Greg McKeown | How to Make it Effortless to do What Matters Most

Srini Rao

Greg, welcome to The Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Greg Mckeown

Yeah, fantastic.

Greg Mckeown

So great to be with you. Thank you.

Srini Rao

Yeah, so you're actually here for a second time, which says a whole hell of a lot about, you know, your first appearance. We had you when, I think long after Essentialism was published, which is probably one of my favorite books. In fact, it's one of those books I think I keep within arm's reach all the time because I thought the concepts were so vital to being productive in the world. And you have a new book out called Effortless, which we will talk about in great detail. But before we get into that, last time I asked you what your parents did for a living.

Greg Mckeown

Well.

Srini Rao

and how that influenced you. This time I want to start by asking you, what is one or two of the most important things that you learned from one or both of your parents that influenced and shaped who you've become and what you've ended up doing with your life?

Greg Mckeown

Um, I was just talking to my dad just a couple of days ago, and he summarized something that I've watched him do all my life. And he had the phrase, and it was like, my job every day is to try to observe, then serve, and uplift. That was like the mantra. And the way it's manifest for him is quite

you know, unique as he is, but as he's driving down the street, he'll always notice if someone's pulled over. He'll always observe if someone seems to have, you know, some car problem. And he knows how to fix cars. He's, you know, he's capable in that way. And, but it's not just the capability, it's the awareness, and he'll pull over. And I've seen him do that so many times.

And it continues to be a frequent, you know, I would be surprised if it's not every week or multiple times a week even. And you know, sometimes you can't help them, but sometimes, most of the time you can. And that, there's something in that very simple orientation that is portable and relevant to me. And the idea of...

First observe, then serve. I think that of the two elements, my observation would be that people...

are more willing to do the second than the fourth. But as a result of that, they actually serve less than they're willing to and are less effective in their service and contribution to others. And so I think in that first principle of like, first observe, you could go quite deep in understanding that. At one level, it's just an awareness that you're not so focused on the things right in front of you that you don't notice people.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Greg Mckeown

But it can go much beyond that, where you start to listen deeply and care about people and understand what really is going on for them so that you can serve them in a highly effective way. So that's one principle that's relevant right now that I've learned from my father.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Why do you think it is that more people aren't like that in the modern world? Because I think that, you know, one, the observed part makes sense that people are not very observant given that they move at like lightning pace and they're drowning in a sea of information from every source imaginable. But then the other component of this is that, you know, people often act out of self-interest and I, you know, I'm writing this like massive article on, you know, what it takes to build an audience in 2021 and beyond. And one of the central themes.

of that article is that it has nothing to do with you. Nobody gives a damn about you. It's about what they want and what they need, but so many people are driven by self-interest.

Greg Mckeown

Well, I mean, I can riff on that a second with you. I mean, I think it's pretty much the distinctive quality about what it means to be a professional in any field is your ability to observe deeply and precisely the needs and wants and unspoken needs and unspoken wants of the other. And so...

You know, if you go to the doctors and they don't take any time to diagnose you, how much will you trust the prescription? If you take your car into a garage and you don't trust that they have understood properly what's going on with your car, how will they pay you to want to pay for what they're suggesting? You know, it doesn't matter what field you're in.

that's the distinguishing quality. How well can you identify precisely what is actually going on and what the need is? And so I think that it is a bit of a paradox because to get somebody who is themselves self-interested to recognize why it is in their self-interest to understand precisely what's in other people's self-interest.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Greg Mckeown

It is a mindset shift to recognize, to wake up and go, oh, maybe I've lived with an independent mindset in an interdependent reality. That's a big, I mean, that's like a big problem and a big opportunity. If we've lived our whole lives as if it's like, what I want, what I need to do, what I'm trying to achieve.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Wow.

Srini Rao

Uh-huh.

Greg Mckeown

And I think that approach will take you a certain distance. You know, just determination about what you want, just go after it. But what got you here won't get you there. So there's a big transition if you want to really move to, let's say, a 10x level of contribution and impact and influence. I mean, then it's all about your ability to understand others and to be able to put into words what they want. The great author is someone who...

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Greg Mckeown

who doesn't begin with their own mind in mind, but begins with the reader's mind in mind, and that they see and understand and feel what that reader is experiencing and feeling, and can write to that. This is a big difference.

