#843: Tactics and Strategies for a 2026 Reboot — Essentialism and Greg McKeown (Repost)

Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. Happy New Year, Happy New Year,新年快乐,恭喜发财. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. To kick things off in this 2026, I am re-releasing my most recent conversation with Greg McKeown. I'll explain who that is, which was recorded right at the end of 2024. I've had it super helpful. I've revisited this episode myself. And if you want to get grounded, centered for the New here, focused. We cover a lot of practical stuff. How to get centered when life feels destabilizing, using journaling to move from confusion to clarity, personal quarterly offsites, pre-mortem systems thinking, converting one-time fixes into repeatable rules, defining done so your work doesn't expand indefinitely, the one, two, three method for having a successful day. And it goes on and on. There's a lot to it. Greg, who is Greg? Greg McEwen, M-C-K-E-O-W-N. You can find him on X at Gregory McEwen, is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. I have highlighted this book in hundreds of places, and that is what led me to ultimately connect with him. And his second book, Effortless, Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. And these two pair very well together, and we certainly dip in and out of a lot of the key concepts in our conversation. He's also a speaker, host of the Greg McEwen podcast, founder of the Essentialism Academy with students from close to 100 countries. And 200,000 people receive his weekly One Minute Wednesday newsletter. And he is also the creator of the Essentialism Planner. So he's done a lot. This conversation gives you plenty to chew on and to take away and apply. So happy new year, everyone. I hope 2026 brings you and yours many pleasant surprises. And now let's get to the episode. Enjoy. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would it seem appropriate to me? What if I did the altitude? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. When something hits, it could be a calamity, it could just be something destabilizing, it could be anything. How do you center yourself so that you don't just end up feeling like you're in the washing machine? Because I am very good at getting things done, even when I'm internally suffering a lot of turmoil. But the last handful of days have been very, very challenging. We don't have to go into specifics, but this is a close loved one. And a lot of the responsibilities are going to fall on me to figure things out. It's also the holidays, right? So the people I want to get a hold of, I cannot get a hold of. And I recognize that fretting over it does not fix anything, and it makes my day less peaceful and enjoyable. And I'll make a reference to one of our earlier conversations, which may have been on the record, may have been behind the scenes. But I'm pretty sure that you mentioned a piece of artwork called The Listener, I want to say. Yes, that's right. is this sort of centered, calm person. And I have it up on my wall at home with all of this shouting commotion and chaos around him. And in the center, he's just perfectly centered and thinking clearly. So I suppose my question is, how do you help get yourself closer to that depiction of the listener when you realize, wow, there may be a lot of chaos around me. There may be a lot of chaos in my head. And look, I'm meditating twice a day. It's helpful. It doesn't seem to be quite enough. And maybe the answer is, look, you sit with it. This is just something you're going to have to weather. So don't make a problem out of a problem in a sense. But I'm curious what you found helpful in those circumstances. I think I can respond that I don't think it's just sitting with it. And I'm pro-meditation and I'm certainly pro-prayer. But the thing I want to say is sort of distinguishing the noise outside of us and the noise inside of us. Because they are two different things. And I want to sort of share a story and then illustrate the action that comes back from it. But this last summer, I was back in England. I'm doing this doctorate at the University of Cambridge. And so part of the requirement of that is to have residency every year there. And this summer, I felt really destabilized while I was there. And it wasn't the doctorate that I don't think was a particularly major part of why. It's because my best friend of 35 years, Sam Bridgestock, is dying of cancer. and that's been a long time coming. We've known that that would happen, but facing it more directly in person, but it wasn't even just that because it wasn't like I didn't know before. It wasn't that I'd come to a new understanding of the truth or the reality. It was, actually for a while, I couldn't work out what it was, but then I realized, oh, he has so much mindshare about the reality of my whole life. We became friends when I was 10 years old. And those years, those developmental years, I mean, I escaped to that friendship and it was so stabilizing to me at the time to have a relationship that was open and honest. And if I'm completely frank, at a little bit of a risk in a way, but in a family culture that didn't prioritize that for a whole series of complex reasons. So suddenly the imminent and certain loss of him, it's like, my goodness, my whole sense of reality is being shaken. So it's not just even though this is a loss of such a friendship and so on, it tapped right back into this whole sense of what is true and who do you go to to validate that? And do I have enough internal sense of truth to be able to navigate this because he was the one I would go to. Oh, my goodness, this is what's happening. This is the reality. This is the situation in those most complex relationships. And the idea of like, oh, I won't be able to go to him, it destabilized something at a different level. And all human systems have these levels, right? From the surface, which is secure, safe, shallow, and then you go further closer and closer, likes it to say that the onion of human systems at the core are things that are so meaningful that they are inherently blisteringly vulnerable. Because to mess with them, to tweak them even, I mean, the opportunity is enormous. I mean, that's where massive transformational change happens. But if it gets shaken by something, everything shakes. It's the earthquake because the tectonic plate of truth inside of you is getting readjusted, or rather you're getting a clearer sense of what is true. Now, that's all contextual because I think from your own description, if you're using language of destabilization, it's because whatever is happening externally isn't just reverberating at the surface or the middle, it's hitting something really deep. And so, of course, then that changes everything. Nothing works the same way before. Everything has been injected with some sort of degree of uncertainty. I just want to come back to this idea of just meditating, the idea of just sitting with it. And people that are more deeply meditative than I am may say, well, no, no, that practice would be the thing to do. But I found this summer, and I find in general, I need to write it out and loudly. It's one of the things I try to teach our children about. There's all kinds of prayer. There's all kinds of writing. Scream it out. Cry it out. Whatever it is. It's like it doesn't have to be a conservative version of this. A little example of this was given to me. Somebody that had on my podcast had just started a new business and that destabilized her, not all the way to the core, but suddenly she's waking up. She doesn't have a set income as before. And she wakes up at like four in the morning, just hot sweat. Just what have I done? Just super stressed. Sounds like my warning this morning. Yeah. Well, that's it. Different reasons, but viscerally similar. Different reasons. But the dynamic is similar. And what she did, she did it all spontaneously, which I think is pretty amazing. But what she did, she grabbed a sheet of paper. And I think it may have been deliberate that she grabbed a sheet of paper rather than a book, like a journal or a planner, because she wanted to scream onto the page. She wanted to do it with complete abandonment, with the awareness, conscious awareness, I'm going to throw this thing away. No one else gets to see this, or no one else has to see it. I see. So the sheet had more of an impermanent implication than a journal, where you can't tear it. You're less likely to tear it out and toss it. This is like, all right, I'm going to scribble fast and furious. And then that's the act. Right. And then I thought was interesting because without her intent, what she experienced in just a few minutes was that she went, maybe this is my restate of what she experienced, but she went from confusion to clarity and then naturally onto creation without meaning to do that. And I thought that that was one of the things that was so interesting in her case study is that she didn't wake up going, okay, I need to create a plan of what to do in these circumstances. She just went, the noise is so loud and it's so overwhelming. The emotions are so much, I have to give it somewhere. But that process of screaming into the page, of letting it all out, separating ourselves from that discombobulating internal state, I think is extremely powerful because I think it helps us to go from prisoner to observer. And then from observer, I think once we start observing, we're better able to become a creator. So I think that's the shift. This is a good reminder that these best practices are like brushing your teeth. And I know this, but I've lapsed in my use of something that sounds very similar, which would be morning pages. And it's been a while since I've done it. I picked up a new habit, this meditation, and there are only so many minutes in the morning, right? So it's tough to do a 27-step boot up, especially if you have kids or responsibilities. So the meditation came in, other things went out. One of them was the morning pages, which is fine, but I had forgotten that was in my toolkit. And this is a very good reminder that to me, that when in doubt, kind of go back to the fundamentals. Maybe it's something that you've already used. Doesn't necessarily have to be a brand new shiny thing. And in this case, you're absolutely right. While my monkey mind is just running in circles, trying to think my way through it is not going to be helpful. It is just a fruitless labor. I think so. I mean, I remember this summer But because I happened to be doing the research, I was raging into the page one day for like, I don't know, a couple of hours. And I don't know that anything there was usable for the research or for a future book or so on. It was too raw for any of that. I just definitely wanted to get it all out. And I thought when I looked at it all afterwards, I thought, yeah, you know, David Allen says, yeah, your mind is a bad office. It's good at all sorts of things, but not that sort of complex organization on its own. And when I looked at the page of all this content, I thought, yeah, that's way, way too much for the ram of my mind to be able to navigate. This is like layers and layers of complexity and intensity that needs to step over there so I can look at it rather than trying to live in it. One additional little thing I learned in this conversation, in the case that I was mentioning, is a term I had never heard before, and it's instinctive elaboration. And what that is, is when you ask a question, we've all had this happen. If someone asks you a question, it is impossible not to think about it. And that's a really powerful thing to learn about somehow our cognitive inheritance, because it means if you give yourself a prompt and then rage about it, it's like your mind can't help but go there. And just recently, I used this instinctive elaboration when I felt overwhelmed, not in the same