The SIMPLE SECRETS To 10x Your Productivity TODAY! | Greg McKeown

You stack the decks in your favor by creating systems that make it easier and easier to do the things that are essential so that we can do them consistently and end up where we want to end up with having lived an essential life.

I want to jump right in. I love your work. I've recently discovered about six months ago and had to have you on the show. And one of the questions have been firing up in my ability, my belly, if you will, is why is it so important? Or why are people trading a meaningful life? What are they trading for a meaningful life versus like a purposeless present? Like, it's almost like we're making a backwards trade of sorts.

Yeah. Sometimes I ask people in audiences when I'm doing sort of a keynote for an event, I'll say, okay, what did we gain as we went into mobile technologies? Right. What have we gained since we've had the phone? And people will list, well, we have flexibility. You know, you can communicate from anywhere, anywhen, and they'll sort of list them and there are some advantages. And then on the other side, I'll say, okay, what did we give up? What did we trade off? And literally the answers are freedom, my life.

Yeah.

You know, freedom, life, some, some flexibility. It's like these. This was not a great trade off. Now your question isn't just about mobile technology and phones and so on and that trade off. But, but the deeper question of why do people give up a life, an essential life, for a trivial life? Why would we do that? And of course there's, there's lots of reasons that we do this. But, but among them is. Well, among them, and this is a more recent answer to the question, to this conundrum. But a reason answer is that I think a lot of otherwise.

Overachievers really believe that the essential path is harder and so they sometimes give up before they barely begun. It's the equivalent of when somebody's looking at a slide and it has 500 words on it. We don't read the first 400 and give up. We just do the pre scan. We're like, no, I'm never gonna read it.

Yeah, I'm guilty.

And, and so that's what I think people do sometimes with the essential things, the meaningful things to build a great relationship, the. The have a, have, have a great family, have good health and exercise and these sort of essential things in life. I think that sometimes they just seem so overwhelming that we just quickly, before we barely begun, we do the pre scan. Oh, I'm just gonna get, you know, I'LL just do this easy but trivial stuff over there. Yeah. And after years of watching this and working with people on it, I realized that. That you've got to discover how both of these are like a false idea. It's a false dichotomy. You got to discover that there really is a way to create life where you.

You stack the decks in your favor by creating systems that make it easier and easier to do the things that are essential so that we can do them consistently and end up where we want to end up with having lived an essential life.

Yeah, I think that's powerful because, you know, one of the things that I've been, I guess, on my own journey in trying to figure out life and business and all the things that go into it, obviously doing, you know, video and speaking and shows and all this kind of stuff, is how to determine what the highest priority would be. And I finally got down to the place where I was using a terminology of, okay, how does it multiply? How does what I'm doing today multiply my time in the future? How does what I'm spending on today multiply my money in the future? Talk a little bit about the priorities, because I think that's where a lot of us get it wrong. We think we're doing the most important thing.

And then we don't realize it comes at a cost. So how do we break that crazy cycle?

Well, there's two parts riffing on what you're saying, right? The first is about priority, is about the word priority. And then the second is about residual results. Let's connect those. But first, the word priority came into the English language in the 1400s, and it was singular. What did it mean? It meant not just one thing. It meant the very first thing, the priorest thing. And that's very useful word, you know, to enter our vocabulary. It stayed singular, according to Peter Drucker, for the next 500 years. So it wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that somebody started introducing the idea of priorities. And in a sense, that word is a strange word because you say, well, can you have very, very many, very first before all other things. Things? And the answer is, of course, no, you can't. And yet that's what, you know, people, maybe each of us have been to meetings where someone says, Here are my 34 priorities. They all have to be done before everything else. So just right from the get go, getting back to the original definition to really saying, okay, there's lots of important things, there's lots of good things, there's lots of interesting things. There's lots of trivial things. But there can only be by definition, in any given moment, one. One priority. And trying to get ourselves back to that. What's important now, that has a nice acronym when what's the most important? What's important now? And coming back to that, being in that moment and giving our attention to that, that's the priority side of the equation. But you said something else that I just don't want to miss, which is that increasingly in your business, if I understood you right, in your life, you're saying, well, I don't want to just do stuff or good stuff, valuable things even. I want to identify the. That vital few things that will produce results for me many, many times over.

