Greg McKeown is an author, public speaker, and leadership consultant Success requires you to focus on what truly matters. But in the modern world there are more distractions than ever before. So how should you best choose what to prioritise, and what are the pitfalls to avoid? Expect to learn how Essentialism has evolved over the past decade, why saying no is so hard and how to get better at saying it, how to counteract your desire for novelty, why it’s so difficult to cut your losses, how to use boundaries in your life, the challenges you'll face as you become more successful and much more.. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Essentialism and why is it important?
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.
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.
And so the antidote, of course, is the disciplined pursuit of less but better. So anyway.
No, I think it's so right as well that I'm aware talking about success on the internet is one of the least popular things to do because the total addressable market is essentially zero compared with talking about grinding from the ground floor up. But assuming that the people that are into personal development
and work on themselves and read books like yours that have been hugely formative for me, assuming that their goal is to achieve a level of success, you better fucking future-proof yourself. If the thing that you want to get is there and you know. Maybe it's one of those things that you just don't get to appreciate or believe until you actually arrive there.
You're like, no, no, no, that's bullshit. When I get to success, it's all going to be fine. It's like, look, every single person I've spoken to, every single one of them, the problems don't stop. They get more complex the higher up the ladder you get.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How can you effectively say no?
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.
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.
So that's one reason that I think living reactively is suboptimal.
Well, it completely puts you at the mercy of...
whatever next comes careening into consciousness right whether it's a notification on your phone whether it's a fear that you've had whether it's memory of the fact that you don't have any bread in the the cupboard uh you know that's that it's the most salient thing and you know the eisenhower matrix of sort of urgent versus important the urgent will always all i mean when i think back to you know when i was really really obsessive about the sort of working on productivity i
When I think back to that, the amount of time, months, months that I would put off the important thing, months that I wouldn't do it for. Like the most important thing, which evidently not that important. Well, no, it is. It's just somehow other stuff gets in the way.
And if you're not careful, and this is something I'm sort of realizing as I grow up and get a little bit older, you don't have an unlimited amount of time to do the important things in your life. You don't have an unlimited amount of time.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of success?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
how can people better work out their priorities? It sounds all well and good if it's not above 90% important, but you've just admitted yourself that we're living in an age where everything feels important. Not only does everything feel important, but the most important things are often the least urgent.
So you have to get through the non-important urgent shit first, then you need to get through the non-important non-urgent shit to find the important non-urgent shit that sits at the bottom. How, after all of this time teaching people, doing courses and all the rest of it, What's the best framework that people can use to work out what they need to work on?
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.
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Chapter 4: How to prioritize in a noisy world?
you're forcing all of this water into an ice cube tray so that it sits nice, compartmentalized, because you have no idea what to do. It's messy. The world is messy and chaotic and you need to wrangle it into some sense of order. Fantastic. What I've learned that that, whatever it is, conscience, daemon, gut instinct, habit, whatever it is, that thing that goes off there, for the most part,
is almost always right. And it gets more right the longer that you go on. And you say, well, that's whimsy. It's imprecision. It's wishful thinking. It's untestable. It's unverifiable. It's unfalsifiable. I'm like, yep, I am completely there with you. And yet, when I find myself following that thing, most stuff goes well.
Most stuff goes well, and it goes better than it would have done had I have tried to reverse engineer my, what do I want written on my gravestone, broken down into 10-year chunks, broken down into one-year sprints, broken down into daily action. It's just, what do I want to do? And that, again...
The reason that it's so cool is that it is a competitive advantage that compounds with experience, which means that as opposed to it's one of a countervailing forces to things get more difficult the further along the ladder that you get, because this is one of the things that you can't speed run. There is no fucking growth hacking experience, really. It comes along as a byproduct of time.
This is your first tour that you've done with the band. You have no idea how you should eat, how you should sleep, how you should train, when you need to go to the bathroom, how you need to pack everything. After a while, maybe you've got a system in place, and then after a while, after that, you just do it by feel. And you're like, fuck, that's cool. And it's not replicable.
It means that competition is... And it's more fun because it doesn't feel like it's this prescribed... top-down dictatorial world. It's this sort of emergent, bottom-up, very uniquely you. And yeah, at least for me, managing that transition has been a difficult one to allow myself to be more free-flowing. But I really appreciate it.
I appreciate and I'm grateful to me for letting go of some of the more sort of rigorous and rigid and structured ways that I used to do things to now allow me to sort of tap into that experience. So maybe that resonates.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What is the 90% rule in Essentialism?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This seems something like optimal living to me.
Yeah, beautiful. I want to talk about something else that I've been kind of conflicted by this year. So a lot of the people listening to the show will know a good friend of mine, a guy called Alex Hormozy. He is very much hard things are hard. That's why they're hard. Stop complaining about them being hard. And I think...
his message is is fantastic and it's resonated with me a lot and it's given me an awful lot of resilience in times when i've needed it uh but i'm not convinced that it is a fuel that i need to rely on all the time and i'm interested in alchemizing something different or maybe just having a couple of different fuel sources you know switching between fucking coal and nuclear or whatever yeah
And I came across a really gorgeous quote from you that said, Puritanism went beyond embracing the hard. It extended to also distrusting the easy. And I think for the people who take pride and pleasure and meaning and purpose from deploying the hard, from leaning into the hard, from dealing with it, and they say, I can do things other people can't.
And I can put my nose to the grindstone and I will keep going and I'm going to carry the boats and so on. That... the distrust of the easy comes along for the ride. So I'm interested in that arc and how a micro David Goggins can learn to trust the easy and have a little bit more comfort when things come along like that.
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Chapter 6: How to find clarity and direction?
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?
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: What does it mean to trust the easy?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 8: How can we navigate disorientation in life?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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