013: The Art of Essentialism With Greg Mckeown

00:00 Greg Mckeown: So I love this idea of the rich life you’re describing here because we know that we don’t want to be in debt financially. I mean, we know that we want margin in our life financially. But what about our emotional, our spiritual, our physical debt? I think that we are in, just to take one example, I think we live in time debt now. Massive time debt. I mean, think about how easily we make commitments and how much energy and time those commitments would take to do. And how much time we actually have available. I mean, we’re all guilty of a brain heuristic, which is called the Planning Fallacy. And the Planning Fallacy basically is this, that we routinely underestimate the amount of time a thing takes to get done. And we’ll underestimate it even where we have done that task before, and we know how long it takes.

[chuckle]

00:56 Beau Henderson: Yeah.

00:57 Greg Mckeown: So for example, somebody says, “Well, I’ve got to drive from Point A to Point B, we’ve done it 10 times before, we know it takes us 20 minutes.” We’ve only got 20 minutes left before that meeting and we still take the time to do two or three more e-mails, “Well, today I’ll just kind of go fast, and maybe the traffic will be extra good, and I’ll just get there in 15 minutes.” We know it isn’t so, but this brain heuristic underestimates. A heuristic is obviously something in our mind that is very deeply rooted, so much so that even knowing about the heuristic won’t necessarily change it. So here I am, sharing this, and it isn’t actually going to make any difference because we’re wired so tightly. But we can slowly, over time, create more margin in our life. We can teach ourselves that even though we know something, we think something will take a certain amount of time, we can add 50% to that estimate.

01:48 Greg Mckeown: So that we start to really count the cost of every new commitment, and the full cost of it so that we can start getting honest about, “Well, look, I can’t do all of these things I’m committing to. Actually, I have to uncommit to some of this. And I have to really get realistic so that I really can provide a generous margin on my estimate so that I can do the things that matter most as effortlessly as possible.”

02:14 Beau Henderson: Well, and that Planning Fallacy, Greg, that really resonated with me and I was almost laughing because I believe there’s a lot of people out there and I was this way for a lot of years, I would start the day with a to-do list with 20 things, and it was just… It was almost… We talked about that stewardship of your energy, it almost killed my energy before I started the day because I knew I would not be successful in getting that list done.

02:39 Greg Mckeown: Oh, that is such a real experience, isn’t it? When you look at your to-do list, and you know you are lying to yourself? That experience where you just go, “Oh, there’s no way I’m doing all those things.” But you don’t want to face it, you don’t want to admit it. And so I don’t mean you, Beau, I just mean all of us.

02:58 Beau Henderson: Correct.

03:00 Greg Mckeown: So I think this is what we ought to do. Here is a concrete practice that everyone could do, and this is a very simple practice, but don’t let it kid you into thinking that therefore it’s a shallow or simplistic idea. This is a winning idea here, if someone really wants to live a life around one’s essential. Here’s your to-do. Every day you make the list, sure, of all the things you need to do. Do it the day before. So I did this yesterday; I was on a plane, and I did it, and it didn’t take me five minutes. I would say it took me a good half an hour of just making a list of all the different things that I’d really like to get done today, all the things that I think are kind of important or really expecting or hoping that I’ll get them done. Made the list, and then you’ve got to narrow it until finally you say, “Look, here are the six things that I really think are really important to get to tomorrow.” And I did that. And then you prioritize that list so that you actually have just the six items in priority list. Now you’ve got your six, and then at least metaphorically, if not literally, you then cross off the bottom five.

04:03 Beau Henderson: Wow.

04:03 Greg Mckeown: So that you just go, “This is the thing. If I only get one thing done today, this is that thing.” And then you schedule time around it. It might not be that it’s the very first thing you do on the day, it could be. In my case, my item for yesterday is something that I need to do at the end of today. So it’s not like it’s the first thing I do in the morning, but it was the most important thing and I knew that this was the thing that mattered. You see, when you do this, what it means is that at any given moment, you start to be able to answer the question, “What’s important now.” And actually have an answer that you feel pretty confident in. And I think that’s what people need to do to be able to win every day. That’s actually sort of the fun acronym, “What’s Important Now” is “WIN”, right? W-I-N, WIN.