level of destabilization, but a very intense last 30 days. You know, with family wedding, there's been funerals, there's been the holidays, Christmas, two birthdays, and that's just the normal high level, some of the stuff that's been going on. So it's been this really intense period. And I remember one time I was sitting down, my journal is finished, is over the holidays and there's so much going on. I was like, I can't just go and grab another one. I thought I had extras and I didn't have it. And I really felt strangely stuck. Of course, there's so many possible solutions, but when you feel frozen or stuck with things, you're not thinking in that creative way. And I literally used like an AI tool and I sort of raged into that. Like, okay, this is answering this question. What is going on? Just download the what is happening in your life. I like this structure of what, so what, now what. what is happening? Let's just get it out. And then once I look at it, okay, now what's the news? What does this mean? Because we're all meaning makers and destabilizing experiences. What they're really doing is they're messing with our sense of meaning and orientation. And so then now what is, well, what do I do about it? And I just downloaded, like I literally recorded it and then sent the recording. It was like, okay, what do you make of that? And I didn't really expect that much from it, But the restate it gave me back was so helpful. It really put my life in perspective and helped me go, oh, of course, that's why you're feeling all of these things. And it even gave me some quite, I would say, reasonably advanced suggestions of what to do. So you uploaded the audio file? Yeah, that's right. What tool did you use? Just GPT. Yeah, okay. That's a good experiment because that's something you can do kind of in between, right? And if I'm walking around here, I could just let it rip and there's no downside to it. I've done it a couple of times. Here's a good little prompt to give to that is, I didn't do it this last time, but I've asked it before to respond as Carl Rogers would. Carl Rogers was the psychotherapist who really, more than anyone else, introduced into therapeutic process is the idea of powerful, deep, empathic listening. There's been two studies that were done about Rogerian psychotherapy. One, I think in like 1980-something, and then again in like 2000-something, I can find the links. Questionnaire was sent both times, a huge number of psychologists, who's the most influential psychologist in psychotherapy? And both times they identified Carl Rogers as the most influential in their view and in their practice. I think that's pretty amazing because Freud and so on gets a lot more attention. But in practice, what works is what Carl Rogers did. And of course, what he's saying is similar to what we've been talking about. He says, if someone would really listen to me, he says, whenever someone really listens to me, I find that in the process, my life starts to make more sense. The dots start to connect for me. And it's not that they're trying to do that for me. It's just the nature of the process of being deeply listened to. And so he was the one that sort of really invented the language of empathic restating and brought that into practice. And the whole idea, I think, is that you are de-layering the stuff that isn't the real issue. Whereas in what normally happens in conversation, even everyday conversation, is somebody says something and people just immediately give advice. I mean, just instantly. They have no idea what's going on inside of you. You don't even know what's going on inside of you. And yet they're already giving advice and suggestions and adding confusion. And I think often a lot of stress and a sense of judgment and all of those things. Whereas what he found was that if you would listen deeply enough, and he said, it takes a lot of courage to do this. And he said, it's that most of us cannot do it. We just don't have the courage to listen like this. But if we are, and we restate back to them and we just keep doing it, we'll go deeper and deeper to the central issues. And it's a sense of like people in the end kind of almost heal themselves because they start to understand what's happening inside of them. Well, I've played around with using GPT to construct that backwards and forwards relationship communication. And actually, I found it to be fairly advanced at being able to do it. So I think it can be a very helpful tool. I'll give it a shot. Well, thanks for that detour off of our planned programming. I appreciate that. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. 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It turns out that I use them all the time. They're super convenient and they are NSF certified for sports. So you get the gold standard purity without all the mess. Head to livemomentous.com and use code TIM for up to 35% off of your first order. Why don't we then begin at the beginning? We are just about to head into January 1st, a new year. And a lot of people are thinking ahead with aspirations, goals, hopes, maybe some trepidation. and before we get into the bucket of tricks strategies and tactics and so on let's back up for people who don't have much context on your background could you briefly explain what essentialism is and also effortless the titles of two of your books respectively and you know i've thought about it as in part, one is what to do, the other is how to do it, but that's not going to give people enough of a table setting. So would you mind just taking a moment to explain what the sort of main kernels are, the core concept for these two? Essentialism in one word would be focus. Effortless in one word would be simplification. Another way of contrasting them is essentialism is figuring out what the right thing is to do, and effortless is to do it in the right way. And one of the reasons that I wrote both books was because I'd covered some of effortless within essentialism. But as I've traveled around and taught this now, you know, all over, maybe 400 plus organizations around the world over the last decade, almost nobody got the second message, even though it is in there. Some of it's in there. Yeah, I know the feeling. And yeah, well, I can take responsibility for this, but it's like people heard the first mindset shift and not the second. And I think they're both just as important, just as powerful. So what they heard in essentialism is, so essentialism has three elements to it. Explore, eliminate, execute. Explore what's essential as opposed to non-essential, as opposed to the trivial many. It's like, what are the vital few things that make all the difference? Exploring that and identifying that. Then eliminate is to actually delete the non-essentials, to remove them. It's not enough just to know what matters, what's essential in your life, in your year, in your day. You actually have to get rid of the stuff that's getting in the way of those essentials. and then execute is literally to make it as effortless as possible to do what matters most. So in there, there's these two shifts, find what's essential and eliminate the non-essential. And then once you've arrived at that state or in an ongoing process, really, you're then saying, well, how do I set up systems? How do I organize myself in such a way that the essential things happen? Having your best day or your worst day. Yeah, right. You stay your hardest day. Well, first of all, and I'll recommend both books to everybody. Essentialism is one of my most highlighted Kindle books that I have. Effortless is similar, and it's the discipline pursuit of less. I would also, in my mind, it's what to do. That is effectiveness would be essentialism. And then how to do it, which would be efficiency, is effortless. And I think for myself, if I'm looking back on the past year, I think I've been very good at identifying the essential. And old habits die hard. I have been overexerting. I have been efforting my way through some of those essential things by subconsciously overcomplicating them or introducing unnecessary complication and obstacles. because there is that mantra that was ingrained in me at some point, which is if it's important and it's not hard, you are not trying hard enough. But in a world of noise, if you aim to be surgical, there's nothing wrong with that applied focus. So let's hop into new year, new you type of discussion. A lot of folks listening will peg things to like a 30-day challenge, a 60-day reboot, whatever it might be. but you have a different lens through which you look at pegging dates and thinking about these types of landmarks. Could you elaborate on that, please? The term for this in the literature is temporal landmarks. So what almost everybody is familiar with, this idea of the new year, new you, we all experience that. Oh, it's a new chance. What the research on this is distinguishing is it's like any moment that allows you to distinguish old self to new self. And that this is a really helpful cognitive malleability that you have because, oh, we have an excuse to become a new version of me, to upgrade myself. So the new year, new you is obviously a chance for people to do that. It gets a bad name in some sense because people say, I mean, everyone says, oh, well, who here has set new year's resolutions? And then by the 7th of January, you're not doing them anymore. And I actually think people are really wrong to say that in a sense, to frame it like that. What we just need is more temporal landmarks so that we say, yeah, we did the right things. And if it was seven days, well, that was great because that was seven days you wouldn't have done otherwise. How else can you select meaningful sort of tagging fresh start moments? So of course your birthday is a chance to do that, but so could the anniversary and so could your parents' birthday or so could your child's birthdays. You can have the first day of the quarter. So that's an additional four. And so identifying meaningful dates, and this is more than just a nice idea. And I think people would themselves know if they've experienced this in their lives. Yeah, this is real. You want to increase the number of these you have in 2025 so that you have lots of what's called the fresh start effect. You want lots of fresh start effects supporting you in getting to the new you. So I think, yeah, celebrate. If it's seven days, great. If it's two weeks into January, you're doing that new thing, fantastic. Build in the next one. What's the next meaningful date of the year And that your next chance to be able to have an excuse to improve upon something I think all of us are prisoners to the way our mind currently works And we prisoners until we become observers to it. So I think these temporal landmarks are a chance to sort of separate ourselves a bit. And the moment we get into that observer role, my experience at least, is that, well, it might feel a little esoteric to say this, but it's like, who's observing that? That's the real you. And that observer is not so full of pain, not so full of confusion. The observer is actually really clear. And so anytime you can use different tools to shift into that, anytime we can break down projects and anchor them to meaningful dates, not arbitrary deadlines, but meaningful dates, I think is a good accelerating, encouraging way of going through the year. Yeah. Something that I've done in addition to pegging things to dates, I've done this somewhat, I suppose, intuitively with the temporal landmarks is creating landmarks that are effectively tests for the X that I'm trying to improve. So I will have, and I already have two or three of these blocked out in 2025, which are, let's just say, three to 10 day events, which could be a meditation retreat. It could be something very physical at altitude that's going to require types of fitness that I am loathe to cultivate because I find them