. And in evidence of that, well, first of all, the people followed him. So that's evidence that there was resonance. But then also immediately following that, eventually tens of thousands of people also make salt, also are arrested. And the civil. Not just the civil rights. That's true. Just the human violation that. That demonstrated caught India's attention and the world's attention and got Gandhi a seat at the table to negotiate for what eventually became the independence of the largest democracy in the world. Okay.

You could repeat those kinds of stories for Gandhi, certainly.

For Mother Teresa. I mean, she just. Oh, yes. Just people. Oh, yeah. Very kind. She's really kind. That is not the whole story of her. There's so much. All of them had to say no. Very deliberately, constantly and deeply. Like, they had to really think through it because they were under so much demand. So many people wanted different things for them. So to figure it out.

Is monumental. And so.

Then when you go from that back to sort of, what about our lives?

I think I just want to make the point that there's more in our own lives that are like those people or like the awful examples on the other side. Right. You know, the Hitlers and the Stalin's like there's more of both of those in us than is obvious. The wrestle, the wrestle inside of us is serious.

And that desire to.

Actually choose between them on a daily, maybe even more than that basis, what's the right path, what's the wrong path? Make the trade off, make the choice.

That's the essence of what we're going to become.

And it can seem a little trivial in the moment, but that discipline, pursuit of the elimination of non essentials, that adds up. And.

So let's just talk about what somebody can do. Another thing that somebody can do is, well.

One thing people can do is when they feel their conscience say, do not do this, do not do this. That's not nothing.

I was caught in storm Ida, which was massive, massive storm.

Just finished a keynote in New York, New Jersey. I was in the New Jersey airport and the whole thing was just collapsing in a very strange kind of way. The water coming in through all the scenes, there's floods all over the place. I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but it was. Well, that's actually the least of it because people were just getting more and more stressed. All the flights are being canceled, there's people trying to sleep everywhere. Uh, you know, and then as soon as I see this all happening, I'm like, I've been in enough of these situations before. I know what to do. I got to get out of this airport, I get to a hotel. I had two keynotes the next day to do, but they were virtual. So I thought, look, just, if I can just get to a, to a hotel and you can see a hotel right from the New Jersey airport.

And it's, it's like, this is like 10 minutes walking. And so I thought, okay, I'll just lift the terminal left the airport and I went to try and get on a bus. Oh no, all the buses are cancelled. Okay, well, I'll get on the train. They have a subway system there, I'll get on that. And so each stop, I mean, there was a lot of evidence to like this wasn't the smartest plan in the world because we'd get to a stop. Literally. I remember one stop, they wouldn't let anyone get off because it's just flooded in there.

Unbelievable. I thought, my goodness, one huge storm. And this whole thing is just, this infrastructure is not standing up to this big storm, but we could have bigger ones. And then I thought, okay, well maybe I can get a car. I'm being very determined about this. Maybe determines a positive word for it. Being really stubborn that this is what I wanted to do. I get to the way we rent cars and yet we can't rent any cars. And they said, but it's on this road, we are on the road. And if you walk from there to the hotel, that's 10 minute walk and it's straight there. And I took like, let's say 10 steps forward and I hear, you know, those words, do not do this. And then I carried on for another like three or four more steps. I'm like still just wanting to do it. And again, but clearer, stronger, do not do this. So there's not much more to tell about the story, in fact, because I didn't do it. Went back to the airport for a while until the storm was over. Ended up still getting to the hotel a bit later. But there's something in that story that I think people can start that right now.

Because of course in life what we want is perfect clarity about what we should do. And that's what, you know, we've talked a bit about that getting clear what the yes is. But if you don't have that, at least you start with what not to do. And.

You know.

I think it was Aristotle who.

Was known as the wisest man in the world at the time. And.

He said, I don't know if I am the wisest man in the world, but he says if I am, it's because I have a daemon with me. That was his term. Daemon isn't the same as a demon, but it's sort of almost the same word, but daemon. And he said this daemon that's with me never tells me what to do, but always tells me what not to do.