04:51 Beau Henderson: What’s important now? I like it.

04:52 Greg Mckeown: Yeah. What’s important now. And so I think every day you have to do this. Now I will be honest, there are days I fluff this. There are days I just don’t do it, I get into a reactive pull, so many things. Sometimes I can be… It can be quite ironic that I am teaching people about essentialism and can become non-essentialist in approaching that. But I’ll tell you what, I notice the difference when I do this, as I did yesterday, and I did the day before. When I do it, I just feel this sense of… My day seems to expand when I do it. So it’s almost like the experience of the day changes. Instead of feeling so reactive to e-mail, to e-mail, whatever the things are coming in attacking us, you just go, “No. This is the thing.” And you feel confident because you’ve given some real thought to it. So this is one practice I think everyone can understand, and I think everybody can start doing. And I think if they did that one thing, it would make a big difference to their experience, the way they’re experiencing their lives.

05:56 Beau Henderson: No, I love it. Action item right there. Put on your index card, “Think when. All day long, think when and ask yourself what’s important now.” Love it.

06:05 Greg Mckeown: And on that same little same card, right? So you imagine this 3×5 card, right? The win card is make the list of six, put them in priority order, have it in front of you so that you keep coming back to it. Of course people get pulled off, right? Of course in a world of social media and smart technology and just the normal pulls of normal life, people are going to pull you in all different directions. The question is this, how quickly can you come back to the things that you actually know, “No, this is really essential to me.” And I think that the 3×5 card, I mean, I don’t use the 3×5 card actually, although I think that is a really good suggestion, I have done it before. I use my journal, I’m a pretty faithful journal keeper. In fact, I would say it’s been several years since I’ve missed a day, and I use it for that. So I have a… I write it in pencil, here’s my six… I mean, I could show you the page right now, and I can show you the thought process I went through. And it was quite intensive to get to a place where I really felt these are the six things in priority order. And I’m working on exactly that list today. All right, this materially affected the decisions I’ve made already today.

07:16 Beau Henderson: Well, and that’s… Greg, that’s why I think your book resonated with me so strongly and why it’s creating a movement because when you focus on behavior, you actually change something that goes beyond me reading and saying, “That was a good book.”

07:30 Greg Mckeown: Yeah. Well, I think that’s right. I mean, in anything that we learn, you can learn… You could read about how to ride a bike, you can be explained how to ride a bike, you go watch someone else riding a bike, and then one day, you have to get on and ride the bike. And I do think that that’s true with essentialism. Essentialism isn’t a… It isn’t just a philosophical idea, it’s not just conceptual, this is a practical… Is a practical approach to the primary challenge of our times, which is too much. I mean, it is… In fact, let me just ask some questions, people listening and just ask these questions one by one of themselves and see if it describes them. Have they ever… Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin at work or at home? Have you ever been busy but not productive? Have you ever said yes just to please or to appease or just to avoid trouble? I mean, the answers to these questions are just yes, all the time. I mean, I ask these questions all over the world now and at all levels of organizations, inside of corporations and outside entrepreneurs, mothers, fathers, students, all ages, everybody experiences these.

08:44 Greg Mckeown: This is a universal experience and so I don’t really think there’s anything I’m writing, not very much, that’s truly unique in essentialism. What I think is important about the book is that it’s identifying what’s relevant now. It’s saying, “No, you can’t just give a nod to what’s essential. You can’t just prioritize every so often. This is something you have to become, you actually have to become an essentialist because that’s the size of the challenge we’re faced with.” And if you just do it occasionally, you just gonna get… You’re completely beaten up by the earthquake of nonessential stuff.

09:23 Beau Henderson: Well, and that’s what something that really stood out to me, is this idea you have a subtitle, ‘Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less’. And you’re really having to almost have a mind shift because we live in a world of more is better, the person with the most stuff wins, I knew… I grew up with that mentality and it’s almost like in finding the movement or the message with the RichLife idea was very similar, and that there had to be a mind shift. The RichLife wasn’t just about money because that’s not necessarily gonna make you happy. It’s about a lot more than that.

