Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Greg McKeown (@GregoryMcKeown), author of two New York Times bestsellers, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most. Together they have sold more than two million copies in 37 languages. He is also a speaker, host of The Greg McKeown Podcast, and founder of The Essentialism Academy, with students from 96 countries. More than 175,000 people have signed up for his 1-Minute Wednesday newsletter.
He is currently doing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and he is easily one of my favorite thinkers on all things related to effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of life.
Greg is originally from London, England, and he and his wife Anna are parents to four children.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Happy New Year.
Greg McKeown: Happy New Year to you. Are you feeling good?
Tim Ferriss: Happy, happy New Year.
Greg McKeown: Are you feeling good about the new year? How are you feeling about this year?
Tim Ferriss: I’m feeling great about the new year. I’m feeling really outstanding about the new year, actually. And my realization on New Year’s Eve as I was doing an inventory was that despite my predilection to self-flagellate and always look for the black lining on the beautiful cloud, that 2023 was a great year. I did a lot of things right. I did a lot of things that were uncomfortable and overall feel really good about it. So my overall feeling is do more of that, keep going, which is unusual as a realization or maybe just a framing for New Year’s Eve.
So I feel really good about 2024, and of course, the text that kicked this whole experimental walk and talk podcast off. For people who have no context, in case we use this, I am walking around with multiple forms of audio recording attached to my head and my hips, and I am really appreciating the combination of locomotion and conversation.
And you had sent me a text which was very simple, at least at face value, which is, “What is your top goal of 2024?” And I thought to myself, that’s a good question and I would like to hear your answer, at least explore it with you. And here we are. So how are you feeling about 2024?
Greg McKeown: The way I’ve been thinking about it myself is just what is the number one highest priority for the year? So normally, I’m not even thinking about it necessarily a goal because that itself can be constraining. And so —
Tim Ferriss: Could you say that wording one more time, just so I make sure it sinks in?
Greg McKeown: What is the number one highest priority for the year? That’s not very different than the way I worded it when I texted you, but it just means a little different than just, okay, well you’ve got all these existing goals like, what’s the next book or what’s the next, how do you get the podcast to the next level? It’s saying, look, bigger picture than that. Step back, look at your whole life from the longest possible, the broadest possible perspective, and get connected to that. Something like, okay, what do you understand the purpose of life to be? And therefore, what is missing right now? If you got to the end of your life and you didn’t do something differently this year, what might you regret?
Just a couple of months ago, I dropped off my daughter, Eve, who you and I have talked about before. She was the one that got really sick. But we dropped her off. So she is healthy again, she is well again. It’s really done well. And I was dropping her off for a mission. So she’s gone to Brazil for a year and a half. And I thought dropping her off would just be this really happy thing, because I felt happy about it, and she did, and the whole family did. It’s just this great thing and she’s going to Manaus, which is in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest, which she also loves.
Tim Ferriss: I know where that is. Yeah.
Greg McKeown: It’s all good. She’s learning Portuguese. But just like everything was working good about it. But about 10 minutes before I drop her off, I just have this awful feeling. Not like, oh, this is bad, this is wrong. But I suddenly just feel grief and strong emotions and I can sort of see her whole life to this moment flashing before my eyes. And I don’t know, something, the language I’ve given to the experience was something like a micro-Essentialist judgment day or something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, what does that mean?
Greg McKeown: It means did you miss it? Did you miss her life? Were you there for it? How many times —
Tim Ferriss: I got it. Like a ghost of Christmas past type of Essentialist review.
Greg McKeown: Yes, just like A Christmas Carol type experience, a micro version of it. Because it’s done. Of course, there’s a role to be played in her life forever, but that phase is done. And so whatever I feel in this moment, that’s it. The moment has gone and I’m just now reflecting on it. And in that moment, I did come to this awakening of like, no, I was, I was there for it more than I wasn’t. We traveled together, we did things together, we’ve made all these memories, our relationship connected and safely attached. But I also learned in that moment, my goodness, this life is so pathetic and short. And I learned also in that moment, it’s not divided between 1x, 2x, 3x activities on an important scale. It’s like 1x, 10x, 1,000x, and this was a 1,000x relationship. And did I live it like that was reality? That is reality. But did I understand that in the moment?
That’s a fairly dramatic way to answer your question, but it’s like that’s the perspective that I was reflecting on as I was thinking about, okay, therefore, if all of those perspectives are the true perspectives that approximates reality, how do I think about where to put my time and energy for ’24 when there’s so many good things to be doing and so many things that will act upon me, good things that will act upon me, that would consume the whole year easily. What’s missing? What do I need to do differently? And an answer did come to me. So that’s some of how I’ve been thinking about it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very helpful. So it sounds like, if I’m hearing you correctly, and please correct me if I’m wrong, that the way you’re thinking about 2024 was informed by this realization/reinforcement that as we think about different priorities, different relationships, they’re not incrementally different. They are in many cases, exponentially different where you have like a 1x, as you put it I think, 1x or 2x versus like 100x, 1,000x.
Greg McKeown: Right.
Tim Ferriss: In terms of importance. So you have that farewell with your daughter, sending her off to Manaus, which I’ve always wanted to visit, but that’s a separate story. And so where do you go from there? Because people have these realizations, maybe they go, I have no idea. They go on a rafting trip with friends and they think to themselves, “Oh, my God, this was so nourishing. I deepened my relationships with three of my most cherished friends, and I need to do more of this.” But then it, like sand through the fingers, slips away as they reenter their daily lives. And that’s kind of it, right? Things get busy, things get crowded out. So what do you do or what did you do or what are you doing after you have that realization?
Greg McKeown: Well, let me answer this in a conceptual way first of all. Why have all sorts of limitations that make focus challenging, that make prioritization challenging, that make relationships challenging? And all of us have our own mix of literally our DNA can predispose us to various weaknesses. And so the key for me seems to have been, I have to build, I mean the word gets overused, I build a system that’s equal to that challenge.
And so I have a paper planner that I built and designed myself and keep adapting all the time as soon as I learn, oh, that’s kind of a weakness for me, I build something in. And oh, that’s a tendency where I make trade-offs that I’m not pleased with later. I build something in so that it acts on me. And this really is the whole idea of Effortless. Effortless execution is I don’t want to trust my weaknesses. I want to build a system that means my weaknesses become something like irrelevant.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Greg McKeown: That’s what I’m trying to build. So one of those things, literally physically, I take it with me everywhere. My personalized plan I take everywhere. Literally everywhere I go, I will have it. And so in it, I have the key relationships of my life. And that for me is very simple. That’s my wife, Anna, that’s our four children. They are the 1,000xs in my life. And then there is a select group of friends.
And then there’s a much broader group of people that I also am building relationships and making sure I’m checking in on that really matter to me. But if I fail in those relationships, then everything’s probably okay. But if I fail in my relationship with a 1,000xs, it’s like, no, nothing’s okay. With my wife, Anna, let me use that as an example. It’s an old saying, but it’s like if things are bad in your marriage, it doesn’t matter how good anything else is, nothing’s good. And if everything’s good in your marriage, it doesn’t matter how bad everything else is, everything is good. It’s like this is so disproportionately important. And so I don’t think I can separate my answer to your question without saying, yeah, it’s actually the establishment building of this family that means there is a permanent system in place to help me remember what matters and who matters.
Tim Ferriss: When do you revisit that? In other words, if you’re carrying this with you everywhere, and it seems like, and again, I’ll just —
Greg McKeown: Go for it.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll add in my thoughts and then you can refine as we go. But it seems like unlike a lot of folks, and this would include me, who probably start with, “What should I do? What should my priorities be?” Seems like you are starting with who, and you have this constant reminder which acts as a system. I’m wondering how you use that system, right? Because I think about my phone, I have 1,379,000, I’m making that up, notes on my phone. And I’m like, this is so important. I’m definitely going to come back and read this. And 99 percent of the time, I never look at it again. So how do you use this list of people?
Greg McKeown: The way that my binder works, the first section is all about direction, sort of let’s say essential intent for my whole life. What really, really matters? It’s as succinct as possible. It’s a few pages in total. And so that’s always the place to begin, right? Because I want to come back and get centered in what I have come to learn is the closest approximation to the purpose of it all.
And I literally have to come back to it. You’ve heard the metaphor before, but the idea of a flight is off track 90 percent of the time. An airplane literally only gets to where it’s supposed to get to at the time it’s supposed to get there because it readjusts constantly along the way. And I feel like that myself. So for example, I don’t think that I’m better at being an Essentialist than anybody else. I think if there’s any advantage I’ve had in that journey, it’s that I just really admit that I’m a non-Essentialist easily. And so it’s this idea, there’s only two kinds of people in the world: there are people who are lost and there are people who know they are lost. It’s like, I know how easy it is for me to get lost.
