This PRODUCTIVITY SYSTEM Will Completely CHANGE YOUR LIFE! | Greg Mckeown & Lewis Howes

complaining state is going to limit my creativity it's going to make it harder for me to achieve it's going to be harder for me to attract good talent and all the rest of it so i said okay every time i complain i'm going to i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really it seems like in a world of burnout culture hustle and grind culture that there isn't a lot of effortlessness happening in the world it's more work as hard as you can grind it out and hustle because hard work is the key to success you hear a lot of great athletes say how did you get here they had to work hard yeah they had to put in hours and hours every day in order to master their skill to be the best of what they were had to so is there a way to create effortlessness when you also need to work hard and be diligent in your practice and all these things or do we not have to work hard and it can be effortless in accomplishing what we want yeah well look i mean to to me uh essentialism is about was about rethinking prioritization what really matters and figuring out what is essential effortless is a cousin to that and that's about rethinking simplification which is that sometimes we just make getting great results breaking through to the next level harder than it needs to be yeah so it's not saying hey you should never work and you should never work hard and you should never put an effort i believe that you're supposed to put an effort the point is if you can't work any harder you've got to find an easier path and yet in a grind culture sometimes people start to get burned out and their answer is push even harder rather than think different think smarter find an alternative route rather than take pause reflect have a better strategy it's more just go hard hard hard more spend more time more hours on the thing yeah as opposed to re-evaluate simplification yeah yeah that's what it is how can we do it more effortlessly in a simplified version not just hard push push bush one of the things i think we can do is is just well the the the book structure the model is to have an effortless state like three concentric circles effortless state effortless action and effortless results right and that's sort of like three books in one each of them can make your life and the results you get easier to get you want to first remove all the complexity in your mind in your heart that makes life more frustrating than it ought to be just talking with tim ferriss and i asked him a question about this i said look how much of your mental and emotional energy have you given on stuff that you know holding grudges being angry stuff that just got in the way of your success and he said look from age 15 to 30 he said probably 60 to 70 of my energy was spent on that on angry at what himself other people the people the world anything and awful things that happened to him that he was angry about from when he was young he's talked about this publicly now um of abuse that he'd been through and so on but either way he's making his life is more burdened than it needs to be because he's spending so much of his cycles on this stuff that isn't actually propelling him forward or helping him achieve this thought process his energy on those things right yeah spending a lot of time that's right just you just your mind's what you're what you're processing how you're feeling is just burdened burning energy burning energy instead of getting you going forward yes and so simplifying your state i think is a is a huge return on investment if you can let go of a grudge if you can let go of something that you keep on you know draining you then you have there's just more of you on offer and that's not through grinding effort that's through just removing burdens you don't have to be hauling up the mountain at all right you know the number two area is effortless action that's effortless state the first one effortless state so you're simplifying all of your you're basically all of that clutter that's in your mind yeah so it makes it easier to focus on what matters before we get to the second the second ring how do people learn to let go of grudges yeah how do they let go of resentment and your frustration about others and about the things they've done and that's really hard to do you seem like it's a simple doesn't matter just get a clear mind but uh you know people have been trying to figure that out for a long time yeah so how do we how did you learn how to do that well well one of the things that i've learned is that specifically on grudges is that we need to learn like we have to ask an unusual question about grudges and that is uh what did we hire the grudge to do yep as clayton christensen says with any product or service that you have you don't you don't you don't no one wants a six you know a six uh inch drill bit what they want is a six inch hole right yes you you there's a reason that you're hiring that product or service well you can do the same with grudges every grudge we hold we hold for a reason we've hired the grudge to do something for us maybe we hire the grudge to make us feel powerful see i am i am one up i'm above that person see they did this bad thing i'm holding on to that see i'll show that i'm superior we hold on to it for a sense of superiority or maybe we hold on it uh because we like that we get to tell a story of being a victim and people go oh yes we get sympathy for doing it well we hire grudges to do certain jobs and what i think is that if we simply evaluate grudges like we say how are you doing in your job performance for me are you actually protecting me are you actually making me powerful are you actually getting people to build a stronger relationship with me or if you evaluate them and in the book there's a section specifically one by one you can do this where you you say well is you actually find well actually it's not making me powerful it makes me more vulnerable uh it makes me vulnerable with everyone because i'm carrying this wound still i'm not letting it heal is it is it helping me to build relationships no if you pay attention you notice that when you tell these stories you kind of have to find new people to tell them to because people get bored of it right and so you're not building deeper trust relationships you're you're actually kind of wearing them out along the way and you can go one by one to suddenly discover that this is like a bad employee we have a grudge is like you've hired them to do this they aren't doing any of those things they're using you grudges use you they burn you up they waste you out they make you weaker and so just through this process you start to find like i'm ready ready to fire my grudges ready to be free of it so that i can actually recuperate whatever the percentage is 60 to 70 percent with him maybe it's different for other people get all of that back and we can start putting that into the stuff we really wanted to do in the first place yeah can you imagine there's been different stages of my life where i felt like 10 out of 10 of positivity of freedom of my thoughts from holding grudges or resentments or angers and you feel like you're flying and there have been many years of my life many years too many years where i've held on to resentment anger frustration a lack of forgiving other people right where you feel like you're at a six or seven maybe you get to an eight for a moment but then something triggers you and you're back into anger frustration mode and that really pulls me back into feeling tired exhausted drained and burnt out typically not from the effort i put into my craft but in the effort i put into my mind thinking about the things i don't like yeah you've just you have basically made the case for why effortless state is the first part of the effortless model that's it exactly right you you think the language you used you feel like you're flying yes is that not just another metaphor for effortless yeah i mean what would be more effortless than i'm flying that's the idea that's why even though you would never think of forgiveness as a productivity hack like maybe no one's ever written that you know the productivity hacks you know true is to forgive people in your life and yet what else can you call it if you could get back that much energy that much of your own light and ability and capability it's the best rebate available there's a story that i came across in the research that i love of a man who was productive in his community and then one day he he saw what he thought was a piece of string on the ground and it was a piece of string he gets it he's like oh i can put that to use he puts it in his pocket on that same day in the marketplace someone else had lost a wallet and lost some money and they thought that they had seen him pick up the wallet and take it accused him of it publicly there was no way for him to prove his innocence and so the word went out this person has acted dishonestly dishonorably and so on now at this point in the story he has a choice he can't prove his innocence but he could have in this moment let go of the accusation of the harsh judgment and he would have suddenly had all that energy back to be able to get back onto what can i do something about how can i serve how can i make a contribution how can i be successful again but he doesn't he gets fixated on it everywhere he goes he talks about it he nurses the grudge he explains it's a piece of string don't you see it was wrong a piece of string a piece of string people started laughing about this guy all he ever wants to talk about is a piece of string and it makes him ill and on his deathbed final words of the story you know a little piece of string a little piece of string and this is how the story goes now that is it's a fictionalized account but it it illustrates the point of where are you putting your mental energies if we put them on grudges if we put them on things that have happened we wish they hadn't happened or even on our own mistakes where we go i wish i'd been different we're beating ourselves up for past mistakes we're just we're just putting tons of effort onto things that will exhaust us and burners out instead of moving forward to the things that really matter so we just say that things in our minds will hold us back from an effortless state and getting and getting the actions and the results we want is the things in our mind first yes definitely um there's a little story about that where i was staring at myself um dressed head to toe in a storm trooper costume yeah and i mean i'm in a you know i'm in a in a store of halloween this is like a this expensive suit it's like a movie quality stormtrooper outfit and as i'm staring back at myself in the mirror like should i buy this i'm like how am i even here like what why for 30 years without realizing it i'd had this goal of buying a stormtrooper costume yeah so when i reflect on it it goes back to like when return of the jedi comes out and my older brother says oh wouldn't it be cool to have a movie quality suit you know wouldn't that be great and i'm like this you know whatever 10 year old kid just amazed by this like yes that would be cool forget about it entirely but here we are 30 years later still pursuing that goal it's still a part of me has been working on achieving this well no part of me wanted that costume i'm like that's why am i even what am i even doing here let's get out of this i don't want this concept and it became like a shorthand my wife will say to me now like if i'm pursuing something that she's like i don't know that has a certain vibe about it she'll be like is this a stormtrooper and i think you can use that for goals that no longer serve you but also for grudges that no longer serve you could be relationships that no longer serve you could be any mental clutter any assumptions that are simply like that they were true to a point but they don't serve you now uh and and one of those one of those stormtroopers i think is the idea that any problem can be solved by working harder that alone is a really limiting idea it'll get you only to here it won't get you to there so it's a good principle as far as it goes but then we need to invert that question instead of say how can i work harder we say look is there a more effortless way of doing this and so as you rid your mind of this old paradigm you open yourself up to a new option a new question and suddenly i mean i almost think it's almost like magic there's so many cool options once you're free of the idea that anything worth doing has to be exhaustingly difficult yeah what was the thought process that stuck in your mind the longest that was the hardest to let go of that when you let go of it life became more effortless whether it be in your relationships or your career or whatever it might be um yeah i mean one answer that question is well i'll give you one answer though which is that the work at what's essential needs to kind of be hard drudgery and then you've got separate to that play and fun and that those two things are just two different categories yes they don't have to be but we often divide them up and so we we we just have the fun and the play separate but what if they what if the essential things can be the fun things what if you can make the the things that used to seem like drudgery into like fun rituals yeah how do you make cleaning your laundry or mopping the floor or yeah cleaning the toilet a fun enjoyable experience