And I think that that's the spirit of this is when you think, don't do this, just don't do it. And that will course correct you towards a more essential, meaningful life. So that's one very immediate thing people can start doing tactically. You might even turn that into what I said no to list. I found that very helpful, encouraging myself. One page, I keep it in a paper and pen form. Every time you say no, you write down what you said no to. It reveals two things. One is that you can say no, which is very encouraging, and two, it allows you to evaluate later, well, should I have said yes to that? I said no, but maybe I should have done it. And so you can, you can weigh this up because you actually want to get to the point where you've said no to a little more than you wish you had. You want to have some errors on that side of the. Of, you know, of the calculus of your life.

Musk talks about this. He says, you want to say no enough things within your business, within a product that you go, oh, we need to pull it back a little bit. All of us are making the mistake on the other side.

Yes to everything.

All saying yes to too many things. So we want to at least get to the point where we're saying no to a few more things than we want to and then we can adjust from there. That to me is kind of a good idea.

What makes your list. What makes you no list in recent months or years without naming names, of course.

What makes my no list.

I mean, look, my trade off list, which is the same thing as a no list, right. But is a way of communicating the nos is okay. Having a.

Done for the daytime.

Start as a practice. I started in the pandemic. The pandemic. I did it for months and months. Like I would say 95% of the time, I would choose 5 or 5:30. And at that time I would come out of the office and I would yell like the town crier, it's 5 o'.

Clock.

You know, and if it was 5:03, I had to be honest, it's 5:03. Like it was 5:20. Like if I went as long as 5:20, it's embarrassing. You haven't kept to what you've said. But that was saying no to so many different things in order to be able to be there so we could eat dinner as a family, so that we could continue. And if I hadn't done that, and I know a lot of people, including me, would have been pulled into it, which was this zoom, eat, sleep, repeat, life. Because there's no natural end to anything anymore. You don't even leave work physically. And so you're just endlessly in that loop. That's an example of something. I don't do that as much now, but I just recently restarted doing it literally even in this last couple of weeks I was just talking about. And it's. That just gives you an excuse not to do something, you know, the same, the same is true for.

I mean, I mean my no list includes about 90% of the requests that I get, for example, doing keynotes, which, you know, I must from time to time quite a bit, in fact to speak at events. And about 90% of that I'll say no to.

And you can say no in a lot of ways, right? Like you can say no by the word, say no. Right. But that's not the best. Essentialists don't say those words very much. They just have systems in place that lead to no. So I have a team of people handling and helping me navigate these things. This is a series of criteria that are being used to assess the requests that come in. And that allows me to make trade offs, like being able to respond to.

Personal letters that come in that are really meaningful. So there's space on your calendar to do that, to actually have a connection. That doesn't sound like.

Really important in one sense, but I know that when I've received letters from people at key moments in my life, I found them to be, especially if they've touched me in some way. That's been incredibly encouraging to me. So I've been trying to make that trade off as well as a real intentionality.

That's interesting. And the one thing I want to just chat about is this idea of decision making. Because something can only become a no when you've made a decision, it's a decision to make it a no or a yes. So in life, I guess, decisions, the word decide.

Yes.

If we break that up and we look at C I, D, E, the second syllable, other words that end in C I, D, E are pretty interesting. We've got homicide, we've got genocide, suicide, pesticide, the list goes on. They all have one thing in common, which means to kill. Ugly words, right? But D side is no different. Yet we make decisions often quickly and maybe even flippantly at times. But to me, my understanding of the word decide, when we go back to its origins, it means to kill off all other options, essentially to say no. So I've really struggled in recent years in saying no.

Sure.

And I've had to come up with my own little decision making filter to go, okay, how does it weigh up against my values, my priorities? Cool. That's a no. That's a yes, or that's a not now, Maybe next year or next month. How do you go about making decisions when you're a bit torn that, God, I would like to do it. But this thing here. Do you have a filter to help you make an essentialist decision?

