From Essentialism to Effortless with Greg McKeown
//Many of us value hard work. But what if we’re making things harder than necessary? What if we’re carrying a burden we don’t need to carry?
Greg McKeown, author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, joins Andrea to discuss his new book Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most.
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Transcript
Andrea: Greg, it is an honor to have you here.
Greg McKeown: It’s a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Andrea: So, my husband, Aaron, and I have read Essentialism many times, really helps us to recenter, refocus on what matters. And now after reading Effortless, I know that we need another one of these, like, quarterly off-sites that you talk about to get refocused again because there is so much more to take in and to look at it all again. So, congratulations on this new book.
Greg McKeown: Well, thank you. I’m so pleased that you’ve had a chance to read it, and that it’s made you think, sounds like, and I hope it’s useful to both to you, and of course, to the listeners.
Andrea: Indeed. I not only made sure to read it, I was like, you know, I really want this to be an opportunity just to synthesize and take it in for myself, really think about things as I went. And so I just built in that extra time and space, to allow it, to have a little bit of breathing room inside as I was going through it. And I finished it this morning with a surprising kind of emotional moment of, like, tears in the last – I guess, it was the conclusion when you’re talking about your daughter. So, it definitely has had an impact on me already. Your message is really universal.
Greg McKeown: So, what I heard you say was that the book, in a way, surprised you that – not so much that you enjoyed it, because I think you were hoping to enjoy it – but it was more emotional. It hit you in a different place than you expected it to. That’s what I hear you say.
Andrea: Yeah, I don’t know if I was completely surprised that it would do such a thing because I think what you speak about is so meaningful. And you know, you’re talking about living a meaningful, purposeful life, being intentional about that. And that is something that I care deeply about. And so, when you bring that to a very personal level, and you mentioned 14-year-old daughter, which my daughter is 14 years old right now, then it connects with me in that way that is more that heart change that you also talk about. That connection with the personal allows it to really take hold in a different kind of way.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, and you have just come out of that experience. So, you’ve come at this conversation, not just “I checked the box; I read it” because we have a conversation today. But you’ve come out of it, actually, feeling something, experiencing something and at a deeper level than just, “I read a book.” And I’m very pleased to hear that. I mean, I’ve never thought about my work as productivity, even though I’m not in any way anti-productivity. I just don’t feel like that’s actually what I’m trying to say. And one of the reasons is because I feel like there’s deeper messages.
And in this book, perhaps, even especially, I feel like there is, like, an emotional thread running through it. It grew out of, you know, emotional experiences, painful experiences. And so, I feel myself when, especially when I was very, very first talking about it with people when they hadn’t read anything, I was just trying to even get words out, I felt emotional myself about it, which felt different than when I wrote Essentialism. So, Effortless has, yeah, there’s something else going on with it.
Andrea: You start the whole book off talking about the exponential attention you got after writing Essentialism. So, you were doing all this speaking, how did that impact what you decided the next message needed to be?
Greg McKeown: Well, there were two things happening at the same time. One was this unparalleled listening tour, multi-year journey of people sharing with me their most essential things and wanting to talk about those things and being vulnerable and sharing those things. So, I’ve learned more, just an unbelievable amount, about that subject with people the world over now. And so, I’ve just found that real privilege and learned a very particular lesson. It’s that people really do believe that the more important something is the harder it needs to be, or it will be. And it’s just taken for granted.
If you start an important, big new initiative, if you have something that really matters to you, so “Yes, it’s going to take a lot of hard work, it’s going to take a lot out of us. You know, I don’t know if I can even do this, but I would love to achieve this amazing thing.” And I remember even one person after reading Essentialism, said to me basically, “Look, this is a life-changing book for me. But it should come with a warning, this will be the hardest thing that you will ever do.” And for a while, I just bought into that. I even used that quote and shared it with people as if it was sort of the way to think about this, “Well, it’s good. It’s gonna be worth it, but it’s gonna be so hard.”
And I don’t believe that anymore. I think you have to separate those ideas. And that separation began for me, personally, when I just realized I am stripping away everything that’s non-essential, and I don’t mean perfectly. I make mistakes on this all the time every day. But I am intentional, and I am trying to live what I teach. And I see it as a disciplined pursuit of what is essential.
So, I had stripped away, I wasn’t writing another book. I mean, in publishing terms, you’re supposed to do every sort of 18 months, and there are many thought leaders do that. And it’s not like I don’t have ideas or a desire, but I just was saying “No, no, be careful, workshop business, that could be something.” There’s a great demand that always has been for that, “Nope, not going to do that, put that aside.” There’s a class I co-designed at Stanford could have continued to do that, “Nope, let’s pause all of this.” I mean, those are quite big things for me not to do in order to be able to have time for the things I felt were essential – which was to teach and write professionally.
