How to Accomplish MORE by Doing LESS | Greg McKeown

"Live life in crescendo means to believe that your most important work lies ahead of you, not behind you." What I think is interesting about that is as you get older and as you watch other people getting older, you see how that is not the natural way of things in a way that wasn't obvious when I was young. And you can see that people peak at any various point. I mean, that's in a way the opposite, the opposite of live life in crescendo is peaks at some point. So sometimes people peak in high school, literally, right? That's, you know, they were the quarterback or they were, you know, they were the popular person or they homecoming king and queen or whatever. Like this was the best and that was their peak and they never learn how to adapt that to the next circumstance. And so they've peaked there or maybe somebody peaks in college, they're college sports or maybe they got the high GPA or, you know, and it's the key is not to peak. It's like to have, to learn as much as you can at each stage, but to really genuinely believe, This is about a long journey. This is about making a higher contribution tomorrow than today and to keep going in that way. And, and that has already been a very profound idea that was embedded in me young that I think has already been great, really advantageous to me.

Today we have an incredible guest. Greg McKeown. He is a leadership and productivity expert who has dedicated his career to discovering counterintuitive strategies to achieve success without burnout. And I want to share personally that I am a huge fan of his bestselling book Essentialism. This is a book that sold over a million copies, and I've had so many people I've recommended they read this book, uh, for the health benefits, but also for the benefits in success in their career and overall living a successful and fulfilling life. And really excited. Now, Greg also has a new book out called Effortless. So, we're gonna talk today about how to reduce stress, how to avoid burnout, but really how to work smarter, not harder, so you can achieve more success in every area of your life. And so, Greg, wanna say, hey, welcome to the show.

It's great to be with you, Josh. Thank you.

Yeah, you know, as I was starting to read about your book Effortless— and let me touch on Essentialism first, you know, that was a, that was a transformative book for myself and, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of others, because I think this idea of whittling life down to the things that matter most and what can happen if we really prioritize in the proper way, uh, and it's not minimalism per se, it's, it's, it's part of that, but I think that messaging was so important for so many people. And I feel like in your new book, you're hitting on some new things about Effortless. And, uh, you know, I used to have patients come into me. I remember when I first started, I had a functional medicine practice, and when patients started coming into me, the biggest surprise to me was when I would ask them, how are you doing? And I would go through their list of symptoms. The most common thing I heard, and I was oftentimes, uh, moms uh, in my practice, but they would say, I'm overwhelmed. Mm-hmm. I'm overwhelmed. I'm burnt out. I feel like they have the weight of the world on my shoulders. I hear this from so many men and women today. What— why is that?

Well, I mean, we live in an era of, uh, exponential choices, uh, outrageous expectations, uh, exhausting noise. If you compare our times to let's say pre-1895, it's far easier to survive physically in the world, literally. It was very tough to survive in 1895, but there were no options. I mean, that's part of what made life hard. If you went to market, you've got 28 items. If you've got some malady, some physical malady, there's hardly any options available to you. And so, but at the same time, you were not overwhelmed in the same way by the just crescendo of noise. And when we're hammered by all of that noise, the risk is that we get caught up in the trivial, in the peripheral, the shallow, and so we miss the things that matter. And we can spend enormous amount of our time, energy, resources pursuing things that in the end do not address the real issues, do not get to the essentials. And so our lives are sort of completely out of balance in this way.

Yeah, I can absolutely see this, this sort of idea of out of balance. You know, there are a lot of people, it's really easy to fall into that. Give me the idea, the main core of the principle behind Effortless.

Well, they work together. So the idea in Essentialism is focus, and the idea in Effortless is simplification. And so you need both because it's not just about doing the right things. It's about doing them in the right way. I remember coaching a woman, she's a manager. She's the kind of insecure overachiever who's up at 4:00 AM in the morning Photoshopping for an unpaid nonprofit youth group the next day. No one's asking her to do it, but this is how she's wired. She's the kind of person who feels guilty if she eats lunch, not if she takes time away for lunch. I mean, just even if she eats it. So there's a certain mindset at play there. Maybe you could say it's a sort of Puritan mindset, but it's something like, if I'm not sacrificing to the point of pain, then I'm not giving enough, then I'm not serving enough, I'm not helping enough. And so there was this endless tendency to overcomplexify everything that's coming her way. So I'm coaching her and I said, well, listen, what you need to do is a little bit like the Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza suddenly realizes He's been making all the wrong choices his whole life. So he just does the opposite day. And he says, "I'm gonna do everything different to my intuition." I said, "That's what I want you to do. Invert. The next time you're asked to do something, invert it. Stop, pause. How would I do this in an effortless way instead of in this exhausting, overcomplicating way?" She gets a call the next day or so from, she works at an educational institution.. And the professor wants her to come and bring her videography team, record his lesson for the rest of the year, his class. And she is about to jump into it. I'll bring the whole team, we'll edit it all together. We'll have intros, outros, music. We'll wow him, you know, amaze him. Because this is that mindset. And she remembers, no, invert, opposite day. And what she does instead, she says, okay, hold on, let me just pause. Is there an effortless way to achieve what you want to achieve? And it turns out that this was going to be for one student who was going to miss a few classes because of an athletic commitment. And the solution that she helped to identify was, well, what if someone just on their iPhone records whatever classes he misses and sends it? Oh, I had not thought about that. Head-slapping moment the professor has. It saves her 4 months of work for her and her entire team. And she came out with this sudden awareness. There is a different way to do life. Extreme simplicity. But it starts with this mindset. How can I make it effortless instead of, well, how can I wow them? How can I do everything with bells and whistles? This was a tipping point for her, and I think it's illustrative of other people and what they can do beyond just figuring out what's essential. It's how to do it effortlessly.