Srini Rao

Yeah. What role do you think that sort of the prevalence of social media, internet, personal brands, all this stuff has played in our inability to observe? Because I think that we were talking about Adam Smith before we officially hit record here. And one of the things he says.

in the book in the wealth of nations is that self interest is the engine of prosperity which there is definitely a grain of truth to that if we didn't have self interest people just sit on their asses and not do anything all day. But then you kind of have the issue of self interest pushed to the point of diminishing returns which I think we started to see the consequences of that you know from organizational levels you know individual levels and politics and you know damn near every other area of sort of the way society functions to your point.

largely driven by an independent mindset in an interdependent reality.

Greg Mckeown

Yeah, I mean, look, the wealth of nations, that principle of self-interest driving, you know, the...

the invisible hand of the market is an accurate idea, but it comes with an assumption that life has a certain amount of virtue necessary. The great entrepreneur is still going to be the person who can anticipate the needs and desires of the customer better than they can.

So it's not just, it is an oversimplification even of the wealth nations and his thinking, which of course is an oversimplification of the complexity of the world, but to say that it's only that. It's more like that principle, and I know you are saying this, I know you're in support of it, it's just, it's a little bit like that classic quintessential idea in How to Win Friends and Influence People where he says,

You can achieve more by way of becoming interesting in conversation, by being interested, than in trying to get other people to be interested in you. And I think he says it more like, you'll achieve more in 30 minutes than you will in years, if you shift that strategy. People will be, oh, such a great conversationist, because he's so interested in me. That's what they really are experiencing.

And so similarly, if we really want, all the things we really want are on the other side of an interdependent mindset. Everything. You want meaning? You have to understand people that you're going to serve. There's no meaning outside of people and relationships. All purpose starts with service. All purpose starts with somebody else that you want to make a difference to.

Greg Mckeown

born or unborn. If you want money, well you have to figure out what other people want. You aren't going to make it just because you happen to want wealth. You want love. You've got to understand what the people around you need so you can meet those needs so that they can feel love themselves and love in return and so on and so on. There's just nothing that you want that you can actually sustainably get.

without understanding the interdependent reality and that sort of relationship mindset, I think changes everything. And in some ways, I think it shifts essentialism. There's like essentialism 1.0 and essentialism 2.0. Essentialism 1.0 is where you say, hey, what's essential to you, right? You know, okay, think about that. So if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. And it's the, you know, you don't want to give up your.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Greg Mckeown

your right to think independently and for yourself and so on. And there's a case to be made for that because you don't want to live in a dependently where you're at a codependent relationship with people. So there is a shift that's necessary here to take responsibility for prioritization, but 2.0 is where you start to go, okay, I think I know what is essential for me, what my objectives are.

But what if I could discover what everybody else is disproportionately important, vital things are to them? They'll be different to the ones that are for me. They're going to be as unique as that person is. And if you can identify that precisely, then the world is yours. Because as Lao Tzu put it, something like people are easy to move if you have what they want. And suddenly you will...

know what people want precisely, and then you can give a very small amount of service in the precisely essential thing that somebody else wants, can feel for them like a massive deposit. It's like somehow investing a dollar and getting $1,000 of value in the person that you're serving. Think of what the difference is. I'll give you one final metaphor on this.

Greg Mckeown

You have given a gift to someone and you could tell once they received it, it just, they didn't want it. It isn't, they just didn't, you know, like it isn't what they really would have liked to have or vice versa. Think of a time when you've received a gift, maybe it was expensive and it's not at all what you wanted and how awful that moment is to not be known, to not, to feel alone, more alone than if they hadn't given it to you.

And that's what's happening all the time in interactions with other people is that we are, you know, people feel more lonely in our interactions together. If you can do something about it, if you can be the one in a thousand who actually knows people what they want and what they need and precisely what's essential to them, it changes everything.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So to go back to that whole idea of self-interest as the engine of prosperity, you made a really important point, which is the role that context plays, which is something that just has become more and more apparent to me over the better part of this last year, is that context is incredibly important when it comes to prescriptive advice of any kind, and yet...

I think particularly in the self-help world or in the world that you and I live in, people have a tendency to ignore context. The example I always come back to is people sell an online course or something like that. They're like, oh, I did this, and this, and buy my course, you'll get my results. It's like, wait a minute. There are all these variables that the person buying the course can't replicate that the person selling it happens to have as major advantages.