Tim Ferriss: Never heard that. That’s good.
Greg McKeown: I’m reading that, I’m looking that, definitely I will look properly at those few pages once a week, every Sunday morning, I will look through that. I will read through it —
Tim Ferriss: And that’s scheduled, that’s in your calendar?
Greg McKeown: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Sunday morning.
Greg McKeown: That’s right. But then at other times through the week, if I feel that sensation, I know people feel this, that just sort of feels a bit crazy, it’s feeling just a bit frenetic and frantic. Even, I just texted Anna yesterday in the morning, I’m like, “Man, I just feel so lost.” And I don’t mean for the last six months, I mean for the last half hour. Man, I feel so lost right now. Okay, that’s right. That’s the signal. Go back, get centered, take a moment. What really is the intent? What matters in your life. Now from that, and then you start designing your day. And I have some thoughts specifically about that. But you’re asking the year process, or I guess you’re asking my system. So that’s once a week.
So for per day, let’s get to that. So I’ve come to call this the one, two, three method. I do not do it every day. Man, I wish I was doing it every day, but I do it more often than I don’t do it. And it’s simply this, and it has to be written down for me in paper and pen. Not in technology, free of technology. And I try now, more often than not, to have this power half an hour where I don’t go to text and email or apps or my phone for the first 30 minutes. And I do that. I haven’t been doing great at that recently, but I still do that more often than I don’t.
And so in that, then instead of doing that, I’m in my planner and I’m literally writing, “Okay, what’s the essential for today? What’s the one most essential today, most important person, most important action for that person?” Number two is I write two things that are essential, but urgent. That’s like, it could be all sorts of things. Whatever’s got a deadline on it, finish this writing assignment by this deadline. It could be finish these financial things for retirement documentation. Stuff I don’t really want to get to, but I know it’s important and there’s a deadline. And then the third thing is three things that are maintenance items. That’s anything that if I don’t do it’s not important today, but if I don’t do it will make life a lot harder later. So it’s like an effortless strategy. And so that’s the 1-2-3 method, one essential, two things that are essential and urgent, three, maintenance items.
Tim Ferriss: Would you mind, Greg, giving me just some concrete examples so we can visualize what this looks like? They don’t have to be real, they could be hypothetical. But just to give an example of what a one, two, three might look like.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, I’ll just talk through. I talked to her yesterday. So yesterday, I was in California in L.A. for an event. I was doing a keynote. I had my oldest daughter, Grace, with me. So when I was texted Anna, like, “Oh, man, I’m just kind of feeling a bit lost.” After I expressed that, I was like, okay, get focused. What is the essential for today? The number one thing, oh, Grace is here. It’s my relationship with Grace. I need to make sure that we connect today, that we’re not just with each other all day. I try to travel with one of my children about 80 percent of the time for keynotes. And so that’s built into the system, but you still have to be present and connected. And so that was the priority. The two things that are essential and urgent, one of them is the keynote. That’s coming up. I don’t really know how to phone it in on a keynote.
And I certainly fear phoning it in because it’s like such an opportunity missed. The thing is coming, that moment will arrive and you’re going to be on stage. And it was for, there’s 500 people, it’s a non-trivial event, and to all the senior leaders of the organization. And so that was one of the key urgent tasks. And then the next urgent task was to do with some family members who, I won’t get into the precise details of it, but there’s some health challenges involved. And so I’ve sort of taken it upon myself to say, okay, how could I maybe kind of be a little bit of a coach, which is not really the natural relationship I have with them. But I’m risking it because I think it really matters, and it’s like they seem to have responded really positively. And so I wanted to keep that going, that would be the next thing. And then of course, maintenance items from there.
Greg McKeown: Maintenance items literally included — I was in Florida a couple of days before California. So literally, I have to unpack everything, put everything back in its place, make sure that that’s just in order so that you don’t get behind on those things. I needed to respond to a key email about a contract that we’ve been in negotiation with over the last couple of months. So that would be an item of maintenance.
Tim Ferriss: So when you’re talking about the few pages that you would review on Sunday mornings, what would be an example of something from those few pages? Because I feel like this would be very helpful for me in the sense that I feel like I am pretty good at staying on task. I’m pretty good at keeping the important things in mind and majoring in the major things. However, there are certainly times when and weeks when I get a little lost and end up doing a lot of minor things, and at the end of the week couldn’t really point to what I’ve achieved. So what might be some examples from those few pages, if you don’t mind sharing?
Greg McKeown: I have two pages at the beginning that I don’t share anywhere, but it’s very carefully worded. The highest expression of what I think the fullest manifestation of my life can be. It’s not goals, it’s beyond that. It’s like it’s who you can be, what your most important relationships can look like, and it’s sacred. That’s how I feel about that. And so that’s still the most important centering part of it because literally, if you don’t get clear on that, nothing else matters in the system. If you execute superbly on things that end up not being what your life needed to be about, then nothing else, then it doesn’t matter. Efficiently doing what should not be done at all, of course is like, it’s a form of madness, you’re speedily going the wrong direction.
So from that, I’ve identified, let’s say five or six roles and a goal that goes with each of those roles. And so my worldview includes the idea that I’m a child of God, that you’re a child of God.
So one of the most unbelievable things to me, one of the benefits of my church membership is that every person who wants one, who’s a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, can have a specific blessing that somebody gives you, personally to you that nobody else ever gets to read. And it’s like we literally think about it, not metaphorically. It’s like literal scripture for you. And no two are the same. I’ve only ever read mine, Anna’s, the children’s, and my grandfather who died, and grandmother who died because you can read your ancestors once they’ve passed away. And my grandfather gave it to me because he was a patriarch. So every 1,000 people makes up what’s called a stake, and every stake has a stake patriarch, excuse me, and the only thing they do is give these patriarchal blessings. They’re the only blessings that are recorded, and so this is — whenever I think about what it is, I’m just like, “My goodness, how would you go about thinking about life without this document?” Because this is precise and specific revelatory insight into who you are, who you were before you came, who you are here, what’s possible, what relationships are going to matter, what weaknesses to think about, and it’s like this is the centering document. So a version of this, when Stephen Covey’s talking about, “Hey, we need to create a mission statement for your life and company,” and so on, he’s describing, let’s say something like a watered-down version of what he’s actually using every day.
Tim Ferriss: I see, so this was adapted, sort of a secular version of the blessing, effectively.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, and if you want the kind of language he used for this, so we think of life after this as having not Heaven and Hell, but a series of heavens, let’s say something like different kingdoms, a celestial kingdom, a terrestrial, celestial. He described sun, moon, and stars, and so he said to me once, he said, “Look, I think about my work professionally as a terrestrial mission.” He’s like, “I’m trying to bring a certain amount of light, like the light of the moon.”
This whole other light is way brighter.
Tim Ferriss: How long is your blessing? Is it two pages long or is it —
Greg McKeown: It’s two to three pages
Tim Ferriss: Ah, wow, okay. So it really gets — really covers a lot.
Greg McKeown: Yes, and it’s a different range. Some people’s could be as short as half a page, but I remember meeting somebody that had one that was eight or nine pages, and it really doesn’t matter because what it is is a portal what I just described, what a portal, all reading — every book is potentially a portal, it takes you there in time and place, and that’s what makes fiction especially so powerful. You suddenly experienced this whole other world, but I really think that that’s a way of thinking about scripture that isn’t obvious to most people, even people that sometimes are reading scripture all the time. It’s not the words, it just opens up the possibility. Let’s say I’ve read my patriarchal blessing, I don’t know, let’s say it’s 500 times or something. It’s probably more, but two weeks ago when I read it, suddenly a phrase, a way that it’s phrased suddenly opened up to me.
And I was like, “Oh, my goodness, I bet that means that.” And it’s like, it doesn’t matter. The words are just the vehicle, and it’s as soon as I’m ready to understand something more that suddenly the particular word is open, and that’s just how — however that sounds, I don’t know how it comes across. Nobody else has to believe or think or see it the way I do, but it’s a fact. That is an experiential fact that that is what happens over these years. I got it when I was 13, so whatever, I’ve had it for more than 30 years and even now I’m like, “Oh, that’s what it means, and this is what I need to do differently in my life. Oh, that’s where my weakness lies and that’s how I need to improve.” And so, this is a very centering tool to guide all of life.
And it’s the kind of thing I think that’s a difference between that and trying to read 200 self-help books for all. In some sense, regurgitating the same set of potentially terrestrial ideas. It’s like this to me helps — it’s better than me, it’s better than my thought. I’m trying to figure out a higher set of thinking beyond me and it’s self-transcendent rather than about self-actualization. It’s not me setting a goal for me and I’m going to achieve it. It’s, “Oh, man, I’m going in the wrong direction. This is what I’m supposed to do,” and so that’s — the whole idea, for example, the biblical term “repent.” It was translated from a Greek word that doesn’t really mean what people think of when they hear the word repent. What it means, it comes from metanoia. It means to see life yourself, life, God, everything through new eyes, and it’s that idea of new eyes and new breath and seeing that newness of sight. That is what the goal is, and so the repentance isn’t about shame.
