Greg McKeown
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I mean, nobody on their deathbed says, oh, I just should have spent a bit more time scrolling on Instagram. That's what I wish I'd done. It's obvious. But this is the nature, I think, of the noise and the deafening nature of it is that we don't hear the signal in the noise.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so everything starts to seem equally important where the reality is always, always that a very few things are, I mean, like something like this, infinitesimally important. small things, but infinitely important. And that's in every human system, in every set of data, in every set of tasks, there is something that is so much more important than everything else.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
But you have to really work to get to it. It's a little like thinking that a lot of the productivity language and focus has been around, how do you do more? How can you be more efficient? And so on. And fine, okay, I don't think about what I do is like that. But
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
that's more like thinking you're in a coal mine your whole life and then waking up one morning and going, oh, I've never have been in a coal mine. It's always been a diamond mine. Well, how would that shift all of your behavior? I have to operate differently now.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I have to figure, get really good at finding the diamonds, pausing, thinking, reflecting, exploring, pushing everything aside that isn't the diamond. Well, that's just not, I'm not going to focus on that. I need to find the thing that really matters. And I don't know why it's the case, but I absolutely observe like it's a reality in all human systems and all circumstances that you have.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I think about it now like an onion of human systems. You have the noise and trivia at the edge. As you move in, you get towards a bit more important. It's a little more, you know, you have to be a little more careful around it because it's a little more intimate. And then at the very center of it, you have things that are so vulnerable, so disproportionately important. They're everything.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
This is how I think it is. I think that's true in a personal life. I think it's true in a relationship. I think it's true on a team, an organization, a country. At every level of human system, this strange phenomenon seems to exist. And so once you discover that, once you understand that, I think your life changes completely, irrevocably. At least that's what happened to me.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Yeah, I can teach people how to do it in six minutes, which is really cool. But I mean, not to teach them in six minutes. I mean, they can learn to do it themselves every day in six minutes. And I learned it in some ways from someone I interviewed on my podcast. And what happened to her is that she'd started a new business and she woke up at like three in the morning, hyperventilating.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Oh my goodness, what have I done? I've just quit this job. I'm not yet earning sufficient income. She's just in that panic mode. And quite spontaneously, what she does is she grabs this huge sheet of paper that she plans to throw away. So it's just like
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And maybe if I just get all of the noise out of my head and just free write, and she's just messy and it's crazy and it's chaotic and it's, you know, let's say she's swearing all the way through it. And it's just like, you know, it's not for anyone. Not even in a sense, it wasn't even for her. She's just like pouring it out.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Yes, that's what it is. And people struggle to believe it if they're in the first phases because those are really complex, challenging issues as well. But what happens is that the opportunities increase and the scale of the impact of those choices increases and the number of people that are impacted by them and therefore the number of critics also increases and on it can go.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And what she noticed happening, and she's learned, I mean, even I think the first time she did it was like the six minute process. It was like nothing. But then she has learned since then. It's like in six minutes, what happens is she went from Confusion, I don't know if this was her language, but this is my language now, right? She went from confusion to clarity to creation.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
First, she's just confusion, noise. Then she starts going, well, maybe what would I do about that? What could I do that would be healthy? So it started to turn into questions that were relevant for her. And then within just these few minutes, she's looking like, okay, well, here are some plans. This is what I could do.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And she was able to go back to bed at peace with the sense that, okay, I still know what the problems are, but I've worked through it. It's not just spinning in my head. What is she writing? What was she writing? Yes. What is she writing? Well, the prompt was something like, what's going on in your head? What is happening? So the prompt is quite a simple prompt. She taught me this too.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I've never heard anyone share this, and I love this. It's called instinctive elaboration. And what instinctive elaboration is, is that if you ask yourself a question or are asked a question, there is an involuntary mental process that takes place. You cannot not think about it, which is a pretty powerful phrase. And I think we've all experienced it.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Somebody asks you an interesting question and it just like hijacks the way that you were thinking and what you were thinking about. And so you can use this to your benefit by having good prompts. So after this, I started the following process. What, so what, now what? So every time I'm writing my journal, I say, okay, what is going on? And that's the free writing. That is just all the noise.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
It doesn't matter. No judging. Maybe you plan on throwing it away if that helps. I don't care keeping it. I don't mind who reads it. I want the noise. So what? Now the prompt now is not what's going on, but like, well, what does it mean? You know, like, let's just try and look at that noise as if, let's imagine...