10:00 Greg Mckeown: Yeah. I mean, what you’re describing with the RichLife is the same kind of transition. It’s a transition between the undisciplined pursuit of more, and the disciplined pursuit of less but better. So let’s talk about the problem again, the undisciplined pursuit of more. See, something that people don’t appreciate fully, I think, is how when they start doing the right things, it will lead to success. But that success turns out to be a very poor master because it brings all these new opportunities and options, right? Say somebody starts to get… Somebody gets a job, they start making some money, now they can buy new things and so on. But the new options and opportunities can undermine the very things that led to success in the first place and so this is what I’ve learned. I’ve learned that success can be a catalyst for failure. And that’s such an important idea. See, I’m not against success, but I am against allowing it to be the master of our lives. What we have to do is we have to learn how to be successful at success.

11:06 Beau Henderson: I like it.

11:06 Greg Mckeown: And that takes an internal discipline to become far more selective than we were in the original stage, right? So if we wanna go from stage one to stage two, I’ll give you a personal experience for this. So when I was first… A year before I wrote the book, I was doing some work with Standford Design School. And one of the reasons I wanted to do work with them is I wanted them to become a faculty member with the Design School and I thought, “This is fantastic.” And we co-created a very successful clause, successful enough that I was then asked, “Are you working? Maybe you could continue doing this, and you can be a faculty member.” And that was exactly the reason I had approached them in the first place. But in the interim year or so, since that happened, I now had the book finished and I realized this needed to be the focus. I needed to completely put my professional energies into launching this book and helping to get the message out there.

12:09 Greg Mckeown: And so all of a sudden I was faced with exactly the thing I wanted a year before, but no longer was it the right thing to do. And if I’d said yes to it, if I’d said yes, then I would have ended up being so consumed with the teaching of that class that I wouldn’t have had the energy to get the book launched, and so the book would have failed. Or at least it would have done averagely well. And so that was hard for me. I’m telling you, I wrestled with that for weeks, if not months, and I wish I’d been… I wish I could have made the decision faster. But in the end, I chose not to do it. I had to say no to something that used to be awesome in my mind, that no longer could be justified. And that’s what we have to do if we want to be successful at success, you have to become more selective than you were in the past.

12:52 Beau Henderson: And you weren’t attached. You saw it was part of the path, but you weren’t attached to, “This is what I saw and this is what it has to be.” I love it.

13:01 Greg Mckeown: Well it’s… I had an experience years ago that… Well actually I had two stories, two experiences, that really resonate, that really taught me this. The first was that I remember, this was 15, 16 years ago now. 16 years ago I think, when I was staring at a piece of paper in my hands with all of these ideas that I’d just been writing out on it for the last 20 minutes, and I’d been answering a question of, “What would you do if you could do anything, but not everything? What is it for you, what is your highest contribution?” And when I was finished with that list, what I noticed was not what was on the list, but what was not on the list. Law school was not on the list, which was a problem because I was, at the time, at law school.

13:46 Beau Henderson: Right.

13:46 Greg Mckeown: What do you do, right? What do you… Do you just keep going because you’ve committed? Do you keep going because you’re a year in? After all that time, all that money, all that effort? And I remember I called my parents. I was visiting Shawn Vanderhoven, a friend of mine, in Colorado. He’d sent me tickets to come to his wedding, which was very nice of him, and I was… That had given me space to reflect and to think about, you know, “What would you do if you could do anything,” as I just mentioned. And so as I called my parents, my dad gave me really very sound advice. After he listened for a while, he said, “Son,” he says, “To thine own self be true.” And he’s quoting Shakespeare, yeah, ’cause all Englishmen quote Shakespeare over tea and crumpets for breakfast in the morning.

[chuckle]

14:30 Greg Mckeown: He pulls out Shakespeare, which is Hamlet talking to his… Laertes, at a key moment in his life. But you see that’s the thing, you see. You see, the idea of, “To thine own self be true,” is the right essence. And so I quit law school and pursued this whole other path which led to undergraduate in print journalism at BYU, it led to Stanford to do graduate work, it led to, of course, to writing this book, becomes a New York Times bestseller, working with most extraordinary companies and people in the world. I mean, it’s an amazing journey that has grown out of that trade off. And so there’s something that happens, I think, when you make a big shift in your life, when you realize you don’t have to do what you have committed to doing. That you can uncommit, that sometimes that’s right; that lot’s of times it’s right to keep committing, but sometimes in order to maintain one’s integrity to the thing that really is the best use of you, that really is right, you actually have to uncommit from something you previously committed to. That’s a correct path. And sometimes you have to unlearn what you learned in the past.

