YouSaid · the spoken record

Greg McKeown

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125
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2019-01-09
most recent
2019-01-09
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1
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  1. “I don't have any ask for them, but I do want to say, Tim, I really appreciate how this conversation, I feel like it's been, I found it more than a normal podcast kind of conversation. And that's credit to you. And I appreciate that you've brought so much to the conversation and helped it to be, well, at least for me, has felt rich and meaningful and real. So thank you to you.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “And so that's why it's so powerful. This is not getting all burdened about whatever the past has been. It's in this moment. Am I leaning into the light or leaning out of it? And that to me is like, seriously, it's like the whole of life written in one single rule. And so that's that would be, I think that would be my answer for that at least today liked.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Maybe it carries on forever until the perfect day. But that's the idea. Wherever anybody's at, they can do that, right? Whatever choices they've made before. And all of us have made mistakes, right? All of us have chosen in those moments. Oh, I went down. It was a dark choice. I don't mean the dark side, like, you know, like some Star Wars thing where you go over to the dark side. No, but just in this moment, I chose the impatient path. I chose the negative path. I chose the self-interested path. I chose the, you know, or I could just choose the light. And my experience is wherever anybody is on this journey, you know, between light and dark, let's say, wherever they are on that continuum, the people that are most full of light aren't the people who have done all the best things in their lives necessarily. It's which direction they're headed in. It's which decision they just made.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “That's it. Light is that every moment in our lives, in whatever capacity we're in, there is always this choice in this moment to step towards light or to step towards darkness. And I don't mean grandiose, you know, as I said before, massive good versus massive evil. It's not that. But each moment we have the choice. Do I step towards delight? Do I step towards some dark version of this moment? Do I get irritated with my kids or do I be patient? Do I listen to the voice of conscience in this moment? Or do I just go after what my ego would want me to go after? And my experiences with this, and I'm just beginning my own journey, of course, but is that if I pursue what is light, it will bring more light. And that light grows brighter and brighter.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Deal with it. It's not going to be easy, but we're dealing with it now so that it doesn't just get passed on. So the next my great grandkids are still struggling with this stuff. I'm going to shift it. Yeah, we had alcoholism in i family, but we, I'm not going to, I can choose not to drink alcohol. I can choose not to pass this on. This is tremendously, to me, empowering, inspiring change in perspective.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Whatever's happened to me intergenerationally, it's full circle back to this new work that you're going to start working on in the new way from this moment on forever is that we don't have to do what happened to us. We don't have to repeat what happened to our mother, father, grandfather, grandparent, great-grandparent. Bad stuff did happen almost certainly, but we can be a transition person. We can say I have a new choice and I choose differently. And it's so powerful the moment somebody discovers that has an awakening around that. They're able to move forward and change everything that comes after them. Oh, we didn't talk about it in my family, but I'm going to talk about it in my family. This was a black box and we didn't deal with it.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Living a lies so differently than the one you really intended to live that, again, it's waking up to this. Yes, I have a choice. I've got to make a choice. And it might be the wrong choice. I might guess it wrong. Of course I am, but I'm going to make it. I'm going to actually, you know, to lean into that reality. It's the one choice you can't make is to get rid of your ability to choose. It cannot be done. It's like not theoretically, not practically possible. So that's good news, though. This discovery, I am choice. Whatever's happened to me, I can make a different choice going forward.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And it's easier to do that in the short term. It feels easier. I don't have a choice. See, I'm not responsible. I'm not on the hook for this. I mean, I'm the victim of everything. I mean, of course, in a sense, we don't have to worry as much because I don't like this, but this is what it is. And that's all fine if everybody around us is making the right choices and that the society is going in the right direction. culture is supporting our highest values and our best contribution that we could make in life fine but of course that's not the case and so in a world where you know it can be tilted in all sorts of pernicious directions all sorts of negative themes and influences if you just go with the flow you just have a choice I think you I think you know you can end up”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “That's exactly the shift that I'd be advocating for. I rarely advocate explicitly for what I think is essential or non-essential. There's some for those that are paying attention in the book, some of my values I think are in there. But it's not explicit. I'm not saying, hey, you should value this thing over that thing. But I am advocating that people should be conscious about the value that they are choosing, not compulsive. Compulsive, this is the environment in which we don't know we're choosing. We're not conscious of it because we just become a function of everybody else's choices and what everyone else is doing and whatever we just last thought in our heads kind of a thing.