Well, you know, the rule of thumb that's useful is if it's not a clear yes, it becomes a clear no.

Something that helps keep me more honest about that is this simple way of thinking about our lives, which is that our lives are.

There's so little left of them.

That we could fill every moment of the rest of our lives with only the essential things, the essential relationships like the what I came here to do stuff. And so saying yes to every non essential is saying no to an essential. That's sort of the awful, I would say the awful truth behind essentialism. If we could just do everything for everyone, all the time, non essentials and everything. If we could just do that, well fine, I mean then forget essentialism, you don't need it. If you can just do everything for everyone, super. I mean double down on it, you know, just, just, just go all the way with non essentialism. Don't sleep at all. You know, say yes to 5,000 things today. I mean just do it all. It's that the, the inconvenient.

Thing is that non essentialism is based in a lie that you can do it all. So, so essentialism is based on this, you know, this, like I say, this, this terrible truth. You have to choose, you have to, have to make the trade offs.

So for me there's a whole variety of ways that I think about saying no. I mean one obvious thing, I seem obvious is to increase.

The depth and discipline of a certain kind of conversation that is to counsel together with somebody in a way you don't always do. So modern life, a lot of what we say yes to isn't, isn't in a conversation. It's not like somebody turns up at your door and says, hey, would you like to take this responsibility on? Would you like to do this thing? No, it's an email, it's a text. It's something that you see in, in social media. It's something someone else is doing that now you feel, oh, I probably should do that too because that I don't want to miss out on this thing. It's something you see someone else did on social media. Now you think, oh, I have to go to that country too, I have to make that thing. And so the inputs aren't in conversations, most of them aren't in conversations. And so what we need to do is increase the number of what we call like elimination conversations.

And so that's a key process for me, right is actually counseling together with my wife, with my family. What are the traders? Do we really want to do this? When we were in England, we had a whole intention to go through all of Europe and do all these really cool things. And we just felt more uncomfortable about that. And it's like back to what we said before, you know, when you feel the do not do this, do not do this. And we didn't and immediately felt the relief of it that we've made the Right decision. We cut that off. And so it's having. Creating space for the conversations you need to do.

This was taught to me really vividly in a way that's a bit embarrassing to me.

I read about someone, his name's Banks Benitez. He's the former CEO of a company called Uncharted, based in San Francisco. And he'd read Essentialism and he got really into it and he even felt that it had been life changing for him. And there's somewhere after two or three years, he really thought, well, why? If I could take this into the business in a serious way. And so he embarked on a experiment. At first it was just look at everybody to read it. So they all read it together. They had like kind of a corporate book club.

I love it.

And so they did it in four parts. So they read the book has four parts in it, and they read each part and they had a meeting after each part. One time one of the executives came in and he was like, I want to throw this book across the room. And which I really love that part of the story because I'm like, oh, well, he was really reading it because it's bringing to the fore something we don't want to be true, but is true, which is you can't do everything. And so, you know, they're wrestling with it in this way. That was a good way to begin. And then they proposed the following experiment. They said, if Essentialism is true, then we should be able to.

We should be able to increase our productivity with less time. And they formalized it in this way. They said, okay, let's see if we could achieve 40 hours of output with 32 hours of input. Four day work week. So they bring in a firm, external firm comes in, actually assesses their output so they have external reliability and perspective the data from it. Six weeks later they come in and do another assessment. Six weeks later after that, they did the final assessment. So it's a three month, 90 day experiment. And they conclude at the end of that that they have achieved 40 hours of output with 32 hours of input. So they became a permanent four day workweek company.

Incredible.