or which is a specific example in my family uh cleaning up after dinner yeah so we we we have pretty good rituals around the actual meal time like we actually eat together i got four kids and my wife and i we will do like you know uh we'll do toasts for each other at the end of each day and like what's gone right today and we have some good rituals around this but as soon as the dinner is over uh my my kids are just like gone they're like see you on the phone disappear like they're like ninjas man they're just gone it's like so silent and like where did they all go then i have the unenviable task of like coming back and pulling them all back where did you all go and oh no i've got homework and it's hard to argue with that go to the bathroom okay that's hard to argue and it's just this cat and mouse game to get them back in so i'm like okay how do we make it effortless and so we we divide up the chores so everyone's got a certain part of it right many hands make like work and we trained them on each piece and i'm like okay we're gonna set this up we wrote it all down on a piece of paper where everyone can see it okay ready to start what happens nothing chaos yeah it is back to the same they're gone the next day they have gone like ninjas again and it wasn't until mail the store to grace added just a particular kind of music to the occasion that it became like karaoke there was like classic disney tracks it was i mean she's a teenager she's just turned 18 now but it's just like sing-along stuff that you can't not sing to all kinds of music and it turned it into just like a little party and even now we'll start to do yourself the same problems as soon as someone puts on the right music you all do it you play and and and and it's like that now and in fact i didn't think people would believe me but the other day i wasn't even helping them music got put on everyone's doing it i grabbed like five seconds of video and put it on instagram just to like prove like it really is like that now so the idea is one of the ideas that's hard to let go of is that is that essential stuff has to be the drudgery you know the the important stuff is just hard work some things are just hard and then there's fun stuff and that's play over here but what if you make it what if you combine those what if you make essential stuff enjoyable well then it becomes relatively speaking and i would add into that and say if you don't make the essential stuff enjoyable then you will be burnt out yeah even if it starts out as like fun like practice and sports for me there were many different sports that i played growing up and some of them i burnt out on because it came we started to become a job where it was only like you got to show up to practice you got to work hard this is a business mentality now and it kind of lost the idea of having fun yeah when we're playing a game but it's like the business of the game right and right you almost have to so what could start out as really fun could turn into drudgery right and what could be like this thing that i don't like could be this incredibly fun experience yeah based on the parameters you create for yourself i was a truck driver for many months um i got paid 250 a week right as a truck driver when i was about 22 23 years old and i remember being like this is miserable this was not fun this was not you know it's essential to just pay like for food for the week right it was not like the path of my life right but it was a season of my life and i remember saying okay i have an opportunity here like this is gonna be happening for many months i can either be in misery in pain for six hours a day driving a truck right or i can make the most of it and i downloaded cd with salsa songs and i started it visualizing myself while watching the road but visualizing myself salsa dancing because i was learning how to salsa dance at that time well so i would imagine myself doing the moves and and the dance and the steps and everything and it made the time flight it made it more enjoyable right but also sing songs as well and just see like okay how can i make this fun even if people are looking at me like i'm crazy singing along to myself but that made it more enjoyable where it wasn't like uh i have to go to work and do this thing but i had a great time and time flew well i love what you're saying and it really is sort of a lot of what i mean when i say effortless state is it like which is there's nothing so hard that complaining and whining about it won't make it harder so some things in life once you decide i'm going to do this thing i'm dealing with this this is a responsibility that's important to me i'm taking on now you just have to decide do i want to do it the hard way or the easier way exactly what happens when we complain and why do we complain so much you know i searched at one point when i was doing this research for like just what are the easiest things to do in the world like just off the cuff like what are the answers and i remember that one of the first answers that people really agreed on was complaining is the easiest thing to do wow so i thought that was very interesting and and i took on a little exercise myself with this and i was like okay well that's not a great state to be in a complaining state is going to limit my creativity it's going to make it harder for me to achieve it's going to be harder for me to attract good talent and all the rest of it so i said okay every time i complain i'm going to say something i'm grateful for i read this in the book i like this strategy well his really good strategy well i like that you like it what i noticed about it was that it didn't work well what i noticed is nothing i didn't work i realized that i complained a lot more than i realized right i read that too but yeah is this this how much were you complaining a day when you started that strategy i don't know if it's there's a number for it but i just found i would walk into a room and i'd be complaining i'd see my wife and oh how are you doing well you know this thing was a bit of a drag that meeting took longer than i thought and i'm like why are you saying this it's not even how you feel about your life there's so many good things happening but for some reason i was in a habit of just starting with a complaint you see your kids there's always someone to complain about well why are you on that why aren't you doing this why haven't you cleared this thing up there's an endless variety of complaints and and what i noticed was that the more i complained the more there was to complain about and as soon as i introduced this new habit what i was surprised by is how fast the state changed because you can't be grateful and complaining in the same moment you can't be fearful and grateful in the same moment you can't be angry and grateful in the same moment i mean it is a it is a dynamic powerful catalytic thing it's not just for too long we think of gratitude as being like well that's a nice mindfulness be mindful and grateful over there but when you've got to go real stuff that's not the real stuff gratitude is the real stuff this is the way to be able to accelerate success in any area of your life and it's instantly effective so i found that as soon as i would say i was grateful i could see people's eyes light up just even my kids my wife just it just brought a more positive feeling so then we carry on with our kids and i'm like okay my son jack one time i'm like he complained and i'm like okay give me three things you're thankful for he says this i'm so thankful that my dad wants to play this dumb game after i say something i'm complaining about right says it just like that we all laugh it works even though he did it with the worst attitude ever and by the time he's doing two and three he's laughing and he's saying stuff and it didn't matter gratitude is that powerful and so i think it's like the fastest way to get ourselves back into an effortless state uh and and and and i learned about it first in the extremity of of you know a family crisis i found that this thing would help even in the direst of circumstances yeah what crisis we moved into a new neighborhood a few years ago uh pretty picturesque beautiful neighborhood uh you know there's a in nature white picket fences i mean it's like lovely uh place and and our children seem to thrive they're out you know especially one of my daughters is eve she's out naming chickens um i mean yes we have chickens uh but but but also just up trees she's she's barefoot everywhere she's reading endlessly i mean she is thriving just can't be angry for more than like two seconds at a time if she tries to she'll burst out laughing that's just who she is until she turned 14 and then she just was like taking longer to do a chores uh she's not as talkative anymore and she's a little physically awkward and we think well this is all pretty age-appropriate behavior 14 okay fine we don't think much of it but then we take her to a physical therapy appointment just normal and and he the the therapist pulls over my wife aside and says you know she failed a reflex test and like the whole point is you can't fail those right like they're just basic health and so the fact she didn't respond to it he said like that's normally kind of neurological or i mean like the knee test for the hitch on the knee basically there's a few different ones but that's one of them you can do the same with the feet and your your toes curl up a certain direction and there's nothing you can do to stop that that's what happens but she wasn't responding in the way that she should have done to those and so you don't have to be told twice right like for real you're like okay maybe what we've seen as being normal developmental behavior isn't at all and we suddenly i mean we went to a neurologist immediately but also just re-examined her behavior and what followed for the next several months was a complete discombobulation of her abilities that's like taking someone perfectly healthy and just i don't know like just making them go super slow so like instead of eating a meal in i don't know half an hour like everyone else it's taking her hours uh instead of being able to write you know page a night easily and fast it's taking her literally i have it recorded two minutes to write her own name [Music] first the whole right-hand side of her body stops moving wow the same pace as a left personality change she's just no emotion in her anymore and all the while these neurologists these lifelong neurologists cannot give us even the beginning of a diagnosis wow so there's nothing we're getting no information that's scary yeah i mean it's it's um what it is really is the stuff that agony is made of right that is that is human suffering i i that's in the category there's worse stuff but it's in the category of the worst stuff and that really opened us up to this moment i remember in my mind's eye seeing this like two parts ahead of us and it the first path was like the heavy hard hard path and the other one was the easier path and you might say well it's obvious which one you should take but actually it wasn't the temp the temptation or even the inclination was the heavier path what does that look like relentless research night and day all-nighters every neurologist on the planet every email you get from well-intended people saying well maybe she has this you study that problem you you talk of nothing else you think of nothing else you you get obsessed about it i mean that's actually the path that we felt like leaning into because you wanted to figure out the solution yeah because the problem was the solution yes because because of an assumption that says look the more more important it is it's such an important thing you have to kill yourself to go do it and and or even just even just a path of even blaming i mean talk about holding grudges we could have held grudges there why these neurologists they don't know anything why can't they know something why is it happening to eve you know she's innocent this is unfair this is wrong i mean there's a whole set of approaches i think that we you know really were on the edge of doing and then i had this sort of feeling one day like among among the reactions that we were having one was this idea like go and read this particular article it's an article it's a church article it's by gordon b hinckley and it's it's uh um it's an article about optimism and thankfulness and i started i felt like really kind of guided to like listen or read to that every day and i did almost every day for the next like four months and what happened in that moment really or not that that experience was that like it was like my mind was being re-engineered in the midst of this excruciating experience there was this alternative path there was a different way to do life that started to open up and it began with gratitude we will be grateful relentlessly grateful anything we can be grateful for we're going to say it we're going to say out loud we're going to say it to each other we're going to catch people doing the right things we're going to catch the neurologists doing the right things well they're willing to meet with us but thank goodness that they're willing to meet with us that's a good thing and what that did is it created almost instantly this kind of magical force at play it meant that we were able to just stay optimistic when you know you're getting sent emails every day almost from people saying well maybe she has this thing that's