- The justification for slowing down,
becoming more deliberate, becoming more focused is single
and it's this, if you really believe
that a few things are exceptionally valuable
and most other things are noise,
then you will automatically naturally
start to change your behavior.
It's about what matters most to you in life.
It's not just about less, it's about essential things,
essential relationships, essential living.
Most of the stuff that's going on is not vital.
It's a trivial many versus the final few.
- [Matt] We sometimes forget that we have a choice.
We make decisions impulsively,
say yes before we think it through,
and burden ourselves with commitment.
The end result, we feel overworked,
overwhelmed and stretched too thin.
Greg McKeown is the author
of the New York Times bestselling book,
"Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less."
In the book, Greg describes an approach similar
to minimalism that gets us to take stock of our lives
and ask the right questions about where
we're spending our time, energy, and effort.
He first started thinking about these ideas
when he noticed his priorities in life had shifted,
seemingly without his control.
- One of the experiences that led me to really focus
on this subject in this book was that, I mean, you know,
I got an email from my colleague at the time said,
"Look, Friday would be a very bad time for your wife
to have a baby because I need you to be
at this client meeting between one and two."
Look, and I'm sure they were joking,
and yet somehow I took it as a responsibility,
a burden, you know, I gotta navigate this, balance this.
Friday comes along, is when we're in the hospital.
My wife's just had our daughter.
We're, instead of being focused, I allow another passion,
another interest to confuse it
and so I go, to my shame, to the meeting
and even if some great thing had come from that meeting,
which in fact it didn't,
surely and clearly I made a fool's bargain.
What I learned from that lesson is the simplest idea,
which is if you don't prioritize your life,
someone else will.
That idea of heightened awareness
of what the priority is and making sure
that we aren't just busy pursuing lots of things,
but that we are creating space to actually pause
and discern and make sure that we're sleeping enough
so that our discernment is intact,
so that we can keep on figuring out
what is the most important contribution I can make.
And so that's what I'm saying.
I say there's an inherent trade off when people are just,
"I'm so interested in this, I'm so passionate,
I've gonna do more of everything."
Yeah, there's an advantage to that for a time, perhaps,
but you're giving up something along the way as well
and you have to be careful about what you're giving up
because otherwise you wake up one day and you say,
"My goodness, I've done all these different things
but I basically lost my way.
I don't know what it is anymore that I want to do."
And you're so consumed and you've been so consumed
and this happens for years for people's lives
and that they were, "Why am I even doing this?"
And they got disconnected.
- Finding what is essential to our lives
is becoming more and more difficult as our world
has become more distracting.
The tools that we use to be productive
can just as easily be used to pacify us.
And when we travel with them 24/7,
bringing them into bed with us,
the truly important things can get lost
with the non-essential.
And in many ways, this behavior is encouraged.
Busyness has become a badge of honor.
When I look at our culture, I would say in America,
but I'm sure it's spread pretty far,
there is this work hard, hustle, grind it out busyness
that is promoted.
How do you view our hustle culture today
and is that something that as you would describe it?
- When I first came to America,
I would ask people how they are
and this is, we're talking almost 20 years ago,
and they would say, you know, they'd say,
"I'm great, I'm great."
And it was almost like,
"I'm American, of course, I'm great."
And I liked it.
I liked this sort of inherent optimism and positivity.
I connected to that.
I related to that.
But if you ask people now, as often as not,
when you ask 'em how they are now,
the first word will be busy.
"I'm busy, I'm so busy.
I'm good, I'm good, but I'm busy.
I'm busy, busy."
I mean there's whole flavors of busy.
And so I do think that something has changed.
It's not just in our own minds,
something has significant has changed
and even in those years I think we've gone
from being connected to hyper-connected.
That's not a small change in the human condition.
It shifts from a place where sometime
we had information overload,
yes, we've had that for a long time,
but we're now in a state of opinion overload.
And so this is particularly the kind of busyness
that I think is most potentially harmful
is where we're busy not because we just have a sense
of internal mission that matters,
a sense of contribution that we want to make in the world,
it's that we're busy because other people are busy.
We're doing things because other people are doing stuff.
We see them on social media,
"Oh, that person's doing this thing.
They're in that place, they're pursuing this idea."
And so keeping up with the Joneses has been a deep part
of human nature, I'm sure, forever,
but when you add into it this hyper-connection,
this hyper-comparison, then I think it gets to the point
where people do feel pretty crazy all the time.
People feel busy, but not productive.
They feel stretched too thin at work or at home,
but they don't feel a sense of accomplishment with it.
They feel, instead, a constant sense
of other people hijacking their agenda.
- How do we say no to things?
Because saying no is really uncomfortable.
Saying yes feels good.
When somebody says, "Hey, I would love to grab coffee
and pick your brain or just chat a little bit."
- Right. - Saying yes leaves you
feeling good, leaves them feeling good for the short term.
In the long term, then, when it comes to that day
when you have to meet up with them, you're like,
"Ugh, I'm already so busy.
I don't have time to do this."
- I actually think the first thing you have to accept
is that we are saying no all the time and everybody is.
What we are not aware of is that we are saying no.
Every time I check email,
every time I randomly go on social media,
every time you get pulled into some binging
watching something, you're saying no to stuff,
and so in a sense, we're quite good at saying no,
we just don't use the words no.
And so we have to, in a way, apply that same logic
to more important projects, more important work
so that we just pause before saying,
"Yeah, I'm gonna do that."
The first thing we need to learn about saying no
is just within ourselves.
If you believe that all things are approximately
of the same value, then you it's like,
it's like you're just shoveling coal.
You're in a coal room,
you're just trying to get out as much as possible
and your job is to get more and more of it
and the way to do it is just to push more and more,
shovel more and more.
Becoming an essentialist like discovering
that you've lived your whole life in coal mine
and you suddenly go, "It's not a coal mine."
I mean, "I'm in a diamond mine.
Here I was thinking it was all about just how much
to get out, and no, it's about finding those things
that are really precious and valuable and important."
And as soon as you suddenly wake up
and you're in a diamond mine, your behavior shifts,
and that's the same, it's just the driver
of becoming essentialist is to suddenly see,
you know somebody else says not me,
it's difficult to overstate the unimportance
of practically everything.
The idea is get that new thinking in.
And as soon as you start to look at the world
through that lens, you find, yep,
that is in fact far closer to reality.
Most of the stuff that's going on is not vital.
It's a trivial many versus the vital few
and I think it's not just one more thing
to figure out what those vital few things are,
it is the work of life.
Figure out what they are, eliminate what they aren't,
and build a system that protects and enables you
to pursue those things that you've said are most important.
- To get my full, one hour uncut interview
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