15:38 Greg Mckeown: You have to get wiser. And I think that that certainly gave me permission for many future decisions, that you don’t have to. That you can make a different choice. We often know that intellectually, somewhere in our head we know it, but in our heart we feel we don’t have a choice, so that means in practice we don’t have a choice. You know, we just don’t… You don’t feel you do, so you don’t ever take the choice. I think this goes to the heart of what it means to become an essentialist, is to re-enthrone the idea you do have a choice, you don’t have to do what you thought you had to do.

16:12 Beau Henderson: Or, even, as I hear you explain the story, I love it, or even what “makes sense”, meaning back when you were in law school, it might not have made a lot of sense to anybody but you to the path that you have now been wildly successful with, but you trusted yourself and you made those moves, you know?

16:31 Greg Mckeown: Yeah. Yes, I think that’s right. I think there’s an inherent trade off here between doing… By what makes sense, I think what we mean by that is what other people around us think we ought to do right now.

16:42 Beau Henderson: Right.

16:43 Greg Mckeown: You know, and what other people seem to be doing right now. Versus listening… Sorry, it’s an external noise versus our internal voice. And to create enough space in our life to hear that voice and then enough space in our life to listen to it, and to design a life around that so that we don’t end up getting to the end of our lives and realize, “Well look I really… I sort of fundamentally regret the way I chose because I did what everyone else was doing or I did what every one else… I perceived everyone thought I should be doing.” And I mean, one of the things, and we’ve talked about this daily practice, I’ll tell you the other thing I think people absolutely can do to make sure they live the life and path of an essentialist is to hold a personal quarterly offsite. So that is 24-hour period every 90 days where you’re completely designing your life based around what is essential. So in fact, we just spent a year designing just such a program for people. And so every part of it was curated thoughtfully, carefully, caring about each piece.

17:53 Greg Mckeown: So we said, “Where does it have to be,” and we went through so many different locations, geographies, and we found a place. It’s in Calistoga Ranch, it’s a beautiful location up in the hills of Napa Valley that you can’t have technology, it doesn’t work up there. It’s a beautiful environment, great location, so that was important. Then we said, “Okay, who are the right people?” And we went through this very careful selection process. So often you would be told, “Well, you just sign up as many people as you can for any program like that. That’s the way to go.” But we really don’t believe that’s the way to do this, it has to be less but better. So we have an application process so we do not have… Everyone who applies cannot get in. People can go to apply at essential.com if they think they fit the criteria and so we selected, hand selected the right group of people. They have to be nice people, for example. We have the propensity to spend time with nice people so that’s important, and they have to really want to be essentialist’s too, so we got the right people.

18:51 Greg Mckeown: And then we went through the design exercises that you simply either cannot do or really just never do in a normal email to email existence. So I’ll give you an example. So we have people design, not just long-term thinking. If someone says to you, they say, “Look, what is a long-term goal for you?” “I don’t know.” “What does a long-term goal mean, 10 years, maybe 20 years? Certainly, the end of your life, that’s a long-term goal. But we go even further than that. From the first day of this program, and we meet, as I said, every 90 days for a year. So the first day we have people design really creative exercises. They have to go all the way back, not to their birth, not to their parents birth, but to their grandparent’s birth and start to explore what was it that they did. What choices did they make? Why did that matter? What affect has that had on the generation since? Including me, sitting here doing these exercises. And so you go through your grandparents, your parents, your own birth experiences, all these experiences you’ve had in your life.

20:00 Greg Mckeown: You go continue forwards into not only what we would hope for our own children but also for our grandchildren so that even after our life, what would they remember from us? What would they… How would we want to influence them 20 or 50 years after we’ve died? So that’s a pretty extreme design exercise I’m describing.

20:19 Beau Henderson: Wow. Yes.