boring. But if I go on this trip with close friends and I am not up to snuff, not only will I suffer, I will be ridiculed and have my balls busted endlessly by my friends who should exactly do that. And by having these, I don't want to say final exams, but these tests that are intended to be enjoyable, but they're only going to be enjoyable if I do the work ahead of time. It builds in a lot of incentive and insurance that I will behave myself on some level and do what I know I should do. Let's hop into, doesn't have to be rapid fire, but I want to give people a number of different concepts and tools that they can hopefully contemplate using. And I'll let you choose in which order you want to tackle these. Personal quarterly offsite, which is something that I've long been fascinated from your toolkit. I've been fascinated by that for a while. So the personal quarterly offsite, the power half hour or half an hour, and then the one, two, three methods, where would you like to go first? That order I think is good. Actually, the personal quarterly offsite, if I put it just conceptually for a second, it's speed over direction because we live in a time where it's so easy to have what I would describe as counterfeit agility. So you're moving fast. Life feels fast. Life is fast. And you're taking messages, you're sending messages, you're doing things, but actually they don't add up to a lot of progress towards what matters. Right. It's a millimeter in a thousand directions. Yeah, precisely. So the speed over direction is what you don't want. Yeah, that's right. That's right. The metaphor to go with it, right? You could say, well, a plane is off track 90% of the time. It only gets to where it's supposed to get to at the right time because it's adjusting constantly. So it's what is the forcing function in our lives to make sure we don't go too far off track and then find, oh my goodness, you know, it's been five years that I've gone down this path when really I shouldn't have been on this journey. Right. I thought I was going to Arizona. I'm in North Korea. What happened? Yeah. Right, right, right. That would be a moment, wouldn't it? And so personal quarterly offsite, I mean, you can take it all the way literally. I mean, Anna and I have done this where we'll travel to somewhere and take a weekend or take a few days possibly and really talk big picture. I mean, there's three main questions that I think need to be addressed in a personal quarterly offsite, even though it's more than these three, but this is the core of it is one, what are the essential things that we're under-investing in? The second question is, what are the non-essential things we're over-investing in? And then perhaps not surprisingly, how can we make it as effortless as possible to be able to make that shift within this next 90 days? Now, there's more sub-questions to it than that, but I think that's the tension that is so important to identify clearly. And so it doesn't have to be as major as this, though. I think you could still make meaningful progress in an hour or two on your own or with someone else. I like doing it with an accountability partner. But even there, I think the best practice is you fill out this process. You answer these questions yourself, they do it, and then you bring them together and start talking and get into not negotiation exactly, but exploration and working through things. And I think that's one of the primary benefits of a personal quarterly offsite, is really facing the reality that all of us are lost. All of us are going in the wrong direction until we pause, think about it, get clear again. I do not feel like I'm a better essentialist or better at applying these ideas in one sense than anybody else, certainly not inherently, but I think I admit to it faster than maybe the average person. And I think that's the key. Could you give an example of, ideally a real example, but it doesn't have to be, but particularly number three. So there's the, what's the essential that you're under-investing in, I'm sure I could sit down and identify that. What's non-essential that you're over-investing in? I think I could also come up with that list. How can you make it as effortless or make it effortless to make the trade-off? That is where the rubber hits the road. So I would love to hear an example perhaps of how you've navigated that or seen others navigate it. We could do it with me or with you right now. I'm game to try it. We'll see if my brain cooperates, but I'm happy to give it a shot. Okay. So let's just ask these questions with you right now. Let's do like a little essentialist intervention. Maybe I shouldn't call it that, but let's try it. Sure. Well, let's do it for the whole year. What are candidates for things that are essential that you feel like you've been under-investing in? I think what I've been under-investing in, in the last month, which is something that I need to invest in, in almost the most literal sense, because it's something that will have a payoff in the long term as it compounds, is physical therapy and training for the legs and glutes and lower back. Because I've had this chronic pain for, let's just call it two years, it's probably longer, with these brief windows of respite. And there was a period of time where I was doing this training very consistently. and having intermittent progress. And then about, let's just call it a month ago, I had a injection in a very particular place, which helped the back pain tremendously. And I could give a litany of excuses, family, medical situation and various things. I have been neglecting that, in part because I'm having this window of relief from the lower back pain. So it's not an immediate pressing issue, but I know it will be. So let's just say that, and it's something essential that I'm under investing in, even though I am going to be doing this particular training as soon as we finish this recording. So it hasn't completely left the arena, but it's something that I've been inconsistent with that I know is fundamental to my wellbeing. That'd be one. Well, first of all, it's a great example because when I ask people what's essential that you're under-investing in, there are some really predictable answers. And one of them is certainly will be health-related, fitness-related. It's something they already know about, that their conscience is already tapping them about. But what I have learned is this strange law of inverse prioritization, which is, I literally believe now that the most important thing in our lives at any given time is the least likely thing to get done. It sort of squares with what I see and what I've experienced at points. Why do you think that is? I think one of the reasons is because it's so important. The risk of failing at it is much higher than anything else in your life. So it adds to this procrastination feeling. Performance anxiety. Yes. Yeah. Very high performance anxiety around that important thing because doing something about it shows that you can fail or might show that, yeah. Doesn't work. It doesn't work. And now we'll be back to the beginning on this thing that's so high stakes. And then the more important the thing is, the more vulnerable it is. So then, you know, you want to avoid, you know, we all know we should, that courage is a virtue, but courage always feels terrible. I mean, like it is an awful feeling. It's not like you imagine when you see other people being courageous. Well, courage doesn't exist without the prerequisite of fear. It's you feel fear and you do the thing anyway. Without the fear, courage as a word and concept doesn't apply. Yeah. There's lots of layers of reasons that add on to that. One is sort of pretend perfectionism that drives procrastination. Well, unless I'm going to do this perfectly, unless I'm really ready to do this, unless I'm in the perfect situation, unless I'm going to do it for the full amount of time. So all of these additional rules. Yeah. I think I've set up, basically set myself up to fail with the number of checkboxes, like the perfect length. And as we're talking about this, just in terms, I'm skipping to the end. We haven't hit number two, which I'm sure I've got plenty, but in terms of making it effortless, it's just like, and I've done this in other areas too. It's just scale it down, right? Don't eliminate the session. If it's 10 minutes, it's 10 minutes instead of an hour. but don't put a lot of zeros on the calendar in terms of missed training sessions. It's like, if it's got to be five minutes, it's got to be five minutes, but like 60 can be the ideal, but what's not allowed is zero. It's having a maximum and minimum, like it's a lower bar, but also the higher bar, like a limit on both. And when I hear you say, oh, well, an hour would be perfect, or I think that's what you said, I felt overwhelmed for you. literally i'm like an what an hour that is you know like oh i can't add an hour of physical therapy even though i'm sure there are things i should be doing too and so i like the term microburst for this that's an environmental reality right like these storms that are just these 10 minute storms a microburst but actually setting a timer for 10 minutes and the key is that you end at the end of the 10 minutes that's what you're using the discipline for and you say okay i'm gonna do that 10 days in a row, 10 minutes, and when it hits 10 minutes, I'm done. So that the next day, you know, this is small. Like I really will end when it says so, and therefore I'll carry it on. There's just almost no end to the application of that. I was just reflecting on this as I was finishing this journal. I need to get the next one. You know, this is like in January, that will be 14 years that I've kept a journal. And I don't think I've missed a day. I might have done if I went through it all, but I don't think I have. But the reason is because my upper bound when I first started was five sentences and my lower bound was one sentence. And what normally happens with journals is the exact opposite. First day, people write three pages. And by day two, it's done by day two, because on day two, they're like, I don't have an hour for this. And so then they go, oh, I'll do it tomorrow. And then day three, now they're going to do two hours in their mind. And so it's over before they've begun. So I think that's one key thing for you is the 10 minutes. I've done it 10 minutes. Until I have done 10 days in a row, I'm doing 10 minutes. It's way, way better to do that little than to not do any because you want to do it perfectly. Yeah, that's good advice. Then I mean, I think there's so many things that you could do to make this more enjoyable. What is a certain book, could be a podcast, but it could be a book or some other thing, audio thing that you're only going to get to listen to, or a movie, you know, fun show. This is the only time I get to watch that is the 10 minutes that I'm going to do this. And so you link it together. I've gone through so many classics this year because while I'm running, while I'm doing exercise, while I'm traveling, I'm listening to some of the greatest literature ever written. I just almost feel like it is like cheat code. I'm cheating the system. I am just having wisdom and knowledge and entertainment poured into me while I'm doing something else. I really am getting two for the price of one. And so that's another way to do it. Of course, you could have a forcing function where if you don't do it, we've heard these things before, but if you don't do it, then you have to pay a certain amount to a charity or to a political party, not of your choosing, or you can create these forcing function bets. I had somebody who had a really important trade-off they were trying to make and their penalty for not making the trade-off would be their favorite wine was $300 bottle is some, I don't know wine, but, and he would have to pour down one glass of it if