It’s about letting go of the old thinking, so that there’s something new and better, and this higher — we’ve talked about before, the idea of light. It’s lighter and lighter and lighter to eventually some perfect day in the future, but it’s like more light produces more light. And as long as we’re following that light, it gives us more and more, and bringing this now back to you for a second. I see you doing this in your life. I see it, and you know when it’s happening because you feel more light and you know when it’s not happening just like I do because I’m like, “I feel myself — I’m being pulled into this — not away from the good into just what I want.”
I have a goal now when I’m doing keynotes. It’s probably not the most inspired goal, but pretty much I really wanted to work out how to get standing ovations because that hadn’t been my journey, that hadn’t been my story. I get great feedback, did really well, but not standing ovations. And I’m like, “Man, what do you do?” And so I feel like I actually know how to do that now, and so that consistently happens. And in the event yesterday, it was really distinctly different because they’d had everyone read the books ahead of time. And so for the first time, it’s never happened before, I walk out on the stage and I get a standing ovation at the beginning, and I’ve seen it happen to others, but it never happened to me before, ever.
And I thought in that moment, it was really — just the whole conversation was enriching and good, and I was doing the right thing and it made difference to people and all of that, but imagine if you just are living in that, breathing that in every day.
You could lose track of your way so easily. And there’s a risk of that. There’s a risk of that for me, there’s a risk of that for you, there’s a risk of that for anyone in a certain — just consumed with — consumed with — what would we call it? I could call it bro culture, that’s what I would call it, where we’re just consumed with a certain set of ideas and a certain set of what women look like.
Tim Ferriss: Well, just consumed by groupthink, or sort of group trend or whatever the success du jour happens to be. Maybe that’s going viral along TikTok, whatever the hell the shifting sands of supposed favor and adulation appear to be, right?
Greg McKeown: Well, and you just named it, the shifting sands. In my lifetime in the last, I don’t know, it’s as short as five years and the last 10 years, I feel like what success means has changed in some ways and not in a good way.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, you mean in general —
Greg McKeown: I think so, and I look at it and I go, “I don’t even want these things that are being talked about by influencers.” Influencers I never even heard of, they weren’t influencers two years ago, and now this is what to do in life and this is how to be. And I’m like, “This just feels like a bad 1980s motivational speaker,” or something like that. And I’m like, this doesn’t feel — I think I could get really lost if I pursued all of this shifting sands as you described.
Tim Ferriss: Let me come back to the blessing and the two pages, if you don’t mind, because I’m really grateful that you brought this up. And it resonates very deeply for me because I actually use different types of poetry for this, but the pages change, which has some upside, I would imagine, but also some downsides, but if you’re —
Greg McKeown: Downside, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — if you’re looking at, say, as I might the poetry of Hafez or other — they’re generally mystics. They don’t need to be from the Islamic traditions, they could be from any tradition, but they resonate a lot with my lived and felt experience for a multitude of reasons. So I will flip to a random page, and that is the page that I use as the mirror, so to speak, or the lens through which I look at my life or whatever I’m contemplating, the goals, the troubles, whatever it might be.
And it’s incredibly helpful as a way to grease the skids to get unstuck because if you’re in a pattern of thinking that has not solved whatever puzzle you’re trying to solve, then oftentimes more thinking of the same kind is not going to do a hell of a lot. So having this type of jolt of novelty/unexpected, in my case, words is very helpful, but I do see the benefit of something more comprehensive and more consistent. And so, maybe the life mission is one approach.
I will say, and this isn’t something I’ve talked about, that I’ve been single, as you may or may not know, for the last year plus maybe a year and three months or something like that,
And I wrote down what I was looking for. I also asked my ex, who I’m still very close with, if she could write down what she thinks I need, so that I could provide it to, say, a potential matchmaker or people who might want to help. And what I found was that description of what I need certainly applies to a partner, but applies to a lot more than a partner. So I found myself reading that quite consistently, and it applies to much more than — just isn’t an appropriate word, but just the partner piece. It applies to so many other aspects. So indirectly, by accident on some level, I’ve ended up also with some document that I read on a regular basis.
Greg McKeown: One of the — not just popular now, but popular forever questions is, how do I meet the right person? What would I want in that person? And some questions you lose just by trying to answer them.
Tim Ferriss: Please say more. Right.
Greg McKeown: Because it’s the wrong question.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Greg McKeown: It’s framed wrong, and so you can get — people can spend years and years on a question like that. And so, let’s say a better question is, maybe not surprising, it’s like, “How can I be the right person? Who do I need to be?” And then that means that some point you attract people like that to you, and so that your probability of meeting somebody that actually is the right person for you increases, but that seems like what’s happened to you, like you say almost without design, but it’s like, “Oh, actually that list looks a lot like what I need to be and how I need to orient myself in the world.”
So what the patriarchal blessing is to me is the highest possible ideal that I can have. And so I think that that’s the question for everybody. Given all the tools that we have, all the insights we’ve ever heard, all the best and highest wisdom that we have come across thus far, what’s that highest ideal? And to focus on it and to have mechanisms where you come back to that more often than not, more days than you don’t, so that becomes the guiding force of your life.
And so I think that there probably is some process right now where you say, “Let’s take the best of the poetry or the best of this list, and I’m going to try and write down, these are the things that…” It’s not, “What do I want?” It’s, “What is the highest truth I’ve ever come across? Even if it’s really inconvenient for me, what’s the closest thing I can articulate as to the purpose of my life?” And I do think that really without doing that, when we don’t do that, I don’t know, man, I just don’t even know what I’m doing when I don’t do that. It’s like I can respond to a lot of emails, I can travel a lot. I can — I mean, when I look back at 2023, I think, “Man, I did a lot of things and I just need to be really grateful for all those things,” but sometimes I’m like, “Did you do what really made it the most in the whole year? Did you?” I don’t want that to be true for 2024.
Tim Ferriss: What comes to mind for me also, actually I haven’t thought about this in a while, but it was from a conversation I had on the podcast with General Stanley McChrystal, and I’m going to paraphrase here, but you said something along the lines, and I’ve heard this elsewhere since, but the purpose of life is to find the purpose of life, something along those lines. And the reason that that came to mind is I would imagine, I’m just visualizing myself here, that if you have something like the patriarchal blessing or four or five pieces of poetry, so “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver would probably be in my shortlist as an example, if you have a handful of things that you have decided even for a year, even for just say the next year, are going to be effectively your personal mission statement, something like that.
Greg McKeown: Directional documents.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, your directional documents. Just having that directional document, I would imagine, gives you a certain peace of mind or ability to exhale that makes it less likely that you’re going to chase as many shiny objects and get as easily distracted as you would otherwise. Does that make sense? Just the act of gathering that and having that I see having an impact on your state and also your behavior, above and beyond what it does when you check it each week. Does that make any sense? Does that resonate? It’s kind of like you’re lost in the woods. Do you have a compass or not? Even if you haven’t figured out how to get to where you’re going, do you have a compass or not? And if you have a compass, you’re going to feel a hell of a lot better even if you don’t use it.
Greg McKeown: Well, so literally, I guess this is actually true, that if you — there’s a piece of research about this that people were given the task to walk in a straight line, and they found that if they were in a wilderness where there was no point that they could look to, they literally walked in circles and they didn’t know they were doing that, and so the only way to actually go forward is to pick something on the horizon, like, “There’s the mountain, there’s a thing, I’m going to that,” and then you could walk in a straight line, and so that’s so strange because that means that there’s nothing inside of us that knows exactly where to go physically, and that’s true for me when I’m driving, I’ll tell you that, and that’s absolutely sure.
So I think that it’s beyond the goal, it’s what’s the direction? What’s it all about? And then I’m going to fix on that for a while and then I’m going to strive to live that. We’re going to see how that goes and whether that reveals another higher insight. So, if “Wild Geese” is your poem of today, maybe in five years there’s a new poem that you go, “Oh, that’s a higher truth for me, I’m going to hold onto that and walk towards that and see how it goes.” So this could all sound ethereal to people when they say, “Oh, but I’ve just got to get on with the actions of today,” but man, the risk of skipping this part of the process is you just go in circles for years and years. I read this a while ago. There’s a big difference between 20 years of experience and the same year lived 20 times that you don’t learn the lessons because you’re just going in circles and you’re just rushing, rushing and actually not getting closer to what the purpose of your life really is.
Tim Ferriss: I have a question for you, Greg, which is self-serving, as a lot of my questions are, I suppose, but the personal is universal, right?