And that. That second subject is one that's been really interesting to me ever since I wrote Essentialism. And so interesting to be really so, so important to me that I ended up writing a new book on it called Effortless.

Yeah.

And if you'll allow me just to share one story to illustrate.

I have a friend, Jessica Jakely, who Jessica Jakely, who went when she was younger to Africa to try and make a difference there. She wants to make an impact. She's trying. That's what her goal is, impact. And she finds an entrepreneur there who is at the subsistence level.

She is selling produce on the side of the road every day. If she's not there today, then she doesn't make enough money to be able to eat herself or feed her children. So it's like pure subsistence level. It's like literally she just gets one result for one amount of effort, and if she stops the effort, she stops the result and she's in trouble. So Jessica says, well, I'd like to help with that. I'd like to help basically provide her with the income necessary to build a better system. What she found was that a relatively modest investment of $500 would help her, this entrepreneur, to be able to go and create a flow process, flow, where the food would be delivered directly to her instead of to a middleman who takes the profit out of it. So it's a pretty small thing you can say even there. That's leverage, right? $500, given or invested, allows her to shift and change her business because she's no longer working, you know, in her business, she's working on her business. That's a success story in and of itself. But it gets better because Jessica Jackley had just gone to a to Muhammad Yunus presentation on microloans, and she says, okay, well, maybe we should do it. It's a micro loan. We give $500, but it comes back. Now we've got a 10x impact because we're going to help this entrepreneur and many, many other. Okay, that's great. But then she doesn't stop there. She says, well, hold on. If that's what we're trying to do, what if we created a system that created systems? So they started a website. This is kiva.org and this allows any entrepreneur in the world, or any investor in the world who says, I want to put in a relatively modest amount and it will be invested and reinvested and so on. So this is the current state of affairs is that $500 on the one side versus what they've done, which is $1.3 billion in loans, the 97% repayment of loans. That's the power of creating residual effortless results. That's the difference. It's not a 10x difference or 100x difference. In this case, it's significantly beyond even a thousand x impact. So to me, even though that's quite a grandiose example, it's the kind of thing that we ought to be looking for if we want to achieve at a 10x100x,000x level. That matters because every person listening to this or watching this right now wants better results. Right? That's who. That's who shows up here. I get significantly better results if they can get them. So let's say 10x, even 10x results. Can any person listening or watching this work 10x harder?

I would say no.

And that's the problem. That's the dilemma. That's why I wrote this new book on effortless. Because. Because Nobody can work 10x. The people I'm writing to can't work 10x harder, but they still want 10x results. And that means you have to find a smarter, easier, more effortless strategy to be able to produce it. And residual results, of course, is one of the key ways to be able to achieve that.

Yeah, and I would argue that that young lady also, you know, she set up. Set up with a goal for impact. I would dare say that she made a larger impact with the market microloans than she did with the stand.

Yeah, precisely. So Jessica's trying to. She's trying to increase her impact. And she does that by using, you know, by creating a system. She didn't do it by just by giving out more money herself. She did it by building a system that would enable lots and lots of people to be able to produce those results. So it's, it's, to me, it's very inspiring. Example.

Absolutely. I mean, I would second that all day long. You know, when you look at essentialism, your first book, that did incredibly well, one that I'm very fond of myself, it seems like one of the bridges between there and effortless because I think your work just continues to build on itself. Right. Which is really powerful to watch. Right. It makes it really easy for someone like myself to consume your content and get, get a benefit from it day after day after day, week after week after week.

Thank you.

One of the commonalities that I, that I get out of both of the books is this power of choice. How important is the kind of choice or the power of choice in making a residual, you know, a residual impact over time?