So they did a lot of things differently. They cut out meetings that they just assumed you had to have. They did a lot of different things. They increased their awareness of all the stuff they were doing. I mean, that helps too. But the big thing they did differently, and this was the part that in a sense was embarrassing to me because it's so obvious, but I thought people were doing this already just not enough. And after this, I now realize people are simply not doing it. And that was, they would have these prioritization or elimination conversations in person. They would actually talk about this. Hold on, here's the project I'd like you to do. So here as CEO, here's a project I'd like you to do. What are you already working on? What's your priority? What do you have to say no to to say yes to this? What am I interrupting to do this? He said he found that about 40% of the time they would together conclude that they should take on this new project or initiative of the thing that he was asking them to do. But 60% of the time they concluded no, what you're doing is already more important. You know, I'll either find somebody different or we'll just wait. And it got real when his assistant came to, his executive assistant comes to him and said, well, is this, is this all true for me as well? You know, like this whole thing empowering everybody to negotiate and talk about these things. Is it true for me? And he's like, we've got like a really real conversation that they had. But that was also a really important tipping point because it's like, yes, of course it's true for you. And the default position of traditional hierarchy, that's true everywhere, which is that if somebody higher up in the hierarchy asks you to do it, of course there's not a question involved, you just are doing it that is so suboptimal and it produces non essentialism everywhere. It defaults to non essentialism. And so you have these awful situations where CEOs or executives will share an opinion and people will take it as a mandate.

And they didn't differentiate, which they can. That's something that I would advise leaders to do in any field is to say, okay, is this a one person's opinion? Did I just give you my opinion about how you might want to do that or what you should do? Is it a strong suggestion or is it a mandate? We ought to signal that, clearly flag that, so that you don't find a situation, which happens so often in organizations where somebody's mentioned something as a possibility and now it's been written up as.

Written in stone.

And the executive doesn't even, it's like a zombie project. They can't ever get rid of it. You know, this whole initiative, this whole distraction, this disruption and, and so, and so these conversations, this is, this is what I'm doing research on right now. I interrupted things. This is why I keep Going back to England now is. I'm doing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge to really study this properly. How do you have the kinds of conversations you need to have even in hierarchical environments to be able to actually say no together? How can you eliminate the non essentials together? How can you work together in a way that you, you aren't just an essentialist yourself, but you can, you know, you can build an essentialist culture in your relationships, in your family, in your team, in your business. You know, like.

You know, because, you know, essentialism would be easy if it weren't for the people you know, like that 100% sort of the, the spirit of that. So yeah, those are the kinds of those conversations. To make essentialism live, you have to upgrade your communication negotiation ability and make space for these conversations, this counseling together. And that works really well if you upskill in that way.

And to me, when I hear it say, hey, James, this is simple. However, it's definitely not easy. It takes commitment. It's a learned process. There is going to be a struggle initially and probably resistance. Like that guy that wanted to throw the book.

Yep.

But it's worth it.

Yeah. I mean, you try and eliminate anything from any. You try and say no to anything in your life where other people are involved, actually, even just with yourself. You start immediately to learn how the system works. And that system, the antibodies will fight.

You to try to live. And anyone who's ever tried to make change inside of an organization knows that that's true. You go on paper, it's like, oh, hey, we're just going to stop doing that. I'm going to do this instead. I'll give an example. Chick Fil A.

There's approximately the exact numbers I don't remember, but it was certainly years of work to get their frontline employees all across, you know, all across the world where they have franchises answering each person's conversation with my pleasure. There's three options they're allowed to give. It's very nice touch, you know, I don't know if you've gone to a Chick Fil A, but it's very nice. My son worked there for a few months as one of his sort of high school jobs. And, and they're really organized and well, well, you know, quite a sophisticated system in a way. But, but imagine how many years it took them just to get that consistently executed across. All of that seems like a simple.

Like a memo goes out and we all do it. It's not like that.

That is the memo going out and everybody Doing the thing you want consistently in a way that makes sense. No, so it's a. So it's a very strange thing, leadership, isn't it, about you can mention something and everyone goes, oh, yes, the CEO has spoken on certain things. And then on other things you go, behaviorally, this is what we want. And then it just takes so much repetition in order to bring that about. I can't remember quite how we got there, but.