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “That was easy. That saved months of work. It was no love loss from at all. That's why we get caught into this. We think we have to. We don't take the responsibility. It's a choice. It's a choice because I don't want this output. Now let's go and find out if that output really is what would happen. So I think that that's kind of where we get into it. And in some ways, you could say, well, what's the big deal? But it's a huge deal because at the core of it, what we are is our ability to choose. That's who we are. That's what makes us human. And so when we remove that, when we forget about it, we're removing what makes us most human. And so that's when we start living in kind of non-human ways, machine ways, robotic ways, disconnected ways, disconnected relationships. We're not choosing anymore.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “If we don't, he's going to be really disappointed. By framing it like that, if you say I have to, it's the end of your reasoning, end of your thinking, you can't prosecute the hypothesis. You can't do anything. There's no hypothesis. It's end of story. By saying I'm choosing to do this because he'll be upset. Now we could test it. Now, he could have been upset. We didn't know, so we can test it. Jack come in here comes in. So I'm thinking about this baseball season. We're thinking it might just be, you know, one more thing. And we're just wondering, what are your thoughts about this, about, you know, if we did it, didn't do it? What are your thoughts? Instant reaction. Oh, that'd be fine. That'd be fine if we didn't do that.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “It was really unlikely that I was going to win the wages. And at least he thought so. And so as it turns out, he lost a wager, so he's now doing this. And so this is all just fun and games. But then as the season began, we realized that we, of course, had been conned in our own thinking, planning fallacy. Of course, there's still requirements for us. We still had to get him all the equipment and we still got to get him ready every single time. And we still got to go take him to the still, it's not going to literally be zero impact just because someone else has taken them to the practices and so on. And so right as it came, there was still enough going on in our life. It just felt like definitely one more thing and quite a big one more thing. But here we are. We could have said, look, we have to do it. We don't want to, but we have to. And we almost did make that mistake. And then we changed the language. We said, and this is important, I choose to have.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “We're creatures of habit. And so we get pulled into a whole set of things as if And eventually those habits are acting on us. And so we just really start to believe I don't have a choice. And we say it that way. We say I have to. What we're saying when we say we have to is there is nothing else that could be done. I have to means there is no agency involved. There's no choice involved. And I had a great little experience with this where we had a son through a funny and welcome sort of wager that I did, just friendly, silly wager with a friend of mine. He said we had this thing. If I won the wager, then he would take my son to baseball for the whole season. And if I lost, I had to take him to baseball the whole season, which seemed like that was the wager in my favor.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Nothing in me. I don't personally struggle with, oh, I want to do something bad in my life. I don't feel that, but I want to know between the essential and the good. I want to know what that is because I don't have time to get all the good and all the essential things done. I don't have that time. I don't think actually any of us do. I think really we have enough essential things to fill the rest of our life. And that is precisely why I must, it's so jugularly important to me to figure that out is because every time I'm not doing what's essential, I am giving up something that is essential.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “I will do it. And if I'm in that state, then it becomes clear what to do and what not to do. And especially important on something like a personal quarterly offsite, but also true, of course, in this ongoing journey of trying to discern, not between as you could frame it good and evil. Maybe it is that still in some way, but really for me I don't think about it like that. I'm trying to discern between essential and good. I'm trying to say, look, it's all good. I got a long list of things I can do today. And there's nothing on it that's bad.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And so for me, it's about the realness. I mean, I certainly subscribe to the idea, to the principle that the state of my heart before God that matters at any given moment. It's not what I did yesterday. It's not what I did 10 years ago, good or bad. It is this moment, and of course that's true in every moment, this moment your condition. Am I willing to admit my vulnerabilities? That's what I'm trying to do in prayer. Look, this is what's going on. This is what's a struggle for me. This is what's a trouble. And I'm really willing to do whatever, if I can hear the voice of clarity, I commit right now. I'm doing it.