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Work-life balance isn’t a myth—it’s a mission. At The Double Win Podcast we believe that ambitious, high-growth individuals can experience personal and professional fulfillment simultaneously. Hosted by the creators of the Full Focus Planner, Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller, The Double Win Podcast is your go-to resource for unlocking secrets to productivity, wellness, and work-life balance.
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Greg: [00:00:00] Maybe you can't control everything, but if you could take control of half an hour and use that to design what you want to do, instead of operating by default, it improves the quality of life for the rest of the 23 and a half hours.
Michael: Hi, I'm Michael Hyatt.
Megan: And I'm Megan Hyatt Miller.
Michael: And you're listening to The Double Win Show.
Greg
Megan: McKeown is a globally recognized author, speaker, and business strategist. He's the author of two bestselling books, especially. Essentialism, the disciplined pursuit of less and effortless, make it easier to do what matters most. Greg is a graduate of Stanford University where he studied leadership and social change.
And he's spoken to major companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, sharing insights on focus, productivity, and leadership. Essentialism has now been translated into more than 20 languages. That's crazy. And has impacted countless high achievers looking to focus on what truly matters.
[00:01:00] Effortless, which was published in 2021, continues his message of making essential tasks easier to execute and enjoy. He lives in California with his wife, Anna, and their four children.
Michael: One little known fact, he also endorsed Free to Focus.
Megan: Oh, I love that. I feel like
Michael: in many ways, our work is parallel.
Megan: Yeah.
Michael: And I so respect and admire Greg for his work. His book has had a huge impact on me personally. I know it has on you, Megan.
Megan: Yeah.
Michael: So without further ado, here's our conversation with Greg. Hey, Greg, thanks for joining us. Oh, it's so great to be with you.
Megan: We were just talking about how, uh, you know, you and I were maybe babies before we saw each other last, maybe not needing our reading glasses quite as much.
Greg: Well, it's been a swift decade. That's all I can say about that because it is now a decade of essentialism in my world. It just came out with the 10th anniversary edition of essentialism. So As I was writing the new forward to that a preface, it has been fascinating to [00:02:00] reflect on all that has happened in that time.
As I say, it's been amazing to watch the ideas go from being in your own head and you're writing about them and you're just trying to get them out into the world. But then seeing people in a small way, a part of the zeitgeist, a part of Americana and the different people. That have embraced it in building whole organizations around the ideas and so on.
It's been a, you know, for me, inspiring and humbling journey and moment of reflection.
Michael: Let's go back to the very beginning. And what were some of the key milestones in your journey that led to essentialism?
Greg: It all started when I got an email from my. Manager at the time that said, look, Friday, between one and 2 PM would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby client meeting.
And sure enough, when Friday came along, our daughter had just been born. We're in the hospital. And instead of being focused on that essential moment, that essential relationship, uh, had my phone on my [00:03:00] laptop out, and I'm trying to do it all on the basis that if I can do it all, I can have it all. And then to my shame, I left, I went to the meeting as well.
And even afterwards, I remember the manager said, well, look, the client will respect you for the choice you just made. And the look on their faces didn't evince that source of respect, but even if they had, it's obvious to you, to me, to everyone that, uh, that I made a fool's bargain. So what I learned was if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.
And that's me, but. It begs a set of questions. Have you, have I, have anyone ever felt busy but not necessarily productive? Have we ever felt that our life is spread too thin at work or at home? Your day is being hijacked by other people's agenda for you. I mean, this is the way of the non essentialist and most people don't have a name for that, but they are pursuing a strategy.
They don't mean to pursue. So the antidote to that is. The disciplined pursuit of less [00:04:00] or the way of the essentialist. And so this is the quite literal, I suppose, birth of essentialism. And from it, what I found is that it seemed to hit a nerve and that people in all sorts of organizations and all sorts of circumstances.
Relate to that basic set of challenges and are looking for a disciplined way out of that madness and essentialism seems to have been useful for some people.
Michael: I loved it. I know you loved it. We read it years ago right after you wrote it and had a huge influence on us. How would you define the difference between Essentialism and minimalism.
Greg: They're complimentary ideas. I mean, I think if you think about minimalism as being the physical things in your life, how you can eliminate those things that aren't, as Marie Kondo would put it, sparking joy for you, essentialism is how to do that in the human dimension, how to be able to make the choices that make sense.
Clutter up the [00:05:00] metaphorical closet of our lives instead of asking, well, is this a good thing or is this something other people are doing? You can ask much more selective questions. You can say, well, is this the most important contribution I can make? Uh, is this a clear? Yes. And if it's not a clear, yes, it becomes a clear, no.
And in a sense, essentialism in a single idea is a single decision that makes a thousand other decisions. It's. The 90 percent rule. It's saying if it's not 90%, yes, you default to no instead of the, uh, the norm of our times, which is exactly the opposite. You default to yes, no matter how trivial it is. Uh, and unintentionally you bury the essential contribution that you wish to make.
Megan: I love this concept so much. I feel like you were ahead of your time when you wrote this book. I mean, little did we know over the next 10 years how complex and overwhelming our world would be in terms of the [00:06:00] decisions that we have to make on a daily basis. I mean, I think it's, you know, just deciding what kind of sparkling water you want to buy at Whole Foods now.
It's like, wow, that's a big decision. There are 45 options. So I'm curious what you've seen over the last decade as the world has evolved and people have been implementing this. What's different now as opposed to what it was like 10 years ago? And what's the impact been compared with what you thought it would be?
Greg: I thought had the power of relevancy in my own life and I could see it for other people, but it was much more counter cultural than I realized. So one of the realities I think of this is that you can be an above average. Essentialist and, and you'll still have enormous set of, of challenges with focus because it's not like a, even a normal distribution curve where, you know, 50 percent of the people are more essentialist It's like almost all of us are [00:07:00] buried.
With noise, that's a word I didn't use very much in essentialism, but I use a lot more now is just people are buried in noise, noise, that idea. There's so many kinds of noise and it makes it very hard to sort of navigate our way through life, through relationships and so on. I think that's one of the changes that I've observed.
I think that what I've come to realize is that people need, because of the Size of the system that is designed to keep people distracted, incentivized to keep people from other potentially more important relationships and tasks. I've learned that I had to build more of an ecosystem to help people. I used to think, look, you have the book, that's the mindset.
And there's some skills in there too. So this is enough, but. Over time, despite that, people would, would keep asking, okay, well, where do we start? And I always thought, well, that's what I wrote the book for. That's where you start. But, but, but then eventually I thought, okay, no, they need that. And so we designed it.
