I was working with high-performing executives in Silicon Valley and noticed a predictable pattern, which is that in the early days, these companies, they were really focused at led to success, that success-breeded options and opportunities, which, if you're not careful, can undermine things that led to success in the first place. You fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more, you're just doing too many things and it may all be good things, but just too many different things, and so you start to plateau in your progress or fail altogether. As I studied this, I find that almost universally people will feel stretched youth in, work or at home, busy, they're not productive, they're like their days being hijacked by other people's agenda for them. And this is like the problem essentialism is seeking to address or solve.
Greg McEwen, how are you, my friend? I'm wonderful. Nice to be with you. Nice to be with you as well.
Could we have dressed any more polar opposite? You've got this beautiful suit on lovely press suit with a white shirt, and I am in a vest because it's the first hot day of May in Newcastle. Listen, that's what it is. That's the difference is that I'm in California, so I've got no reason to celebrate, but I should celebrate, but this beautiful weather, and that explains it.
There's a rarity, you know? Anybody, all these people on the internet, I'm allowed to wear a vest, if I want to wear a vest, to podcast with Greg McEwen. Yes, there was an essentialist outfit for today. This would be it.
So essentialism is the word of the day. That's what we're going to be talking about today. And I fear that I might be the arch nemesis of an essentialist, or at least I was for quite a long time. So I have a very high desire for novelty.
I love new things. One of my five core values is adventure, which also pulls me toward that, and another one is curiosity, which pulls me toward that. I tend to work more than I need to. I enjoy work, I enjoy being busy, doing things.
And over time, that has led to me adding an awful lot on my plate, and presuming that I will just be able to up regulate my productivity or down regulate my sleep, to slot in these extra things. And to the audience at home, you will know this feeling, right? You will see from the front row seat, you will watch the slippage of your own terrible unproductive ness, right? You'll see the inefficiencies in your system first time.
You think, well, I can add that project in, and all that will happen is I'll just have to get rid of those inefficiencies. And you just presume that like, I don't know, like a system that the oil will be greased sufficiently more to allow it to go in. And I learned, I learned the hard way over a career of 13 years of running club nights, and being a DJ, and being a model, and being a podcaster, and doing coaching, and being a fitness, and all this sort. So I realized that you can't, you can't.
You can't do it all. No, who knew? Why don't you knew actually, which is, which is the question. So why don't you give us a bit of a background, essentialism, and sort of what you do in your approach to this?
Look, I was working with high performing executives in Silicon Valley, and noticed a predictable pattern, which is that in the early days, these companies, they were really focused, that led to success, that success, breeded options, and opportunities, which, if you're not careful, can undermine the things that led to success in the first place. You fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more. So you're just doing too many things, and it may all be good things, but just too many different things get pulled in a million different directions. And so you start to plateau in your progress or fail all together.
And as it turns out, this is a pattern that a lot of people, where you just have to describe a little bit feel the same thing. So as I studied this, I find that almost universally people feel stretched youth in, at work or at home, busy, but not productive, feel like their days being hijacked by other people's agenda for them. Now, this is, this is like the problem that essentialism is seeking to, to address or solve. Yeah, can you pronounce that German word for me, please?
The German word. Less, but better. Yeah, I typically just do the English, less, but better. Is it quite an ugly word?
Hold on, we're going to find it here now. We're going to do this. Okay, correct. Do you not page it, Tom?
No, sorry, I'm kindling as well. So you have no idea. I love that you put that on me. I can't, I know for a fact that I can't pronounce that German word.
And I thought, do you know what it is? See if I can pronounce it, you know? Yeah, I mean, you put it all on me and I can't even find it. It's, it is where it is where we're trying to find it.
It's, it comes from Dieter Rams, who's the one that at least is credited with having made this idea. And, and, and he's, he's, I can't find it now. It's fine. It doesn't matter.
We couldn't, we're not going to pronounce it in any case, even if we do, we'll just call all the words. You just move on. It's, he's, he's this amazing designer who was the first person to see, one of the first people to see how rubbish it was the way that we were designing a whole bunch of furniture. So he's working over at Braun and he has this insight.
He says, I mean, it doesn't give an example of this at the time, if you want to buy a record player, the first record player did not look like the record players that, you know, if you think of that right now, you know what that looks like, they didn't look like that. They looked like massive pieces of furniture, you know, because it takes a while for people to lose the old in any design. And so, and so as soon as you're creating a record player, they say, well, it has to look like a piece of furniture. It has to look like a closet.
And so he was the one that said, no, hold on, we get rid of the closet. We'll just have the record player. And first, when he designed that, people were actually, they were all hesitant about it. They thought, well, this is, this is, they described it like a glass coffin, like snow whites coffin or something.
It was so pristine and simple and clear. But what's interesting is that for ever afterwards, every design of every record player looked like his, because he'd stripped away all the non-essential stuff and he'd said, this is, this is how it needs to be. And he did that for many, many products over 35 years, he summarized everything he'd learned into those three words, less, but better. I love less, but better is, is phenomenal.
So people that are listening, and we've mentioned essentialism, we've said less, but better in this chaotic, how can people self-diagnose if they're a non-essentialist? Look, the questions I already put, I think are the simplest questions, right? Like, have you ever found yourself busy, but not productive? Yes or no?
Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin at work or at home or both? You know, have you ever felt like your day is being hijacked by other people's agenda for you? Are you trying to do too many things and ending up doing them averagely well? Have you ever found yourself making just a millimeter progress in many, many different directions?
Somebody who says yes to any of the above, especially if you say yes to all of the above, a pretty good chance, you know, you're operating more as a non-essentialist than an essentialist currently. I mean, the good news about all of this is that it's, people are completely redeemable. This is the reason that people are non-essentialists, there's a few, but the primary reason is because they didn't know they were choosing that. They didn't know there was an alternative.
They didn't wake up in the morning. I just want to be a non-essentialist. You know, I just want to do too many things in too many different directions. They just, they just woke, they just lived in a world that happens to emphasize that, happens to pursue too many different things and they just went along with everybody else.
And, and so the awakening is where you say, well, hold on, there are a group of people who aren't operating like that and the results they get are extraordinary. They're able to produce far, far better results at a lower stress level, so they can break through to a higher point of contribution and enjoy the process at the same time. These are the essentialists. And so, and so learning that is a big moment, it's a big change in mindset and therefore you can change your life quite quickly afterwards.
Yeah, I think there's two main realizations I had when I was reflecting on that particular area of your work. And one of them was, to me, busyness was inbuilt into life and you're right, I didn't know that there was an alternative. I was like, well, this is just what life is, you know? Life is just, life just happens to go a million miles an hour in across the galaxy.
Yeah, that's what you're entry level. And the other thing was, it gave me, especially to younger businessmen, it gave me a sense of accomplishment. You know, it made me feel important, it made me feel like I was doing things because, and it was impressive, low key, it was impressive for me to start, so the people to say, what do you do? And for me to have a laundry list and be like, so what do you do?
Well, it's an interesting question. Actually, I hope you've got about 10 minutes. So I do the modeling, I do the podcast. I've been on reality TV and I do this thing and I do it, you know, and you've got this big list.
So those are the two things. I was like, I didn't know there was an alternative and it made me feel important and busy and valued. And I'd wager a lot of other people feel like that as well. Yeah, and that right there's interesting, this idea of it being important, that busyness somehow has come to equal importance, it's not a necessary human condition or understanding, but it does seem to be this current culture's understanding.
And so I remember talking to one more time and I was asking you, I said, how are you? And she said, I'm so busy. She said, I'm so busy. Greg, I tell you, I've slept on average four hours a night for the last two weeks.
That's how busy I am. You know, and she's smiling. I mean, first of all, why is she smiling? And she didn't say this, but what I think she was saying was, when I hate to break it to Greg, I'm just a little more important than you are.
You know, you don't get to sleep a normal night's rest, but I am under so much demand using me. And she didn't know exactly how important I am. And she didn't know, of course, that she was speaking to, well, to an aspiring essentialist, you know. So she didn't know that this was not, this is not impressive to me.
This is not sort of achievement to me. And so it led to a very genuinely friendly conversation. And a couple of weeks after that, she came back to me and said, okay, my goodness, I completely stripped away the way I was doing it. Sleeping properly, I've like made prioritized decisions about what I actually want to go after and don't.
And I feel this increase of productivity, right? My stress is going down, my productivity is going up. Like, this is the value proposition of essentialism. And in that story, it's also the nonsense of non-essentialism, what a calm that it is.
Yeah. I think it's a Ray Dalio quote that felt like it should have been inessentialism. Yeah. And it says, a truth in this life is that you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want.
Yeah. And accepting that genuinely, truly, not just going, yeah, yeah, sounds good, sounds, sounds, sounds, sounds nice. But I'm going to get, I'll get, I'll get the other thing after I've had this thing. So I'll have this anything, then I'll have the next anything.
I mean, no, that's the everything mentality. And I wonder how much of this comes from people not knowing what they want. In life. Yeah, absolutely.
It comes from people, it comes from people not taking the time to explore that. You know, they're just, they're just going along. And the busyness begets busyness. And that's what everyone else is doing.
So they're just, they're actually in a way that they're not having to make any decisions. They're just doing what everybody else is doing. But they're doing that, what am I actually doing it? I mean, it used to be just, you know, keeping up with the Joneses, but now, of course, it's social media keeping up the Joneses, which is a much different challenge, right?
You're getting to compare yourself to everybody's best possible version of themselves, basically sort of a form of lying, you know, because it's so curated and different than the rest of their life. And you're comparing yourself against the best of everybody's. So this is really like a recipe for nonessentialism. You know, it's not just opinion overload.
I mean, it's not information overload. It is opinion overload. We're just getting crammed with all this stuff. And so our job is to try and push all that way and get quiet and ask what, not just even what do I want or that that's not bad.
What am I supposed to do? What is, what is my mission? What is the thing I came here to do? What, what do I, what do I come here to do?
That, that is a, that is a completely different kind of question. And as you start to explore that, you find that you already have more answers than you realize, but it comes from inside of you instead of just from all this outside stuff. And you can start to have quite, instead of the fear of missing out or FOMO, you start to have the joy of missing out, right? Or JOMO.
Wasn't she a singer? And it's almost that dido. Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, so you could probably write a JOMO is, or to be a singer, but we ought to make a song to it.
You could do that. But JOMO is a, you know, you discover that just because other people affect you like not doing things that other people are doing. You start to go, yeah, that's great for you. You can celebrate it for them, but that's not what I'm doing.