It's so good. And obviously, as you said, busyness, right? This sort of, which is in a way it's this artificial, uh, trying to make myself feel like I'm, I'm doing a lot rather, or, you know, getting ahead even if you're not, uh, obviously plays a big pull. And I can really see how this essentialism and effortless really go hand in hand. You know, I, I think that there are so many people, and I've heard you talk about this, they are conditioned to believe, and then I was trained this way by, uh, actually, I was in a coaching group one time, and basically they said everything was about just work until you're exhausted, right? Just, you know, it works 60 hours a week. And I got to the point where gave me major health— I actually developed health issues my first couple years in practice because I was working 60, 80 hours a week. So talk to me about that mentality of why is that so prevalent and how do we counteract that?

Well, there's a single mindset behind all of this. I just did an episode, a podcast episode entirely about this on The 85% Rule. But let me just try to give a synopsis of it. There is a dominant mindset: maximum effort equals maximum results. It's like a bad 1980s motivational speaker. But that idea has infiltrated so many of the thought practices of insecure overachievers. So people that want to have high performance assume because of that simplistic idea, well, therefore if I want to overperform, I have to overwork, I have to overstrain, I have to overcomplicate. More must produce better results. And the thing is, it doesn't. The, the data does not support that. And it hasn't for the last, let's say, quarter of a century, meaning that The data we've been gathering over the last quarter of a century shows that that's not the case. What is true is that optimal effort equals optimal or even maximum results. And that's— it's just a rule of thumb, but that's what the 85% rule is all about. So I'm not arguing that we do nothing, that we do not put in any effort. The effortless effort, that sweet spot, does require effort, but it starts to feel effortless because it's just in that right position where we're giving You know, we're giving of ourselves in a challenging way, but not to the point that we're using up tomorrow's reserves. And if you'll allow me, there's a case study that blew my mind as I was researching Effortless. It's one of the most physically arduous challenges imaginable. 1850s, everybody in the, you know, the developed world at that time is fascinated with who will be the first to get to the South Pole because nobody in all recorded history had ever done it. Lots of people had tried, and then two teams set off on almost the same day from two different locations to try to have a race to the poles. There's a British team with what I would describe as this outdated mindset, maximum effort equals maximum results. And their idea, led by their captain, was go as far as you possibly can day one, and the same for day two and day three and so on, because that will get you there faster. Well, that isn't what happens, and it's not what happened for him. What happened is that he burned his team out really quickly so that as soon as they had their first bad weather day, they started the journey and couldn't make it 2 inches, end up going back into the tents and just sitting there, you know, exhausted, mentally fatigued, writing in their journals. Could anybody make progress in weather like this? Well, one team could, and that was the Norwegian team that they were competing against. Their leader, the expedition leader, had a different idea. He'd learned it from the Eskimos, which is that you can't go— you can't push too hard because in those extreme weather conditions, you can't sweat too much because that becomes a tremendous risk to your overall health. And so he'd learned this in a very tangible way, this 85% rule. And so as a result, he set the limit. 15 miles. On good weather days, we will hold back from 40, 50-mile efforts that we could achieve, and we're going to do 15 miles. That meant that on their first bad weather day, they were able to continue and do 15 miles. They carried on doing this, 15, 15, 15. But the plot thickens when he got within 45 miles of the South Pole. They have perfect weather and perfect sledding conditions. And they don't know where the British team is. So for all they know, the British team is ahead of them. And the question I always pose to people is like, what would we do and why? Would we push or would we pace? And my sense is, at least if I'm honest myself, I'd push. I'd go, okay, fine, we'll break the rule this one time. One day we can make it. We'll do 45 miles and maybe that will make the difference. But he doesn't because he understands the, the, the, the vital power of this restrained approach. So they take 3 more days averaging again 15 miles per day. Well, what happens? They get there before the British team. They beat them by more than 20 days. It's unthinkable to the rest of us that such a thing is true. There was a moment when I read the original biography about this And the biographer said something so outrageous, I just— it almost knocked me off my chair. He said the Norwegian team made progress every day without particular effort. Now, to me, that's outrageous. It's a ridiculous thing to say. How can the most physically arduous task almost imaginable to humans at that time be described in that way? And yet that is how they won. And not only how they won, but they also had to make the 16,000-mile journey back. So that's a non-trivial part of the story because they all made it alive. But the British team who did make it to the South Pole but had lost the race had nothing left and they all died on the way home. In that case study, you can see, I think, the argument for the 85% rule of this effortless way of thinking. Because if you can find a way to pace your progress so that you have enough left in the tank for tomorrow, you avoid the boom and bust approach to execution that the British team inevitably fell into. That's what so many people are doing, and it keeps them from what would otherwise be sustainable high performance and instead creates this kind of crazy world in which we live, in which you— yes, okay, there's moments of performance followed by burnout, followed by stress, followed by relationship strain, health strain, and all the rest of it in this vicious cycle that we that we see because it's based in a bad paradigm. To me, this is one of the case studies that gives me fire for the deed on these subjects.