Greg Mckeown

Yes. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Like, for example, if I started a podcasting course, right? I started 10 years before this thing became a massive cultural trend. There are a lot of very lucky variables, unless somebody has a time machine, that they could never replicate in my story.

Greg Mckeown

Yeah, I mean, it's a it's absolutely right. It there's certainly. You know, the word, one of the words that comes to mind as you're sharing that is just relevancy. You know, if there's so much irrelevant. Sales copy, there's so much irrelevant content in the world, there's so much irrelevant posts, there's so many relevant things that people are saying and and.

And of course that's waste for everybody involved, right? Irrelevance means that the person sharing is gonna be ignored and the person receiving feels, you know, that it was a waste of their time too, it was useless. So that's the, you know, that's the failed market of ideas. If, you know, what we're trying to do is to find what it is that they really, what is it? I have...

uniquely that they uniquely want to need. And I think again, the biggest error is not, just not even taking the time to identify, you know, who am I writing to? Who is this for, really? Not just a word, well, people age this to this, you know, not just a demographic, but like what's going on in their world? What's their pain, what's their felt pain right now? What's the complexity of their life?

What do they want really? What's a tangible promise that has relevance right now that will stop them in their tracks, in their busy lives? Oh, yes, I would need this, an almost physical reaction. That's what you're trying to do. I mean, certainly, I think in the work that I'm trying to do in writing, I am looking, whether I'm successful or not, is to be determined, but it's to try to work out.

where is somebody at right now? And therefore, which ideas have the most power of relevancy? That's to me the connective tissue that many, many of the books that are published, just I think that's really what they fail in. They're not failing whether they write about something that is good or something that is true.

Greg Mckeown

Most of these books that are written are true or good in some way, but they just aren't, they just have not bridged the gap to make sure that the way they're writing it is highly relevant to the person reading.

Srini Rao

Well, speaking of relevance, I think that makes a perfect segue into talking about effortless in particular. So it's been a while since you published Essentialism, right? Probably the better part of like six years, if I remember correctly.

Greg Mckeown

Yeah. Amazing really when you think about it, how quickly it all goes.

Srini Rao

So.

Srini Rao

Yeah. I mean, you know, I was very, very thrilled when I saw that you had a new book out. I think I ordered it the second I saw it was on Amazon. I was like, Oh, Greg Mckeown McKeown has a new book out. Essentialism was fantastic. So how is, you know, what is that led to this book and, you know, why this and, you know, how did you end up deciding on this as the next sort of natural follow up to essentialism?

Greg Mckeown

Well, I mean, let me answer that in two ways, if you don't mind. Let me answer it with first, given what we've just talked about, why I think this has relevance for people right now. And then I'm happy to share sort of my backstory to it as well. The you know, the why I think this is relevant for other people is that it's sort of two questions. Everybody listening to this, you know, if I if we had them all, if we were all together in a room and I say to all of you together, if I say, OK, put your hands up.

if you would like to get better results, even 10x results, right? 10 times better. Every hand's going to go up. Now, if I ask a second question, if I say, OK, by a show of hands...

how many of you can work 10x harder? You're gonna have either no hands or sort of one or two hands, and the book's not for them, right? Like if you can work 10 times harder, well, you're gonna have a lot of value by working a little harder. You will get better results. You work a bit harder. That's great. I'm at virtue. Hard work is a virtue. Problem is it's just not infinitely scalable principle.

If you want to get 10 times better results, you either, you have sort of one of two paths ahead of you. Either you can't do it so you give up, so now you've got essential things you'd really like to achieve, contributions you really like to make, and you just go, no, that's not possible. That's one option. Second option is that you say, well, the only way to do it is work harder, even though I can't work any harder, so I'll try anyway, and then that's a recipe for burnout.

And broadly speaking, I think that the second path is what people choose to do. Maybe they jump back and forth between the two and a kind of boom and bust execution strategy. Oh, God, push harder. I can't do it. I'm exhausted. I'm burned out. And then they don't for a while. And they try again when they're inspired to do it by someone or some circumstance. And and I think broadly speaking, there are probably only two kinds of people in the world right now. You know, there are people who are burned out and there are people who know they are burned out.