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “That he's trying to listen to his voice of conscience instead of all these other people around him. Some of them are laughing, some of them are yelling, them Shakespeare's in there. I think his mother-in-law was painted in there. You know, he's got all these just different people. And he's trying to listen, not to all of that, but to the voice within it. That's when I know that prayers working, so to speak, is that it's not just sort of one way. I'm not just going through, I'm not going through the motions. If I go through the motions, but when I go through the motions, it's not changing. I don't feel different afterwards. You're having a, I mean, if you and I got on the phone and every time I got on the phone with you, I said exactly the same things thoughtlessly. Our relationship would not be very real. You know, this would get very...”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “I'm sorry, not being wrote. So when it's great, it has a single test point, which is already kind of mentioned, which is that you can feel that voice of clarity. You can actually center yourself in it. Okay, I can now feel the difference between all of these voices around me. In my office, I have a picture of James Christensen. It's called The Listener. And in the picture, you have the listeners in the middle is a young man, and around him he's got all these people. It's very colorful picture. He's sitting there almost in a sort of Buddhist seated position, his eyes closed to represent.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Is gossip. This is just gossip. This is just nonsense. Well, at least that's how I feel about it. And so that's an example of a kind of book that I would want to be reading, something that can ground me in principles that longer term than hopefully than my own life. I mean, that's what I want to be connected to.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Has John Quincy Adams, and it's just inspiring. I mean, John Adams reads, he was reading Latin, Greek, all of these, not these classic texts, not just classic texts in English in their original Greek and Latin. I mean, that's amazing. It puts me without excuse. Suddenly I think, okay, I need to give up this kind of junk gossipy news that it's so easy to get dragged into multiple times a day, breaking, everything's breaking news now. Everything's breaking. Breaking news. There's the most important thing that's ever happened. And when you click on the bait, what you find is that somebody is now talking about someone who was tweeting, about somebody else who was tweeting. And that's the breaking news.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Examples, yeah. I mean, beyond scripture, which I do bring, I do read, it can be, it's classic literature, it's what it's not is as important as what it is. It's not rubbish. It's not just thought of the day, latest reactive thing. It's as far away from the latest news update as I can get. So I just finished reading John Adams' autobiography, not autobiography, biography by David McCullough. And I loved that. That's a long biography. And by the end of it, I just love John Adams and loved what he was trying to do. And it inspired me no end to what I want to be able to do with my son. I have a son. And actually, he's a namesake just like John Adams.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “In pursuit of helping someone to find clarity. And so your goal is not to persuade them to do something or persuade them not to do something. It is to ask questions so that they can feel and get clear on what they feel right to do. Again, I know I'm talking high standards. I know these are aspirational things, but that's really what you're trying to get to. You're trying to create an environment. I mean, one of the things I'll do, I certainly meditate. I mean, I pray, and so I pray when I'm on these off-site so that I can feel that sense of direction. I'll read, I'll bring literature with me that gets me centered.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “In pursuit of the Quakers have a process that's very powerful. You could put a link to this possibly, I don't know, God got some notes or whatever, but a process that they follow called the clarity, it's not the Clarity Council, but it's something like that. The clarity they have rules, these two rules, which is that you're not allowed to give any opinion. And you're not allowed to give any advice, you need advice, any opinion, you can only ask honest questions.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “That voice have lots of names for it, right? But the voice, your own conscience, your own sense of direction, and it's to be able to listen to that so that you can discern again between all these good things, all these different pools and so on. And really what it is that you feel, even what you came here to do. And that's the point of it. If there's no one who can help with that process, go on your own. But if you've got somebody who can do it together with and you're doing it for them too, so it's not one way, you're being listener for them. And not just what they're saying, but to try and get deeper and to hear what they're not saying.