Greg McKeown: It makes you good at what you do.
Tim Ferriss: That’s my pitch.
Greg McKeown: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: I imagine you’ve been exposed to thousands upon thousands of people, not just through Essentialism and your other books, but also through the church and your various communities. And what I’m very curious to know is when you think about the people who come to mind as secular, but who are good at, in some fashion, doing what you’re describing, it could be, what do they have in common as the question, or it could just be, if you think of one or two of these people, how do they approach this?
Greg McKeown: That’s such a good question, and the word that comes to mind, and a word it might sound, I don’t know, almost trivial because it’s like, “Oh, yeah, we know that word,” but it’s truth. It’s like willingness to speak the truth. Meaning not that they or any of us have some monopoly on the truth, obviously we don’t. Obviously, truth is beyond us and our expression needs to be as close to what we understand the truth to be as possible, otherwise it can’t be corrected, we can’t engage in proper communication with other people.
I have a few thoughts about this. One, I think that telling the truth is — it’s like whatever the consequence is for telling the truth in the immediate moment, it is the path to your best possible future, that speaking the truth and listening to other people, having conversations — as soon as you start speaking the truth, you start having truthful conversations with people, and if you can do that in what I would describe as the spirit of truth, which is different than just saying what you think is true, “I think this,” and then it’s like you’re trying to say the truth, but in the spirit of truth. It’s like, “Am I doing this in the right spirit, or am I just doing this to win the conversation? It’s like there’s a — why you are doing it.
Tim Ferriss: Could you — I understand winning the conversation as a description, but what would the antonym of that be? In other words, saying it in the spirit of truth, what does that look like or feel like?
Greg McKeown: It means that the intent of the conversation is to discover together what is really true, not to make your point to win and so on, so the intent of the conversation changes, and so let’s describe the absolute ideal of this. The ideal of this is I am trying to speak the truth by the spirit of truth. That is, as soon as I’ve spoken it, I’m open to being wrong, and I’m open to not just being wrong, but I’m open to learning because then you say something back to me and you go, “Well, listen, this is how I see this,” and hopefully me being true makes it easier for the person I’m talking to be truthful. And so then they share something and I go, “Oh, my goodness, I have not thought about that way,” or, “That makes me think of this,” and so you’re trying to say what you think is true, but now let’s see if we can expand the parameters of truth that we together can have previously.
There’s more truth that’s going to come out in this conversation. I think that’s what the spirit of truth looks like. And then the ideal, of course, is that when the other person speaks, now I want to make this safe, so they can speak the truth to me, whatever that is, even if I don’t really want to hear it. And so I now have to listen with the spirit of truth. And so that becomes the symbiotic communication. And I would say that most people have experienced it occasionally, rarely, but they have experienced it because when you get into this kind of communication, time sort of evaporates, and we’re not worried so much about ourselves anymore, how we’re coming across, we’re not judging them and so on. It’s back to portal communicate — and I think what I’m describing now, it’s taken me a long time to understand this, to articulate this, but I think this is the one true way of communication.
Was it Anna Karenina, you know, opened with the brilliant line, “All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, and happy families are only happy in one way.” There’s a single way of doing it right and 1,000 ways of doing it wrong, and I think that’s communication too. And I didn’t know that until fairly recently, but I think that’s right that every other form, when we’re trying to speak to impress, or when we’re trying to weasel out of responsibility — I’ve done that in my own family, “Oh, well, yeah, no, I meant to do it this way or I tried that way,” defensive, this isn’t communication. I don’t know what it is. I don’t have a word for it, but it’s anti-communication. I think speaking with truth, the spirit of truth, listening in the spirit of truth, that magic happens then in that. You make each other better, you edify each other, you understand each other, you can sort of rejoice in it.
I have to assume that you have had many moments like that in podcast conversations when they’re at their best, it’s like it’s beyond any agenda. And so the people that I’m thinking of in my mind have the courage to speak the truth, and that’s non-trivial, and in my own life, I have to get better at it. And having the courage to do it, whatever the consequence seems to be in the moment, and then immediately open myself up to what they’re going to say because it’ll surely bring a response from somebody else and have the risk it, the real vulnerability.
Tim Ferriss: Is there anything else that comes to mind if you had to add something else to the answer of the question of what you see in some of the secular examples who seem to really be able to travel the road less traveled in the way that we’ve been discussing it? Anything else come to mind? It doesn’t have to be specific to any type of patriarchal blessing-like document or compass per se, but just someone who is in general good at operating kind of top down, if that makes sense. As opposed to, here are the thousand things that I could do in a reactive sense, and then let me try to pick a handful of those as my priorities, people who are very good at operating kind of top down.
Greg McKeown: It’s hard for me to get out of the thread that I’m on about this because what I’m learning is that it’s not just — we’ve talked already about this idea of the mountain, the highest aspiration, you’re looking towards something bigger than you, self-transcending. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is wrong and it’s wrong, like, Maslow said it was wrong and nobody updated the documentation.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I can’t wait. This is new to me, all right.
Greg McKeown: So before Maslow died, he wrote a final book in which he updated his model and just no one — I don’t know why, I don’t know what was going on precisely, but it just got ignored, and every time we — and for some reason that model just is in every single psychology book that’s ever been written, and it’s everywhere, everywhere, the highest need is self-actualization. And he changed that before he died to self-transcendence, that that’s the highest ideal, and my goodness, that’s a big difference.
Tim Ferriss: That’s not even a similar species.
Greg McKeown: No, they’re really not. They really are different in kind. Self-actualization is like what I was briefly describing before as bro culture, and maybe that’s not a precise terminology, but it names something for me of like, “Yes, it’s just about you. Greg McKeown looking like he wants to look, feeling like he wants to feel, getting what he likes to get. More for me…”
Tim Ferriss: It’s individual achievement-related.
Greg McKeown: Yes, it’s achievement ethic, and the data shows that achievement ethic as a value has increased in society over the last few decades significantly, more than any of the other, let’s say the other virtues, and of course, I think achievement is a virtue, the desire to achieve, but it’s of course just one of many. And so, self-transcendence is kind of what we’re talking about, and it certainly leads me down this path of yes, it is about the relationships. It really, really is about that because if you have a model of self-actualization and then you try to be in a relationship, well, it’s not going to work. That’s the summary: it is not going to work. And it’s not going to work because that’s not what a relationship is.
And by the way, this is big in my mind — and so, one could argue that the biggest insight that’s come about in psychology and in psychotherapy over the last 50 years is this growing understanding of what a relationship is, what love is, and particularly the idea of safe attachment and the attachment theory. And so at risk of riffing too long on this subject, let me just —
Tim Ferriss: I’ve got nowhere to go, man. And actually, Greg, just so we don’t lose track of one thing, for people who may not be familiar with the term self-transcendence, if you could just define that at some point, it could be brief, but just so people have an idea. Self-actualization I think people probably can infer, but self-transcendence.
Greg McKeown: So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go for the attachment stuff and I’ll bring it back to self-transcendence.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Greg McKeown: One could ask a question like, “What is a relationship? What is love? What makes a healthy, strong, resilient, successful relationship over decades? What does that look like?” And it’s a really non-trivial question, especially when one considers what, for something like 50 years, we have been actually taught, and the data now is increasingly showing that that is wrong. So that really matters. But what we’ve been taught, first of all, go back with me to how people thought about raising children in, let’s say, 1910, 1920, like this, in England, the center of the world probably still, in terms of economic power, and political power, and so on, and what was the perspective of that relationship?
And John Bowlby is in an upper class home, in a gentleman’s home, he’s allowed to come and eat at the family dinner when he turns 11 or 12, just for dessert. So prior to that, he’s not even allowed to eat dessert in his own family, and the reason is because there’s this idea that children should be seen and not heard, that if you were to show emotional connection with your child and are overly loving, you’re going to raise namby-pamby kids, and they’re not going to be strong in the world. And in that perspective, the reason it’s so non-trivial is that that defined policy and behavior in the broadest possible sense. So for example, if your child needed to go to hospital, I mean a two-year-old, three-year-old, you are going to drop your child off at the door, if you see them, you’ll see them once a week for one hour, and all of the nursing staff in the hospital will treat them also in this same regimented way, non-emotional, non-connected way.
In fact, Bowlby is shipped off to boarding school. And so again, he’s separated from his family of origin and connection, and he’s not safely attached to them. He didn’t have that language yet, but that was it. I mean, eventually, he goes on this journey. He creates a documentary. It’s something like, I don’t remember the name precisely, but it’s like A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital, or maybe A Three-Year-Old Goes to Hospital. It’s something like this. And he videos the experience of this child, and the separation anxiety that they experience, and how terrifying it is for them to suddenly be in this hospital, unwell, they don’t know anybody, and so on. And they create this video. That video was almost banned. It was almost kicked out of the Department of Psych, whatever the agency was that was managing psychological institutions in the UK. You only got kicked out of it for having this theory that eventually he calls the theory of attachment.
