This PRODUCTIVITY SYSTEM Will Completely CHANGE YOUR LIFE! | Greg Mckeown & Lewis Howes
In this extensive interview, Greg McKeown and Lewis Howes explore how to achieve high performance without the burnout‑inducing grind culture that dominates modern work and life. They introduce the three‑ring model of the "Effortless" system – Effortless State, Effortless Action, and Effortless Results – and argue that true productivity begins with simplifying the mind, releasing emotional baggage (grudges, anger, resentment), and cultivating gratitude. The conversation weaves personal anecdotes (e.g., Tim Ferriss’s energy drain, a stormtrooper costume obsession, a truck‑driver’s salsa‑dance mental hack) with practical frameworks: evaluating grudges as “hired employees” to see if they serve a useful purpose, asking the inverted question "How can I make this effortless?" instead of "How can I work harder?", and using high‑trust agreements for delegation. They discuss the cost of relentless hustle, the concept of "relaxation debt" analogous to sleep debt, and the importance of intentional rest, rituals, and seasonal cycles of work and recovery. The dialogue also touches on essentialism – focusing on the one thing under‑invested in – and the danger of pursuing the wrong goals. Throughout, gratitude is presented as a rapid, high‑leverage productivity hack that reclaims mental energy. Toward the end, Lewis asks Greg to define greatness. Greg cites Stephen Covey’s distinction between primary (private) greatness—character, kindness, gratitude, integrity—and secondary (public) greatness—external accolades. He argues that primary greatness precedes and sustains secondary greatness, warning that chasing only public recognition without inner integrity is risky, especially in a cancel‑culture environment where fame can vanish overnight. The interview concludes with a reflective “three truths” exercise, a call to check out Greg’s book "Effortless", and a free PDF offering three secrets to unlock the power of the mind.
Chapters
Complaining state is going to limit my creativity. It's going to make it harder for me to achieve. It's going to be harder for me to attract good talent and all the rest of it. So I said, okay, every time I complain, I'm going to... I think you gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness. Really? Yeah.
Please welcome Lewis Howes. It seems like in a world of burnout culture, hustle and grind culture, that there isn't a lot of effortless happening in the world. It's more work as hard as you can, grind it out and hustle because hard work is the key to success. You hear a lot of great athletes say, How did you get here? They had to work hard. They had to put in hours and hours every day in order to master their skill to be the best at what they were. Had to. So is there a way to create effortlessness when you also need to work hard and be diligent in your practice and all these things, or do we not have to work hard and it can be effortless in accomplishing what we want?
Yeah, well look, I mean, to me, essentialism was about rethinking prioritization, what really matters, and figuring out what is essential. Effortless is a cousin to that. And that's about rethinking simplification, which is that sometimes we just make getting great results breaking through to the next level harder than it needs to be. So it's not saying, hey, you should never work and you should never work hard and you should never put an effort. I believe that you're supposed to put an effort. The point is, if you can't work any harder, you've got to find an easier path. And yet, in a grind culture, sometimes people start to get burned out and their answer is push even harder, rather than think different, think smarter, find an alternative route.
Rather than take pause, reflect, have a better strategy, it's more just go hard, hard, hard, spend more time, more hours on the thing, as opposed to reevaluate simplification.
Yeah.
How can we do it more effortlessly in a simplified version, not just hard push, push, push.
One of the things I think we can do is just Well, the book structure, the model is to have an effortless state, like three concentric circles, effortless state, effortless action, then effortless results. And that's sort of like three books in one. Each of them can make your life and the results you get easier to get. You want to first remove all the complexity in your mind, in your heart that makes life more frustrating than it ought to be. Just talking with Tim Ferriss and I asked him a question about this. I said, Look, how much of your mental and emotional energy have you given on stuff that, you know, holding grudges, being angry, stuff that just got in the way of your success? And he said, Look, from age 15 to 30, he said probably 60 to 70% of my energy was spent on that.
On more than that. Angry.
Angry.
At what? Himself, other people, the world, anything.
And awful things that happened to him that he was angry about from when he was young. He's talked about this publicly now of abuse that he'd been through and so on. But either way, he's making his life is more burdened than it needs to be because he's spending so much of his cycles on this stuff that isn't actually propelling him forward or helping him achieve.
His thought process, his energy on those things, right? Yeah, that's spending a lot of time.
That's right. Just your mind is what you're processing. how you're feeling is just burdened.
Burn and energy.
Burning energy instead of getting you going forward.
Yes.
And so simplifying your state, I think, is a huge return on investment. If you can let go of a grudge, if you can let go of something that you keep on, you know, draining you, then you have, there's just more of you on offer. And that's not through grinding effort. That's through just removing burdens. You don't have to be hauling up the mountain at all. Right. You know, number two area is effortless action.
That's effortless state.
The first one, effortless state. So you're simplifying all of your, basically all of that clutter that's in your mind.
Yeah.
So it makes it easier to focus on what matters.
Before we get to the second ring, how do people learn to let go of grudges? How do they let go of resentment, anger, frustration about others and about the things they've done? That's really hard to do. You see my head just says, just get clear minds. But people have been trying to figure that out for a long time. So how did you learn how to do that?
Well, one of the things that I've learned is that specifically on grudges is that we need to learn We have to ask an unusual question about grudges. That is, what did we hire the grudge to do? As Clayton Christensen says, with any product or service that you have, no one wants a six inch drill bit. What they want is a six inch hole, right? There's a reason that you're hiring that product or service. Well, you can do the same with grudges. Every grudge we hold, we hold for a reason. We've hired the grudge to do something for us. Maybe we hire the grudge to make us feel powerful. See, I am one up. I'm above that person. See, they did this bad thing. I'm holding on to that. See, I'll show that I'm superior. We hold on to it for a sense of superiority. Or maybe we hold on it because we like that we get to tell a story of being a victim. And people go, oh, yes, we get sympathy for doing it. Well, we hire grudges to do certain jobs. And what I think is that if we simply evaluate grudges, like we say, How are you doing in your job performance for me? Are you actually protecting me? Are you actually making me powerful? Are you actually getting people to build a stronger relationship with me? Or if you evaluate them, and in the book, there's a section specifically, one by one, you can do this. where you say, well, you actually find, well, actually it's not making me powerful, it makes me more vulnerable. It makes me vulnerable with everyone because I'm carrying this wound still and not letting it heal. Is it helping me to build relationships? No, if you pay attention, you notice that when you tell these stories, you kind of have to find new people to tell them to because people get bored of it. Right. And so you're not building deeper trust relationships. You're actually kind of wearing them out. along the way. And you can go one by one to suddenly discover that this is like a bad employee. We have grudges like, you've hired them to do this, they aren't doing any of those things. They're using you, grudges use you, they burn you up, they waste you out, they make you weaker. And so just through this process, you start to find like, I'm ready to fire my grudges, ready to be free of it so that I can actually recuperate whatever the percentage is, 60 to 70% with Tim, maybe it's different for other people, get all of that back. And we can start putting that into the stuff we really wanted to do in the first place.
Yeah, can you imagine? There's been different stages of my life where I felt like 10 out of 10 of positivity, of freedom of my thoughts from holding grudges or resentments or angers, and you feel like you're flying. and there have been many years in my life, many years, too many years, where I've held on to resentment, anger, frustration, a lack of forgiving other people. Where you feel like you're at a six or a seven, maybe you get to an eight for a moment, but then something triggers you and you're back into anger frustration mode. And that really pulls me back into feeling tired, exhausted, drained, and burnt out. Typically not from the effort I put into my craft, but in the effort I put into my mind thinking about the things I don't like.
Yeah, you've just, you have basically made the case for why effortless state is the first part of the effortless model. That's it exactly. You use, think of the language you used, you feel like you're flying. Is that not just another metaphor for effortless? I mean, what would be more effortless than I'm flying? That's the idea. That's why even though you would never think of forgiveness as a productivity hack, maybe no one's ever written that. The productivity hacks you need, it's so true, is to forgive. people in your life. And yet what else can you call it if you could get back that much energy, that much of your own light and ability and capability? It's the best rebate available. There's a story that I came across in the research that I love of a man who was productive in his community and then one day he saw what he thought was a piece of string on the ground and it was a piece of string. He gets it. He's like, oh, I can put that to use. He puts it in his pocket. On that same day in the marketplace someone else had lost a wallet and lost some money. And they thought that they had seen him pick up the wallet and take it, accused him of it publicly. There was no way for him to prove his innocence. And so the word went out, this person has acted dishonestly, dishonorably, and so on. Now, at this point in the story, he has a choice. He can't prove his innocence, but he could have in this moment let go of the accusation, of the harsh judgment, and he would have suddenly had all that energy back to be able to get back onto, well, what can I do something about? How can I serve? How can I make a contribution? How can I be successful again? But he doesn't. He gets fixated on it. Everywhere he goes, he talks about it. He nurses the grudge. He explains, it's a piece of string. Don't you see it was wrong? A piece of string, a piece of string. People started laughing about this guy. All he ever wants to do talk about is a piece of string. And it makes him ill on his deathbed, final words of the story. You know, a little piece of string, a little piece of string. And this is how the story goes. Now, that is a fictionalized account, but it illustrates the point of where are you putting your mental energies? If we put him on grudges, if we put them on things that have happened, we wish they hadn't happened, or even on our own mistakes where we go, I wish I'd been different. We're beating ourselves up for past mistakes. We're just putting tons of effort onto things that will exhaust us and burn us out instead of moving forward to the things that really matter.
So would you say that the things in our minds will hold us back from an effortless state and getting the actions and the results we want is the things in our mind first?
Yes, definitely. There's a little story about that where I was staring at myself dressed head to toe in a stormtrooper costume. Yeah. and I mean, I'm in a store of Halloween, this is like a, this is an expensive suit. It's like a movie quality Stormtrooper outfit. And as I'm staring back at myself in the mirror, like, should I buy this? I'm like, how am I even here? Like, what, why? For 30 years without realizing it, I'd had this goal of buying a Stormtrooper costume.
Yeah.