We thought we'd do it like three [00:08:00] months and it took us nine months to do. It's a very simple thing. It's free, but it's a less, but better course people can take. It's free for everybody, but it's a 30 day email course. They get an email every three or four days. Oh, great. Because as I took the course myself, I found at first we used to do it every day.
And it was just. Completely overwhelming to me to receive it that much, even though I thought the content was good. And so eventually we changed the design of it. And so people can sign up for that because that's the place to start. So that was one thing I learned. They needed an actual, very easy onboarding process to be able to experience it.
That's something that I've learned. And, and there's been a whole set of other things that I've been working on and building slowly that have, I think now create a kind of A system, I won't say it's equaled fully to the challenge of our times, but I think it helps to reinforce these ideas of essentialism so that essentialism isn't just like one more thing.
It becomes a different way of living [00:09:00] and that different lifestyle is the goal and, and what I'm trying to provide for people.
Megan: How do people get your free email course if they want to go deeper on this?
Greg: Yeah, it's a, there's gregmccuhan. com. So G R E G M C K E O W N dot com. It's on the front page. You sign up in 10 seconds.
It's the easiest sign up ever. And then it will just be sent to you, uh, a workbook that you can print out. Uh, it brings together the best of essentialism and effortless so that you're just starting with the best of those ideas. Uh, and, uh, and I think helps people to kickstart their journey. Excellent.
Michael: It seems like the entire culture is arrayed against us.
I mean, you talked about this when you've got the social media platforms, for example, Facebook, Spending billions of dollars in research to distract us. Essentially, it seems almost like I wouldn't say a loss cause, but it's an increasingly challenging thing to try to stay focused and to say no to all the distractions.
Do you think it's greater today than it was? 10 years ago, we're about the [00:10:00] same.
Greg: Yeah, no, no. Everybody knows it's greater because they can just feel it. They can feel that they're in a kind of what I call red brain mode frequently through the day. We were familiar 10 years ago. We'd say, Oh yes.
Multitasking. That's like a thing and it's a challenge, but it's somehow it's different than just multitasking. Now it's just an impossible game and it is a game and it's a game of course, the social media companies. Uh, literally paid to win, but it's like there's starting just a little more than 10 years ago, this unholy alliance of smartphones in your pocket, social media.
I mean, even just those two forces meant that, you know, this device in our pocket, like whatever it is, the one thing it isn't is a phone. And what I think it is, is a 3 trillion, a military grade, uh, Not just distraction producing machine. It's much more severe than just [00:11:00] distraction. It's a disorientation machine.
And we don't totally, we're totally unprepared for that. We're there. We're no match for it unless we start to see it for what it is. And then you can take corrective and adjusting action. But if you just a swimming in it, unaware of how extreme this has become, how different life has shifted. Almost without each day you don't notice.
And then suddenly, you know, you wake up and, well, how about this? Like nobody talks to each other anymore. You know, I mean, I mean, inside of people's homes, I have a podcast now and I just had Brad Smith on there is the president of Microsoft and he's one of the few senior leaders in technology. And I've worked with many, many of them in, in, in all of the major companies and many of the minor tech companies.
And he's one of the very few technologists who. Really seriously admits that there's an upside and downside to all technology. He wrote a book called tools and weapons. I mean, he really acknowledges it. And one of the things [00:12:00] that he says is for a hundred years, we've created technology that makes it easier to connect with people who live on the planet.
A long way from us at the expense of connecting with the people who live closest to us. And that trade off is serious. So you have to think about it this way, that these technology companies only make money when you make that trade off. Like that's what their technology allows. It doesn't make it easier for my wife and I to have a deep, Conversation and connection.
It will always interfere with that. And the same for Children, the same for the people that you want to live around. And so anyway, these are some of my thoughts on that.
Megan: Wow. I feel like we could go so down that rabbit hole. And personally, I feel the pain of this. I have five kids, two young adults and two teenagers.
The five year old does not have any technology really yet, except an iPad if she's sick. Um, but This is a real challenge. You know, it's like, we don't know how to be with ourselves [00:13:00] anymore. We don't know how to be with each other anymore. So can you talk to us about maybe two or three things that give us a fighting chance?
against this weapon that we're carrying around in our pocket? Because I think from my perspective, it feels like just getting rid of your iPhone, that doesn't feel realistic to me. But at the same time, the consequences are undeniable in the negative.
Greg: Well, look, I interviewed somebody on my podcast recently who calls herself the opt out family.
And she, Really is advocating for something close to a Luddite position of you can undo everything. Like you can push back on every request. You can just live app free. And I found it quite refreshing talking to her, even though in some ways I find myself as you're describing, like, I'm not sure that I want to pay the price for that way of living either, because there's a cost to that.
Call the school every time they do anything new. Well, I don't want to [00:14:00] be on that signup. So how else do I do it? Like there's a price in that too. I was just having, I was just doing a keynote for an organization and was for Amazon, but it was the section of Amazon that, that is responsible for the last mile.
So when you have something delivered to your door, you know, if you order something from Amazon, right. An Amazon truck arrives, but actually it's not an Amazon employee that's in that truck. It's somebody else. And so they, they outsource that. And so this group of people is facing a pretty extreme version of the life that we're all challenged with, because they're required to deliver it three to five times the speed.
Of, you know, UPS, for example, you know, there's a lot of pressure to do things better and faster and more efficiently all the time. And so they live in a kind of red brain world if they're not careful. And one of the things I felt was important when I was talking to them is to not. Pretend. Look, you can just take control of this situation.
You could just simplify everything. You could just focus on what matters and that's it. They are [00:15:00] part of a system. They're not even employed by in that sense. So it's like they can't just change the whole system. And I think that that's a good metaphor for all of us. Cause it's not like we are in charge of these, these social media companies that we're in charge of the way that technology is evolving.
We're not in charge of open AI or an experiments that are going on. Okay. So what I said to them, and I say now in answer to your question is what can you take control of? And the language I've eventually moved to is the power half an hour. Can you take control of 30 minutes of your day? Not the whole of it, but 30 minutes.
Maybe it's the first 30 minutes. Maybe that would be ideal, but maybe not super realistic. If you have young children, especially, maybe it's the first half hour of your workday or the final half hour of your day, but use 30 minutes tech free. paper and pen. I mean, this is a music to your ears, but, but I finally was persuaded to create an essentialism planet.
And I've done that now. And I was under contract to do it maybe as [00:16:00] much as 10 years ago. And I, I started working on it and actually I quit and got out of the contract because I felt that it was, I just wasn't ready. I didn't think I had an answer that was useful enough for people, and so I just didn't do it.