going to kill her maybe she's going to have this thing i mean that's what you're getting all the time from well-intended people and it started opening us up to like well well let's let's let's have joy through this let's let's get around the piano and sing together and we're going to still eat dinner together we're still going to laugh together we're going to still going to and it just kept us positive and open and healthy and our marriage didn't collapse our family didn't collapse the culture was actually positive and i would say overall the experience sometimes agonizing sometimes tears but overall i would say it was joy and i don't say that lightly i know what it was but i also know what happened as we took this alternative path and uh you know if it was a disney story i'd just say it all worked out perfectly happily ever after she got a series of treatment pretty miraculously that got her much better but then the symptoms returned and we had to go through the whole cycle again from the beginning and if we had taken that heavier harder just grinding effort i think we'd have had nothing left of us either physically nothing emotionally nothing mentally nothing but also the culture of the family would have been so burned out i think that's the stuff that breaks people and instead the the culture just just thrived it really worked and so now two years through this experience she's gone through a whole nother set of treatment as of this conversation she is i would just describe her as back wow back mentally back physically back emotionally just back she is back congratulations that's amazing well it it it is and it's a you know with this it's something to be grateful about all the time for us but also out of those experiences really came the fire for the deed for this first to save myself and my own family to find what are the principles and practices that make doing what matters a little easier a little more effortless but also now then to write about it and to share it with others and i think it comes about at a time that it has the power of relevancy because who isn't feeling a bit burned out right now yeah who isn't feeling like well maybe i got good results but through grinding effort do i have another year in me of this yeah now i'm exhausted we're exhausted and so you've got these highly engaged capable driven people who are so scripted in the idea that the only path to greater success is through more hustle well they're out of juice so i guess they have to give up on their goals right no there's an alternative path there's a different way there's a better way of doing life starts by getting this effortless state the gratitude is a fast mover and the reason the gratitude is so pivotal i think is because when we focus on what when we focus on what we lack we lose what we have and when we focus on what we have we gain what we lack yeah that's two full pages in your book yeah side by side yeah i love that yeah it was a it was a big part of the lesson that the eve experience taught us say it one more time when we focus on what we lack we lose what we have when we focus on what we have we gain what we like yeah and that goes on and on and that's why it's at the core of the model because as you get into that more grateful state you cleanse out so much clutter and you start to see the world differently so effortless action starts to be more achievable you start to build better relationships with the people around you and and really i if you you know if you had you know gun to my head what's the most important thing in effortless i actually think this is a pretty good contender for that because it creates an upward momentum it creates a spiral of success that that i think brings to you the results you want i i think you can't overdo this i think if you are grateful in everything you will attract exactly the things that you currently lack you'll start to see opportunities that were always there but you couldn't see them before it's like the um you know if you go fly fishing which i have never done but if you do it's hard i've done it once it's hard i did it once and i couldn't catch anything it was hard well do you know about the hat the uh the uh the if you put on polarized sunglasses you know about this okay so if you put polarized sunglasses when you go fly fishing it it means that like the water it refracts the reflection of the water the the light on the water so you can see under the water huh that's that's how it works because the way that the polarized glasses are vertical and or whatever so it means you can see the fish underneath which makes it throw it yeah towards them yeah you know where they are and as a metaphor i think gratitude is like that that it allows you to see what's currently being hidden by grudges complaining criticizing by all paradigms that don't serve you old goals that no longer are interesting actually interesting you but they are controlling you all of that gets in the way of seeing the opportunity that is really there and as soon as you can rid yourself of that you suddenly go my goodness there's so much here there's so much more that's working on my behalf there's so much in my life that i've been complaining about that actually was given to me it was happening for me not to me and and it just gets you into a state that's like well whatever the next challenge is i'm in a better position to be able to handle it for us the next thing was the pandemic right so you're prepared yeah well your culture is prepared your state is prepared so you can deal with it with a different better state than you otherwise would have done yeah it's interesting you know all roads go back to how we think about ourselves and about others and about the world and our thoughts yeah and um our perspective on different things you know when i went to india and studied meditation at a facility many years ago four or five years ago now yeah they mentioned that there are two states two two human states a beautiful state and a suffering state yeah the suffering state is where we're holding on to the past you know resentful angry comparing all those different things the beautiful state is gratitude you know wanting to support other people seeing other people succeed uh appreciation those things right and any moment we're thinking about what we lack we suffer that's right and any moment we think about what we are grateful for we're in a more beautiful state yeah a peaceful state of being yeah and i want to build on that for a second i just had benjamin hardy on the watch central podcast and we were talking about this and he summarized it this way he said are you in the gain or the gap i love that phrase if you're in the gap you're looking at what you haven't achieved yet how life isn't the way you want it to be where you've failed you know the what's ahead of you if you're in and basically he just says you can do it that way but you will be unhappy yes you can live that way if you're in the if you're in the gap of what's missing what's missing what you haven't achieved who you haven't become but if you move into the game that's what progress have i already made who have i become so far what did i used to be compared to now i've become something better if you can look at the gains you've made he says the difference is you simply will be happy in your journey not only focusing on where i'm not right where i want to be what's in between now and where i want to be but think about everything i've become up until now that's right so you've got is it thinking about both is it thinking about okay i want to be here but in order to get there i've got to appreciate how far i've come where i'm at right now well i think for achievers they will never ever get rid of a hundred percent of the gap thinking yeah and they're never going to do how do i improve how do i grow how do i earn more how do i achieve so we don't have to worry about that when we try to make these adjustments we don't have to be like well what if i only ever thought about the gain and never thought about the gap like whatever that's never happening to me it's never going to happen to you we don't have to worry about that the question is could we spend a little more what's the ratio we spend a little more in the game and when we start to feel you know when we start to feel miserable well you're going to find you're in the gap right so it's time to just take a pause be a bit grateful i need this as a sort of mental health practice i write like what i'm grateful for at the end of the day i try and do each week haven't done it each week through the pandemic i used to have a routine for it started again recently out of a need not like i am so enlightened i must do this it's if i don't do this it is miserable i'm miserable so i'm gonna do it out of self-preservation but i find it like i find it amazing unbelievable sometimes what i have already forgotten about in the day i'm writing it like literally what do you mean what you forgot about things you've done good or things that suffer things that were good today that i've already forgotten moving on to the things because you're comparing about something or you're lacking or i wish i had this or that person did this thing exactly so for me it is it is a therapeutic thing to each day just go okay what are you thankful for let's really think about it let's review the day sometimes there are amazing things that i have already just slipped from my memory so we're just i think terribly forgetful creatures and especially for achievement orientation we're like so looking for the next achievement that we forget like wow let's take a moment yeah let's pause and enjoy the blessing of this great thing that happened today so what i'm hearing you say is the greatest keys to the highest level of productivity hacking yeah is forgiveness and gratitude yeah is there anything else that would go in there as the highest productivity hack um i think inverting the question okay would go in there how would you invert it well it's just literally instead of well most of the questions we ask sit in like the back of our head like we're not aware of them so we live out answers to questions we don't even know we're asking our brains like google search and we're tab somewhere along the line we said okay how can you work harder so you can achieve your goal that's just back there somewhere and now we keep having answers well i guess i need to do more here because i've not got the result i want and i guess i need to do you know more hours on this issue and put more up we just those are answers to a question and we're not aware of it so we can invert that question into simply asking how can i make this effortless i was working with a manager she's um she's the kind of person she's just like the kind of person who's watching this or or listening to this um she was four a.m in the morning photo shopping for a non-profit thing she's doing the next day with a group of youth at her church that's what she's doing at 4 am why why is she doing that why well she's the kind of person who doesn't even take lunch because she feels guilty yeah that's too selfish because you see if you believe if you have the assumption that more work equals better results if you believe that that's an absolute statement that somehow got ingrained in you then you'll act out all sorts of peculiar ways that are counterproductive so i said okay just forget all that like we're going to ask another question that's going to cleanse all of this just next time you're asked to do something you just pause for a second to ask how could this be effortless so she's working at university she's the manager in the administration she gets a professor who calls her and says look i want you to uh to you know could you record a semester of my you know my uh my class and she almost jumps into that meaning like come and take notes the whole semester or what do you mean video recording oh sit there report yes it's free or something or well she has a team that's a videography team several teams one of them's a videographer team so she almost is like well i've got the capability we've got the team let's make it happen i'm going to add graphics i'll add music we'll have intros outros we'll do edit the whole semester i mean she's get i'm going to wow this guy this is all going on in her head for free or paid well she's she's it's it's her managerial job so it's got it's paid but it's not like a new gig sure it's just one more thing on her plate got it and then she remembers i gotta ask this question what if this could be effortless is there a simple way to get the result we're going for here she asks a couple more questions to him well it turns out this is all for one student who has an athletic commitment so he'll miss some of those sessions some of the classes through the semester but he needs this class to graduate so he's trying to uncover accommodate this individual they come up with a solution one of the other students is going to record on the iphone whatever classes he misses and email it to that's it 10 minutes call saves four months of work for her her videography team everything and she just steps back and she's just like what just happened wow she would have gone down this one path thinking it was the only path this is the way to achieve right and she achieved the same result with 10 minutes of work that story is so available to us again and again and again i am telling you it's like i i i hate to use the word magic because it