But also, now I’m the father of four children, and so to really be there for them and to be intentional in that way as well. And I just started to find myself seeing cracks in a theory I’d held on to before. And the theory summarizes the big rocks theory, right? So, in big rocks theory – you have a big container, you put in the sand first and the small rocks and the big rocks don’t fit. It’s a geometric problem. If you change the order, you put the big rocks in first, then there’s more rocks in the sand, it all just filters in and it fits. And that’s marvelous. And that’s how it’s supposed to work “big rocks theory.” But I started to find myself saying “Yeah, but what if there’s just too many rocks?”
And I don’t know what it is about that question even now when I asked it to you. And we’re responding now in a better way to it because that was my personal story. That was what a struggle for me. But also, as I say it, I just feel like it’s almost like I can hear or feel like a collective pain, that there are so many people right now who have too many big rocks. And you just think about is we’re on the edge of the transition out of the pandemic, we all hope, but it’s been more than a year now that we’ve been in the pandemic. Think of what that has been. Of course, there’ve been advantages, but for some people or maybe a majority of people, they’ve achieved what they have through a sort of grinding effort.
I was just talking to Eve Rodsky, who has a statistic that 153 percent increase in invisible work for working women over the pandemic period. But that’s just means too many big rocks. Well, what do you do in that situation really? That’s not a question of stripping out nonessentials. Let’s say you’ve done it. Let’s say you are putting the essentials first, but what if it’s still too much? What if the responsibilities are still too overwhelming? And so, if you put down the rock, do you say, well, this essential relationship. No, forget it. You say that my personal health, no, not going to bother with it. A lot of people do deal with the problem that way.
And I just started to, you know, in the midst of a personal crisis on top of that already feeling of too many big rocks. Then suddenly had a personal crisis, the health of my 14-year-old daughter, that has been a multi-year challenge. And suddenly you say, “Okay, you either have to give up on what’s essential, but you have to find a new way to do those essential things, not just enough to know what the right things are, you’ve got to do them in the right way. And that’s what the effortless is about is if you can find a way to make the essential things, the easiest things, if you could make them far simpler, what’s possible, it could change everything. And in my experience, it does change everything.
Andrea: So, we have to get right to it then, what does it look like, I mean, you talk about making things lighter.
Greg McKeown: Yeah. So, a few years ago, we moved to an idyllic area, so beautiful, actually. It’s like built in the 1950s, and then like the world moved on, but no one told anyone here. And so, it’s like white picket fences, horse trails. There’s no street lamps, and our four children just seem to just thrive. I mean, they were just out in nature every day, especially my daughter Eve, who was just, you know, always up trees, running barefoot everywhere. She’s, you know, naming all the chickens. She’s playing with a dog, she’s going on walks. She’s horse riding. And she has just such a particularly unique personality, always has just love of every animal.
Her favorite book is a James Herriot; it was a series. She has read those many times. She writes a journal every night. She’s articulate and voluminous. I mean, I remember on a trip when I often would take one of my children when we’re traveling. And on one trip, we were like, an hour and a half in and I texted my wife, Anna, and Eve has not stopped talking in an hour and a half. It’s like just completely – but it’s scintillating. It’s interesting, and it’s exciting, and that is Eve.
And then she turned 14, and she just seemed to slow down a bit. You know, just take a little longer to do her chores, speak less to us, seemed a little awkward physically, but we’re like, “Well, it’s pretty age-appropriate behavior, you know, that’s what people would sometimes say about their teens, so probably okay.”
We took her to a routine physical therapy appointment for something minor, but the therapist just took my wife aside afterwards and she said, “Well, Eve didn’t pass this reflex test. And the whole point about reflex tests is they’re not conscious. So, we’re just making sure the unconscious system is working but it wasn’t.” And he said, “Look, I just think you probably want to go see a neurologist.”
And once we had thought that question, we suddenly saw the behavioral change in a different light, through a different lens. And, of course, I felt the burden that possibly something was much more serious going on and it was. I mean, her capabilities were in a total free fall, like literally, every day you could see her physically becoming incapable of things than she had always done her whole life. So, we’re just taking somebody’s abilities and just turning them way, way back. It’s like just super slow motion.
Andrea: So painful to the parents.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, well the agony is surely made of. I mean, she just took hours to eat one meal as you would take. Literally, I have a recording of her writing her name, and it took her two minutes to write out her full name, and that is very slow, right? If you had to try and do that yourself, you’d feel very impatient doing it. She was very pleasant through all of this. She didn’t become in any way aggressive or anything like that, but it was a total personality change. She could only answer in one-word sentences. Really, her emotions became kind of muted or almost non-existent.
And all the while, we’re meeting with neurologists pretty much every, I mean, not every day, but we’re regularly meeting with neurologists at different kinds, different experts within their field, that every test came back within the normal range. So, one of them just shrugged his shoulders just like – yeah, you know, so you’re watching your child, basically, on a maybe over a period of 2, 3, 4 months be well on the way to becoming completely comatose, like, actually fall into a coma, and no one can tell you anything about why or what to do about it.