So when I reflect on it, it goes back to like when Return of the Jedi comes out. and my older brother says, oh wouldn't it be cool to have a movie quality suit? You know, wouldn't that be great? And I'm like this, you know, whatever, 10 year old kid just amazed by this. Like yes, that would be cool. Forget about it entirely, but here we are 30 years later still pursuing that goal. It's still a part of me has been working on achieving this. Well, no part of me wanted that costume. I'm like, why am I even, what am I even doing here? Let's get out of this. I don't want this costume. and it became like a shorthand. My wife will say to me now, if I'm pursuing something that she's like, I don't know, it has a certain vibe about it, she'll be like, is this a stormtrooper? And I think you can use that for goals that no longer serve you, but also for grudges that no longer serve you. Could be relationships that no longer serve you. Could be any mental clutter, any assumptions that are simply like they were true to a point, but they don't serve you now. And one of those, One of those stormtroopers, I think, is the idea that any problem can be solved by working harder. That alone is a really limiting idea. It'll get you only to here. It won't get you to there. So it's a good principle as far as it goes, but then we need to invert that question. Instead of say, How can I work harder? We say, Look, is there a more effortless way of doing this? And so as you read your mind of this old paradigm, you open yourself up to a new option, a new question, and suddenly, I mean, I almost think it's almost like magic. There's so many cool options once you're free of the idea that anything worth doing has to be exhaustingly difficult. Yeah.
What was the thought process that stuck in your mind the longest, that was the hardest to let go of? That when you let go of it, life became more effortless. Whether it be in your relationships or your career or whatever it might be.
Yeah, I mean, one answer to that question is, well, I'll give you one answer though, which is that the work at what's essential needs to kind of be hard, drudgery, and then you've got separate to that play and fun, and those two things are just two different categories.
Yes.
They don't have to be, but we often divide them up. And so we just have the fun and the play separate. But what if the essential things can be the fun things? What if you can make the things that used to seem like drudgery into like fun rituals?
Yeah, how do you make cleaning your laundry or mopping the floor or cleaning the toilet a fun and enjoyable experience?
Or, which is a specific example in my family, cleaning up after dinner. So we have pretty good rituals around the actual meal time. Like we actually eat together, I've got four kids and my wife and I, we will do like, you know, we'll do toasts for each other at the end of each day, like what's gone right today? And we have some good rituals around this, but as soon as the dinner is over, my kids are just like gone.
They're like, see you on the phone, other family members.
They disappeared, they're like ninjas man, they are just gone. It's like so silent and like where did they all go? Then I have the unenviable task of like, come back and pulling them all back. Where did you all go? Oh, no, I've got homework. It's hard to argue with that. Go to the bathroom. Okay, that's hard to argue. And it's just this cat and mouse game to get them back in. So I'm like, okay, how do we make it effortless? And so we divide up the chores so everyone's got a certain part of it, right? Many hands make light work. And we trained them on each piece. And I'm like, okay, we're going to set this up. We wrote it all down on a piece of paper where everyone can see it. Okay, ready to start. What happens? Nothing.
Chaos.
It is back to the same. They're gone. The next day they're gone like ninjas again. And it wasn't until my eldest daughter Grace added just a particular kind of music to the occasion that it became like karaoke. It was like classic Disney tracks. I mean, she's a teenager. She's just turned 18 now. But it's just like sing along stuff that you can't not sing to. All kinds of music. and it turned it into just like a little party. And even now, we'll start to do it, we'll have the same problems as soon as someone puts on the right music, you all do it, you play, and it's like that now. In fact, I didn't think people would believe me, but the other day I wasn't even helping them, music got put on, everyone's doing it, I grabbed like five seconds of video and put it on Instagram just to like prove, like it really is like that now. So the idea is, one of the ideas that's hard to let go of is that Essential stuff has to be the drudgery, you know, the important stuff is just hard work. Some things are just hard. And then there's fun stuff and that's play over here. But what if you make it, what if you combine those? What if you make essential stuff enjoyable? Well then it becomes relatively speaking, and.
I would add into that and say if you don't make the essential stuff enjoyable, then you will be burnt out.
Yeah.
Even if it starts out as like fun, like practice and sports for me, there are many different sports that I played. growing up and some of them I burnt out on because it came, it started to become a job where it was only like you got to show up to practice, you got to work hard. This is a business mentality now and it kind of lost the idea of having fun.
Yeah.
When we're playing a game but it's like the business of the game.
Right.
And you almost have to, so what could start out as really fun could turn into drudgery.
Right.
And what could be like this thing that I don't like could be this incredibly fun experience based on the parameters you create for yourself. I was a truck driver for many months. I got paid $250 a week as a truck driver when I was about 22, 23 years old. And I remember being like, this is miserable. This was not fun. This was not, you know, it was essential to just pay like for food for the week. It was not like, the path of my life.
Right.
But it was a season of my life. And I remember saying, okay, I have an opportunity here. Like this is going to be happening for many months. I can either be in misery and pain for six hours a day driving a truck.
Right.
Or I can make the most of it. And I downloaded CD with salsa songs and I started visualizing myself while watching the road but visualizing myself salsa dancing because I was learning how to salsa dance at that time.
Wow.
So I would imagine myself doing the moves and the dance and the steps and everything and it made the time fly and it made it more enjoyable. I would also sing songs as well and just see like, okay, how can I make this fun? Even if people are looking at me like I'm crazy, singing along to myself. But that made it more enjoyable where it wasn't like, oh, I have to go to work and do this thing, but I had a great time and time flew.
I love what you're saying and it really is a lot of what I mean when I say effortless state. Is it like, which is, there's nothing so hard that complaining and whining about it won't make it harder. So some things in life, once you decide I'm going to do this thing, I'm dealing with this, this is a responsibility that's important to me, I'm taking on, now you just have to decide, do I want to do it the.
Hard way or the easier way? Yeah, exactly. What happens when we complain and why.
Do we complain so much? You know, I searched at one point when I was doing this research for like just what are the easiest things to do in the world? Like just off the cuff, like what are the answers? And I remember that one of the first answers that people really agreed was complaining is the easiest thing to do.
Wow.
So I thought that was very interesting and I took on a little exercise myself with this and I was like, okay, well that's not a great state to be in. A complaining state is going to limit my creativity. It's going to make it harder for me to achieve. It's going to be harder for me to attract good talent and all the rest of it. So I said, okay, every time I complain, I'm going to say something I'm grateful for.
I read this in the book. I like this strategy. Well, it's a really good strategy.
Well, I like that you like it. What I noticed about it was that-- It didn't work. Well, what I noticed is not that it didn't work, I realized that I.
Complained a lot more than I realized.
Right, I read that too.
How much were you complaining a day.
When you started that strategy? I don't know if there's a number for it, but I just found I would walk into a room and I'd be complaining. I'd see my wife and, oh, how you doing? Well, you know, this thing was a bit of a drag. That meeting took longer than I thought. And I'm like, why are you saying this? It's not even how you feel about your life. life. There's so many good things happening, but for some reason, I was in a habit of just starting with a complaint. You see your kids, there's always something to complain about. Well, why are you on that? Why aren't you doing this? Why haven't you cleared this thing up? There's an endless variety of complaints. And what I noticed was that the more I complained, the more there was to complain about. And as soon as I introduced this new habit, what I was surprised by is how fast the state changed. because you can't be grateful and complaining in the same moment. You can't be fearful and grateful in the same moment. You can't be angry and grateful in the same moment. I mean, it is a dynamic, powerful, catalytic thing. It's not just, for too long we think of gratitude as being like, well, that's a nice, mindful moment. Be mindful and grateful over there. But when you've got to go real stuff, that's not the real stuff. Gratitude is the real stuff. this is the way to be able to accelerate success in any area of your life and it's instantly effective. So I found that as soon as I would say I was grateful, I could see people's eyes light up, just even my kids, my wife, it just brought a more positive feeling. So then we carry on with our kids and I'm like, okay, my son Jack one time, I'm like, he complained and I'm like, okay, give me three things you're thankful for. He says this, I am so thankful that my dad wants to play this dumb game after I say something I'm complaining about, right? Says it just like that. We all laugh. It works even though he did it with the worst attitude ever. And by the time he's doing two and three, he's laughing and he's saying stuff and it didn't matter. Gratitude is that powerful. And so I think it's like the fastest way to get ourselves back into an effortless state. And I learned about it first in the extremity of, you know, a family crisis. I found that this thing would help even in the direst of circumstances. Really? Yeah.
What crisis?
We moved into a new neighborhood a few years ago. Pretty picturesque, beautiful neighborhood. You know, there's in nature, white picket fences. I mean, it's like a lovely place, and our children seem to thrive. They're out, you know, especially one of my daughters, Eve, she's out naming chickens. I mean, yes, we have chickens, but also just up trees, she's barefoot everywhere, she's reading endlessly. I mean, she is thriving. Just can't be angry for more than like two seconds at a time. If she tries to, she'll burst out laughing. That's just who she is, until she turned 14. And then she just was like taking longer to do her chores. she's not as talkative anymore and she's a little physically awkward and we think well this is all pretty age appropriate behavior. 14 okay fine we don't think much of it. But then we take her to a physical therapy appointment just normal and he the therapist pulls over my wife's side and says you know she failed a reflex test and like the whole point is you can't fail those right? Like they're just basic health. And so the fact she didn't respond to it, he said, like, that's normally kind of neurological. Like the knee test where they hit you on the knee. Basically, there's a few different ones, but that's one of them. You can do the same with the feet and your toes curl up a certain direction. There's nothing you can do to stop that. That's what happens. But she wasn't responding in the way that she should have done to those. And so you don't have to be told twice, right? Like, for real, you're like, okay, maybe what we've seen as being Normal developmental behavior isn't at all. And we suddenly, I mean, we went to a neurologist immediately, but also just reexamined her behavior. And what followed for the next several months was a complete discombobulation of her abilities. That's like taking someone perfectly healthy and just, I don't know, like just making them go super slow. So, instead of eating a meal in, I don't know, half an hour like everyone else, it's taking her hours. Instead of being able to write a page a night easily and fast, it's taking her literally, I have it recorded, two minutes to write her own name. First, the whole right-hand side of her body stops moving at the same pace as the left. Personality change, she just has no emotion in her anymore. All the while, these neurologists, these lifelong neurologists, cannot give us even the beginning of a diagnosis.
Wow.
So there's nothing. We're getting no information.
That's scary.
Yeah, I mean, it's what it is really is the stuff that agony is made of. That is human suffering. That's in the category. There's worse stuff, but it's in the category of the worst stuff. that really opened us up to this moment. I remember in my mind's eye seeing this like two paths ahead of us. And the first path was like the heavy hard path and the other one was the easier path. And you might say, well, it's obvious which one you should take. But actually it wasn't. The temptation or even the inclination was the heavier path. What does that look like? Relentless research night and day, all nighters, every neurologist on the planet, every email you get from well-intended people saying, well, maybe she has this. You study that problem. You, you talk of nothing else. You think of nothing else. You, you get obsessed about it. I mean, that's actually the path that we felt like leaning into because you.
Wanted to figure out the solution.
Yeah.