he didn't complete it on this day. And that was his forcing function. And that was so painful for him that it really gave him an excuse. I mean, it's a fun excuse, but an excuse to be on track and to be consistent. So, I mean, there's all sorts of things that we can do. Even you publicly is talking about it here. Okay. Well now everybody knows. I mean, all of these things are to try to stack the decks in your favor and to try to remove those things that make it harder than it needs to be. Yeah. I mean, I'm already thinking about a few things. I mean, it's very basic, but for instance, you know, I'm staying due to the circumstances with the family stuff. I'm not at home. I'm staying in hotels and I need to travel to a location and sign in and sign waivers and so just to do any of this. So it's like, all right, look, I've fortunately got the budget. I should just go out later today, get a reasonably thick yoga mat and just stick it in my hotel room. I don't actually need anything else. And currently, because it's a concrete floor, I can't do what I would intend to do because it'll be brutally unpleasant on the joints. And okay, that's a solvable problem, right? And obviously I'm trying to sort of stack effortless ideas. This woman does not have to do any of these things. The question is the key. How do you make it effortless? I mean, okay, in a hotel, somebody in that hotel can go do that for you. You could find somebody to pay to do it. Now, that all sounds like, oh, yeah, champagne type of solution. But it's like, well, that also makes it effortless. It's all about trying to ask that question and giving your brain enough time to do a Google search looking for easy solutions. And I think there's such a, in the insecure overachiever, there's such a pushback about this in the mind, well, what's the easy solution? Oh, no, no, that can't be it. That we don't even allow the search to take place. Yeah, well, also as the insecure achiever, which is a label I've grown quite fond of while we've been talking, that probably characterized me pretty well. You and me both, we're both in this. Yeah, these achiever types often have a modicum of success in any number of ways because they are good at solving problems. So the inclination is to ask, how can I do X? But that's not how the sentence needs to start. The sentence could be, who could do this besides me? Or who knows? Maybe Instacart could go get me a yoga mat. It doesn't necessarily have to be Claude the butler. I'm not suggesting that it's like, well, I'll just take my seven-story hovercraft down to Scrooge McDuck's office and we'll take some gold coins out of his swimming pool. but reframing and rephrasing the questions that you habitually ask yourself. This is something I do try to pay attention to. But my go-to is typically like, all right, look, it's going to take me too long to get somebody up to speed on all this bullshit. I'm just going to do it myself. How can I do this as easily as possible? But that still presents a hurdle. And especially in this current day of automation, getting someone else or someone else vis-a-vis an app or a retailer vis-a-vis an app to do something like this is available to almost anyone who is listening to this podcast, practically speaking. Yeah. Well, look, Warren Buffett described it this way. He said, to be alive today in the developed world, you have more opportunity, more means, more chances for learning and for travel and so on than Rockefeller did. And that was such a good reframe for me because you're talking about Instacart, there are so many ways to make things happen now. And almost all of us do have access to those things. And I'm not trying to minimize this. It's the way of thinking that's outdated. That's where the clutter is. The execution ability in our societies are really pretty unbelievable right now. Now, there's one more tactic worth considering here. One of the principles in Effortless is the courage to be rubbish. And doing it in a shorter period of time, that's one of the things you could say, well, that's the rubbish version. but you're saying the yoga mat and I think, well, yeah, I can see why that works. But you could also use something else. It doesn't have to be a yoga mat on the first time today. Yeah. If we wanted to scale that down to dirty prototype, it's like, okay, well, let me just grab some of the towels or something else. And it's going to kind of be a pain in the ass, but it's better than nothing, right? It's better than doing a zero. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and microcoils that create a soft contouring feel. Helix offers a 100-night sleep trial, fast, free shipping, and a 15-year warranty. So check it all out. And now you can get 20% off anything on their website, so site-wide. So just go to helixsleep.com slash tim. One more time, helixsleep.com slash Tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now. CoyoteGame.com will take you to all the retailers, but you can find it everywhere. It is a game of thinking fast and laughing faster. Thinks charades meets hot potato meets a bunch of brain fun. It's good for your head. It's perfect for families with kids age 10 plus or adults who are kids at heart or don't take themselves too seriously. A lot of adults love this game. And as I said, it's available everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target, 8,000 plus retail locations, you name it. So please check it out. I loved making it. People are really enjoying it. It has 300 or 400 million plus social views of gameplay online. And try it, enjoy it this holiday season. Check it out, coyotegame.com. One more time, that's coyotegame.com or anywhere you buy your games. Now, back to the episode. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on doing a pre-mortem, because I have found that this seems to be something you've given quite a bit of thought to. And the reason I bring it up is I think a lot of people fumble sort of right before the touchdown, so to speak. And that's because they don't think about what could go wrong. And there are lots of questions maybe they've answered. And I just came from a company off-site. We were chatting earlier today before recording where we talked about where have we been, where are we now, where do we want to be? We covered a lot of that ground. But one of the questions that we didn't really think about as much, we did maybe in some nominal way ask, are there any blockers? But we didn't explicitly ask, what are the most likely things to stop us from getting there, meaning where we want to go? and that's something I really want to hone as a skill which I've done intermittently but maybe you could just lay out what that looks like if people aren't grasping the example that I'm giving but what is this pre-mortem? I think if you want to make optimal progress on what's essential then using a strategic narrative is a really helpful way to go about this. I just did a session like this with the leadership of the Navy SEALs. And this wasn't the only thing that we did, but this was part of it, was to not to write out, but to draw, where have you been? Where are you now? Where do you want to be? And then this fourth question that you're focusing on, what is going to keep us from doing it? What's stopping us? What's in the way? And so you have all of these commanders and above drawing. And then we're looking at all the drawing. The drawing's not just, it's not just to be fun or gimmick. It's another forcing function to get to clarity. It's easy to hide behind numbers and too many words and too many bullet points. If you have to create an image, it forces a certain part of your brain to light up. And so they did that. But then what it enables us to do to look at, in this case, an image of what's going to keep you from achieving your outcome is that, first of all, it becomes tangible so that you can actually prosecute it. Well, that might not really be the issue. That is a thought that you have, but that thought is actually outdated thought. That's not really what it is based on an assumption. So you need to prosecute it before you try to solve that obstacle. You need to say, well, is it really an obstacle? Is that just the way we've been doing it in the past? How have we overcomplicated it? Every organization, every single organization follows a predictable pattern with overcomplicating. Every society does the same thing. There's a brilliant book written about this by Joseph Tainter called The Collapse of Complex Societies, in which he says, look, all societies become fragile because they solve problems that add too much complexity, and then there's no mechanism for reducing that complexity other than failure. The most fragile state for society in his analysis is that it requires all of the resources you have available to maintain the current level of complexity. And so then it doesn't matter what the next massive problem is. He studied all these dozens of different societies that have collapsed. And one's for famine and one's because of war and one's because of civil unrest. I mean, every cause looks different, but he's like, they're the same thing. It's just another massive problem and you don't have any resources to handle it. So the first thing to do once you've asked the question, what's getting in the way is to just pause on it. Why do I think that's getting the way? Is that really the problem? And it's back to this falling in love with the problem, not the solution. And high-performance people and high-performance executives, and in this case, high-performing commanders and major commanders, I mean, they are built to execute. They're the elite of the elite at being able to make something happen. But the problem is, how do you challenge that strength so that you first go, have we identified the right problem? Is this really the issue? Why do we think this is the thing? Why do we think this is getting in the way? That's really non-trivial part of the thought process. If you really think you've pinpointed and unlocked the real issue, which as I say, most people with the curse of competence make the mistake of not prosecuting it. Then of course, now you're saying, okay, well, we really do think this is the obstacle. We do think this is the problem. Then it's really creating a lot of buffer for that to expect the unexpected, to know that things will come up. I mean, your example that we've started this conversation with, right? Like, let's say, I assume two months ago, you didn't know this was going to happen. And here it is, and it's having all this effect. And it's like, we don't know what will happen in 2025, but I'll bet anybody, almost any amount of money that they will have such things come up in 2025 that they're not yet prepared for. If you think about the future as only perfect best case scenario, you are setting yourself up for really frustrating, stressful, poor execution. The best performers, I think here, think of Phelps. Think about Phelps process. So when they're creating the coach, Bob Bowman and Phelps, effectively their strategic narrative, right? Effectively, they don't literally do it, but drawing out where they've been where they want to go, what could get in the way? The list is a long list, longer than I realized, because of course he's performed so many times at elite level. Well, what really can get in the way at the Olympics other than the other competitors No they got a long and complex identification of possible problems One of the things that they said which was interesting to me when I talked to Bob about this he said well the conditions in China or in any Olympics is that they will be worse than the conditions he's used to training in. That never occurred to me before because I just sort of always look so extraordinary. You just assume that The athletes are having great experiences off camera. And he's like, that's never how it is. It's always much more chaotic. There's