And then finally, it's physically not out. They just sent me the prototype as of this conversation, but here it is. We have our nice little, uh, planner, but in it, there's this process. I have started to use 30 minutes a day in which I do the following. What's going on? Free writing for six minutes. Get the noise out.
No order, no judgment, no rules. What's going on? The prompt is just what's happening. You're like, what's in your mind. Get that noise out of your head. Where, where you can't manage it and put it where you can look at it. And then, and then I didn't come up with this phraseology, but so what, what is the news in your life?
What does that noise reveal? Is there, is there a signal in the sound? Is there a headline? Sometimes for me, it's a, yeah, you need to take a break. Sometimes it's okay. You need to be focused [00:17:00] and disciplined today because of what you've committed to doing. Sometimes it's okay. You need to build in some pauses.
There's different news depending on the day. And then the now what, uh, Follows the one, two, three method, which is what is your priority today of all of these things? If you only can do one thing, what is that thing? And of course we've talked about this before but the word priority came into the English language in the 1400s and it was singular And it stayed singular according to Peter Drucker for the next 500 years So it took half a millennium for anybody to Start using the term priorities and that's for good reason because you can't have very very many Very first before all other things things and yet sometimes we're living our life as if everything is a priority all of the time and And so you identify the priority and a rule of thumb I like is to try and spend a couple two or [00:18:00] three hours on that today if possible What i've learned in my own experience is that that is the thing You Whatever that thing is, that is least likely to happen today.
And so this is part of the reason to go through the process. So the one, two, three method, I've said what the one is, the two essential things that are also urgent, those things more often get done because there's a deadline attached to them, there's something there. But if you don't do them, it could certainly stresses you out.
And then the three is three items of maintenance, which. Yeah, I sort of call it the laundry of our life because it's literally true about laundry, but there's other things that are like laundry, metaphorically, that if you don't do them today, tomorrow or the next day, things get a lot harder. And I won't say that I do this every single day, but I think that I'm, I'm still upwards of around 50 percent of the time.
I think I'm, I'm doing it and sometimes I'll do it once a week for the whole week, but this process, it is a tangible difference. In the experience of my [00:19:00] day, when I do it, I can feel time slow down a little bit. I can feel like I have something to come back to so that I can orient myself. And if I don't do it, my day just is frenetic and frantic.
And you just don't even know if you're doing the right things. You're just doing things and you're just reacting. And it's, it's like reactivity. As your dominant way of living as lifestyle reactivity as a lifestyle. I don't think anyone would choose that consciously. Well, if I could live any kind of life, what the one I want is the reactive life, but that is sort of how it seems to be unfolding for many of us.
So maybe you can't control everything, but if you could take control of half an hour. And use that to design what you want to do instead of operating by default, it improves the quality of life for the rest of the 23 and a half hours.[00:20:00]
Michael: Part of what occurred to me as you were talking too, is we're kind of swimming in a current of dopamine where our biochemistry gets hijacked by social media and everything else. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about is the idea of trade offs, but particularly the idea of saying no. And I think so many of us find that difficult, and increasingly difficult.
You know, you think, once I become aware of this, once I become aware that I need to say no more to protect the things that are important, That doesn't mean that you're done with that. I have to keep coming back to that concept.
Megan: When I initially heard you really talk about this, it felt like it was primarily about saying no to other people, which is still very relevant.
And I'm sure people say to you all the time, as they do to us, you know, I'm a people pleaser. This is really hard for me. I don't like to let people down, you know, that kind of thing. But I, I personally find my biggest challenge at this point is not saying no to other people, although that'll be a perennial problem for all of us.
It's saying no to myself and my impulse. to [00:21:00] do easier things than what you're talking about with this one priority that is the priority to end all priorities every day. You know, that usually requires. some cognitive weightlifting that, um, it's, it's so tempting to just say, yeah, I think I'll just go check Instagram or yell, go, you know, do something that's easier.
And I feel like our tolerance, our frustration tolerance is less than it's ever been. So as you're answering this, I'd love to hear your thoughts, not just on saying no to others, but also. The man in the mirror is the problem.
Greg: One of the things I just want to observe is the nature of this problem, particularly this idea of struggling to say no to ourselves.
And in a state of red brain, if you're sort of in red brain, you want out because it's really painful, but we escape to the wrong places and it's extremely tempting to do it because it's been designed to be effortless, right? There's almost nothing more effortless. Then jumping onto whatever your [00:22:00] social media, you know, vice is.
And of course, occasionally you do that and there is something useful there. So there's, that keeps you going in, in this sort of addictive cycle because you never know whether it's going to have something or not. So you sort of roll, uh, Las Vegas, you know, a slot machines, what might be useful, this might work, same thing that gets us to email it, you need that.
Uncertainty. And so yes, there is a system and there's no pretense about whether these are addictive. They are designed absolutely to be, and they're way more addictive than almost anything else because they are just more addictive. To the person, you know, they are designed more and more precisely the more that you use them.
So yeah, yes, this is a very effective trap that has been designed to work in just this way. Now, what do we do? Well, one thing I think that is overlooked is something you said there about the priority thing that's so hard and the going to social media that is [00:23:00] It's so trivial, but so easy. And that's why one of the reasons that I wrote effortless is just to question, first of all, in my own mind, is it true that essential things are harder?
And non essential things. Is that true? And of course, sometimes it's true. Of course it is, but does it always have to be true? Could it sometimes be designed in such a way that the essential thing becomes effortless and rewarding and enjoyable and the non essential thing becomes hard and challenging and less enjoyable?
Like, is there a way to sort of hack the system and stack the decks in our And so I found that there's a series of things that we could do to try and, and challenge what I almost have come to think of as the Puritan way of thinking about important things. So it's like whether it's like a bad 1980s motivational speaker, or whether it's that coach on the football team, or maybe it was a [00:24:00] parent, they all gave the same kind of speech, which is, This is going to be so hard, but it's going to be so worth it.
Grinding these two ideas together, fixing them as a meaning frame, frozen as if that is always and ever true. And it's like, well, then people give up before they've even begun on some of the really important areas of their life. And so it's like the equivalent of, you know, when somebody has a slide that's got 500 words on it, you don't read the first 400.
And then give up. You do the pre scan and the pre scan, you look at it, you're like, uh, no, I'm never going to read that. And I think people pre screen the essential commitments in their life, whether it's health or a key relationship that needs attention and so on, or even just the chores of our lives, or that one project we've wanted to do, write that book, do, you know, that, that the meaningful.
Deep work. We pre scan it, already overwhelmed, go do [00:25:00] something else I'm more familiar with, easier with social media, escape it. And I think if we invert the question we don't even know that we're asking, which is how can I do this really hard thing that's important? If we just invert it and we simply, you remember, what's his name in the sitcom?