sounds so like whatever but it is almost like that it's the closest i've come across to like human dynamic magic is asking this question we just don't ask it so our brain can't search for an solution so the greatest productivity hack is asking the question how can i make this more effortless yeah i think that's i think those three that you said i would say you're forgiveness gratitude and asking the question yes how can i make this effortless yes i i was just talking to somebody yesterday who spent years in the military right talk about a a an experience that's going to train you in uh embrace the suck do the hard way journey right discipline hard work it's all about hard work i'm not against hard work it's just not the only strategy i'm not against it's just not the only question we can ask if we want to achieve something he gives me the scenario so he was he he got to the point where he's in special ops he has a specific situation if they need to get in he said he was he was in iraq afghanistan there would be times he had a high value you know target they have to get to the door there's these metal doors they're like barricaded and they're gonna they're gonna blow these things up and the way that they would do it is that they would put explosives on the hinges of the door blow them up and then they can get inside he said now the problem with that is that it's super loud so you brought massive attention what's going on exactly and the whole community the whole area suddenly there that increases your risk it makes it harder to enter because you've got this whole hole in the door it's just this this crazy environment smoke everywhere you can't see anything exactly yeah yeah so actually you it was a pretty rough way to achieve your objective but that was all they had was an effortless way well he had somebody on his team who was the son of a carpenter who said look if you just get me a hydraulic drill i can do this in like half a second we'll just take the hinges off there'll be no sound no no smoke no explosives no danger no additional risk well that's the effortless path and there are so many ways to do this but it's just like we just don't know that that path is even there because we're not asking that question if you don't search in google for x then you're never going to get answers to x you're going to find lots and lots of answers for something else it's funny i i interviewed someone who that was his job as a navy seal where he was the guy who put the bombs on the door to or on the wall to blow it up so that they could all enter right that was his job right and there's a lot of risk with the hard way also where what if one of the bombs goes off when you're deploying it and then the person dies right what if uh the shrapnel that comes from those bombs the effects of it hurting people around there right also you can only do that job for so long from my memory of what he said because i guess either you can't go far enough away or you can't get enough barrier from that where it actually hurts your ears so much from the explosion over and over again wow that i think he left if i'm my memory is correct because of like the ear stuff like the explosion caused so much in the air where he's like okay it's too damaging right so the hard way the forceful way right has a lot of repercussions it's a great metaphor for what you just said for the for the argument against the exhausting always hard and always hustle strategy yeah yeah there's a time that just force is great it helps yes but if but what if you can find a better leverage what if you can find a different path to achieve your the results you want there's a thing called you mentioned leverage just now there's a thing um in productivity hacking called delegation yeah you're right uh what's your thoughts on delegation versus leverage oh that's interesting i mean i think of so so yeah structurally from the book we've talked a lot about effortless state effortless action is how to make an action easier one time which is useful in all sorts of settings yep but the final section of effortless results what i mean by that is to make to create effort one time that produces results many many times over for you they flow to you give me an example um well you use the asked about delegation and this would be an example if i can hire someone that i trust highly by which i would use a warren buffett's you know criteria right three eyes integrity intelligence initiative if i can hire someone like that if i can set up for them a high trust agreement which i outlined in in that chapter in the book then they can operate working for me working as a team effortlessly many many times in a row if i hire the wrong person give them a low trust agreement which basically means i didn't even come up with an agreement we just did it randomly and kind of hacked our way through it then i can end up getting poor results many many times over so i don't see delegation itself as as inherently effortless or exhausting it's doing it right setting it up one time right is worth the effort getting yes you you want to throw a person up a problem when you when you're an entrepreneur you know you've got a problem you're like i need to see someone in there to solve this because i don't have the time the energy and it's very tempting that's blows up most of the time well that's it and so you get poor results many many times over and you're resentful and then you go back to the thoughts of like why is this person here you have a sport in your book about this why is this person here uh and you think about that for years until you finally let them go or or they screw you over like it happened in your book where someone took all the money yes and then it's a bigger problem longer yeah i mean that's that's uh steve hall hires somebody to work in his accounting department they find after a few years a 300 000 deficit ask her about it she says well you know it's just an error you know it's my fault and after that they didn't trust her properly but they just were running too fast they thought it would be economic to just leave her in that place yes and in the end they said you know it went on for a couple more years and it was then two million dollars yeah and she you know they she texts everybody uh i'm quitting and they just gone yeah they never even saw her again so he then said okay i've made false decision here i thought i was taking the quick path but really this is the expensive path because of the residual effect of hiring the wrong person so if you hire the right person they went through a thorough process the three eyes found somebody that person has just been a dividend every single day it doesn't have to be micromanaged doesn't have to be control you don't have to put someone watching over them because they have the integrity already and trust makes everything so much faster so much easier if you hire someone that you trust everything is easier if you hire someone you don't trust everything is harder and it's it's hard once they've lost their trust a few times over and over again if you don't make a decision on how to shift that quickly you're going to be thinking about can i trust them in the back of your mind yeah you need to let them go or create a new agreement and commitment to move forward and then let the thought of i can't trust this person go yeah i think you're right you you have if you have a situation where there's sort of low trust in a relationship you sort of owe it to that person into yourself to do basically either let them go like hey listen it's not working let you get on with your life i'm gonna get on with mine that is i think a legitimate option option two is maybe we didn't get an agreement really clear here let's reset and you have the reset conversation yes and it could be in the reset that they go i don't want to do that and now you know so now it's good now we know it isn't going to work because you don't want to do what it is i'm asking you to do but getting the agreement is written down like a social agreement i call it high trust agreement in the book where you're clear on what are the results what are the resources available to you how will accountability be be given is it once a week i want a written report from you is it once a week we're gonna have a one-on-one but you get clear on this and if you get clear enough on it then sometimes you can turn a lower truss situation into a high-performing situation what are the factors of this high trust contract we should be thinking about and now you have a whole spot in the book about this yeah so i mean the first thing i think the most important thing is results getting absolutely clear what is the right result what do you want from this person getting agreement that you both agree and understand what that is when people aren't clear about what they are to deliver on i mean think how frustrating that is for them and for you and for everyone involved and before i go through the other steps on it let me just make the one broader point which is that every relationship has three parties to it right there's person a there's person b and then there's the agreement and the agreement to the relationship the agreement to the relationship the challenge before we get into that the challenge with most romantic relationships is that and business relationships is the uncommunicated expectation right that one person says well i am assuming they know the agreement but they haven't communicated it 100 and the other person's like well that's not what you ever said i didn't agree to that and i thought you thought this thing what you have is by default you actually have created a low trust agreement yes so sometimes it isn't them and it isn't you which is what you think it is well it's either them and i'm blaming them and sometimes you go well they seem like they're okay sometimes maybe it's me and neither of those are helpful very often it is the agreement that you have come to that is unclear i mean how clear are you on the results not clear uh you know how clear are you on the rules of the of of how we're going to work together the rules are unclear you have a set of rules i have a different set of rules we're violating them all the time with each other because we haven't got clear about the rules resources might seem a little different in a romantic relationship but in a corpora employee relationship it's important what resources do they have available what is reasonable for them to use even even in a you know even in a romantic relationship you could have you know we we make these kinds of decisions together and these kinds of decisions are independent you could get clear about that what resources are available to help you with it and then i think you know ultimately the the final most important part of it is is this accountability that you have a clear uh way of reporting that be the alliteration they are there reporting it so that you're just not taking that for granted clear results rules resources accountability was there something else i missed yeah uh no that those were the ones i think there's another one in the book but i can't remember it someone should read the book it's all good yeah yeah i think um i mean i think that works for romantic relationships as well if you don't have clear results of what you're looking to create which could be a vision for our relationship what are we looking to have here do we want to be you know have a family do we want to be a healthy relationship are we looking to make an impact as a relationship what is the results the rules here's what is acceptable not acceptable the boundaries you could say correct don't cross these boundaries i won't cross these for you yes the resources who's using their time to create something who's using money how are we sharing these resources that's right to make the relationship healthier and then accountability how are we holding each other accountable yeah so it works in business and intimate i think yes i think so i mean i mean i'm thinking here about conversation i just had with eve rodsky who wrote a book called fair play and um and one of the now i'm down a rabbit hole on this but but she she works with these uh highly dysfunctional high net worth families and so it's like knives out you see the movie nights out i i think i watched part of it i know what you mean yes yes this she works with the real knives outfit yes and one of the things she learned is that you have to try and create um i mean one of the things she just said to me the other day this is what made me think of it is that she thinks in every employee relationship there should be a prenup agreement and i love this idea and i think it aligns with this idea of the high trust agreement because every employee relationship is going to end yeah and yet we use as our model like marriage and family we talk about that well we're a family here and and you know it's like no you're not you know it's something else and what is valuable about employee relationship is that you're not family that you can say we can work together collaborate together for a year for five years maybe we do it for 20 years but one day we're not going to one day because we're not married yeah and yet we operate as if it's going to be forever and i think that actually introduces a lot of dysfunction onto teams and i think what you need is like okay one day we weren't going to do this let's make sure we get out we can do this in a way that we can leave and be okay with that