[00:00:00] Host Create clip what essential is um can be that maybe minimalism isn't, is to just design around the relationships around the memories, around the richness around the stuff that is going to matter in the very, very long run. Certainly that's how I think of it. I think you're really going to like this next episode with best selling author Greg Mcewan. He's a brit and seems like a deeply spiritual man with strong convictions for his family and faith. That is what he credits for a recent health scare with one of his Children who had a serious undiagnosed illness But eventually regained her health. Greg talks about the idea of essential is um in his latest book, which is different from minimalism, where you basically just pare down your belongings to the bare bones. No essential is um is about keeping only the things, ideas and beliefs that serve you well. This really resonates with me as I've shared my story when I felt like a victim 10 years ago, during a really dark time in my life, I was able to swap out that story and adopt a new one of being a survivor and that was my essential keepsake.

[00:00:00] Host Create clip what essential is um can be that maybe minimalism isn't, is to just design around the relationships around the memories, around the richness around the stuff that is going to matter in the very, very long run. Certainly that's how I think of it. I think you're really going to like this next episode with best selling author Greg Mcewan. He's a brit and seems like a deeply spiritual man with strong convictions for his family and faith. That is what he credits for a recent health scare with one of his Children who had a serious undiagnosed illness But eventually regained her health. Greg talks about the idea of essential ism in his latest book, which is different from minimalism, where you basically just pare down your belongings to the bare bones, no essential ism is about keeping only the things, ideas and beliefs that serve you well. This really resonates with me as I've shared my story when I felt like a victim 10 years ago, during a really dark time in my life, I was able to swap out that story and adopt a new one of being a survivor and that was my essential keepsake.

[00:01:03] Host Create clip I would also like to thank our sponsor element and speaking of Essentials, it's a good segue into this amazing drink. That's really improved my health in a big way. Some of you know, I've been battling migraines for a while and my doctor hasn't found any solutions for me. I was so sick of taking medicine. So I talked to several pro athlete friends and their trainers who told me I was probably dehydrated and a missing important electrolytes. I googled electrolytes and did more research and found this amazing drink which is packed full of essential minerals like magnesium potassium and sodium. And over a 30 day period I saw my headaches decreased by about half. I'm hooked. So I reached out to folks that element headquarters and now we're working together to help more of you. Okay, here's the full of factor Colonel close to see it right in the face. Electrolyte deficiency is real. Uh I experienced it myself and the imbalance can cause headaches, cramps, fatigue and weakness. Maybe you know what I'm talking about for those of you fasting, doing intermittent fasting or just working out a lot electrolytes can make the difference between feeling great and feeling like garbage.

[00:01:03] Host Create clip I would also like to thank our sponsor element and speaking of Essentials, it's a good segue into this amazing drink. That's really improved my health in a big way. Some of you know, I've been battling migraines for awhile and my doctor hasn't found any solutions for me. I was so sick of taking medicine. So I talked to several pro athlete friends and their trainers who told me I was probably dehydrated in a missing important electrolytes. I googled electrolytes and did more research and found this amazing drink which is packed full of essential minerals like magnesium, potassium and sodium. And over a 30 day period I saw my headaches decreased by about half. I'm hooked. So I reached out to the folks at Element headquarters and now we're working together to help more of you. Okay, here's the full effect of vernal falls. You can see it right to the face. Electrolyte deficiency is real. I experienced it myself and the imbalance can cause headaches, cramps, fatigue and weakness. Maybe you know what I'm talking about for those of you fasting, doing intermittent fasting or just working out a lot electrolytes can make the difference between feeling great and feeling like garbage When you sweat. The primary electrolyte lost is sodium. Athletes can lose up to seven g per day. Anyway, I drink one mixed with about 10 oz of water before working out in the morning and the other one later after dinner to hydrate for the next day.

[00:02:07] Host Create clip When you sweat. The primary electrolyte lost is sodium athletes can lose up to seven g per day. Anyway, I drink one mixed with about 10 oz of water before working out in the morning and the other one later after dinner to hydrate for the next day. I want to try a free sample pack. Go to drink element dot com slash brian Elliott and they'll send you all the flavors to try shipping is just five bucks. That's drink L. M. N. T dot com slash brian. B. R. Y. A. N. Eliot E double L. I. O. Double T. And get all the latest flavors. All right now. Let's get into the episode with best selling author Greg Mcewan? Here we go. Hi, my name is Greg Mcewan, I'm the author of Essential is um and now also effortless and you're watching behind the brand with brian Elliott. Everyone, I'm brian Elliott. Welcome to another edition Behind the Brand. Today, I'm here with best selling author Greg Mcewan, welcome to show, it's great to be with you, thank you brian.

[00:02:20] Host Create clip Want to try a free sample pack. Go to drink element dot com slash brian Elliott and they'll send you all the flavors to try shipping is just five bucks. That's drink L. M. And T. Dot com slash brian B. R. Y. A. N. Eliot E double L. I. O. Double T. And get all the latest flavors. Alright now let's get into the episode with best selling author Greg Mcewan. Here we go. Hi, my name is Greg Mcewan, I'm the author of Essential is um and now also effortless and you're watching behind the brand with brian Elliott. Everyone, I'm brian Elliott. Welcome to another edition Behind the brand. Today, I'm here with best selling author Greg Mcewan, welcome to the show, it's great to be with you. Thank you brian. I usually ask my guest, how did you get this job? Well I was originally many years ago studying law in England and I visited some friends in the United States, somebody said in passing if you do decide to stay in America then you should, you know whatever they gave me some advice but their question, the idea that you could do something completely different Was it was refreshing and I went and brainstormed for 20 minutes, what would you do if you could do anything by the time I was done, I noticed not what I'd written down but what I hadn't written down, I noticed law schools not on the list. And so that was the moment of breakage and I thought okay I don't need to do law school, I'm not enjoying that, that's not my Sense of mission or passion and so what I did instead I wanted to teach and write and that's what I've spent the last 20 years doing Put a time stamp on that. When was that? That's 20 years ago. So we're talking like 1999. So a little more than 20 years ago now. And so I literally never went back to law school and just started over and said, Okay, what would you do if you really could just teach and write and spend your life in that manner? I always ask people about their early um thoughts and signals. Um what did your parents do for work? For example, my mother was a stay at home mom and my dad ran his own business as a carpet and upholstery cleaner. Okay. And your brothers and sisters? Yes, I was the youngest of five growing up. And so yeah, and did they want to steer you in any particular direction? Did you get influence from them? Like Greg, you should go to law school or should you should become a doctor or my dad. My dad always said the same thing to me. He always said go to law school will keep your options open. I don't think he's wrong about that, but the fact was that I got to a point in my life where that wasn't the goal, it wasn't to keep options open. I knew what I wanted to do, I just wasn't doing it. And so I remember calling back to England and my mother answers the phone fortunately she listens for a while and she said, I think you better talk to dad. So he comes on the phone and he said, well first of all he listened, which isn't entirely like him and then at the end of it because perhaps or all englishmen quote, Shakespeare over tea and crumpets for breakfast in the morning. He pulled the line straight out of Hamlet and the line was to thine own self be true. That's let's speaking to his son. And he said, I've always told you that son, that's what I've always told you. And he never said that to me in his whole life. What it said was go to law school to keep your options open. But in the end he said it when it counted and it just helped give permission to go and do something different. I wonder about signals. You know, um, I think sometimes they're very subtle and I know a lot of people who are watching this, I'll over generalize and put people into two camps. There's one camp of people who are probably just coming out of school and wondering, what am I gonna do with my life? And there's a whole other camp of us who've been affected by the pandemic, who are pushing the reset button and maybe get a chance to start something new. Maybe that's our only option or maybe this is like the perfect timing to try something different. And so I'm always curious about signals because I've had signals my entire life. Um actually loved, you know, writing and writing stories and um and you know what I do now is even though I'm a filmmaker and you have a production company and I do this show, in essence, if you boil it all down, I'm a storyteller and I love telling stories. And so I don't think I keyed in on that from a very early age and I should have because it would have, I think helped me Maybe make different decisions along the way. I mean, you know, Hindsight's 2020, right, but what sort of signals did you have that you had the chops uh for writing or at least this sort of thought process to put and codify some of the things that you've done in your in your books. I felt from very young, in love with teaching and words writing. I remember literally being younger than 10 years old and being at church waiting for my dad to finish some meeting that he was in and I was at a chalkboard and I was just writing as if I was teaching a class. I remember that feeling of wanting to teach. And I think what's interesting about finding the signal in the sound is that the signals often in life are hard to notice because they're always with you because you have been you wherever you went. And so to discover that the signals you're getting aren't the same as the signals of the people are getting is itself quite an important awakening that I know there's a a mentor of mine whose father was a great professor, a scientist, hundreds of academic papers in physics and chemistry. And he was talking to his son. And he said to him one time he said, well, he said, don't you think about physics when you're in the shower? And isn't that what you and it's his senses? No, never in my life have thought about that in the shower and he himself has become a significant academician and leader, but all the time getting different signals. I think that's an important discovery. Just even recognizing you're hearing something other people aren't hearing. Yeah, I like this idea. And I think you're right. I can think of my own wife who is an artist, very artistic and she is so talented. I'll talk to her right now just say, honey, you're the best. But you also take your talent for granted because you know, she can do like freehand calligraphy or drying or I've seen her she has a furniture restoration business and she's like hand painting the most intricate gold leaf on an