20:19 Greg Mckeown: We’d spend a whole day doing it. But what happens is people start to touch something that is absolutely uncontroversially essential, nobody can question whether the answers they get start to be essential in nature. They’re not just passing fancies, they’re just buying the next gadget, the next flashy thing, they’re not even just a job promotion, it’s what really matters. And then from that, we have them design the dream routine, which means a weekly routine that starts slowly over time week by week to add a little ritual here, a different tweak to the routine there, so that they can develop a routine that starts to feel effortless, natural, frictionless in living the life they have just designed for the very long-term. Now, they always blow it. We always blow it, but we don’t worry about that. We’re very gentle with each other about this.

21:24 Greg Mckeown: We just say, “Look, get back into the seat 90 days later and do it again, and again, and again. Just keep coming back every 90 days. Keep touching those things that are most important in life.” And over time, you will find that maybe not over a week, not over a month, not even over 90 days, but over two or three years, oh, what difference can be made. Truly life changing experience in life over a two or three year period doing what I’m describing here.

21:53 Beau Henderson: Powerful, powerful work. And again, I applaud that you’ve taken this content and this idea and actually gave people a way to experience it. And I’m more convinced, Greg, as we have this conversation, that essentialism is the key to living a rich life, if I can cross-brand there a little bit.

22:12 Greg Mckeown: Oh, I don’t mind at all the cross-branding there. We’re all using these worn out tools called words to try and tap into something we know is real and to give words to it. And so it’s absolutely about living one’s highest, best, richest life. It’s about finding one’s highest point of contribution and not allowing a good path but a parallel path to con us away from the essential mission that we’re really supposed to be living.

22:42 Beau Henderson: Well, and as you were talking about going back to your grandparents, it made me realize a conversation recently that came up about… We were talking about this buzz word of lifestyle business. Everybody wants a lifestyle business and something with it wasn’t quite resonating, the idea of being able to go do what you want on the beach and not have to worry about working any. And what I realized, and that came up, was this idea, “You know what, let’s take that a step further and let’s work on a legacy business.”

23:10 Greg Mckeown: Yeah, I love that.

23:11 Beau Henderson: Yeah. So let’s have a business that doesn’t just take care of us, but the only thing that’ll truly make us happy is this idea of what’s gonna… A William James quote, “The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.” And I’ve found that whether somebody has millions of dollars, whether… Doesn’t matter if they don’t feel their life has a meaning, they’re really poor, in a way. But anyway, not to get off track too much but what I realized is that essentialism exercise you described, it made me realize probably some of the best people are the people that leave the biggest legacies, have gotten their head around it, whether they knew what it was called or not, but by being very focused on what’s important and passed on some good things.

23:57 Greg Mckeown: Look, I don’t think we’re off track, I think we’re on track in this conversation because I think that it’s this idea of living the meaningful life is the end of essentialism.

24:09 Beau Henderson: Right.

24:10 Greg Mckeown: The idea of essentialism isn’t about essentialism, it’s about becoming more of who you really are, and less of who you really aren’t. And in the process… In fact, I just finished… Just finished reading again ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, by Viktor Frankl, which… It’s been a few years since I’d really read it cover to cover, and I loved reading through it again and sensing somebody who went through… Obviously this is a psychiatrist and a Jew going through the concentration camps, four different camps, Auschwitz and beyond, in Germany through the second world war, and learning as he’s going through it and sensing what will matter to me after this, and what purpose do I have to live and why should I keep going. And these very fundamental questions that he’s learning in a crucible experience that I am sure most of us will never come close to experiencing, but we can learn from that to get us through our own suffering and to face… I suppose this is where this comes to. I have come to believe there are only two kinds of people in the world; there are people who are lost and then there are people who know they are lost.

25:29 Beau Henderson: Very good, right.

25:30 Greg Mckeown: And it’s the group that know they are lost that can do something with their lives. These are the people, from a religious point of view, that God can do something with their lives because they’re open. “Okay, I don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do?” It’s facing this. I feel like this is what the daily battle for me with these six things are, and putting it in priority order. That whole thing we discussed. To me, the test everyday is for me to admit I don’t know. I don’t know. So I’ve got to go through the process again, I’ve got to adapt with all these new things that have just happened, and the new updates, and the things that are happening in my family, and the things that are happening in the business. And really be able to face it each day, “I don’t know.” So now I’ve got to ask the question, now I’ve got to spend the time, what’s essential? What matters most? What’s important now? If you pretend you’re not lost, then you’re just gonna get beaten up by all of the non-essential tasks that are asked of you. But if you face it each day and then you can do something about it, then you can adjust, then you can get your clarity.