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Has got to be a key element of success with a design partner to be a powerful listener is also pretty rare. People that aren't, the second you say, well, I've been thinking about this, jumping in with their opinion, reading their autobiography into your life, telling you what, you know, you've got to have space. And I think it would be better to go on a personal quarterly offset on your own than it would be to go with somebody who's just going to jump in immediately and interrupt your thinking and tell them about what you think they think. The whole idea is to create space to be able to”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Those are some of the things I've learned that I've thought about. But I do think having a design partner or two can be a good idea. Maybe one of the comment about it is that maybe I've been a little idealistic to say it this way, but having people who can powerfully listen.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “I mean, I don't know. I mean, the idea of having a close relationship with someone, I mean, I'm talking marriage now for some reason and I'm reflecting on that. The idea that you can have a relationship without having conflict is absurd. There is conflict in all of life. And so having conflict about what is important is really to be expected. And to figure out together, to have even what is sometimes painful conversations, what is most important to us? Is it this thing or that thing? Which is the trade-off? How much of this are we really going to have in our life? This is hard work. And it's not one more thing to do. It's like the very work of life. And so with a design partner, you're engaging, you're willing to engage now in something over time that could be quite tough, especially as I say, if you're living together with the output.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “You're trying to least approximate. And so it doesn't have to be a spouse, of course. It could be a friend. It could be a colleague. It could be a parent. It could be anybody. But as long as these are the rules of the road, I think the only other thing I want to say about the design part is that one shouldn't expect the conversations to all be easy, especially if you're choosing someone who knows you well. Just because they're a supporter of you doesn't mean that they're going to say easy things to you.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Me without hurt is not to have written essentialism. No way. I might have wanted to. I might have thought about it. But the idea of executing her, the idea of completing it, the idea of the key breakthrough moments, it's not that she's done it. It's that she's believed in me as I've tried to do these things. I mean, I read somewhere that all you need is one person to believe in you for the rest of your life. To have somebody believe in you, affirm you just not and a weaker version of that is like don't talk them down. Don't, you know, why are you doing that? That seems weird. Why would you want to achieve that? Any of that kind of stuff, just to have somebody that isn't doing that is something. But that has been incredibly useful to me. And so with a design partner, that's what...”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “A bad design partner, a bad friend, bad relationship is one that eats the heart out if you're successful and has some sort of pleasure if you're unsuccessful. That's what's a bad relationship. And unfortunately, I think because of our human weakness, that is often what we're offering. That's often what we're offered. And so you've got to find that person who is celebrating your success, who wants your success. When you're successful, they don't go, oh, geez, I'm now jealous of that. Oh, what's wrong with me? They just are delighted. And I say this in a small way. I mean, I am fortunate that my design partner, right? That's my wife. Anna is this, and she has been the whole time I've ever known her. And it's been really amazing. And I think often about how different my life would have been without her being that design partner. I'm not making some, I don't know, some cheap comment or cheap praise.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “And that's the whole shift. The essentialism is different to every other productivity system that I'm familiar with in this primary way. It's not about getting more stuff done. It's about getting more of the right things done. And it's not about efficiently doing what's on the to-do list. It's realizing that the most important thing isn't even on the to-do list. That's the insight. And that's what the personal quarterly offsite can do.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “And I got to tap into that so that as I then move into the future, I'm also doing the same thing. So in these personal courts of the off sites, it's pushing yourself beyond that. You're saying, okay, what do I want my children, grandchildren, generations, especially this idea? What do I want the generation that has forgotten me? What impact do I want to have on them? If it's true that we can't even name our great-grandparents, then it's going to be true that our great-grandchildren won't be able to name us, or it might be true. Might not be true, it might be true. But the impact doesn't change, just the memory changes. It's impact outlasts memory. And so this perspective, this helps to reveal for us the difference between good things and essential things.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “This is something I learned. The design school in Sanford, I didn't know it then. I was still thinking birth till death thinking. I thought that's pretty long-term perspective. If you're getting people to think about their whole life from birth till death, you are doing a good thing. And I think it probably was a good thing. And it's certainly far more long-term than most people think on a daily basis. But it's so insufficient. It's necessary but insufficient. What a self-centered perspective. I couldn't believe it actually when I really realized how blind of a perspective I was suggesting. I mean, but like my story begins, like the story of my life is really about me. What a weird thing to think. It's about my birth, my death, and what's happened in between, the narrative is so much richer than that.