So, there’s no treatment because there’s no diagnosis, there is nothing. And so, in the midst of this, as I share that story, it’s not like I think, “Oh, yes, life is easy.” Like, clearly, it’s not. Life can be incredibly hard and is for many people on many issues, right? Relationships are hard, and health challenges like this are hard, and things you can’t control are hard. I mean, there’s so many things that are hard. But even within that context, I felt like two paths opened up before us, and it was like there’s really two options – you could do either in this moment. You could take the harder path, the heavier path or the easier and lighter path.
And it might seem so obvious like “We’ll take the easier and lighter path.” But actually, it wasn’t at all, because both the way, you know, our view of the world, you’re supposed to work hard, you’re supposed to get into it, and get on with it. And you think that every box of the horse in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, every problem, every setback, he said, “Well, I will work harder.” But, actually, in his case, in that fictional book, it makes all the problems worse.
And so, in this case too, the temptation is, or even the first thing you think to do is, “We’re gonna pull all nighters, you know. We’re not gonna leave any rock unturned. We’re gonna look at alternative medicines.” Every email people send to us, well-intended, family, friends extended, “Oh, you know, maybe she has this issue.” “Oh, let’s study all that. Let’s look at all the symptoms within that.” These are life-threatening conditions, of all sorts, trying to become an expert. I mean, there’s a part of you that thinks that’s what you should do.
And fortunately, there was just this glimpse of this idea of, like, you could have taken the lighter path. I felt very inspired to read in an article by Gordon B. Hinckley, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he passed away years ago. And I hadn’t thought about this article for the longest time, but it’s about optimism. And I share that because I think it is part of really what opened up this possibility. It’s about happiness and optimism. And I felt like I should read that every day, and I did for the four months that she was going through this total discombobulation. And almost every day, I managed to do that.
And it seemed to rewire my mind, everything within me was going down this heavier part, this path of, you know, that I just described. That’s what you wanted to do. But there was this other counterforce that said, “There’s a lighter way. There’s an easier way.” You can have faith in this. You can do the small and simple things. You can get around the piano and sing. You can be grateful, just be grateful for every single thing that’s going right, everything, and say it explicitly. Find each other in our family culture – “what are you doing right today?” – anything, the smallest thing.
And what we found is that as we did those small things, as we leaned into this lighter path, this different way of living, that actually, the culture responded immediately, it was almost like a magical force. And everything just seemed, you know, we didn’t change the big problem, but it was just lighter. It was more possible. It wasn’t so burdensome. It meant that the family culture actually came together. And I would describe the experience, as a whole, as one of joy – and I don’t use that word lightly. But that is what it was.
And what I feel like is being revealed to us through this extremity, was there really is a different way. It’s not nice, like a nice idea. It’s not just like, there is a different path – there’s a different way to do life. And previously, I had been like the weight lifters whose lifting with their back, you know, they’re doing it the wrong way. Or I’m trying to knead bread as a baker by hand instead of, maybe we get machines that can do that, find a simpler path, an easier path.
And that was one of the things I learned is no matter what’s going on in your life, every moment we’re in, no matter what’s going on, no matter how hard or challenging, you have a choice, you can take the heavier path or the lighter path. And that led me on this journey to find the principles and practices that first would be able to enable our family to do what was essential without burning out. But also then to be able to share it with other people, whatever the challenges they’re facing.
And it’s very important that we do it. It’s a noble pursuit to find an easier way to do what matters, because when you can do even more important things, things that seem impossible start to be doable, achievable, even effortless. We think of what would happen if the things that are essential, important, valuable, were suddenly much, much easier than they were before. Think of all the good that we can do.
And so, I feel there’s a message here for people that are burned out on the edge of it, or well passed it. But there’s also a message for people that just feel like a great mission for me to achieve, not burned out, but I don’t think that’s really possible. Because either way, wherever you are on that journey, the principles and practices of Effortless have relevance for you right now. How can you make it easier today and tomorrow?
Andrea: Thank you for sharing that story, it’s really powerful. You talk about the effortless state on page 26, “The effortless state is one in which you are physically rested, emotionally unburdened and mentally energized. You are completely present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in that moment. You are able to do what matters most with ease.” So, when I read this, I could immediately relate, like I know what that feels like to be in that state. However, I only know what I felt like to be in that state about 5 percent of the time.
And so, my question is, when you want to be in that state more often, I mean, what is even a reasonable amount of time, like I said, 5 percent, you know. I think the same thing with Essentialism, a lot of people might be like, “Oh, I just need to be a 100 percent essentialist.” But what percentage of the time should we be shooting for to be effortless?