Greg Mckeown

And so that's like, you know, that's sort of a set up of the problem. And now let me just share, you know, before I get to the solution, let me just share sort of the backstory for why I personally came to this. And you know, it's a multifaceted experience, right? One thing, essentialism became a big success, so traveling with that, in addition to being, you know.

which you might say the father of essentialism. I now am the father of four children, so there's all the responsibilities with that. I'm being more selective than I've ever been, but I still found myself just running out of space. I want to make a higher contribution, just as I've just described for others, they feel this, I felt it too, but there's no more space, there's not 10x, I can't work 10x harder. And then in the midst of that, we have a family emergency where one of my daughters, she,

She became, she went from sort of a picture of health, outgoing, vivacious, funny, can't even stay mad, always climbing trees, running barefoot everywhere, naming our chickens. Yeah, yeah, somehow we have chickens. And all of that to then suddenly a massive decline inexplicably in her health, her mental capacities, sort of imagine.

Parkinson's disease type symptoms. We're visiting lots of neurologists and nobody can even give us the faintest idea of why all the tests are coming back in the normal range. And this is going on for several months. And so, you know, once you suddenly add that to something that already there's no space in it, well.

I found myself in the position that I just described. Do you give up on what's essential? Do you burn yourself out trying to pursue what's essential? Or what? And fortunately, I mean, it came through this exquisite, you know, challenge or trial, but what came of it was a very clear understanding that there was an alternative path. That that...

Greg Mckeown

you know, when you can't work harder, or let's say it differently actually, when you're facing the hardest, most important challenges of your life, don't make it harder than it needs to be. You know, there may be things that are making life, in fact that's a good question just to put to people listening to this, it's like, think of something that really matters to you that might be overwhelming.

and just ask, how am I making this harder than it needs to be? That's it. That's like a magic question. Because all that over-complication, all that over-engineering, over-thinking, over-exertion, all that over is actually going to get in your way. And it's because you're sort of caught in this old paradigm, this old mindset. And there is an alternative mindset.

And that mindset is summarized in that one word, effortless. That's what I mean by the word. There's a different path, an easier, simpler, lighter, smarter approach. And you've got to learn how to find those and search for them, because they are key to breakthrough contribution without burning out.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it's kind of funny. It reminds me of a story which I may have shared on the show before. I had a friend, this was back in the early, probably 2000s, maybe late, late 90s. This is when streaming to the internet wasn't as common as it is today. And he was working at Oracle as an MIT engineer, really, really smart guy. You go over to his house and, like, what are you working on? He's like, well, I think he worked on RFID technology. And he's like, what?

He had figured out that he said, you know, I'm trying to basically, uh, set up my computer so that, uh, you know, when I'm watching movies that I've downloaded, I can watch them on my TV without having to go back into the bedroom where the computer is at. So I'm building this RF remote and you know, spending all this time. And I looked at him and I was like, why don't you just use a wireless mouse? And he looked at me. He was like, yeah, I guess I could do that. Huh?

Greg Mckeown

Well, exactly. In tiny and big ways, we can apply the question. I was working with somebody who's a classic quintessential overachiever. She's the kind of person who, you know, she's up till four in the morning photoshopping for her church youth activity the next day.

No one's expecting or asking that from her. But that's just sort of how she thinks. If I'm gonna make it, you know, if I want to be, if I want to serve more, if I want to serve at a high level, I must sacrifice more and more, more sleep, more of me. She feels guilty if she even eats lunch. And I said, look, you've got to invert the mindset. You know, everything you've learned just about, about performance and achievement has got you to this point.

But in order to go to the whole next level, you've got to unlearn it all, invert the whole thing. The next time someone asks you to do something, don't say, well, how can I, you know, well, I always say not to ask. Ask, how can I make this simpler, easier? How can I, how am I making this harder than it needs to be? So she gets a call, she works at a university, she gets a call from a professor, says, oh, I would like you to record my, you know, video my class this semester, and she is just ready.

wired to jump in this, you know, two feet in. I'm going to wow him. Um, what that meant to her was, well, we'll get my whole team there. A team of videographers will have different camera people will have will edit it together. Uh, we'll, you know, all this, uh, and music intros and outros will have graphics. I mean, we're just going to make it special. And then she remembers, well, how am I making this more complicated?

more difficult, harder than it needs to be. And so she pauses on that for a moment. She asks him, OK, well, tell me a little more about this. Like, who is this actually for? And what would it done look like for you? And well, it turns out that this is for one student who's going to miss a few classes because of an athletic commitment. So the solution they come up with is that someone else in the class will just record it on the phone.