26:42 Beau Henderson: Right. And essentialism, in effect… My take, as I read it, I guess that’s the interpretation, it’s not a destination, it’s your journey, right?

26:53 Greg Mckeown: Yeah.

26:55 Beau Henderson: It’s what you become?

26:56 Greg Mckeown: It’s… The language in the book is the way of the essentialist.

27:00 Beau Henderson: Right.

27:00 Greg Mckeown: And I think that that matters because it’s not just the end result, it’s the quality of the journey as well.

27:09 Beau Henderson: Love it.

27:11 Greg Mckeown: This comes back to Viktor Frankl again. It’s not just the end result. They were in a position where they had so little control as to whether they would live or die, that odds were… Certainly odds were they were going to die, but they had so little control over this. So they couldn’t have an end goal kind of a way of getting through things. “Well it’s all okay if I survive.” No, they had to say, “If I don’t, is there any meaning in living now?” Because they realized that they couldn’t find meaning in the now, then there was no point in living then either. This was sort of the psychological journey they had to go through. So they had to find meaning in this day, in this moment, and that’s the test, I think, for us as well. Not just justifying today by the future, but to say, “No, there’s something now. What matters now? What’s essential now?” And I feel like I’ve hammered that point several times already. [laughter]

28:14 Beau Henderson: We’re talking with Greg McKeown, New York Times bestselling author of ‘Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less’. And Greg, I tell yeah, I’m so fascinated with this I could just camp out and talk about this with you all day. But I wanna make sure we give some… Most people have probably got their head around, “You know what? This makes some sense. I like this idea or it sounds like a valid idea,” but let’s give people maybe some tools. So okay, I want to move towards this idea of essentialism, how do I start eliminating some of the things in my life when I’ve spent the last 20, 30, years saying, “Yes.” Learning that… This idea of, “I can have it all.”

28:57 Greg Mckeown: Well we’ve talked about a few of them, the thing that I want to emphasize is that I didn’t write a book called ‘Knowism’.

[laughter]

29:06 Greg Mckeown: It’s important. The book’s ‘Essentialism’ and that’s because it’s about essential. Now I do think learning how to gracefully say no is important, there’s a whole chapter of eight different things, I think, on how to say no gracefully. So that’s an important skill, of course it is. But we always, all of us are saying no all of the time because of the inherent nature of trade offs. So we rarely use the word, sure, but whenever you say yes to someone, you’re saying no to something else. So what’s important is that we’re saying yes to what’s essential. So that’s the beginning place. I think that’s really important, the whole section at the front of the book is about exploring what is essential and how to create the space for it so that we actually have that clarity. Armed with that clarity, we then begin the negotiation of non-essentials, then we can have a conversation even with our boss, even with our bosses boss. We have the right to be able to negotiate back and push back. I mean, I’ll give you a pretty… It’s a personal example, not from me, but for the person who shared it with me, this is they had…

30:11 Greg Mckeown: In fact, they came to the class that I was teaching earlier, ‘Early Days on Essential’, and as a result of that, said, “Look, I’m about to get married and I want to have five days uninterrupted from work to focus on my marriage.” And so she went and negotiated with her boss, “Okay, here’s the work that needs to be done. Here’s what’s essential, here’s what’s not. I need to get this delivered by this date,” and she got it delivered by that date. In fact, she got it delivered ahead of time, and everyone was very happy with the quality of the work. So her side of the bargain done. As she entered the five days of non-work zone, focus on preparing for my wedding, as she entered that, she gets an email or a call from her boss saying, “I’m so sorry to do this, but someone’s dropped the ball, I need you to pick up this project.” And for five years previously, she said she would say yes, and every time that happened, she would just say yes. She was the person, she was the go-to person. She’s the yes person, she’s the order taker, she makes it happen, that’s what everybody likes about her.