Yeah, well, it's, it's, it's all the difference. Right. It's, you know, the good news is that none of us can, even if we wanted to, give away our ability to choose and nor can it be taken away from us. Like choices can be taken away from us. But the ability to choose what to do in any given circumstance cannot be taken away. It cannot be given away. It is, it is a relentlessly powerful.

Force. And so the what it can be is forgotten. And so that's one of the reasons that I write about that theme is because it's, it's not like it's a new idea, but it's to try to make sure that it's in our present, you know, thought process. I don't have to do what I'm doing and I don't have to do it the way that I'm doing it. Yeah. I'm thinking here of a classic overachiever, non essentialist, I suppose, who was the kind of person who was where she said I'd be up at 4am in the morning photoshopping my youth group at church the next day. Even though, you know, like no one's asking me to do that. It isn't even that urgent. But I just have that idea. She's part of what my brother Justin calls the hit squad, which is hard working, intelligent, talented people hit the hit squad, whose problem is rarely going to be that they don't put in effort. Yeah, they don't, they don't try to do things. No, they're highly motivated. They've got the curious and have loads of initiatives. Like they've got all of those assets. But it also makes them vulnerable. As in with her case, she's taken a strength and gone too far with it. So she's there, you know, she says even eating lunch, she feels guilty. And so this is a certain way, she's got a certain paradigm, a certain way of operating. And what I was trying to do when I was working with her was to remind her she has a choice. She can make a different choice. In fact, a particularly powerful choice is to invert, invert the way she's approaching the world. She has to learn a new way of thinking because what got her here won't get her there for sure.

Yeah.

And I said, okay, for you, I said, for you, it's part of the hit squad. You need to start asking this question. How can I make this easy? How can I make it effortless? She had in her mind, her mindset was very puritan. It was like hard work is good, easy is vice. Right. Like I should distrust the easy. And so she would not even look at solutions that were, that would potentially be significantly easier. But I coaching her on this. So the next day she gets a call from a professor at the university. So she's a manager at the university. And he says, I want you to come and record my class for me because, yeah, that's it. And she's just ready to jump in. Instead of clarifying, well, what's really going on or let's find a simple solution to your problem. She's just ready to go. She's thinking, okay, I'm going to maximize this. We're going to have multiple camera people there.

Yeah.

We're going to have different edits and we'll put it all together. We'll add music and intros and outros and graphics and slides and wow him. She's like, all of this is mentally happening. And then she remembers, oh, I've got a choice. I don't have to do it. That way I can at least explore for a moment. Is there an effortless solution? Is there an easier way to do this? To get the same result with a lot less input? And so she starts asking a couple of clarifying questions. It turns out this is an entire effort for one student who will miss a few classes because of an athletic commitment. And so the solution they come up with is that another student in class will just record on an iPhone whenever he's going to miss and send it to him. That's the whole solution. Professor hadn't thought about it. He was caught up in too much busyness too, to see the solution. And so he's delighted. It was a 10 minute conversation, he's delighted. She hangs up the phone she's like, how did that happen? I saved four months of work for an entire team for the power of pausing, remembering, I have a choice. And inverting the question that I would normally ask into a different question. I think this is an illustration of how choice can be so powerful in getting the results that matter. But it far better return on our effort.

Yeah, and I think that's why I wanted to mention is because, you know, I always have this mental image, if you will. There's a, there's a boulder here and, and I can walk over to it and I can pick up the boulder myself. Now obviously it's not too big, cause if it's too big, I can't pick it up. But I can pick it up, right? I'm gonna struggle, I'm gonna pick it up, I'm gonna do my little duck, walk over to the side and go drop it. Or I can grab a piece of leverage device, a piece of rebar or a two by four, and then walk over and just pop it loose and send it across the way. I've expended less energy, I've expended less time, and I've still gotten the work done. And when you're saying effortless, that's what I'm hearing you say. I'm hearing you say stop, pick up, stop picking up the boulder with your hands. Come up with a device or a process or a system that allows you to do that over and over again without you physically having to pick up that rock.

