The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

the justification for slowing down becoming more deliberate becoming more focused is single and it's this if you really believe that a few things are exceptionally valuable and most other things are noise then you will automatically naturally start to change your behavior it's about what matters most to you in life it's not just about less it's about it's about essential things essential relationships essential living most of the stuff that's going on is not vital it's a trivial many verses to find a few we sometimes forget that we have a choice we make decisions impulsively say yes before we think it through and burden ourselves with commitment the end result we feel overworked overwhelmed and stretched too thin Greg McEwen is the author of the New York Times best-selling book essentialism the disciplined pursuit of less in the book Greg describes an approach similar to minimalism that gets us to take stock of our lives and ask the right questions about where we're spending our time energy and effort he first started thinking about these ideas when he noticed his priorities in life had shifted seemingly without his control one of the experiences that led me to really focus on this subject in this book was that I mean you know I got an email from my colleague at the time said look Friday would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby because I need you to be at this client meeting between 1:00 and 2:00 look and I'm sure they were joking and yet somehow I took it as a responsibility of burden you know I got to navigate this balance this Friday comes along that is when we're in the hospital my wife just had our daughter where were instead of being focused I allow another passion another interest to confuse it and so I go to my shame to the meeting and even if some great thing had come from that meeting which in fact it didn't surely and clearly I made a fool's bargain what I learned from that lesson is the simplest idea which is if you don't prioritize your life someone else will that idea of heightened awareness of what the priority is and making sure that we aren't just busy pursuing lots of things but that we are creating space to actually pause and discern and make sure that we're sleeping enough so that our discernment is intact so that we can keep on figuring out what is the most important contribution I can make and so that's what I'm saying I say there's an inherent trade-off when people are just I'm so interested so I'm so fast I've got to do more of everything yeah there's an advantage to that for a time perhaps but you're giving up something along the way as well and you have to be careful about what you're giving up because otherwise you wake up one day and you say my goodness I've done all these different things but I basically lost my way I don't know what it is anymore that I want to do and you're so consumed and you've been so consumed and this happens for years for people's lives and then they were why am I even doing this and they got they got disconnected finding what is essential to our lives is becoming more and more difficult as our world has become more distracting the tools that we use to be productive can just as easily be used to pacify us and when we travel with them 24/7 bringing them into bed with us the truly important things can get lost with the non-essential and in many ways this behavior is encouraged busyness has become a badge of honor when I look at our culture I would say in America but I'm sure it's spread pretty far there is this work hard hustle grind it out busyness that is promoted how do you view our hustle culture today and is that something that as you would describe it when I first came to America I would ask people how they are and who this is we're talking almost 20 years ago and they would say you know they'd say I'm great great it was almost like I'm American of course I'm great and and I liked it I liked this sort of inherent optimism and positivity I connected to that I related to that but if you ask people now as often as not when you ask them how they are now the first word will be busy I'm busy I'm so busy I'm good I'm good but I'm busy I'm busy busy with this whole flavors are busy and so I do think that something has changed it's not just in our own mind something as significant has changed and even in those years I think we've gone from being connected to hyper connected that's not a small change in the human condition it shifts from a place where sometimes we had information overload yes we've had that for a long time but we're now in a state of opinion overload and so this is particularly the kind of busyness that I think is is most potentially harmful is where we're busy not because we just have a sense of internal mission that matters a sense of contribution that we want to make in the world it's that we're busy because other people are busy we're doing things because other people are doing stuff we see them on social media oh that person's doing this thing they're in that place they're pursuing this idea and so keeping up with the Joneses has been a deep part of human nature I'm sure forever but when you add into it this hyper connection this hyper comparison then I think it gets to the point where people do feel pretty crazy all the time people feel busy but not productive they feel stretched too thin at work or at home but they don't feel a sense of accomplishment with it they feel instead I can't a constant sense of other people hijacking their agenda how do we say no to things because saying no is really uncomfortable saying yes feels good when somebody says hey like we'd love to grab coffee and pick your brain or just chat a little bit right saying yes leaves you feeling good leaves them feeling good for the short term in the long term then when it comes to that day when you have to meet up with them you like oh I'm already so busy I don't have time to do this I actually think the first thing have to accept is that we are saying no all the time and everybody is what we are not aware of is that we are saying every time I check email every time I randomly go on social media every time you get pulled into some binging watching something you're saying no to stuff and so in a sense we're quite good at saying though we just don't use the words no and so we have to in a way apply that same logic to more important projects more important work so that we just pause before saying yeah I'm gonna do that the first thing we need to learn about saying no is is is just within ourselves if you believe that all things are approximately of the same value then you it's like it's like you you're just shoveling coal you're in a coal mine you're just trying to get out as much as possible and your job is to get more and more of it and the way to do it is just to push more and more shovel more and more becoming an essentialist is like discovering that you use your whole life and at coal mine you suddenly go it's not a coal mine I mean I'm in a diamond mine here I was thinking it was all about just how much to get out and has no it's about finding those things that are really precious and valuable and important and as soon as you suddenly wake up you're in a dynamite your behavior shifts and that's the same it's just a driver of becoming essentialist is to suddenly see you know if somebody else says not me it's it's difficult to overstate the unimportance of practically everything the ideas get that get that new thinking in and and as soon as you start to look at the world through that lens you find yep that is in fact far closer to reality that most of the stuff that's going on is not vital it's a trivial many verses to fight a few and I think it's not just one more thing to figure out what those vital few things are it is the work of life figure out what they are eliminate what they aren't and build a system that protects and enables you to to pursue those things that you've said it moving you know most important to get my for one hour uncut interview with Greg McEwan go to patreon.com/scishow Bela and sign up at the exclusive videos tier you'll also get access to extra videos every month including behind the scenes personal vlogs and my private AMA there's a link down in the description below thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Matt D'Avella

Views: 869,887

Rating: 4.9753003 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: hsFefdPhL3w

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019