Greg McKeown: Well, don’t be all like effortful and exhausting about effortless, you know; let’s not do that. I mean, look, I love that question. I will answer, but give its context. I mean, Essentialism is about rethinking prioritization, and effortless is about rethinking simplification. It’s like, how can we make it simpler.
And there are three basic ways that I’ve learned that there’s very low hanging fruit for us to make things simpler – that we can gain a big reward. One of them is to simplify our state. A lot of us spend an enormous amount of our time burdened mentally, emotionally, physically. And we get to the point where we just think it’s normal to be carrying these massive, unnecessary burdens.
And in fact, I was just talking with Tim Ferriss on his podcast, and I asked him – and it’s related to this first idea of effortless state: “What percentage of your life have you spent, like of your mental and emotional energy, you spent on holding grudges on being angry?”
And he was like: “Oh, Greg, between, like, say ages 15 to 30, that period of my life, probably 60 to 70 percent.” Which is unbelievable.
If you were looking for something to make life a bit easier, you might not think about forgiving someone as being the answer. That would appear on almost no life hack lists for productivity or to make life easier. You think about these things that produce a fast smaller return on investment 60 to 70 percent of your mental, emotional energy, unbelievable – and that’s really the idea. It’s certainly not about beating yourself up for not being in the effortless state; like, that is itself not being in the effortless state.
Andrea: Of course:
Greg McKeown: It’s just about trying to come back into this moment. And I think the first thing I would say, the fastest single thing you can do is to start this practice. You say, every time I complain, criticize myself or others, I will say something I’m thankful for. That’s it. When I started doing this today, what I learned, I complain a lot more than I realized. And I think of myself as quite a positive person, you know, future-oriented, can-do, that sort of thing. But I still was amazed at how much I’m carrying.
When you’re complaining, when you’re criticizing, all you’re doing is making something challenging just harder. That’s it. That’s all that does for you is it just takes the thing – it doesn’t change the thing at all. It just makes it harder. It just adds burden to your life. The moment you do it, gratitude and fear cannot coexist. Gratitude, worry cannot coexist. Gratitude, anger cannot exist or coexist. This state of gratitude is not to be underestimated. It is a complete game- changer. It doesn’t matter how powerful you think it is. I think it is far more powerful.
We’ve played it even in our family where, you know, somebody will be complaining about something. I remember my son was complaining, and we have a rule, not always but, you know, “Okay, if you complain now, tell me three things you’re thankful for.” And he’s like, “Well, number one, I’m really thankful that Dad wants to play this game.” You know, it was all attitude,. And it made us all laugh, so then he said the other two. And then we all start doing it. And I’m telling you, man, that says it all about gratitude, is that you can do even with a bad attitude and it’s so powerful, it still breaks through.
You can have a daughter lose herself, without any power to do anything about it, and there can still be a culture of optimism and goodness and the light and hope around you. Whatever that is, that is worth having a little more of in your life. And it will push out these other burdens. And suddenly, it’s like, “Yeah, now what would it be like if every time we start worrying, we just simply say something we’re thankful for.”
There’s a metaphor that I came across that I like. I haven’t ever done fly fishing, but it’s a fly fishing hack, which is if you put on polarized sunglasses, it changes the deflection of the light on the water, so you can see underneath it, so you can see the fish. So, the fish are already there, but you don’t see it. And I just find that this idea, this practice of, you know, what if we were just grateful every single time we felt out of the effortless state. As soon as you feel out of it – “One thing I’m thankful for…” And you see stuff that’s everywhere, there’s so much. And you no longer get consumed with the negativity of a situation you’re in or the frustration of something that you’re in.
And so, then what happens, it’s part of Barbara Fredrickson ‘s theory called broaden-and-build theory, basically, whatever state you’re in, it’s not like things are going well, therefore I’m in a good state. That’s what we normally think it is, get good results, then I’ll be happy, then my state will improve because I’ll have what I want. But she says, it’s exactly the opposite, it’s that the state that you’re in, as soon as you’re in a positive state, what I’m calling an effortless state, your sense of optionality in the world increases.
You see all these assets, see all these possibilities, and that has an effect on your own state, but also on the state of the relationships around you, because they immediately react to that positivity. And there’s all these options between each other because you have a good feeling of creative feeling. And that creates actual changes in the systems that support you because your network increases and the relationships are stronger. And so, it means that you are materially better prepared for the next problem that comes along.
For us in our family culture, the next big problem that came along was the pandemic. As we’re dealing with the crisis of our daughter, and now the crisis that the whole world is dealing with as well. And what I saw, and I don’t mean to say this sounds a bit self-congratulatory, probably, but what I was really struck by was that the culture in the family. When you apply effortless state to team dynamics, its culture, that’s the word for it. You want an effortless culture, one that doesn’t make things harder than they need to be.
I noticed that there was just like this default setting within the culture. Everyone knew what to do without talking about it. We just knew to be grateful, knew to be “What can we do and what are possible.” “Well, we can get out and exercise and we’re gonna make a plan and we’re going to do these things.” And it was like everybody just knew. It just didn’t have the immediate impact of fear that I think, otherwise, it would have done. I feel like that’s one very quick, extremely powerful way to just get back into the effortless state. Don’t worry about percentages. The next time you fill out of it, just say something you’re thankful for, and watch. I’ve just begun my journey with gratitude, and I’ve been in it for years. But I still feel like I’m scratching the surface.
Andrea: I’ve heard people talk about gratitude a lot. But I think something that hit me a little differently this time reading your book was just your, I love diagrams, and I think just seeing the circle, there was a circle, which meant that it’s somewhat finite, the amount of mental space that I have. And that gratitude could literally push out, complaining and whatever, like that clicked for me finally. I have the struggle with like, you know, when to be real, though. This is how I feel, but I also know that there’s a deeper realness inside of me that believes something else. So, I have to tap into that and all that. But anyway, I like it.
Greg McKeown: No, no, but that’s okay. I like that you’re being real about it, even in this conversation, of course. We are so full. It’s not if we’re not in the effortless state we’re being bad. That thought alone is creating a burden you don’t need to have. That sense of self-criticism is so real. I just got an early copy of a book called Soundtracks by a friend of mine, Jon Acuff. I mean, we’re just all overthinkers. In contrast to the effortless state, we’re already overthinking, overthinking, overthinking.
And he says, which is a good transition for us, to these three areas in the book, and the second is effortless action. And one of the things he says, you know, the solution to overthinking is not more thinking, it’s to take action. And I really like that, because as you start to get into this more grateful, more centered place, you’re in a better position to be able to even imagine how to simplify the action you’re taking your life.
And that’s what I’m saying, it’s like you simplify the internal state first, then you can start to simplify the processes and the work that you’re doing just to make the action easier. And then that can, overtime, create enough space for you to create and simplify the results. So that results ultimately can start coming back to you without you even putting any effort if you design your systems right.
Andrea: Voice of Influence listeners want to have a deep impact with the messages and offerings that they contribute or bring forth in the world, as you would put it. But choosing or whittling down a message to its essential form is really not easy to do. Like how did you come down to, “It’s Essentialism, that’s the book I need to write. It’s Effortless.”
Greg McKeown: Okay, that’s I like that. I mean, the process for me is a long one. It’s a very language-oriented process, where I am a title first writer, and I obsess about the word, the actual title for a long time, typically. I’ve gone through certainly 100 titles for Effortless, and the same for Essentialism. And with Essentialism, I was realizing that that was something I had observed that I thought was disproportionately important.
But when I started talking to people about it at first, I remember sharing with a manager at a tech company I was working with, I said, “You know, clarity, if you can just have clarity on your team, it just solves everything else. If you know, what’s essential as a team and you know what we’re really doing versus what we’re not doing. If you know who’s doing what, it just solves 80 percent of the other problems. It’s an amazing powerful tool.” And she said, “Yeah, I think there’s a lot of other stuff.” And it was in that moment that I thought, “Yeah, okay, I’ve just got to go and find the words now because I have observed this for years and years, I just don’t have the language.”
And so, it was all about trying to find a word to capture a single insight of something that I wanted to say, wanted to bring. And for a long time, I think this working title for Essentialism was the story of clarity. And so, you know, you sort of have a clear sense of something you want to say. But then you’ve got to do the work, to go from there, that those ideas can be hearable and fresh to people.
And I think that’s the journey that often distinguishes, at least, in my field as a writer. Books have something that are true in it. These things are good. Yes, if we all did them, we’d be better, but we don’t care, you know. Yeah, it’s like there are many books get ignored, because they didn’t make the journey from the principle back to where people are right now in their lives, and how to find a way that makes that draw them in.
And so, you know, Stephen Covey once said to me, he said, “I get 20 books sent a week to me.” And he said, “One of the challenges that I find is that most people, most authors start with their own mind in mind, not the readers mind in mind.”
Andrea: Yeah.
Greg McKeown: And so, in my mind, that’s the journey then. You’ve got an idea, you know, you want to say something, and then it’s the journey from there all the way back to where people are. And really, that, for me, all is about the title is the first thing anyone will ever hear about the idea. So, to me, it’s the most important thing to get right. And Essentialism was, you know, that was the best word that we can find for it. And the discipline pursuit of less seemed to say it succinctly, now with Effortless, similarly.
I mean, honestly, if I’m being frank about it was all about, you know, don’t write a rubbish book, you know, don’t write a book that nobody wants to read. The temptation is huge, actually, where you pretend that you don’t want to write, but no one’s read. But the temptation is that you just write a book because the agent wants you to do and the publishers are ready. And even people who read Essentialism, “Hey, what’s next?” And so, you’ve got an open door. But I was just so keen, and I don’t know, we’ll see. It sounds like you’re on board. But we’ll see what other people feel.
But Effortless was about, I went through so many titles. But one day I just had Effortless come to me; I just was like, “Oh, that’s it.” I knew it was it. And it had to do with that belief that for people when they hear that word, there’s some people will have a reaction, “Oh, it’s not realistic.” I’m not saying 100 percent, but there is a group of people who want that. They just want a little more effortlessness in their life. And they’re just burdened right now.
And I knew in that moment, there was this very visual thing that happened for me, as soon as I had that title, Effortless, was that everything I knew in life, like all these principles I wanted to teach suddenly had a reversal process in my mind. It was like seeing the world through a completely like, I don’t know, taking something inside out. It was like an inside out view of the world, because everything we’re taught; work harder, if you want better results, you got to work harder. And we all know and that’s true in lots of ways.
But what if there’s a whole another truth, that’s opposite that’s also true, or if there’s a whole another level you can move to if you can just find a way to make things effortless. So, it’s very curated careful process over a long period of time. Because what I believe in both instances with both books is if you can find that right word, you have something that, I think, is almost magical. Its force goes on for a long, long time if you can play the right note.
Andrea: Oh, the right note that resonates with where people are.
Greg McKeown: Totally, it’s the power of relevance. And it got to connect with me if people don’t want it. So many years ago, a church leader said to me, I only keep that because it’s like not quite what you’d necessarily expect from the individual. But they just said, “Greg, you know, my advice to you is,” and I just told them an idea for a book, by the way, and they said, “My advice is don’t write a book that nobody wants to read.”
And that’s still the best advice I’ve ever been given about writing or communication or having an impact, like it’s not whether the world needs what you want to say, it’s whether the world wants what you are trying to say. And so, you have to figure out a way to give people what they want, sell people what they want, and to give them what they need. But if you can’t do the first, there’s no point in the second because you don’t have their attention.
Jay Shetty said this way to me, I thought this is a very clever summary. He said, “Some people just want to be entertained, so that’s where it needs to start. Some people from that group will say, well, actually, I want to be educated as well, and then a smaller group will say, well, I want to be enlightened.” But I thought those three were very nice because, you know, what he’s saying is if you can’t entertain them in the first place, you can’t have a conversation to educate or to enlighten. And so, I think that that’s, you know, an important part of this process.
Andrea: You mentioned Tim Ferriss, I loved your interview with Tim Ferriss, you know, a couple years ago.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, the previous one. Thank you.
Andrea: But I know that this is still an issue for many of us who are worried about disappointing others when we’ve chosen to say no to something. Any particular tips that you can offer in terms of not disappointing others and dealing with that internally as well?
Greg McKeown: One thing I would say is, you don’t want to come across as someone who’s just complaining about because I’m overwhelmed by all these things, right? Nobody wants to be a whiner, “Hey, look at all these things. They got all this stuff; can you believe it?” But do want to come across, I think, as a professional who cares about what really matters most. So, I think that looks more like if we’re talking about, like, a professional situation.
It looks more like looking at everything you’re working on, gathering it together in categories, figuring out which ones you think are most important, taking that list in a prioritized list to the person, you know, who’s managing you and you’re saying, “Okay, here are the most important things I’m working on. I don’t think I can do all of these superbly well, but here are the things matter most and I’d like to focus on.” “These are really the things that are going to help push your agenda forward and be the best use of me.”
That’s why, you know, I didn’t write a book called “No-ism,” you know, saying no to everyone and everything. It’s Essentialism – it’s like focus on what matters. I think that’s one of the things that I would say. So, one of the chapters in Effortless that I found personally most helpful in researching was the chapter on trust and how effortless relationships can become if the trust is high enough, and how hard relationships get if the trust is low enough.
I mean, if the trust is low, and you say “no,” that’s not going to work. If the trust is high enough, they say, “We need to do this.” “Well, yes, I’d like to do that his way, but I’m thinking maybe not.” You can have the conversation. Yeah, actually, with some people, you just say no, “I can’t do that. This is what I think we should be doing.” The relationship can withstand it, because there’s trust in the relationship. You understand each other’s motives. You don’t misjudge the motives.
And there’s a story about this in the book, of Warren Buffett, who decides they’re going to buy this massive, nowadays, a $17 billion firm, something. And, you know, the amount of work you would normally expect for that just in months and months could be many millions of dollars, just making sure that everything that they say is true in the business, just looking through all of the contracts and looking through everything. I mean, this could be just enormous. And that’s why it was so breathtaking to read about it, and to go back and read the description of it by Warren Buffett in his annual report, is that the whole thing was done in a two-hour meeting and a handshake.