always many more problems. The conditions aren't ideal. So his goal was, how can I make Phelps experience as normal as possible in really abnormal circumstances? So some of the things that they do. Okay, they have a set routine so that he's there two hours before every race. That's a lot of buffer, especially for me who can be quite time blind. It's easy to just show up right at the time or a couple of minutes late, two hours ahead of time. Why? Because no matter what happens, you have buffer now. They're in the pool following a normal routine so that he can feel normal even though everything's abnormal. So they're doing the same thing until 45 minutes when he sits on the massage table, never lies down because it's routine. You routinize everything you can routinize. When he comes to the call time, he sits down, puts a towel next to him on one side, his goggles on the other so that no one can sit next to him. You just don't need another detraction. It's another thing you can control in the routine. He's listening to the same music. When he gets up to the board to jump off, he's getting on always from the left-hand side, always tries it before he gets up there. All of this is as a result of having identified previously problems that could come up. And if you do it in this sequence, then you've mitigated all those execution problems. When he stands to jump into the pool, he flaps his arms in a very particular Phelpsian way every time. That's just the physical preparation in advance. He also had mental preparation processes that included, for example, for 10 years before the Beijing Olympics, he is every night and every morning told to put in the videotape. You can see how long it's been going on for. Put in the videotape. And it means to imagine the perfect race from end to end in slow motion. But it also includes exercises like, what will you do if your goggles fill with water? So imagine stroke by stroke, perfect race, even though your goggles are filled with water and so on. Like lots of different mental preparation cycles. And in fact, that is what happened in one of the races is the goggles did fill with water, which you could just imagine how just if you have never anticipated that never thought through it psychologically mentally that's it that's over forget a race forget the olympics i would hate to try and do that for even a couple of lengths would be not at all enjoyable and he still is able to win because he's literally prepared for these scenarios when it came down to those olympics bob bowman said to me he said i knew it was feasible to happen but i couldn't believe that it happened as effortlessly as it did. It just, everything clicked every time, one after another. He says at the end, he stood like in the movie, The Miracle, he stood in the hallway and just on his own, just had this moment of sort of exquisite meltdown of like, here I have, I've been speaking with confidence, but the thing actually executed so beautifully, so well, no one had ever done it before. You know, like somebody described him, if he wins seven gold medals, he'll be like the first man on the moon. If he wins eight, he'll be like the first man on Mars. And he does the eight. When I went to the cube in China, I was reflecting on this. How did he make the execution look so effortless? It's like, that's why I ended up interviewing Bob about this because I was like, you've got to explain it. What went on? What's behind the scenes? It's not just the moment that looks like the moment of execution. It's what are all the problems? What are all the mitigating things we can do. We'll build that into the routine. He added this final thought, which I think is interesting. He said, if you ask Phelps about this, he might not even tell you there is a routine. It's so normal now. And it was built so deliberately. That's just life. And yet all of it was built in place as anticipation for challenges and problems so that then the whole thing feels effortless, fluid, but really it's because of all of this anticipation planning. Yeah, and it's also, it strikes me, not what is holding this back. It could be present tense, but what could prevent this? I know one very, very successful, one of the most, maybe the most successful consumer packaged goods investor. He's also a serial founder, so he invests in, if you go to Whole Foods, everything there is CPG. All right, he will ask co-founders, he said, three years from now, you guys have had a huge dispute and one of you wants to leave. What are the most likely reasons? That's his question. What are the most likely reasons? And I mean, there's a lot that can uncork, obviously. If there are already tensions or finger pointing at play, then he'll get to see it. But it often will unearth other things that might be problematic. Maybe there's an equity split that one person feels is unfair. Maybe there's a power dynamic where they're both trying to split CEO duties 50-50, which I've never seen work, and so on and so forth. But having those come up early allows him as an investor to say, okay, great. And I'm role-playing here, but he might say, I want to invest. Here are the terms I'm willing to agree to, but a condition of that will be that we fix A, B, and C that you guys brought up. And that's it, right? So that's a way of sussing out a pre-mortem. And in my case, to focus on my lower back rehab, it's very simple. It's like, okay, well, if I'm traveling, what happens? Because sure, if I'm at home and I have all of my toys and tools and my routine is already established, so there isn't a lot of hemming and hawing or figuring out how to order food from room service or whatever, that's great. But you need to develop systems and plans and contingencies so that you do what you're supposed to do on your worst days. The best days will hopefully kind of take care of themselves, but the world doesn't always serve you up perfect days. So in the case of the low back stuff, it's like, okay, well, I should have yoga mat. I'm just using yoga mat example pre-ship to every hotel room maybe we choose hotels based on which ones have gyms or yoga mats already in the rooms which is true for some places dot dot dot dot dot dot dot but basically put that into a template right maybe that's a google doc for me or for someone else where it's like okay i have to book a hotel for location x like what are the rules what's the template and then that's it it's just done hopefully it's a set it and forget it type of operation where it's like okay identify a possible problem identify solution to possible problem build that in to every time x is done right whatever that x might be the word that you use that isn't a new word to any of us but brings to mind an extreme and amazing case of this is the word systems. And I don't know if you know Rob Dyrdek. I don't think so. He's an MTV star. Have you seen the show Ridiculousness? I don't think I have. Maybe. Maybe, yeah. I'll have to look it up. It's a kind of American home videos, you know, crazy crashes and terrible things and hilarious. That's one of the shows that he's most famous for now, a big MTV show. Before that, he was famous first. His first big show was Robin Big. And then before that, he was famous as a skateboarder. Lots of people listening to this know already who Rob Dyrdek is. But in persona, he's this skateboarder. I mean, he's funny and he's a certain kind of version of him. But as I've got to know Rob, he absolutely blows my mind in the intentionality of the system he's building. I think he's the second best paid skateboarder in America. among many other things. I want to try and capture this because he sent to me a document. It's called The Rhythm of Experience. I've had a lot of people send me life plan tools and documents and versions of things, like his vision statements and mission statements and goals and roles and all sorts of things you might expect to have in there. This is a 50-page document that is like seeing the future. Every single thing he learns about himself, about a system, about a problem. They just build it into the same single document, everything. So when he got married, he has therapy. I think he does it either every week or every two weeks from the time they got married. He's like, it's like a Ferrari. We're just updating Ferrari. It's not because there's a problem. It's just anticipation. Of course there'll be problems. So we just build it into the routine. So anything that comes up in those conversations, he doesn't just go, oh yeah, that's good. I'm really trying to work on that. I'm going to improve on that. He goes, okay, right. I'm not communicating well about what my schedule is. Okay. So he builds it into the routine. Every single morning, an email of my routine will be sent every day forever going forward to my wife. So she never has to have that specific problem again. Everything he learns, he builds into the system so that he isn't learning the same lesson, you know, like living 20 years, but actually you're just living the same year 20 times. he's actually gaining 20 years of experience. So let me ask you a question about his document, the rhythm of experience, because it sounds like there are two things, at least just to confirm that I'm understanding this. He has a document that contains learnings and various things. He also has very rapid action after, let's just say, wife gives the feedback. I don't know what your schedule is. I want you to communicate. I'd love for you to communicate better about that. He's like, great. From this point forward, daily email to wife regarding schedule. But it sounds like that goes into action. How that's implemented, I don't know. But what does the document do? Because if the document is 50 pages long or however long it is, presumably there would have to be some scheduled time for reviewing that or using it. My takeaway is that he basically creates a rule and systematizes things that he doesn't have a hundred one-off band-aid solutions, right? There's like some sort of recurring semi-permanent or permanent policy that he puts in place to address various things. But how is the document actually used? Everyone on his team has access to the same document. So it's not just for him to remember. And so this is the brain. This is what you're going to first. Like you're not coming to him, hey, how should we handle this and that? unless it's not in that document. It really is. I mean, we all sort of know the idea of the difference between working in your business and on your business. But he's just applying that to his life in a more sophisticated, developed way than anyone I have seen. I'm curious because I have, not surprisingly, spent a lot of time thinking about systems. I come up with rules and policies and this, this, and this. That I have found to be the easy part. I create a document or someone else creates a document. There's a Google Doc. It's shared with everyone on the team. But by the way, in the process of doing business week to week, month to month, year to year, there are hundreds of Google documents. And aside from for specific documents saying if they're short enough, let's just say there's a short, which there is. I have a sort of 12 commandments of Tim's calendar type of document. It's like, okay, like every Wednesday morning review this or something. Okay, you can have somebody put in a recurring calendar item to do that. But otherwise, I'm most interested in how the team uses the document because there's a search and discovery challenge sort of inherent with Google Docs and so on. Now, if it's a single doc, that's interesting, but that presents its own challenges if it becomes kind of unwieldy. It's like, hey, my wife didn't get the reminder on the calendar. They're like, what reminder on the calendar? Well, whatever. And they're like, oh, it's on page 47 buried under miscellaneous. Why didn't you find it? Because no human would ever think to find