yeah have you heard of the book conscious uncoupling yes catherine woodward thomas who's been on here is amazing she's awesome and she's helped many people consciously uncouple right as opposed to the hard way of doing it the effort way of doing it which is i hate you and you hate me and lawyers and mitigation and i'm stealing your money and i own i deserve this right blow-ups for years yeah anger and sadness is like what's the effortless way to do this it's a full circle back because because you can think about like even the the biblical idea which i think is so applicable which is like to agree with that adversary quickly yeah and not like 10 years of dragging out something yes because it kills people man i talked to somebody the other day and they were talking about their brother and they said this guy and he's made a lot of money but he spent a third of his life has been in a huge uh like legal connection it's so exhausting who you you say are you making a bargain i need that i want that i'm gonna get that it's like you've heard of it and i've actually seen it now so it's not just a metaphor but like the monkeys who get their hands caught in something and they can't get their you know they're holding on to them and they can't get they can't pull their hand out of the the you know whatever the container is yeah the trap whatever this the trap is yeah i've seen it online or something right is it like the coconut and they can't get what i saw was actually like kind of a little almost like a little cave on this mound and so they just as soon as their hand was in it they just couldn't get away because they wanted to hold on to it he would do that we want the thing we want but actually often we end up without the thing we want and we do it for 10 years or years and all the emotional stress and all of it it's it is the harder way it'll let it go you get all that time back all that emotion back get on with creating the thing that you want to create i think it's i truly think it is it is a more effortless way of doing it the employee pre-number agreement what would that look like well i mean i don't think it's i mean i just think it says when this when we get to an end yes i mean different to a marriage because you don't even in a prenup with a marriage you're not wanting to assume it's going to end yeah but with this you know it will so it just says when it ends we're going to try and honor these these ways of doing these rules these rules this way and we'll ask you to do the same it just i think it just the contemplation it's my kind of advice the first day of your job you should be saying what's my exit strategy not because you'll know the answer but because it's going to happen one day so you might as well understand that from the beginning rather than okay well it's not going well i'm going to keep on what working harder i'm going to keep doing this i'm going to do it for years and years and pour more and more of my lifeblood into this to make it work and make it work because i have to because you don't have to yeah what a liberating thing for everyone involved it's okay so it's getting to the state the state of mind first where we're letting go yep destroying letting go uh releasing releasing these negative thoughts that's right these beliefs that hold us into a low-level state right so that we can have a more effortless state and then the effortless action which we didn't we kind of skipped yeah so effortless action so we get into a a state of mental flow where we are free from the the the prisoners thoughts that keep us trapped right and and at a at a two as opposed to a ten right emotionally then from there we can take it into action so how do we create an effortless action state well the the effortless action is a natural i can connect these three dots here these three areas by thinking about you know when you have somebody mba they come up to do a free throw you see these three steps you're talking about the the girl 94 percent yes she's the hot she's the most successful free thrower across the nba wnba like in history what's her name susan or yeah yeah dune dude something yeah uh and uh and yeah i didn't think about that too like 94 yeah right so it's so basically she never misses right i mean that is what that is the bottom line it's going in you it's going to be shots exactly and and so but but but anyone you see doing this you've watched them do the three steps the first thing they're doing is they're getting to the you know they're finding the dot they're dribbling the ball three times why are they even doing that it's just a ritual to get into an effort to clear their mind you almost can see them doing it try to clear out the noise so they're not distracted by all the fans that are trying to distract them and and all the pressure that they can feel and all the things that would get them out of being able to do the job well that's step one step two i mean he she says it this way she's like just do it the simplest possible way you don't overthink it you don't try over try it you know so it's you know you you're lifting your elbow to the the the square you're doing it as simply as you've done it practiced many times effortless action and then the effortless result of course is that the people that are best at this like her the ball almost just bounces back to them they don't even almost have to move the result can be done again and again and again so that's how to connect the three state action and results but the action is really about how do you simplify declutter the job at hand there's a few specific questions i think help any time you have an essential project you say you say what does done look like what is the first obvious step you can take so you're not worried about the hundredth step of the thousandth step you're just the first obvious step uh and then you say okay well how can i how can i take a 10 minute micro burst on that thing how can i what are the minimum number of steps i can take in order to achieve the result i want and then if it's a long ongoing project or process how can i pace myself so that i'm within an effortless pace on the journey those are kind of the five questions i think that really help and you can apply it to one project yeah just talking to someone on a podcast um i said okay what's essential to you that you're under investing in they said um they said eating healthy okay so now we know we it really matters to them because of a variety of reasons they're not doing it they're not doing it um and it's in the gap it's in the gap i say okay how can we make it effortless i said i said what does dunn look like he said well it just means that i have food when i'm hungry so i don't wait till i'm past hungry and eat junk that's what success looks like that's what dunn looks like i said okay what's the first obvious step for doing that he said well i would just get one of these uh services that you know they are going to automatically send it meal plan whatever is it delivers it and what's the first step while i just search for that i'd search on google for for for something in the area i said what's the what would you do with him first 10 minutes a micro burst what can you do in 10 minutes for that he says uh he said well actually i think within 10 minutes i could probably do it solve it like put in my credit card choose the meals and set it up with my address it's done and there was this like kind of this weird pause and i'm like was that really it he's like yeah that would do it right i said i said how long have you been struggling with this problem he's like 20 years literally he's like 20 years 10 minutes to solve a problem that took has been with him for 20 years so that's what effortless action looks like it's asking a few questions a very simple process that helps take something that would either be procrastinated you don't even start it or you've been such a perfectionist about it you don't finish it uh yeah it's removing the obstacle of saying in that scenario of like okay well every sunday i'm going to the grocery store and i'm going to meal plan and i'm going to cook all afternoon right and then i'm going to get the plastic bins and put them in for myself and it's going to take all day right just to do this one action right and we think about that and we're like that's exhausting so you don't even bother cause you're like i don't have the time i don't have the energy uh i'm drained right now let me eat the snickers right because i'm emotionally drained i need sugar and you owe you you you you just what happens it's like when you look at a slide you know if somebody has a presentation and there's 500 words on the slide we don't read the first 400 words and give up we do like the pre-scan we're like am i ever going to read that i'm never going to read it yeah i give up we give up before we get too hard it's too hard and so if we perceive something as overwhelming we just don't even get going with it there's a small tiny example in my own life but when i was writing the book i'm like thinking about these things and i look around my office i want to clean it up and i see a printer on the floor it's been there two weeks we've replaced the printer it's no big deal but now i don't know what to do with this printer i have not spent hours thinking about it but every time i think about it it's just a bit overwhelming do i give it away if i give away i sell it if i sell it why would i sell it and i don't know do i do i throw it away well if i throw it where i have to find a digital recycling place that's all enough in my head the 10 seconds five seconds of thinking about it i'm like oh no i'm doing something else and that's why it's there for two weeks so i asked a different question right how can i make this effortless and i look up to some workers that are outside and i'm like i wonder if they want it it goes well i walk out there ask if they want it they do want it within two minutes of asking the question i don't just have a solution it's executed they said yes i come back and i give it to them it's done but that that's like again it's like kind of full circle it's like asking that question delivers options that previously weren't available two weeks hasn't been available because i'm asking i'm not asking the right question here's a first world dilemma yep that i get a lot of our audience they say louis when they're thinking about their their next move maybe they've had a little bit of success maybe they're have their basic needs met and they've got some money coming in and they say this to me all the time louis i don't know what to do next i have so many passions so many things i love to do i want to do them all yeah when someone has the first world problem of lots of options wanting to do them all and yet they become a master of nothing and they get they put a lot of energy spread thin across everything right they get very little results yes what do you say to someone on how to make a better decision on what actions what where should they should put the majority of their energy on those things should they spread it across 10 passions right should they find one passion should be one main passion and two side passions yes like obviously when you put energy on one essential thing that thing expands and grows like you talked about in your first book and it becomes more effortless when you put effort on lots of things it becomes hard right so what is the balance when people that have lots of passions um i mean i really relate to this i struggle with this myself i i find the world fascinating i want to go everywhere see everything do everything i mean that that's you know in a sense i wrote essentialism for me right to try and to try and go well is there is there a time at which that outlives its usefulness yes it's good to be passionate and interested but does it do you get too spread too thin and you don't achieve what you want to i mean i think i would say that at any given time you ought to know what the priority breakthrough thing is in your career what does that mean priority breakthrough thing well it's like um i mean so for me right now the breakthrough is that this book effortless uh well first of all my kind of mantra and maybe it's not a good mantra but it was like don't write a rubbish book right don't write a bad book don't and for real like the risk of that was high because if you have a book that does well the chance is that the next follow-up is you that can be bad yeah and uh and i think if i'd written a book right away i think it just would have been bad and i didn't fortunately pause waited until i was like there's something i really want to say and it felt the right time to do it so so that would be like the priority objective and and one of the things around it is that you kind of know it because you feel it fits right so it feels mentally right emotionally right but also you know that if you achieve this it's a breakthrough a lot of people that will start doing you know like they want the they want the career tent to go higher to be bigger and they do it by like doing more and more tentpoles at the same height and now they've got 10 projects on the road well if they do all 10 of them they won't go to the next level they're actually just going to be busy doing the same stuff so i think it's always key what you're looking for what i call the 90 rule is what is it a 90 above clearly yes definite if we could do that it would change everything if i could do that it would take me to the