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “What is their impact? What have their decisions been impact on me positively and negatively? What am I grateful for? I mean, I'm a big believer in the idea that if we're going to blame people, we've got to blame them intelligently. I also blame you for having messed this thing up that's always made this particular thing hard for me or for my mother father but I also blame you for the fact that they turn that around and became strong and I've always benefited from that strength you know so you blame intelligently you see the good and the bad you blame intelligently you're looking at the whole picture so that you can see your life with some sort of perspective”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “From your ancestors, right? I mean, that would be fantastic. Sometimes people do get pretty close to that. But for most of us, it's pretty dysfunctional family history once you get back a little ways. And the same for parents. So you're really trying to understand”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “What decisions have they made that still affect us? Even if we don't know anything about them, we don't know their names. We know that, well, they moved to this country, they moved to this place, they did anything that we know they've impacted us. So what lasted for good or ill, what has lasted? It's a grandparent so people know a lot more about their grandparents in general. You're asking, okay, what positive things did they do that are still with you? How did they shape you in ways that you would want to pass on to others? What challenges did they bring into the table, meaning to almost always not meaning to? You've been impacted by decisions they made. It's true for almost everybody. I mean, great. Very rare. You have all positives.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Things that include, well, first of all, write down anything you know about them. It won't take long. It's its own kind of lesson, actually. What do you know about them? Most people, I think less than 5% of people not scientifically, but based on thousands of people, many thousands of people that I've asked this question to now, cannot name the first and last names of each of their great-grandparents, eight-great-grandparents. They cannot name the first and last name of all eight. We cannot even name the first and last names of the people that made us everything we are. It's extraordinary. It's its own lesson. Where we live, the country we live, the language we speak, everything was either determined by them or largely influenced by these people. We don't even know their names. Amazing. But we know something about them. If we know anything about them, we should gather it. What has lasted?”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “The one I was referring to, we actually started prior to our life. It was back to, you know, so we started great-grandparents, in fact, great-grandparents, parents, your own life, and then going forward to the end of your life, to your kids, grandkids, great-grandchildren, or if you don't have children, it's just the people that you would influence generations from now. And it's that kind of huge vision, that kind of level of perspective that helps to draw up within you an unexpected insight, something that you already know but somehow is being buried because you're thinking about life in just sort of reactive ways. What questions do you ask?”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “I think here's what I think. I think it's offsite. It's in nature or thereabouts. It's somewhere that's quiet, uninterrupted. I know of some people, I've never done this, but I know of someone who has a second phone and their second phone is like one of these little credit card sized phones and two people in the world that have the number to this phone. And so when they go, it means they can be reached for emergency, but that's it. And so they are just gone so that they can have an unencrypted space, which is very hard to have these days. So you want to be in an uninterrupted environment. You want to not have text that email and all of that available. I recommend you either on your own or maybe with one other person, a design partner that you can really go through the process. I think that the longer the perspective is the better.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Care about all those kinds of things. And so that's sort of a personal example of why to hold personal quarterly off sites. It shifts the whole direction you're going in. It gives you, it tilts and bends your narrative as you go forward.