But over time, more than a thousand studies have been done since on his work, and over time, his insights have been really strongly applauded, and it’s grown. And so now, we have attachment theory. And what that means is that especially in years one to three, whatever level of attachment we have with our mother, with our father defines us in really significant ways for the rest of our lives. And if we were insecurely attached, then it also makes it extremely hard for us to have deep and proper relationships with people all through our lives. It’s massively influenced by those early years.
Now, that’s phase one, but phase two, he died before he ever got to see this, but another set of researchers picked up the baton and started looking into whether the attachment theory that everyone thought applied only to these infants could also be true with adult relationships. And the answer to that question is a resounding yes. And that every argument, every fight that adults have with each other, and in intimate relationships, especially, let’s say every fight is about the same blasted thing. And what it’s about, it’s described by a different professor as a primal cry, or a primal scream, or something. I can’t remember the term now. And what that primal desire is is, “Do you really see me? Do you really know me? Are you really going to be there for me if I’m desperate enough?” And that’s what it’s always about. Every other argument is about the same thing. “Do you really see me? Can I be securely attached to you? Are you securely attached to me?”
Okay, now contrast that with self-actualization. There’s a whole argument of self-actualization. If you think self-actualization is the highest need in life, and then you get into a relationship, you start creating this kind of language in the psychological industry. You start saying, “Well, if you need the other person too much, you’re codependent.” I mean, you create language around it. You say, “Well, that’s just enmeshment that you are struggling with.” What you need is to be independently happy, independently secure, independently invulnerable, independently strong, and then together, then you’re going to create this great dynamic relationship.
I can think of people, I don’t really want to say it, even though everybody knows these people, global icons who are in a relationship that looks about as toxic as a relationship can possibly look, in which they describe that they’re in. They say, “We’re in this bad marriage. We’re in this terrible — but we’re going to stick it out because that’s what love is.” It’s like you go make yourself happy, and you go make yourself happy, and then we’ll be happy together. It’s a global manifestation. I feel so bad for the couple and all the people involved by it, but it’s this manifestation of a bad paradigm that we have been taught. What you want is exactly the opposite of that. It’s like, no, we need effective dependence, where we actually feel deeply connected, deeply seen, emotionally safe, attached. That’s what we’re really going for.
And so bringing this now back to the question of self-transcendence. Self-transcendence means multiple things, so I don’t want to oversimplify it. It certainly means giving yourself to something bigger than yourself. It certainly means that, transcending yourself, trying to live for something beyond us. And it definitely includes in his definition, being able to be unified with other people in deep relationships. And so that’s not the whole sense that he meant by that term, but it’s certainly included in it.
And that is to say it’s like you can’t have self-transcendence if you haven’t learned how to — they go together. You have to be quite developed in order to be able to deeply connect with others. You have to be very vulnerable because, my goodness, you have to cry out, as it were, to say, “I feel so unsafe right now in this conversation. I have to speak truth about this.” And I’d rather say, “Oh, you just don’t like me,” or, “You just are like this,” instead of the vulnerability, the truth of, “This is how I feel. This is what’s going on. Now, let me listen to you. Let’s fight this out, but let’s have, as our intent, we’re going to actually deeply connect with the other person.” I see an overlap between these two terms.
Tim Ferriss: Let me hop in with a couple of thoughts that are popping to mind and then a couple of questions. So the first is that, if we end up publishing this, for people who are listening, I would imagine what you’re describing, on some level, as its core has truth. So you can be truthful, and communicate your needs, and so on without trauma performing or using performative vulnerability, which I think has become very fashionable, especially in places like Austin, where you meet somebody, you’re two minutes into meeting them at a party, and they’ve already told you about their worst childhood trauma and are just offloading these horrible things as a means of theater, almost. It’s become like a Portlandia of, “Here are the bad things that have happened to me, and let me be vulnerable.”
But I feel like what you’re describing is very different in the sense that there’s a core of truth to it, and you can still be independently strong in a million different ways, and effective in a million different ways while still doing that. Right? I’m just trying to say that to myself as much to anyone else.
Greg McKeown: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t have to be this overly sort of bemoaned, drawn out, protracted confession of weakness, or something like that. It can have a component of vulnerability, certainly, but there’s also a core of strength in my mind because it requires a certain core of strength to be consistently truthful and to solicit truth. That is not easy.
Greg McKeown: It’s truth, not performance.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And then the question that I wanted to ask is thinking about, say, attachment, and self-transcendence, and relationships, and so on, what order do we put these in? For people who are listening or for myself, although I think I’ve actually made tremendous progress on most of these fronts in the last handful of years, but how would you suggest someone approach this? In other words, if they’re thinking, all right, well, self-transcendence is the top of the ladder by Dr. Maslow in his final writings, I’m up for that. That makes sense to me. And they want healthy, interdependent relationships, and they recognize that the sort of Gordon Gekko/go-go-go achiever culture in the US, while it produces a lot of GDP and other things, actually very rarely produces stable well-being in most people.
And the question then comes up, which is, in what order do I tackle these things? Should I read a book on attachment theory, and do that first, and then maybe look at Maslow’s stuff, and then look at something else? From a brass tacks perspective, if somebody’s like, “Yeah, you know what? You’re right. If I look at myself truthfully, honestly, I have deficits in these areas, and I want to try to make the leap. I want to work on these things,” how would you suggest someone do that?
Greg McKeown: I’m just thinking.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll buy some time. Maybe you can give me your two cents. There is a book. Let me look at the cover really quickly. Yeah, I think it’s just called Attached. Yeah, The New Science of Adult Attachment, et cetera, et cetera, which has, I guess, two magnets in the form of a heart on the cover. Pretty good cover. I’ll give it credit. The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love by Amir Levine, MD and Rachel S.F. Heller, MA. 19,437 reviews, 4.7-star average. I have not read it, so I can’t speak to this, but I know a number of friends have read this and found it helpful, but I’m speculating here. So what would you say?
Greg McKeown: Well, I mean, I can start with myself, in just being, I suppose, truthful about how I’m seeing it. But the answer to the question, what is my one priority for 2024, it is to help my wife, Anna, and I to feel safely attached, deeply connected. And I would say, I mean, there’s a lot more right with our relationship and marriage than there is wrong with it, and actually, I think there’s a lot of goodness in it. We’re married 23 years, we have four children, we work together, we are communicating in all sorts of ways, and I think successfully, but I now understand there’s this additional gear. And I think, yeah, that’s the difference. And so one of the books that was recommended to me is a book called Hold Me Tight by Dr. Sue Johnson. And I would say that she’s done maybe more than anyone else to sort of bring this adult attachment theory, I think she calls it [EFT], to the therapeutic process. And so I think that’s a pretty great place to start is to read what she’s written. She has a process, a series of conversations.
Tim Ferriss: I want to also suggest Sue Johnson. She’s actually been on the podcast and was beyond impressive, exceeded every possible expectation I could have had. So I’m glad that you’re mentioning her.
Greg McKeown: Yeah. So I mean, I think that’s the place. But yeah, I think that is an answer to that question. And the only thing I’m concerned about as I try and answer that is to what degree am I reading my autobiography into other people’s lives? I mean, I’m sort of coming into this with there are a thousand-x relationships. If there’s a purpose to life, it’s that. I’m using a quote, and I want to tell you where that’s from in a second.
And so therefore, my most important relationship is Anna, and therefore, as I’m understanding what really creates these disproportionately great relationships is this attachment. There’s a logic that gets me here, but of course, somebody else is coming. Their lives are so different to mine, and there’s different starting points, they have different ending points. I want to be careful about that. But I don’t think what we’ve talked about today is the kind of thing that people regret. If you pursued this, you’re not going to use the deathbed test. You’re not going to be like, “My goodness, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that I really figured out the most important relationships, and I really invested in them seriously, and I got attached to them, and struggled with them, and improved them.” You’re not going to regret that journey, it seems to me.
Tim Ferriss: No. No, definitely not. What was the quote? You alluded to a quote.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, this is something, man. Okay, so I’m writing a new book, doing new research, doing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, inadvertently. And so what I’ve learned is something like this, it’s: we live in the loneliest era on record. More surface interaction is not going to help at all, so we have to learn to connect deeply with vital few people, and that that is through the work of life. So that’s part of what I’ve come to as I’ve been doing all this research and this thinking. So I posted something about that and these subjects on social media, and one of my friends that follows this said, “You know what? This is something I just read that’s right on that theme,” so that’s how I got connected to it. I think it’s Erik Newton, I think, is his name.
And Erik Newton took to X, and he wrote up a story of what’s happened in his life recently, which is heartbreaking, but also life-changing. And he starts off basically saying, “Look, I’ve wrestled with whether I should share publicly something that’s so private.” It’s a bit tacky to do that, but still really glad that he did it.