Yeah, that's exactly right. It comes back to, we talk about roi, right? Return on investment. This is roe, this is return on effort. I'm in favor of effort. I teach it to my children, I use it myself. It's a super important strategy in life.

Yeah.

The only problem is that it's a finite resource, just like time is. There's only so much effort that we can put in. But as overachievers, we sometimes have bought into this as being the only strategy, so we over utilize it. And I've seen that happen to a lot of people in the pandemic over the last year and a half, where they solved the problems that have come at them, but just through more effort. And so what's really happened is they're getting more and more burned out as they do. Zoom, eat, sleep, repeat life cycles where there's no natural end to the day. They get to 5, 6, 7, 8, and then it's 10, 11, and so on. They don't. And then they don't even know what Day it is. You know, so they're just emailing all through Saturdays and Sundays and meetings, and there's no real boundaries in place. So they're over utilizing a strategy to the point of, you know, on the edge of exhaustion, on the edge of burnout, or completely past it. In some ways, I think that there's like two kinds of people in the world right now. There are people who are burned out, and then there are people who know they are burned out.

Yeah.

And so it's like an enlightened thing to suddenly discover. Oh, my goodness, I've been following this strategy past its usefulness.

Yeah.

Where it's, it's, it's now like giving me diminishing returns in my business, in my relationships. And maybe even worse than that, we might get to the point where it's negative returns, which means that if we put in more effort, we're going to get worse results overall than if we just stopped, rested, relaxed, recuperated. But because the paradigm is so dominant, sometimes as this is happening to people, they are unaware of it happening to them. And they see, well, I'm not getting the results I want and therefore I need to push even harder.

Yeah.

And so you go on this downward cycle and this spiral, and it happens to a lot of people. And I've noticed a significant uptick in this over the last year and a half. So it's a perfect opportunity for us just even explore. Maybe there's a different mindset, maybe there's a new paradigm that will help me in this moment, but also for the many levels of success I'd like to achieve going forward.

Yeah, absolutely. I got two thoughts that kind of come into mind off of that. The first of which is, you know, if I'm gonna go to the gym and I'm work out a muscle and I'm gonna do it X number of days a week.

Yeah.

I get injured. Or maybe I'm in the gym seven days a week instead of six or five. Okay. Yeah, I noticed. And I've done. This is me working. This is me using an act, a literal analogy of something I've done. I work out seven days a week, and I go in on the eighth day, you know, the beginning of the next week, and I'm exhausted.

Right.

Like, I haven't got that recuperation time. I haven't got that. So when I go to pick up a weight, it weighs twice as much as it normally does.

Right.

The other thing that pops in my mind is with Effortless, specifically, if I look at the global economy. And I look at some of the biggest businesses on the planet, Amazon, Apple, Google, some of the largest facilities businesses on the planet, if I'm honest with myself.

There are other development companies out there, there are other Internet providers, there are other organizations that create phones and tools and computers. But part of the reason they've gotten so big and so gargantuan is because they always find more and more efficient ways to do things, reducing the amount of effort, ergo, making things effortless. And if I'm hearing you correctly, that is not just attainable for the select few, but attainable for everybody as long as they choose to focus on it.

Yes. I mean, you've used two examples, and I want to speak to both of them. But let's just begin with the. Just the. Well, let's start with the exercise. So there's a. One of the coaches of the elite UFC fighters, and he was on Joe Rogan, and he was talking about this. People could go and watch it, maybe put it in show notes where he starts to explain how he trains these elite fighters. Now, think of the image, what you'd expect him to say, the kind of, yeah, I mean, of course, no pain, no gain. But you might even expect something far more extreme than that, like a Rocky B roll, Right? Because that's what we've been shown, that's what we've been taught. And there's plenty of people that do follow that type of training exercise. That's their. That's the paradigm. They're coming out of nowhere. What he said is, is I believe that when people work out, they should never ache afterwards.