What's the problem? What's the solution?
Yes. Because, because of an assumption that says, look, The more important it is, it's such an important thing, you have to kill yourself to go do it. And, or even just a path of even blaming. I mean, talk about holding grudges. We could have held grudges there. Why are these neurologists, they don't know anything, why can't they know something? Why is it happening to Eve? You know, she's innocent, this is unfair, this is wrong. I mean, there's a whole set of approaches I think that we, you know, really were on the edge of doing. And then I had this sort of feeling one day, like among the reactions that we were having, one was this idea, like go and read this particular article. It's an article, it's a church article, it's by Gordon B. Hinckley. And it's an article about optimism and thankfulness. And I started, I felt like really kind of guided to like listen or read to that every day. And I did almost every day for the next like four months. And what happened in that moment really, or not that experience, was that it was like my mind was being re-engineered. In the midst of this excruciating experience, there was this alternative path. There was a different way to do life that started to open up. And it began with gratitude. We will be grateful, relentlessly grateful, anything we can be grateful for. We're gonna say it, we're gonna say it out loud, we're gonna say it to each other. We're gonna catch people doing the right things. We're gonna catch the neurologist doing the right things. Well, they're willing to meet with us, thank goodness that they're willing to meet with us. That's a good thing. And what that did is it created almost instantly this kind of magical force at play. It meant that we were able to just stay optimistic when you know, you're getting sent emails every day almost from people saying, well, maybe she has this thing that's gonna kill her. Maybe she's gonna have this thing. I mean, that's what you're getting all the time from well-intended people. And it started opening us up to like, well, well, let's, let's, let's have joy through this. Let's, let's get around the piano and sing together. We're gonna still eat dinner together. We're still gonna laugh together. We're gonna still gonna. And it just kept as positive and open and healthy. And our marriage didn't collapse, our family didn't collapse. The culture was actually positive. And I would say overall, The experience, sometimes agonizing, sometimes tears, but overall I would say it was joy. And I don't say that lightly. I know what it was, but I also know what happened as we took this alternative path. And, you know, if it was a Disney story, I'd just say, oh, it all worked out perfectly, happily ever after. She got a series of treatment pretty miraculously that got her much better. But then the symptoms returned and we had to go through the whole cycle again from the beginning. And if we had taken that heavier, harder, just grinding effort, I think we'd have had nothing left of us, either physically nothing, emotionally nothing, mentally nothing, but also the culture of the family would have been so burned out. I think that's the stuff that breaks people. And instead, the culture just thrived. It really worked. And so now two years through this experience, she's gone through a whole other set of treatment. As of this conversation, she is, I would just describe her as back. Wow. Back mentally, back physically, back emotionally, just back, she is back.
Congratulations, that's amazing.
Well, it is, and it's something to be grateful about all the time for us. But also out of those experiences really came the fire for the deed for this. First to save myself and my own family, to find what are the principles and practices that make doing what matters a little easier, a little more effortless, but also now then to write about it and to share it with others. And I think it comes about at a time that it has the power of relevancy, because who isn't feeling a bit burned out right now? Who isn't feeling like, well, maybe I got good results, but through grinding effort. Do I have another year in me of this?
Yeah, now I'm exhausted.
We're exhausted. And so you've got these highly engaged, capable driven people. who are so scripted in the idea that the only path to greater success is through more hustle. Well, they're out of juice, so I guess they have to give up on their goals.
Right.
No, there's an alternative path. There's a different way, there's a better way of doing life. Starts by getting this effortless state. The gratitude is a fast mover. And the reason the gratitude is so pivotal, I think, is because When we focus on what we lack, we lose what we have. And when we focus on what we have, we gain what we lack.
That's two full pages in your book, side by side. I love that.
It was a big part of the lesson that the EVE experience taught us.
Say it one more time.
When we focus on what we lack, we lose what we have. When we focus on what we have, we gain what we lack. And that goes on and on, and that's why it's at the core of the model, because as you get into that more grateful state, you cleanse out so much clutter and you start to see the world differently. So effortless action starts to be more achievable. You start to build better relationships with the people around you. And really, if you had gun to my head, what's the most important thing in Effortless? I actually think this is a pretty good contender for that because it creates an upward momentum. It creates a spiral of success that I think brings to you the results you want. I think you can't overdo this. I think if you are grateful in everything, you will attract exactly the things that you currently lack. You'll start to see opportunities that were always there but you couldn't see them before. It's like the, you know, if you go fly fishing, which I have never done. But if you do... It's hard, I've done it once. It's hard. I did it once and I couldn't catch anything.
It was hard. Well, do you know about the hack, the...
If you put on polarized sunglasses, you know about this? Okay, so if you put on polarized sunglasses when you go fly fishing, it... It means that like the water, it refracts the reflection of the water, the light on the water, so you can see under the water. That's how it works. Because of the way that the polarized sunglasses are vertical and whatever. So it means you can see the fish underneath, which of course makes it all the more interesting.
You can throw it towards them, you.
Know where they are. And as a metaphor, I think gratitude is like that. That it allows you to see what's currently being hidden by grudges, complaining, criticizing, by old paradigms that don't serve you, old goals that no longer are interesting, actually interesting you, but they are controlling you. All of that gets in the way of seeing the opportunity that is really there. And as soon as you can rid yourself of that, you suddenly go, My goodness, there's so much here. There's so much more that's working on my behalf. There's so much in my life that I've been complaining about that actually was given to me. It was happening for me, not to me. And it just gets you into a state that's like, well, whatever the next challenge is, I'm in a better position to be able to handle it. For us, the next thing was the pandemic.
So, and you were prepared.
Yeah, well, your culture is prepared. Your state is prepared, so you can deal with it with a different, better state than you otherwise would have done.
Yeah, it's interesting. All roads go back to how we think about ourselves and about others and about the world and our thoughts and our perspective on different things. You know, when I went to India and studied meditation at a facility many years ago, four or five years ago now, they mentioned that there are two states, two human states, a beautiful state and a suffering state. The suffering state is where we're holding on to the past, resentful, angry, comparing all those different things. The beautiful state is gratitude, wanting to support other people, seeing other people succeed, appreciation, those things. And any moment we're thinking about what we lack, we suffer.
That's right.
And any moment we think about what we are grateful for, we're in a more beautiful state.
Yeah.
Peaceful state of being.
Yeah. And I want to build on that for a second. I just had Benjamin Hardy on the what's Essential podcast, and we were talking about this, and he summarized it this way. He said, are you in the gain or the gap? And I love that phrase. If you're in the gap, you're looking at what you haven't achieved yet, how life isn't the way you want it to be, where you failed. you know, what's ahead of you. If you're in, and basically he just says, you can do it that way, but you will be unhappy.
Yes.
You can live that way.
If you're in the gap. If you're in the gap of what's missing.
What's missing. What you haven't achieved, who you haven't become. But if you move into the gain, that's what progress have I already made? Who have I become so far? What did I used to be compared to now? I've become something better. If you can look at the gains you've made, he says, the difference is you simply will be happy in your journey.
Not only focusing on where I'm not, where I want to be, what's in between now and where I want to be, but think about everything I've become up until now.
That's right.
So you've got to, is it thinking about both? Is it thinking about, okay, I want to be here, But in order to get there, I've got to appreciate how far I've come where I'm at right now.
Well, I think for achievers, they will never ever get rid of 100% of the gap thinking. Yeah. Then they're never gonna do that.
How do I improve? How do I grow?
How do I earn more? How do I achieve? So we don't have to worry about that. When we try to make these adjustments, we don't have to be like, well, what if I only ever thought about the gain and never thought about the gap? Like, whatever, that's never happening to me. It's never gonna happen to you. We don't have to worry about that. The question is, could we spend a little more? What's the ratio? We spend a little more in the game and when we start to feel, you know, when we start to feel miserable, well, you're gonna find you're in the gap.
Right.
So it's time to just take a pause, be a bit grateful. I need this as a sort of mental health practice. I write like what I'm grateful for at the end of the day, try and do it each week. Haven't done it each week through the pandemic. I used to have a routine for it. Started again recently. out of a need. Not like, I am so enlightened, I must do this. If I don't do this, it is miserable. I'm miserable. So, I'm going to do it out of self-preservation. But I find it amazing, unbelievable sometimes, what I have already forgotten about in the day I'm writing it. Like, literally.
What do you mean, what you forgot about things you've done good or things that suffered?
Things that were good today that I've already forgotten moving on to the things that I've done.
Because you're comparing about something or you're lacking or I I wish I had this or that person did this thing.
Exactly. So for me, it is a therapeutic thing to each day just go, okay, what are you thankful for? Let's really think about it. Let's review the day. Sometimes there are amazing things that I have already just slipped from my memory. So we're just, I think, terribly forgetful creatures. And especially for achievement orientation, we're like so looking for the next achievement that we forget like, wow, Let's take a moment. Let's pause and enjoy the blessing of this great thing that happened today.
So, what I'm hearing you say is the greatest keys to the highest level of productivity hacking is forgiveness and gratitude.
Yeah.
Is there anything else that would go in there as the highest productivity hack?
I think inverting the question.
Okay.
Would go in there.
How would you invert it?
Well, it's just literally instead of. Well, most of the questions we ask sit in, like, the back of our head, like, we're not aware of them. So we live out answers to questions we don't even know we're asking. Our brains like Google search and we're tab somewhere along the line. We said, okay, how can you work harder so you can achieve your goal? That's just back there somewhere. And now we keep having answers. Well, I guess I need to do more here because i've not got the result I want, and I guess I need to do. you know, more hours on this issue and put more in. We're just, those are answers to a question and we're not aware of it. So we can invert that question into simply asking, how can I make this effortless? I was working with a manager. She's, she's the kind of person, she's just like the kind of person who's watching this or, or listening to this. She was 4 a.m. in the morning photoshopping. For a non-profit thing she's doing the next day with a group of youth at her church, that's what she's doing at 4 a.m. Why? Why is she doing that? Well, she's the kind of person who doesn't even take lunch because she feels guilty. Yeah. That's too selfish. Because you see, if you believe, if you have the assumption that more work equals better results, if you believe that that's an absolute statement that somehow got ingrained in you, then you'll act out all sorts of peculiar ways that are counterproductive. So I said, okay, just forget all that. Like, we're going to ask another question that's going to try and cleanse all of this. Just next time you're asked to do something, you just pause for a second to ask, how could this be effortless? So she's working at a university. She's the manager in the administration. She gets a professor who calls her and says, look, I want you to, you know, could you record a semester of my you know, my, my class. And she almost jumps into that. Meaning, like, come and take notes the whole semester or.