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Imagine someone else showed me their writing and I'm looking at it and going, oh, I wonder what that says. What does that mean? And so you're just trying to now connect the dots a little bit. And then the now what, I have a really clear structure for this. I call it the one, two, three method. The highest priority item for the day, that's the one. You might spend two hours on that, ideally.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
The two is two things that are urgent and essential. And the three are maintenance items. That's like the laundry of our life. If we don't do it, tomorrow gets a lot harder. And that together becomes what I think of now as my done for the day list. And it doesn't mean that I won't do anything else. But if I get those one, two, three things done, I know I have done the most important thing.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
some urgent things and some maintenance items that will help my future self be thankful to me. And I say, okay, well, if I just do those things every day, life is going to be better and it's going to help me orient my way through this noise. And that's what we need because it seems to me that there are just two kinds of people in the world now.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
There are people who are lost and there are people who know they are lost. And if you can get in the second category, that's really helpful because if you're lost and you know you're lost, you're actually not lost anymore because you know what to do. You know, you can stop. I don't know what I'm doing. Let's write this all out. This is where I'm at. This is some confusing.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Okay, what does all that mean? Okay, what am I going to do about it? Like the problem is when we don't realize we're lost and we just keep barreling ahead. without pausing and reflecting and getting, you know, it's like a plane is off track 90% of the time. The key is to getting where it's supposed to get to is that it has an automatic get back on track function.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so in a disorienting world, what we need is a reorienting process. And that's why I think this daily process is such a helpful tool for living essentialism in a noisy world.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
So the reward for getting to the top of the mountain is that there are other mountains. And in a way, that's a great part of life that behind every mountain, there's mountains. But it doesn't make it easier. And I think this is a very poorly understood area of success. People just assume if I get to the top of that mountain, all the problems disappear. Life is just great.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Well, there's sort of one way you could go with that question, but I'm sort of wanting to answer it a different way because of how you set the question up. And it's like Socrates was described as like the wisest man in the world. And he said, well, I don't know if I am, but if I am, it's because I have this daemon with me.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And he says, this daemon, so this sort of, I mean, we don't really use that term now, and it's not the same as a daemon, but this sort of entity. Yes, I suppose conscience, but it felt very separate to him. He said, my daemon never tells me what to do, but he always tells me what not to do. I thought that that was such a consistent idea with what you were just sharing.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I remember when Storm Ida came through, I was stuck in the airport. The storm is completely consuming the airport. There's water coming through the ceilings. People are already starting to lose their minds. And I've been in these situations enough in airports to know, like, you just don't want to be there through all of that.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Like, if you can possibly just get somewhere else away from the storm, that's better. And I knew that there was a hotel about 10 minutes from the airport. I'd stayed in it before and I could physically see it. And I thought, look, if I just get there, it's just 10 minutes over there.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And I try all these things and everything's not working out, you know, because they've shut everything down because there's water pouring everywhere. And finally, I even tried to rent a car and they were like, no, this is impossible. But they said, if you just walk straight down that road and the water, it didn't look like it was too bad.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
You know, it looked a little like it was slowing down the rain. They said, it's a 10 minute walk. Just go there and you'll be fine. And I took like a few paces and I heard like my own Damon saying, Do not do this. That was exactly the word. And I carried on walking for about another four or five steps, and it was louder. Do not do this. And that's it. That's sort of the end of the story.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I went back. I retraced all my steps, went back to the airport, stayed there for a while until things were calm enough that I was able to get to the hotel and spent the night there. I don't know what would have happened had I gone down that path. I'm glad I don't know. But I do think that there's something in this, you know. You could say, okay, what's the most essential thing in my life?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
What's the very best use of me? I do think those are helpful questions, but they can be overwhelming. And so if you ask the opposite, it's like, what don't you want? What is the thing, the number one thing you know you don't want? Okay, well, now you basically know what it is you want because it's just sort of the inverse of that.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And it's like, no, nobody gets to escape success. the mortal experience. However it's designed, it's designed in such a way that you just can't do that. This is never an option. And sometimes I think as people get higher in their level of success, it becomes much more lonely because there's fewer people to appreciate the new set of challenges. So anyway, I think it takes courage.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Yeah, well, look, One way to riff on that is to say, look, the daemon is playing an extremely complex game. And if we use Musk's idea, the simulation idea. Okay, so in the simulation, we are trying to... Let's say that part of the purpose, central purpose, is to maximize the growth of people.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Well, one of the things that's interesting about that to me is just in essentialism itself, there's this idea of the paradox of success. So it's four stages. You have clarity, leads to success, leads to options and opportunities. All of that sounds like the right problem to have, and maybe it is, but it doesn't make them less problems. especially if it leads to the undisciplined pursuit of more.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
That people need to use their agency to make choices, including mistakes, so that they can gain that experience that they didn't have before, so that they can become wiser, become better, and grow. Okay. So if that's the case, like as a parent, like that's what I want for my children too. I want them to make mistakes as soon as possible, be in a high rapid learning process.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
So there's no shame when they make mistakes. I'm never going to shame them because that's what they're supposed to do is make choices and some will go right and some won't. And they'll learn about themselves and other people through the process. What we would want optimally is someone like