That's what I'm about. It's not what I'm supposed to be doing in my life. And you start to feel this joy and momentum in doing, as I keep saying, what you came here to do. Before we go on to, I want to ask the question, which is how do we do that?
What are the steps that we can take toward identifying that and getting rid of the trivial many, but that deprogramming, right, of the existing societal norms, the paths of least resistance, your genetic predisposition, your traumas in the coping mechanisms you've got with that is something I'm swimming in at the moment. I've got an amazing blog post. I'm going to send to you after we've finished. And I know that I've just completely teased that to everyone that's listening.
However, the author of the blog post is going to come on the podcast in the next couple of weeks. I've got a big announcement about that. It's phenomenal. Just some fella, but wrote the best thing I've read on the internet this year.
And one of the things that he was talking about there was about sort of deprogramming the societal norms, getting rid of all that stuff. And that FOMO versus JOMO paradigm that you've just come up with there, to me, is present in a lot of different areas of life. So for instance, as soon as you see discomfort in training, physical training, as something to actually lean into, as something that is a signal that you're doing something right, as opposed to a signal that you're doing something wrong. But it takes time to program yourself.
You go into the gym for the first time and you do a difficult workout and you feel like you're going to die. You're on the floor and you want to throw up and you're sweating and you knees hurt and all this stuff happens. And there's some very real physical adaptations that need to happen before you can go like fully in. But once those have occurred and presuming you're doing it safely, the discomfort is the signal of progress, right?
And it's kind of the only way you can do that is by learning, oh, hang on, this is me moving forward. This is me doing the right thing. And the the JOMO, as it seems, the joy of missing out, again, is that it's like, I'm missing out. That's fantastic.
That means that I'm focusing on what I should be focusing on. I'm not getting swept away with the trivial many. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right to think about those signals that will be new signals so that when other people are zigging, you're zagging. You know, when other people saying yes, you're saying no, when other people saying no, you're saying yes, because you're trying to, you're not trying to be like everybody else anymore.
Yeah, you can't be distinctive in everything. You are very, very right. Okay, so how do we do it? Where do we start?
You've got me, Greg, I'm here, I'm a nightmare, I'm doing too much. How do I start to bring order to chaos? Okay, so you're asking that question in like, still a hypothetical way, or you could be. So, we could do it in a literal way, right?
So we'll just do it with you right now. I mean, again, okay, so tell me, first of all, what is something that's essential to you? It's very important to you, but you're under-investing in it currently. You might be doing something, but you're under-investing, go.
First of all, writing. Okay, what does success look like for you in writing? One new article per week. And you're putting out in your blog to your newsletter.
That's what you want to do. How are you doing it right now? How much are you managing to do currently? Zero.
Okay, good. So good. It's an under-investing. That was a good avatar for this.
No, I like it. I like it honestly very much. Okay, so when you say you're not publishing any, you aren't doing any writing at all. So I've been, I've been gesticulating over the font size of the website and the tiny little things that I know is really a glorified version of procrastination to put me off from actually putting in hard work.
I have six half-finished articles, all of which require two hours of focused work to be really good. And I really like them. But there's just six half-finished meals and they're all in the kitchen. Yeah, I like how practical that example is.
I think a lot of people can relate to that. Okay, so how long have you been doing those six and a half articles? How long have they been sort of sitting there getting called? Probably since the beginning of lockdown, that's maybe a maybe a couple of months.
You started working on them then? Started working on one and then did a bit and then I would go, oh, that's a bit that's enough for today. And then when I came back, I'd go do something else. I got a podcast or I got a business caller.
I got training or I got, you know, life. Come back, start new. That one's already kind of of doing. I'll just do a new one.
That illusion, sorry, allure of novelty again gets me new idea. Yeah, you're more excited to start the thing than to finish the thing. That's yes. That's it.
Okay, so tell me, tell me one of those articles. What's the first one you worked on? In fact, 10 things I learned from speaking to the smartest people on the planet for 200 hours. Yeah, okay.
Well, that's good. That's good title. You heard your first ladies and gentlemen, drinking Q and say that the title of my articles is good. Because that's a way with that.
Okay, so what is the minimum amount of work that needs to be done to the article? It's current format before you can put it out. I don't even know what she's embarrassing. Because you haven't done it.
Yeah, all 10, all 10 things are done. Each of the common themes. They're kind of fleshed out. A proof, a proof read.
It's the unsexy stuff. Go back through proof read it. Make sure that I haven't used too much hyperbole. Check if there's one concept I'm not really too sure if that should be in.
I think part of me is scared as well that when I reopen that Pandora's box, at the moment it's, I know it's not done, but it is closed. And when I reopen that, I get reminded of the fact that it's still going. Does that make sense? Well, it's an interesting point you're saying.
You're saying that in its unfinished, closed position, it feels a sort of done. That's very interesting, right? You're saying like stopping working on something has a feeling of closure. Finishing it can't satisfy it.
That is officially undone. That is, I can check that off. That's been, this is informally procrastinated. That's it.
That's it. That's it. Well done. Yeah.
Move on the next one. Let's quickly get the next article into the same published position, almost translated. You are working through these at a storm. Okay.
So what is really stopping you from publishing an article? So I think it's publishing the article is a perfectionist trap. A little bit that I'm like, I feel like there's a little bit of pressure. You know, I have a bunch of friends who are all very competent at writing online, and I think right, it needs to be like fucking more in peace.