What do you mean? Record it.
Video recording.
Oh, sit there.
Yes.
For free or something or.
Well, she has a team that's a videography team. Got it. Several teams. One of them's a videography team. So she almost is like, well, I've got the capability. We've got the team. Let's make it happen. I'm gonna add Graphics. I'll add music. We'll have intros, outros. We'll edit the whole semester. I mean, she's get I'm gonna wow this guy. This is all going on in her head.
For free or paid?
Well, it's her managerial job, so it's paid. Got it, got it. But it's not like a new gig.
Sure.
It's just one more thing on her plate. Got it. And then she remembers, I could ask this question. What if this could be effortless? Is there a simple way to get the result we're going for here? She asks a couple more questions to him. Well, it turns out this is all for one student who has an athletic commitment so he'll miss some of those sessions, some of the classes through the semester. But he needs this class to graduate, so he's trying to accommodate this individual. They come up with a solution. One of the other students is going to record on the iPhone whatever classes he misses and email it to him. That's it. Ten minutes call saves four months of work for her, her videography team, everything. And she just steps back and she's just like, what just happened?
Wow.
She would have gone down this one path thinking it was the only path. This is the way to achieve. Right. And she achieved the same result with 10 minutes of work. That story is so available to us again and again and again. I am telling you, it's like I don't hate to use the word magic because it sounds so like whatever, but it is almost like that. It's the closest I've come across to like, Human dynamic magic is asking this question. We just don't ask it, so our brain can't search for an effortless solution.
So, the greatest productivity hack is asking the question, How can I make this more effortless?
Yeah, I think those three that you said, I would say yes.
Forgiveness, gratitude, and asking the question.
Yes.
How can I make this effortless? Yes.
I was just talking to somebody yesterday who spent years in the military. Right, talk about an experience that's gonna train you in embrace the suck, do the hard way journey, right?
Discipline, hard work.
It's all about hard work. I'm not against hard work. It's just not the only strategy. I'm not against it. It's just not the only question we can ask if we want to achieve something. He gives me the scenario. So he got to the point where he's in special ops. He has a specific situation. if they need to get in, so he was in Iraq, Afghanistan, there would be times he had a high value target, they have to get to the door, these metal doors, they're like barricaded, and they're gonna blow these things up. And the way that they would do it is that they would put explosives on the hinges of the door, blow them up, and then they can get inside. He said, now the problem with that is that it's super loud, so you draw massive attention to yourself. What's going on here? Exactly, and the whole community, the whole area suddenly there, That increases your risk. It makes it harder to entry because you got this whole hole in the door. It's just this crazy environment.
Smoke everywhere, you can't see anything.
Exactly. So actually, it is a pretty rough way to achieve your objective, but that was all they had. What's an effortless way? Well, he had somebody on his team who was the son of a carpenter who said, Look, if you just get me a hydraulic drill, I can do this in half a second. We'll just take the hinges off. There'll be no sound, no No smoke, no explosives, no danger, no additional risk. Well, that's the effortless path. And there are so many ways to do this, but it's just like we just don't know that that path is even there because we're not asking that question. If you don't search in Google for X, then you're never going to get answers to X. You're going to find lots and lots of answers for something else.
It's funny. I interviewed someone who that was his job as a Navy SEAL where he was the guy who put the bombs on the door to or on the wall to blow it up so that they could all enter. Right. That was his job. Right. And there's a lot of risk with the hard way also where what if one of the bombs goes off when you're deploying it and then the person dies.
Right.
What if the shrapnel that comes from those bombs the effects of it hurting people around there.
Right.
Also, you can only do that job for so long from my memory of what he said, because I guess either you can't go far enough away or you can't get enough barrier from that where it actually hurts your ears so much from the explosion over and over again.
Wow.
That I think he left, if my memory is correct, because of like the ear stuff, like the explosion caused so much in the ear where he's like, okay, it's too damaging.
Right.
So the hard way, the forceful way has a lot of repercussions.
It's a great metaphor for what you just said for the argument against the exhausting always hard and always hustle strategy. Yeah, there's a time that just force is great. It helps.
Yes.
But what if you can find a better leverage? What if you can find a different path to achieve the results you want?
There's a thing called, you mentioned leverage just now. There's a thing in productivity hacking called delegation.
Yeah, you're right.
What's your thoughts on delegation versus leverage?
Oh, that's interesting. I mean, I think of, so structurally from the book, we've talked a lot about effortless state. Effortless action is how to make an action easier one time, which is useful in all sorts of settings. But the final section of Effortless Results, what I mean by that is to create effort one time that produces results many, many times over for you. They flow to you.
Give me an example.
Well, you asked about delegation, and this would be an example. If I can hire someone that I trust highly, by which I would use Warren Buffett's, you know, Three I's, right? Integrity, Intelligence, Initiative. If I can hire someone like that, if I can set up for them a high trust agreement, which I outlined in that chapter in the book, then they can operate working for me, working as a team effortlessly many, many times in a row. If I hire the wrong person, give them a low trust agreement, which basically means I didn't even come up with an agreement, we just did it randomly and kind of hacked our way through it. then I can end up getting poor results many, many times over. So I don't see delegation itself as inherently effortless or exhausting. It's doing it right, setting it up one time right is worth the effort. Yes, you want to throw a person at a problem. When you're an entrepreneur, you know how.
Quick you can be like, I need someone in there to solve this because I don't have the time.
You do. You do. And it's very tempting.
That blows up most of the time.
Well, that's it. And so you get poor results many, many times over.
And you're resentful. And you go back to the thoughts of like, why is this person here? You have a spot in your book about this. Why is this person here? And you think about that for years until you finally let them go, or they screw you over, like happened in your book, where someone took all the money.
Yes.
And then it's a bigger problem longer.
Yeah, I mean, Steve Hall hires somebody to work in his accounting department. They find after few years, a $300,000 deficit. I asked her about it. She says, well, you know, it's just an error, you know, it's my fault. And after that, they didn't trust her properly, but they just were running too fast. They thought it would be economic to just leave her in that place. And in the end, they said, you know, it went on for a couple more years and it was then $2 million. And she, you know, she texts everybody, I'm quitting. And they leave. They never even saw her again. So he then said, okay, I've made a false decision here. I thought I was taking the quick path, but really this is the expensive path because of the residual effect of hiring the wrong person. So if you hire the right person, they went through a thorough process, the three Is, found somebody, that person has just been a dividend every single day. It doesn't have to be micromanaged, doesn't have to be controlled. You don't have to put someone watching over them because they have the integrity already. And trust makes everything so much faster, so much easier. If you hire someone that you trust, everything is easier. If you hire someone you don't trust, everything is harder.
And it's hard once they've lost their trust a few times over and over again. If you don't make a decision on how to shift that quickly, you're gonna be thinking about, can I trust them in the back of your mind?
Yeah, I think so.
You either need to let them go or create a new agreement and commitment move forward and then let the thought of I can't trust this person go.
Yeah, I think you're right. If you have a situation where there's sort of low trust in a relationship, you sort of owe it to that person and to yourself to do basically either let them go, like, Hey listen, it's not working. Let you get on with your life, I'm gonna get on with mine. That is, I think, a legitimate option. Option two is maybe we didn't get an agreement really clear here. Let's reset. and you have the reset conversation. And it could be in the reset that they go, I don't want to do that. And now you know, so now it's good. Now we know it isn't going to work because you don't want to do what it is I'm asking you to do. But getting the agreement is written down like a social agreement, I call it a high trust agreement in the book, where you're clear on what are the results, what are the resources available to you, how will the accountability be given? Is it once a week I want a written report from you? Is it once a week we're going to have a one-on-one, but you get clear on this. And if you get clear enough on it, then sometimes you can turn a lower trust situation into a high performing situation.
What are the factors of this high trust contract we should be thinking about? And there you have a whole spot in the book about this. Yeah.
So, I mean, the first thing, I think the most important thing is results. Getting absolutely clear what is the right result. What do you want from this person? getting agreement that you both agree and understand what that is. When people aren't clear about what they are to deliver on, I mean, think of how frustrating that is for them and for you and for everyone involved. And before I go through the other steps on it, let me just make the one broader point, which is that every relationship has three parties to it. Right, there's person A, there's person B, and then there's the agreement.
The agreement to the relationship.
The agreement to the relationship.
The challenge, before we get into that, the challenge with most romantic relationships and business relationships is the uncommunicated expectation.
Right.
That one person says, well, I am assuming they know the agreement, but they haven't communicated it.
100%.
And the other person is like, well, that's not what you ever said. I didn't agree to that. And I thought you thought this thing.
What you have is by default, you actually have created a low trust agreement. So sometimes it isn't them, and it isn't you, which is what you think it is, what's either them and I'm blaming them, and sometimes you go, well, they seem like they're okay sometimes. Maybe it's me, and neither of those are helpful. Very often it is the agreement that you have come to that is unclear. I mean, how clear are you on the results? Not clear. You know, how clear are you on the rules of the of how we're going to work together? The rules are unclear. You have a set of rules. I have a different set of rules. We're violating them all the time with each other. We haven't got clear about the rules. Resources might seem a little different in a romantic relationship, but in a corporate employee relationship, it's important. What resources do they have available? What is reasonable for them to use? Even in a you know, even in a romantic relationship, you could have, you know, we make these kinds of decisions together, and these kinds of decisions are independent. You could get clear about that, what resources are available to help you with it. And then I think, you know, ultimately, the, the final, most important part of it is, is this accountability that you have a clear way of reporting that'd be the the alliteration, the are there, reporting it so that you're just not taking that for granted.
Clear results, rules, resources, accountability.
Was there something else I missed? Yeah, those were the ones. I think there's another one in the book, but I can't remember it.
Someone should read the book. It's all good, yeah. Yeah, I think that works for romantic relationships as well. If you don't have clear results of what you're looking to create, which could be a vision for our relationship, what are we looking to have here? Do we want to be have a family? Do we want it to be a healthy relationship? Are we looking to make an impact as a relationship? What is the results? The rules, here's what is acceptable, not acceptable, the boundaries you could say. Don't cross these boundaries, I won't cross these for you. How are we sharing these resources? That's right. To make the relationship healthier. And then accountability, how are we holding each other accountable?
Yeah. So it works in business and intimate, I think. Yes, I think so. I mean, I'm thinking here about a conversation I just had with Eve Rodsky, who wrote a book called Fair Play. And one of the, now I'm down a rabbit hole on this, but she works with these highly dysfunctional, high net worth families. And so it's like Knives Out, you see the movie Knives Out?