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Sooner rather than later, to be able to achieve this dream. Otherwise, we're going to achieve it after at least the eldest is out of the house. And what's the point? And so it was an insight, a strategic insight that has had profound influence on a, you know, it's a one decision that makes a thousand. There's a whole series of things we had to do to put in process, to be prepared to organize it, to find such a place and so on. And it took a while to do it. It took a couple of years, maybe, maybe as much as that. And now we live in a community that you're required to have space for horse, that you don't have to have them, but you have to have space for them. And that single criteria, again, makes a lot of other influences change, right? You're going to be around a lot of nature. You're going to be, even the kind of people in some ways that you're around certain value system that”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “After they're out of diapers. And so it's like a magical period because you can do things. You can make memories together. You can do it. And we weren't living in a place at the time. We were in the middle of Silicon Valley, which is terrific in lots of ways. But you're not going to end up with horses, right? You have to think differently. And that single insight in that quarterly offsite shifted a whole sense of intent. And we realized if we want to do this while our children are still in this golden years, we're going to have to move.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “One of them was a, I don't know, it might sound funny to people, but it was like horses, horses, right? That's a weird thing to say, isn't it? Horses, that's not what you expect me to say. She said, I just had this vision of having a place with horses. And it's not necessarily even that we would own the horses. It wasn't even necessarily that. And we don't have any horseback. It's not like horse people. nothing like that but but it was a sense of if we if we were to achieve what that means our children would grow up in a certain kind of environment you know it was like a symbol of a certain type of childhood and our children were at the time were were sort of in in the golden years which means which means the years before they're driving and”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Achieve? What feels important again? It's not just success. It's not just goal setting. You can set the wrong goals. It's what's essential to me, what it feels like my mission to pursue. And I remember in that very first official session.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Sure, we followed through as I did it where we had a few people come together and I was sort of leading the process. But underneath it, one of the important intents of it was so that Anna and I could actually have a full day once every quarter away from everything else and to think about the long-term goals. And out of that process, for us, what are you doing on that process? You're saying, okay, what's happened over the last, you know, well, the big picture, you can say, okay, what's happened in my life? What's the long-term perspective here? Where have I, where am I? Where have I been? What's been going on? So you're trying to get a clear view of your life, what's been going on with it. And then you say, okay, going forward, long-term perspective, what would I like to be?”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “It's creating space for you to actually think long term about what really matters in the greater scheme of things. I mean, it's the same as any executive team. They have a quarterly offsite, an annual off-site. Why do they do it? Because they know if they don't, they're going to get buried in reacting to proximate issues instead of seeing strategically where they want to be headed and what trade-offs they need to make in order to get there. And it's just the same for the individual level. My wife and I started doing quarterly off sites two, three years ago. In fact, one of the things I did to try and construct a system to make”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Of tantrum. If it is of a major tantrum, because they didn't get the thing they wanted, of course. And we just have to be adult about it. And mature about it and recognize, yeah, you're not going to keep everybody happy all the time. What a con.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Committed to saying what we're doing. And you're right, sometimes people go react badly, but if we've been respectful, if we've been thoughtful, if we've been useful within the parameters that we've identified, for example, if you can actually do a favor for someone in five minutes, if you really have a system that allows it to be five minutes, fine, five minute favor. I'm a big, I can be a believer in that disciplined giving. I'm a believer in that. But if within that context you've made, if then somebody is upset, takes the victim approach, is basically throwing a tantrum. That's no fun for anybody, but that's not good enough reason to have said yes to it as every great leader has ever dealt with and every great parent has dealt with almost on a daily basis. Every great parent is dealing with a situation where a child wants something and they may throw some sort.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “That's what he's doing. So I think what I'm trying to say is sometimes you can simply say no. I mean, it does depend on the relationship and the request. But also, I think sometimes it's just the best no is a yes. It's saying, look, yes, I can do this. So I just couldn't do anything beyond this. I'm quest to be interviewed for something. I'm working on this book, this really important project. It's high risk for me. I think it can make a huge difference, but it's consuming all of my energies and creativity right now to do this right. And I just can't get this wrong. That's what I can do. I think it's starting with the yes. In some ways, I think the best no is a really saying the yes that we're.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “I cannot find the original citation of this that it's him, but he's quoted as having said that the difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.”

    2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT