YouSaid · the spoken record

Greg McKeown

lines on the record: 125
first: 2019-01-09
most recent: 2019-01-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Is to have the problem without any ability to even talk about it, to address it, to even know that it's really there until we have language for things that are not even that real.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's something about that here, which is okay, if we get really honest and raw, we find that there's a lot of unresolved, a lot of unresolved trauma. And now we're riffing here a little bit beyond the process. But, I mean, this is something that's very important to me, the subject that we're on to. And so I can relate to it in this way. One of the things I've begun doing research about is intergenerational trauma And how even if in our own lives we go, I think my life has been pretty good and life has worked out and so on, what you find is that there can be multiple generations of unresolved issues that manifest wordlessly in our own lives because no one talked about them. So the ramifications are real. But we don't have language. That's the worst scenario to be in.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first one, I think. The first one. Let's stay with that then because what I'm exploring a little with you here just to be sort of transparent on the process is why does it matter so much to you, right? You've said it's essential. You've said this thing matters and we ought to identify then really why. And maybe we're as far as we need to go on that. But I sense in you All of the books I've done before are really preparing for this. Those have all given a platform This is millions of people, literally, right? And well done. You built this extraordinary platform to be able to reach people, make a difference. And now what? What is the highest or deepest contribution that can then be made? And as you're doing it, I feel like there's a sort of, you know, is that quote which is most personal, is most universal.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so what you're saying makes perfect sense to me that even a deliberate, intense pursuit of good objectives to be successful could in fact be, as you're saying, they could be just a form of being stuck in a different, more positive looking coping mechanism.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It makes total sense, and we should go there for a moment because, as a friend of mine once said to me, success traps are often harder to get out of them failure traps.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Potentially Yeah, interesting. You can see that if you could identify the tools, the concrete ways of handling this kind of deeper trauma, I'm reading into this now, but that you've experienced that you know other people have experienced, that that could be incredibly valuable to people because it's actually so much more universal than is obvious. It's not talked about a lot, but it's really universal challenge that we've gone through traumas and we don't know, we don't have the skills, the tools to know what to do with that.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Myself, I will agree. I don't think you will, and you don't and anybody listening doesn't have to overthink any of these questions. This is really simple, but it cuts away all of the concepts and just gets us moving. So, okay. So, Tim, just in your life right now, for real, something, think of something, tell me something that is essential to you, very important to you, that you feel you're underinvesting in right now. It really matters, but you know you're not really putting the resources you wished you were behind it. Go.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I would love to do that, and I'd love to do it in a different way rather than to talk about it in the abstract or even just to tell a story about someone. Let's do it. Like if you're a game, I'll go through an exercise that grew out of those experiences, but with you right now. Are you game?”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Role in your life that is still the stormtroopers still taking up energy, resources, attention that aren't really the right things. And so this is what we were doing. We had a variety of exercises for trying to get to that.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A life around the most important things, the essential things. And if we haven't made it clear, it ought to be made clear that this is what essentialism is. It's to figure out what is essential. It is to eliminate what is not essential. And it is to then build a system that makes execution as effortless as possible. And that's exactly what we were doing in that class. So people would come and they would work together to get greater clarity about what really mattered versus what was just good in their life, you know, what those very few highest values are, highest value projects, most important contributions. And then together to work out how can you start to trade off the things that are of least value that still play.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was co created at the design school at Stanford. The intent of it was, look, could you, you know, would people be interested in really coming together to design their life, not just using design principles, which design thinking has enormous application of value to our lives, but particularly design thinking with an essentialist lens. So if you had to come together and you had to design your life and we did it in design pairs or even in design threes where you would be designing for each other.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and the idea is to trick your brain into putting it into a position where you don't own the thing, where you don't have the opportunity. So you have to reflect on it afresh. You have to say, okay, starting now. Do I want this thing now? Do I, how hard would I go off to this now if I didn't own it, if I didn't have it? And it helps us to evaluate things more without this inflation of the fact that we own it, which is, of course, the endowment effect.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing, but you're pursuing it because you just sort of have it, you caught onto it, you feel a sense of this endowment effect, this sense of it's my opportunity, it's my thing, it's my goal. And it's not serving me anymore. I think a lot of people have a lot of stormtroopers in their life. And so it's not about the closet. It's not about the stormtrooper. It's about the stuff that really we need to get past and let go so that we can pursue the right things now, not just the things that we are pursuing because at one time we wanted to pursue them or one time they came into our life.