I think I watched part of it, I know what you mean. Yes, yes.
She works with the real Knives Out families. Yes. And one of the things she learned is that you have to try and create, I mean one of the things she just said to me the other day, this is what made me think of it, is that she thinks in every employee relationship there should be a prenup agreement. And I love this idea and I think it aligns with this idea of the high trust agreement because every employee relationship is going to end. And yet we use as our model like marriage and family. We talk about that, well we're a family here and you know, It's like, no, you're not. You know, it's something else. And what is valuable about employee relationships is that you're not family, that you can say, we can work together, collaborate together for a year, for five years, maybe we do it for 20 years. But one day we're not going to. One day. Because we're not married. And yet we operate as if it's going to be forever. And I think that actually introduces a lot of dysfunction onto teams. And I think what you need is like, okay, One day we weren't going to do this. Let's make sure we can do this in a way that we can leave.
And be okay with that.
Yeah.
Have you heard of the book Conscious Uncoupling?
Yes.
Katherine Woodward Thomas, who's been on here, is amazing. She's awesome and she's helped many people consciously uncouple as opposed to the hard way of doing it, the effort way of doing it, which is I hate you and you hate me and lawyers and mitigation and I'm stealing your money and I own I deserve this. Blow ups for years. Anger and sadness. It's like, what's the effortless way to do this?
It's a full circle back because you can think about even the biblical idea, which I think is so applicable, which is to agree with thine adversary quickly.
And not that's 10 years of dragging out something.
Yes, because it kills people, man.
It's exhausting.
I talked to somebody the other day and they were talking about their brother and they said, this guy, and he's made a lot of money, but he spent a third of his life has been in a huge, like, legal connection.
It's so exhausting.
Who? You. You say, are you making a bargain? I need that. I want that. I'm gonna get that. It's like you've heard of it, and I've actually seen it now, so it's not just a metaphor, but, like, the monkeys who get their hands caught in something and they can't get their.
They're holding on to the.
And they can't get. They can't pull their hand out of the, you know, whatever the container is.
Yeah.
The trap. The trap is, yeah, I've seen it online.
It's like a coconut or something, right?
Is it like a coconut and they can't get out? The one I saw was actually like kind of a little, almost like a little cave on this mound. And so they just, as soon as their hand was in it, they just couldn't get away because they wanted to hold onto it. We do that. We want the thing we want, but actually often we end up without the thing we want. And we do it for 10 years or years and all the emotional stress and all of it. It is the harder way. And let it go. You get all that time back, all that emotion back. Get on with creating the thing that you want to create. I think it's, I truly think it is a more effortless way of doing it.
The employee prenup agreement, what would that look like?
Well, I mean, I don't think it's, I mean, I just think it says, when we get to an end, I mean, different to a marriage, 'cause you don't, even in a prenup with a marriage, you're not wanting to assume it's gonna end. But with this, you know it will. So it just says when it ends, we're going to try and honor these ways of doing it. These rules, this is the thing. When you leave, we'll do it this way and we'll ask you to do the same. It just, I think it just the contemplation. It's my kind of advice. The first day of your job, you should be saying, what's my exit strategy? Not because you'll know the answer, but because it's going to happen one day, so you might as well understand that from the beginning, rather than, okay, well it's not going well, I'm gonna keep on working harder. I'm gonna keep doing this. I'm gonna do it for years and years and pour more and more of my lifeblood into this to make it work and make it work, 'cause I have to. 'Cause you don't have to. What a liberating thing for everyone involved. It's okay.
So it's getting to the state of mind first, where we're letting go, destroying, letting go, releasing these negative thoughts, these beliefs that hold us into a low level state.
Right.
So that we can have a more effortless state. And then the action.
Action, which we didn't, we kind of skipped.
Yeah, so effortless action. So we get into a state of mental flow where we are free from the prisonist thoughts that keep us trapped.
Right.
And at a two as opposed to a 10 emotionally. Then from there, we can take it into action. So how do we create an effortless action state?
Well, the effortless action is a natural-- I can connect these three dots here, these three areas by thinking about, you know, when you have somebody, MBA, they come up to do a free throw, you see these three steps.
You talked about the girl 94% free throw average.
Oh my goodness, she's amazing.
And WNBA, that's amazing.
Yes, she's the most successful free thrower across the NBA WNBA like in history.
What's her name, Susan or Sue?
Yeah, Dune.
Dune, something Dune.
Yeah. And, and, you know, I think about that, too.
Something like 94 of something, right?
So it's, so basically she never misses. Right. I mean, that is what, that's the bottom line.
It's going in. You found her.
She's making two shots. Exactly. And, and so, but, but, but anyone you see doing this, you've watched them do the three steps. The first thing they're doing is they're getting to the You know, they're finding the dot, they're dribbling the ball three times. Why are they even doing that?
It's just a ritual to get into an effort.
To clear their mind. You almost can see them doing it. Try to clear out the noise so they're not distracted by all the fans that are trying to distract them and all the pressure that they can feel and all the things that would get them out of being able to do the job well. That's step one. Step two, she says it this way. She's like, just do it the simplest possible way. You don't overthink it, you don't try over try it. you know, so it's, you know, you're lifting your elbow to the square, you're doing it simply as you've done it practiced many times effortless action. And then the effortless result of course is that the people that are best at this like her, the ball almost just bounces back to them. They don't even almost have to move. The result can be done again and again and again. So that's how to connect the three state, action and results. But the action is really about how do you simplify, declutter the job at hand? There's a few specific questions that I think help. Any time you have an essential project, you say, you say, what does done look like? What is the first obvious step you can take? So you're not worried about the hundredth step or the thousandth step. You just the first obvious step. And then you say, okay, well, how can I? How can I take a 10 minute microburst on that thing? How can I, what are the minimum number of steps I can take in order to achieve the result I want? And then if it's a long ongoing project or process, how can I pace myself so that I'm within an effortless pace on the journey? Those are kind of the five questions I think that really help. And you can apply it to one project.
Yeah.
Just talking to somebody on a podcast, I said, okay, what's essential to you that you are under investing in. They said eating healthy. Okay, so now we know. And it really matters to them because of a variety of reasons. They're not doing it. They're not doing it. It's in the gap.
It's in the gap.
I said, okay, how can we make it effortless? I said, what does done look like? He said, well, it just means that I have food when I'm hungry, so I don't wait till I'm past hungry and eat junk. That's what success looks like. That's what done looks like. I said, okay, what's the first obvious step for doing that? He said, well, I would just get one of these services that, you know, they're gonna automatically send it, meal plan, delivers it, delivers it. And what's the first step? Well, I just search for that. I'd search on Google for something in the area. I said, what would you do within first 10 minutes, a microburst? What can you do in 10 minutes for that? He says, well, actually, I think within 10 minutes I could probably do it, solve it. I put in my credit card, choose the meals, and set it up with my address. Done. And there was this kind of weird pause. And I'm like, Was that really it? He's like, yeah, that would do it. I said, How long have you been struggling with this problem? He's like, Years. 20 years. Literally, he's like 20 years. 10 minutes to solve a problem that has been with him for 20 years. So that's what effortless action looks like. It's asking a few questions, a very simple process that helps take something that would either be procrastinated, you don't even start it, Or you've been such a perfectionist about it, you don't finish it.
Yeah, it's removing the obstacle of saying in that scenario of like, okay, well, every Sunday I'm going to the grocery store and I'm going to meal plan and I'm going to cook all afternoon. And then I'm going to get the plastic bins and put them in for myself. And it's going to take all day just to do this one action. And we think about that and we're like, that's exhausting. So you don't even bother. Because you're like, I don't have the time, I don't have the energy.
I'm drained right now. Let me eat a Snickers. Right.
Because I'm emotionally drained, I need sugar.
And you owe, you just, what happens, it's like when you look at a slide, you know if somebody has a presentation and there's 500 words on the slide, we don't read the first 400 words and give up. We do like the pre-scan. We're like, am I ever gonna read that?
I'm never gonna read that.
Yeah, I give up. We give up before we even begin. It's too hard. It's too hard. And so if we perceive something as overwhelming, we just don't even get going with it. There's a small, tiny example in my own life, but while I was writing the book, I'm like thinking about these things and I look around my office, I want to clean it up and I see a printer on the floor. It's been there two weeks. We've replaced the printer. There's no big deal, but now I don't know what to do with this printer. I have not spent hours thinking about it, but every time I think about it, it's just a bit overwhelming. Do I give it away? Do I sell it? If I sell it, where would I sell it? And I don't know. Do I throw it away? Well, if I throw it away, I have to find a digital recycling place. That's all enough in my head that 10 seconds, five seconds of thinking about it, I'm like, oh no, I'm doing something else. And that's why it's there for two weeks. So I ask the different question, right? How can I make this effortless? And I look up to some workers that are outside and I'm like, I wonder if they want it. I walk out there, ask if they want it, they do want it. Within two minutes of asking the question, I don't just have a solution, it's executed. They said yes, I come back in, I give it to them, it's done. But that's like, again, it's like kind of full circle. It's like asking that question delivers options that previously weren't available. Two weeks hasn't been available because I'm asking it, I'm not asking the right question.
Here's a first world dilemma that I get a lot of our audience. They say, Louis, when they're thinking about their next move, maybe they've had a little bit of success, maybe they're, have their basic needs met and they've got some money coming in and they say this to me all the time. Louis, I don't know what to do next. I have so many passions, so many things I love to do. I want to do them all. When someone has the first world problem of lots of options, wanting to do them all, and yet they become a master of nothing and they put a lot of energy spread thin across everything. They get very little results. What do you say to someone on how to make a better decision on what actions, where should they should put a majority of their energy on those things? Should they spread it across 10 passions? Should they find one passion, should it be one main passion and two side passions?
Yes.
Like obviously when you put energy on one essential thing, that thing expands and grows. like you talked about in your first book, and it becomes more effortless. When you put effort on lots of things, it becomes hard.
Right.
So what is the balance when people that have lots of passions?
I mean, I really relate to this. I struggle with this myself. I find the world fascinating. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I mean, that's, you know, in a sense, I wrote essentialism for me, right? To try and go, well, is there a time at which that outlives its usefulness. Yes, it's good to be passionate and interested, but do you get too spread too thin and you don't achieve what you want to? I think I would say that at any given time you ought to know what the priority breakthrough thing is in your career.
What does that mean? Priority breakthrough thing?
Well, it's like, I mean, So for me right now, the breakthrough is that this book Effortless, well first of all, my kind of mantra, maybe it's not a good mantra, but it was like, don't write a rubbish book. Right?
Don't write a bad book.