Greg Mckeown

iPhone and just send it to him wherever he's going to miss. And that's it. That's the whole solution. 10 minute phone call saves four months for an entire team. She can hardly believe it. That's when she sort of became converted to this idea of invert. Ask a different question. Look out of the different mindset. There's a Puritan ethic within many of us that says not only that hard work is a virtue, but that ease is to be distrusted.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Greg Mckeown

and when we distrust it, what we're doing. Now sometimes easy is wrong. I mean, I'm not saying always easy is the right virtuous good solid path, but if we say it always is, that it means that all of those strategies, tools, options, tactics, that would make something simpler and easier, we just are like, well, we don't even look at those. We don't examine them, explore them. What a massive strategic error of judgment.

And so I'm just trying to say, look, add it to the range. She wasn't even, she would never have discovered it without asking a different question. So invert the question. That's one of the most practical things we can do to start moving into this effortless mindset.

Srini Rao

So, you know, I wonder what role...

our sort of media narratives play in all of this. And we had Justine Musks here, Elon's ex-wife. And I think one of the things that you see, right, is when people see people like Elon, they think, oh, if he works 120 hours a week, I should do the same, and then I'm gonna become him. Again, we go back to context. And I think the thing that really struck me out of all the things she said is that people don't see the amount of work that goes into these kinds of accomplishments. She's like, it's an extreme way of living,

comes at the cost of a lot of other things in your life. And I don't think a lot of people are aware of the reality of that. And then, I think when Michael Shine here, it was like Gary Vee is out telling people, tweet from the toilet 200 times a day. So, how do you begin to sort of unwind from this cultural narrative that we perpetuate through iconic figures?

because they're the ones who have books written about them. They're the ones in the covers of magazines. They're the ones who are giving TED Talks.

Greg Mckeown

Yeah, well, a lot of this is wrong. It's just because something makes it as a media story doesn't make it accurate, doesn't make it the true narrative. In fact, there's tremendous bias that is difficult to overcome because you don't.

write a story about someone who's just steadily working today, you know, is working on something today and working on tomorrow. It's not a story. There's no story to tell. And yet, in many of the stories that eventually do get told, that's actually the backstory. You know, so that doesn't get covered in the story because you only become aware of somebody when suddenly something happens. And most progress is slowly, then suddenly.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Greg Mckeown

And so even where someone's story was about steady and effortless pace of continual steadiness over time, that isn't going to get told. You want the dramatic if you're trying to grab people's attention in news articles, and then of course this identifies which books get told. And so I just think that there is, it's somewhat like...

parallel to bloodletting. Just because the medical profession for the longest time were, you know, thought that the problem was in the blood, much of disease was in the blood, and so your job was to drain people of blood using literally leeches. I mean, it's so medieval. But that was dominant mindset. And if you'd lived at that time and read the media stories and the books at that time, that's what you'd have.

been taught. And that doesn't, none of all of those articles or books or stories or the medical professionals of the time, none of that would have made it true. None of that made bloodletting right. It just meant that was the narrative everyone was learning from. And so similarly, we have this very outdated paradigm, this outdated narrative about what leads to superb performance.

a superb achievement, and lots of what's in that narrative is just wrong, and I don't know how else to say it but that. And we've known for at least the last 20 years in peak performance, in athletic performance, that there's all sorts of smart ways about how to help people operate at that level. And it doesn't look like no pain, no gain as we grew up hearing about.

That's just, you know, no pain, no gain. It's just a great example of performance bloodletting. Actually, what you want is to find a pace that you can sustain so that you don't train, for example, in boom and bust cycles. You don't want to be pushing yourself to such a limit that you're aching and sore and don't go and work out for days or weeks or you just give up for a while, it's too much. You want...

Greg Mckeown

slow and small and steady and simple, and get better bit by bit. So that eventually leads to your own breakthroughs. But of course, so I think that that's something that's helpful to remember. A lot of these caricatures in the media, if you go back and double click on their story, it's very different. Thomas Edison is the kind of part of the quintessential American...