I mean, this is— it's a powerful story. I love— I mean, it's, uh, it's— yeah, I'd never heard that story before. I, um, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's the idea of, in a way, the tortoise and the hare as well, right? It's a slow and steady wins the race. It's, you know, pacing yourself and, and saving fuel in the tank. You know, I'm reminded of a couple things. One, I had a track and field coach. He used to always tell me I used to start off way too fast, you know, every race I did. And the first lap around, I'm cruising, I'm in first place, and then I just totally burn myself out. And so I found when I started to race differently and started to say, okay, you know what, I'm going to stay in the middle of the pack, I'm going to, I'm going to keep a little bit of fuel in the tank for that last, you know, 200 meters, I performed the best. And so that was so good. And then I experienced the same thing you're sharing with, uh, when I was in practice. When I was in practice, I, um, well, at one point I, I was doing, you know, like I said, 68 hours a week. And then I had an injury. I was doing CrossFit. I ended up hurting my back, laying down for a couple weeks. And I realized, well, I can't be doing all this stuff. I couldn't do anything. So I was on the phone and I just started telling my team members— I just started leading them and encouraging them and telling them, hey, do this, do this, basically acting like a coach to my team. And I kept doing that for the full year, and we went from growing by 10% to— I want to say we grew 8 times that single year. And the only thing that was different was, rather than me doing all of the work, I instead was helping my team work smarter.

Well, and, and the idea of, of team and the idea of a high-trust team, of course, is one of the strategies, and I cover it in the book. For being able to have residual results, right? The difference between linear results and residual results is really different, but it's another example of how we can get locked into a way of thinking. There's something so fair and just about this approach that we put in X effort today and get X result to, to today, and that tomorrow if we don't put in X effort, then we won't get X result. But that mental model is enormously limiting because it means that we can't ever escape the current performance that we're in. It's just day after day, we're back to square one. And what I found is that the people that understood this principle the best are people that break that thinking. They separate effort from reward. Now, it doesn't mean that you don't put in effort. It means where do you put in your effort? Do you use it to achieve the result directly, or do you use it to build systems that produce results for you? And of course, one of those systems is hiring the right person or working with the right partner, you know, being selective, maybe even the influencer that most influences you, being really selective about that. But it's making sure you have the right few people that you're working with. And I mean, an illustration of what I'm trying to describe here is you look at like Warren Buffett. He's— there's this amazing story when he is deciding to purchase this $21 billion firm from Walmart. And he said, if you work with— he says, if you work with the wrong people, you have to manage them all the time. You have to— it's a low-trust interaction and it's extremely expensive. I mean, Imagine if you're buying a company of that size and that value, you could spend 6 months and many millions of dollars on your— just going through the due diligence, just making sure, sort of forcing the process to make sure you've looked at every item on people's books and every legal risk that you're taking on, which is what makes it so striking that what he said he did is that it was a 2-hour meeting and a handshake. That was the entire due diligence that was done. He said, we knew that Walmart would have it exactly as they said they would. And they did. It was McLane Industries that he was buying. And he uses that, or at least we can use that as an illustration of the power of working with the right people. He says, we look for the best managers in the world. And then he's like, do you think we tell them what to do? We don't tell them what to do. They're the best in the world. He said, so our investment strategy, his phrase, not mine, our investment strategy borders on lethargy. Again, it's a sort of unthinkable thing to say. Here we have the highest performing investor, perhaps in history, but certainly in the modern age. And he's saying, yeah, we just spend a lot of time waiting till we find the right people. And then we go big and for the long run with the right people because they'll make the right choices over time. And that's what we're looking for. He said, we're not looking— here's another metaphor he used. We're not looking for 7-foot fences to leap over. We're looking for 1-foot fences we can step over. They're obvious yeses because these people are people they really trust, and then they get to trust them completely. I think that's applicable to people beyond Warren Buffett.