antique piece of furniture with the greatest of ease. And I would have just, you know, like, and I said that is a remarkable talent and I'm sure you don't realize how amazing you are, but you just do this effortlessly. Yes. Right. And well. And that's an interesting point to connect because I think that sometimes perhaps because of a kind of puritanism that's embedded in the culture underneath Western civilization. We not only value doing work that we think of as hard, that's a virtue. We also were taught to distrust the easy. Yes. And so then sometimes in our life we think, well, if I've got to build a career, it's got to be around something that's hard, something that's, you know, maybe it's serious, something that doesn't fully come natural to us. On the other side, there are things that come spontaneously to us, something that we're drawn to, something were pulled from something that doesn't feel like such hard work and we think, yeah, but you can't who wants to pay for that? It comes so easily. It must not create value. And that's a huge shift when you suddenly can wake up and say, I'm going to build a career around the things that come more easily. And naturally this is I mean it's gonna be hard enough anyway. Yeah, but if you can build it around something that you are built to do yourself, the whole journey does become not effortless, but a lot easier. Yeah. And I think I'm in that camp with you because I've heard both sides of it, right? So some people will say on this side, you should find something that you can make a career out of and learn to love it. And others would say follow your passion. I'm thinking steve jobs and more idealists like I am, I'm I'm in that camp where I would rather pursue something that I love because I never get tired of it and it never feels like work and um and then I'm sort of pursuing the intersection of something I love and something I'm great at. Yes. And then, you know, trying to master that skill, honed my skills and something, those two things, there's the passion that you want to do it, this talent, you can do it the competence to actually achieve it. And then there's the economic engine that what are people hungry for, What do they want, What are they, are they willing to pay you for? And in the intersection between those questions I think is 1's highest point of contribution professionally and my my bias still remains the same on this. Is that, is that building a career? Yes, not everything in your career can be perfectly in the sweet spot of that, that's probably right. But to build a career around things that are not any of the above or any one of the above, if you build a career around something that you're not passionate about now that now your life is a lot harder than it needed to be around something that you're not talented at, that, that's a way to make it harder than it needs to be or something that people don't actually want. Yes, you have now designed a life that is harder than it needs to be. And I guess as we're unpacking this little bit more, I'm thinking, you know, it is a best practice to hire people who complement your skills, right, who are good at the things that you're not good at. So maybe the thing that you hate, if it's for me it's like accounting or that kind of thing. You know, you hire a great accountant and she does all your books and you know, she takes it off your plate and is amazing at it and then you focus on what you're good at, which is coming up with ideas or whatever that is right or yes, that that would be, that would be what was just described to me recently, had a Benjamin hardy on my podcast and he was saying, you know, asked the question who not how I love that to not always be thinking not always default, I've got to figure out how to do this myself, that's a great skill in and of itself, but to always do that is to overuse a strategy if you can think of, who not how you can accelerate your path immensely because they've already bringing their capabilities what they do well. And in fact I could go even one step further, which is that in the same sense as I feel like my mission in life includes being useful to certain people. I think it's not entirely improper idea that there are some people that their mission in life, part of their mission in life is to be useful to you. And so you're making space for those people to come along and to be able to help you and support you just as you are trying to help other people. I mean it's the essence of specialization really, but we need to play our part in that by being specialized ourselves open to other people coming into our world and doing what they do superbly well for us, I can co sign that, I think because uh well, so I had another sort of billionaire big shot on the show before, um he's one of the guys from shark tank and he said this quote, he said a salary is the drug that give you to forget your dreams. It's a great one line up, it's a great one liner, but if you scrutinize that a little bit, it doesn't really pencil because it could work for some people, right? But like, so let's say all of the people in that person's businesses, right? They are getting the salary right? Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, that's what you're saying. Yeah, so like, so what are you saying about your people? Right? Like, so, um, that works to a certain extent and I understand the context in which he said it, which is consider entrepreneurship because you have this opportunity, if you feel capable, that's the caveat, you know, if you have the chops if you have the skills, if you feel like doing this because this side of the fence and I was on the client side, it's not for everybody. And in fact, I would love to hear you weigh in on this too, do you think like entrepreneurs are born or is this something that we can learn? Are they born or they made? Um I have my opinion, but let me ask you first, I think that entrepreneurs still need some activating ingredient. The for me, my the activating ingredient for me was being young, not having any money and then watching of the people make money in different ways In England, if you're young, if you like, let's say around 10 years old, there's only a couple of things you can actually do to make money, right? You can, you know, you could maybe, maybe around that age, maybe a little older, you could deliver milk to people's doorsteps and people would do that, they get paid very little per hour, but you've got a lot of hours over here, we'd cut grass. OK, so you can cut grass. Exactly. Um I I found somebody that came across a friend of ours that was washing cars, they had a car washing business and like literally my life was never the same after that, I was like, well I can do that and I can run a business on that and that was my first experience with it and I just thought I can earn more in one hour than any of my friends earning in six hours. So do you think that um the the, you know, the the skill to see the opportunity, you think it's based on circumstance, you said age is that because you had a shorter distance to fall, you had less to lose fewer liabilities. Do you think that's the reason? I think, I think it's a mix of things. I agree with you that not everybody is an entrepreneur, but I think there's a lot of people that could be entrepreneurs that probably aren't because they didn't have access, they didn't have an exposure to it. They didn't have an experience with it while they were young. And so then as the burdens rise to your point, you start to feel less and less able to take the risk because the risk is higher. I certainly believe in my life and I certainly believe it with my Children that I want to make failure as cheap as possible to maximize learning. I want them to make mistakes while it's cheap. Not everyone is in favor of giving Children an allowance and in fact we had not been. But then we were reading about it and we realized we want them to make mistakes with money when the stakes are so low, I don't want them to wait until they're in their mid thirties and they buy some house, they can't afford and they've invested in some business. They don't understand that those things can be catastrophic, but when they're young when they mean we want, I remember my son what we did, we gave them three containers and they had their allowance and they had to divide this up. One was to charity, the second was savings and the third was spent and they could choose which buckets to how much to put in these different containers. I remember that he decided he wanted to buy a car that could drive on the ceiling came across it in some store. It was very spontaneous were in London at the time and he just loved this and he did it cost $40. He used his money to do it. The thing hardly worked for half a day. The thing broke and then he didn't have the money he needed for the thing he wanted to do which was a big lego set that he had. Yeah but that was fantastic. The next time he was choosing whether to spend or not he had some intelligence, he had some experience with it. He wants to make the trade off so that he can get the the thing that really matters. I think the earlier you can have people have experiences with money with entrepreneurship the faster they're going to learn when it's cheap to learn. So that then they have an option later on. Yeah. It reminds me of something my mentor Seth Gordon told me taught me and that is he said the person who fails the most wins because built into that idea, that notion is as long as you don't fail too far and you can't come back to play another day, you will eventually figure it out. And it's the people that, you know, it's that old adage, right? If you if at first you don't succeed, try try again. You know, that's the story of Edison apparently as the lower goes and all of these other people who are successful, think of anyone, no one's an overnight success. They toiled, They made mistakes, they failed fast, they got back up after being knocked down, punched in the mouth, whatever you thought they were down for the count out, but no, they got back up, kept fighting and then they figured it out. And uh and I agree with that, that we ought to be trying and experimenting. That's the only way to get wise, right? It's try fail. Maybe you get experience. If you learn from that failure, that experience turns into wisdom. So the next time hopefully you don't make the same mistake, the only way to get it is to do stuff. I completely agree with this. You have a choice of whether to learn to do what to do to learn. And if you can get into the second category, you're going to learn a lot faster, no doubt in my mind about that. And to construct learning in like to construct mistakes in in bite sized learning, you know, you don't want to fail massively if you can fail in a small way and learn from it, right? We're talking to experimentation a great story. I came across in the research of this new book, effortless of a Henry Kramer who started the Kramer Prize in England, he was trying to get people to be able to achieve in an accelerated way. Human powered flight, basically a bike with wings right like this is this is what he's trying to achieve, And this was only 10 years before people are walking on the moon, So he thinks it's a pretty achievable goal to be able to get people to do this, he just wants to give it a boost for 17 years. Teams failed at that goal. They completely didn't make almost any progress at all to everyone's surprise until paul MacCready comes along, he looks at it all and he suddenly sees that everyone is trying to solve the wrong problem. Everyone else is trying to build these elegant, beautiful machines that can achieve the construct, which is a figure eight around these two pylons without, you know, an engine to drive it, but he says the problem is not that he had no money, he had no team, he had no elegance in anything, he could bring to the table. In fact, he had his young son operate as his test pilot and he said the problem is not what everyone else thinks is what we need to do is build a plane that can crash and be fixed cheaply. And so the thing he put together this is this albatross was the Gossamer albatross I think is the name of it. It looked ugly but he said it could crash And be fixed and be back up in the air within five