that quickly there. So I don't know if there's any light you can shed on that. While we're sort of thinking about that, I'm just remembering of other precision things that he has on there, right? So he gets his haircut once a week at exactly the same time because he likes his hair just to be, never have to think about that, never have to schedule it. And every time I schedule an appointment to get my haircut, every time I think, you're doing this wrong, Greg. Because there's a way to systematize that. And I know someone who's done it and I haven't done it yet. I mean, what we're talking about is the difference between linear results and residual results, right? So if a linear result is one way you say, well, it only happens today if you take action to do it today, right? So linear income, right? You get paid per hour, per day. And so you get paid when you work today, right? And residual income would be, okay, income that rolls to you through all sorts of investments that can do that when you're sleeping. So it just is happening automatically. It's such a game changer to shift one's mindset between the two. Let's talk about if you're open to it and feel free to defer this and continue on a different thread if you like. But defining done, this is also something that has captured my attention. I'll let you open that in any way that makes sense. But why is it important to define what done looks like? because insecure overachievers can endlessly complicate any task to an infinite degree. So just asking the question, what does done look like? And then sticking to it, knowing when this thing has happened, when we've reached that point, that is what done will be on this project, this goal. It of course is an accelerating thing to do. And then maybe just saying it a different way, it's almost like a natural law. If you don't know what done looks like, you cannot be done. Even defining a done-for-the-day list, I think, is really helpful. So as part of a tool that I actually never thought I would do it, I was under contract to create an essentialism planner 10 years ago. And after I worked on it for a few months with a team, I just concluded, yeah, I think I would just be creating something just totally non-essential, which would be too ironic. And I just, it's just not helpful enough to anyone. This is just like every other planner like this and, or journal. And I uncommitted, got out of the contract. And then a couple of years ago, after I'd carried on trial and error in my own life, applying these ideas, I finally was like, no, actually, I think I have something now that special and it works and it's so helpful to me. I think I'm ready to actually get into contract and do it. So we did that, went through again, more iterations, removed loads of stuff you would normally have in a planner so that it really is sort of just the heart of it has a personal quarterly offsite in it as a weekly process you go through and then a daily process. And the output of the daily process is a done for the day list. It doesn't mean when you've done these six items and it's the particular, it's called the one, two, three methods. So there's six items total. When you've done those six things, you can feel you're done for the day. And maybe you don't do anything else, but you know you have done important things, urgent things, key things for tomorrow. And there's a method to get to that. But a done for the day list is, I think, helpful psychologically for removing unnecessary cognitive strain on our minds when we're just perpetually doing. There's no doing and they're not doing times. There's just endlessly looping, endlessly doing semi-tasks or semi-distractions in a digital world. The one, two, three method, you mentioned that, that is the one most essential thing, two essential and urgent things, and three maintenance items equals done for the day? Yep. Okay. And could you give an example of what that might look like in your own life? What that one, two, three has looked like or might look like? I'm going to back up just for just a second, just to say, okay, this is part of the daily process. There's a solid science behind structure and this protocol. And nobody needs to know that, you know, what all that research is, but it's helpful just to know that that's the case. It follows this structure that I call it the power half an hour, because I basically think, look, for most people, maybe everyone, including me, it's unrealistic to say, oh, take control of your whole life. But if you could take control of half an hour of your life that will improve every other minute of the other 23 and a half hours, okay, that's a pretty high return on effort. And if there's a micro version, you can do it. The minimum, I would suggest, I think you can do this well, still have a valuable experience. It's like six minutes, and that's sort of a backup lower bound. But you're answering three questions. I mentioned them previously, but you do it on a daily basis. What? So what? Now what? but that's the structure. So that every day you take that noise. So instead of it building up days and weeks at a time, you're just spending that immediately, just getting the noise out. What's going on? Download. So what? What's the news in your life? Try to find the headline, the key. Why does this matter? What does this mean? And then the third thing, the now what, is the one, two, three method. What does it look like for me? Okay. So the priority for the day. So I'm thinking about Saturday, priority for the day on Saturday. My niece is getting married. Clara and John, a shout out to them. And so that's the priority. And that's an obvious one, I suppose, on that day, because certain things, it's already structurally built in. I still find it helpful to identify it because it helps me go, okay, that's the mission. That's the priority, singular. If I only do one thing today, if I only need to give my attention to one thing today, this is what I need to give attention to. And underneath that, you have, okay, two things that are essential and urgent. I sort of described this as like the taxes of our life. And that was kind of literally true on Saturday, right? We'd come into the very end of the year, any final financial things I need to have sorted out, retirement, taxes, anything, this would be the last day to check. So I think those were the items that were on there. Maintenance items I describe as like the laundry of our life, which can be literally the laundry, but I have a car that has one of the tires. It is just losing air on it. Obviously, it's not a normal, simple thing, but if I don't take care of that, which doesn't mean I have to execute it, the task is schedule this or have this organized so that you know it's done. The three maintenance items per day are the things that make tomorrow a lot harder if you don't resolve them today. Your future self is always grateful that you took care of the maintenance items. And of course, this is all just a rule of thumb, this one, two, three, but I've just found it so helpful. And I don't do it every day. I still wish I did. But what I notice is that when I don't do it, my day is more frenetic, more frantic. I don't have as clear sense of the day. It's not nearly as satisfying because even though I can still be productive in a kind of more forced way, you don't know if you're doing the most important thing. You don't know, yes, I have selected these things. You don't have something to come back to going back to the plain analogy of, okay, well, all these things happened that I didn't expect to happen. Yes, that's normal. That's life. But you don't have a chance to go, okay, coming back to the most important thing, let's work on this again. And so that's an example from just literally this weekend of how I would think about it. And it just allows you on the days that I've done it to enjoy the experience. And also, and I suppose maybe this is the most important benefit, is that you actually know and work on the most important thing, which as previously stated, is actually the least likely thing to happen. That's, of course, a very satisfying way to live. So you go through 2025 and you literally every day did. If you and I, if everyone listening to this does the most important thing every day, if they did nothing else different in 2025, there's no question that would change both trajectory and momentum. The whole velocity of the year would be different because of our tendency not to do the most important thing. And of course, the other things add to that sense of a more effortless approach to doing the things that matter most. Yeah, I would also add to that that working on the most important thing gives you a sense of mission and purpose that smaller things do not. So it's not purely the clinical moving of the needle on important things, because really there's nothing outside of your psychological experience of reality. But the feeling of being moored and pointed in the right direction with the bigger thing psychologically is really, really, really valuable. It's not just about whatever the points might be. Sure, the points are nice, but really psychologically and psycho-emotionally, knowing that you're working on something that matters, however you've defined that, is I have just found this past year, I think I've done a very good job of that. And it's remarkable what that does for your mental health. Well, just describe that a little more in detail. So you're describing the impact of meaning, you know, practically knowing each day, each week and so on, I'm pursuing something that means something to me. Yeah. But what difference has it made for you psychologically? Sure. Well, I would say that there's a bit more to it just in terms of maybe characteristics when choosing that important thing. So for instance, for me, there has to be a making or mastery component, one or the other. So either creating something or I am trying to master something. Not just, this is on the flip side, like manage or mitigate. So for instance, even though doing the PT for the low back and so on is incredibly important, if I decide that is the most important thing per se, it's depressing. There's no winning there. It's doing something not to lose. There's a lot of fear associated with it. it is not an inspiring headspace to inhabit. Now, it doesn't need to be doing back PT in the gulag by candlelight. I mean, it doesn't have to be miserable, but it doesn't have the requisite payoff that I would want in a most important thing. It still needs to get done, which means that it's maybe the two essential and urgent things or one of the maintenance things, right? It's a non-negotiable maintenance. This is not a nice to have. but for instance been working on my first book in seven years which is making fantastic progress shocker it's become absurdly long one day i'll write a short book it's going to be a hell of an accomplishment by the way someone was just raving to me last night about tools of titans this is the groom who just was married oh he's talking to me who's like he's like yeah i normally i try to read he said 20 minutes a day but i sat down and it says i was just gone for like two hours working through it. There's so much in it. That was literally yesterday. They just out the blue said that. So carry on anyway. Yeah, thanks. That makes me feel good. That was a fun book to write, which isn't always the case. So that is one at the top, which feels very good to get back into as I feel like much of what is online, most of what is online increasingly is just becoming ephemera, very short half-life. It's just like you could put out the best thing imaginable in most formats that are available today, and it will have vanished from the minds of the people it passed in front of within 24 hours. Books still hold an interesting place. They have a certain durability. It might not last forever, but there's a certain durability that I think