Well, I have to say a couple of things. I want to be mindful of your time as well, but I've seen a couple of companies do essentialism really well. First you mentioned already was Apple. I love Apple.

Yeah.

Very simple in their approach. I think their motto internally is actually simplify, simplify, simplify. That's one of their mantras. You can see it in their products. It's built for dummies like me where I can actually open the product and just engage with it. But another one was Southwest Airlines. They did essentialism really well to the point where others started trying to copy and did it really poorly. I believe, I think, that you wrote that in the book the Story of Southwest. So would you mind just sharing for the listener that hasn't read the book yet, who will go and buy it in the show notes right now. That story of Southwest was fascinating. What did they do? What did the competitors try and do? How did it end for them?

Yeah, look, Herb Kelleher is the founder of Southwest. He is a. He is such a character. I mean, he's passed away now, but I met him at an event once and where he was speaking at an event and just kind of Q and A at the front and he was laughing to the point of tears before they had finished his bio. There was something, the introduction, it wasn't just reading a bio, but like the person who did the five minute introduction. And he just. There was. He is. I mean, he was a phenomenon. And he inculcated a couple of really surprising combinations into the DNA of the company. One was really wicked rethinking of service. Like, let's be genuinely fun. Let's actually go connect with people. Let's love our customers. Let's, you know, let's love. Let's love our customers. Let's love our employees in a really kind of honest, rich, ridiculous way sometimes. And so that culture, I think, enabled them to then also be. Be really.

Provocative in not doing what everybody else was doing. So, I mean.

There'S actually an example that's not an essentialism, but it's in a different book. I wrote called Effortless that names their different kind of approach. Context. Essentialism is about focus. Effortless, it's about simplification. Essential is about figuring out what the right thing is. Effortless is about doing it in the right way. So when it comes to simplification, they did so many things. Okay, they said no numbered seats. Anyone who's flown Southwest knows that. But why they did that was because it turns out that it's faster to get people in their seats if you don't define what seat numbers they are for a lot of reasons, including that everyone's incentivized to get on the plane because that's the way to get the best seat. And so they had 15 minute turnarounds, which were considered utterly impossible. And that's really important for an airline.

This is counterintuitive, but the profitability of an airline is based almost entirely on minutes spent in the sky. Because as soon as you're grounded, you're losing money because your assets are being devalued so fast and they're so expensive, the assets. So you only make money if your plane is going somewhere with, of course, with customers on board. And so they had to get them back up in the air really, really quickly. Okay, so that's an example.

Another elimination story from, from. From Effortless is that they simplification. Everybody else in the industry were upgrading their ticketing machines and this was like a couple of million dollars to install it. Then of course, all of the money that you spend after the fact maintaining it and all of that.

And the executive team, Herb Keller, is there as well, and they're all just talking about this, do we do it? There's this pressure to do it. If we don't do it, we're not part of this ticketing system that everybody's trying to do, and we want to be left behind. And then somebody just put out in words what was already instinctively true for that culture, which is, do we care what everybody else is doing? Do we care what other companies think a ticket is? And they're all like, no, of course we don't care. That's not who we are. You know, they had this distinctive way of being and seeing themselves in the world. And. And so they said, well, then let's just use the existing system we have, and we'll just have it print on this is your ticket. You know, and that's what they did. So they eliminated all that cost and all the maintenance costs. And. And that's just illustrative of the way they're doing now. Meanwhile, over at Continental, at first they're like these, you know, these Southwesters, they don't know what they're doing. They don't even know what an airline is. No international travel, no seat assignments, no tickets, all of this. And then 10 years go by. Southwest is now extremely profitable.

And Continental goes, okay, we better do something about this. And so what their answer is, it's a quintessential non essentialist thing to do. They said, let's just, we'll straddle it. Well, they didn't say that that's what they were doing. We will start our own additional service. They called it Continental Light, which will copy, you know, on the surface, will copy the service of Southwest.

No frills.