Interesting.

And Joe goes, He says. He says, now, you don't mean like beginners. You mean like somebody who's already at elite level. He says, no, I mean, if I'm working with an absolute beginner, they should never feel it the next day. Right?

That is what happened to my no pain, no gain thing.

We've been sold no pain, no gain, but it's a bill of goods. And this is what it comes down to, is that it's like, we've been. No pain, no gain is like the personal development and personal performance equivalent of the medical bloodletting that lasted for the longest time, where you're literally putting leeches on people's bodies and you're sucking out the blood, thinking that the disease is in the blood. And therefore, by doing this, you're healing them. I mean, you are hurting them. That's what you're really doing. And sometimes even killing them. But for a long time, the paradigm dominated over the reality. Now that's of course what happened then and I think is happening now. And certainly this coach does. He said, look what we want, he says, if I was dealing with a beginner and they can do like the max they can do is let's say 10 pull ups. That would just be like exhausting. If they did 10 pull ups, he said, I don't want them to do seven or eight or nine. I don't want them to be at the max because if I do, they're going to need to recover, you know. Well, they do. Like you're saying, it's so much heavy, it's so much harder. Maybe they don't even want to do it or they don't do it. They need a day or two off. He said, if I get them to do let's say five, then the next day they can do five again and the next day five again. So by the time like Thursday comes around, they've done 20 reps now they've been here consistently. Their body's getting used to the idea that they're being asked to do this where. Whereas in the person who did 10 to their max has taken two days off, now he's there again trying to do it again. Yeah, he's only done 10 and he's just, you know, he goes on, I mean the whole thing is fascinating. Goes on deeply about this idea that there's a very different way to achieve high performance. And it really is the this, this. I mean, it's to do with sustainability, consistency. Not one time sort of boom and bust performance where you go big and then you're sort of over before you've begun. It's about how to go less than you feel like going so that you can do it again the next day and there's something left in the tank and you keep it going consistently and consistently.

You know, that's like, that's like the example when it comes to exercise. Yeah, I feel like I may be spending too much time on this, but the. Not at all. I'll go one step further.

I'm still learning, man. Keep teaching.

One of my favorite case studies that I came across in writing, Epilus is.

A story of the race to the Poles, South Pole. It never been achieved. No one had ever made it to the South Pole.

Not that the British Empire is great naval prowess, not the Vikings for a thousand years, you know, like no one had ever, ever done it. And it captured the imagination of the world at the time.

Sort of equivalent of that time Space race and, you know, put a man on the moon, kind of everybody, who's going to be the first? And they had lots of failed attempts. And then finally there's two teams that are going at the same time. So it's a particularly interesting race, right, to see. Will one of these make it and who will make it first? One team is from Norway, the other from Britain. The team from Britain, Captain Scott, he had a particular approach and his approach was, on the good days, we're going as far and as fast as we possibly can. Push them to exhaustion. Then on the bad days, partially because they're exhausted and partially because of the bad weather, they stay hunkered down in their tents. Emotional state for that group was pretty negative because they were just complaining about how bad the weather was and they're worn out and emotionally exhausted. Oh, has anyone ever. No one has ever had worse weather in an attempt at the South Pole. Well, actually, the team that went before them did have better. Did have worse weather. So he actually had relatively good weather, but he didn't feel that well. That's team one, team two from Norway. The captain of that group said.

15 miles a day. Good days, 15 miles, bad weather days, 15 miles. Wrote in his journal, one day, terrible weather, the worst weather, we progressed 15 miles. He kept this going until. Plot thickens. When they are 45 miles from reaching the South Pole. Now, what would you do? What does the overachiever do? 45 miles.

Let's go.

Let's go. With perfect weather.

Yeah.

Great sledding conditions. With one big push, they can make it in one day and they don't even know where the competitor team is. To all they know, the team could be ahead of them and still consistency. They took three days to do that last 45 miles, averaging 50 miles per day. That was their consistency the whole time. Well, they beat their competitor teams by 32 days using this strategy.