Well, yeah, I absolutely agree. And I remember reading something similar about Warren Buffett when he was asked about his top 3 reasons he decides to invest, and he said exactly what you're saying. Well, number 1 is the team leadership. Who are the people that are going to run and build the company? And that was— is by far number 1. So I think that's, that's brilliant. You know, we see this in the health field. There's a study out of Duke University that came out not too, too, too long ago that said if you want to see results in your health, the number one thing you should do— and it wasn't— the crazy thing was it wasn't you need to eat better or exercise. It said in the study, hang around more disciplined people.

Yeah. And, and, and there's— I just was reading a piece of research just about this recently that, you know, we've heard this idea that, uh, Jim Rohn made it popular that you are the product of the 5 people you spend most time with, right? We've heard that idea. Well, that's probably right, but it's also wrong because if you look at network effects, you find that you're influenced not by just those people, but by the people that influence them and the people that influence them. So in the largest longitudinal study on on weight, you find that if people, 2 people removed from you have increased in weight, you'll tend to increase in weight. And so, yeah, it's a really extraordinary thing because that seems, I mean, first of all, it just seems unthinkable. You don't even see them, you're not meeting them. But this is the, we're so much closer connected than is obvious. So this deliberate choice of who you're spending time with and this deliberate choice of what networks you want to involve yourself with, I think is one of these— it's one decision that makes a thousand. If you can be in the right place within a network and then almost forget about it, it's on autopilot. It starts to work for you in your favor. And it's another example of this residual result that we were talking about a moment ago.

It's so great, Greg. And so, as you're talking about, one of the things we can do to make our life more effortless is to get around the right people. So if you want to lose weight, hang around more disciplined people. If you want to have more success in your career and you own— you're a small business owner, hire the right people. Or if you want to grow in your career, get, you know, be part of an organization that has a great culture and a great boss. And you know that. So all of these principles, I think, or what was you're saying, one of the keys of being effortless is finding that right inner circle of who you, who you spend time with. What are a couple other things that people can do to make life more effortless?

Well, I think one of the things that people can do is to build in like a done-for-the-day list where when you're making the list in the morning, I mean, I suggest people create a list. I call it the 1-2-3 method. I do have a newsletter and a free newsletter and people can sign up for it, but it's— I just put this out there just in the last couple of weeks. And what that is, you identify, okay, what's the one most essential project that I'm going to work on today? And I'm going to try to commit 2 to 3 hours on that. So it's a major commitment. And then the 2 in the system, 1, 2, 3, 2 is 2 things that are essential and urgent. So these are things that by definition they're important, but they also have deadlines attached to them. And then the third thing, 3 things that are to do with maintenance. And so these maintenance items, they don't seem especially important on day 1, but if you don't do them, your life is going to get harder over time. It's going to get in your way. It's going to add friction to your life. And so, yeah, so it's the laundry or it's, you know, it's going through your mail or it's paying bills. I mean, it doesn't necessarily feel essential, but don't do it for a while and it's going to clam up everything else that you want to do. So I think the 1-2-3 method is a really good way to think about planning your day. And then the thing I'd said at the very beginning of this answer is to have a done for the day list. So that is once you're done with it, you're done. No sneaky work. Maybe you even have a done for the day time. And so you're bounding your world because otherwise, because of technology's deliberate design of boundarylessness, it will never end. It literally never ends. And so people get into these habits of, being on their phone till 11 and then 12 and 1 and 2, and they're just not stopping. Of course, they're becoming extremely unproductive at some point in this process. They're killing the sleep hours, so they reproduce this same kind of unhealthy mental and physical cycle. So I think that one way to stop this is the done for the day list as I've just described it.

That's a great idea. Can you give me an example that maybe everyone could resonate with and kind of feel in terms of Somebody who was in that position, they felt like, you know what, I need to work harder and harder and harder, and they overwhelmed and exhausted themselves. And but then they had this epiphany of, hey, I need to work smarter. I, I can do things that are effortless.