And then another bit of it's just the working process of writing isn't yet coming as easily to me as podcasting is I've never procrastinated on podcasting, never once, because it feels like a high calling. It's something which comes to me incredibly naturally. There's also a very interesting way that the format pulls you through, because it's like a treadmill. You know, you don't actually have to overcome your own inertia to do a podcast.
I can't now stop talking to you and just give up halfway. I mean, I could, but it'd be really weird. It'd be really weird if I now stopped talking. So you've got some externalised accountability.
You've got some motivation from the person that you're speaking to. So I think that the nature of a conversation is quite different, which is also why book clubs and stuff are successful, I suppose. They give you that external accountability to keep you moving through something and get over your own inertia. Yeah, so you need to choose a day that your podcast goes out no matter what, right?
Three days a week at the moment, Greg. We're doing three episodes a week. No, but I mean, I mean, with your blog. Yes, okay, yes.
I mean, having a set date where you say, okay, it goes out on, we'll choose your day, what's your day? May 18th. All right. May 18th.
And then every week after that, you put out a blog. Correct. Your body language, when I said that, was like so non-committal. You're going to turn the camera on.
I'm not going to turn the camera on. I knew I shouldn't turn the camera on. Inside you were like, no, I am absolutely not committing to doing that. I'll say I'm here because it would be awkward not to in the middle of this podcast, but there's no way I'm doing that.
That's what I heard from you. Maybe. I'm wrong. Maybe.
No, I look, the thing, for everyone that's listening, you're hearing and watching and feeling me go through the turmoil of something that I think we all experience, which is I want to do a thing. I genuinely do or else I wouldn't have started it. I wouldn't have spent my time. I wouldn't have started learning about the process of writing and spoken to people.
But there's something that's happening with that that's getting in the way. And there are so many still now having started to strip back as much as I can and focus on the get rid of the trivial menu and focus on the vital few. There's still a lot of things pulling on my time. And the urgent gets in the way of the importance a lot, which is a nightmare.
Yeah, well, you're doing three podcasts a week. You know, you could say, okay, for until I publish my first article, I'm only doing two a week. I'm not allowed to do the third until I get my first out. That would help the podcast momentum help you, you know, keep you accountable towards this new trade off.
Look, I think that I think what's at the heart of the matter for you with this is that you want the first article to be of the same quality as the other writers that you admire and have read their work from. That's what I think this is about. And I want to encourage you to have the courage to be rubbish. To just go, success is posting that first podcast, first blog.
And here's how I would recommend you do it. I would recommend that you send it to your list as a link to your blog rather than the whole content is in the email, right? And here's why, because if you do it that way, you can keep updating it as you need to. Right, so the first version you send out on the day you send that link doesn't have to be the permanent state of that article.
That is just how it is now. And on it right there in the email you send out to everybody, you just say, I assume that's how you're sending it to people. How you're going to get sent out to everyone? Combination of that and sending it through social media and stuff like that.
The same thing, you just have the link to be somewhere where you can keep editing it over time. I'll tell you something that happened to me that's similar to this. I once wrote, at like late at night, a very rubbish piece on LinkedIn. And it asked me to be an influencer on LinkedIn.
And it was, it was rubbish. And I just was new to that platform. It was a brand new platform that they were using. And they said, and so I post this thing, the number one career mistake capable people make.
That's the type I came up with, post it. And the next morning when I wake up, 60,000 people viewed it. And there's a ton of comments and a ton of criticism. It wasn't all negative.
But I've just written this like, you know, just sort of two, three paragraphs. And I like jumped in and started editing it immediately and improved it and improved it. A couple of million people read that too. It's maybe more than that in the end.
It was like, it was a relatively viral piece at the time. And it was so encouraging that, okay, so it started off as this piece, but we were able to improve it as we went. Now that's not necessarily how you always wanted to be, but you have to get over the hump here. So you have to lower the hump that you're trying to get over.
It's mental number, but it has to be fantastic. I can't put it out. Put something out. It's a small amount.
I don't even know what that would mean, a perfect article. But you will get feedback and you will learn and you'll be in the same mode before we started this idea. What did you say? I can't refine the name.
The skill take off and that sensation of the skill take off. And so maybe what you say is I'm going to publish, maybe you say I'm going to publish. Or yeah, I don't know. Okay.
And so I am trying to encourage you to, and it is really my, probably my biggest insight since writing, essentially, is that, is that people, there's a piece of feedback people often give. It's not the most common feedback, but it is regular enough that I definitely noted it. And it is where they'll say, oh, yeah, it's hard. Isn't it essentialism though?
It's hard focusing on what's essential and not what's non-essential. It has to, you know, in fact, somebody once said to me, they say, look, you know, essentially should come with a warning. This will be the hardest thing that you will ever do. And for like a year or two, I absorbed that line and would share that with people.
Well, the thing, the problem with essentialism isn't you'll ever do. But what a comma is. That's a totally non-essentialist idea. It's like completely wrong.
It's only, it's only the harder thing to do because you're a non-essentialist trying to be an essentialist. Like you're, you're trying to be an essentialist in a non-essentialist way. You're like, I have to do this perfectly. I have to do anything essential right now.
This is not what essentialism is about. I think there's a way to do essentialism that's so easy. And that's what we need to do. I mean, let's cut away all these layers of getting the way of you actually publishing what you've written and then need the fancy website.