Come on, Seinfeld, George, George Costanza. It's like when he has that. Eureka moment in his life. Every decision I've ever made has been wrong. He says, so therefore if I inverted, if I do exactly the opposite, everything's going to work out right, which it does in fact happen for that single episode.
Everything works out right because he does the opposite. Well, for insecure overachievers. To do the opposite, to invert it by simply asking even this question, which is surprisingly powerful, which is like, how can this be effortless? That's it. You, here's the important thing you've done. You're planning.
Here's the priority you're about to get to it. You're [00:26:00] imagining that you're going to climb Everest and you just say, well, is there an effortless way to achieve this? Can I make effortless progress on this? And just even that inversion at first seems. So counterintuitive, it's like, ah, that doesn't seem realistic.
And it shows us some of the thinking that's in our heads and how deep it is. Well, that just, that's lazy. Easy must equal lazy. I don't want to be lazy. Let's just be obvious here. Easy does not equal lazy. Like that's literally true. Easy is something doesn't require effort. Lazy is not willing to put in effort in this world where cognitive burden, that effort, that's what we mean by modern effort is cognitive burden.
You want everything essential to be as effortless as possible. So that you free up some mental space to be able to think and to work out what the next level of contribution is. So that single question alone, how can I make this effortless? I can give you case study after case study of this, and really surprising to a mind [00:27:00] saturated in the idea that maximum.
Effort equals maximum results. If you believe that, like I still do, like maybe you still do a lot of achievers do, then you push back on this idea. It's not very comfortable, but that is so not true. The idea, what is true is that optimal effort equals maximum results. Maximum results. And that, that shifts the whole scenario.
Michael: Could you give us an example of some task that you thought was going to require an enormous amount of effort, but you asked that question and it became effortless
Greg: while I was writing the book. And I was asking myself that same question and I looked around the room and in the room, I had this printer, we'd replaced her printer and the printer that we had worked perfectly well, but we wanted something different.
And so it sat there for weeks. Why is it sat there for weeks? It's because there's a cognitive burden, not massive, but enough. I don't want to do it. Do we recycle it? Where do we go to a digital recycling center? I [00:28:00] don't know where one is for that. Well, do we give it away? Well, who do we give it to? And do we sell it?
Well, then we have to go through the process of selling it. Do we throw it away? Well, that doesn't seem right. And that's just enough of uncertainty that that's why it's still there. And I started going through that same flow, but I was noticing it this time. You know that i'm doing it the hard way i'm making it harder than it needs to be so i asked this question Well, how could it be effortless?
How can it be effortless to have that no longer there in a way that I feel good about it? And I literally look up and I see that down the road. There is some workers and I thought I wonder if they want it So I walked out, I said, Hey, we've got this printer. It's in good working condition. Do you, does it, do you know anyone wants it?
They did. It was loaded into their car within two minutes, actually timed between the time I asked the question and it was completed. But that's a tiny illustration. I'm not saying everything's like that, but here's what I do know. If I hadn't asked the question, I would never have got that answer. So we're priming ourself with very effortful, draining, exhausting questions that keep otherwise insecure overachievers stuck [00:29:00] and not breaking through to the next level.
But now I have to give you another case study because you said, can I give you another case study? Please. So this is a brilliant middle manager, woman, married children. She's the kind of person who, she told me, I feel guilty if I, Not if I take a break to eat lunch, just if she eats lunch, she feels guilty.
You know, she's tuned a certain way, and I don't think she's the only person tuned that way. attuned that way, that if she isn't sacrificing, kind of sacrificing her health or sacrificing something, she's not good. She's not a righteous person. She's not that, that couldn't be the holy path, you know, that kind of thing.
And she was up at 4am in the morning, photoshopping something for her youth group. The next day, no one's asking you to do that. No one's expecting you to do it. The impact of that. Extra few hours is, is minimal. [00:30:00] She's certainly well past optimal performance. I'm sure that you'd say that's a diminishing returns or even negative returns, meaning if you had not done it, you'd be in a better position than by doing it.
So this is the norm of her life. So I give her the coaching. I was like, if it's simple, you ask the question, how can I make it effortless? Let's just ask that better question. Might not always relate, but it might. So use it. So the next day she gets a phone call from, she, she works at university and the professor calls, she's in charge of their videography department and some other departments.
But he said, listen, I just need you to come and get your team and just record my class for the semester. And in the moment that he asked, she was already thinking like an insecure overachiever. But this time she noticed the thought pattern was like this. Okay. I'm going to wow him. That's the first thought.
I'm going to wow him. I'm going to, what does that mean to me? In her head, she's like, well, we can bring a whole team in. We can have multiple camera angles. We're going to edit it together to be the, [00:31:00] you know, the optimal video performance. Uh, we're going to have music intro and outro. We'll have some graphics.
We'll splice in his slides. You know, these are the things that are already in her mind. This is in the micro moment after the request is made, but she notices this time. That she's making it more complicated than it has to be, or she might be. So she just asked a couple more questions. Well, who is this for?
And when do they need it? And when do you need an answer? And she just pauses before offering both a yes and all the extras he hadn't even asked for. And it turns out that it was for one student who was going to miss a few classes because of an athletic commitment. Oh my gosh. And so she's like, how can I make it effortless?
She said, well, if you thought about maybe asking someone else in the class, just to record it on their iPhone, you know, the audio or the video, and then just sending it to him. And you know, the professor's like facepalm moment. He's like, I hadn't thought about any of that. That's the [00:32:00] answer that we'll do.
I'll just go with that. So she hangs up the phone and she's like, what just happened? I just saved four months of time, the whole semester. For a whole team. And all of the energy going into it that would have been creating something that was completely underappreciated because it didn't address the real issue and extra strain.
And for one question, one noticing of how I'm making the decision literally did make the execution effortless, actually effortless for her and practically effortless for the professor as well. That to me was another one of these moments. You know, I'm not saying you can do it about everything. But if you don't ask the question, then you can't find an effortless answer.
Michael: I love that because I tend to be somebody that over engineers things. And when I get a request, it's like, how can I wow them? And it's probably the insecure overachiever [00:33:00] part of me. Golly, just pushing the pause button and asking that question.
Megan: I think there's so many examples of this. You know, I, I think about a consultant that we've been working with Brian Harris from a company called growth tools.
And I was just recommending him to another CEO friend of mine today. And I was, as I was writing that recommendation, I said, the thing that Brian is brilliant at is making things that are overwhelming and complex, simple, and effective. It's like you slap your head every time you talk to him because you're like, Oh, I've been working on this problem for six months and it was actually always this easy.