Okay, so I just pulled it up. I’m just going to read a few little bits from it. He said, “I lost my wife to cancer last month — our daughter lost her mother. I’ve hesitated sharing any of this, but there is something I want to record. Fair warning: this is mostly about love. I’m devastated. A hole has opened where I thought my identity lived. Our daughter is doing the same in her toddler way. Asking questions. Slowly understanding what’s happened. Grieving in stages. We had a delightful life together. Full of intense highs and lows. But two elements that were vastly more important to us than any of this: our extraordinary little daughter, and the quality of the time we all spent together. Aubrie and I fell in love early and fast, but we fell more in love during the time she was convalescing than I thought was possible. Facing death every day allowed us to set aside the silly things and focus on what matters. The privilege of knowing and loving her so deeply outpaces every other experience I’ve had. It’s the one thing that matters.”
Okay, “I’ve considered whether to share any of this. Obviously, it’s tacky to make personal tragedy into a public spectacle, but I wanted to capture something that I’ve learned.” Okay, I’m skipping here. He says this, “We had an epic love affair, and yet we reached a depth of intimacy while Aubrie was on her deathbed that we’d never had access to before. That depth of love wasn’t available to us any earlier for whatever reason, but it is available. I want to make it available to everyone by reminding you it exists. Aubrie shifted into a deeper love about six weeks before she died. During her time in the hospital, her one regret was that she hadn’t spent more time deepening relationships with the people she cared about.” She said, “The only thing that matters at all is the quality of the relationships with the people we love. Focus on that.”
He says, “I know it sounds trite in a tweet, but I can guarantee you with absolute certainty that when you are dying (and you will die), these are the only things you will care about. Aubrie realized this deeply in the most fundamental way because she was running out of time. So she put it into action. It was mostly instinct at first, but by the end, her deeper way of loving had become very conscious and intentional. Her change was palpable. She softened and opened. She began to be with those around her in a kind of total surrender. We all felt that she was experiencing us without a filter somehow. We were seen and loved. It was beautiful. It was overpowering. It was humbling beyond measure.”
“As she did all this, those around her began to learn how to do it as well. I learned. Being loved that completely is overwhelming in the best way. It’s probably all any of us ever crave. I’ve tried to carry that love forward ever since. Loving that deeply is a practice. It’s like anything, sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s very hard. But it’s always worthwhile. The key to this kind of love is necessarily different for everyone. I only know one way: complete surrender to the inevitable death of yourself and those you love. I’m not writing this to proselytize any given path. I simply want to say out loud that it is possible to love with a depth and breath that I used to think was fiction. Progressively deepening love is the goal, an end in and of itself. If there is a point, it’s that.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible. I’m just sitting with that for a minute. What a gift to write that down for people also to absorb and to read.
Greg McKeown: Yep. Yep. Yeah, so I reached out to him, and so he’s already responded. We’re just going to schedule a time, and I’m going to try and get more of that story and the details of it because I think that deserves to be told.
So that’s it. So when I read that, that sort of is reinforcing and crystallizing of all these other themes I’ve been describing. It’s like, yeah, he said it, and he said it, out of his suffering, produced that level of clarity. And it’s like, look, if I don’t understand that, and then I make my goal list, if I don’t understand that, and then I just go to email, if I don’t understand that, and I just react, and just do what I think other people think is cool or good — “Oh, they think…” I shouldn’t use this example. I don’t know why I’m using this example. I love skiing, and so do you, but, oh, if I’m just going skiing because other people think it’s cool to go skiing, if I’m traveling because I think other people think it’s cool to travel, I could spend my whole life doing that and really just miss it all. Miss this. Miss what Erik stated.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, quick, maybe mundane recommendation. Get off social media for a while, folks. Or ask yourself before you post, or actually, let’s rewind, before you do something. If you could never tell anyone about it outside of maybe your family or closest friends via a phone call, if you could not post it, if you could not put this on social media, or in a newsletter, or on a blog, or pick your channel, YouTube, would you still do this? And if the answer is no, don’t do it. As an exercise. You can always go back to the heroin feed of fake social reinforcement on social media. That’s always available, but at least as an exercise, ask yourself that question. I’ve done that, and part of the reason I have no social apps on my phone, and that’s been largely true for two or three years now.
As you mentioned, if you don’t have these foundational, directional documents or tools, given the tools at hand, given the information deluge that is only going to accelerate exponentially with AI, and disinformation, and so on, this year, 2024, it is going to at least 10x, probably a hundred x. I mean, it is going to multiply so unbelievably. If you do not have these guardrails and these operating principles in place, you are going to lose. What you’ll lose is personal, but you are going to lose. Whatever — then that could apply in a lot of different domains, but the technology has you completely diagrammed and defeated before you ever step into these domains, right? I mean, it’s like billions upon billions of dollars of data science, and research, and so on that has gone into ensuring that your willpower will not be sufficient, particularly if it doesn’t have a trained, fixed point in the distance to come back to the being lost in the wilderness analogy.
And yeah, I was just going to say, as my job, I interview some of the top performers in the world, hundreds of them, and the change that I have seen for those people in that subset who are already, I think most people would agree, in the top one percent of one percent in terms of worldly achievement, the dramatic handicap that I’ve seen, the dramatic reduction in productivity that I’ve seen among those people who have succumbed to the siren song of social media specifically is jaw-dropping. It is truly unbelievable, just in the last 12 months, what I’ve observed. It really seems to be going parabolic. So in any case, I’m going to stop giving my Scent of a Woman speech.
Greg McKeown: No, no. Hey, listen, I like that speech. And I think first of all, that’s right, and it’s the system. I don’t even love the term “matrix” for various reasons, but it’s still helpful too. But the matrix is so consuming, and it’s so much bigger than me, and it’s so much, in that sense, more powerful. Now, it’s not if I am conscious of it, and can step out of it, and can make it — all of this, AI and all of it, perhaps makes a good servant, but it certainly makes a poor master. And if I’m not aware that — if I’m not conscious that it is either already my master, or is trying to be, then it’s already over. If I’m like, “Ah, it’s fine. It’s easy,” it’s like, “Oh, okay,” well, then I already lost the game.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, if you don’t realize you’re in a game, you’ve already lost the game.
But let me ask you, when you’re talking about the priority, your priority, top priority, the one priority, and I’m going to make mistakes with the wording, but it was along the lines of fostering and cultivating secure attachment with your wife, if I remember correctly.
For a lot of people who may be listening, certainly for me also, when I think about that, I’m like, “Yes, yes, and yes.” And also, typically, if I had a primary goal, let’s just say I’ll pull out something that’s lower to the ground, in a sense, that makes it easier to use as an example, write a screenplay.
Greg McKeown: Yup.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s say I want to write a screenplay this year. That’s one of my top goals. Okay, great. Then I can work backwards from that, and say, “Okay, well, what are the sort of antecedents? How long do those take? Who do I need to interact with? How should I block those out in the calendar?” And then I can execute something resembling a blueprint, or a Gantt chart, or something like that. With your top priority, how do you ensure that you are taking meaningful action related to that top priority?
Greg McKeown: Yeah, right. I know exactly what you’re saying. I mean, this is the advantage of a concrete goal, is that a concrete goal almost immediately presents the plan, or elements of a plan almost immediately start to arrive. “Okay, well, if we’re doing this, we would have to do A, B, and C,” and so on. And that’s one of the reasons goals are so powerful and so scary too because if you get your mind set set on the wrong goal, then you’ll be consumed with it and maybe going in the wrong direction.
Okay, so how do you do it if the goal is a relationship? It’s really different, isn’t it? Because it’s not about achieving checkpoints, and the very nature of the relationship is that it’s symbiotic. But I think that the way I’ve been thinking about this is like this. I like this intent, the language that I’ve chosen, because it’s something that is a metric in and of itself. And so it’s an immediately testable metric. Do I feel that right now? Does Anna feel that right now? And then, of course, you could go from that to each of my children. Do we feel it right now? And if we don’t, let’s talk about that, because now we’re having the real conversation.
Tim Ferriss: Is that feeling one of calmness, lack of fear, that you are not withholding? What are the characteristics of feeling the yes?
Greg McKeown: Safely attached.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, right.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, I’ll give you the words that come to mind and then maybe by the end of the year I’ll have better, more precise ways of describing these things. But yes, I think it’s really safe, not just sort of safe, really safe. I’m safe to say what I really think. It’s safe enough to hear what you really think and not take it personally so that there’s just space somewhere in the world to be able to express all of that, that we don’t express in any other situation. It’s a little bit like this idea that you want your, remember somebody, a psychologist describing this, they said if your children are acting out at home but not at school, they’re doing well at school, but not at home. The teachers are going, “Oh, they’re so great here.” And you go, “Geez, they’re not so great with us.” It’s actually just exactly what you want because they’re safe to be acting out at home.
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t see that coming. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, and so it’s a similar way I think, in a safely attached relationship is like you can act out a bit because you need somewhere to be able to do that. You can say all your fears, you can say all the nonsense. So I think that’s sort of a test of it. If you want to build beyond there, I think, and this is I would say, the biggest test for me is can I create enough time every day for that? So that it’s not just a bit here and a bit there, like normally happens in fact, because just in the same way as if you leave exercise and you leave your relationships, it’s just like, well, we’ll just let that happen however it does, then you end up with bad relationships and ill health, and that’s what normally happens. I mean, that’s like when I ask people what’s essential that they’re under investing in, those are basically the two most frequent answers, is not exercising, not eating well and my most important relationships are struggling in some way.
So it’s how do I create, let’s say, one to two hours per day, not watching TV, not together, not doing things, not even just talking about, hey, what happened today and what’s going on and updates, and there’s loads of that, but enough time, uninterrupted time, so you actually get to get the other subject. And because whenever I do that, whenever we do that, it works. I mean, the difference is conversation. Conversation starts at a tip, right? It’s trivial, it’s present. It is like, okay, this has happened in the news and Jack’s going to work right now, and he just got back and it’s updates. And then as you go down, it becomes more vulnerable, but it also becomes more essential. And so you have to have enough time to have those conversations. So that’s the piece that I’m like, man, I have to really, really —
Tim Ferriss: May I jump in for a second, so for distinction, and this is a question because I’ve developed this, as I’m sure some listeners have, this acute allergic reaction to the word processing. You’ve heard this word I’m sure, used when it’s let’s talk about all of the difficult emotional things. I would imagine what you’re referring to is some version of what people might call quality time, where you’re getting past just the triage of updates. For instance, a friend of mine who’s been on the podcast quite a few times, Seth Godin, has found that preparing meals he had cooked for his family as his kids were growing up, a lot. And his kids would help with some of the prep where they’d just stand around the kitchen island, and that’s when the kids would volunteer a lot and it was in that type of setting.
So they were doing something or he was doing something, but it kind of provided a safe container for all of that to happen. But it wasn’t like sitting down in two chairs opposite each other, plumbing the depths of deep emotions as a conversation, if that makes sense. So I’m wondering when you say, “making the time,” what forms that time takes?
Greg McKeown: Yeah, I think it’s quantity and quality. It really is actually making a sacrifice, making the trade-off. So examples, yes, yes, what you’re saying, Seth Godin example I think is included. So with my children and with Anna, when I travel, I will take somebody with me. And so that just provides a lot —
Tim Ferriss: A lot of surface area —
Greg McKeown: — potential for ripping at the surface, but then, exactly, and then suddenly spontaneous. I mean conversations are like that. They’re so random, but there’s this method in the madness too, that suddenly something more sensitive comes up and now you’re talking about that real subject. And so I think it is, there is a structural piece too. So of course for me with Anna, okay, there’s the date night, actually structurally insisting it happens once or even maybe you get to twice a week. And you are sort of forcing the space to exist for possible conversation and be all sorts of things. But it’s a structural piece. And I think that’s non-trivial. Space never happens in our lives.
Tim Ferriss: No, no, never.
Greg McKeown: If I go back into 1820 kind of timeframe, so pre-Industrial Revolution, and I’m not trying to romanticize it. I think that must’ve been so hard to live then I cannot even imagine surviving was so, so, so hard.
Tim Ferriss: You mean you don’t want your five-year-old being a chimney sweep? I’m just kidding.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, I mean honestly though, but what they did have an advantage over us is that the sun went down and there wasn’t electricity. And so you could not escape the people in your life in the way we can. It was defaulted in favor of you’re facing each other. There’s not a phone to face. You’ve got a few books maybe, probably have The Bible if you have a book and then you have a few other books and you’re going to read from those books and you’re going to talk about them because once the sun is down, that’s what you have.
And that was a forcing function that we just completely lost. I talked to somebody one time, I was doing, here’s what I was doing. I was working on a TV show based on Essentialism, and so we were trying to create the pitch deck for it, and we selected these people and we were talking to her and she’s a very professional, put-together woman, and maybe even non-emotional even in the interaction and the conversation with the coaching session, we were having this speed coaching session.
And then quite unexpectedly, completely unexpectedly for her, she burst into tears. So just right in the middle of the conversation. It surprised me too, but it shocked her. She does not do emotion like that. And it was because she was reflecting on her relationship with her husband, I think, and how basically their relationship had become both of them in the bed on their phones. And that that had become so consuming, not an exception, but the rule of the relationship. And it was like, my goodness, there’s no connection. It’s just, that’s so different than what you would’ve had in 1820. There’s no phone, there’s no technology, you can’t, there’s no doom looping, there’s no, it’s not there. That whole system was gone.
So anyway, I do think that never exists now, you have to create space. And so that’s the structural element I would say for me, is that travel with my children and I have started saying, okay, once a quarter we go away ourselves. And it’s not just, hey, we’re going on a little vacation. It’s like we are trying to go deliberately, let’s talk. Really, we’re here to talk. Let’s talk beyond the things we get to normally. And look, we’ve got miles to go, but we just got back from the last one. And I mean it was an amazing trip and it was so helpful. And so there’s a structural, so we scheduled the next one, and it wasn’t three months later, probably about six months later that we’ll go to that specific location again because it worked so well.
And so I think it’s the daily scheduling, it’s the weekly structure, the monthly structure, quarterly structure, and all of these things, I think once you start exploring them and you’re like, okay, well that’s what you would do with other goals as well, but it’s not getting it done. You’re not trying to get it done as you are with other goals, right? Checking it off the list, project is complete. This relationship is not a means to an end, relationship is the end. It’s the end in and of itself. So that’s how I think.
Tim Ferriss: You mentioned the 1820s and I just wanted to say that I have spent a lot of time in South America and Africa in some very rural locations, and I’ve then gone back and visited these places after cell phones and very slight broadband penetration. And then post-broadband, I’ve been able to see what has happened. So those places have resembled in probably more ways than not, the 1820s you described. Tight social bonds, in part because that is the entertainment they have, and very little electricity. So also life tends to slow down. People are communal at night. They wake up, they go to the farm very often.
And then as things are introduced, for instance, I went to two different villages in northern Ethiopia and was chatting with one of the interpreters who was helping this group, and he was mentioning that one town was really unhappy, and the other town was very happy because I was commenting how I found Ethiopian people in general to be very upbeat and to smile easily and so on. And I asked him why that one village was unhappy. And he said, “Well, they got satellite television introduced and now they see The Kardashians in reality TV, and they know how much they’re missing.” Literally that’s what he said. Not in those exact words, but more or less that.
And then if I look at, for instance, some of these places in South America as another example that I’ve visited, which now have say Starlink and other means of readily accessible, easily accessible, 24/7 broadband. They’re suffering from all of the same distractions and issues now, the fracturing of social bonds, the isolation, not to the extent that you see in a city like New York City, of course, but you’re seeing the same phenomenon. And so much like sometimes people have heard the expression, “It’s the economy, stupid.” On some level, it’s the tools, stupid. You don’t assume you are fundamentally flawed. There’s always a lot of self-work to do and the project is never finished. But also let’s look at the Occam’s razor contribution here to a lot of these issues and so much malaise and sense of discontent, which is the tools. So turn off the tools, or at least ration the tools and see what happens.
And then I would say, just to bring this full circle, that this conversation has been super, super helpful for me. It’s given me a lot to think about. Also, I’m still thinking about the patriarchal blessing and what my version of that could be something that I revisit on a regular basis. So I’m actually fortunate that I’m spending time right now with a friend of mine, my only male friend who is incredibly well-versed with poetry, or at least younger male friend. So I can visit his mental library to see what he matches for me. So I’m thinking about that.
And then also, once again, about systems and structure for not just busy CEOs, but for almost anyone who is barraged with the sensory overload and uninvited inputs and stimuli that anyone listening to this is, without structure, without putting things in the calendar, without a plan, the most important things are not going to take care of themselves. You’re not just automatically going to have time and a program for self-care, for the gym, for your most important relationships. It’s not going to happen accidentally, or at least, the odds are against it. So the better plan is to plan.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, that’s it right there, is how do you stack the decks in your favor? Because they’re currently stacked against you, right? I’m not making a plug, I’m just expressing the reason I did it. The reason I wrote Effortless after Essentialism is because I’d like you have to build a system that makes it the default that you’ll do the essentials and not do the non-essentials. And I already said that in Essentialism actually, but it was like people didn’t hear it. They just heard, “Oh, yeah, you’ve got to do the essentials versus non-essentials.” Then I hear the feedback over years and years, “Well, yeah, it’s so hard to do.” And it’s like, “Well, yeah, well, because you aren’t…” It’s like, “Yeah, you aren’t doing it right.” Because you figured out what’s essential. You figured out what’s non-essential, but then you didn’t maybe realize the system is so built to make the non-essential easy, immediately at your fingertips, addictive and so on. So now you go, “How do I?” It’s not easy to build the system, but you build a system that then makes the execution easier than it would otherwise be and it’s —
Tim Ferriss: So on that, strongly recommend that everybody read Effortless. I’m going to reread it, and I’ll also say that there’s a corollary to what you just said that I’ve found helpful, and that is one way to make the default easier is to make not doing the default harder/painful, right?