minutes, take a hit, take it and be and just put a broom handle on, tape it up and we'll be getting up and we will be gathering data again immediately. The competitive planes Would crash one time And be back in the lab for six months. It was a six month learning loop for them. Whereas in what he was doing, he had four or five crashes in one day. It took him 222 crashes. It was on the 223rd that they achieved the goal, they won the prize and two years later I got the second Kramer prize by crossing the english channel. But the key breakthrough wasn't aeronautical, it was in the way they were approaching the problem itself. So yes, I do think that a lot of people make success and progress harder than it needs to be by trying to be too perfectionist about it, especially in the early days of their learning. I mean we could probably rattle off several characteristics that we know and have come to maybe um developed in our own personalities, you know, as we've, you know, both of us, you're an author that's very entrepreneurial. Um, and what I'm doing as well. I think it's something like a muscle that you have to build up. You start week and you become stronger as you use it. And going back to this quote about the salary is the drug. Um, I mean it's useful to, you know, prod you to try something new if you, if you want to. But um, there's also something to be said for ah, building on something else, right? Like, so you know, building a career I did early on working for someone else. I learned everything that I need to learn on the company's dime and, and made all those mistakes in a very safe environment where I basically had a trapeze net catching me and, and then when I felt capable, so I had this conversation with my daughter and she said, You know after seeing me do my thing for 10 years, she said, Oh, you must love risk. And I said, no, actually, um, I am trying to mitigate risk with every decision because I know better. Right. And so I don't want to make a leap of faith and possibly die. That's bad. I never want to bet all my chips on 13 black all in and then see what happens. I will never do that. I told her what I'm doing and you don't see it. But I'm closing that Delta as close as I can. So it's more of a hop. So I have an a surety or at least, you know, an idea that I can make it to the other side or if I don't make it the first time, I have several other attempts to make it. And that's how I approach, you know, new opportunities and you can do that as a side hustle totally don't have to quit your day job to do that. I think one of the stupidest ideas that has been promulgated into the masses is that entrepreneurs are about taking high risk. I just don't think actually the evidence supports this, what you're looking for people. I mean what Warren Buffett is a perfect example of this, right? I mean, is he a high risk person is a high risk entrepreneur? No, he is not. And yet he's been one of the most successful investors in history. He's on the record as having said, Look, I'm not looking for seven ft you know, fences to leap over. I'm looking for one ft fences I can step over. He's willing to look and search for the right kind of investment that he thinks this has a very, it's an asymmetric risk is a very low chance of a downside, Very high chance of the upside and I'm going to invest for the long run. Well, one of the ways he does that, that is many ways he does it. But one of the ways he does it is in selecting high trust individuals to invest in. A lot of us can actually do that. Maybe we don't invest in the way he does, but we can choose the people we have around us. We can seek out great mentors, we can seek out great people in our network, build friendships with people, high trust. He gives three criteria, the three I's integrity, intelligence initiative. Oh, I just love this when I found this in the research because that gives you such a clear way to evaluate the kinds of people you want to spend time with integrity. He says it's the most important because if you don't have that, the other two can hurt you. But now literally I'm looking for people and stated openly, I'm looking for people with high integrity. nine or 10 out of 10, Same for intelligence. Same for initiative. When you find people that are strong and all those three things, I mean look at what they can help you with, Look at how great it's going to be to work with them. This is one way to mitigate risk and increase your chance of being successful. Yeah. And I've had this conversation with a lot of other successful business people, they all basically say the same thing, which is the the EQ and the I. Q. Nowadays emotional intelligence. Um it's so much more valuable and it used to be called the soft skills, but these are now the essential skills, right? These things of integrity and and and uh work ethic and so forth, uh ability to get along with other people. You know, skills can be taught, let's face it, right? But like, uh you know, I was I was an athlete, I'm still an athlete in my older age, fancy myself still an athlete. But you know, you can't teach heart. They talk about, you know, you can't teach that will to to to come back and battle back if you get beaten down, you know, that's hard to teach versus, you know, I can run a route and I can teach anyone to run that route and catch a pass, hit a ball, whatever that is. But some of those other more intrinsic characteristics are are harder. I want to talk about representation too, because I think that matters, you know, um having someone, whether it's a mentor, someone you look up to, it could be an author, someone that you just watch from afar and take a page from their playbook. I think representation is also important to see people who have done what you want to do and then sort of make it your own. Um it's another way to again, maybe mitigate risk if you want to jump out there to see, oh, well that's already been done. There's a precedence for at least that way. You at least know that there's maybe market demand or you at least have a path that you can look at to study to when you carve out your own path, you know, it might not be a little bit easier. I think that's one of the ways to, to sense those little signals in the sound. Who are you drawn to and paying a little attention to? Why does it speak to you in a, in a, in a way that pulls you in Patrick Mcguinness had him on the what's Essential podcast as well and he's the person who came up with the term fomo. So that's like a good bragging rights, you know, like he came up with a term that is now in the dictionary. So that's cool. One of the things that Patrick Mcguinness taught me this kind of comes back to this risk mitigation strategy. He said, you don't have to go in 100%. He said learn from the people you're currently working for, don't make a huge high risk, you have to quit. Like I did with law school, What he said is, is do it be a 10% entrepreneur, He said, take 10% of your time, your energy and say, I'm going to try this new thing I'm going to learn by doing, but not putting everything at risk right from the beginning. I thought that was a very helpful way to be able to kind of ease into something to discover if it's what you really want to do with your career. So I'm intrigued by the titles of your book and I want to dig into it a little bit more. So the first book is this idea of Essential is um which reminds me a lot of like what Stephen Covey wrote about that first things First, that kind of flavor at least. Uh he talked a lot about doing first Things first, if I remember, you know, when I read it back in high school or college many, many years ago, um so how do you define essential is um and why is it important? I see essential is um now that you've mentioned, Stephen Covey, it's a bit like Stephen Covey meets steve jobs to me, if you take sort of the best in their approaches to leadership, that that's like essential is um essential is um is the disciplined pursuit of less but better. And it stands in contrast to the undisciplined pursuit of more, which in so many ways defines a certain part of our modern culture, where it's just more and more for the sake of more and people can lose their way and lose what really makes them unique, lose a sense of their own mission and direction just because more is always better and it does play into your, you know, your idea of fomo or fear of missing out. Yes, sometimes we're I think Malcolm Gladwell said something to me like you gotta be careful that you're you're connecting not collecting, right? And we could be collecting these things for the sake of collection and it's sort of a maybe a mental hoarding or physical hoarding, who knows if you're just collecting items and stuff for the sake of it. But it's very interesting. Yeah, I love that phrase and and I think it can apply essential is um can apply to across any decision frame so you can apply it literally to the stuff in your closet. You could be essential ist about it. Just selecting just a few things that you love to wear and you wear often. I mean you could literally apply it there, but most of the time I use that as just a metaphor for the closet of our lives to also get so full. What I find is that people feel stretched too thin at work or at home people feel busy but not necessarily productive people live an experience where other people's agenda hijacks, there's all the time and this becomes not a momentary thing, Not an occasional thing, but the lifestyle, the norm of our times. Yeah. And it is, can feel like a rising tide. Um you know, everyone else is doing, you know, they're working 10 hour days and 14 hour days and 16 hour days and 80 hours a week and 100 hours a week. It's like, wow! I mean I sort of experience a little bit of this in corporate America where literally they, You know, put a measure of value on your dedication by the number of hours you were in your office and if you, you know, left at five or 6 PM because your son had a baseball game that you were coaching. People are sort of looked at you like not quite as dedicated. I guess this is an evidence of a non essential ist culture. That's what you're describing right there because it's not about how much value people are creating right? It's about just how many emails they respond to, how many hours they put in. You know, it's, it's a poor measurement. It's a, it's a, it's a bad set of metrics for what you really want. It's an approximation of something, but it doesn't actually get you there contrast to a different company that's interested in still being successful. That they're driven by growth. Just like other companies. This company is called Uncharted. I was talking to the Ceo Banks Benitez. He read essential is um, ah, and he first, he just applied it to himself, but then he brought it into his company, had the whole executive team, read it. One of the things I loved about his story about this is that he said, one of the executives came in for one of them, they did four book club meetings, so to speak. Came in rada section section of the book and talked about it. One came in one day and he said, I want to throw this book across the room. I loved that because I felt like they were really reading it, not just going through the motions, you know, what's essential? What is non essential? How do we make the trade off sensibly? What happened as a result of that conversation? They got started as somebody said, well, listen, if essential ism is true, we should be able to work fewer hours and still achieve the same results. And they said, ok, well, if we're going to do this, we're going to experiment with this. We can't just do it anecdotally. They brought in a company to measure their output, then did it six weeks later, then six weeks later again, three month experiment designed, you know, in a thorough way. And they came out of this concluding that not only could they, they had had developed the capability to do in 32 hours what they used to do in 40 hours, they moved to a four day work week. This is this is one application, it's not for everyone, but application of essential is um if you get into what really is essential, what really matters, then you suddenly opened up a whole new way, A whole new avenue of how to actually be more productive, not by doing more things, working more hours, doing more email, but doing more of the right things that really is the value proposition of essential is um yeah, I'm glad you mentioned steve jobs because that really resonates with me or at least brought the comparison right in front and I get it because it seems like steve jobs was all about essential is, um, in terms of design UI UX, I mean, look at, you know, he eliminated basically all these chords and, and things that he just wanted one cord that went from the back of the Mac to the, to the wall socket, you know? And even as he streamlined all these other products that he did with Apple, that's that's that's what you're talking about. Yes, I think that's right. And without making the transition to too abrupt, I came across research about steve in for the new book effortless that I found fascinating as well. So that aligns with what you just said, there's a story, I came across in the research for effortless. That is about steve jobs that I really love and builds on what you just said, it was right when they were building the imac, after he returned to Apple and he, they wanted to build a DVD burning at four, the imac. So they purchased a company that built DVD burners at the time. It was so sort of industry specific that to buy a DVD burner, you might be paying $60,000 for a unit. And so this company, they came full with a 1000 page manual for how to use this product. So now they've bought the technology and he said, look, we want to make simpler software. And so these guys they get together and they say, okay, we've got two weeks to simplify everything we've got. And they did, I mean they went they 1000 pages, they simplify all. They create slides there, waiting for the meeting for Stevie comes in, they're ready to give the presentation and he goes up to a white body says, listen, I've been thinking about this, this is the app and this is the part people know about the front end of the story is that he draws up on the white board, he says, he says, here we go, one button. It says burn, you're gonna drag your music or your file to the but this is Burn, press it, that's it, that's the app we're going to build as soon as he did it, this engineer I was talking to, he just suddenly became so embarrassed about his slides. He's like, okay, we're never gonna show those slides ever. And and he said, but the lesson was super valuable. He said, where we were doing this, we were saying, how do you simplify the complexity? How do you take complexity and go down less and less complexity? He said, what steve was doing is he started from zero? Start from zero. How can we achieve what I'm trying to achieve in one step, What are the fewest number of steps to actually get the result that you want for a lot of us, we are dealing with so much complexity already that even a streamlined simplified process is still going to have way too much in it? If you start from zero, it's a really good trick to try to be able to simplify and make it easier to do the things that are most essential. So then this is the, the idea behind effortless is work smarter, not harder. Essential is um in one word is prioritization, effortless, in one word is simplification and there's a variety of things to simplify because there's a variety of things that we make more complex than it needs to be. So the first thing we make more complex than it needs to be is the state we live in and we live in this state. Many, many people live in a state almost what what the the Enlightened would score like the state of suffering, we're so cluttered with grudges with, with, with anger, with with just exhaustion, physical exhaustion right now, I sort of think there's two kinds of people in the world, there are people who are burned out and then there are people who know they are burned out. And if you can get into the second category, you can start to at least see what the problem is, which is that I've got so much stuff that's just clouding my judgment. It makes it harder to make any progress, it makes it harder to know how to go forward in my life. So really to try to start from zero to use that phrase. But in your state, how do I rid all of this clutter. So I can just be and what I've come to call the effortless State, the good news about the effortless state is it's just always there for us. It's just clouded and cluttered. We don't have to go and strenuously get to the effortless state. We just have to remove the things that are there that are making it harder than it needs to be. Yeah, And I guess you're a real advantage if you can get there before you are compelled to be there, if you know what I mean? If you've ever been burnt out or if you're at the end of your rope, dire straits bottom of the barrel, whatever you want to reference it. As you get to a point where just like you know what? Forget it. All right, burn it to the ground and I'm starting over. I'm burned out. I'm going to burn everything right, or or it gets taken away from you, right? Like you've that's right. You know, you've ignored all the signals and then some other force removes it for you. Whether you get, you know, downsized, let go or your relationship suffers whatever that is. So what advantage to be able to get there before and you be in control of the things that you strip away pare down. There's only two forces that simplify anything one is failure, Serious failure will simplify anything blockbuster is today simpler than they used to be right, failure simplifies for real. The only other force is an individual deciding before they have to to simplify. There's there's there's no other forces seriously. In fact there's a there's a book, I mean this is a bit heavy but there's a book all about the collapse of complex societies written by tainted where the great US historian and he maps the single cause of the collapse of complex societies. The same can be said for the complete collapse of complex organizations or teams or our lives as well before tainted. Everyone said well every collapses unique to its own civilization. The roman empire fell. For one reason the greek empire. For another reason the british empire got discombobulated a different reason and so on. But he came along and he said no it's the same thing. It's that what happens is that you have a simple group of people, a simple society and the leaders problem comes along. The leaders say how do we solve it? Let's solve it and they do they solve it. But what they do is they create more complexity without meaning to and so it continues and continues until the complexity is at a point where it requires all the resources of the society just to maintain the complexity. Now the society becomes incredibly fragile because if you add any new challenge, it can't deal with it because there's no buffer to deal with that challenge. So it gets to a point where the society itself is really fragile because it's got no buffer to deal with whatever the next challenges. And so similarly in our own lives or in companies that we start, we have to be careful not to have complexity to get so large and so out of control that we become fragile, that our system can't cope with the next thing. I mean, I think the pandemic in a lot of ways has done this to us for a lot of people, it's been a huge increase of complexity and a lot of people's lives Greg how is essential is um different from minimalism. Essential is um is I think the difference between, I think the difference between essential ism and minimalism is the difference between warm clarity and cold clarity. Essential is um if you were to search like for a minimalist house, it's going to look a certain way, it's gonna be very cold, you know, black white, very you know, a certain kind of structure, empty less things. Just so and but an essential ist house, if you could construct such a thing could be very different for different people. It could be, it's full of people, it's full of relationships, it might be a bit messy. Full of memories, full of memories. Essential ISMs key is in the title it's not just about less, it's not just about minimum, it's about what is essential and making sure you're designing that around the most essential relationships the most important life and the most important way of being. I think minimalism is is important and it's very trendy right now, a lot of people are doing it, but I think it kind of misses the mark. Um essential is um you know, we recently had Marie condo on the show if you know who Marie is. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of her philosophy, which is Only keep the things that spark joy and that could be your favorite t shirt that's 20 years old or a piece of artwork that your grandfather handed down. It's not particularly attractive, but it means something to you. And I think that's a lot more useful than just stripping away things for the sake of it to have less things that sort of leaves me feeling feeling very empty. Um versus some of these little things that I hold on to that I do feel are essential. And you know, bring back great memories and reminding me of people that I love, who have passed uh I lost my dad this last year, I'm sorry, thanks. And and he became a painter later in his life, he fell in love with painting. It became very therapeutic for him and I have all these paintings of his and as through my sisters and and I, you know, those are just like priceless to me, what I hear you saying that is that what essential is um, can be? That maybe minimalism isn't, is to just design around the relationships around the memories, around the richness, around the stuff that is going to matter in the very, very long run. Certainly that's how I think of it. And so let's unpack this simplicity idea to in in the new work effortless. Give us some advice and maybe, you know, let's let's engage, let's go right to the audience now and give some practical advice to people who maybe working harder but not smarter, who may be over complicating things something that is tactical and useful. Well, one thing I think that people can do, who feel a bit overburdened to feel like things are more complicated than they need to be, is to think of of the story that I came across in this research is of a mother who was with her dying son in the hospital. She got up into the bed next to him, right at the end. She knew it was the end and right at the end, he sort of opened his eyes and in that in between state when you're sort of part here and parked somewhere else, he says, oh mom, it's all so simple. It's all so simple. And those were his last words that's what he said and he died and he left that soundtrack for the rest of us. The question that goes with that story, something you can ask right now is how am I making life more complicated than it needs to be. And when you have the answer to that question, you'll have something really valuable, you'll know what to do next. So that's the first thing I would recommend that people do is ask that question. A second thing that people can do who feel like they're on the edge of exhaustion, who are feeling too burdened by all of their responsibilities is to create a done for the day list instead of an endless to do list that literally gets longer by the end of the day than it is at the beginning. Done for the day. List is the list of things you say when I have completed these tasks today, I will feel satisfied and I'll be okay to say, okay, I'm done, I'm not just going to carry on and on in a zoom, eat sleep, repeat type endless flow of doing done for the day list helps to create a boundary and for goodness sake, the boundaries are almost disappeared now because of the pandemic and because of technology going everywhere, so you've got to create boundaries or there won't be any. So that's the second thing people can do is create a done for the day list. The third thing that you can do to start creating a more effortless life is to start paying attention to the specific things that keep happening in your life that are irritating or in other words are making your life harder than it feels like it ought to be to instead of managing them, you try to solve them before they happen in the future. If you can identify something that's irritating, frustrating, causing friction for you, and especially things that you say, well, maybe if I spent a couple of minutes on these things, two minutes to solve a problem that's been bothering me for years, you get a great return on your investment. So look for the specific things you can do to prevent a problem that's been happening and annoying you many times in the past. If you can solve it now, you have a great return, as I just mentioned, that's the third thing that you can do to be able to make life a little bit easier. So let's get personal for a second, you got a family That's right. I would assume that you're not perfect yet, massively far from that. So what's the hardest part of being you like, what are you working on for Greg? Just yesterday, I was totally impatient with one of my Children. A couple of times. I remember they turned to me at one point, they were like, well that was that's two and o for you dad today because I had just kind of lost my patience with them and the reason I had lost my patience, as ironic as it is is because I was tired, you know, it's burned out. I had strained myself too far. And so now even a small provocation was getting a bigger, you know, a bigger reaction than was helpful, amplifying the situation. Yeah. My wife had just said, my wife and I had just said to me, not half an hour before there was no initiation for this particularly, but she just said, she said, you know, all we have to do is stay calm, right? Is that all? Yeah, well that's right. But she but it's still name something smart for me. It's like you don't have to solve every problem. You don't have to be the perfect everything just stay within a certain state. Keep coming back to that state. So I completely fluffed it, you know, half an hour later. But I I think this is one of the most important things I need to work on is just maintaining when those moments come right. Things that can value is to is to maintain peace. But actually the thing I need to do isn't just to somehow transform my character overnight is to make sure you're getting enough sleep that I'm getting enough sleep. I'm not great at getting as much sleep as I think one ought to have at night, but I am generally really like a champion napa and that's that really helps me. But but again, the irony is not lost on me with the launch of this new book. I've taken a lot less naps and it's adding up so it just makes everything harder than it needs to be. So I've got to keep protecting that time to take a nap each day. Yeah, I'm glad that that works with you and your wife. I have tried to tell my wife to calm down when she is uh, losing it. It doesn't work so well. I get quite the opposite reaction. No, no. You never want to say it to someone who's losing it right For all the times that people who said just calm down the the ratio of success is close to zero for that, right. We want to say it. But, but, but to remember in the good times to remember when you are calm like that's it. That's your goal. Just stay, stay calm through the ups and downs and you have like a superpower. I mean we were just sitting back, you know, chopping it up, reminiscing about the good old days and all that, you know, tracking my roots where I came from him, where I'm going, Oh yeah, but like I say, man always said it, it's not about the destination. It's all about the journey's ain't nothing changed but the weather, the dangling carrot that hangs from the rear view, your dreams in the past ain't nowhere near you, backseat drivers got nothing but two cents, shotgun rounds to biased, They all liars. I should get an A for effort. I'm too tired but I'm never giving up.

[00:03:03] Host Create clip I usually ask my guests, how did you get this job? Well, I was originally many years ago studying law in England and I visited some friends in the United States, Somebody said in passing, if you do decide to stay in America then you should, you know, whatever they gave me some advice but their question, the idea that you could do something completely different Was refreshing. And I went brainstorm for 20 minutes, what would you do if you could do anything by the time I was done, I noticed not what I'd written down, but what I hadn't written down, I noticed law schools not on the list. And so that was the moment of breakage and I thought okay, I don't need to do law school, I'm not enjoying that, that's not my Sense of mission or passion. And so what I did instead I wanted to teach and write and that's what I've spent the last 20 years doing Put a time stamp on that. When was that? That's 20 years ago. So we're talking like 1999. So a little more than 20 years ago now. So I literally never went back to law school uh and just started over and said, Okay, what would you do if you really could just teach and write and spend your life in that manner? I always ask people about their early um thoughts and signals. Um what did your parents do for work? For example, my mother was a stay at home mom and my dad ran his own business as a carpet and upholstery cleaner. Okay. And your brothers and sisters? Yes, as the youngest of five growing up. And so yeah, and did they want to scare you in any particular direction? Did you get influence from them? Like Greg, you should go to law school or she usually become a doctor or my dad. My dad always said the same thing to me. He always said go to law school will keep your options open. I don't think he's wrong about that, but the fact was that I got to a point my life where that wasn't the goal, it wasn't to keep options open. I knew what I wanted to do, I just wasn't doing it. And so I remember calling back to England and my mother answers the phone, fortunately she listens for a while and she said, I think you better talk to dad. So he comes on the phone and he said, well, first of all he listened, which isn't entirely like him and then at the end of it because perhaps all englishmen quote Shakespeare of a tea and crumpets for breakfast in the morning. He pulled the line straight out of Hamlet and the line was to the known self be True, That's late 80s speaking to his son and he said, I've always told you that son, that's what I've always told you. And he never said that to me in his whole life. What it said was go to law school to keep your options open, but in the end he said it was counted and it just helped give permission to go and do something different. Yeah, I wonder about signals, you know, um I think sometimes they're very subtle and I know a lot of people who are watching this all over generalize and put people into two camps. There's one camp of people who are probably just coming out of school and wondering what am I gonna do with my life? And there's a whole other camp of us who've been affected by the pandemic who are pushing the reset button and maybe get a chance to start something new. Maybe that's our only option. Or maybe this is like the perfect timing to try something different. And so I'm always curious about signals because I've had signals in my entire life. Um actually loved, you know, writing and writing stories and um and what I do now is even though I'm a filmmaker and you have a production company and I do this show in essence, if you boil it all down a storyteller and I love telling stories. And so I don't think I keyed in on that from a very early age and I should have because it would have, I think helped me Maybe make different decisions along the way. I mean, you know, Hindsight's 2020, right, but what sort of signals did you have that you had the chops uh, for writing or at least this sort of thought process to put and codify some of the things that you've done in your books. I felt from very young uh in love with teaching and woods writing. I remember literally being younger than 10 years old and being at church waiting for my dad to finish some meeting that he was in and I was at a chalkboard and I was just writing as if I was teaching a class. I remember that feeling of wanting to teach. And I think what's interesting about finding the signal in the sound is that the signals often in life are hard to notice because they're always with you because you have been you wherever you went. And so to discover that the signals you're getting aren't the same as the signals of the people are getting is itself quite an important awakening that I know there's a a mentor of mine whose father was a great professor, scientist, hundreds of academic papers in physics and chemistry and he was talking to his son. And he said to him one time he said, well, he said, don't you think about physics when you're in the shower? And isn't that what you and he senses? No, never in my life. I thought about that in the shower and he himself has become a significant academician and leader, but all the time getting different signals. I think that's an important discovery. Just even recognizing you're hearing something other people aren't hearing. Yeah, I like this idea. And I think you're right. I can think of my own wife who is an artist, very artistic and she is so talented. I'll talk to her right now just say, honey, you're the best. But you also take your talent for granted because she can do like freehand calligrapher, your drawing or I've seen her, she has a furniture restoration business and she's like hand painting the most intricate gold leaf on an antique piece of furniture with the greatest of ease. And I would have just, you know, like, and I said that is a remarkable talent and I'm sure you don't realize how amazing you are. Uh, but you just do this effortlessly. Yes. Right. And well, and that's an interesting point to connect because I think that sometimes perhaps because of a kind of puritanism that's embedded in the culture underneath Western civilization. We not only value doing work that we think of as hard, that's a virtue, we also were taught to distrust the easy. Yes. And so then sometimes in our life we think, well, if I've got to build a career, it's got to be around something that's hard, something that's maybe it's serious, something that doesn't fully come natural to us on the other side, there are things that come spontaneously to us, something that we're drawn to, something were pulled from something that doesn't feel like such hard work and we think, yeah, but you can't who wants to pay for that, It comes so easily, it must not create value. And that's a huge shift when you suddenly can wake up and say, I'm gonna build a career around the things that come more easily. And naturally this is, I mean, it's gonna be hard enough anyway. Yeah, but if you can build it around something that you are built to do yourself, the whole journey does become not effortless, but a lot easier. Yeah. And I think I'm in that camp with you because I've heard both sides of it, right? So some people will say on this side, you should find something that you can make a career out of and learn to love it and others would say follow your passion. I'm thinking steve jobs and more idealists, like I am, I'm in that camp where I would rather pursue something that I love because I never get tired of it and it never feels like work and and then I'm sort of pursuing the intersection of something I love and something I'm great at and then trying to master that skill, honed my skills and something those two things, there's the passion that you want to do it, this talent, you can do it the competence to actually achieve it. And then there's the economic engine that what are people hungry for, what do they want? What are they, are they willing to pay you for? And in the intersection between those questions I think is 1's highest point of contribution professionally and my my bias still remains the same on this. Is that is that building a career? Yes. Not everything in your career can be perfectly in the sweet spot of that. That's probably right. But to build a career around things that are not any of the above or any one of the above. If you build a career around something that you're not passionate about now, your life is a lot harder than it needed to be around. Something that you're not talented at, that's a way to make it harder than it needs to be or something that people don't actually want. Yes, you have now designed a life that is harder than it needs to be. Yeah. And I guess as we're unpacking this a little bit more, I'm thinking, you know, it is a best practice to hire people who compliment your skills, right? Who are good at the things that you're not good at. So maybe the thing that you hate, if it's for me it's like accounting or that kind of thing, you hire a great accountant and she does all your books and you know, she takes it off your plate and is amazing at it and then you focus on what you're good at, which is coming up with ideas or whatever that is right or you know, Yes, that that would be, that would be what was just described to me recently, had a Benjamin harding on my podcast and he was saying, you know, asked the question who not how right? I love that to not always be thinking not always default. I've got to figure out how to do this myself, that's a great skill in and of itself, but to always do that is to overuse a strategy, if you can think of who not how you can accelerate your path immensely because they've already bringing their capabilities what they do well, and in fact I could go even one step further which is that in the same sense as I feel like my mission in life includes being useful to certain people. I think it's not entirely improper idea that there are some people that their mission in life, part of their mission in life is to be useful to you. And so you're making space for those people to come along and to be able to help you and support you just as you are trying to help other people? I mean it's the essence of specialization really, but we need to play our part in that by being specialized ourselves open to other people coming into our world and doing what they do superbly Well for us, I can co sign that I think because uh well, so I had another sort of billionaire big shot on the show before um he's one of the guys from shark tank and he said this quote, he said a salary is the drug that give you to forget your dreams. It's a great one lineup, it's a great one liner, but if you scrutinize that a little bit, um it doesn't really pencil because it could work for some people, right? But like, so let's say all of the people in that person's businesses right? They are getting the salary right? Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, that's what you're saying. Yeah, So so what are you saying about your people? Right? Like, so um that works to a certain extent and I understand the context in which he said it, which is consider entrepreneurship because you have this opportunity, if you feel capable, that's the caveat, if you have the chops if you have the skills, if you feel like doing this because this side of the fence and I was on the client side, it's not for everybody and in fact I would love to hear you weigh in on this too. Do you think like entrepreneurs are born or is it something that we can learn? Are they born? Are they made? Um I have my opinion, but let me ask you first, I think that entrepreneurs still need some activating ingredient for me. My activating ingredient for me was being young, not having any money and then watching other people make money in different ways. So in England, if you're young, if you like, let's say around 10 years old, there's only a couple of things you can actually do to make money right? You can, you can maybe, maybe around that age, maybe a little older, you could deliver milk to people's doorsteps and people would do that, they get paid very little per hour, but you've got a lot of hours over here, we cut grass. Okay, so you could get grass. Exactly. Um I found somebody that came across a friend of ours that was washing cars, they had a car washing business and like literally my life was never the same after that, I was like, well I can do that and and I can run a business on that. And that was my first experience with it and I just thought I can earn more in one hour than any of my friends earning in six hours. So do you think that um the, you know the the skill to see the opportunity, you think it's based on circumstance you said age is that because you had a shorter distance to fall, you had less to lose fewer liabilities. You think that's the reason, I think, I think it's a mix of things. I agree with you that not everybody is an entrepreneur, but I think there's a lot of people that could be entrepreneurs that probably aren't because they didn't have access, they didn't have an exposure to it. They didn't have an experience with it while they were young. And so then as the burdens rise to your point, you start to feel less and less able to take the risk because the risk is higher. I certainly believe in my life and I certainly believe it with my Children that I want to make failure as cheap as possible to maximize learning. I want them to make mistakes while it's cheap. Not everyone's in favor of giving Children an allowance. And in fact we had not been, but then we were reading about it and we realized we want them to make mistakes with money. When the stakes are so low, I don't want them to wait until they're in their mid thirties and they buy some house they can't afford and they've invested in some business, they don't understand those things can be catastrophic, but when they're young, when they mean we want, I remember my son, what we did, we gave them three containers and they had their allowance and they had to divide this up. One was to charity, the second was savings and the third was spent and they could choose which buckets to how much to put in these different containers. I remember that he decided he wanted to buy a car that could drive on the ceiling came across it in some store. It was very spontaneous were in London at the time and he just loved this and he did it cost $40. Used his money to do it. The thing hardly worked for half a day. The thing broke and then he didn't have the money he needed for the thing he wanted to do which was a big lego set that he had. Yeah, but that was fantastic. The next time he was choosing whether to spend or not he had some intelligence, he had some experience with it. He wants to make the trade off so that he can get the thing that really matters. I think the earlier you can have people have experiences with money with entrepreneurship the faster they're going to learn when it's cheap to learn so that then they have an option light wrong. Yeah. It reminds me of something my mentor Seth Gordon told me, taught me and that is, he said the person who fails the most wins because built into that idea. That notion is that as long as you don't fail too far and you can't come back to play another day, you will eventually figure it out. And it's the people that, you know, it's that old adage, right? If if at first you don't succeed, try try again. You know, that's the story of Edison. Apparently as the lower goes and all of these other people who are successful, think of anyone, no one's an overnight success, they toiled, they made mistakes, they failed fast, they got back up after being knocked down, punched in the mouth, whatever you thought they were down for the count out. But no, they got back up, kept fighting and then they figured it out. And uh and I agree with that, that we ought to be trying and experimenting. That's the only way to get wise, right? It's try fail. Maybe you get experience. If you learn from that failure, that experience turns into wisdom. So the next time, hopefully you don't make the same mistake, the only way to get it is to do stuff, I completely agree with this. You have a choice of whether to learn to do what to do to learn. And if you can get into the second category, you're gonna learn a lot faster. No doubt in my mind about that and to construct learning in like to construct mistakes in bite sized learning, you know, you don't want to fail massively if you can fail in a small way and learn from it, right? We're talking to experimentation a great story, I came across in the research of this new book, effortless of a Henry Kramer who started the Kremer Prize in England. He was trying to get people to be able to achieve in an accelerated way. Human powered flight, basically a bike with wings, right? Like this is this is what he's trying to achieve And this was only 10 years before people are walking on the moon. So he thinks it's a pretty achievable goal to be able to get people to do this. He just wants to give it a boost for 17 years. Teams failed at that goal, they completely didn't make almost any progress at all to everyone's surprise until paul MacCready comes along, he looks at it or and he suddenly sees that everyone is trying to solve the wrong problem. Everyone else is trying to build these elegant, beautiful machines that can achieve the construct which is a figure eight around these two pylons without an engine to drive it. But he says the problem is not that he had no money, he had no team, he had no elegance in anything, he could bring to the table. In fact, he had his young son operate as his test pilot and he said, the problem is not what everyone else thinks is what we need to do is build a plane that can crash and be fixed cheaply and so the thing he put together this, this albatross was the Gossamer albatross I think is the name of it. It looked ugly, but he said it could crash and be fixed and be back up in the air within five minutes. Yeah take a hit, take it and be and just put a broom handle on, tape it up and would get up and we will be gathering data again immediately. The competitive planes Would crash one time And be back in the lab for six months. It was a six month learning loop for them. Whereas in what he was doing he had four or five crashes in one day. It took him 222 crashes. It was on the 223rd that they achieved the goal. They won the prize and two years later got the second Kramer prize by crossing the english channel. But the key breakthrough wasn't aeronautical, it was in the way they were approaching the problem itself. So yes, I do think that a lot of people make success and progress harder than it needs to be by trying to be too perfectionist about it, especially in the early days of their learning. Yeah, I mean we could probably rattle off several characteristics that we know and have come to maybe um develop in our own personalities, you know, as we've both of us, you're an author that's very entrepreneurial um and what I'm doing as well. I think it's something uh like a muscle that you have to build up, you start week and you become stronger as you use it. And going back to this quote about the salary is the drug. Um, I mean it's useful to, you know prod you to try something new if, if you want to. But um, there's also something to be said for uh building on something else. Right? So building a career I did early on working for someone else. I learned everything that I need to learn on the company's dime and made all those mistakes in a very safe environment where I basically had a trapeze net catching me. And then when I felt capable, so I had this conversation with my daughter and she said, You know after seeing me do my thing for 10 years, she said, Oh, you must love risk. And I said no actually, um, I am trying to mitigate risk with every decision because I know better, right? And so I don't want to make a leap of faith and possibly die. That's bad. I never want to bet all my chips on 13 black all in and then see what happens. I will never do that. I told her what I'm doing and you don't see it. But I'm closing that delta as close as I can. So it's more of a hop. So I have an a surety or at least you know an idea that I can make it to the other side or if I don't make it the first time. I have several other attempts to make it and that's how I approach, you know, new opportunities and you can do that as a side hustle totally. You have to quit your day job to do that. I think one of the stupidest ideas that has been promulgated into the masses is that entrepreneurs are about taking high risk. I just don't think actually the evidence supports this what you're looking for people. I mean, Warren Buffett's a perfect example of this, right? I mean, is he a high risk person? Is a high risk entrepreneur? Uh, no, he is not. And yet he's been one of the most successful investors in history. He's on the record as having said, Look, I'm not looking for seven ft you know, fences to leap over. I'm looking for one ft fences, I can step over. He is willing to look and search for the right kind of investment that he thinks this has a very, it's an asymmetric risk is a very low chance of downside a very high chance of at the upside and I'm going to invest for the long run. Well, one of the ways he does that, that is many ways he does it, but one of the ways he does it is in selecting high trust individuals to invest in. A lot of us can actually do that. Maybe we don't invest in the way he does, but we can choose the people we have around us, We can seek out great mentors, we can seek out great people in our network, build friendships with people high trust. He gives three criteria, the three eyes integrity intelligence initiative. I just love this when I found this in the research because that gives you such a clear way to evaluate the kinds of people you want to spend time with integrity. He says it's the most important because if you don't have that, the other two can hurt you. But now literally I'm looking for people and stay to openly. I'm looking for people with high integrity. nine or 10 out of 10. Same for intelligence, Same for initiative. When you find people that are strong and all those three things. I mean look at what they can help you with a look at how great it's going to be to work with them. This is one way to mitigate risk and increase your chance of being successful. And I've had this conversation with a lot of other successful business people, they all basically say the same thing, which is the queue and the bike. Nowadays, emotional intelligence um is so much more valuable And it used to be called the soft skills, but these are now the essential skills, right? These things of integrity and, and, and uh work ethic and so forth, uh, ability to get along with other people for sure. You know, skills can be taught, let's face it, right? But like uh, you know, I was, I was an athlete. I'm still an athlete in my older age, fancy myself still an athlete. But you know, you can't teach heart they talk about, you know, you can't teach that will to to to come back and battle back. If you get beaten down, you know, that's hard to teach versus you know, I could run around and I can teach anyone to run that route and catch a pass, hit a ball, whatever that is. But some of those other more intrinsic characteristics are harder. I want to talk about representation too, because I think that matters, you know, um having someone, whether it's a mentor, someone you look up to, it could be an author, someone that you just watch from afar and take a page from their playbook. I think representation is also important to see people who have done what you want to do and then sort of make it your own. Um it's another way to again, maybe mitigate risk if you want to jump out there to see, oh, well that's already been done. There's a precedence for at least that way you at least know that there's maybe market demand or you at least have a path that you can look at to study to when you carve out your own path might not be a little bit easier. I think that's one of the ways to to sense those little signals in the sound, Who are you drawn to and paying a little attention to. Why does it speak to you in a, in a way that pulls you in uh, Patrick Mcguinness had him on the, what's the central podcast as well? And he, he's the person who came up with the term foam. Oh, so that's like a good bragging, right? You know, like he came up with a term that is now in the dictionary. So that's cool. One of the things that Patrick Mcguinness taught me this kind of comes back to this risk mitigation strategy. He said, you don't have to go in 100%. He said, learn from the people you're currently working for, don't make a huge high risk, you have to quit like I did with law school, What he said is, do it be a 10% entrepreneur? He said, take 10% of your time, your energy and say, I'm going to try this new thing I'm going to learn by doing, but not putting everything at risk right from the beginning. I thought that was a very helpful way to be able to kind of ease into something to discover if it's what you really want to do with your career. So I'm intrigued by the titles of your book and I want to dig into a little bit more. So the first book is this idea of essential is, um, which reminds me a lot of like what Stephen Covey wrote about the first things first, that kind of flavor at least. Uh, and he talked a lot about doing first things first, if I remember, you know, when I read it back in high school or college many, many years ago. Um, so how do you define essential is um, and why is it important? I see essential is um, now that you've mentioned, Stephen Covey is a bit like Stephen Covey meets steve jobs to me. If you take sort of the best in their approaches to leadership, that's like essential is um, essential is um, is the disciplined pursuit of less but better. And it stands in contrast to the undisciplined pursuit of more, which in so many ways defines a certain part of our modern culture, where it's just more and more for the sake of more and people can lose their way and lose what really makes them unique, lose a sense of their own mission and direction just because more is always better. Right? And it does play into your, your idea of foam or fear and fear of missing out. Yes, sometimes we're, I think Malcolm Gladwell said something to me like you gotta be careful that you're connecting not collecting, right? And we could be collecting these things for the sake of collection and it's sort of a maybe a mental hoarding or physical hoarding. Who knows if you're just collecting items and stuff for the sake of it, but it's very interesting. Yeah, I love that phrase and, and I, I think it can apply essential is um, can apply to across any decision frame. So you can apply it literally to the stuff in your closet. You could be essential ist about it. Just selecting just a few things that you love to wear and you wear often. I mean you could literally apply it there, but most of the time I use that as just a metaphor for the closet of our lives to also get so full. What I find is that people feel stretched too thin work or at home people feel busy but not necessarily productive people live an experience where other people's agenda hijacks, there's all the time and this becomes not a momentary thing, not an occasional thing, but the lifestyle, the norm of our times. Yeah. And it is, can feel like a rising tide. Um, you know, everyone else is doing, you know, they're working 10 hour days and 14 hour days and 16 hour days and 80 hours a week and $100 a week. It's like, wow, I mean I sort of experience a little bit this in corporate America where literally they, you know, put a measure of value on your dedication by the number of hours you were in your office and if you left at five or six PM because your son had a baseball game that you were coaching, people sort of looked at you like quite a dedicated, I guess this is an evidence of a non essential ist culture. That's what you're describing right there because it's not about how much value people are creating, it's about just how many emails they respond to, how many hours they put in. You know, it's a poor measurement. It's a it's a it's a bad set of metrics for what you really want is an approximation of something, but it doesn't actually get you there contrast to a different company they're interested in still being successful. They're driven by growth, just like other companies. This company is called Uncharted. I was talking to the Ceo Banks Benitez. He read a centralism and first he just applied it to himself, but then he brought it into his company, had the whole executive team read it. One of the things I loved about his story about this is that he said, one of the executives came in for one of them. They did four book club meetings, so to speak, came in right section of the book and talked about it. One came in one day and he said, I want to throw this book across the room? I love that because I felt like they were really reading it, not just going through the motions once Essential. What is non essential? How do we make the trade off sensibly? What happened as a result of that conversation? They got started. As somebody said, well listen, if essential is um is true, we should be able to work fewer hours and still achieve the same results. And they said, ok, well if we're going to do this, we're going to experiment with this. We can't just do it anecdotally. They brought in a company to measure their output, then did it six weeks later, then six weeks later again, three month experiment designed, you know, in a thorough way. And they came out of this concluding that not only could they, they had developed the capability to do in 32 hours what they used to do in 40 hours. They moved to a four day work week. This is, this is one application is not for everyone, but application of essential is um if you get into what really is essential, what really matters, then you suddenly open up a whole a whole new avenue of how to actually be more productive, not by doing more things, working more hours. Doing more email for doing more of the right things. That really is the value proposition of the centralism. I'm glad you mentioned steve jobs because that really resonates with me or at least brought the comparison right in front and I get it because it seems like steve jobs was all about essential is um, in terms of design U I U X. I mean, look at, you know, he eliminated basically all these chords and and things that he just wanted one chord that went from the back of the Mac to the to the wall socket, you know. And even as he streamlined all these other products that he did with Apple. That's, that's, that's what you're talking about. Yes, I think that's right. And without making the transition to to abrupt, I came across research about steve in for the new book effortless that I found fascinating as well. So, uh, aligns with what you just said. There's a story I came across in the research for effortless. That is about steve jobs that I really love and builds on what you just said. It was right when they were building the imac, after he'd returned to Apple and he wanted to build a DVD burning at four, the imac. So they purchased a company that built DVD burners at the time. It was so sort of industry specific that to buy a DVD burner, you might be paying $60,000 for a unit. And so this company, they came for with a 1000 page manual for how to use this product. So now they bought the technology and he said, look, we wanted make simpler software. And so these guys, they get together and they say, okay, we've got two weeks to simplify everything we've got and they did, I mean they went, they 1000 pages, they simplify all, they create slides there, waiting for the meeting for Stevie comes in, they're ready to give the presentation and he goes up to a white body says, listen, I've been thinking about this, this is the app and this is the part people know about the front end of the story is he draws up on the white board, he says, he says, here we go, one button that says Bernd, you're gonna drag your music or your file to the but this has burned, press it, that's it, that's the app we're going to build as soon as he did it, this engineer I was talking to, he just suddenly became so embarrassed about his slides. He's like, okay, we're never gonna show those slides ever. And he said, but the lesson was super valuable. He said, where we were doing this, we were saying, how do you simplify the complexity? How do you take complexity and go down less and less complexity? He said, what steve was doing is he started from zero. Start from zero. How can we achieve what I'm trying to achieve in one step, what are the fewest number of steps to actually get the result that you want? For a lot of us, we are dealing with so much complexity already, that even a streamlined simplified process is still going to have way too much in it. If you start from zero. It's a really good trick to try to be able to simplify and make it easier to do. The things that are most essential. So then this is the idea behind effortless is work smarter, not harder. Essential. Is um in one word is prioritization, effortless. In one word is simplification and there's a variety of things to simplify because there's a variety of things that we make more complex than it needs to be. So the first thing we make more complex than it needs to be is the state