You don't need the article to be perfect, whatever that means. You don't even have to have 10 of them. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be published.
And then the feedback will come and then you'll learn something and then you can progress to the next step. You've got to have this. And this is only a couple of the things one can do to make them easier, but that is my primary learning since essentialism was written. That's a very cool way to look at it.
And I've seen and heard other people as well say the challenge of the discipline pursuit of less, you know, especially, I think relinquishing your hand on novelty is something that I want to get into in a second. Because you know, for the people out there who similarly to me like adventure, like new things, new experiences, it just leads to yeses all over the place. Just because you think, well, that's interesting. Oh, well, that's interesting.
Well, that could be fun. Well, that could be fun. Well, I could do that. And then you post-doc rationalize it, right?
This is the most fucking insidious way that you post-doc rationalize it, all the non-essentialists listening, which is everybody. Most insidious way that you rationalize doing too much is by hedging your risk. That's the most insidious way because it's got a kernel of truth in it. It's got a kernel of truth in it that if you were to do two things instead of one, you half your risk if that one thing goes shit.
But you then take it to, well, if I do a hundred things and one of them goes to shit, that's only 1% and you don't realize that the price that you pay for doing a hundred things is that you've only gone one unit of distance over a hundred things as opposed to a hundred units of distance over one thing. Yeah, that's right. And also the other false assumption in that is the idea that all opportunities or actions are randomly, like success is randomly assigned to those 100. If you couldn't understand any cause and effect between anything, you might be best to just do a hundred things and you only make an inch progress in all of them, but at least you'll make an inch progress in one thing that's going to work because it's totally random.
That's fine. You want to believe life is completely random. Fine. You go live that one out and see how that works for you, right?
But on the basis that, and this is the first principle of essentialism is to explore what's essential, right? It's to actually create space looking for the thing you feel really good about pursuing, the thing that you feel your best built to do. And so in that process, you come to a point of view that says, I'm built to do this and not to do that. So I'm going to go strong on the thing that I am good at, passionate about, I think is relevant right now.
I mean, all of those things are risk mitigation techniques so that you can then lean into something fully that you're actually, you know, is your highest point of contribution. And one of the things for me about that is writing. I mean, there's so many career paths I would have been rubbish at and failed at in a sort of capital F way, right? Like just not, perhaps wouldn't have worked well.
I went big on something not because I was high, like, not because I had a high tolerance for risk because I'm actually quite risk averse and I wanted to do things that I really felt strong and good at and so on. And I think that's what we have to do. Yeah, instead of thinking it's all random, you take the time to explore, figure out what you really can make a great contribution and then go big in it. What about someone that says, well, I'm not great at anything?
Yeah, so you can start with, you know, what we're talking about here is criteria, right? What criteria to use to evaluate what to do? And you start off with maybe like, well, what are the things I have no interest in? Well, don't do that stuff.
Fishing. But you don't like fishing, don't do fishing, right? It's because you're makes of doing fishing. I mean, you have to go fishing.
I have lots of people who love skiing. I always feel this guilt like I need to do is I've got to go skiing. Of course, if you go skiing, you ought to be able to go skiing. You know, it's such a bad formula.
Let me go, jump and love the snow. You love it. You would love it. You would love it.
This is what you always feel this. And I'm like, no, I'm not interested. Not interested to start with this stuff. You're not interested in start with the stuff that you go.
No, I not only am I not good at that. I could not imagine ever being good at that. That is not my thing. So you just start at the extremes, right?
The periphery and move forward. So you don't have to say what am I great at? But you can say what am I interested in? What do I think I might have a little bit of talent for?
You know, you look on like, you know, Britain's got talent or whatever the talent show is. And you see these people in these that are just terrible at that thing. They've got high passion, really low talent for it. And you feel for those people, right?
Or you wonder why they don't understand it. What we're looking for is things that have, if you're some passion for it, you think you might be quite good at it. You could become good at it. It meets a need in the world and that overlap.
That's where your highest points of contribution can lie. And then over time, you're developing that more and more narrowly. So that over time, as your competency increases, you aren't just interested in doing the things you're good at. You are looking for the thing you would be the best at, really great at eventually down the journey.
It's like, I don't need the best in the world at this thing. You know, maybe there's a tiny group of people who can do this thing. But that's, you know, that's, you increase your selectivity as your competence increases. I like the idea of using inversion and a contrasting effect to work out where you don't go.
It's the same for the easiest way to avoid being depressed is to work out, not what makes you happy, but how you would make a happy person depressed. I would fucking go to sleep, I'd fuck up with the nutrition and make sure they didn't get any daylight and, you know, do all of the different bits and pieces. And you're like, oh, yeah, well, that makes a happy person depressed. And go, OK, what's the implication of that?
It's also funny that that's, as he was saying about the different things, that sounded to me like a hell no. It's like, would you go fishing? Hell no. Would you go skiing?
Hell no. And as past modern wisdom guests and good buddy Derek Sivis says, it's either hell yes or no. And that ties into something I actually wanted you to run us through, which is the 90% rule. Do you take us through that?
Yeah. So you imagine a, you know, everything, every option that you have on a, that can be plotted on a continuum from zero to 100. And it's an importance continuum. So an importance continuum of zero is, it's totally unimportant.