Holy smokes.

And importantly, on the way home, this team, the Norwegian team, actually makes it home. There's enough in their tank to make it out of the freezing desert that they're in and all the way back to Norway. Whereas in the British team arrive so exhausted, so burned out that they literally not one of them makes it out alive. They all die on the way home. And so you've got this total tragedy versus this total success. Now get this. This is like one more step. The craziness of this story. The biographer for the Norwegian team.

Used this phrase and I remember when I read it, it just like was just breathtaking to me. I just can hardly believe it, even now, to share it with you. He said the Norwegian team achieved this result without particular effort.

Now, listen, it's never been done before. It's the most arduous physical challenge for an explorer known to man.

Yeah.

And it's achieved without particular effort. It's, it's, it's almost unthinkable that he would write such a thing.

Yeah.

And, and yet that was his description of their experience. Now, of course, there was effort, but it wasn't defined by the, the kind of heroics that we normally think of as. We could think of effort. And so it, to me, it shakes. It, it should shake us who have been taught to do hustle, to burn ourselves out. That's the only path to success. That's the media story. That's what we watch in the movies. That's what we see. That isn't actually how to achieve sustainable, superb, peak performance. It really literally isn't. It is a bill of goods that we've been sold. If you want to perform superbly over a long period of time, you need to find consistency, you need to find an effortless pace. And this illustrates it as well as any. I know.

No, I love that story. And, you know, it's funny, I'm sitting here thinking of some team members I've recently been kind of working with, coaching. I even did some Instagram live stuff today with our stories, whatever they call it.

Yes.

And I was talking to him and whatever, and he's, and he's, he's, he's young, he's aggressive, he's hungry, he's smart, he's, you know, I would say he's darn near genius level, intelligence wise. And he would, he would come up to me all the time and he would say, all right, I'm going to do X, Y and Z. It's going to be, it's on. From this day forward, it's on. I'm going to be grind on my grind, Right. You know that on my grind thing.

In four days, he's up at 5am, he's working till midnight, up at 5am, working till midnight, up at 5am, working till midnight. Day five, he crashes. Day five turns into day nine, right? And he came to me, said, I don't understand. How are you able to do what you do on a consistent basis? And I said, that's just it. It's the consistency. I get up at the same time every day. I go through the same routine that I know is going to feed my mind, body and spirit. On a regular basis. I try to look for ways to multiply my time, my talents, and my resources on a consistent basis. And I'm constantly trying to become more aware, primarily from your first book, Essentialism, but even more so now with Effortless, of where I'm utilizing the one commodity I don't get, I don't get to get back time.

Right.

I want to make sure that I can duplicate my efforts on a regular basis. He took that advice and over the course of the next 90 days, he got very consistent. And coincidentally, he's outperformed himself 2 to 1 to prior performance, which is pretty. Which is pretty incredible. So I think it just goes to show how powerful the effortless process is and helping people. Now when we're trying to walk through this, I'm a big believer that the types of answers you get are based on the type of questions you ask. If someone's on one side and they're saying, okay, I'm not really sold on the effortless lifestyle or effortless concepts, I'm going to keep doing things in the grunt way versus the person says, I'm all in. I'm tired of being exhausted. I'm tired of being frustrated. Priority, the priorities with apostrophe s is leading me to feeling overwhelmed because I got too many of them to kind of juggle. What types of questions are they asking themselves? How do they keep themselves kind of under wraps and ongoing?

Well, I mean, I think that you can simplify a lot of life into two questions. The first is. The first is what's essential?

Right.

Because most stuff is trivial, you know, vital few things, and then you've got the trivial many. And so the first question to come back to again and again, right? What's essential here? What's essential now? What's important now? What's the priority for today? What's the one thing I need to do today? Yeah, that's the first question. And then the second question is just. We've kind of already mentioned it, but it's just like, how can I make that thing as easy as possible? How can I make it effortless? Now, there's all sorts of ways that we can do that.