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Anna and I as parents to step there to be able to occasionally say, no, that isn't going to work well for you. But to use that very carefully, otherwise everything's a no all the time. And like, then they don't get the optimal growth path and learning of life.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so I do think that this sort of this Damon approach and paying attention to that, like, Hey, if you're not feeling it, proceed, let's keep going. But as soon as you do, you never don't never ignore that. you just avoid so many of the catastrophic things. And in some ways, anything but catastrophic failure isn't failure. It's like, yeah, keep going, keep learning.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Just avoid the catastrophic things. And I really do believe that if people are paying attention, if they're listening, they will always have a Damon warning. That's been true in my life, and I think it's true in all the people I've talked to as I listen to them and their complex life story and their narratives. And I've done quite a bit of that over the last 25 years.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And as we've gone through literally creating a graphical representation of their life from birth to the moment we're having the conversation, in those big mistake moments, the huge things, that have been really, really big, they had a moment of warning and maybe they just were like, oh, I'm still doing it. Don't let the warnings guide you and then play openly within that lane.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I think every phase of life and every phase, if you wish to get to a higher point of contribution, you have to take your life into your hands, take responsibility for it and be courageous, which means that if you want to keep making progress, you're sort of living in a state of I don't know, like not comfort with discomfort, but you're certainly familiar with it all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
This seems something like optimal living to me.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Well, look, all wisdom to me is sort of something like the center between two opposing truths. They're both true, but if you go too far in one direction, it will no longer be true and wise. So justice and mercy would be like that. But so would, I think, sort of hard and easy is like that. So if you, for example, if a person is an insecure overachiever,
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
they will tend to operate out of a mindset where if it's not hard, I'm doing something wrong. And so they're always pushing, but they can push too far because they've gained a sort of mindset, something like a bad 1980s motivational speaker slash coach. You've got to do 150% and if you don't, then that's not enough and you just got to push further.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And that was one of the reasons that I wrote the book Effortless, was as an antidote to that. You can think about it like an insecure overachiever's guide to healthy productivity. What does that look like? Is there a way that is actually more optimal, get better results, but without this endless assumption that burnout is the way? Now, you could take it too far, but that's not who I'm writing to.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I'm writing to those that only default one way. So there's a case study that blew my mind when I read it. The more I got into it, the more some of these ideas... sort of elevated for me. So go back with me to the 1850s and the great expedition of the time, like getting to Mars is ours today. Getting to the moon was the 1960s. This was who's getting to the South Pole.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And no one had ever done it in all of recorded history. You have Shackleton that tried and failed. That's sort of the most famous failed attempt at doing it. And then after Shackleton, there are two teams that set off on almost the same day, a Norwegian team, a British team. The British leader, the expedition leader, had as a mindset something like maximum effort equals maximum reward.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so he translates that like this. Day one, we'll go 30, 40, even 50 miles if we can. We will maximize the distance because obviously, if you maximize the distance each day, you'll get to the South Pole faster than the Norwegian team. So that's what he starts. Day one, day two, day three is like that. Then they get really bad weather.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
They're so burned out physically that they have to stop, set up their tents, and sit in no progress. So it affects them psychologically. We know this because they wrote in their journals, oh, we have worse luck than anyone who's ever tried this. We have the worst weather conditions of anyone. And they're wrong about that.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And the alternative is sort of slowly dying. So it's not like you're either on the edge of your ability and facing the fear and taking new risks so that you can have the great adventure continue. Or you're just slowly dying in whatever level of success a person happens to be at. So, yeah, it's like those are two tough choices.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
In fact, they have better weather conditions than the team they had based their own attempt on. but they felt like it was true. So now they are physiologically and psychologically exhausted. One entry, we don't think anyone could make progress in weather like this, but one team could, and that's the Norwegian team who had a different mental model.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Expedition leader, something like optimal effort equals maximum results. But he got it curiously from the indigenous people in Antarctica, who had taught him this, that making maximum progress in those conditions is about sweat management. That is, if you sweat too much, you will burn out the body too soon, you will be colder, you will freeze, and it will have all of this negative consequences.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
So he translates what they had taught to him into the rule, 15 miles a day, one, five. Day one, we could go way further, but we won't. Day two, day three, day four, they get the first bad weather day. Well, they have sufficient energy to be able to continue making the progress. So they go maybe 13 miles, but it's somewhere within the range, 13 to 15 miles, even on those bad weather days.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
They avoid completely... the boom and bust approach to execution that the British team has. But the plot thickens when they get within 45 miles of the South Pole because now they have to choose what to do because they have perfect weather conditions and perfect sledding conditions. So they could, if they break the rule one time, make it to the South Pole in a single day.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And to make the decision harder, they don't know where the British team is for all they know the British team is ahead of them. And so that's like a good moment to sort of pause and just reflect on our own mindset. What would we do? What does the insecure overachiever do? Do you push? Do you pace? I've asked audiences this all over. 85% or above will admit, including me, to push. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Because that's the mindset. Because we really genuinely believe maximum effort equals maximum results. Okay, well, they don't. They pause, they pace it still, takes them three days, they get to the South Pole, they've beaten the British team by more than 20 days. That's not what should happen. Every insecure overachiever knows that's not what should happen.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
That's not how the world works and yet it is. Eventually, the British team make it there as well, but they're so burned out, not one of them make it home alive to England. They all die on what would have been the journey home, whereas in the Norwegian team, their approach allowed them to make the non-trivial 16,000-mile journey home. When I read the biography of this, The Race to the Poles,
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