next level for me the word is contribution i want to make a higher and higher contribution so i'm not sitting around going how can i make more money uh what's the thing that will make more money but it is how what can i do that will impact 2x 10x impact in the world and there's a lot of stuff that won't do that and you could do it superbly well and you'll still be exactly the same level and so what i'm trying to do is what's the what's the thing that would break through to the next level of contribution i think that's the that's kind of the question you're looking for right interesting what would it be for you i'm just trying to say so so if people had a lot of these things that they really cared about though would they have to eliminate those things and just focus on the breakthrough thing first and put those things on the you know the side burner um when i wrote essentialism i think i probably was leaning towards that like just eliminate the other stuff completely yeah and focus on the thing you can make the biggest impact with yes and i still think as a basic principle that's not bad but i think i would be more nuanced now about it i would say like for example i had um had patrick mcguinness on the show and uh he's the guy that first came up with the term fomo i had fear of missing out and i really i really loved talking with patrick mcinnis and and one of the things he introduced me to was the idea of the 10 entrepreneur meaning okay so you choose your main thing that's your main stuff but if you say you shouldn't have 10 other things that you're going hey i'm going i'm trying to do 10 on 10 different things in 10 different directions i don't think that's breakthrough success is likely at all no but you say here's my main thing and i'm going to have one additional thing i'm really interested in it i think it could be something but i can't yet afford to just spend all of my time on it so i'm going to start investing in it i'm going to learn i'm going to see if i still have interest beyond no that was kind of a hobby that's fine i'll put that aside try something else so i think i would say look choose the big thing and then be very selective and careful about the other things that you do and i do think you there's a lot of stuff you do have to say not now not yet it doesn't mean i don't like it it doesn't mean i don't care but if i say yes to this i'm going to be saying no to something more important more breakthrough yeah my friend rory baden has a saying called procrastinated on purpose yeah he's like you've got all these things that you that are important to you and you are excited about and you may want to do now but it's not the most important thing right now so procrastinate on it have it here but don't put the time and attention on it put it in the back burner procrastinate on it until it's the right time until you want to add that to the plate right now but do the thing right now that's going to help make that more effortless in the future i think so i mean it essentially isn't really about the idea of doing the right things at the right times for the right reasons and so it's not just the right thing it timing's enormously important and i think does affect prioritization but there are some times when things come up and the opportunity is here now so you take you take you're opportunistic about it because well this this is what's here the person has emailed the opportunity is here the moment is here so you go with it because momentum is so important um but i think that the thing to be aware of is is is this thing i'm doing creating motion sickness or momentum an interesting oh yeah what's motion sickness being you're all over the place you can't think clearly yeah i mean you're just being dragged in another direction it's just it's just one more thing and you're like i don't see how it fits together it doesn't feel like it's cohesive it doesn't feel like it's taking me in in a direction that's meaningful it's just one more thing and you the thing about motion sickness is that you feel like things are moving fast but actually you're not moving anywhere you're just spinning yes it's kind of it's kind of like the difference between um gosh i've written this down sorry to interrupt you there no that's right between the keys to productivity and momentum versus busy work and just writing things off a checklist yeah it's like you know the motion sickness is busy work it's like i'm doing a lot of things but nothing's actually building a test of this for me and i fail at this most days right now but the the test is the difference between a to-do list and a done for the day list the to-do list is endless so really you don't have to make many decisions on a to-do list you just go here's all the stuff write it all down it feels good writing it down and if you could do all of that stuff that would be great you'd like that the done for the day list is something my wife and i started using and what it what it forces you to do is to actually think about what would be satisfying to you do you say if you accomplished by the end if i accomplish this stuff i would feel satisfied and i can be done and feel good about it so you don't just go well it's it's six o'clock i'll keep going seven o'clock i'll keep going eight nine ten there's the two to-do list is still there you get to the end of the day you go to sleep oh my gosh i can't believe all this stuff i didn't get done this is this is the life style we've created on an endless to-do list the done for the day list what i think the challenge with it is is that you have to really think what would make me feel done for today there's a list i i do have a list i made but the thing is i made it like two days ago so it's not really a done for the day list maybe it was more like a done for the week list but if i do those things this week i will feel great those are really solid achievements and the idea of the done for the day list or the done for the week list is once you're done you go okay guilt-free i'm done i'm not you know like my wife and i were like you don't get in the hot tub or in the bath and then sneakily get on amazon and order stuff and do email on your phone there's no sneaky work allowed you're done for the day so you can start taking relaxation like a responsibility you actually relax purposefully intentionally you figure out the things that you enjoy doing that you like to do you create fun rituals around them and this is so important for peak performance on a sustainable level so smart i mean it's how do people learn to not beat themself up if they get these things done for the day and they have four more hours of like work time totally i think the beating yourself up when you're not working is as clear an evidence that we need to choose a new paradigm as any there is you do productive work on the things that matter you get them done and you but i'm guilty i'm not i'm not doing more what is that what kind of a reversed world is that you are working how's that living to work rather than working to live what it shows is that we've got skill and competence in working and being productive and not skill in how to relax and a lot of overachievers do not even know how to relax like they don't know how their novice is active and it's really important that they learn because we are not machines that can work 24 7 like in the industrial age we are humans that work in cycles and rhythms and if you try and work all the time and hustle i mean i don't care yes you can find one this person that person who seemed to be an exception to this rule i can point to you a million or two million people that prove it right right that that if you just try to do it all the time you will burn out you will have worse relationships you will you will enjoy your life less so i think the key though is to start designing relaxation that we want to do because i think there's something very awkward about like okay now i'm relaxing i'm taking spring break off i'm taking the weekend off i'm having a long weekend and we got nothing and we just got blank time no one likes that and certainly overachievers don't like that you just feel awkward and weird and just like well my phone's right there i think i'm just going to get on my phone right so i think it's one of the things i like my wife and i've done this and i think it's useful is to make a list of 10 or 20 things that you that really create joy for you that you enjoy doing you like relaxing in this way this is good for you you don't have to justify this list to anyone but you've got to be honest about it and and once you have this list they become like building blocks that you can start matching and connecting together in order to create like if you have a day uh my wife and i've done it before where i've taken her list 20 things i guess her birthday what am i going to do let's do three or four of these things let's look at these and i can look at the list and go oh if i if i combine any number of these it's going to be a good day for her because these are the things that she likes this is the my list is very different to her list but now it's useful to know that so if she's designing an evening for me or a day for me or we kind of come up with something what are we going to do on our vacation vacation is going to be quite stressful for a lot of people can you almost need a vacation from the vacation when you get home they can be and also they can be miserable if you don't have design in them yes there is not enough oh i went to this place i went to hawaii it was going to be great it just sounds like such an awful first world problem but but i i my wife and i went to the white house we didn't enjoy it at all right it was actually i don't know it just was we just hadn't figured out what was purposeful about it for us or what kind of what does she like to do what is enjoyable for her what's enjoyable for me let's construct something around those activities and and once we learn that we're like okay that's it you can't just go and suddenly sit on i don't know sit on a beach somewhere and assume that that's going to be satisfying to you fulfilling to someone yeah relaxing to you but you gotta by by figuring out what are the building blocks the things that that actually are relaxing and enjoyable you start to have competence and relaxing you take relaxing is a responsibility relaxing is responsible you relax well uh i relax better now let me try and be like like give me a really honest answer to that question do i relax well uh i is too long to now be fully credible in this area uh there are a bunch of things i love to do to relax um you just don't do them enough yeah i don't here's what i haven't done well about them like i'll give you them i love to play tennis i love to play tennis with my son you know he he he's enjoying that more and more now i like to be in the hot tub that's a very relaxing place i think it's very you know it's kind of beautiful little area yeah the experience is calming uh i would say on those things i'd love to go on a walk with my wife like for an hour we were doing that almost every day until like the last two or three weeks but and we did it the last two days that's i would say we do pretty well uh and that's that we both like it we don't bring our phones we just go out there and we just you know talk and connect we're normally all over the place she's got different agenda to me which is fine we're just there to listen to each other just hear what's going on in each other's world that is a pretty relaxing experience um the tennis i have been amazed at how little i've done over the last year of that and i don't even know why i love it i love doing it and i just haven't done it i think the pandemic just has drained us all a little more there's a little less umph at the end of the day to go do that maybe uh but but we just started that up more what was the other one i mentioned yeah hot tub oh no i give myself an a on a hot tub you can go there every day i go every day and i do meetings from hot tubs it's cool yeah it's a little is that is that yeah they're not fair enough it's checking the phone that's more like that's more like how do you make the most out of meetings if i'm doing yeah that's more like what we were saying before about making it a ritual funner if i'm going to be in a meeting i just realized i'm like literally we're here in california you're paying for to be in california you got the weather outside and i stay in a little office through the day must be outside might as well be outside doing that doing it there it's made it i feel like it's a little weird for people when they call and i'm like i just always confess it bubbles they can't even hear it but i i just feel like if they hear anything it'll be weird so i'm always just like oh listen i'm in a hot tub i'm just letting you know and we just fess up about it that has been good and i'll do the same with the kids at night and i find that good relaxing time that's correct so i don't know that's a mixed mixed bag what is the what do high achievers get wrong about life um they did one thing what does high achievers get wrong in life and if they had one if they could do one thing to make their life better or more effortless what would that be uh i i feel like the primary thing high achievers get wrong is that they go after the wrong thing right they just get on some focused task you know high achievers know how to achieve that is what they know how to do so if a high achiever go hey i'm