Yeah.

One way we can do it is when we're taking on a major project, we can ask a series of sub questions, right? What does done look like just even defining that so it doesn't just grow and grow and grow as we're doing it, and suddenly five years have gone by and we haven't actually got to the end of the result. But that's to me a powerful question. And let's just double click on that simple sounding question right there. The. It's an interesting story from the King of Sweden who decided he wanted to build this, this juggernaut of a ship to show his prowess compared to the other fleets. And he secures the shipbuilder and he says, look, you have unlimited funds. We've got a forest with a thousand trees to build this one ship. You know, go and they build it, they cut the wood, they get it shaped, it's ready to go to put together as ship. And King said, well actually Instead of being 135ft long, I want it to be 165ft long. Okay, so now they have Dave just to throw all that wood away. They can't use any of it. They got to go cut the wood again. And it keeps on going like this. He keeps adding and adding and changing his mind and oh, I want to have 35 cannons. No, actually I want to have 70 cannons in two rows. Okay. Actually I want to add. I mean, talk about a non essential addition. I'm going to put, I want 700 sculptures that I want you to put on onto this ship to make it look so impressive. Right? He does that. This, this like one of these changes is said to have given the shipbuilder a heart attack and killed him.

Oh, wow.

So that the second in command is now, is now the shipbuilder. So this is like a second now, second generation. And the changes keep coming. Well, a day arrives not of the completion of the ship. Like literally, they still haven't defined what dun looks like or actually achieved it. Yeah, but they still. He has had time, the King has had time to invite all of these VIPs from the neighboring countries to come and see. The ship's called the Vasa. The Vasa set sail. It's not done, but he wants to show it off. So as it comes out for its maiden voyage, they have all of the cannons out so that they can do a big gun salute to the dignitaries that are on shore. But a gust of wind comes along and pulls the Vasa over so that the cannons go into the water. Suddenly the whole ship is filled up with water. Within one hour, the ship goes down along with all the 53 sailors on board the maiden voyage. I mean, this is literally the most expensive ship in Swedish history. It goes less than one mile before it sinks and is over. So it's like this is the worst story ever, right? This is what the worst kind of project looks like. If you simply say what does done look like on the next project? You already force yourself as a forcing function to increase your probability of starting and completing the project. Other questions you can ask to streamline a project are what are the minimum number of steps to achieve it? Yeah, don't try to say but one story to go with that.

Sure.

You mentioned earlier on I wanted to get back to it. These tech companies, Apple, Google and so on.

Apple and Amazon founders were both really good at particular skill.

In fact, I came across case studies for each of them that are almost identical even though they were dealing with different tech products. And I thought that was really fascinating.

The first is over at first is at Apple. I interviewed Mike Evangelist, that's his real name.

And he was working for a DVD burning company at the time. This is when DVD burning machines were brand new, industry specific, cost you $35,000. Come complete with a 1000 page manual for learning how to use it.

Right.

You can imagine, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Apple comes along, Steve says, I want to buy this because I want to take your software and I want to simplify it and create, put this standard on the map. So they're given two weeks to simplify their software offering and they're really proud of how much they've simplified it. I mean they're looking at this thousand pages, they've got it down, they've removed functionality and features and all sorts of things that they don't think are valuable. Streamline, streamline down, they're ready to give their presentation. Steve comes in the room and before they start, he goes, okay, hold on, let me just go to the. He goes to the board, he draws a rectangle and he says, okay, this is going to have one button. You drag your file to that button and then you click burn. That's the app, that's what I want to build.

Yeah.