Yeah, I, I had somebody who I feature in Effortless who wrote to me after reading Essentialism. He's an eye doctor, and he and his wife were on a car, a long car journey. And so they were listening to the book and taking notes as they went. And basically, he'd got into this habit of just feeling like he has to do it all. He's a bit of a perfectionist in what he's doing. And so the things that are immediately falling out of your life in that pattern, immediately, is your personal health and your most important relationships. Like, those are the first things to be sacrificed. And that's what he was sacrificing. So as he's going on this car journey together, they make a plan. By the time they arrive there, they've finished the book and they are now empowered, I suppose, with a bit of a plan for what to do. He negotiates how he can take some of these customers, clients that he's worked with in the office for all these years, but pass them on to someone who can serve them better. So he reduces his load. He, he renegotiates a lot of commitments that he has so that there's buffer again. And so he's exercising again and so on. What had instigated all of this is that he'd started to have this, um, this, uh, some kind of effect in his hands, and it was affecting his ability to even work and function. But he still didn't feel he had time or permission to be able to go and take care of it. So this was kind of a wake-up call for him. It's like, look, this is completely out of balance. And what happened next is curious. He, in his practice, he had a partner that kind of quit last minute. And so within just a couple of weeks, he suddenly had double the client responsibility. And if he hadn't made those changes that he'd already made, well, his wife was the one that sent the email. And what she said in that email was, this approach didn't change his life. I think it saved his life. I thought that was quite a profound thing to say. And it was, you know, of course, a humbling thing for me to receive. But to me, this illustrates the stakes that are involved in this, how easily we can get into a pattern that has no buffer in it so that we can't actually— we can't adapt to the next big challenge that's coming along. If you're at maximum effort in pursuit of maximum results, you have no space to deal with the unexpected things that are absolutely going to come your way. And so then, of course, you don't handle them gracefully. Usefully. Maybe you damage more relationships. Maybe you take them on, you keep saying yes reactively, and that strains you even further. And, and perhaps this is actually stuff that, that leads to people's heart attacks and, and worse.

Well, I absolutely believe that. And by the way, there's a couple medical studies that show that around 80% of doctors' visits are stress-related, which we know then that leads to, you know, increases your likelihood of a heart attack, increases your likelihood of obesity, you know, getting sick with coming down with a common virus, all kinds of things. So all that being said, I can see where if you help somebody as you have, hey, go from the state of being overwhelmed and burnout and stress to a state of doing things in life that make life feel more effortless, where it would actually save their life. And so to me, that's, you know, that's, uh, that's very efficacious and very true, uh, what they, what they had shared there. You know, I, I was thinking about this as I was reading through Um, and learning more about your book. And, you know, I, I think that, uh, when I've thought about some of the times in my lives when I tend to get the most— my time— times in my life when I've felt the most burnout, it was doing sometimes things that I wasn't good at or I didn't enjoy, right? There was a sense of— and I, I tend to notice that I feel like time moves faster and things feel more effortless when they're part of my gifts or talents or things that I'm skilled at. Is that something you found in your research?

Yeah, I want to just think about that. I think it's hard enough to build a career or a life around the things that we're naturally drawn to, perhaps that we're naturally good at. So it's not that we can't improve at things that we're not naturally good at. Of course, we should improve at things that we're not naturally good at. But to build our whole lives around it, to build an entire career around it seems like a suboptimal strategy. And so, and the whole, I mean, a major part of the success of the Industrial Revolution, not that it didn't have downsides, but it increased productivity by 50 times. And a big part of that is specialization. I mean, it's an enormous part of how that was made possible. And similarly in our lives now, I mean, we, we need to continue advancing specialization so that we can, well, let's say something like master something so we can become— maybe it's a bit overwhelming to say it this way, but like unparalleled at it. You know, if you can take a few things and become extremely competent at those things, then your value goes up exponentially. And by the way, it's protected against inflation because because there's not— you can't protect a lot of things against inflation, but you can protect your competence against it. Because if you're highly valuable at something that's highly specialized, that's in great demand, it doesn't matter what's happening with inflation. Your value remains and continues, and you can, you know, you can protect yourself against that in that way. So that's a nice advantage. And maybe just a final thought about it is that is that that kind of unique— that unique knowledge, that unique value is, I think, something that, yes, it costs a little more to produce in the first place. Maybe you're putting in effort over a longer period of time, but the value is an exponential curve. You know, if you— if you go from someone who says, okay, well I have a high school diploma. Okay, well you and, you know, 100 million other people, right? Maybe more than that in the US, I suppose, probably 200 million or something. But okay, so that's like, that's not differentiating you. Okay, now you have a college degree. Okay, now you're, you're part of a still a massive pool. And then you develop closer and closer specialization around the things that you really are great at, that you have natural interest in so that you're thinking about it in the shower.. So you are doing this and in an effortless way. Eventually the goal, I think, as far as I can tell, is to create something like a monopoly. So you're the only person, like in an— eventually you're the only person who can do a certain thing, a few combined competencies. And so of course it becomes a necessary and useful thing to do to start stripping away those things that are not in that category. And letting somebody else who has natural passion and ability to do it. And I think that this is, you know, this is a mindset shift that I think allows you to be able to achieve 10x results but without burning out.

It's so good. You know, I think one of the things that you said there is that most people don't— most people spend time becoming a jack of all trades rather than a master of one, right? And there's so much value in finding that gift or skill you have and really, really continuing to become one of the best in the world at it. And I think that's, that's something that— that's a really good, um, idea you shared there. You know, one of the things I really appreciated, you, Greg, is I've read your books, uh, is you spend a lot of time doing research. I mean, I know it's hours and hours and hours of research. What was something that has really surprised you as you were writing this last book? What was, what was something that really surprised you Um, uh, maybe a piece of research or something you came across.

Yeah, my head was in a slightly different place. Maybe I'll just go to where my head was at. Sure, feel free and come back to it.

But the—

yeah, when you said hours and hours of research, uh, a little while ago I had this— I sort of inadvertently was accepted into a doctoral program at the University of Cambridge in England, and that's like mid-career. No one's asking me to do it. It isn't really a natural next step in a lot of ways, but I was really interested in— it's not effortless, it's the next set of research that I'm doing, but I just became so interested in the subject of how we can navigate this, the just the relentless, absurd, almost stupid level of noise in the world. So like, it's been 10 years since I wrote Essentialism. I wrote Effortless, you know, of course since then. But when I look at the sort of that 10-year cycle, I mean, I'm not saying it wasn't noisy 10 years ago, it was, but I think it's a different kind of level now. We've moved, I think, from the information age to the influencer age. Fully. Now, influences is not a new idea, but the idea that we're in an influencer age, I think, is a reasonably new idea. And I think does describe something about this opinion overload, this endless stream of voices who the only thing we know they have in common is that they figured out the algorithm to be able to reach lots of people. I guess the only thing we know that they have in common. And so there's this risk of just really a lot of strange and uninformed voices making their way into our world. And that's just one example. Of course, there's noise of all sorts of kinds, but its ramification is that people find themselves in the thick of thin things, in the shallowest of ideas, loud, persuasive voices, but really, you know, at the periphery of everything. And so as a result, we're not even addressing the core issues. And so I found myself really absorbed in what can you do about that? You know, like, what are there certain people out there that are above average skill at navigating all this noise that can read the signal in the sound. And as it turns out, it is literally true that they are. And I think of these people as readers, in adverse comments. I don't mean people who read more books, although they do. I mean that they can read the room better, they can read people's body language better, they can get to the heart of the matter faster. And so I'm very interested in those kinds of people and interested in the research I've been able to find and do on that subject. And I found that this is kind of a way to come back to your specific question of something that surprised me. It depends where you date this from, but I've been thinking about this idea for the last quarter of a century in some ways, and then over the last couple of years very seriously. And all this time trying to find a name for this particular skill or this particular type of person. And it just surprised me to find that there is a word for it that already exists that just almost nobody uses or even knows, and it's perspicacity. That's the word, perspicacity. And that is the ability to keenly see through and understand what's really going on, particularly what's not obvious under the surface. And then they apply that in real actual people that I've studied and started to interview and work with. They apply this to being able to perceive, that is cut through the noise. They get into pinpointing exactly the core issue. They're able to plan more presciently so that they can figure out the right precise solution. You can think of a doctor who gets just the right prognosis and the right prescription rather than just kind of going all over the place. And then they're able to persuade people to take action on that thing that matters most. This seems to be the framework of what they do differently. But the idea that that word already exists, it's like it's an idea whose time has come. That's at least how I'm seeing it. That's something that surprised me recently.

That's incredibly interesting. I read Ray Dalio's book Principles, and then afterwards I watched this interview that he had done. And when he left Bridgewater, Um, they, they said they just saw a real— I mean, he, he had, you know, incredible team, but they felt this sort of deficit when he was gone. Things weren't quite as good as they could, and they started calling it the Ray Gap. And, uh, and they said, they said, what, what is it about Ray Dalio that, you know— and, and they— I think it was a very similar thing. They started saying, well, he has the skill of a shaper. He can see exactly what— diagnose what the problem is, but then also, you know, help create a strategy of this is exactly how it should work. This is how. And so anyways, it kind of reminds me of that, um, that kind of idea of some of these brilliant people we see who are able to see both the big picture but also hone in on that little thing.

Zoom out and zoom in.

Yeah, that's so good. That's fascinating. Yeah, I love it. I love that.

No, sorry, I just love that, that, that story about, uh, the Ray Gap. I think that's, that's a great illustration of it and And really you find at first it seemed like this was a, you know, like, I don't know, like when you're trying to name these phenomenon and you're trying to figure it all out, it feels like you're dealing with very small data points at first because either I'm new to the subject or the subject itself is new. And then once you get closer to understanding it, one of the evidences that you are closer to understanding it is that more data appears, that you can start seeing more people and more examples examples of the phenomenon. The same happened with essentialism, the same happened with Effortless, and now with this new research. And so, whether it's Ray Dalio or whether it's Steve Jobs or whether it's Elon Musk or any of the people, in fact, then you go to almost anyone in almost any field that has been disruptively successful over time, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, you find these are the patterns. I mean, Satya at Microsoft, he comes in after 10 years, like the lost years at Microsoft where people are yelling at each other in meetings, "Oh, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." This had kind of become a dominant culture. Like intelligence was something to compete against and to fight with. And he comes in and he is like, "Well listen, I think that what we have to do is listen a lot more, talk a lot less, make better decisions together." All these stories of him listening to people, like calling up people, new employees, and talking to them for half an hour, just asking questions the whole time and using that insight and synthesis to be able to then help create these breakthrough strategies that have made Microsoft far more valuable than it's ever been before. Stock price far higher than it's ever been before. I mean, this is what these real-life readers look like.