And you know, I just like, what kind of energy and brainpower am I using trying to solve these problems? But I think that you're so right. What I'm taking away from this myself is that we've got to become self aware about the internal dialogue that we have When we're starting to solve a problem because our kind of default bias around this is going to be really hard, but it's going to [00:34:00] be worth it.
And I did that earlier today. I'm like, Oh my gosh. I mean, really like, it's not even hard. Like it's not even hard. And in my mind, it's like, I got to like really work up the enthusiasm to do this thing. And then it takes way longer. It's, it's actually hard. Because of all the heart I thought it was going to be, not because of all the heart it actually is.
Greg: No, no, no. It makes perfect sense. Just this morning I was saying to my daughter, Hey listen, you know, you need to have your, you know, get your room tidied before A, B, and C. And playfully, she fainted on the floor in like, overwhelm at this task. And it was pretty funny. But then I said, I said, listen, literally set a timer, do a little microburst.
You just do 10 minutes, set a timer and at 10 minutes, just you're done wherever you are. And she literally, I audibly heard a response. She's like, Oh yeah. Okay. That was something she could sign up for. The thought of like, when are we done? How do we know when we're done? It's another good question to make execution more effortless.
How do we know when we're done? Oh my, I wasn't going to share this story, but this is such a fun one [00:35:00] too. But this is in, in Sweden at the time it was all about. The size of your ships and your, your Armada. And that was how you showed your prowess because of course that was your military dominance. And so the King of Sweden decides he's going to have the greatest ship that's ever been built.
And so he starts the building of it. He selects a forest of a thousand trees that's available, opens the coffers and almost unlimited budget gets the ship builder, the best that he can find, and let's go, we're going to build this ship, but he just keeps changing all the way along. What it is that he wants in the ship.
So after they have cut everything for the ship, all the wood, he decides he wants the ship to be twice as long. And so everything they've done has to be redone. Okay. So that's an example. Then he decides he wants to add cannons and a second set of cannons. Okay. So that's like a whole set of work. Then he says in a truly sort of non essentialist unnecessary complexity, he wants to add an unbelievable set.[00:36:00]
of hundreds of ornate statues to it. And so that, of course, apparently one of these, I don't remember which, but one of these changes gave him a heart attack and it killed him. And so the second in command now is in charge of building the ship. And so the story continues on unimaginably as changes continue and years and years go by.
Well, finally they get to a day, not a completion. The Vasa is still not finished, but. The king has organized a date in which he wants to show off the ship and he's brought all the VIPs and the other people from the Scandinavian countries, all of the other royalty and so on. And they bring them out and so that he wants to show it off.
Doesn't want to complete it. It doesn't want to actually figure out what done looks like still, but still wants to show off what he has. So it is an untested ship. So it goes out and. He wants them to do a gun salute to just, you know, to show off to these, uh, to these VIPs. And in doing that, what happens is that [00:37:00] first of all, all of the windows are open, not glass windows, but you know, the wooden windows are open.
And because they haven't tested it and they suddenly put all these cannons on there, it pulls the ship immediately over. And so instantly it's filled with water. It goes basically one mile and lasts one hour. It's actually quite tragic. I don't know. I'm sort of setting up in a humorous way. Cause like the whole ship goes down with the entire crew that is such.
A ridiculous version of what happens if you don't just say done looks like this. This is how I'll know everything can be improved. Everything can be changed, everything. And I'm in favor of doing things in a great way. I'm not suggesting we just accept low standards, but to just add frills and complexity endlessly makes it.
impossible to finish and it burns us up all of the way. And how many times have we done that on things that don't even matter to us? Or we take something that does matter, [00:38:00] but we've now made it twice as challenging. And I can put this all to you in two questions. Who wants 10X results, both in terms of quantity and quality?
Yes, everybody wants that. So then the corollary question is, who can work 10 times harder? And for any insecure overachiever, the answer is no, no one can do that. And so if you put those two questions together, you have the 10 X dilemma. That's why I wrote effortless. We cannot just do what we've been doing 10 times more.
We can't just over engineer overcomplicate 10 times more to get to where we want. We need a different, simpler path. To be able to, to achieve what matters to us so that we can achieve what matters, but without burning out.
Michael: It's easy to complicate things. It takes a lot of effort to make things simple. I think that this is one of the things that I loved and admired about Steve jobs.
Right. He would persist on product design till he got the simple, elegant [00:39:00] solution. And at the time we're recording this, The iPhone 16 has just come out and we have yet another button. You know, he didn't want any buttons, right? He wanted it and simple. And now they've got this other camera control button.
And so now it's getting more complicated and it's just more to learn. And I was showing Megan the button today, cause she has A new iPhone 16, and she says, I didn't even notice that. What is that for?
Megan: I mean. Probably something I like. It's solving a problem I didn't even know that I had.
Greg: So let's just stay on Steve Jobs for a second because this is important.
If we, if we say it like this, if we say essentialism equals focus. Effortless equals simplification. Like that's how to think of them differently. If, if, if essentialism is about doing the right things, effortless is about doing them in the right way. And it really matters. So Steve jobs story about this, do you remember when they, he first returns to Apple and they're creating the EMAC, which is the very colorful machine.
It looks really different to the, to the PCs at the time, but he wanted [00:40:00] to add the IDVD. Software to that. So this allows you to burn a DVD. Okay. So obviously it's a almost a generation ago now, at least it feels like it. And at the time, DVD burning was a very specialized industry. And so your typical machine would cost maybe 60, 000 just to be able to burn DVDs.
So they buy a company that specializes in DVD burning. And their manual for using that software was 5, 000 pages long. So you can kind of get a sense of what period we're in. They're given a certain amount of time, I think only a couple of weeks, but they're given like two weeks to prepare for their first meeting with Steve jobs, you know, to review the product and to try and show.
And so they know ahead of time, they have to simplify this and, and significantly simplify it. And so they create, I talked to the, the, um, one of the engineers that was involved in the whole process and was in that meeting when, when they met with Steve and they prepared their slide deck and they had [00:41:00] just spent The whole time removing features after features that they thought were just necessary only for a very specialized audience and so on.
And they were really proud of what they had. I mean, they, they could see it and they could feel that sense. Like we were saying with the closet, we've got rid of a lot of the clutter and you go, Oh, it just feels so much better. And we, why didn't we do this before? This is just a much better product already here.
And when Steve comes in, he doesn't look at the presentation. He doesn't do any of it. He walks to the whiteboard and he just draws one rectangle. And so that's the Emacs screen and one button on the screen, which he writes burn, he says, you drag your item into the rectangle and you press burn. That's the app we're going to build.