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Greg Mckeown

archetype of what it is to be successful and what it takes. But if you go back, and I mean, I remember 20 plus years ago going to the home that he lived in Florida next to Ford had built a house, and they both built houses next to each other so that they could spend time together. And among other things, in the studio where Edison worked on the famous light bulb, there's a bed right there.

He would take naps in the bed, in the room where that was done. So he would work and he would sleep. And then when he had ideas, he'd wake up and work and go back to sleep. And he's sleeping constantly. He didn't believe, for example, in straining the body. He himself actually was quite extreme this way. He wouldn't run even. He just thought, yeah, your body's just there to kind of get your brain around. And so he wasn't draining himself to exhaustion in some extreme fashion in the way that maybe the narrative would be.

So we've got to go past those surface and outdated narratives to find what really works.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So one of the things I think I've always loved about your books is that you seem to frame them in these very clearly defined mental models in which I could literally summarize your book by reading out the seven sort of key headlines from each one. And I think that that's why I loved essentialism so much because it was just like, oh wow. So this is just a personal question. I would.

morbid curiosity, like how do you develop these sort of mental models and frameworks that end up becoming the content and then we'll get into, you know, the sort of what I literally have written down as sort of the seven parts of effortless action.

Greg Mckeown

Um, yeah, I mean, I, that's a nice question. I.

I think a lot about them. That's for a start. I'm drawn for reasons I can't quite explain to clarity. I care about clarity and I seek it in conversation and I seek it in the world around me and I don't feel fully satisfied until I've sort of wrestled down.

and found, got to the other side of complexity and gone, okay, that's what it is. And I can name it. I feel satisfied in being able to name a phenomenon. And by naming a phenomenon, I also mean being able to identify clearly from what to what. You know, that's important. There's many books that write about what to do, but they aren't as good at clearly delineating what not to do.

And it's in the what not to do column that we actually need to, like that's where we, as a reader, can say, oh yeah, well, guilty of that, guilty of that, guilty of that, yep. That's where my world is. And that's what, you have to have that moment as a learner, as a reader, to be able to go, okay, got it, I'm now here, so what's now this book going to help me to get to from, and what got me here won't get me to there, what's the gap? And so,

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Greg Mckeown

And so, I mean, I'm working on a new book, and in that book, I'm constantly thinking about this, about where are people now? What's their, you know, I know what I'm trying to teach them to do, but where are they? If I can't state that more clearly than they can, then they won't get pulled into this in the first place. Yeah, we're gonna have to.

Srini Rao

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I mean, you just gave me a dozen ideas for revisions I plan to make to my audience article, thinking about what it's like to be right at the beginning. Because I remember a friend of mine when we were doing a writing course on habits, you know, I'd been doing this thousand order day thing for six years and I remember he was our copywriter. He said, dude, you have to realize these people aren't you. He said, this is second nature to you at this point.

Greg Mckeown

Yes, and I think that is another error when people write books because they start thinking about a subject. By the time they've written a book, and it doesn't just have to be books, but you asked me about books, and by the time they have anything like a manuscript done, they've thought about that subject a great deal more than the reader, or they may well have done.

And so again, the same errors can be made. You know, the presumption of where, you know, they must understand this thing or that thing, and they don't, because they're not thinking about that all the time. So you have to sort of keep, in a way, it comes back to full circle to what we talked about at the beginning, you have to keep coming back to where are they? And that's what that first column is for, it's like, where are people at? And...

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Greg Mckeown

That's actually, to me, that's where the subject gets exciting. Because then you're talking about something real. Then you're no longer talking about a concept of just an idea that someone goes, well, do I think that's true or not? You don't really want people sitting in an audience when you're teaching or reading a book going, do I think that's true? That's not really the optimal. That's fine, but it's not optimal. What you want is for someone to go,

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Greg Mckeown

oh my goodness that's me right now and that is what I want. That's what you want somebody to say. Not is it conceptually true, is that true for me right now? Oh yeah, I'm already in yes this is true. I want to get better even and in this next book I want to be even better than I've been able to do it in the past from this to this and capture it just right.

Srini Rao

It's funny, this is probably something I've said a handful of times and it's something my roommate, Tim, said to me. He's working on building what he calls adaptive learning systems for online courses. And he said the truth is, he's like, it's not that people need content. He said they need a transformation. And my realization from that is, let's go. Content is just a vehicle for the transformation that people are seeking. It made me think of Rameet Sethi. People look at Rameet's work and go, his work is all about money and finance. I was like, actually, it's not.

It's about money and finance as a vehicle for transforming behavior more than anything else.

Greg Mckeown

Yes, I mean it is all about, you know, a theme here is going under the surface, you know, and that's an important thing I've experienced in my life and I'm trying to capture the language for now is that what's on the surface is like the least accurate, least interesting stuff.

And so you have to go, you know, let's say there's 10 layers. Well, let's say there's 10 layers to a person. Yes. And you think you meet someone, you say, you know, oh, hey, how are you? And they say, oh, yeah, good, great. I mean, actually, that person probably feels isolated because, you know, you're in half of the pandemic, pretty exhausted, pretty burned out. They feel, you know, they feel.

Yeah, maybe some loneliness, some disconnection, they're struggling with some key relationships in their life, they're worried about some things. I mean, what they said is good, fine. That's like an illustration of the point is that on the surface, what you get from people is both is kind of not interesting and it's not accurate. So you've got to work to get below the surface.

level two and level three, four, five, because at the bottom of that, like level 10, there is something infinitesimally small, like what I sometimes think of as the red-hot center of what matters to someone. And if you can get to that core, sorry, I'm in a room right now. Hold on, let me try and see what to do about this. Give me one second. I'm in a hotel.

Srini Rao

Nusso.

Srini Rao

No worries.

Greg Mckeown

So I don't know what one.

Greg Mckeown

Sorry for this, just give me a minute more.

Srini Rao

That's what. All better to edit out.

Greg Mckeown

I'm back. My apologies. Okay, where were we?

Srini Rao

No worries.

Srini Rao

We'll cut all of this out, don't worry about it. So let's do this. As we were talking about, we were kind of getting into a framework. I think we were talking about mental models and clarity and how I think the thing that makes your book so easy to read is the fact that you really think about them as you pointed out in terms of mental models and we're getting close to towards the end here. So to me, I think what was so brilliant about this is...

Yeah, like, I guess not coincidentally the simplicity of it. But, you know, you kind of break this down into sort of, you know, a couple of different actions which are, you know, define start simplify progress, pace, and effortless results. And then you talk about learning and automating which that's another big one for me but let's say, say for example somebody listening to this is planning out their day.

hands down the number one problem that I kept coming back to over and over again when we did surveys for our email. This was every week ago, I'm, you know, dealing with information overload. Like I can't remember where the hell I put anything. But I think that when you talk about defying in particular, this is really something that struck me. You say that if you want to make something hard indeed truly impossible to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible. That's because you cannot by definition complete a project with a clearly defined endpoint.

You know, you can tinker with it, you can and likely will abandon it, but to get to an important project, to get an important project done, it's absolutely necessary to find what done looks like. And so it made me think about some of the answers that came back in the survey data, where people's answers for what they would do if they could accomplish anything were incredibly vague, like I want to build a creative business that, you know, serves humanity. You're like, great.

That is so vague. There was some other one where, you know, I don't remember the exact thing I said, okay, well, there are numerous businesses that could fall into the category you're talking about, you couldn't, you know, have an adult film studio, and it would still be in this category that this person was speaking of. So let's just, you know, talk about this through the lens of planning a day. I think that will be a really perfect way to sort of bring everything that we've talked about here full circle.

Greg Mckeown

Hmm.

Greg Mckeown

Yeah, look, I mean, the first thing I think somebody should do if they're trying to plan a day is to create a done for the day list. We set ourselves up and as overachievers, one of the main reasons we feel dissatisfied by the end of the day is that we don't know what done looks like for that day. So we have an endless, almost literally infinite to-do list.

to-do list gets longer by the end of the day than it was at the beginning. And so you lie down at night and you're just looking at the gap and all the things that haven't been done.

and feel discouraged by that. Well, it's an unwinnable game. So let's make it more winnable, more sustainable, wiser by saying, what are the things I need to do today, but when I'm done with them, I can be done for the day. I tend to think that the list is like a three to six item list, maybe three things professionally, three things personally, and these are the important things. You may do other things beyond this, but these are the things that when you're done with them, no more sneaky work after that.