And they're all suddenly embarrassed of their presentation because it was so much more complex than that. But what they learned, and this is the takeaway and the key point here is he said you have to learn to start from zero. We were starting with complexity and reducing the complexity, which is good but not great. The great thing is start from nothing. That's the ultimate simplicity. And say, can I achieve this in one step? And if not one, can I do it in two steps? And force yourself to be at the minimum possible number of steps rather than taking the maximum and going down a little bit. The story. Jeff Bezos up at Amazon, again, I say that like the comparison is so striking. This is the beginning of Amazon early on, when E commerce is new. So people are uncertain about buying something online. You know, they're buying a book, they say they want to buy it, they go through the checkout process. At the time, every checkout process looked the same in every major E commerce platform. There was 25 steps involved, 25 times you're clicking, you put your name, click last name, click address, click, click, click. You know, like everything. So there's this whole process. As an engineer who's been given two months to simplify the process, he's doing the same thing as in the Apple example. He's saying, how can I streamline each step of the existing process? He goes and has a meeting with Jeff and with the first employee of Amazon. They go and meet at this brewery up in Seattle. And. And in that meeting, Jeff finally says, no, look, this is what I'm saying. I'm saying not how do we streamline what we have? I'm asking, can we do it in one click? Well, that's what one click became known as at Amazon. I don't know how you'd value that decision, but I reckon it's one of the most successful business decisions that's ever been made. Right. I mean, they had a patent on that one click buying for the next 20 years. And you could say, well, that's unfair. And maybe it was, but the thing that that engineer said to me, which I thought was interesting, he said nobody else was thinking like that. Yeah, I wasn't. After two months of staring at this problem, no one else in any other company was. So that's the power. Steve's doing it, Jeff's doing it. They're saying, start with zero. Can I do it? In literally with Amazon's case, one click and almost literally the same with the DVD burning turned out to be IDVD burn software that Apple put standard Mac. Can you do it in one step? That's the key to simplifying any project you start on Start with zero.

I love it. You know, I'm just thinking about that and now it's gotten to the point where it's a. It's a double button click on your phone and ding. Purchase made. It's already on shipments all coming. Man, I've loved the conversation. I love your work. I know you have an amazing podcast. I want everybody to hear a little bit more about the podcast. If you get a second before we tell them where they can get the book and things like that. So tell us more about the podcast.

Listen, I appreciate that opportunity it's been out for a year.

It's just. It's top five podcasts on Apple in self improvement and in education. And it's been a series of conversations. The very favorite conversations so far have been been with my wife, Anna, keeping me honest, talking about what essentialism really looks like in our lives and in our relationship. But we've also, you know, we've had big names on there as well. Matthew McConaughey and Jay Shetty and Property Brothers and all sorts of people talking about, hey, listen, what is. What is most essential in their lives? And how can we all, you know, figure that out for ourselves? Streamline so that we can. So that we can do what really matters most as effortlessly as possible.

I love it. I love it. And again, your content's amazing. It's clearly that you've learned a lot of lessons through a variety of different ways. I know we don't really have time to jump into some of those today. Where can everybody else find out more about you And Effortless? Because it's a book they've got to get. I mean, it's got to get. I'm getting four or five copies for the audience that I'll have that I'll send to people that comment in the stream. So. But other, other than that, working with everybody, get the book.

I mean, the book's available absolutely everywhere the books are available. So Amazon, one click. That seems like the right thing to say.

You're welcome, Bezos.

Yeah, exactly. He'll know.

He'll know.

He'll know we did this. You know, there's a. I have a one minute Wednesday newsletter that goes out. Try to make it the most essential minute you're going to spend online each week. People can sign up for that@essentialism.com. you can take a 21 day essentialism challenge right now. Whether you get sort of micro masterclass videos sent to you each day for 21 days, just helping you to make small adjustments and the things you do often to be able to make what is essential a little easier today and tomorrow.

I love it. I love it. Well, dude, thank you so much for spending so much time with us. I've learned a lot. I've got a whole page of notes over here. That stuff like, now I have to go implement so I can figure out some way to make things effortless. That's what it is. That's right, dude. I loved it, man. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today.

Thank you. It's been real pleasure. Thank you.

All right, take care if you love that interview, go ahead and check out this next one right here. You can actually achieve success faster. Because I would be further in my career had I paid more attention to developing relationships earlier in my career.