So in that moment, everyone in the room, like they said, they never shared that presentation. You know, they never shared any of this stuff because they were immediately embarrassed about all of it. But he said, he said, but I learned a lesson [00:42:00] forever. This is literally true. All of the great simplifiers that I.
Read about research or interviewed. This is the difference. They don't take the complexity and cut off a bit of the unnecessary complexity. They start with zero and that's the difference. And it, it, it's a really important inversion. You don't say, Hey, it's take 20 steps. How can I do it? 19. You say, if we're starting today, how can we do it in one step?
How can you make it effortless? How can you make it so easy? It's just, it's just, it's so easy. Mind blowingly different than what everyone else is designing. Anyway, start with zero seems to me to be a helpful sort of tool when we're thinking about simplification.
Michael: We've been talking about the arena kind of at work mostly, but our personal lives are more complicated. One of the things that I've noticed. As a grandparent now is how not [00:43:00] essential that world is, you know, it's, it's like every teacher thinks you've got full time to work on their homework. It's so true.
Every sport thinks you need to, you know, be doing that and only that. And it can be crazy. What happens to your personal life when you say yes to all these opportunities. So how do you think about it in the arena of sort of family and personal stuff?
Greg: I'm thinking first in my own life about the extent to which we've done this or not been able to do this.
And we ended up homeschooling for almost a decade. We've just come to a close with that. That's sort of definitely overcomplicated our lives. Like in one sense, it's like a huge mistake. And on the other hand, it was sort of a radical move. And I haven't regretted it in any strategic sense. I know that's not really the answer that you're looking for in that way, but I'm just trying to think about, I think one of the things that happened, we were in Silicon Valley and we would go to these [00:44:00] public school meetings with the other parents.
And there was such a range of conversations and questions. And we think of ourselves as being fairly high achiever and driven and so on. Yeah. But we would want to say, I don't think we ever really asked, but like, Hey, can we just do less homework? I mean, you know, like they're in kindergarten, they're in first grade.
Like, I mean, really, we want a lot of time for play here. That's what we really want. That's the work for young children. And, but lots of other parents would say that we'd need more homework. Are we going to get more homework? I mean, it was real that I'm not, I'm not exaggerating. And, and so there was just this growing pressure on our eldest daughter, especially, you know, And we just thought, can we not just extend childhood a little?
Can we not just believe that there's a natural growth process that she'll be able to adopt? And so we decided, well, one year for one child and, and then she wanted to carry on and the next child wanted to, and so on. So we ended up in this, uh, you know, in this unexpected adventure, but what it allowed for was a very different way of doing [00:45:00] life.
So when I traveled about. Maybe 80 percent of the time I would take one of the, you know, one of my children with me. And I knew that was a good move. I didn't think that was like a, I knew that was aligned with my values and my purpose in life. But now that we're sort of coming towards the end of that, I just think, Oh my goodness, I could have so easily not have done that.
But trade offs work best when they're reinforcing an overarching strategy because they, instead of thinking about trade offs is like, Oh darn it, we've got this trade off to make. You start to embrace them because you go, yeah, I'm, I want to do something different. I want to end up somewhere different. I want a different type of experience.
I want a different kind of relationship. And so now when our children talk and they just, I've got one on a mission in Brazil, one on a mission in Chile for like a long time that they're not, not for a couple of months for like a couple of years. And, and one's at college at BYU. And, but I just saw them, I was listening, I was running actually, and I was listening to them all chat on Monday [00:46:00] and that the sound of the feeling between them was so rich and funny and sometimes talking over each other, but in order to laugh together and so on.
And I thought, you know, this is rich, Mike, this is what, this is what I want. This is what Anna and I wanted, and it has come to be, but it took trade offs to get there. I'm not saying that the way we did, it's what everyone else has to do or should do. I could see a lot of reasons. People shouldn't do it the way we chose to do it, but I'm saying that the way of the essentialist, you're going to find yourself saying no.
When other people are saying yes. And yes, when other people are saying no, because you are trying to be a different kind of thing. Smilingly saying no, happily saying no, you know, watch people running past you, you know, okay? Yeah, you you look very very stressed doing that and maybe we're making a mistake in what we're doing But what you're doing doesn't isn't calling out to me that that would be a better way to live I know that's what I just [00:47:00] gave you was the opt out answer You know, and there's downsides to what I'm describing, but the upsides have been many and rich.
I mean, for a start, my children have read so much and I feel a little emotional about it, but they, they've read so much more than I read when I was a teenager. And in fact, they've become the worst of all possible things, which is book push. I never talked to them in which they don't guilt me in about books.
I haven't read, but it has, it has encouraged a pretty deep dive. Now into reading the classics.
Megan: I love that. We have three questions that we ask every guest. This is our lightning round. Okay. So are you ready?
Greg: Okay. Let's go.
Megan: First question is what is your biggest obstacle right now in getting the double win winning at work and succeeding at life?
Greg: My, my biggest challenge is just that we're, we've been in a transition. So instead of the children being with us all the time and traveling with me and so on, they're now dispersed. [00:48:00] And so I have to build new routines to be available when they call that can be random. There's a randomness to it, which isn't especially convenient to be perfectly honest.
Right. I mean, yeah. So I have to figure out how do I create enough buffer that when that call comes in, I'm not just picking up. I'm not just being available. I'm, I'm recognizing this is the rich stuff. Yeah. These are the thousand X relationships.
Megan: I'm right there. We have a, our oldest is 23 and he, he always likes to call us about 30 minutes before we're going to bed.
So we're like getting, we're getting towards that, but it's, it's always worth it. That's a trade off, you know, it's, and it's, it's a trade
Michael: off. Okay. Second question. How do you personally know? When you're getting the double win.
Greg: What's been happening over the last two, three months, as we've gone through this transition, Anna and I, my wife and I have found ourselves.
Without intentionally trying, have time to talk and [00:49:00] connect again. And it's not like we haven't been doing that for 10 years, but there's a, just a higher density of it. And what we both have experienced and have believed is that when we do that, we end up being successful in the professional areas, as soon as we're aligned, as soon as we're united, it helps us in a way that.
We feel connected, but then the decision making quality increases. And so we end up being successful personally and professionally. If we're making the space to talk, reflect, make the trade offs and so on. That to me has been, you know, what I've been learning about that. Beautiful.
Megan: I love that. It makes sense to me too.
What is one ritual or routine that you regularly practice that helps you do what you do? So you talked about the. The one, two, three method. But beyond that, like what is one ritual or routine?