It's okay to stand aside and to then move into recuperation. So that's like one thing to do. The next rule of thumb I think would be helpful for people is to say, make sure you organize your day in a way that you...

Don't do more today than you can completely recuperate from by tomorrow.

Greg Mckeown

Because as soon as you get into anything like a lifestyle of using up more than you can recuperate from today, then you're already moving quickly past your optimal state. You'll end up living, even if you've got used to it, a lifestyle of exhaustion, where your mental capacity is very clouded, your mind feels foggy, you start to resent.

other people's requests for your time and so on. Yeah, this is like when somebody, you can't find your keys, you get an email from a client or boss or something and you just, oh, resent, they seem to be complaining about something and your daughter asks you to braid her hair and you resent that too. And then contrast that with, if you implement even the two things I've just suggested, you stop the day, you eat a good meal.

have a hot shower, get a good night's sleep, and then the next day you wake up, you're fully rested, you find your keys right where you left them, the email, you're like, oh, I know how to respond to this, this is no big deal, I know what they mean, you're able to respond to the needs of the people around you and welcome it. I mean, that's the difference. So if I could wrap that up and maybe a third specific thing, I would just say that we have to take rest and relaxation and treat it like it's a responsibility,

when we're crafting this ideal day, we are actually crafting activities for rest and recuperation. That we don't just, you know, for a lot of overachievers, they don't know how to relax. They literally don't have that competency. They're far more adept at running a marathon than they are taking a nap.

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Greg Mckeown

And so when you're designing this day, you have to design like it's a responsibility, like relaxation, it becomes a set of rituals that you build into your day. And you do it not because you're lazy, of course, not because you don't want to achieve, but because you want to achieve at a pinnacle level for a very, very long time. You want to perform well, even superbly, for 50 years.

not for five days, not for five months, not even for five years. You want to be able to perform decade after decade. In fact, and I think this is a good place to sort of end it in a sense, because of this simple idea, you want to live life in crescendo, where your greatest contribution always lies ahead of you, not behind you. And if you want to live like that, then you have to take, design your day to day,

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Greg Mckeown

differently than you otherwise would. Yes, it's about contribution. Yes, it's about doing what really matters. And it means doing it in ways that are protecting the asset that is you and that has boundaries and that has a place for design for rest, recuperation, relaxing, so that you can keep on contributing and contributing for a very long time to the future. And that's really what, certainly what I want and what I think.

most achievement-oriented people want once they recognize that as an option.

Srini Rao

Wow. Well, you know, it's funny. This is one of the handful of times that I didn't end up like, you know, quoting multiple sections of your book. But I mean, you just kind of packed this with so many nuggets that it was. It's kind of funny. You summarized amazingly enough, you kind of effortlessly summarized your entire book.

So, well, I have one final question, you know, which I've asked you before. It's how we finish all of our interviews. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Greg Mckeown

You've made it easy.

Greg Mckeown

Yes.

Greg Mckeown

What do I think it is that makes something unmistakable? Is that what you said?

Srini Rao

Yes.

Greg Mckeown

My answer for that today has to do with this idea of utter and total uniqueness. And it's really the idea that the more we understand who we are, the more we understand who each other are, the more distinct each person becomes. And

And therefore, as you gain greater clarity in that uniqueness, each person can become more and more of who they really are and less and less of who they really aren't. And so it's a complete opposite of FOMO, of the fear of missing out, being like everybody else, of competing and comparing, trying to be like and do like every other strategy. You become more and more uniquely you. And therefore...

and you value the uniqueness in other people distinctly. And therefore every person in this way becomes unmistakable, signature them. And that's what I think. That's what I.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and sharing your story, your wisdom and insights with our listeners. And it's just so wonderful to have you back for a second time. Where can people find out more about you, the new book and everything else you're up to?

Greg Mckeown

I think the easiest single thing people can do is they don't miss anything. I have a One Minute Wednesday newsletter. You can sign up for that at Greg Mckeownmchewn.com. Literally, we just try to make each week's letter, you can read it in one minute, and our goal is to make it the most valuable minute you spend online each week. So it's just tight and essentialist and just enough to keep...

Greg Mckeown

putting this into your life in an incremental way over time. That's probably the best single thing people could do.

Srini Rao

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.