Don't. And for real, like the risk of that was high, because if you have a book that does well, the chances that the next one can be bad, and I think if I'd written a book right away, I think it just would have been bad, and I didn't fortunately paused, waited until I was like, there's something I really want to say and it felt the right time to do it. So that would be like the priority objective and one of the things around it is that you kind of know it because you feel it that's right, so it feels mentally right, emotionally right, but also you know that if you achieve this, it's a breakthrough. A lot of people that will start doing, you know, like they want the career tent to go higher, to be bigger, and they do it by like doing more and more 10 poles at the same height. And now they've got 10 projects on the road. Well, if they do all 10 of them, they won't go to the next level. They're actually just going to be busier doing the same stuff. So I think it's always key, what you're looking for, what I call the 90% rule, is what is it? A 90% above clearly yes, definite. If we could do that, it would change everything. If I could do that, it would take me to the next level. For me, the word is contribution. I want to make a higher and higher contribution. So, I'm not sitting around going, How can I make more money? What's the thing that will make more money? But it is, what can I do that will impact 2X, 10X impact in the world? And there's a lot of stuff that won't do that. And you could do it superbly well and you still be exactly the same level. And so, what I'm trying to do is, well, what's the thing that would break through to the next level of contribution? I think that's kind of the question you're looking for.
Interesting.
What would it be for you?
I'm just trying to say so if people had a lot of these things that they really cared about though, would they have to eliminate those things and just focus on the breakthrough thing first and put those things on the side burner?
When I wrote Essentialism, I think I probably was leaning towards that. eliminate the other stuff completely.
Yeah. And focus on the thing you can make the biggest impact with.
Yes. And I still think as a basic principle that's not bad. But I think I would be more nuanced now about it. I would say, like, for example, I had, had Patrick McGinnis on the show, and he's the guy that first came up with the term FOMO, like fear of missing out. And I really, really love talking with Patrick McGinnis and, and. One of the things he introduced me to was the idea of the 10% entrepreneur. Meaning, okay, so you choose your main thing, that's your main stuff. But if you say you shouldn't have 10 other things that you're going, Hey, I'm trying to do 10% on 10 different things in 10 different directions. I don't think that's breakthrough success is likely at all. But you say, Here's my main thing and I'm going to have one additional thing. I'm really interested in it. I think it could be something, but I can't yet. to just spend all of my time on it. So I'm going to start investing in it. I'm going to learn. I'm going to see if I still have interest beyond... No, that was kind of a hobby. That's fine. I'll put that aside. Try something else. So I think I would say, look, choose the big thing and then be very selective and careful about the other things that you do. And I do think there's a lot of stuff you do have to say not now, not yet. It doesn't mean I don't like it. It doesn't mean I don't care. But if I say yes to this, I'm going to be saying no to something more important, more breakthrough.
Yeah, my friend Rory Vaden has a saying called procrastinate on purpose.
Yeah.
He's like, you've got all these things that you, that are important to you and you are excited about and you may want to do now, but it's not the most important thing right now. So procrastinate on it, have it here, but don't put a time and attention on it. Put it in the back burner, procrastinate on it. until it's the right time, until you want to add that to the plate right now, but do the thing right now that's going to help make that more effortless in the future.
I think so. I mean, essentially, it's really about the idea of doing the right things at the right times for the right reasons. And so, it's not just the right thing. Time is enormously important and I think does affect prioritization. There are some times when things come up and the opportunity is here now. So, you take You're opportunistic about it because this is what's here. The person has emailed, the opportunity is here, the moment is here. So you go with it because momentum is so important. But I think the thing to be aware of is, is this thing I'm doing creating motion sickness or momentum?
Interesting. Yeah. What's motion sickness being? You're all over the place, you can't.
Think clearly, Yeah, I mean you're just being dragged in another direction. It's just one more thing and you're like, I don't see how it fits together. It doesn't feel like it's cohesive. It doesn't feel like it's taking me in a direction that's meaningful. It's just one more thing. And the thing about motion sickness is that you feel like things are moving fast, but actually you're not moving anywhere. You're just spinning.
Yes, it's kind of like the difference between Gosh, I've written this down. Sorry to interrupt you there.
No, that's alright.
Between the keys to productivity and momentum versus busy work and just writing things off a checklist.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, the motion sickness is busy work. It's like I'm doing a lot of things, but nothing's actually building.
A test of this for me, and I fail at this most days right now, but the test is the difference between a to-do list and a done for the day list. Mm-. The to-do list is endless. So really, you don't have to make many decisions on a to-do list. You just go, here's all the stuff, write it all down. It feels good writing it down. And if you could do all of that stuff, that would be great. You'd like that. The done for the day list is something my wife and I started using. And what it, what it forces you to do is to actually think about what would be satisfying to you.
You say if you accomplish by the.
End of the day if I accomplish this stuff I would feel satisfied and I can be done and feel good about it so you don't just go well it's six o'clock I keep going seven o'clock I'll keep going 8 9 10 the to-do list is still there you get to the end of the day you go to sleep oh my goodness I can't believe all the stuff I didn't get done this is this is the lifestyle we've created on an endless to-do list the done for the day list what I think the challenge with it is, is that you have to really think what would make me feel done for today. There's a list. I do have a list. I made it, but the thing is I made it like two days ago. So it's not really a done for the day list. Maybe it was more like a done for the week list. But if I do those things this week, I will feel great. Those are really solid achievements. And the idea of the done for the day list or the done for the week list is once you're done, you go, okay, guilt free. I'm done. I'm not, you know, like my wife and I were like, you don't get in the hot tub or in the bath and then sneakily get on Amazon and order stuff and do email on your phone. There's no sneaky work allowed. You're done for the day, so you can start taking relaxation like a responsibility. You actually relax purposefully, intentionally. You figure out the things that you enjoy doing that you like to do. you create fun rituals around them. And this is so important for peak performance on a sustainable level.
So smart. I mean, it's how do people learn to not beat themselves up if they get these things done for the day and they have four more hours of like work time.
Totally. I think the beating yourself up when you're not working is as clear an evidence that we need to choose a new paradigm as any there is. You do productive work on the things that mattered. You get them done and you, but I'm guilty. I'm not doing more. What is that? What kind of a reversed world is that? You are working, how is that? Living to work rather than working to live. What it shows is that we've got skill and competence in working and being productive and not skill in how to relax. And a lot of overachievers do not even know how to relax. like they don't know how, they're novices at it. And it's really important that we learn because we are not machines that can work 24/7 like in the industrial age. We are humans that work in cycles and rhythms. And if you try and work all the time and hustle, I mean, I don't care. Yes, you can find one of this person, that person who seemed to be an exception to this rule. I can point to you a million or two million people that prove it. Right. Right. That if you just try to do it all the time, you will burn out, you will have worse relationships, you will enjoy your life less. So I think the key though is to start designing relaxation that we want to do. Because I think there's something very awkward about like, okay, now I'm relaxing, I'm taking spring break off, I'm taking the weekend off, I'm having a long weekend and we got nothing. and we just got blank time. No one likes that. And certainly overachievers don't like that. You just feel awkward and weird and it's like, well, my phone's right there. I think I'm just going to get on my phone.
Right.
So I think it's one of the things I like. My wife and I have done this, and I think it's useful, is to make a list of 10 or 20 things that you. That really create joy for you, that you enjoy doing. You like relaxing in this way. This is good for you. you don't have to justify this list to anyone, but you gotta be honest about it. And once you have this list, they become like building blocks that you can start matching and connecting together in order to create, like if you have a day, my wife and I have done it before where I've taken her list 20 things, and I go, it's her birthday, what am I gonna do?
Let's do three or four of these things.
Let's look at these and I can look at the list and go, oh, if I combine any number of these, it's going to be a good day for her. Because these are the things that she likes. My list is very different to her list, but now it's useful to know that. So if she's designing an evening for me or a day for me or we kind of come up with something, what are we going to do on our vacation?
Vacations can be quite stressful for a lot of people.
You almost need a vacation from the vacation when you get home. They can be, and also they can be miserable if you you don't have design in them. Yes. It's not enough. Oh, I went to this place. I went to Hawaii. It's going to be great. It just sounds like such an awful first world problem. But. But I. I. My wife and I went to Hawaii once. We didn't enjoy it at all. Right. It was actually. I don't know. It just was. We just hadn't figured out what was purposeful about it for us or what kind of. What does she like to do? What is enjoyable for her? What's enjoyable for me? Let's construct something around those activities. And once we learned that, we're like, okay, that's it. You can't just go and suddenly sit on, I don't know, sit on a beach somewhere and assume that that's going to be satisfying to you. Fulfilling to someone, yeah. Relaxing to you. But you gotta, by figuring out what are the building blocks, the things that actually are relaxing and enjoyable, you start to have competence in relaxing. You take relaxing as a responsibility. Relaxing is a responsibility. Do you relax well? I relax better now. Let me try and be like, give me a really honest answer to that question. Do I relax well? Uh, I...
If you have to think about it...
I know, I know, that means you're... Pause makes me guilty by, you know, pause is too long to now be fully credible in this area. There are a bunch of things I love to do to relax.
You just don't do them enough.
Yeah, I don't, here's what I haven't done well about them. Like I'll give you them, I love to play tennis. I love to play tennis with my son. You know, he's enjoying that more and more now. I like to be in the hot tub. That's a very relaxing place. I think it's very, you know, it's kind of beautiful little area. The experience is calming. I would say on those things, I'd love to go on a walk with my wife, like for an hour. We were doing that almost every day until like the last two or three weeks. But, and we did it the last two days. That's, I would say we do pretty well. And that's that we both like it. We don't bring our phones. We just go out there and we just, you know, talk and connect. We're normally all over the place. She's got different agenda to me. It's fine. We're just there to listen to each other, just hear what's going on in each other's world. That is a pretty relaxing experience. The tennis, I have been amazed at how little I've done over the last year of that. And I don't even know why. I love it. I love doing it. And I just haven't done it. I think the pandemic just has drained us all a little more than there's a little less oomph at the end of the day to go do that maybe. But we just started that up more. What was the other one I mentioned? Yeah, hot tub. Oh no, I give myself an A on a hot tub.
You can go there every day.
I go there every day. And I do meetings from hot tubs. That's cool.
Yeah.
It's a little bit more relaxed.
Fair enough. Fair enough.
Checking the phone.
That's more like, that's more like, how.
Do you make the most out of meetings? If I'm doing, yeah, that's more like what we were saying before about making it a ritual funner. If I'm gonna be in a meeting, I just realized, I'm like, literally, we're here in California.
You're paying to be in California.