No frills airline. Right, that's the idea. But the problem is they're not a no frills airline. They just have a no frills service within their existing airline business. And it created, so there's a different price ticket. So if you, if you want Continental Light, that's cheaper. If you want Continental, it's this, it caused massive confusion for employees within their business, for customers trying to use the service. I mean they, they set the records in the airline industry for complaints per day in the airline industry, you know, and so they, it cost them $150 million. They fired the CEO and they.

This is the straddle it strategy. You're just trying to do everything, we're going to do everything, everyone's doing. And so that's sort of, if you go back, if you went back in a time machine.

To like 1972, and we said, okay, we come out, we have $500 with us and we're going to put $1 in every company, the S&P 500 for the next 30 years. We get back in the time machine, go forward 2002, we come out, which company would have given the largest return on that dollar is Southwest.

Most people would say IBM's everybody, everybody does.

I asked this question to audiences all over and everybody's, nobody ever says Southwest. The only way they ever say Southwest is if they've read one of my books or if they cheat and they start looking online for the answer. Nobody thinks that that's going to be the case. Now that doesn't mean it'll always be the case because you can't live on, you can't live on the strategic trade off somebody else made in a previous thing forever. But for 30 years at least they did it. They didn't have one international flight in those 30 years. Not one. Everyone else. That's where you make your money is in the international flights. They didn't have one. They just kept on. They just said they did the math. They're like, no, it's still more profitable.

For us to do step to one thing. And to me, that's ultimate essentialism. Being able to say no to all the potential shiny objects out there. Herb and his team said no. It's amazing.

Yes, explore, eliminate, execute. You can't eliminate before you've explored. So there's a tension there. And it's important. When Steve Jobs says you have 10,000 bad ideas, you have a thousand bad ideas. For every one good idea, you have to say no to the thousand things to say yes to the one thing. He's famous for saying that although I'm so brutalizing that quote, all of a sudden, I'm not saying it quite right. But.

What that says to us all when we first hear it is, man, you've got to say no a lot. And that's how I used that quote for the longest time. But then I had. Jeremy Utley is a good friend of mine from. What's that?

The school at Stanford. We had him on the show recently.

Yeah, he's great. And we were talking about this together and sort of in a way, for the first time, we both.

Heard that quote in a different way because his book is all about idea flow. That's the title of it. And you have to generate a lot of ideas. And suddenly it was clearer to me that, yeah, that quote, he's saying you have to have a thousand ideas. That's a lot of ideas. You have to create space to keep exploring and trying and considering many, many, many different things. You think about more things, but you say no to more things than the non essentialist. The non essentialist is committing to stuff immediately. Oh, that's an interesting idea done. It's a good thing. Let's go. And so they actually.

You know, like, the essentialist is trying out more things than a non essentialist. They're just committing to less. And so that's the only caveat I would say is that you don't just choose one idea. And no matter what I'm doing this. It's. You go, you keep brainstorming and exploring, considering and considering. Just like Steve Jobs and Jony. I've. I love the accounts we have mostly, but not all from Johnny, talking about those conversations. They met every day, set time, specific set time. It's just those two. They're eating lunch together. They, the, the, the way that those conversations went, he said, every day we're going to, what if we did this? What if? What about that? What about the other? What about the other? He said there were so many bad ideas, there's so much rubbish, he says. And then once every just so often, one of us would say something and it would take the air out of the room. And that was a clear yes. And so then you have then the conviction to say, okay, we're going to nurture this and work on this and protect it and actually build something now. But that's the balance. It's not just saying no. That's a. We've talked a lot about saying no in this conversation and most people that read Essentialism, it's one of the clear takeaways. But I'm always keen to say it's not about saying no to everything and everyone without really thinking about it. Like that would be a book called Noism, and this is Essentialism. And the difference is you're trying to figure out the few, the vital few, things that are so good and so valuable and so important that you're going to say yes to them and invest everything in them because they're going to be so great for you. You have to go through a lot of ideas to get to that.