going to run a marathon yes i put my money on them they're going to do it they know how to do that they'll figure it out the problem is is if you target the wrong goal right you are you you suddenly you're running the marathon but actually what you want is a great relationship with your wife you want a great family you're like you're focusing on the wrong thing that i think is the primary error that that that otherwise successful people make so we could describe it as unsatisfying success you've achieved that you achieved it you weren't satisfied because it didn't really matter it wasn't the right goal you went after i would say that's prime that's error number one and i just say error number two is uh is doing it in the wrong way it's like it's like uh it's like a the the weightlifter who's lifting with their back instead of you know the correct way it's like a it's like a baker who's needing everything by hand rather than with the machine it's just like doing it the hard way the wrong way and it just costs them too much so what's the question they should be asking themselves well i mean there's two questions that i would say have changed my life and and i mean literally i've written a book about each of them now one is what is what is essential what really is essential what is truly important another way of asking that same question that cuts through all the clutter is what is one thing that's absolutely essential that i'm under investing in right now um that's that's all to me that's all like the same question but the last one is a slightly more precise way of asking it what is essential that i'm under investing under investing in right now yes because you already know that the thing about that question you already know it matters so you don't have to waste time what matters what is essential to me you already know and that's usually relationships and health for high achievers it's like the uh yeah they're not they're not investing in their health and they're putting it in their work or their accomplishments in general not everyone i think or it's like i'm putting all my time and energy on achieving that my relationships suffer yes i think that's right and so that then leads to why i think that's the biggest error because you get to the end of your life or even certain midlife crisis and you go my goodness yes i achieved all these things i've got the money i got i got the money or i didn't but no meaning and love yeah no meaning no health uh no no strong relationship yeah that's that's that's a fool's bargain what's really essential that you're under investing in right now uh okay let me pause really honest with the question what's essential for me that i'm under investing in yeah i would say it is like really relaxing i would say it's the thing we were just talking about and i would give myself now that i'm reflecting on a second time reasonably low grade um and i i don't i don't mean over the last six months or the last year i mean like the last week two weeks month and and i've done a variety of things to relax in that time but i just like literally in the last 24 hours i'm like i pushed awfully hard on monday yeah like i don't mean that sounds weird monday was crazy but it actually was it was so intense with so many decisions right high-stakes decisions one after another the end thing i did was an interview with chris evans in the uk's big radio star and somebody i listened to when i was growing up and that was my like 10 to 11 slot which i wouldn't normally do but it all made sense it was better than 1am which is what they'd offered originally 10 to 11 at night at night early morning their uk early morning that time and pre-recorded so that we didn't do it in the middle of the night all of that actually felt great but here's a thing that i've noticed that you've got to have as a standard something like don't use up more energy today than you can recuperate today and certainly not over a week period where you say okay well today i pushed a little more but i need to pull back the next day so that over a week i am rejuvenating my energy and i didn't do that yesterday so i just hit yesterday like a normal day not realizing and you just used up a lot of juice to get through and to succeed at the things you did today and so it just meant that by the end of tuesday i was both my wife and i were both feeling a bit frazzled and instead of going of course we are so therefore we're just going to chill we don't have to be productive right now we're okay we're still thinking wow you know we must we must we ought to do a bit more we ought to do something it's kind of like my friend sean stevenson who's a sleep master uh talks about sleep debt that if you're burning the midnight oil per se or going to bed yep 2 a.m waking up at seven or getting five hours of sleep four hours of sleep pulling all nighters he's like that's a death that your body can never make up right and you can you can't oversleep to try to compensate that right but doing it over and over and over again is just going to make it worse right you need to have time to rest you need to have the time to recover and heal your body your mind and all things in your body uh and you want to try to sleep more the next day but it's not always going to be like the thing that equalizes it what i'm hearing you say is that when you overexert your energy in one day if you do that over and over and over again whether you sleep or not you're going to be tired and exhausted yeah so you need to find time to rest recover relax the next day or the next week whatever it is if you're in a book tour i get it sure it's like there's got to be a balance the the the term that comes to mind now that you use sleep debt is relaxing debt and that's like that's like a new term to me in this conversation and i i like it because it names that problem relaxation yeah and you can be doing some relaxation but if you start to not have enough of it it's not just the same as sleep you might be getting enough sleep but you aren't getting enough mental just release [Music] it's like it's like if you have a bow on a on a you know on a guitar on a violin like if you keep it strong all the time it will lose its spring you've got to have times when it's you know relaxed and released and then you tighten it again if you aren't doing enough of the relationship when you put it back in the box you got to unloosen got it loosened you can't keep it tight yeah why not you got to loosen it right the same for us it's interesting i was i mean this is why um you know professors take time off you know months six months right it was talking to a pastor pastor michael todd recently who's a pastor of a church right and tulsa oklahoma i believe it is and he said one of the greatest pieces of advice a mentor of him uh of his told him yeah was that no matter what you do you're here his mission is to serve god yeah serve people and serve god yeah and he does it all day all long all night long right that's his mission right he said the best thing you'll ever do is take a month off where you do nothing you don't show up for anyone you don't you're not on your phone you're not on social media you're not at the church you're not serving people that's your time and he goes there's so many much people out there that need my help that need my service i need our time our attention right he goes you will be so burned out if that's all you do all day for years yeah you'll lose yourself and he says every year he takes a month where he's not on the phone he's not doing those things and he's there with himself his family his wife vacationing relaxing and he's like i get more great ideas in the rest and relaxation time right i'm more rejuvenated to go have passion and energy for the other 11 months of the year yeah well that the best book the book he had a book that came from that was the number one new york time bestseller it's like i wouldn't have written that number one of your time best so the idea came from relaxing and resting not always in service but having that time as well well i mean there's another biblical idea there right which is sunday seventh seventh day right you actually say you know so if god has to rest you know we we really have a full justification from that in it from from a religious point of view from a christian perspective to say well from from judeo-christian point of view which is like yeah it is you're supposed to have a day you're supposed to have it i mean that's what sabbatical comes from right from the same word as sabbath you're supposed to have time for the other the it's kind of an other type of productivity i mean i you can think about it that way it's just it's just the rhythm and and and the you know everything has a season so that the best ideas come you're speaking my language with seasons because as an athlete there's a pre-season there's the season yeah there's the postseason right uh there's these different seasons there's a playoffs in the postseason right it's like you got the preseason you got the season you got the the uh the playoffs in the postseason in the postseason you've got to recover your body's been pounded in football you're just hitting over and over again right you got to let your body heal right you can train in other ways but you've got to take some time baseball every every sports team has an off season there's a and if you can and you're not supposed to even in the preseason be playing like you're in the playoffs and if you do i remember one time the goal the golden state warriors they they had like the the you know the winningest season ever they were like they hit the playoffs favorites for everyone yeah but they didn't have enough in the tank to get them over the line yeah that's the year that they they lost the they won like cleveland they lost like five games the whole year and then exactly and so the next season they learned that yeah you you don't worry about that you don't have to be the top of the league even just make the playoffs and so on i mean they'd be happy if they made the playoffs this year but but so there's something something to said for that too but but i like the idea that you don't even have you know you you have different seasons throughout uh it reminds me of a madden who is one of the the people i covered in the book he just was like these players he he said look you've got to actually he said what i wish we'd done more of last year was nothing like i wish we'd done some more just do nothing relax chill nothing yes he's like we needed more no time uh and and he he said um you mean in the season of theirs yes he was saying let's let's have it so that you come in for a game instead of coming in four hours early and training hard and so on he's like let's call it the american legion week uh which is you know so when they were when they were you know not professional players they would just turn up to play all right you didn't practice they didn't do you just you just you weren't there for several hours before and beating yourself up you just turned up to play and he's like we're going to start doing that in the regular season for some of it and and he found that that was so counter cultural it took him a while to get it installed but the results have been incredible you know what's so funny uh you grew up in the uk right yeah so you understand american football with madden but i played uh in college not like you though let's be sure about that but i played in college at the division three level uh there's three divisions in college i was in division three level which is a lower level historically even though there's a lot of great town in it yeah um and there was a team i'm gonna forget the name but it was a team in wisconsin a school that was like national champions in this con in this league in the division three like five out of ten years or like five years in a row ten years in a row something like that it was like 10 out of 20 years it's like they were either at the national championship game won it or they were there and they had they were notorious for never hitting in practice they wore like shorts in practice they would do jumping jacks they would sit back on the back of the field and do like uh snow angels in the grass and just do like silly goofy things for warm up and they wouldn't hit all ever in practice wow and then they would show up at the game and be so fresh and so light and just dominate no speed no injuries no he had no injuries how about that and the most exactly and most of the time when i when i grew up football was like you have to train you have to be prepared hit hit hit all practice long maybe the day before it's more of a walk through and then you're like i'm exhausted yeah going into the game yes you're going into battle exhausted you're already burned out tired or oh i tweaked my arm because we're hitting all day long until i proved something and i'd practice and train this way and these guys they did like jumping jacks and then they were like all right we're loose we're ready to go and you were like how do they keep winning but they were doing the effortless thing in practice which was counterproductive to the hard work we need to be here and grind it out all practice long every minute squeeze out all the pain as opposed to what's the effortless thing what what that reminds me of you you've heard i'm sure of the book of the the um the blue ocean strategy right and so the idea of that the metaphor behind that book is is is that you've got all