You got the weather outside, and I stay in a little office through the day. Might as well be outside doing it there. It's made it, I feel like it's a little weird for people when they call and I'm like, I just always confess it.
Even when they say- They can't even.
Hear it, but I just feel like if they hear anything, it'll be weird. So I'm always just like, oh listen, I'm in a hot tub, I'm just letting you know. And we just fess up about it. That's so funny. That has been good and I'll do the same with the kids at night and I find that good relaxing time.
That's great. So I don't know, that's a mixed bag.
What is the, what do high achievers.
Get wrong about life? If they did one thing.
What does high achievers get wrong in life?
And if they had one, if they could do one thing to make their life better or more effortless, what would that be?
I feel like the primary thing high achievers get wrong is that they go after the wrong thing. They just get on some focused task You know, high achievers know how to achieve. That is what they know how to do. So if a high achiever, hey, I'm gonna run a marathon. Yes, I put my money on them. They're gonna do it. They know how to do that.
They'll figure it out.
The problem is, is if you target the wrong goal, right? You are, you suddenly you're running the marathon, but actually what you want is a great relationship with your wife. You want a great family. You're like, you're focusing on the wrong thing. that I think is the primary error that otherwise successful people make. So we could describe it as unsatisfying success. You've achieved it. You weren't satisfied because it didn't really matter. It wasn't the right goal you went after. I would say that's error number one. And I just say error number two is doing it in the wrong way. It's like the weightlifter who's lifting with their back instead of the correct way. It's like a baker who's kneading everything by hand rather than with a machine. It's just like doing it the hard way, the wrong way, and it just costs them too much.
What's the question they should be asking themselves?
Well, I mean, there's two questions that I would say have changed my life. and literally I've written a book about each of them now. One is what is essential? What really is essential? What is truly important? Another way of asking that same question that cuts through all the clutter is what is one thing that's absolutely essential that I'm under investing in right now? That's all to me, that's all like the same question. But the last one is a slightly more precise way of asking it.
What is essential that I'm under investing in right now?
Yes. Because you already know that the thing about that question, you already know it matters. So you don't have to waste time. What matters? What is essential to me? You already know.
And that's usually relationships and health. For high achievers, it's like they're not investing in their health and they're putting it in their work or their accomplishments in general, not everyone.
I think so.
Or it's like, I'm putting all my.
Time and energy on achieving that my relationships suffer. Yes, I think that's right. And so that then leads to why I think that's the biggest error, because you get to the end of your life or even a midlife crisis and you go, My goodness, yes, I achieved all these things. I've got the money.
I got the money or I didn't.
But no meaning and love and health. No meaning, no health, no strong relationship. Yeah, that's a fool's bargain.
What's really essential that you're under investing in right now?
Okay, let me pause so I'm really honest with the question. What's essential for me that I'm under investing in? Yeah, I would say it is like really relaxing. I would say it's the thing we were just talking about. And I would give myself now that I'm reflecting on a second time, reasonably low grade. I don't mean over the last six months or the last year. I mean like, the last week, two weeks, month. And, and I've done a variety of things to relax in that time, but I just, like, literally in the last 24 hours, I'm like, I pushed awfully hard on Monday.
Yeah.
Like, and I don't mean that sounds weird. Monday was crazy. But it actually was. It was so intense with so many decisions, right? High stakes decisions, one after another. The end thing I did was an interview with Chris Evans in the UK's big radio star, and somebody I listened to when I was growing up. And that was my 10 to 11 slot, which I wouldn't normally do, but it all made sense. It was better than 1:00 a.m., which.
Is what they'd offered originally. 10 to 11 at night?
At night. Early morning there, UK time. Early morning there, time, and pre-recorded so that we didn't do it in the middle of the night. All of that actually felt great. But here's a thing that I've noticed, that you've got to have as a standard something like Don't use up more energy today than you can recuperate today. And certainly not over a week period where you say, okay, well today I pushed a little more, but I need to pull back the next day so that over a week I am rejuvenating my energy. And I didn't do that yesterday. So I just hit yesterday like a normal day, not realizing, man, you just used up a lot of juice to get through and to succeed at the things you did today. And so it just meant that by the end of Tuesday, I was both my wife and I were both feeling a bit frazzled. And instead of going, Of course we are. So therefore we're just going to chill. We don't have to be productive right now. We're okay. We're still thinking, Wow, you know, we must, we must, we ought to do a bit more. We ought to do something.
It's kind of like my friend, Shawn Stevenson, who's a sleep master, talks about sleep debt that if you are burning the midnight oil per se or going to bed at 2 a.m. waking up at 7 or getting five hours of sleep, four hours of sleep, pulling all nighters, he's like that's a debt that your body can never make up.
And.
You can't oversleep to try to compensate that. But doing it over and over and over again is just gonna make it worse. You need to have time to rest, you need to have the time to recover and heal your body, your mind and all the things in your body. And you want to try to sleep more the next day, but it's not always going to be like the thing that equalizes it. What I'm hearing you say is that when you overexert your energy in one day, if you do that over and over and over again, whether you sleep or not, you're going to be tired and exhausted.
Yeah. So you need to find time to.
Rest, recover, relax the next day or the next week, whatever it is. If you're in a book tour, I get it.
Sure.
It's like there's got to be a balance.
The term that comes to mind now that you use sleep debt is relaxing debt. And that's like a new term to me in this conversation and I like it because it names that problem.
Relaxation debt.
Yeah, and you can be doing some relaxation, but if you start to not have enough of it, it's not just the same as sleep. You might be getting enough sleep, but you aren't getting enough mental just release. It's like if you have a bow on a guitar, on a violin, like if you keep it strung all the time, it will lose its spring. You gotta have times when it's relaxed or released and then you tighten it again. If you aren't doing enough of the relaxation.
When you put it back in the box, you gotta unloosen. You can't keep it tight.
Yeah, why not?
You gotta unloosen it, right?
And the same for us.
It's interesting. I mean, this is why, you know, professors take time off, you know, months, six months at a time.
Sabbatical.
It was talking to a pastor, Pastor Michael Todd recently, who's a pastor of a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I believe it is. And he said one of the greatest pieces of advice a mentor of him, of his told him was that no matter what you do, you're here, his mission is to serve God. Serve people and serve God. And he does it all day, all night long, right? That's his mission. He said, the best thing you'll ever do is take a month off where you do nothing. You don't show up for anyone. You're not on your phone, you're not on social media, you're not at the church, you're not serving people. That's your time. And he goes, There's so many people out there that need my help, that need my service, that need my time or attention. He goes, you, will be so burned out if that's all you do all day. for years that you'll lose yourself. And he says every year he takes a month where he's not on the phone, he's not doing those things. And he's there with himself, his family, his wife, vacationing, relaxing. And he's like, I get more great ideas in the rest and relaxation time. I'm more rejuvenated to go have passion and energy for the other 11 months of the year.
Yeah.
That I, that the best book, the book, he had a book that came from that was the number one New York Times bestseller.
Self.
It's like I wouldn't have written that number one New York Times bestseller. The idea came from relaxing and resting, not always in service, but having that time as well.
Well, I mean, there's another biblical idea there, right, which is Sunday.
Sunday, right.
Seventh day, right. You actually say, you know, so if God has to rest, you know, we really have a full justification from that, from a religious point of view, from a Christian perspective, to say, well, from Judeo-Christian point of view, which is like, yeah, it is, you're supposed to have a day. You're supposed to have, I mean, that's what Sabbath comes from, right? From the same word as Sabbath, you're supposed to have time for the other, it's kind of an other type of productivity. I mean, you can think about it that way. It's just the rhythm and everything has a season so that the best ideas come.
You're speaking my language. which was seasons because as an athlete, there's a preseason, there's the season, there's the postseason, there's these different seasons. There's the playoffs and then the postseason, right? It's like you got the preseason, you got the season, you got the playoffs and the postseason. And the postseason, you've got to recover. Your body's been pounded in football. You're just hitting over and over again. You gotta let your body heal. You can train in other ways, but you gotta take some time. Baseball, every sports team has an off season.
And you're not supposed to, even in the preseason, be playing like you're in the playoffs. And if you do, I remember one time the Golden State Warriors, they had like the winningest season ever. They hit the playoffs favorites for everyone. Yeah, but they didn't have enough in the tank to get them over the line. Yeah, that's the year that they lost.
The they won like Cleveland. They lost like five games the whole year and then.
Exactly. And so the next season they learned that, you know, don't worry about that. You don't have to be the top of the league even. Just make the playoffs and so on. I mean, they'd be happy if they made the playoffs this year. But so there's something to say for that too. But I like the idea that you don't even have, you know, you have different seasons throughout. It reminds me of Madden, who is one of the the people I covered in the book, he just was like, these players, he said, Look, you've got to actually, he said, what I wish we'd done more of last year was nothing. Like, I wish we'd done some more just do nothing.
Relax, chill, nothing, play. Yes.
He's like, We needed more no time. And he said, you, mean in the season of theirs? Yes, he was saying, Let's have it so that you come in for a game instead of coming in four hours early and training hard and so on. He's like, let's call it the American Legion Week, which is, you know, so when they were, when they were, you know, not professional players, they would just turn up to play. They didn't practice. They didn't, you just, you just, you weren't there for several hours before and beating yourself up. You just turned up to play and he's like, we're gonna start doing that in the regular season for some of it. And, and he found that that was so counter-cultural, it took him a while.
To get it installed, but the results have been incredible. You know what's so funny? You grew up in the UK, right?
Yeah.
So you understand American football with Madden, but... I played in college. Not like you, though.
Right, right. Let's be sure about that.
But I played in college at the Division 3 level. There's three divisions in college. I was in Division 3 level, which is a lower level historically, even though there's a lot of great talent in it.
Yeah.
And there was a team, I'm gonna forget the name, but it was... A team in Wisconsin, a school, that was like national champions in this league, in the division three, like five out of 10 years. Or like five years in a row, 10 years in a row, something like that. It was like 10 out of 20 years. It's like they were either at the national championship game, won it, or they were there. And they were notorious for never hitting in practice. They wore shorts in practice. They would do jumping jacks. They would sit back on the back of the field and do like snow angels in the grass and just do like silly goofy things for warm-up and they wouldn't hit all ever in practice. And then they would show up at the game and be so fresh and so light and just dominate. Speed, no injuries.
No injuries. How about that?
And most of the time when I grew up, Football was like, you have to train, you have to be prepared, hit, hit, hit, all practice long. Maybe the day before, it's more of a walkthrough.
And then you're like, I'm exhausted. Yeah. Going into the game. Yes.