Greg: One of our daughters, Eve is just like this buoyant personality, rock climbing, uh, voluminous reading talks a thousand [00:50:00] words a minute until she turns 14.
And then she sort of slows down on all of that. And we think age appropriate behavior, but it wasn't, it was, it was a, what turned out to be a massive neurological. Condition that removed her executive function at a breathtaking rate. Wow. So at first it was just sort of shorter sentences and then it became like literally one word answers.
All of that emotional range was, was now locked. The right hand side of her body stopped working at the same rate. So she's literally working at two different rates. Took literally hours to eat one meal. It took her minutes to write her own name and on and on and all the way through this, no neurologist can even give us a, the beginning of a diagnosis.
I mean, they're just one just shrugs his shoulders. I, cause all the tests are coming into the normal range. And in the midst of all of that, one of the things I learned was, Well, the everything we've been taught about gratitude is wrong in quite a literal [00:51:00] way. Like from a definition point of view, if you say, what is gratitude?
What people will say is, is being thankful for the good things in your life. But if you look it up in a dictionary, that's not the definition of it. And that that's, I don't know why that's so interesting to me, but it is because what it actually says is to live in a spirit of thanksgiving. And that's not the same thing because what gratitude is, isn't for the good things.
It's for all of the things. Now that includes the middle things and the, you know, the not good things. And then the definitely absolutely awful, miserable things. And so then the practice starts to look like this and, and this will test. I think anyone, but it certainly tested me to be able to say out loud the following.
I am thankful that my once perfectly healthy daughter is collapsing on the way to running into a coma and dying with an undiagnosed neurological condition because. So [00:52:00] nobody wants to say that, it will stick in your throat, it will test you, it will test your muscle, it will make you question in a sense your own sanity, like that, that is a huge difference.
And around the Thanksgiving table, not that I'm against any of that gratitude either, but it's very different than saying what you're thankful for in the normal sense. But here's what is revealed in the process. You don't know how to end the sentence at the beginning of the sentence. So you're opening yourself up to the possibility that it's happening not to her, but for her, not happening to her, or us.
It opens the window to maybe, suddenly gratitude isn't a feeling, it's an action, like a action of faith. You are beginning that sentence and you don't know how to end it. And what that does in a, among many things that it does, it instantly and neurologically has to change your state. Like it cannot not it's an involuntary shift.
And so you cannot in that [00:53:00] moment be both be in a state of suffering, misery, stress, and gratitude. You can't be in those two different States. Now I'm not saying it lasts forever, but what we started doing is we started being grateful for everything. Everything. What I now think of as radical gratitude, uh, even though actually it's just gratitude, but now as I think of radical gratitude, it instantly changed our state.
It protected our family culture. We were singing again around the piano. We're laughing again. We're praying together. We're, and that took out this threat to go down rabbit holes. Of awfulness because every possible disease, every, so many of them are fatal and so on. And instead of being consumed by that, we could think clearly again.
And my wife was able to go, you know, I've just have this sense and that this particular neurologist is the one to go and see. And we got to see him even though it was an eight month waiting list and we didn't have eight, nine months, but we got in a cancellation and he was the one that saw her and it just a glimpse just saw.
[00:54:00] something no one else had seen. He saw all the reports. He went through all of that. But then he said, just take this dopamine pill, go have lunch, come back and I'll test you again. He comes back. We can't see anything different, but he does. And he turns on his heels. He says, I suggest the immediate hospitalization for Eve for treatment for encephalitis, which is inflammation of the brain.
And I asked him, Later, I said, what did you see, you know, and he said, well, when she came back, her eyes were blinking at a slightly faster pace. And so literally in the blink of an eye, she was, she was treated and, and successfully for encephalitis. And, and so that, that was the beginning of a, of a two year journey that, uh, that as of now she is, I mean, she is back, she is whole, she is healthy, she is well.
And so when we dropped her off, so she's, she's in Brazil right now when we dropped her off. She's gonna, she's gonna be there for a year and a half. And I thought this was just gonna be so happy moment. She's so excited and she's ready for it. And we're ready for it. It's just, think of how, how life could have been different.
And, and so we just [00:55:00] think, this is all just good, up until 10 minutes before dropping her off. And suddenly, it just hits me like a Christmas Carol moment. You know, the Christmas, of Christmas past. And I suddenly, her life just flashes before me. And I think And it's really awful. It wasn't a happy moment. It wasn't like a nice walk down memory lane.
It was just horrendous for me for that 10 minutes. And the question that's, that's welling up inside of me is, did you miss it? Because if you did. It's too late for that. Like, of course you can, you could be different going forward. You could be at any point, you can make a better decision and you can invest differently, but her childhood, that is over.
So did you miss it? You know, did she get her life back and then you missed it anyway? And so it was really raw and really awful. And, and I came out of it, of that sort of experience. With the conclusion. No, I did not miss it. We [00:56:00] traveled together. We went on just she and I together. We went on many separate dates together.
We listened, we talked. I know her, she knows me. We, and so that was relieving, but what was left with me was this sort of two realities. Pathetically absurdly short. I could feel that right. Those years had gone by so fast. And I know that the days don't always feel like that, but, but, you know, life is going to go by fast.
And then the second is that life isn't divided into one X tasks. There's one X tasks and a thousand X relationships and to not get those confused and that Eve was a thousand X relationship for me and there's just a few of them that can be that in my life. Right. And so to try and live the rest of my life with the awareness of that reality, it was always the reality, but I can live in such a way that I can miss that, not see it.
And so I think to me, this is the spirit, [00:57:00] I mean, this is a renewal of the spirit of essentialism and radical gratitude is in there for somewhere as a practice.
Megan: Man, I feel another book coming on for you.
Michael: Greg, thank you so much. Thank you. I still appreciate your vulnerability and your thoughtful answers to our questions.
Yeah. You know, I just, I just felt like this was a real conversation. So thank you so much.
Greg: Well, right back at you. It's really a genuine pleasure to spend some time together. So thank you. Thanks, Greg.
Michael: That may be like the fourth or fifth conversation I've had with Greg over the last 10 years because I've been on his podcast, we've run into each other a few times, but I can still remember back when he was in Nashville about 10 years ago and we all went and had lunch together. I
Megan: remember that.
Michael: And he really challenged us on a lot of things.
He did. On this essentialism idea.
Megan: Yeah. At the time, I'll just speak for myself, I was kind of like offended a little bit, you know, like, you don't really know us that well. You know, I'm thinking, you know, you're just charming and British, which he is [00:58:00] charming and British, but he was really right. And I think, I think that what I know now, 10 years later, that I didn't know then is that we, we just needed time.