we live in, we live in this state, many, many people live in a state almost what the enlightened would score like the state of suffering. We're so cluttered with grudges, we're with anger with, with just exhaustion, physical exhaustion right now. I sort of think there's two kinds of people in the world. There are people who are burned out and then there are people who know they are burned out. And if you can get into the second category, you can start to at least see what the problem is, which is I've got so much stuff that's just clouding my judgment. It makes it harder to make any progress. It makes it harder to know how to go forward in my life. So really to try to start from zero to use that phrase. But in your state, how do I rid all of this clutter? So I can just be and what I've come to call the effort the state, The good news about the effort. The state is, it's just always there for us. It's just clouded and cluttered. We don't have to go and strenuous to get to the effortless state, we just have to remove the things that are there that are making it harder than it needs to be. Yeah. And I guess you had a real advantage if you can get there before you are compelled to be there, if you know what I mean, you've ever been burnt out or if you're at the end of your rope, dire straits bottom of the barrel, whatever you want to reference it as you get to a point where just like you know what? Forget it all. Burn it to the ground and I'm starting over, I'm burned out. I'm gonna burn everything right or or it gets taken away from you, right? Like you, you know, you've ignored all the signals and then some other force removes it. For you whether you get downsized, let's go or your relationship suffers whatever that is. So what advantage to be able to get there before and you be in control of the things that you strip away pare down. There's only two forces that simplify anything. One is failure. Serious failure will simplify anything, blockbuster is today simpler than they used to be right, failure simplifies for real. The only other force is an individual deciding before they have to to simplify. There's there's, there's no other forces seriously. In fact, there's a, there's a book. I mean, this is a bit heavy, but there's a book all about the collapse of complex societies written by uh painter where the great US historian and he maps the single cause of the collapse of complex societies. The same can be said for the collapse of complex organizations or teams or our lives as well before tainted. Everyone said, well every collapses unique to its own civilization. They're roman empire fell. For one reason, the greek empire for another reason the british empire got discombobulated a different reason and so on. But he came along and he said no, it's the same thing. It's that what happens is that you have a simple group of people, a simple society. And the leaders problem comes along. The leaders say, how do we solve it? Let's solve it. And they do. They solve it. But what they do is they create more complexity without meaning to. And so it continues and continues until the complexity is at a point where it requires all the resources of the society just to maintain the complexity. Now the society becomes incredibly fragile because if you add any new challenge, it can't deal with it because there's no buffer to deal with that challenge. So it gets to a point where the society itself is really fragile because it's got no buffer to deal with whatever the next challenges. And so similarly in our own lives or in companies that we start, we have to be careful not to have complexity gets so large and so out of control that we become fragile that our system can't cope with the next thing. Yeah. I mean I think the pandemic in a lot of ways has done this to us for a lot of people it's been a huge increase of complexity and a lot of people's lives Greg. How is essential is um different from minimalism? Essential is um is uh I think the difference between us, I think the difference between the centralism and minimalism is the difference between warm clarity and cold clarity. Essential is um if you were to search like for a minimalist house it's going to look a certain way, it's gonna be very cold, black, white, very a certain kind of structure. Empty. Empty less things. Just so and but an essential ist house, if you could construct such a thing could be very different for different people. It could be is full of people, it's full of relationships, it might be a bit messy. Full of memories, full of memories. Essential ISMs key is in the title, it's not just about less, it's not just about minimum, it's about what is essential and making sure you're designing that around the most essential relationships, the most important life and the most important way of being. Yeah, I think minimalism is is important and it's very trendy right now. A lot of people are doing it but I think it kind of misses the mark. Um Essential is um we recently had Marie condo on the show if you know who Maria is supposed to. Yeah it reminds me a lot of her philosophy, which is Only keep the things that spark joy and that could be your favorite t shirt that's 20 years old or a piece of artwork that your grandfather handed down. It's not particularly attractive, but it means something to you. Yes. Um and I think that's a lot more useful than just stripping away things for the sake of it to have less things. I mean that sort of leaves me feel feeling very empty um versus some of these little things that hold on to that I do feel are essential and bring back great memories reminding me of people that I love, who have passed. I lost my dad this last year, I'm sorry, thanks. And and he became a painter later in his life, he fell in love with painting and became very therapeutic for him and I have all these paintings of his and as through my sisters and I, you know, those are just like priceless to me. You know what I hear you saying that is that what essential is um can be that maybe minimalism isn't, is to just design around the relationships around the memories around the richness, around the stuff that is going to matter in the very, very long run. Certainly that's how I think of it. And so let's unpack this simplicity idea to in in the new work effortless. Give us some advice and maybe let's engage, let's go right to the audience now and give some practical advice to people who maybe working harder but not smarter, who may be over complicating things something that is tactical and useful. Well, one thing I think that people can do, who feel a bit overburden to feel like things are more complicated than they need to be is to think of a of the story that I came across in this research is of a mother who was with her dying son in the hospital. She got up into the bed next to him right at the end, she knew it was the end and right at the end he sort of opened his eyes and in that in between state when you're sort of part here and part somewhere else, he says, oh mom, it's all so simple. It's all so simple and those were his last words. That's what he said and he died and he left that soundtrack for the rest of us. The question that goes with that story, something you can ask right now is how am I making life more complicated than it needs to be. And when you have the answer to that question, you'll have something really valuable, you'll know what to do next. So that's the first thing I would recommend that people do is ask that question. The second thing that people can do, who feel like they're on the edge of exhaustion, who are feeling too burdened by all of their responsibilities is to create a done for the day list instead of an endless to do list that literally gets longer by the end of the day than it is at the beginning. Done for the day list is the list of things you say when I have completed these tasks today, I will feel satisfied and I'll be ok to say, okay, I'm done. I'm not just going to carry on and on in a zoom, eat sleep, repeat type, endless flow of doing done for the day list helps to create a boundary and for goodness sake, the boundaries are almost disappeared now because of the pandemic and because of technology going everywhere. So you've got to create boundaries or there won't be any. So that's the second thing people can do is create a done for the day list. The third thing that you can do to start creating a more effortless life is to start paying attention to the specific things that keep happening in your life that are irritating or in other words are making your life harder than it feels like it ought to be to. Instead of managing them, you try to solve them before they happen in the future. If you can identify something that's irritating, frustrating, causing friction for you and especially things that you say, well maybe if I spent a couple of minutes on these things, two minutes to solve a problem that's been bothering me for years, you get a great return on your investment. So look for the specific things you can do to prevent a problem that's been happening and annoying you many times in the past. If you can solve it now, you have a great return. As I just mentioned, that's the third thing that you can do to be able to make life a little bit easier. So let's get personal for a second. You got a family. That's right. I would assume that you're not perfect yet, massively far from that. So what's the hardest part of being you like, what are you working on for Greg? Oh, just yesterday, I was totally impatient with one of my Children. A couple of times, I remember they turned to me at one point, they're like, well that was that's two and o for you dad today, because I had just kind of lost my patience with them. And the reason I've lost my patience, as ironic as it is, is because I was tired, you know, it's burned out. I had strained myself too far. And so now even a small provocation was getting a bigger, a bigger reaction than was helpful, amplifying the situation. Yeah. My wife had just said, my wife and I had just said to me, not half an hour before there was no initiation for this particular, but she just said, she said, you know, all we have to do is stay calm, right? Yeah, well that's right. But but it's still names something smart for me. It's like you don't have to solve every problem. You don't have to be the perfect everything just stay within a certain state. Keep coming back to that state. So I completely fluffed it half an hour later. But I I think this is one of the most important things I need to work on is just maintaining when those moments come right, things that can rile you is to is to maintain peace. But actually, the thing I need to do isn't just somehow transform my character overnight is to make sure you're getting enough sleep, that I'm getting enough sleep. I'm not great at getting as much sleep as I think one ought to have at night. But I am generally really like a champion napper and that's that really helps me. But again, the irony is not lost on me with the launch of this new book, I've taken a lot less naps and it's adding up. So it just makes everything harder than it needs to be. So, I've got to keep protecting that time to take a nap each day. I'm glad that that works with you and your wife. I have tried to tell my wife to calm down when she is losing it. It doesn't work so well, I got quite the opposite reaction. No, no, you never want to say it to someone who's losing it right? For all the times that people have said, just calm down. The ratio of success is close to zero for that, right? We want to say it. But, but but remember in the good times, remember when you are calm like that's it. That's your goal. Just stay, stay calm through the ups and downs and you have like a superpower. I mean we were just sitting back, you know, chopping it up, reminiscing about the good old days and all that, you know, tracking my roots where I came from him, where I'm going, Oh yeah, but like I say, man always said it. It's not about the destination, it's all about the journey ain't nothing changed. But the weather, the dangling carrot hanging from the rear view, your dreams in the past ain't nowhere near you, backseat drivers got nothing but two since shotgun rounds to buyers stay all liars, I should get an a for effort. I'm too tired, but I'm never giving up