He said, “We knew everything would be exactly as it’s Walmart that owned the company that was selling it, exactly as Walmart said it would be, and it was.” And I’ve had good experiences with trust in my life. I’ve had many times when high trust can be worked, but I am literally at the time of this conversation, I can’t get into the details of it. But I have just made one of the biggest financial decisions of my whole life. It’s become this new evidence that if the trust is high enough, it can be truly effortless. You don’t have to go through the song and the dance.
And I suppose what I would say is this, that effortlessness as a principle is effortless can be stacked in your life. And I loved what you were saying, it’s like – as soon as you have one experience with this, it makes something a little more effortless than it used to be. And then you go, “Oh, great work. Let’s do it again. Let’s make another thing effortless, another thing effortless, and another thing effortless.”
And it works on so many layers, and it builds and grows, and you start to have experiences and you start to trust it more because it’s a nice idea. You go, “Wow, what if incredible things could become effortless?” And suddenly what is possible in your life changes, and I am in the midst of this, absolutely, in multiple areas.
Andrea: Choice is a huge piece of even admitting that you can choose something that is essential. That is a huge piece of your message. It’s a big thing that we talked about, an agency, that feeling like I can do something about this. What do you see as the importance of or how to help people to see that they have a choice, that they have agency? And let’s say, in particular, in inside of a team, if a leader is trying to lead a team and they want them to use their voice, they want them to show autonomous kind of thinking and whatnot, what do you see as a way for people to help them do that?
Greg McKeown: You are saying, really, how do you empower other people to take initiative?
Andrea: Yes.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, I mean, something else is in the same in this trust chapter in Effortless is saying with Warren Buffett is that he has a rule when he’s hiring people. And I call it now the three I’s. You know, the first is Integrity. The second is Intelligence, and the third is Initiative. He says if they don’t have integrity, then the other two can hurt you. So, I love that rule. For me, whenever I’m hiring people, whenever I’m working with people, I’m saying, literally I’m looking for 9 to 10 integrity, 9 to 10 intelligence, 9 to 10 on initiative.
And for me, I think initiative is like, yeah, I have to have people who show initiative, because effort is thinking, like effort is mental exertion. It’s physical exertion too, but really what effort means is that we’re cognitively having to think about something. And it’s one of my favorite titles of a book is Don’t Make Me Think. And that’s what really, in a sense, as a leader of a team that is what you want is people who are thinking for you, you know, taking initiative based on good sensible ideas so that you can make progress without you having to push things forward.
So, I think one answer to the question is hiring, that you have to hire people who have the three I’s. Some people are more comfortable with taking initiative. So, if they’re already strong then you don’t have to try and change somebody into something else, if that’s something that you value. So, I think that there is, like, a hiring answer to your question. Then I think that the second part of it is to create a high trust agreement. And even if you don’t feel like you have time to actually sit down and create sort of a formal written document, you can do it even audibly with somebody where, you know, high trust agreement.
The point of this is that in every relationship, manager-employee, whatever, there’s actually three relationships. There’s the person A, the person B, and then there’s that agreement, the structure, the system, and that’s often very invisible. And so, then we tend to blame each other if there are struggles or the trust is lower. We tend to think “Well, you must be acting in a way that’s not appropriate,” or “Maybe it’s me,” it’s self-blaming.
And I find that more often than not, it’s actually the system. We aren’t focused. We haven’t looked at the agreement, so it becomes very messy. And so, in messiness, people can do all sorts of things that irritate each other because they haven’t got clear about the understanding. So, a high trust agreement is really getting clear about what you’re trying to accomplish. You know, the result that you’re agreeing on, the resources that you want to make sure available, the time that you’re going to come back and have accountability together, all of this is explicitly clear.
So, then people can choose, they could even choose at that point. “But that’s not for me, I don’t want to do that,” and you go, “Okay, well, that’d be good for us both to know.” Even if that’s a little awkward or even very awkward, it’s probably better for us to know now than it is five years from now, 10 years of frustration for everybody involved.” But if you can get clear about that, then it really liberates people to be able to take action and to take, you know, initiative confidently, because they know where the boundaries are. They know what they’re trying to achieve and what they’re not, and it sets them up to be able to win.
So, I think hiring someone you really trust produces effortless results for you many, many times. Hiring the person you don’t trust will produce effort for you and problems many, many times. So, it’s a very high leverage thing to do is to get those people right. And then, once you have the right people, is to have a high trust agreement, so you’re not in the business of command and control.
Andrea: Yeah. You know, what I just heard you say, I heard you say that if people do not see that there are two choices, then they can’t exercise that ability to choose, if they do not know what the choices actually are. So, actually, knowing what the goal is, what the decision is, what the rules are, or the values or whatever we’re agreeing to, without knowing that, they can’t make a choice.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, that’s right. There’s an old story, I’ve never been able to find an actual citation that it’s true. But it’s a story about children who are playing in a playground next to the road. And they all played close to the school, and there’s this fast highway and it’s like terrifying. And then the school puts up a fence between the road and the school. And now the children play fully to the edges. The idea is that clear boundaries, increase empowerment. Because what you really want is, here’s the playground, this is where you can play anywhere here, and we tend to think it’s the other way around, where we don’t have any boundaries.