And 100 is completely important, absolutely essential, right? So everything, you know, whether it's writing this answer, what you just talked about or exercise or doing the next podcast, reading, going on YouTube, like every activity can be plotted on this continuum. And what I'm encouraging people to do is to say anything that is underneath 90%, anything that's lower than 90% important, you question, and maybe even eliminate. You're looking for just the things that are 90% or above essential, vitally important relationships, you know, absolutely must do before I die projects.
You know, habits that I know will make the rest of my life significantly improved and different might even make a difference by children and grandchildren. You're looking for those things because every time you do something that's below 90%, you're taking it away from something that is 90% or above. You're making a trade off. People don't really know about that.
They don't see it that way often. So they just think, well, is this good? Good might be 40, it might be 40% important, 30% important. Yeah, it's fine.
It's fine. What's wrong with doing that? But they don't aware that they're taking it away from the thing that is absolutely vital. So I'm always encouraging people, like look at the extremes.
Look at the things that are 90% important and invest there. Look at the stuff that's below 10% and just eliminate there. Make the trade off between the two so that you can actually go further faster on the things that matter. I think what some people may be concerned about is that sounds like a very totalitarian, disciplined life.
I'm not allowed to have cake because cake isn't contributing to my highest sense of importance. And I used to like YouTube, but Greg and Chris told me that YouTube's only that I really looked at the importance of that. And that's only 30%. So now I've got to delete the YouTube app and now I just feel like I'm this kind of robot that's sort of rolling through life.
So how do people find that balance between turning it on and turning it off, having the focus on the essential few whilst being able to give us enough kind of leeway to live life that doesn't feel like it's completely under super control all the time? Well, what it sounds like you just said is that freedom, creativity, exploration is really important to you. That wasn't me. I'm all right without cake.
I love me a bit of cake, but right now it's summertime. You're just saying other people might find what we described as being really stringent. Well, all I'm saying is that if somebody feels that, something important to them is probably being violated. So they haven't got their list right yet.
When you're working on the 90% and above, you're not feeling rigid and controlled. You're feeling free and liberated from all this nonsense that you don't value. That's keeping you back from living the things you actually do want. So there's a lot of joy.
There's more joy in the 90% than above. Then there is probably in the rest of the 90% combined. When I'm working on something that's meaningful to me, that's inspiring to me. I'll give you an example of just this week.
So it was doing, having an evening with my children, my wife, and we were doing s'mores. Even without the wife and the children, the s'mores on their own would be in the 90% for me. So we just spent the evening doing the outside over a fire together enjoying that time. That was a 90% for me.
That's not stringent and rigid. That's playfulness and joyfulness. And it's way better than me just sort of going, okay, I'll just scan social media and just be my own infinite scanning on that in some room somewhere. Like that's what we're talking about.
We're saying get rid of all that stuff that doesn't feed you. It isn't joyful. It isn't taking you forward. And so I think there's a bit of creativity and imagination as to what really matters.
But people have a good vision of this. Yeah, it's interesting with time, isn't it? The way that time works, because it's the only thing you can't choose to not spend. But you can't not spend time.
You can choose to not spend your money. And it's the the mad thing about people that are able to get in shape or the people that are able to accumulate wealth. Like they do that by having an asymmetry between what they bring in and what they put out. Yeah.
There isn't an equivalent with time. Yeah, there's no time bank. You can't say today, I'm going to just take half of this time. I don't know what to do with it.
So I'll put it over there. Wait, while I figure this out, right? It's being spent at exactly the same rate all the time, no matter what. It's more like a conveyor belt going past and that's moving no matter what you use it for.
So it's it's it's present. Yeah, what you're saying is true. There's a quote from Naval Radakant that I've been playing around with recently, which is play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And what does that mean to you?
So it's meant a lot. I've spent a lot of time thinking about these little that as an aphorism. Um, play stupid games, win stupid prizes to me means what is the what would be winning the thing that you're doing right now. So for instance, what would be winning always replying to an Instagram DM message within 30 minutes all day, every day?
What's what's the what's the prize? Play a stupid game, win a stupid prize. The stupid prize doesn't exist. It's the satisfying of some people who wouldn't have cared if you'd waited a week to reply to them who maybe you're never going to see again who you maybe never met.
Um, play another stupid game. If you want to take it to a kind of a little bit more vicious degree, play a stupid game, which would be have unprotected sex with someone that you don't know after a night out that is playing a very stupid game. What's the prize that you win for that when you compare it with the alternative of having protected sex? What would be play a stupid game of texting while you drive as opposed to waiting until you get to your destination?
That's very stupid game to play when you win a stupid prize. What's the prize? Oh, well, the lads in the group chat got that meme off me a little bit quicker than if I'd waited and I got to have a little bit of a giggle at the light to suppose to sit and look out the window or whatever it is. Um, play stupid games, win stupid prizes, slots into essentialism somehow for me.
Yeah. I think that's right because I remember working with a, uh, it's with maybe like 50 of the top leaders from, uh, from American industry. And as I walked into the room, it's a very, it was a very dark oak room. It's very secretive meeting, actually, by interesting.
It was, it was nothing bad being done there, but it was just like very kind of elite feeling as you walked into the room. And I liked every, I liked all the people I talked to there, but the, the overwhelming sensation I had in that room was here as a group of people that won at the wrong game. What's that mean? Well, one of them was vulnerable at one point and just said, look, my relationship with my teenager is completely shocked right now.