I love it. And one of the things you said there, you said readers and patterns, and I think that that's a part of it, right? You're able to see those patterns. And that also helps you understand, you know, see the patterns of the past, predict the patterns of the future. Um, that's fascinating. You know, Greg, I know you've, uh, been really blessed to be able to, you know, do a lot of research, interview some probably pretty incredible people over time. And I don't know if you've had any mentors or great teachers, uh, in your life, but one question I love to ask everybody is, what is the best piece of advice you've ever received?

I don't know if it's the best I've ever received. I have to like, that's such a high standard, isn't it?

To like, we could say one of the best.

That's, yeah. But still one that pops out to me is, so, you know, among a field of mentors, right? So the late Stephen Covey was someone who I was influenced from a distance and then eventually became closer to and and then became connected to his family too in, in, in meaningful ways. And that's been really just a, just a rich experience. And, and one of those experiences is with, um, with his daughter Cynthia, um, who spent the last 10 years finishing a book that she started with him before he died. And, and so she She was on my podcast and she was, uh, just gave a whole interview about this recently. And the book's title is Live Life in Crescendo. Okay, that's the title. And Stephen shared that with me himself in passing, like, you know, 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago. And I was young enough at that time that that idea I felt no resistance in me. Maybe I was just open, I don't know, but maybe something to do with age. Okay, great. Yeah, why not? Why not live life? That sounds good. Why not? Why not? The subtitle and, and the idea even then that he expressed was that to live life in crescendo means to believe that your most important work lies ahead of you, not behind you. Always to believe that. Now, what I think is interesting about that is as you get older and as you watch other people getting older, you see how that is not the natural way of things in a way that wasn't obvious when I was young. And you can see that people peak at any various point. I mean, that's in a way the opposite, the opposite of live life in crescendo is peaks at some point. And So sometimes people peak in high school, literally, right? That's, that's, you know, they, they were the quarterback, or they were, you know, they were the popular person, or they homecoming king and queen, or whatever. Like, like, this was the best, and that was their peak, and they never learn how to adapt that to the next circumstance. And so they've peaked there. Or maybe somebody peaks in college, their college sports, or maybe they got the high GPA, or, you know. And it's— the key is not to peak. It's like to have to learn as much as you can at each stage, but to really genuinely believe This is about a long journey. This is about making a higher contribution tomorrow than today and to keep going in that way. And that has already been a very profound idea that was embedded in me young that I think has already been great, really advantageous to me. You know, even the fact that I'm now doing this doctorate, right? Like, I'm not doing a doctorate at the normal age, right, to state the obvious. But who cares? Like, those years will come and go and then I'll have finished the doctorate. And if I didn't do it, I wouldn't have done it. And so, this idea that you don't have to be defined by whatever you've done before and that it can keep crescendoing and crescendoing. I mean, how cool is that? That the next year is going to be the most meaningful year and the year after that. So, to me, to live life in crescendo, to believe that your most important work lies ahead of you, not behind you. May be the best advice that I've ever received.

I mean, it's powerful. I— that's one of the best I've heard anyone say. I, I think it's, it's, it's fantastic. So good. You know, thank you. I, uh, I'm excited for everybody to check out your book Effortless. What is one piece of advice you have that you can give that can help everybody start living effortless today?