The biographer chooses to describe the progress being made by the Norwegian team with words I find, even to this moment, outrageous. He said they made progress with, this is his words, without particular effort. I mean, what can you say? What can you say about that? It almost knocked me off my chair when I read the words.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I mean, I'm in the middle of writing Effortless, so it supports the case I'm making, but it's still an outrageous moment. It's the most arduous physical challenge known to humanity. That's why it was so exciting. That's why people were trying to do it. And yet their progress was defined, of course, not no effort, but that that wasn't the distinguishing quality of their advancement.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And in that, I think there is something so real to challenge the thinking that has been absorbed, swallowed almost through the pores of our skin if we're interested in success and achievement. that we have to be going beyond the max. When no one is admitting that when you go beyond the max, what's actually happening is that you're setting yourself up for the bust. No one's talking about the bust.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I'm training right now for an Ironman and there's literally a way that you can track your sort of actual power over time. And yet you wish it was higher than it is. And there are things you can do to push that number up over a long period of time, but it's what you have. And so the reason you want to know this is that when you actually do the Ironman,
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
You never want to be above your average in the entire race. Because every time you think you're, oh, look, I'm making all this progress. See, look at me. I'm passing people. This is what I need. It's like, no, what you're doing is making yourself slower later. You're drawing from a tank. What's that? Yeah, you're drawing from the tank. Right, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so this idea of finding what is your maximum and going back a little ways, like the 85% rule. Go 85% and you'll find you can go further and faster and for longer.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Yeah, I mean, I think... I mean, one way to think about what you just said is, I call it the onion of human systems. And that's, I mean, it's consistent with something we talked about before, but in all, in any human system, right? So a person is a human system, right? That's one way to think about it. A relationship is a human system. It's all of the interaction and it's highly complex.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I mean, take a single person. and try to understand everything that's in their mind and how it's all connected. That is unbelievably complex. So the complexity, like we live in a ridiculously complex world. And so human systems are ridiculously complex. The problem is,
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
If we operate in a way that we only ever at the outer edges of the onion, then we're dealing with the relatively safe and relatively trivial. And so, I mean, I think what you're describing in your journey this last year is I've been moving closer to the center in my own life.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
It's such a rich question if I tried to just answer it honestly. I mean, it's obviously been completely life-changing for me. You know, it's enabled me to operate in a certain kind of rarefied air. You know, in a quite humbling way, it has become sort of a part of the zeitgeist, a part of Americana in a certain way. And so...
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Circumstances are such that it's happening and some of it is just the success itself and going, okay, well, what does it mean? And if I don't have to work for the same reasons I used to have to work, then why do I do that? And so it raises questions that are closer to the highest level of vulnerability and highest level of impact possible is at the center.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I sometimes think about this as like the red button at the center. And there's all sorts of protective measures that people employ to avoid going there. And I used to think that was sort of fundamentally pretty much just bad. But I understand it more now because it's like you mess with that thing. You're resetting. You know, that red button is like there can be unbelievable resets.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so if you reset it stupidly or reactively or something like that, then, yeah, I suppose you risk blowing up your life. But let me just describe what I think is down there, what I've found down there is that at the center of the center, like the holy of holies of our mind and heart and life, It's a meaning frame. Of course, it's not just one, but there are meaning frames.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
That is, well, what things mean to us, how we – when we're looking at a set of data or circumstances, how we interpret it. And we are – Whatever we are, we are meaning machines. I mean, we are constantly sort of trying to make sense of where somebody said it that way. What does that mean? You know, oh, they said it with a slightly different tone of voice. What does that mean?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
You know, like we're constantly trying to map meaning in others and ourselves. Now, here's the thing. It's not just a meaning frame. It's what I've come to describe as a frozen meaning frame. And this is how it works. You have a true... There's a meaning frame that's based in truth that has got locked like two magnets with something not true.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And then because it's happening so deep in us and so subconsciously, we then just move forward in life with that being locked. And we don't even know that that's operating us. It's an operating system and it's shaping a hundred decisions, a thousand decisions. And we don't even know why. And so then people at the surface are trying to say, well, that habit's not really the habit I want.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And let me read a book about habits and then I'll be able to change it and I can move the food out and I can get rid of all the rubbish food. And yet somehow I'm always eating food. You know, sometimes, somehow, even though I know all those stuff, I can't stop doing it. Why? Because they're operating at the surface. You have to get to the center. Let me give you a single illustration of this.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I was working with a very intelligent PhD student, great husband, great father, great in his faith. But in his actual career work, he just can't get any motivation. And he's doing really well. He's at one of the top universities. So on the surface, again, it looks fine, but he knows inside there's no meaning here. And I can't seem to thrive in this environment. And he doesn't know why.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
So we go through this rapid listening process to be able to go from the surface down, down, down, always knowing, at least I know there's something at the center. We don't know what it is yet. And we find what it is together in about an hour. So it was quite rapid. His sister had died when he was young.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And when she died, his young version of making sense of this world he's in is the only things that matter in life are my family and my faith. Now, that makes perfect sense as a 10-year-old or something trying to make sense of his world. And it's not that that's totally false. But it's a set of truth mapped like those magnets with something not true. He doesn't even know it's there.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
But here he is as a PhD student at the top university struggling. As soon as he worked it out, we were able to zoom in and begin a process of starting to look at it, untangle it, gently separate it, and enable him to operate at a completely different level. And...