Greg McKeown: Yes, exactly. Exactly, exactly. You want to make the non-essential harder to do. Precisely.
Tim Ferriss: For 2024, and I’ve done this for a few years now, but looking at my top relationships, I don’t have my own nuclear family right now. I mean, I don’t have progeny is what I’m trying to say. So I’m looking largely at my, yes, yes, so I’m looking at my family, my mom and my immediate family, my parents and so on, siblings. Then I’m looking at my closest friends and I’m blocking out time in the calendar, getting group commitments for say, trips or people coming to visit, et cetera. Making it happen and putting in, in my case, let’s just say these trips, sunk costs, so that it is actually painful for me to undo the thing that I know is good for me. Does that make sense?
And I might write a blog post on this because it’s been on my mind for six months now. I’ve been talking to friends about it. It’s just choosing the right sunk costs, like sunk costs and sunk cost fallacy can steer you in the wrong direction, but you can actually use it to steer you in the right direction. And that’s something that I’ve thought a hell of a lot about.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, I like it. No, I like that so much because you’re right, I generally talk about it in the worst sense. But if you were going to design humans for success, you probably would want it to be true that the thing you’ve committed to, you want to stay committed to. You probably would want to design where people tend to continue to do the thing that they’ve been doing because they have invested so much in it.
In a way, it’s like when they changed the divorce law in the UK originally. Of course, it was intended in a certain way, and I think it was maybe even well intended, I would say, because you don’t want people to be desperately stuck, and certainly you don’t want anyone ever to be in an abusive relationship, and then they just cannot get out because the laws are so strict. So there’s obviously scenarios in which that helps, but the disadvantage is that it’s incentivized this kind of no-fault divorce. It’s like, “Hey, I’m out now.” And because self-actualization is the priority, it’s always, always easy to think that’s going to lead to greater happiness. Even though the data suggests that people that are divorced, like five years later, the majority wish they weren’t and that they hadn’t and that they could go back and change it, but it’s obviously too late now.
And so it’s just interesting to think about what you’re saying about yes, committing, doing things where you go, “I know it’s the right thing. How can I commit in a way that I will be following through, even when I feel like getting out, feel like I would rather not do this thing now?” It’s like, no, you do want to be locked in and loaded in that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure, man. Well, Greg, this has been so much fun. It’s nice to hear your voice. And where can people find you if we end up publishing this? And we’ll talk more about it.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, yeah, we’ll do that. You know what? There is a single thing, it took us way longer than I thought it was going to take to build this. It’s totally free. It’s like literally takes people 10 seconds to sign up for it. It is where to start with Essentialism and with Effortless, and you go to gregmckeown.com. It’s right there on the homepage. It’s a 30-day email program. You get a whole workbook that goes with it. Completely free, easy 10 seconds to sign up.
Tim Ferriss: And how do you spell your name here, sir?
Greg McKeown: Oh, yeah, that’s fair enough. G-R-E-G, Greg. McKeown is M-C-K-E-O-W-N. So, G-R-E-G M-C-K-E-O-W-N.com. Right there on the homepage people can sign up and they’ll get an email every few days. They can also just get the workbook printed up, work through 10 lessons, carefully curated, combining the best of —
Tim Ferriss: Beautiful.
Greg McKeown: — all of that.
Tim Ferriss: Beautiful. And I’m going to dig back into your writing as well. That’s on my to-do list and successful experiment. I enjoyed doing this. I appreciate you being game to mess around with it.
Greg McKeown: Yes. No, I love it. I think it’s a really smart move for you to do it. You’ve got podcast strain. I mean, I have my podcast too. I know, it hits you. It comes at you so fast, it’s that your content, you’re always in trying-to-create-content mode, and it’s nice if you can walk and just build it into your natural routine.
Tim Ferriss: Well, this is actually an example of trying to do the thing that is unlikely to happen by itself or on its own. And that is, I’ve realized, so a lot of my constraining physical issues, my principal physical ailment that affected my last year was this Foraminal stenosis at L4, L5, just some lower back issues. I mean, there is no just to it’s been cataclysmic in its implications for my sleep and for many other things.
However, what I’ve concluded, and I’m on the mend, but what I’ve concluded is the pain is directly correlated to sitting time. So the more I sit, the more it hurts. The more consistently it hurts, the longer it hurts. And I looked at the driving forces or the different converging trends related to say, podcasting, several of which lead to the creation of basically fixed television studios, right? Most podcasters, if they’re aiming to be highly competitive and to feed growth, are building studios. Legitimately building what would be recognized as television studios. And that is antithetical to my reasons for starting the podcast, number one. So the characteristics, including mobility, ease and ease of lightweight production, those are the opposite of what is happening and what I, on some level feel driven to do because I am competitive. So I have to be aware of that. It doesn’t always serve me. It can serve me, but it doesn’t always serve me.
And so I asked myself this question, I asked myself a lot. I should probably ask myself more often, frankly, which is what if I did the opposite? Not just, what if I did 20 percent less?
Not doing TV studio light, but what if I actually did the opposite? So what would the opposite look like? Well, instead of sitting in a fixed location, I would be moving and I would double down on lightweight so that my production would actually become more lightweight, not more heavyweight. And let me test that for a month and sprinkle it in and see what happens, because I can always go back to the other. But from the perspective of trying to think for myself and not succumb to group think, and also just external pressure, but also trying to not just avoid pain but produce wellness in my life, this is an experiment worth running. So that is, yeah.
Greg McKeown: I have thoughts on this now. So number one is, and I’m not trying to be commercial in saying this, you are describing an Effortless strategy, right? It’s inverting it, saying literally, it’s like George Costanza, do the opposite. When you literally think, no, that there is seriously this idea that better is harder. So therefore, “Okay, oh, well look at all these people. Look at what they’re all doing. Oh, I have to have the studio. Mine needs to be better than their studio and cooler than their studio. We have to have all the…” It’s like, well, that’s one strategy. And maybe that is, maybe that’s the way.
But what if there’s an effortless way to do this that actually supports what I really want in my life? I love that you’re doing it. I love you are going in the other direction. And the other thing is, do you have a walking desk yet?
Tim Ferriss: So I do have a walking desk and —
Greg McKeown: But you don’t love it?
Tim Ferriss: I really want to be outside and/or around people.
Greg McKeown: Yeah, perfect.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m messing with that. But yes, I do have a walking desk.
Greg McKeown: I love my walking desk. I’m on it right now. This whole conversation I’ve been doing it. That way we can have good audio on my side, but I’m still going. I don’t want to do, I don’t want to work unless I’m walking now. I literally just think it’s so much better for my mind. Of course, it’s better for your body, but it’s just I feel healthier mentally when I’m doing it.
Tim Ferriss: Kudos.
Greg McKeown: No sitting. No sitting.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Excellent, man.
Greg McKeown: This is kind of fun.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What fun, man. It’s really nice to hear your voice. And this has been also very personally helpful for me to think about the upcoming year. So I really do appreciate it.
Greg McKeown: Tim, it’s been a genuine pleasure. Really.
Tim Ferriss: All right, man. And all thanks to your proactive outreach.
Greg McKeown: Well, final thought on that is I’m just, what I want you to feel, forget all the self, they sound like attachments, but what I want you to feel about me really is like this. I just feel a sense of I want to be there just Tim for Tim. This has spawned in this fun thing and having this conversation in a way that’s helpful through your podcast. And also, of course, it’s helpful to me I’m sure in various subjects and various ways, the reach of your audience. I get that this has spawned into this. But I want you to feel that amongst your group, you’ve got your group of people in your people, that Greg is one of these people in your world who’s not looking for something from you but is concerned about you.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
Greg McKeown: And that’s really for real, for real for me. That’s my intent, and that’s what I want you to think. The day you feel the worst, you text me. I want you to be able to feel safe on that day to go, “Greg, I’m here. This is the worst.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks man.
Greg McKeown: And whatever.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I appreciate that, and I take that to heart, so thank you very much.
Greg McKeown: Well, thank you. We’ll talk again soon.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, talk soon, man. Take care. Bye, bye.
Greg McKeown: Bye.
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