Um, yeah, well, I, I end the book on a story that I went back and forth, I don't know, like a dozen times as to whether to have it be the opening story or the closing story. And even now I wonder about the choice, but I put it at the end because it's sacred enough story that I felt like, well, those that get to the end will sort of have shown that they're, that they're sincere or earnest about something. Or, uh, and, and it's the story about, uh, we moved into a new area. It's a really— it was a lovely area, white picket fences, uh, a great place to be raising 4 young children. Uh, one of our daughters, Eve, especially seemed to thrive. Um, and she was out climbing trees all the time. She's on a rock climbing team. She's voluminous in her language, everything. She's naming our chickens. Yeah, we had chickens, not very essential but still. Um, and, and then she turned 14 and she just took longer to do her chores and slower to say, like, she danced with one-word answers instead of these, just this endless flow of ideas and things. And we just thought pretty age-appropriate behavior. But the short of it is that the symptoms turned into more serious and serious symptoms. Um, and she went to a routine physical therapy appointment one time, and the, the therapist said, oh, listen, she failed a reflex test. Uh, so I just, you know, I don't want to alarm you, but you certainly would want to go see a neurologist. And so, you know, of course you don't have to be warned twice, and by that point the symptoms were more obvious. That it was beyond the normal awkwardness of teenage years. And what followed was 4 months of just discombobulating malfunction of the brain because one whole side of her body stopped working. It took her hours, literally hours, I don't mean metaphorically, I mean like actually timed hours to eat a meal, took her 45 seconds to write the last 3 letters of her name, of our last name. She's just losing executive function on a daily basis and observably so. And all of these neurologists were meeting with her saying, you know, we have no idea 'cause all the tests are coming back in the normal range. And so, you know, I mean, I, I certainly have learned, and it's one of the driving thrusts for why I wanted to write Effortless in the first place, is that, you know, life is suffering, uh, for almost everyone and almost all of the time. And if we don't know people suffering, it's because we don't know them well enough yet. That's what I've learned, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. I, I think I think there is really an enormous amount of suffering under the surface. And so, yeah, this was certainly something that was a cause of suffering for us. And in the midst of all of that, I mean, she's on the way to becoming comatose and dying, and no, no, no, no idea of what's going on. So in the midst of that, one of the things I learned, uh, was that I had been taught something that was totally wrong. What I've been taught is that gratitude is to be thankful for the good things in your life, right? Um, and I think that's probably what everybody listening or watching this has, uh, has actually been taught. Like, not just picked up somewhere, like they've actually been taught that. That's what— be grateful, be thankful for the good things in your life, express gratitude for them. And what I've learned is that that's wrong. Actually, it's definitionally wrong. I mean, if you actually look it up in a definition, like in a dictionary, that's not what gratitude is. Gratitude is to be thankful for everything in your life. It's a spirit of thanksgiving for everything. And that's— that is— I now call it radical gratitude, even though it's actually just gratitude. But it, it, it's sort of radical because it's not at all how we think about it. Because radical gratitude says that as an all— is like an act of faith. You say I'm thankful that this terrible thing is happening. I am thankful. I mean, it's even hard for me even now to say it out loud, but I am thankful that my daughter is going through a discombobulating neurological condition. We don't know what it is. It's affecting her quality of life and even the chance of her surviving. But as we did that, as we found ways to demonstrate radical gratitude, what happened immediately is that shifted states from being in a state of suffering into a state of possibility and openness. And, and, and, and discernment returns, because if you're in a state of suffering, your discernment is shot. And so if you're in a state of stress and panic, your discernment is shot. You, you don't know what things to focus on in order to be able to make better decisions. And so as soon as we exhibited this, it had an almost magical force about it. First of all, the whole family started to kind of feel more full of light, and there was laughter, and there was— there's like singing around the, the piano, and there was this like goodness. And, and so that alone is valuable, uh, because you don't want to lose everything in your journey to try and save something, or in this case someone. But it also allowed us to make better discerned choices about who to go and see and which path to pursue and not to pursue. We were more perspicacious, to use that word again, and And that directly led to somebody that then did have some insight. And as of this conversation, Eve is fully whole again and healthy again, and she's back again, and she's just going, in fact, on a mission for a year and a half to the Amazon. Wow. And there's a low-risk scenario for her to be in, relatively speaking. So we're not playing with fire. You know, this is the power to me of radical gratitude. It, it's like an— it's a principle for the ages. And of course what it does, and it takes it out of the subject matter of productivity, and I don't even think about what I do as productivity, but, but it, it, it just— it's just a principle for all seasons in making life less difficult. And that's maybe the question I can summarize all of this with in our conversation today is the question, how are you making life more difficult than it needs to be?

It's so good. Well, thanks so much for sharing that story. I mean, it's just incredibly powerful. It makes me think of this quote by Viktor Frankl, actually Viktor Frankl quoting Nietzsche in Man's Search for Meaning. And it's, he who bears a big enough why can bear any how. And it's sort of thing, but I think gratitude in place of that why, who has enough gratitude can bear almost anything. So, anyways, thanks so much for sharing that powerful story. I want to encourage everybody to check out Greg's new book, Powerful Stories like this personal one he just told that was so meaningful. You'll find in the book along with ways that you can grow, you can break through, you can simplify, declutter, but overcome being overwhelmed, overcome those feelings of burnout and just crushing pressure. To be your best self and be the most effective you can in the world. So I want to encourage everybody, you can go and find this book. It's in bookstores nationwide. You can go to Amazon.com, but the book is called Effortless. So Effortless by Greg McKeown here. And Greg also has a podcast called the Greg McKeown Podcast. You can also go to GregMcKeown.com. That's spelled G-R-E-G-M-C-K-E-O-W-N. Greg McKeown. And want to say, Greg, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us today.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Josh.

Hey everybody, thanks so much for watching another episode. Don't forget to subscribe here so you don't miss out on all the great new stuff we have coming out. Also, hey, I'd love to hear from you if you're watching on YouTube in the comment section. Let us know your biggest takeaway from the wisdom that Greg shared with us today. Thanks everybody for listening and have a blessed week.