31:21 Greg Mckeown: But at this time, she had the clarity because she’d explored it, figured it out, negotiated it, that she says, “No. We came to an agreement, and we need to keep it.” Her boss was not happy about that, but she went to her wedding, was so touched by how empowered she felt that she put into her wedding vows, “I will essentialize this relationship, this marriage, above all other relationships.” That is embedded in her vows now. And I’m touched by that experience on a lot of levels. What ended up happening at work was that her boss came to her a couple of weeks later and said, “You know what, when you pushed back on this, I realized how often I had expected you to do this when other people dropped the ball, and now I can see that I need to go to the other members on the team and reset expectations because it’s not fair that you should be the one that takes the pain of this.”

32:11 Greg Mckeown: And so it doesn’t always end as happily as that, I suppose, but in this case, by focusing on what’s essential, by negotiating that essential, then by not capitulating in the moment, she ended up with a prioritized wedding, prioritized relationship, and managed to start making improvements in the team that she was on because she did what was right. That I think is the value proposition of essentialism, is that by focusing on the right few things, you can be… Make a higher contribution personally and professionally.

32:51 Beau Henderson: And you know, I don’t know if I would call this a paradox, but have you found in the research and experience that a lot of times people will say yes to everything to find favor or be liked or even get position, but it seems to be the people that will say no are the ones that are actually respected?

33:10 Greg Mckeown: Well, I think it can be the case. So you gotta be skillful at this, you gotta be thoughtful about it. Nobody wants someone who just starts saying, “No,” left, right, and center.

33:18 Beau Henderson: Right.

33:19 Greg Mckeown: But if you want to go from being an order taker to a respected trusted advisor, then it is a total necessity that you learn how to say no. You know because… Well, I’ll give an example. So everyone knows Steve Jobs was somebody who had no problem saying no, or appeared to not have a problem with that.

33:39 Beau Henderson: Right.

33:39 Greg Mckeown: So that’s being covered ad infinitum. However, what I think is more interesting is the example of someone who said no to Steve Jobs, lived to tell the tale, and got paid $100,000 for doing it. And this was when Steve had been kicked out of Apple, goes and starts NeXT, and he wants someone to design a logo. He gets one of the best in the business to come and design it and when they have their first meeting, Steve says, “Look, here’s how it’s gonna work. You’re gonna make a bunch of options for me, I’m gonna look at them, I’m gonna tell you which ones I like the best, then you’re gonna make options of those and so on until we find the one that we really want.” And Rand says to him… Listens to all that and he says, “No.” He says, “This is how it’s gonna work. I am going to solve your problem for you. I will bring you one completed logo that solves that problem, and you will pay me and you’re gonna love it. And you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to, but that’s how this works.” Steve takes him up on that, he said… Steve said, “When he brought me the logo, he brought a jewel of a logo. It was exactly what we wanted, I loved it.”

34:53 Greg Mckeown: He said, “Not only that,” he said, “I learned that Rand was the ultimate professional because he had thought through the value proposition, the value relationship of that more deeply than I had.” And that’s exactly the point, right? So here’s Steve Jobs with all his tenacity and his obsession, and so on about having… Doing things his way and so on, who has suddenly has this tremendous respect for this professional because the professional has paid the price to figure out what is most valuable and what their highest contribution really is. And so that’s the key, that’s why you can’t simply start saying no to everybody. That’s as thoughtless as saying yes to everybody without really thinking about it. No, it’s creating the space to think deeply enough that we actually know what’s valuable. We actually know what’s essential. And that gives us the right, anyone the right to push back on something that’s less essential, to say, “Well, I’ll be happy to do that but what about this thing that I think really is going to move the needle?” Now you’re having a conversation, now you’re in a position even with somebody that’s more senior to you, even, where you can have the right to hold your own and to have a negotiation.

36:08 Beau Henderson: And I believe things like that too, when especially you’re talking about family or just a deep held priority, people respect that because I think probably either consciously or subconsciously, they’re thinking, “I wish I did better with those boundaries myself.”