You're going into back. Exhausted. And you're already burned out. Tired. Or, oh, I tweaked my arm because we were hitting all day long until I prove something or I practice and train this way. And these guys, they did like jumping jacks, and then they were like, all right, we're loose, we're ready to go. And you were like, how do they keep winning? But they were doing the effortless thing in practice, which was counterproductive to the hard work. We need to be here and grind it out all practice long, every minute, squeeze out all the pain as opposed to what's the effortless thing?
What that reminds me of, you've heard, I'm sure, of the book of the Blue Ocean Strategy, right? And so the idea of that, the metaphor behind that book is that you've got all the competitive who are in fighting over the same fish, and because they're fighting over the same fish, it makes the sea red with blood. And this whole book premise is saying, what if you don't fight where everyone else is fighting, and instead you create your own market so you're not competing with anyone, you make your competitors irrelevant, and that's why it's called Blue Ocean Strategy. You go to where no one is playing. What I just feel like is that what you just described is such a red ocean strategy. We're gonna kill ourselves.
All day, every day.
All day, every day, and we're gonna kill ourselves more than everybody else is. I mean, it's like red from a different kind of blood. It's like, yeah, that's one strategy. I'm not saying it can't ever work.
It works sometimes.
But like, you're just fighting with, and you're fighting with everyone else who's doing the same thing. Is there not at least a percentage of your time, I was just talking to somebody who's a general manager in the NFL. And I said, okay, of all the speeches you've ever given as a leader to try and get better results from your teams, what is the percentage ratio between work harder, give more, vote, and let's find an easier way to get the results? What's the ratio? And he just laughs. He's like, Greg, it's a hundred percent the first. I have never given the speech. Let's find an easier way to get the results. That's the problem. It's like almost like it seems like I'm fully attacking this strategy in this book. And I'm just saying it's just not the only one. There's another whole strategy. What if you just ask the other question you might find that there is in fact another way to do training. You might find just like the team you said, jumping jacks might be the thing. Relaxing might have its place so that you can be ready to give you're all when the moment comes.
This is powerful stuff, Greg. I'm so glad you wrote this book. I want people to get it. It's called Effortless. Make it easy to do what matters. Make sure you guys check this out. Also, check out your podcast, which is called what's Essential. You guys can download that, subscribe. It's on Apple, Spotify, everywhere, everywhere podcasts are at. This is a book that I have a footnoted on a lot of pages because for me, my audience knows it's hard for me to read. because it just hurts my brain. Reading one paragraph is like, oh, this is hard work. You made it easy to go through this and I highlighted many pages because it's, you know, it's like a, some pages are like a kid's book for me. It's like, there's a graph, there's an image and then some words. And you make it really simple and easy to read. So I appreciate everything that you have here. And where is that one page? Again, I want to highlight this for people. There's two pages where you said, here we go, I like this. When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack. Again, this is kind of a key principle from the book that I think is really important to think about. So I'm grateful you did this. I have a couple final questions for you. This is called a three truths, a question I ask everyone at the end of every show called three truths.
Okay.
So I'd like you to imagine a hypothetical scenario that it's your last day on earth. Okay. Many years away. And you get to live as long as you want, but eventually you got to turn the lights off. And you've accomplished every dream that you could think of.
Okay.
You have the life you want. You've done it all effortlessly. But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work with you to the next place. Okay. So no one has access to this.
Book, any book that you've ever written.
Or anything you've ever said.
Okay.
But you get a piece of paper and a pen to write down three lessons that you've learned that you would like to share with the world. What I like to call three truths. This is all we would have from you as your memory.
Oh, so this is the only thing that you get to leave behind.
This is all the information we have about you and your thoughts and your ideas and your work, because you've taken it all with you. So you have three lessons to leave behind. To the World.
Oh, okay.
Three Truths by Greg McEwen.
Okay. The first one would be one word, light.
Which spelling?
Yeah, just light, L-I-G-H-T. Light.
Two meanings.
Yeah, that's good because the first meaning, let's deal with the first meaning, light as in light versus darkness. That in every moment you have a choice to go towards the light or to go towards the darkness. And it doesn't really matter whether somebody is coming in with a religious perspective or no faith perspective. Everybody knows this. They know something is the right thing to do is full of light or they know something is not the right thing and we all have to choose between that constantly. So, and I think that's what it means to be a good person is that you keep coming back to the light. You make mistakes but you just go, okay my next choice I'm gonna do the thing that I know to be right. And that will lead to more light and more light until I think your life is full of light.
Yeah.
That's the best principle one, light. Principle two is the same word, but the different meaning.
Okay.
So light, still same way, L-I-G-H-T, I think, yeah, because that still just has a double meaning, light and light. Or L-I-T-E. No, but I think it's just the same, yeah. And that's light as in choose the lighter way of living in the way we've talked about.
The effortless way.
The effortless way, where you're just going, Not everything has to be so hard. And underneath that, I think, is the question, how am I making life harder than it needs to be? My favorite story, actually it's in the version you have here, but it's not in the actual book, which is a shame. It's the one thing I kind of regret that I didn't get into the, I chose to have it out and I regret it. But it's the story of a woman who is, has her son who's dying and they're in the hospital together and it's at the end. So it's actually really similar to your, to your scenario for me. And you can tell, sometimes you can really tell. I've been with people towards the end of their lives and sometimes you know. And, and so she knew. And so she got up into the bed with him just to kind of, you know, hug him. and right at the end, you know, in that between places, he's just the last words he ever says is, Mom, it's all so simple. It's so simple. And then he died. And that was his final message to his mother, to the world. And I think that's what I mean by the second version of light. Like, how are we making life harder than it needs to be? What are we making more complex than it needs to be? Let's try and strip life of all of that so it can be light in that second way. And now I'm thinking about the third thing. And I think if I had to really be honest about this, I would just say light a third time. But now I just have to sort of share my own conviction, and I'm not sharing it because I feel like anybody else has to believe this, or I'm not trying to pressure anybody else into anything, but I just believe that God is a source of light. And for me as a Christian, it is, you know, I believe that Jesus Christ is the source of that light. and I feel that in my own life. I see it in my own family. It's not, it's, it's not based in some, some Relic of a belief. It is a living, breathing thing for me. It got us through this experience with Eve. It is the thing that I, when I, for me, it is where I find the great Enlightenment for my own life. It makes me want to be kinder, be better, serve more. And so I think that would be sort of the final and perhaps most important point is that I make him the light of my life so that it can fill me and it fills me. The thing that I'm currently experiencing.
Is.
That it increases the amount of love in me for other people. And I need it. I need that in my life. I need to feel that love. We all need to be loved and to be able to love each each other. And this is, this has been, this is the journey I'm on, is to feel God's love for me, which allows me to then be able to be full of it for other people. And, like, we don't all need a bit more of that right now in the world where we're just being told to distrust and dislike and not love other people who are different to us. Yeah. We need a lot more of it. That's, that's my answer.
That's beautiful. I love those. A great truce. I want to acknowledge you, Greg, before I ask the final question for being an incredible father. It sounds like your daughter really needed you over the last four years and you showed up with new strategies, new ways of learning on how to make it a better environment for her and the rest of your kids during an incredibly hard and challenging suffering time, which could have been much harder. So for you to show up the way you did and to say, okay, We're not gonna do it the hard way and suffer. We're already suffering. How can we make this more enjoyable? I think that's probably the thing that I admire the most about you. I have no idea what it's like to be a parent and I can only imagine the amount of stress, fear, overwhelm, frustration around something like that. So I acknowledge you for the way you handled it and the way you continue to handle it even though it's not perfect. and showing up as the light for your kids and your entire family. I think it's really inspiring.
Well, I can't have you say that without just really acknowledging the all the people that played a role in that. I mean, the answer I just gave you, I really have to acknowledge that light in my life that guided me even to read that article or to get me through it or to get receive insights and little revelations that guided us through that. There's no question about that. I have to acknowledge, you know, really the hand of God in that and also other people who showed up who's just literally people who we haven't heard from in years showed up. We're praying for you.
Yeah.
Now that can be just a nice polite phrase, but I tell you, we learned that it is for real. That is our experience is that things opened up and opportunities opened up that would not otherwise have opened up without that. That is, I would be intellectually dishonest not to add that to the experience of what that was. And that's one of the reasons that I felt, I guess, obliged a little awkward, to be honest, in doing it, but in dedicating the book to a single principle, which is, you know, it's a verse from Matthew, My yoke is easy, my burden is light. To me, that's a breathtaking phrase, having spent all this time now in the principle of Effortless. It's like, man, that is right there. A lot of people, their life does not feel light, does not feel easy, but there seems to be a path, even a scriptural path, for getting there.
Yeah, that's beautiful. Greg, final question for you before I ask it. Make sure you guys get the book. It's going to be powerful. Get a couple of copies for your friends, for your team. Effortless, make sure you guys check it out. Final question, what is your definition of greatness?
I think that the friend and mentor for me was Stephen Covey, and he used to distinguish primary greatness and secondary greatness. And he said, primary greatness is the private victory. It's all the stuff that's going on inside of you. That's your character. It's whether you're being kind, grateful, honest. it's all of who you are. No one gets to see that. That's all the quiet. Then there's public greatness. Secondary greatness is the public victory. That's what people see. That's the successes. And really what he was trying to distinguish, I think, is that primary greatness precedes secondary greatness and is more important. If you get primary greatness, you'll often achieve secondary greatness. You'll often actually gain the accolades of other people because you have something substantive inside of you. But if you don't, you're still something substantive inside of you, so you still win at the thing that matters most. And so I think the greatness to me is mostly the first, but it's what also powers the second and gives life to it. So that's my definition. That's beautiful.
And to add to that, if you only chase the public greatness and you don't have the Integrity, the character, you're not kind to others. Yeah. You will suffer at the end of the day, and that'll never be enough.
Never be enough. You may not achieve it. And secondary greatness disappears awfully fast. Quick. And we're having this conversation in the middle of, like, basically in the middle of Hollywood. In the middle of cancel culture. Middle of cancel culture. Exactly. So someone can be famous, they can have the money, and then tomorrow they can be completely kicked out. Gone. So you can't construct your life.
Around secondary greatness.
If you do, that's a high risk strategy, let's say it that way.
My man, Greg, this has been powerful. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. If you're looking for more greatness in your life, make sure to check out this video right here. And also check out our free PDF, the Three Secrets to Unlock the Power of youf Mind to Help youp Change youe Life.
Download it right here. An inadequacy is a pathway that you can travel down. What should I do with my life? That's a real complicated question. Oh, here's an inadequacy.
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