Massively, yeah. I take away from that focus on the vital few over the important many. And it's interesting when I think about that, the All Blacks, their senior management, I use that exact phrase. I think they use the critical few for the important many. But they consistently go back to that to go, hey, what?

They use important many.

Yeah, the important many.

That's really good. The language is normally vital for you from trivial many. It comes from the quality movement led by Duran, who was Pareto's principal. Well, it's related to Prato's principle. It was the engineering.

Application of the 80:20 principle in a lot of ways. But Duran was in the US and was like, everyone ignored him. So he went to Japan after the Second World War and they were desperate because at the time their reputation was sort of cheap products, mass produced cheap products. And they were really hungry for his thinking and it transformed them. It's why they became, you know, for, I guess 20 years or so, the second largest economy in the world was almost entirely because of the quality movement, which. That's what he's saying. Vital few from the trivial many. But it's interesting if they've adopted it in that way. It's a very essentialist way to adopt it. The vital few instead of the important many. I really like that.

I think the All Blacks would definitely be all about the essentialism and the essentialist way. So I hope they'll be reading it. I'll certainly send them a copy.

Do, do, do. I just had a great thing that happened with that Usyk. Am I saying his name right? The boxer, yeah. So.

He and his team were in their plane going to the fight against Tyson Fury.

And there's a photograph they published on social media with him holding a copy of Essential.

Yes. Well done.

Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty cool moment. And then, of course, he goes, goes and then becomes the first, you know, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world in 25 years.

That's legendary.

And then when he talked about it afterwards, when he, when he's in the interview afterwards, he talks in detail about the trade offs that he made over the last nine months. And they are extreme. And I didn't even necessarily fully love that this was associated with Ascension. And I'm like, okay, those are your choices. I didn't make those choices. But it's clearly the choices that he had to make in order to achieve that win. So I'm not saying that's the most important thing in the world, to be the undisputed Heavyweight champion of the world, but if you say that it is for you, that's the price. And he paid it and now he's done it.

It's incredible. I love it. Well, I just want to again, be mindful of your time. Firstly, I'm going to encourage the listener or the viewer to head into the show notes and go and follow your podcast because you have some incredible guests on your show, so we'll put a link in there. Secondly, please do get the Planner pre order it now so it arrives early January 3rdly, if you haven't got Essentialism or Effortless, you've got to get them. Whether it's audio books on Amazon or even better, go to your local bookstore and support an independent bookstore. It's been a game changer for me. I'm excited to explore it more and aspire to be an essentialist. But one last question.

Yes.

I'd like you for a moment, just fast forward many, many years into the future. You're highly aware that it's your very last day here on Earth and a very young person that you love dearly comes into the room, says, Greg, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

Well, I mean.

You. The, the question in life is, what is the Highest, you know what, what's the highest thing I can serve? The highest person, the highest idea, the highest. You know, whether somebody's, whether somebody is Christian or whether they've read the Bible, have never read the Bible or whatever. The position is one of the most powerful, even from a psychological perspective. Ideas is expressed in this. Seek first the kingdom of God and then all these things will be added unto you. And that idea of what is the highest thing you can possibly serve and to set your aim on that. And of course, over time that could change because you could gain greater discernment, greater truth, understanding. And so you can upgrade it and ought to be upgrading it over time. But that question, what is the highest thing that I can give my life to? The highest thing, the highest cause, the highest purpose, the highest. And fix your mind on that.

That's what I would be saying. In a sense, it would be asking a question back. What's the highest thing you can serve and sacrifice for?

And.

Everything changes when you give yourself permission to say no to other things and to aim for the one highest priority that you can, that you've yet discovered.

Such incredible advice. I know that there will be a listener or a viewer right now that needed to hear that. So thank you for sharing it and thank you for sharing your gold and your wisdom. I look forward to post doctorate sitting down with you again and hearing what you've learned and what you've distilled. So best of luck.

Thank you. Thank you, James. Absolute pleasure.

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