is really important. There's a deep cachet about it. Deep. Not just, oh, that's impressive. It holds a certain place in people's minds still. And for good reason. I mean, books have lasted longer than almost anything else. So yeah. Yeah. So for me, if I'm among other things, trying to impact lives, I feel like that feels like time very well spent. Yep. Yep. I understand that. So all of that is on the making side, right? Then I also have been spending a lot of time on archery specifically, which is every bit as frustrating as golf in a lot of respects. I don't play golf, but I've talked to a lot of golfers and that's the closest comparison. When it's going well, man, is it beautiful. And when you can't figure out what you've changed to make things go sideways, it's very frustrating. But it's become this constant that I can work on, in some cases, incremental gains in some cases big gains I don want to imply that I going to master archery but I am practicing as if that is my goal And there an article Let me just pull it up I want to give credit where credit is due that I reading right now on mastery And it is on read trung, T-R-U-N-G.com. And the name of the piece, which I recommend to folks, It's actually a fantastic read. And readtrung.com is a reference to Trung Fan, who is the writer. Jerry Seinfeld, Ichido Suzuki, and the pursuit of mastery. Notes from the 1987 Esquire magazine issue that inspired Jerry Seinfeld to, quote, pursue mastery because that will fulfill your life, end quote. So we'll put that in the show notes. But it basically makes the point that if you choose a discipline or something to approach through the lens of deliberate practice and mastery, which never ends, right? This may be something you do for an incredibly long period of time. And it also highlights different archetypes and why they fail to pursue mastery, which I found very helpful. that that art, that sport, that fill in the blank could be your most constant companion you have in life. And there's something very reassuring about that. So to have that as a through line, also as identity diversification so that if something goes sideways with the podcast or something goes sideways in family life, that you have diversified your psychological health on some level because it's not... totally invested in one basket. So I would say that speaks a bit to how I've been choosing things. It's making your mastery versus mitigating, like mitigating risk or managing. That's how I've been thinking about it for myself. And I feel for myself, I need something that is inspiring as the most important thing. Now, that's not always going to be the case, right? If you have a family member has an acute health emergency, it's like, okay, that may be the most important thing. But if you have the flexibility, if you have the ability to choose, I want something that's inspiring because that inspiration, that breathing in generates energy, it generates the excitement and the life force, for lack of a better term, that then trickles down to everything else. But if the thing I choose is kind of depressing, or it's avoiding something bad, it's running away from something as opposed to towards something, then it doesn't work for me. It really doesn't. You said a few different things there, but one thing that stands out to me is just this idea that meaning isn't a nice to have. It was described this way to me once, and I liked this, that because life is suffering, you need to pursue meaning that justifies that level of suffering. 100%. I've been thinking a lot about this as well. So let's say the most famous person in the world about meaning would be Viktor Frankl in his creation of logotherapy out of the Nazi Germany concentration camps. He's a psychologist and a Jew, and he's going through those experiences. He crafts a story in Man's Search for Meaning. But just building on that, it's like he sometimes would try to, if he was in therapy with somebody, he would say, oh, I just want to die. I'm like, I've got no reason to live. I don't know precisely the words he would use, but he's effectively saying, okay, well then, He's sort of, why haven't you done that? What is it that actually keeps you here then? And the meaning could be as, and I don't mean as trivial, but it might sound trivial. It could be, well, I have a cat and I need to feed the cat. Those answers were not nothing to him at all. He would use that as sort of a gateway to being able to reconstruct a life of meaning because there's something, some meaning that can be built upon. And so I really think this is an under taught and underappreciated idea. And I think it distinguishes itself considerably from productivity because you could be productive at all sorts of things like that you shouldn't even be doing or don't really motivate you or don't drive you. You could be doing task execution all day long and feel really meaningless in your life. Finding something meaningful, something beautiful, something creative as you're describing, not consuming, changing the ratio of consumption to creation, I think is one really kind of self-evident shift that I think a lot of people would benefit in. Consuming does not fill you with meaning. Creating anything, even if it's not very good at first. You're just being in the act of creation, I think is closer to meaning. So I struggle a little bit. People will describe what I'm into. Oh yeah, here's a productivity thing. I never self-identify that way because essentialism, for example, is not about doing more things. It's about doing more of the right things. Essential, the very word, it means very important. It's trying to craft your life around the highest meaning activity you can currently it conjure. I think it's about as good an antidote to the psychological traumas and taxation of our lives that exists. Maybe it's the only one, really. This idea of radical gratitude, radical gratitude is expressing thanks for things you're not thankful for, because that's what gratitude actually is. If you look at the definition of gratitude, I did not know this until just a few years ago. I thought gratitude was a life changer, game changer, and it meant be grateful for the good things in your life. That is, remember them, express them, focus on them. That's not the definition of gratitude. If you look up a definition of gratitude in the dictionary, what you find is that it's living with a spirit of thankfulness. And that's not the same thing, because that's not just for the quote unquote good things, that's for everything. And as I was thinking about this, I was like, well, that was a game changer for me when my daughter Eve was very ill with an undiagnosed neurological condition, which is a free falling in her executive function. I found that radical gratitude was a way out of the madness of not being able to control the situation and watching some of the picture of health suddenly become mentally and physically hugely incapacitated on the way to being in a coma. So I learned it there. But as I was talking about it yesterday, when I was sharing this with And I thought, well, it's so easy to point back to that because it all worked out in the end, right? Years go by and okay, it's resolved. So I can point back to radical gratitude there, but can I do it now? And I thought, can I express this idea out loud? Because it sticks in my throat even as I go to talk about it now. Can I say out loud, I am thankful that my best friend of 35 years is fatally ill with cancer because I want to rage against that, that phrase, that idea. It feels so, I won't say wrong because that's not quite right, but it is something so violating about that expression. But it's in the expression of it that you open yourself. It's like an act of faith that opens meaning that's invisible until you express the first half of the equation. Because opening oneself to the idea that there could be meaning in this suffering, and there's such a gift in that. So it's sort of hidden behind this action. I don't want to take the expression of it, but I'm grateful for this challenge because one of the thoughts that came to me just yesterday about this was because now I need to live. I don't mean in a guilt way, but I need to live double now. I cannot just go through life. I must live it alive, in a sense, living it doubly because he can't do that now. So the 40 to 50 years, hopefully, maybe that we could have had together, that's just not happening now. That's not going to be the story. And I still find that unimaginable. It's almost impossible for me to get my head around that. But if that's the reality, what's the possible meaning in it? This, I think, is something like the actual test of life, is to open oneself to the possibility that there is meaning in suffering, that suffering isn't because God is a vivisectionist. That's C.S. Lewis's language for it. You have to decide, is God a vivisectionist? Does he take pleasure in suffering? Or is there meaning in our suffering? And that's only one answer to this question, But to take responsibility for my life in a different way, to value the remaining years and hopefully decades differently. It's like I have a responsibility burned into me like a scar, like a scar. I don't think I could have it taken away from me. I don't think so, but I certainly don't want it to be. It's like, no, that scar stays. I need that scar and I want to live out of that understanding and just try to make good on the years I get that he doesn't get. And there's something about that. I'm obviously still living in the grief of all of this, but I think that's one way to detect meaning that can save us. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I know that can't be easy to think about and feel, but I do appreciate the opening oneself to the possibility that you can be grateful not just for the obviously uplifting and positive things but to tag on that i am grateful for x difficult thing because dot dot dot to cue the mind to hopefully produce something that engenders meaning even when overwhelmed with suffering. Yeah, plenty for me to chew on there too. That's my own lived experience with it, but it's also, you can go back and follow the trail of research about this, the whole post-traumatic growth literature. That is, those people that go through trauma and don't just, first of all, there's three options, right? You can collapse through it. There are some people that return to level as before. That would be kind of the resilience mindset. And then there's this other phenomenon. Happens less often, but it does happen and has been identified, characterized, codified, and studied is people that move to a higher level of living post the trauma. And so we've all been very familiar with PTSD. Post-traumatic growth is less referenced, which is just too bad because I think that's really the thing you want to understand that there is a way that we can, in tangible ways, have beauty for ashes. That it's not just a poetic idea. It's not just nice to have. It's like, if there's so much suffering and those are the raw materials through which we can actually build a life of meaning, it's like, oh, okay. So now I need to embrace it differently, not spend my whole life just trying to avoid it or to, you know, in a kind of positive toxicity. You also can't avoid it. You cannot avoid it. Yeah. Impossible. It's just like, all right, I want to drive for the rest of my life without hitting any red lights. It's like, it's not going to work. So you might as well figure out how to handle red lights. It's a great metaphor for it. Anna will say to me, you know, from time to time, no one gets out without a mortal experience. And there's a term for this, it's called sonder. and it's a term for the experience of remembering and knowing that other people's life is as complex and emotionally challenging and so on as our own. And it's not obvious all the time because it's easy to come up with