But then we have to control people all the time, “Oh, don’t do that, do this,” and they don’t know how to move. I don’t know. And then that’s just entirely awful for everyone involved. It creates bad behavior on both parts. So, the high trust agreement, I think, makes a big difference to that.
Andrea: So, one of the questions that I’ve been asking people as they come on to the podcast is, you know, and our friends around the world know that this is a really divided nation right now. What could Essentialism and Effortless do to speak to or help heal where we’re at or move us forward in some way?
Greg McKeown: Hmm, I have just begun working on the next book. And this next book is just dead on for what you’re describing. I, basically, think that we’ve been taught being overachievers, how to speak, write, read. Almost none of us have had formal education in listening. It’s just a huge gap in our skill set. That produces, actually, two problems. One is that when people say, “Oh, yeah, you need to listen more.” What we conjure up in our minds are what I would call weak listeners. That is people who don’t talk much. So, therefore, “Oh, they must be good listeners because look at them, yeah, they’re pleasant. They don’t interrupt people and so on.”
And as overachievers we tend to go, “I don’t think I need to do more of that. That doesn’t seem like the right way forward.” It’s, actually, because there’s two problems with listening. One is being this weak listener where you’re not listening, you’re just not speaking. Then there’s like, you’re not listening because you’re speaking. And then there’s this other thing -I don’t know maybe for language, and I’m still working on language for sure – but maybe radical listening, where actually you would interrupt somebody if you’re really listening. You do interrupt for clarification, because your job is to seriously understand that there’s a whole series of skills.
And I’ve been working on this book before I worked on Effortless, before I worked on Essentialism. It’s a 20-year journey. It’s something I’ve felt a very deep feeling about. I just needed to spend those years trying to develop the ability, but it’s an ability that starts within. It’s very inside out process; you have to learn some skills internally, just how to do it and why it matters, and it’s internal. Then it moves into interpersonal behaviors, then skills. But there’s also like team and organizational and even societal listening, where there’s some really fascinating research and examples of people that are doing this.
And if you can get, not that artificial listening, that may be half your influence. But this other radical listening is like 10X influence. That’s how I think about it. And if you think about the greatest influencers, they were radical listeners. They were unbelievable. I mean, you look at somebody like Oprah, right? I mean, her ability wasn’t that she could pick a book that everybody wanted. It wasn’t “My influence is so big that I am gonna say, ‘Read this book,’ and everyone will read it.” That’s what we thought was happening. But if you just talk to her, like, what she has said about this, is that she was always asking this question: “What would 10 percent of my viewers really, really want to read?”
So, she’s listening; that’s advanced listening. She said, for an hour a day, after the show ended, The Oprah Winfrey Show, she would listen to the audience ask questions. That was how she said that the show continued to be successful, is because: “I was always getting the pulse of the audience, and I utilized them to be able to stand in for everybody else out there that I couldn’t go and physically meet.”
I mean, this is what we’re talking about. There’s a whole series of skills and abilities about radical listening that increases your influence incredibly. I don’t know anybody that’s been taught how to do this. I don’t know any system that teaches it. I don’t know anywhere to go for it. I don’t know anyone, in any business school, that has had a class in it. And so, as a result, what happens is that we’re basically really bad at this, whereas you don’t know how to do it.
So, this, I think, could help with the stalemate, because we’re just not listening to each other in the way I’m describing. We’re just not understanding each other. And it just creates this bigger, bigger polarization of society where you just judge each other harder and harder, harsher and harsher. Those people are out there, “You’re an American. Well, you’re an American; then you are to be distrusted. You need to be destroyed.” And this is literally what civil wars is built on, is that there’s a tipping point and people just go – and conflict begets conflict. And it’s not because you’re that far apart; it’s because you just feel more and more misunderstood.
Andrea: You know, you may not be able to wait longer than 18 months for your new book, Greg.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, I mean, I certainly feel a sense of urgency with it. It, actually, feels so far like the easiest thing I’ve ever worked on writing. And I think it’s because it’s just had this gentle long journey before it, and it just, time feels really, really right to start working on it. So, this is peculiar. We are now talking about a book that isn’t even written on the day that Effortless came out, but you’re drawing it out of us. And now you’ve had an insider’s look. It’s been so nice to be with you.
Andrea: Thank you so much, Greg. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and I know that our listeners have as well. So, blessings to you. Good luck with the launch, and I am confident, I am absolutely confident that there’s going to be a great response because people need this so bad right now. So, thank you!
Greg McKeown: From your lips to God’s ears. Thank you, Andrea!
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