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
That's one illustration, but I have spent the last, I mean, I don't even talk about it in either essentialism or effortless, not really, not at all, but that's really been the story of the last 25 years of my life have been unbelievable moments like that with people one-on-one, sometimes in bigger groups where you are listening in a way that gets to the heart of the matter.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
you know, there are these, you know, so, so Steve Harvey gets a copy of it. It's his favorite book. And so we ended up doing a bunch of interesting things together. And Maria Shriver, former first lady of California, you know, she, she was given a copy and she's giving them out at her famous Sunday luncheons.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
these vulnerable but valuable unlocks at the center. This is the process I think you're going through and it will be feeling really messy and really vulnerable partially because the closer you get the higher stakes it is, but also because perhaps there hasn't been like a structured process to try and make sense of this journey. But I think if you think about it more in terms of this onion system,
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
It will help you to go, okay, of course, this feels vulnerable. Of course, this is weird. And you know what you're looking for. What are those meaning frames inside, way down, truths matched with untruths that I can start to identify, unlock, and then be able to release a new way of living and operating?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Well, let's level set by saying this, that almost everything that has been written and published both in the popular press and in academic circles and certainly online are about our advice for how to become successful. And almost nothing has been written about what to do once you are. Well, that's a problem. Okay, you can say, well, most people are trying to make the journey from zero to one.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
So maybe the idea is, well, there's a smaller market for the one to infinity market. But I've spent so much of my life working with people in that category that I feel a lot of sympathy and even compassion. Yeah, I would say compassion better even than sympathy because Because there's a lot of misjudgment, really low quality judgment of people that are successful.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And Kanye was missing one time and wherever he was, he had a copy of essentialism because that's what, you know, that's what he posted on social media. And then when he was on Rogan, he's like, uh, He's like, yeah, I'm an essentialist now. And so these moments are a bit – some of those are a bit strange, but it's also humbling because – because the movement has just begun.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Because if you're trying to go from zero to one and somebody's up there and they're in three, four, five, 10, it's like, yeah, they're all right. They're fine. They'll be okay. And it's like, that's because they actually don't understand what it is once you start to get there. So what is someone going to experience?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
They're going to experience, what's that word where you're standing on a high building and you're looking over? Vertigo. Vertigo. Success vertigo is definitely part of the problem. It's just like, whoa, where even am I now? You know, I've just been trying to get up here. you know, and now I got up here and now this just feels so strange.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And the number of people up here, there's like, you know, down there on level one, there was like a million people. And then as I got up, as I carried on walking up and going up and up and up, you know, the numbers start siphoning out. And now up here, it's like, There's three people up here and they're all really busy doing their thing and I don't know who to talk to or how to operate.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so the loneliness of leadership and the loneliness of success is huge. And this is one of the reasons that you see the psychological discombobulation of people that achieve success in a sense overnight, even though they almost have always been working for years to get there. But then suddenly it pops. They get into this movie.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I had Matthew McConaughey on my podcast and we've remained friends since. And He's like, you know, the day after the big break happens and the movie comes out, he's like, I walked down the same road the day before and there was like two or three people that looked at me and maybe they weren't even really looking at me.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
He says afterwards, there was two or three people not looking at him and they might have been looking at him. The difference was so different. And one of the things he ended up having to do, not immediately, but he took a year or two out of it just to go, okay, I don't even know where I am anymore. And I don't just want to be the rom-com guy. So he took a sort of connect the dots year or two.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And I thought that was pretty brilliant. prescient of him, showed a pretty strong degree of foresight to not just become a function of the machine. And that's basically what I think it is, is that as you're moving up the levels, you're building a machine that's going to produce the thing you want, to produce the success.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And building that system, I think, is key to getting from zero to one and even beyond. But there's a certain point at which the machine is working so well, it's like who's serving who? Did I become... The cog, you know, am I now the node in the system I built and I'm just answering to it or am I still the creator? And the gravitational pull of success is so strong that it is harder to escape it.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I mean, truly success traps are harder to escape than failure traps. Failure traps are incentivized to change. Success traps are incentivized to carry on. And so it takes a greater self-awareness to be able to push apart and not be a cog in the system, but separate and look at the system. Okay, what is happening here? What is the state of affairs here? How's it all working?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And do I want to enter that system again? Or how would I now want to change it for the next 10 years of my life? Or the next, in your case, you're saying five years, that's sort of a key metric, the last five years where you were now for the next five years.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