And he's almost ready to leave the house. And I just don't have a relationship with him. He's like, so it's everything's rough between us. And so here he is.
He's, he's got up the corporate ladder, but he's one at a game that now he realizes didn't matter or certainly didn't matter in comparison to these relationships that he's taken for granted over those same years. And so I just think there's many of the prizes that people think are the most important things. So I don't mean the total trivia. I think there's many goals people set that, that actually, if they were, if they spent a little longer pondering them and thinking about them, they would find that's the wrong game.
I, I, I won at the wrong thing. I, I, I achieved it. I got there. But then it was like, you know, it was, it was, it was unsatisfying when I actually arrived there.
That wasn't what it was actually that is not what the, it was unsatisfying achievement. That's what I mean by. And that's where the explore before you exploit importance comes in at the beginning of, of looking at your options of assessing the things that you want. Yes.
And there's, there's a few ways of thinking about exploration, right? One is, one is just intellectually, here are my options. Let me evaluate the options in front of me. A second way of thinking about it is when I think one's highest priority is, which is to protect our ability to prioritize, protect our ability to discern.
All of us have many, many non-essential voices outside of us and inside of us, right? Just all different, a mind is telling us a million things. Oh, you're going to do this and that matters. And how, how do you compare to that person and look at competitions and comparisons and complaining voices and all these voices, right?
There's all of this noise. And then there's another voice. When my friend says it, he says, he says, there's, there's a, there's a scared voice. And then there's a sacred voice.
My distinction will be, I think there's many, many scared voices and one sacred voice, right? And we all know that other voice, I think, I think almost all of us have experienced it, where we just go, that's right, that's wrong. You just know. And nobody else had to tell it to you.
You didn't learn it from someone. You just, you just know, that's the right thing to do in this moment. That's the wrong thing to do in this moment. And if we are quiet enough, that voice becomes the voice that leads us.
So exploring what is essential to me at its highest manifestation means tuning into, amplifying that voice of conscience that really guides you in the right direction. If you do that today in small ways, you don't wake up 20 years from now and go, oh my goodness, I just, I just give myself 20 years to the wrong goal. That's what I think it needs. That's scary, you know, the tweet is something I can't even remember where I found it, but it stuck with me for years.
I tweet this the other day. True hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have been. Yeah, that's, you know, I like, I like that sentiment. It is a bit scary like you say.
I want, I want, I give you a story. So I was staring at myself in the mirror, dressed from head to toe in a stormtrooper costume. Good luck. Good luck.
Well, at the moment, that's certainly what it was. And I was thinking about buying it. This was like a, you know, pretty close to movie level quality suit. Right.
And I'm in my, I'm in like late thirties, looking at myself in this mirror. And I look, it was for Halloween, right? And I still kind of, I think I get why I thought that was a cool thing, why it might be a fun idea. But as I'm staring at the mirror, I'm struck by two things completely at the same time.
One is not one part of me that wants this anymore, right? Like, why am I even thinking about it? I do not want that. So I do not want this.
And the second, in the same moment, I realized that for 30 years, I've had in my mind the idea that one day I would buy this. Because 30 years previously, that's when Return of the Jedi had come out. And my older brother, when my older brothers had said to me, would it be so cool to own like a costume right from, you know, from the movies, like movie level quality costume stuff. And my little like young self influenced by my brother saying this, just, it just like caught on.
And that little goal stuck with me for all of those years. Now, this is the power of goals. We get that. Goals are really powerful.
They're one of my professors once said they're the theory that works. But what he was saying is that they work too well. Once you have a goal, you can get on autopilot. And now you're racing down some path to get something that really, you didn't stop to question.
So what I'm saying here is be careful that some of the goals that we set aren't stormtroopers. You know, should we just have eliminated them already? Could we give up on them halfway? Because we go, no, that doesn't even matter.
Did someone else want to do that swatch? Never wanted to do that. I don't have to do that. You know, just because the rocks do it.
I mean, I have to do it. Yeah, the rock is cool. I absolutely love that I had took a max on. And he is a man who has gone through about as big of 180 as you can imagine from this, uh, what was it called, uh, frat, frat literacy or something?
He created an entire new literary genre, which was like party by, party by stories type thing. And he, uh, he'd gone through this big and then he's done a decade of psychotherapy and a ton of internal work. And this guy is so, so fucking aware now and just completely present. Speaking his truth forward, just stripping away ego left, right, and center.
Really, really delivering. He's phenomenal. I love the person. He's not would have hated the guy that he was back then.
I love the person he is now. And, um, you see when someone makes such a change like that and you got these weird, like epochs in your life, right? You've got like the, the kid and the teenager, then like the young kind of 20s, then like the mid 20s and that, you know, da, da, da, da. And, um, it takes a lot of work, you know, it takes a lot of work to realize that, you thought that having a faster car than you mates when you were 19 was a big deal.
But now you're 32 and your wife loves you and you've got two kids and a dog that you care about. And because you never questioned whether or not still having a faster, bigger, better car was it's just, it's like it's just there. It's just a modus operandi, right? And it's just running below you and you kind of don't really realize and the stream just takes you along.