36:21 Greg Mckeown: Well, I think that’s right. I mean, this is the old story of standing up to a bully. In fact, I was just reading a story of somebody that has finally stood up to a bully and it turns out to be one of those stories where that bully then stands up… Unbeknownst to the first young man, the bully then goes and stands up to his alcoholic father who then finally leaves the house and it changes the whole family dynamic because suddenly this boy is, “You can stand up to bullies. This person’s standing up to me, I can stand up to my challenges.” So I do think that even though sometimes in the short term it’s a cost attached to this, in the long run you make a tremendous contribution. I know it doesn’t always work out in the sort of happy way I’m describing, I know that there can be hard moments.

37:09 Greg Mckeown: I’ve been through… Last year I’d been dealing with a situation, in fact I remember receiving some correspondence from someone who was very unhappy with the decision I had made. And it was quite a personal attack, in a way, and I really found that hard. I took that personally. It was personal, I took it personally. I didn’t have the maturity not to… To be able to just be at peace about it. And a year has gone by and finally I have heard that somebody said, “You know what? They just admitted that they thought that you made the right decision.”

[laughter]

37:42 Greg Mckeown: And I know life doesn’t always work this way. However, there’s enough times in life that it does. That what you have to do is to make the decisions now that will look wise in hindsight; that’s the test, that’s the goal. And to do that… And in a way, I suppose, and maybe we can sort of wrap it on this idea, is that we’re in a busyness bubble now, and like every bubble before, like the real estate bubble or the.com bubble, in hindsight, everyone goes, “Of course you shouldn’t have overspent, bought a house bigger than you could afford, and of course you shouldn’t have invested in that company that had no customers.” It’s obvious in hindsight, the question is, is how to do it before you have to. How to do it before it’s obvious. And that’s the test of the essentialist, right? That’s why essentialism is timely now, is that before the bubble bursts, as it inevitably will, is that we are the ones that took the action before we had to, before it was commonplace activity and decision.

38:45 Greg Mckeown: So I think to become an essentialist right now is to be a bit of a revolutionary, it’s to be counter-cultural, to join a movement of an increasing number of people who can see the bubble for what it is. And they are the ones that, in hindsight, they’ll all look wise, they’ll all be the ones that people go, “Wow, you didn’t get caught up on this, you invested in the right relationships, you invested in the things that you knew internally were the right things to do.” And that’s leadership, that’s leadership.

39:15 Beau Henderson: Well Greg, you’ve given us all kinds of tools, you’ve educated us on this idea of essentialism and this movement. So to some out there listening, is there a way they could plug in further to the movements you’re working on?

39:28 Greg Mckeown: Yeah. I think that there’s probably a couple of things they can do. The first thing that you could do that you just go to greGreg Mckeownckeown.com, G-R-E-G-M-C-K-E-O-W-N.com, greGreg Mckeownckeown.com, and just sign up for the newsletter. You get a few of the key articles just to start with so that you got a very… It’s totally free. If somebody says, “Okay, this means a bit more to me,” get the book, really all the best stuff is in there. And then if somebody says, “No, I’ve read it, I love it, but I can’t do it on my own,” which I think is true for a lot of people. And for those people, they need to apply to come to Essential or hold their own personal courses offsite separately to that. So if they literally go to applyessential.com, they have a chance to be considered as one of the few people, and we have a lot of people that are coming in, so there’s no guarantee at all on that.

40:24 Greg Mckeown: But I do think that for those that can be a part of it, and maybe eventually we’ll open this up, we’ll find a way to scale it and other people can be involved, but at first it’s less the better. But that’s something for those that really are serious about designing a life that really matters, it’s a powerful experience. I would say that the most common feedback I’ve had is that it is a life changing experience and so we’re very pleased with that feedback.

40:45 Beau Henderson: Greg, I just, again, I want to reiterate. I have a short list that’s probably five or six books that have such a versatile message that I recommend everybody to read because the applications go whether you’re talking about business, family, life, period. And ‘Essentialism’ is one of these books. Go get Greg Mckeown’s ‘Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less’. Go find it on the bookstore, find it on Amazon, check out the website. And Greg, I’m excited to call you a RichLife friend and hope to hear more from you before too long.

41:19 Greg Mckeown: Yeah, I love that, I love that. Thank you so much, Beau.

41:22 Beau Henderson: All right Greg, thanks a lot.