the competitors who are in fighting over the same fish and because they're fighting over the same fish it makes the the sea red with blood right and this whole book premise is saying what if you don't fight where everyone else is fighting and instead you create your own market so you're not competing with anyone you make your competitors irrelevant and that's why it's called blue ocean strategy you go to where no one is playing what i just feel like is that what you just described is such a red ocean strategy we're gonna kill ourselves all day every day all day every day and we're gonna kill ourselves more than everybody else's i mean it's like red from a different kind of blood it's like it's like yeah that's one strategy yeah i'm not saying it can't ever work sometimes but like you're just fighting and you're fighting with everyone else who's doing the same thing yeah is there not at least a percentage of your time i was just talking to somebody who who is a general manager um in in the nfl and i said okay of all the speeches you've ever given as a leader to try and get better results from your teams what is the percentage ratio between work harder give more vote and let's find an easier way to get the results what's the ratio and he just laughs he's like greg it's a hundred percent the first i have never given the speech let's find an easier way to get the results that's the problem it's like it's like almost like it seems like i'm fully attacking this strategy in this book and i'm just saying it's just not the only one there's another whole strategy what if you just ask the other question you might find that there is in fact another way to do training you might find just like the team you said right jumping jacks might be the thing relaxing might have its place so that you can be ready to give your all when the moment comes this is powerful stuff greg i'm so glad you wrote this book i want people to get it it's called effortless make it easy to do uh what matters make sure you guys check this out also check out your podcast which is called what's essential you guys can download that subscribe it's on apple spotify everywhere everywhere podcasts are at this is a book that i have a you know footnote in a lot of pages because for me my audience knows it's hard for me to read because it just hurts my brain reading one paragraph is like oh this is hard work you made it easy to go through this and i highlighted many pages because it's you know it's like uh some pages like a kid's book for me it's like there's a graph there's an image and then some words and you make it really simple and easy to read so i appreciate uh everything that you have here and where is that one page again i want to highlight this for people there's two pages that where you said uh here we go i like this when you focus on what you lack you lose what you have when you focus on what you have you get what you lack uh again this is kind of a key principle from the book that i think is really important to think about so i'm grateful you did this i have a couple final questions for you yeah this is called a three truths okay question to ask everyone at the end of every show called three truths okay so i'd like you to imagine a hypothetical scenario that it's your last day on earth okay many years away and you get to live as long as you want but eventually you got to turn the lights off and you've accomplished every dream that you could think of okay you have the life you want you've done it all effortlessly but for whatever reason you've got to take all of your work with you to the next place okay and no one has access to this book any book that you've ever written or anything you've ever said okay but you get a piece of paper and a pen to write down three lessons that you've learned that you would like to share with the world what i like to call three truths this is all we would have from you as your memory oh so this is the only thing that you get to leave behind this is all the information we have about you and your thoughts and your ideas and your work because you've taken it all with you so you have three lessons to leave behind to the world oh okay three truths by greg mccune okay the first one would be uh one word uh light which spelling yeah just light l-i-g-h-t light two meanings yeah well that's good because the first mean let's deal with the first meaning light as in um light versus darkness that in every moment you have a choice to go towards the light or to go towards the darkness and it doesn't really matter whether somebody's coming it with a religious perspective or no faith perspective everybody knows this they know something is the right thing to do it's full of light or they know something is not the right thing and we all have to choose between that constantly so and i think that's what it means to be a good person is that you keep coming back to the light you make mistakes but you just go okay my next choice i'm going to do the thing that i know to be right and that will lead to more light and more light until uh until i think your life is full of light yeah that's the that's principle one light principle two is the same word but the different meaning okay so light still same way l-i-g-h-t i think yeah because that still just has a double meaning light no but i think you just you think it's just the same yeah um and and that's light as in choose the lighter way of living in the way we've talked about effortless way the effortless way where you you're just going not everything has to be so hard and underneath that i think is the question how am i making life harder than it needs to be my favorite story actually it's in the version you have here but it's not in the actual book which is a shame it's the one thing i kind of regret that i didn't get into the i we just i chose to have it out and i regret it but it's the story of a woman who is has her son who's dying and they're in the hospital together and it's at the end so it's actually really similar to your uh to you to your scenario for me and you can tell sometimes you can really tell i've been with people towards the end of their lives and sometimes you know and um and so she knew and so she got up into the bed with him just to kind of you know hug him and right at the end you know in that between places he's it's just the last words he ever says is mom it's all so simple it's so simple and then he died and that was his final message to his mother to the world and i think that's what i mean by the second version of light like how are we making life harder than it needs to be what are we making more complex than it needs to be let's try and strip life of all of that so it can be light in that second way um and now i'm now i'm thinking about the third thing and i think if i had to really be honest about this i would just say i would say light a third time but now i just have to sort of share my own conviction and i'm not sharing it because i feel like anybody else has to believe this or i'm not trying to pressure anybody else into anything but i just believe that that you know that that god is a source of light and and for me as a christian it is you know i believe that jesus christ is the source of that light and i feel that in my own life i see it in my own family it's not it's it's not based in some some relic of a belief it is a living breathing thing for me it got us through this experience with eve it is the thing that i when i for me it is where i find the great enlightenment for my own life it makes me want to be kinder be better serve more and so i think that would be sort of the final and perhaps most important point is that that i make him and the light of my life so that i it can fill me and it fills me the thing that i'm currently experiencing is is that it increases the amount of love in me for other people and and i need it you know i i need that in my life i need to feel that love we all need to be loved and to be able to love each other and this is this has been this is the journey i'm on is to feel god's love for me which allows me to then be able to be full of it for other people and like we don't all need a bit more of that right now in the world where we're just being told to distrust and dislike and not love other people who are different to us yeah we need a lot more of it that's that's my answer that's beautiful i love those a great truce i want to acknowledge you greg before i ask the final question for being an incredible father because it sounds like your daughter really needed you over the last four years and you showed up with new strategies new ways of learning on how to make it a better environment for her and the rest of your kids during an incredibly hard and challenging suffering time which could have been much harder yeah so for you to show up the way you did and to say okay we're not gonna do it the hard way and suffer we're already suffering yeah how can we make this more enjoyable i think that's probably the thing that i admire the most about you uh i have no idea what it's like to be a parent and i can only imagine the amount of stress fear overwhelm you know frustration around something like that so i acknowledge you for the way you handled it and the way you continue to handle it even though it's not perfect and showing up as the light for your kids and your entire family i think it's really inspiring well i i can't have you say that without just really acknowledging uh the the all the people that played a role in that i mean the answer i just gave you i really have to acknowledge the that light in my life that guided me even to read that article or to get me through it or to get receive insights and little revelations that guided us through that there's no question about that i have to acknowledge you know really the hand of god in that and also other people who showed up who's just literally people who maybe haven't heard from in years showed up yeah we're praying for you yeah now that can be just like nice polite phrase but i tell you we learned that it is for real that is our experience is that things opened up and opportunities opened up that would not otherwise have opened up without that that is i would be intellectually dishonest not to add that to the experience of what that was and that's one of the reasons that i i felt i guess obliged a little a little awkward to be honest in doing it but in dedicating the book um to a single principle which is you know my it's a verse from matthew my yoke is easy my burden is light i i just to me that's a breathtaking phrase having spent all this time now in the principle of effortless it's like man that is right there a lot of people their life does not feel light does not feel easy but there seems to be a path even in a scriptural path for getting there yeah that's beautiful greg final question for you before i ask it make sure you guys get the book it's gonna be powerful get a couple copies for your friends for your team effortless make sure you guys check it out final question what is your definition of greatness um i think that the friend and mentor for me uh was stephen covey and he used to distinguish primary greatness and secondary greatness and he he said primary greatness is the is the private victory it's all the stuff that's going on inside of you that's your character it's whether you're being kind grateful honest uh you know it's it's all of who you are no one gets to see that that's all in the that's all the quiet uh then there's public greatness secondary greatness is the public victory it's work that's what people see that's the that's the uh the successes uh and and really what he was trying to distinguish i think is that is the primary greatness precedes secondary greatness and is more important if you get primary greatness you'll often achieve secondary greatness you'll often actually gain the accolades of other people because you have something substantive inside of you but if you don't you're still you're still something substantive inside you so you're still win at the thing that matters most and so i i think the greatness to me is is mostly the first but it's what also powers the second and gives life to it so that's my definition that's beautiful and and to add to that if you only chase the public greatness and you don't have the integrity the character you're not kind to others yeah you will suffer at the end of the day and that'll never be enough never be enough you may not achieve it and secondary greatness disappears awfully fast quick and we're having this conversation in the middle of like basically in the middle of hollywood in the middle of cancel culture middle council culture exactly so someone can be famous they can have the money and then tomorrow they can be completely kicked out on so you can't construct your life around secondary greatness if you do that's a high risk strategy let's say it that way my man greg this has been powerful thank you so much for being here thank you if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here an inadequacy is a pathway that you can travel down what should i do with my life that's a real complicated question oh here's an inadequacy

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, greg mckeown, greg mckeown ted talk, greg mckeown effortless, how to be more productive, focus more, productivity master, never be lazy again, get more done

Id: Y3I5IawG5P8

Length: 107min 52sec (6472 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021