I think essentialism and knowing what's important is a process of maturity. And I think in some ways, we had to mature. in our business to be at the place where we had the clarity that we needed to be in a place of essentialism, which now we are. I mean, we are about the double win, period, the end. Like we want to make it nearly impossible for people not to get the double win.
And that is our mission. And we're fully focused on it. Yeah.
Michael: You know, the thing is, And it's always struck me about essentialism, book, a disciplined pursuit of less. Now, when you think about that, and Greg talked about that, you know, basically the culture we're in emphasizes more and more, you know, you just think about how easy it is to go on to Amazon and order more stuff.
Megan: I don't know what you're talking about. [00:59:00]
Michael: And I've had so many situations where I just like mindlessly order stuff and
Megan: it'll just And you forgot you ordered it. I
Michael: know, or, or worse, my wife Gail will say to me, What did you order? Yeah. I said, I don't know, it was like in my Facebook feed, it looked cool. Yeah.
You know, and then I never used the thing. Right. And sometimes I never open the thing. Yeah. And I think this really takes intention. Yeah. To pursue less.
Megan: I agree. And I
Michael: think you kind of nailed it in the interview when you talked about saying no to yourself.
Megan: Mm hmm.
Michael: Like I think I pretty mastered, pretty much mastered, not 100%, but pretty much mastered saying no to other people.
Right. Because I've got my priorities. I know my time's limited. I know it's trade offs. I know all that. But saying no to myself, and I feel like, oddly, in this season of my life, where I feel like I have less runway in front of me, it's almost like I'm greedy. Yeah. Like I keep wanting to do these things, you know, more experiences.
I want to take on more because I see time running out.
Megan: Yeah, that's so interesting. It's a
Michael: scarcity mindset, I have to [01:00:00] confess.
Megan: It is a scarcity mindset, and I, I think that being self aware, I mean, like I said in the interview, I think one of my biggest takeaways is just this self awareness of the questions you're asking yourself.
And I think that is a big thing. But you know, one of the things I couldn't help but think as he was talking, when you compare what's different about now compared with 10 years ago, and that's like a relatively short amount of time, we live in a time that is all about optimizing every single. Part of your life and you can make yourself absolutely crazy, literally by trying to optimize everything.
And I was just thinking about probably about two months ago, actually, it's about the time I started using our full focus wellness planner, which is relevant to what I'm about to say, I quit using my aura ring and I like loved my aura ring. I thought it was so great. First thing I did every day to the point that our five year old daughter, Naomi.
Who always gets up and snuggles with me. She would always say, mom, did you have a [01:01:00] good night's sleep? Cause I would check my app to see what's my sleep score, you know? And she would always say, is it good? You know? And I'm like, ah, I don't know. And what I realized was I was feeling so anxious as a result of.
Did I win or lose sleep? Sleep, like literally the most foundational thing about being a human, you know, and we have all these wearables and we have all you know, you can have the best drinking glasses. I have these glasses that I love that don't break like they're made of glass, but like They're super durable, some kind of like Japanese glass.
I don't know. It's from a company called Fable, if you want to look it up. This is not an essentialism plug, by the way, me telling you this, but like we are optimizing our drinking glasses. That's where we are right now. And when you think of the, all the things you use every day, the decisions you have to make, it is a tsunami.
And so I think for me, one of my takeaways was we have to decide what we're not going to care about because you literally cannot care about everything because people that make products and marketers are [01:02:00] forever thinking of more things that you should care about. So it's more things that you should buy.
Michael: I'm just thinking that I've gotten into this deep dive on. And so I started accumulating tools. Well, I have about 18 and I'm not making this up and I'm not proud of it, but I have about 18 different AI tools. And it's just like, there's always a new one in my Facebook feed or there's always a new one that somebody tells me about.
And it's just like, well, I don't want to miss out. So I get that thing. But I think the discipline pursuit of less.
Megan: Yeah.
Michael: Means you're saying, no, I've got, I've got enough tools now, enough software apps, enough things. I don't need anything else. And I kept thinking when he was talking also, the Amish have a point, you know, the kind of frozen things in time.
But at some point they said, this is enough technology. You know, we're good. We don't need any more new shiny things. And there's a point at which you have to say, Enough is enough. Do I really need that new iPhone? You know, do I really need that new app?
Megan: Well, because [01:03:00] all of those things, everything you introduce, and I think this is true in our personal lives, it's maybe the easiest to see there around things that we consume, but it's also true in our business, you know, in our professional lives, in our businesses, whatever, everything we bring in has to be dealt with.
It requires maintenance or a decision or, you know, like he was talking about the printer that you have to get rid of, you know, now you got to figure out where do you get rid of a printer? I don't know. Can I just throw it in the trash or do I have to go find, you know, a special place that it goes and, you know, do I have to do anything and well, they're only open certain days a week and now I got to look at my calendar, you know, just something that is so small and you shouldn't even have to spend any brainpower on your printer.
Now it could take up half of a day or, you know, at least a couple of hours trying to deal with it. I just think there are too many things like that and we just have to decide what are we not going to do, what are we not going to care about because it is literally impossible. It's like you always say, a version of this is, you always say you can have anything you want.
Or you can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you [01:04:00] want, you know, it's like you can care about anything you want, but you can't care about everything.
Michael: Yeah.
Megan: You just can't.
Michael: I did the David Allen quote just to give him credit. You know, one of the interesting things to me is I've gotten fascinated by these tiny houses.
I clicked on one somehow in my Facebook feed and now, now I'm getting all these posts, suggested posts on tiny houses. But something about that downsizing and less decisions to make and fewer things to keep up with is really attractive to me. So I don't know how this is all going to play out in my life, but I feel like these are two books, Effortless Essentialism, are two books that I need to reread every year.
Because they're so countercultural and the cultural current is flowing in the exact opposite direction that you've got to work to keep it effortless. And to keep focused on the essentials.
Megan: Yeah. So just as a reminder, you can get that course that Greg talked about at Greg McKeown and McKeown is M C K E O W N [01:05:00] gregmckeown.
com. You can get that for free, which I think would be a great place to start and definitely order both of these books on Amazon or wherever you like to get books.
Michael: Guys, thanks so much for joining us. We'd be so grateful if you would go to apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts, rate the show.
And if you could give us a review, it doesn't take long, but it makes a big difference in terms of getting more visibility to show so that we can get this message of the double went out. We like to think that we're starting or participating in a movement where there really is work life balance. And we feel like you guys are partners with us in that and your part of it is if you could review the show, if you could rate it, that would help us to get the message out.
Megan: So
Michael: thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
Megan: Bye bye.