shallow stories about other people. I hear it quite a bit from people. Oh, well, that person's all right because maybe that person has money or because that person's famous or because that person appears to be above the fray. And it's like, I actually think it's a sort of a limit of imagination, certainly a limit of empathy, but to realize like, no, not one of those people is escaping the mortal experience of suffering that all of us are. Yes, maybe they have a different set of problems, or maybe they have possible solutions that you wish you had access to. I mean, obviously people are in different positions in life, but man, I have never met a person that could escape, even close to escaping it. It's like you can't. It's hardwired into, I don't want to call life a simulation, but if you say it is for a moment, it's like, yeah, it's hardwired into this. You cannot escape it. This is why I think so many people try to actually pursue distraction of any number of kinds because of an attempt to avoid the pain and suffering. And I think most addictions really are that at the core, to avoid the experience of being alive. And that's because it's so painful to be alive. Yeah, can be. And so an alternative to that is to open yourself to the meaning. Well, this isn't happening for me, not to me. I don't know a faster way to get there than radical gratitude. Yeah, thank you for that, Greg. And just to reiterate something you said earlier about how we can turn the stories of others into these NPC extras in video games. You know, simply explained in one sentence, whereas we have this raging torrent of nuance in our lived experience. and a few things come to mind. One, and I wish I had the attribution on this, but someone said, you know, everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about, number one. Number two, I interviewed Chris Bosh, very well-known basketball player on the podcast, and I'm pretty sure it was him who said, and somebody else had said this to him, you know, if you're sitting at a table and everyone else put their problems on the table, you did the same, he's like, you would pick your problems right back up. He's like, once you saw actually what everyone was contending with. We should just underscore that because I think that's such a strange phenomenon. At Stanford University, the Stanford Memorial Church, if you go into that, it's a non-denominational church from the very beginning, but they carve in stone all of these key ideas. And one of them is basically what you just said, so I won't repeat it. But that is a strange phenomenon. There is something that that gives me a glimpse of, a sort of glitch in the matrix in that illustration that even for the discomfort and the uncomfortableness and the pain and the frustration of our problems, something about them, I think it's beyond just they're familiar to us. I think they are connected to us. If I were getting really philosophical, I would say something like, maybe we knew we'd have these. We actually did have a chance to choose them or not, like pre here. And it certainly has that kind of vibe to it, to me when you share it and I'm sort of just having it hit me again. It's like, yeah, we actually do want these problems. Oh, wow. There is something in them that there's something like stepping stones to becoming what we uniquely need to become next, to become more and more of who we really are and less and less of who we really aren't, which is, you know, that's the real essence of essentialism. It's not tasks and to-dos and even goals. It's like a becoming process. And these are the raw materials for doing it. It's not toxic positivity because it's not pretending there aren't problems and not pretending there aren't challenges. It's to open oneself to the possibility that there's no other way, that this is the way to becoming who we're supposed to become. I'm not saying every single thing in life is like that. I'm not saying the flat tire is the thing. I'm not saying it like that. But these tests of life are actually, some of them in my life have felt signature, that they really are built to be, in a sense, particularly excruciatingly hard for me. But even in that, if you can glimpse the other side of it, like, no, but that means it was done with a high degree of care, of thought even. It's a really different way to live. And I'm still obviously just learning in that journey. It's a disciplined pursuit of meaning. Disciplined pursuit of meaning. Maybe that's your next book. So we've covered a lot of ground. I think this will give folks a lot of grist for the mill and things to chew on for the next year, where they want to point themselves, how they want to think about meaning, suffering, mastery, choosing the most important thing. We've covered a lot. Is there anything else we are going to talk about where people can find the essentialism planner and also perhaps get started learning more about principles that we've covered in brief here. But is there anything else that you'd like to cover, whether concepts or closing words, anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind to a close? I had a really interesting conversation with Eric Newton, who took to social media, I didn't know him before to list what he'd learned from the biggest suffering in his life, which was, well, fatal diagnosis of his wife. He described their relationship prior to this as having lots of ups and downs. Once he described it as a sort of fantastic love affair, but then also he describes all the problems and challenges that I had him on my podcast once I'd read this because someone sent it to me like, hey, this is similar to the kinds of things you're wrestling with. And what's particularly interesting about the story is that it wasn't just when she got this diagnosis that things changed. It was post that where she got into what turned out to be the last six weeks of her life, but she hit a regret. And the regret was not having been deeply connected enough with the people closest in her life. And I thought that was such a distinct kind of insight he said she suddenly unlocked a level of vulnerability and intimacy that he literally didn't know existed not just in their relationship he just didn't know it existed in life to have someone be so honest so open so without all of those layers of the onion that you know to go back to that metaphor and so for six weeks he was like okay this actually is love you know here they've been married for years and all of these ups and downs, everything. He's like, this is what it actually means. And he summarized something like this. He's like, if there's a purpose in any of it, it is to have ever deepening connection with the people who matter most to you. And I mean, I was touched by that. I was touched by a story. I was fascinated by that story. But the question I walked away with was, how do you live like that normally? Is there a skill set to it? Or is it just one of those things that you would have to have that extremity to be able to access that? And it links back to some of this research I've been doing on Carl Rogers, because I do think that there's a way that we can at least get a lot closer to that ideal in normal living. And it is a kind of palpably better form of listening than almost anybody experiences in life. It's teachable. It's learnable. It's there. It's available, but almost nobody's trained in it. The only people that are really trained in Rogerian listening is psychotherapists, if they have been. If they haven't been, the risk is enormous that they will make problems worse in their attempt to make them better because they simply won't be addressing anything like the right issue. They'll be attacking the leaves of the problem, not the roots of the problem, and they will do that. They'll build in their own mental models of solutions instead of getting to what the real stuff is. And that's the people that are trained in it, or to some extent trained in it. But think about all the doctors that aren't trained in it. That's what happened with Eve. It's just unreal. That's a story for a different day. But there were doctors with all this training that they just thought they knew what was wrong with her. If we had done what they had said, she would be dead. And it's not about their expertise. In a sense, their expertise was the problem is that they didn't have the humility to be listening properly. And so I think that's the thing I want to say is that I do think that there is a form of listening that we can provide for each other that is so powerful, that's so curative. And I do sometimes think it's the primary thing missing in modern life. My son just said it to me recently. I mean, so many things I've got wrong as a parent, as a person, but he just said that if there was ever a problem, I knew I could come and I knew you would listen. So even if it was something you were doing that was frustrating, I knew you would listen. That's not passive listening. It's a very particular kind. And man, I want to teach that. Man, I really, really want to help people learn how to do this with each other. Where should people go to stay informed of your now pending class related to Rogerian listening? Yeah, I really want to do this. I'm not kidding about it. It's not just a spontaneous thing. I wasn't planning on talking about it, so it is spontaneous, but I really think this has to happen. I mean, I think people could just, the easiest single thing, go to gregmcuhin.com homepage. They can get right now, what we do have right now is a less but better course. They'll get it for free. They can sign up in 10 seconds. And then we will send information about this Apex Listening, or for want of a better term, courses on there. And we'll do them live. and like we'll learn together how to do this because it's everything. Thank you, Greg. Really appreciate the time, Greg, and the flexibility with scheduling. It's always a pleasure to have a conversation with you. And for everybody listening, as always, we'll have everything that we've discussed linked to in the show notes, tim.blog slash podcast. And if you search Greg, so McEwen, certainly you can also try with the MCKE E O W N. And this will be the most recent episode as of right now. And until next time, first of all, thank you for tuning in everybody and be just a bit kinder than is necessary. Not just to others, but also to yourself as you're looking forward to the next year, don't beat yourself up over last year. Just see if you can plan for not just a better, but more joyous new year. How can you not just do the important things, but do the joyous things? How can you not just do the hard things, but find ways to make those important things a little less effortful, effortless even? These are all questions worth considering. Thanks, everybody. called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog.com slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Creatine isn't just for muscle. It's essential daily fuel for your brain, your body, and long-term performance. For me, I have Alzheimer's and dementia risk in my family. The cognitive benefits are the reason I take creatine every single day. And today's episode sponsor, Momentus, is the gold standard in creatine. There's a lot of BS floating around, but I choose them. Why? Because they source CreaPure creatine, the purest, most effective creatine monohydrate available. So if you've been curious about creatine, this is your moment to get back on track or try it for the first time. Momentus is also now introducing the Momentus Creatine Chews. Each chew delivers one gram of pure CreaPure Creatine Monohydrate. I was skeptical of these chews. I was like, I'm never going to use these. It turns out that I use them all the time. They're super convenient and they are NSF certified for sports. So you get the gold standard purity without all the mess. 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