I absolutely love, I love that concept. You touched on something actually that I had in my notes, I wanted to bring up, which is why is it so hard to cut losses? Is it just some cost fallacy? Is it just, ah, well, I've got this far with the huge tech company, which is destroying my relationship with my teenager.
I might as well go all the way. Is that why people have a fear? Is there anything else? Yeah, because you're having to face the potentially poor decision of not having cut off yesterday or the day before, the day before that.
And so you're more, the longer it goes, the harder it is to admit that we weren't wise in the previous scenario. And so yes, at course, we want to, well, you've heard the old metaphor of how you catch a monkey, but you've heard this, right? How do you catch a monkey? There's a trap and the monkey puts their hand in the trap, you never heard this.
The monkey puts their hand in the trap and they can't, once their hand is in the trap, they're holding on to the nuts in there or the fruit or whatever's in there. And because their hand is cleansed, they can't get their hand out, right? Because it's small enough they can put their hand in, but not being able to get their hand out, so they want to hold on to it. And I thought for a long time that this was just sort of a mess up or whatever, but you can go on YouTube and somebody's actually done this.
And it's actually, it's really, really a little video. And they just, first of all, they just will not let go. And he's completely trapped and the man's going to be over to get him. And it will not let go of this thing.
And then right as the man actually takes hold of the monkey, he does let go, and he gets focused on something else. And that's the key to letting go is we have to focus on the next, something that's more important to us, something that actually is a deep, better version of what we want to be, so that we can let go of these old things. They don't matter anymore. Let them go.
I mean, this idea of not growing up, holding on to the 20-year-old version, then holding on to the 25-year-old version of it is a failure to mature, it's a failure to thrive. We're trying to win yesterday's battle, win yesterday's version of the world. And so I think that we got on to the monkey and catching monkeys. I'm answering your question, but I feel like we're holding on to all this investment, we've made in something, and we've just got to look to the next thing.
It's actually better. And it gives us the courage to let go of the thing that we will keep holding on to. Yeah, there's a story from Kamal Radikant, who's Noval's brother, and had him on the podcast just before Christmas. And he lost pretty much all of his blood in an operation accidentally.
It's the sutures burst on his artery. And he basically bled out. And he was a knee-making, all this stuff happened in terrible pain. And love yourself like your life depends on it.
It was just about to come out the second version. And he'd sold tons of self-published. And he was the perfect patient zero for who needs drugs. And the doctors were like, if anyone ever needed opioids, it's you.
Like, you are the guy for drugs. So he's taken them and he gets the first proof, uncorrected manuscript, whatever it is back. And he realizes that because of the drugs that he's on, that he can't view the punctuation with enough dexterity and that resolution that he needs to. Because he wants every word, it's quite short book.
It's only like maybe 70 pages or something. And he wants everything. You need to craft every single word, every line break, every piece of punctuation, all the rest of it. And you realize he can't do it.
So he just stops taking the drugs. And he's in pain. But he has something which is greater than his pain. He has the book and the book allows him to transcend what it is that he's suffering with, right?
And I loved that story. And I would have never heard it. I never heard him tell it on a different any of the podcasts. It's just because I was being like a bit nosy about the pain that he'd gone through in this recent near death experience.
Yeah. It's so powerful. It's really like allegorical almost. You're like, look, you've got this thing which occurs, which is greater than your suffering.
And it allows you to transcend the difficulty of just existing, of just getting through your day-to-day life. And that's kind of like the monkey thing, right? It's like, you know, if only you could let go of the thing that you wanted, you thought you wanted to move on to the thing which you truly want. And one of the best ways for that to happen is to have something which you know that you truly want so much more, because it makes letting go an awful lot easier.
Yeah, I was, you know, I just about to launch a podcast in. And one of the reasons I did it was because I was talking to one of my podcasting friends. And he has this great line. He says, he says, success traps are harder to get out of the failure traps.
And that to me is such a brilliant illustration of the probably describing and the cure of it is higher purpose. It's always something, it's serving someone else. It's doing something more meaningful. So you get out of the trap of being so self-centered in life, where we're worried constantly about how we'll appear and what we'll do and how we, you got to get rid of it.
I think that's probably the ultimate monkey trap, is just that we haven't got past ourselves yet. And this is where all the suffering is. This is where all the non-essential habits lie. As soon as we step out to serve somebody else, I think a lot of that non-essential stuff starts to fall apart, fall away, and we can get out of the trap.
Scott Barry Coffman's new book, Transcend, is precisely about that. He talks about it, it readers Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And he talks about it, he literally believes that you can't reach your full potential without serving others. Yeah, or something, Maslow, you know.
Yes, he was talking about it. Yeah, go on. The story about Maslow, do you hear about his mother-in-law? I think it's his mother-in-law.
And he said that he said that his mother-in-law was the most actualised person that he'd ever met. And she was like just a mum, just a mum living at home. You know, it wasn't the picture of the guy on the top of the mountain, you know, just slaying businesses and driving fast cars and doing all that stuff. But he said she was the most actualised person that he'd ever met.
Well, until the end of his life, he rebuilt his own model. But it was just too late because it was already like become popularised and everybody. No one's updated it. So the top of his model was not self-actualisation, by the end of his life, it was self-transcendence.
And that distinction makes all the difference, doesn't it? I've met so many people trying to pursue a self-actualised life. And you can feel the absence of what matters so much more than self-actualisation. As important as self-actualisation is and sort of going after goals and just achieving them.