So I think it's the escape from it so that you can start to look at it, not be in the system you've built, but to be able to observe the system. I think about it like the observer's advantage. Because we can build really successful complex prisons if we're not careful. And so, yeah, we built it. It did what we wanted.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
But then we get it and you're like, maybe that isn't what I wanted, but I'm still in it now and everyone else seems to want it. So maybe I should want it. And so it's all this very confusing sort of multi-mirrored experience that we're having. And so to be able to escape it, to be able to say, look, that is not me.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And I can feel that, that every year there are more people that essentialism reaches than the year before. There are more stories coming of people that really do feel like it's changed their life, which is always a, you know, that's, that's its own sort of strange experience. And so maybe to your question about what's changed, I mean, Let me try and offer two things to that.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
That system, that success, that way of working, that way of operating, that is not the real me. The real me is the observer. And that I really think is literally true, right? The observer, the fact that we can, for example, if we're having a panic attack, whether because of failure or success, because they can both produce it. The fact that we, it is that psychologically positive,
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
possible to actually observe yourself having a panic attack means that the observer isn't having a panic attack and the observer is you. It's such a discovery at any phase of success to discover, oh, I'm not my thoughts and I'm not my life. That's just where I am and what's happening right now, but I can observe it.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I just think in some ways it's harder to do that as success becomes its own form of noise. It's so loud and there's money involved and there's fame involved and there's people involved and there's criticism involved and there's opportunity involved and there's more involved and all of those things are so loud. It's like, how do I get myself to observe again?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
How do I not just get to the next party and the next moment and the next opportunity and the next flight and the next? That's the journey, I think, to help become successful at success. And if you think about some of the horror stories of success in the past, and there's a lot to pull from.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
You can see why success can become such a catalyst for failure because it takes us away from the observer role where we can actually get clarity about our life. What's happening? So what? Now what? That question from the observer position seems to be the right process at all levels of success, but man, it's harder at the highest levels.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
One thing that's changed is I really believe now that people do need the tool set to go with the mindset. And I wasn't convinced of that 10 years ago. In fact, I was under contract to create, which you know about this new tool, the Essentialism Planner. I was under contract 10 years ago to create that, started working on it for a couple of months and just was like, no, I don't think this...
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Well, one thought that comes to mind, or two thoughts, I guess. One is Elon Musk mentioned at one point that for every minute he spends on Tesla, that's worth a million dollars. That's what he estimates. Yeah. So think about that, right?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Like it's so easy to be, to, to, I mean, if a culture gets, um, if a culture gets infected with, with envy and, and you know, then, then what you produce is a lot of, um, like moral, immoral pride looking up. Of course, you can have pride looking down. You can be one up because of success and achievement. But there is a different kind of pride, right?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
There's a different kind of ego looking up going, well, look at them. They're all right. And it's easy for them. And if only I had that, then I'd be... So that happens too. And I think that's as blind as the opposite because it lacks all the empathy and the complexity of what life is like.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Why is it that not 100% of the time, but a very high percent of the time, people that win the lottery discombobulate? Why is that? It's worth pausing about because everyone who plays the lottery presumably wants to win and believes that if they win, life will immediately be better for them. And it's not what happens.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
So that's worth thinking about because whether you win the lottery or you just achieve something more than you expected to or things work out for you, you're still in the same situation. And it's like, if you can't manage... level one, why do you think you can play at a level a thousand?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
If you're in a computer simulation or if you're playing a computer game and you can't do level one yet, if someone just gives you some hack and now you're in a level a hundred at the same game, why do you think being at the level means you can perform at the level? And so it's a bit of a
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I would say it's a slightly tragic thing to wake up to and go, oh, I got to this level, whatever that level is now. and now I have to learn a new set of skills and a new way of thinking. Oh, I've got to do it again.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I've got to do it again. I've got to do it again. Absolutely. And, and, and like, so, so, so there's, I mentioned it previously just with a six minute planning process of, of going from confusion to clarity to creation. But of course it applies way beyond a daily process. This, this, this, I think the acceptance that everybody faces confusion and a level of chaos every day of their lives.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And I was talking to a very successful entrepreneur and investor recently who said, Apple, Google, all of the top brands in the world, all of these companies that we think operate in a certain kind of way. He says, when you work there, this is true. When you work there, you're just dealing with confusion and chaos every day. That's still what you're managing.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so you are presenting to the world a certain brand, and that's not that that's a lie, but somehow in the way it's presented, people can easily assume, well, behind the curtain, everything's smooth, everyone's... No!
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Tim Cook and the executives there, and I've worked with enough of the executives to know what I'm talking about with it, they're just dealing constantly with the unknown of that next level of success. And so upgrading yourself for the current level you're at Yeah, it's not what we expect. It's not what's expected.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Nobody needs this. And there's so many planners and journals and this kind of thing out there. I don't want to create it just because, okay, essentialism did well, so now we have to do this. So I uncommitted from the contract, went away from it, carried on in my own life every single day doing some kind of written in paper and pen journaling and planning. And I don't think I've missed a day
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I think what you begin with is this assumption that every single person watching this, right? And I suppose it's happening in this moment, right? They're watching or listening to this. It's two more people sharing thoughts and so on. It's like, if you're alive today, you are having more opinion inputs, right? It's not information overload anymore, right? It's opinion overload.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
You have more opinion inputs than anybody ever. And it's from people that know you less well than in any other previous era. So the gap and possibility for irrelevance is really high. If my daughter comes home from school today and before I even listen to her, I just play a podcast for her or I just read off of X some statement that someone made. Just read it to them.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
What are the chances that what I'm going to share is going to be the most relevant thing that could be said to her in this moment? That's very, very low. And that's sort of the problem. So I think you begin by just assuming, oh, you could be below average in your consumption of opinions today and you'd still have an opinion overload problem.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
So I think with that, I mean, maybe one thing I would recommend to your question, what do you do? I think if you fast from social media for a certain period of time, Let's say even if you do it once a year, you say, okay, five days, no social media, cut out that noise. You don't have to go to Hawaii to do it, right? Like you just go, okay, for one week, I'm just not going to do it.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And notice the difference. Notice what happens to your thinking. Notice what you notice. That to me is one good rule of thumb. I think a second thing that I would recommend is people, you know, Maybe again, it's like a once a year spring cleaning, but go through everybody you're following and just start from zero. Like right now, imagine you weren't following anyone.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Who would you select to follow? Who are the people now that you think are going to give you the most relevant insight for your life today? I think that that idea of starting from zero is a better mindset switch than... Let's look at the whole list and remove one or two people. It's like, start the other way around. Go to zero and see what might be relevant.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
See who now is going to be helping you go forward. What have the impact of these voices been on you on the last year? Did they help you? Did they just add more clutter to your life? Are the things you really care about better? I had Brad Smith on my podcast. He's the president of Microsoft. He is one of the only technologists who openly admits to the – well, he wrote a book about it.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so I think that the more success somebody experiences, I think the more the case for essentialism exists in their life because they go, yeah, this is what the problem I thought I wanted. And maybe it still is, but now you still have to figure out how to be successful at success and to not have it eat you alive and and spit you out, this is sort of the path eventually.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
It's called Tools and Weapons. And just the admission that all technology can be both, all of it, I've worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years now. It is so rare that anyone admits that, especially if they're being paid not to admit it. So you're just always seeing only the upsides.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I mean, in the last 10 years, I don't think I've missed a day. And in the process, found eventually this way of using a few minutes every day that I thought was so optimal and so supportive of essentialism, I was like, actually, maybe a plant of wood could really help people.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Anyway, one of the things that he has said about this, he said, for 100 years, all of the technology that we have has made it easier to connect with people who live far from us at the cost of the people who live closest to us.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so you can take that and turn it into a sort of algorithm for life because you can say, oh, right, they only make money if I'm not spending time listening to my wife or my daughter or my son. That's the only time any technologist is making money is if I am not doing that communications work, that face-to-face work.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And as soon as you see that, you're like, oh, well, that makes everything for, well, he's saying a hundred years, but let's just say the last 10 years, that makes the last 10 years make a lot of sense. What's happened to the – deep friendships have gone down in every single category, male, female, and all age points.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
But over the last 10 years, the biggest drop-off has been in men, I think sort of age 30 plus. Now, that doesn't mean that they're worse than anybody else, but the drop-off has been higher over that period of time. It's like, well, why is that happening? Well, because simultaneously technology, gaming, social media has had its heyday, uncontrolled growth. So you're making a trade-off.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so I think that if you put sort of all of those together, like maybe give you one more rule, I think it's like technology offered a set time per day.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
I'm not always great at that, to be honest, but we went through a period over this summer when I really was doing it and immediately the quality of my life went up immediately because what happened is it was like, okay, we're going to, you know, let's get around and talk and we'll just laugh and maybe we'll go swim and we'll swim together and then we'll just make memories together.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And it was the quality of life was immediately improved. And it's because we aren't properly aware of this trade-off that technology companies have made effortless for us. Whatever that device is in our pockets, it's not a phone, right? That's not what it is. Jordan Peterson talks about that. Whatever it is, it's not a phone. So I did some thinking after that. Well, what is it?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And I think about all my experience in Silicon Valley, and I'm like, oh, right, okay. It's a $3 trillion military-grade disorientation machine that makes certain people a lot of money at the cost of connection between humans that live together and are close together. That's what it is. I'm not saying it's only that or all the time that. That's what I think it is right now.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Look, Essentialism 10 year anniversary. That's updated. Of course, the Essentialism planner. If people, depending when this airs, if they go to essentialism.com, there's a whole set of additional tools and, you know, tools that couldn't make it into the planner that people can get and so on. Totally free and a really high quality course.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so that's one of the shifts that's happened for me is you need the mindset, but now I actually believe a tool set makes a big difference for people. Maybe it's for people that aren't thinking about essentialism as much as I am, which is like everybody. For them, they just want the tool. Give me the tool. Give me the best of what you've learned. And so that's one big change, I would say.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
If you go to gregmckeown.com, in 10 seconds, you can sign up. It's called Less But Better. And it takes the best of essentialism and effortless into these 30-day course. There's 10 classes spread out over that time. And, uh, and it's just, where do we begin? You know, here we are, we've talked about so many things. It's totally overwhelming. Uh, but where do you begin?
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Start with this less, but better course. I think those are three things to go with.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Yeah, likewise. Thank you, Chris.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
You said there was a second one. Yeah, I was trying to remember. Oh, yeah, I know what I was going to say about that. So... I think we've shifted eras. Okay, so if you say agrarian age, industrial age, information age, I think in the 10 years since I published Essentialism, we've shifted to an influencer age. And that's a non-trivial shift. So...
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
If you say, okay, the lead characteristic of the information age was distraction, then the lead characteristic in this new age is disorientation. And while I think that those are sort of similar in some ways, I think that this new is much more foundationally challenging. And the word that I think would have been relevant 10 years ago but is different when I talk to people about it now is noise.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Everybody's buried in noise. And so it's the ability to eliminate noise. It's the ability to not just eliminate though, synthesize noise. so that you can connect the dots through it like it's raw material from which to create something meaningful. These skills now seem to me primary in a way that even 10 years ago, I wouldn't have said that.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Well, my brother certainly would call me a Cassandra, so I don't know. I mean, maybe there's something to that.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And so the antidote, of course, is the disciplined pursuit of less but better. So anyway.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Well, I think that the way I think about it is that we are either in or approaching a truly limitless era, right? Like that's the good news. The bad news is that the obstacle to that is the noise. In some ways, it's both the obstacle and the raw material. The enabler, yeah. It's both. But figuring out how to navigate that
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
And we're using this disorientation word and noise comes from the Latin nausea. And so when we say, yeah, we feel all this noise in our world, it's like, yes, we actually feel nauseous. It's seasickness. And so when we go on social media and we're absorbing so much information that way, including news, right? So it's not just influences in the original sense of the word.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Oh, you should wear these clothes or live this way. It's not just that. It's all of the things, all of the information is getting... put through that lens, that process to us. When we get off social media, it's like, where are we? We don't even know where we are. We don't know what's up, what's down. And so it's like reactivity becomes a lifestyle rather than, yes, well, sometimes I'm reactive.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
It's like, we're just constantly in this reactive state.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
Well, I mean, let's start with this, right? Like, I haven't named this law. You and I are going to name this law, maybe. And it's this, that the highest priority today is the least likely thing to happen. Hmm. So that's the strangest thing. And I stand by that. I believe that's a law, at least a law in this era.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
It might be that it's a natural law and it's just a human bias that's just really challenging to overcome. But when I go through a planning process in the day and I've identified the priority, when I look at it, I think there's no way that would have happened today. It doesn't even always happen after I've defined it. I might not even make any progress on it today.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
But I'm like, if I hadn't defined it, there's no way I would have made any progress. Like we react. to either complete trivia, the trivial many, or maybe to important things, or maybe to urgent things. But the essential, the most important thing, the most important relationship, that is never the thing that happens first, unless you make it so.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
So that's one reason that I think living reactively is suboptimal.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
No, no, no. I'll say it further, and this would come close to another law. In essentialism, I call it the 90% rule. The 90% rule says, focus only on those things that are 90% or above important. That is, if it's not a clear yes, it becomes a clear no. So that's like an extreme rule to try and help us escape the tendency to do just the good stuff or the middle stuff is be more selective.
Modern Wisdom
#880 - Greg McKeown - How To Focus On What Matters Most
But over the last 10 years, something I have come to observe and believe is that we have only enough time left to do the 90% and above. And that's the tougher aha, because you say, oh, every time I'm doing something that's just good or completely trivial, I am making a trade-off I would probably not make if they were really placed in front of me as choices.