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something you should pursue. That would be so cool. Older brother thinks so, so it must be so. And somehow in the back of my mind there it lives unquestioned for 30 years. And finally, I mean the store, thinking about whether to buy this. And in that moment, I actually have a sort of did have a Eureka moment, which is there is no part of me that wants this. It stayed with me, but I don't, and my four-year-old self does not need this. This is ridiculous. Why are you in this suit right now? And so I was able to sort of separate myself from the moment. And that's exactly what I'm advocating here. I'm saying that for a lot of us, we have a lot of, it became a shortcut phrase. My wife will say it sometimes to me now. Is that a stormtrooper that you're pursuing? Is that stormtrooper opportunity that you used to think this was?”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And I'm looking at myself and I realize two things. I realize that I have been thinking of this moment in some small degree for 30 years. This is true. I realize I'm standing there staring. I'm in, you know, I'm in the Halloween store. This is not a cheap suit that I'm trying on. And I remember that this is goes back to like when I'm 10 years old and maybe return of the Jedi would come out or one of the Star Wars movies and my older brother, one of my older brothers, had said to me in passing, but with quite a lot of enthusiasm, wouldn't it be great to own, you know, a stormtrooper out just like from the movies, like really the real thing. And somehow that got lodged in me. Well, that's an idea. Let's see.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A valuing because we own it or it's endowed to us. So in our life, that is an incredibly real problem. I'll give you an illustration. It's not in the book, but it's something that happened to me that really hit a chord. And it happened when I was staring at myself in the mirror, dressed from head to toe in a stormtrooper outfit.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“predisposition that we have to all physical objects in our life and also in fact all of the opportunities that we have in our life too. And it is this, it's that we value things more because we have them. And that means that's a good thing in certain situations. I mean, that's why you essentially owning a home is generally a good thing because people look after the home better. It explains the phenomenon of why nobody in the history of the whole world has washed their own rental car. You know, it's a positive phenomenon until and unless we overvalue something that we really ought not to have in the closet at all. It ought to go. It is actually not useful to us. It's not valuable to us, but we are overvaluing it and therefore keeping it.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, just staying with this metaphor for a moment, almost everybody has had a moment where they said, I've had enough. I'm going to organize my closet. And they begin the process and they take an item off the shelf, off the floor, and they say, it's time to just get rid of this item. And in the moment of picking it up and reflecting on it as if to give it away, something mysterious, almost magical seems to happen to many of us, which is in that moment we're looking at, we think, well, you know, I'm not sure I want to get rid of it. I could use it sometime in the future. And so-and-so gave it to me. So I, and there's something somehow in the act of giving it away, it's harder to give it away. than it was before we picked it up to give it away so what's going on and as it turns out there's a a”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me know. Let's use a metaphor to get to the endowment effect. Our closet is a pretty good metaphor for the problem and what to do about it. So for a lot of people listening, even as you say, they don't feel incredibly successful financially, incredibly successful in all the things in their life. Right. They probably still have more things in their closet than they actually can usefully. It's a bit pluttered. Maybe it's a lot more than a bit cluttered. I mean, I talked to somebody not so long ago and they said, oh, Greg, my closet, is it, you've identified the pain point? They said, I have my closet organized by decade So they had organized it, but it said you don't have a closet, you have a museum, man.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At work, at home, both and beyond, you'll feel often busy but not productive. You will feel many different pursuits hijacking your agenda each day. And you'll just have more that you want to do than you can do. So that's, in fact, the normal scenario for successful people. And so, you know, but I felt like it was an underserved problem because most of the literature on success is how to become successful in the first place. But for many, many people, the real problem is what to do once you are, even if you don't feel very successful. As soon as you have more options and opportunity that you can pursue, you need a new way of handling it than being in a scenario where you have no options at all. So this is where I see the book came into its own is it's really one of the few”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it does, in fact, turn out to be a problem if it leads to what Jim Collins has called the undisciplined pursuit of more. If these companies, and they often would, fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more, it would lead them to make decisions in such a way that they would plateau in their progress or even start to fail altogether. So I named that the success paradox. And so it was absolutely the combination of observing this phenomenon inside of these organizations and then suddenly observing it in my own life that I realized, oh, this isn't a business phenomenon, it's a human phenomenon. There's a pattern here that I think I've been able to put the pieces together. I can see it's highly relevant for people who are otherwise successful people because the very nature of success is that you will have this basic problem. You'll be stretched too thin.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've spent 20 years in this field generally so that leadership development, it's writing, it's research. I was working with Silicon Valley companies at the time. And so there was a secondary part to this story, which is that I was already working with these companies and noticed a predictable pattern there at a professional level, which is that these companies in the early days would be very focused on, you know, this is what we're trying to do, sort of a phase of clarity. And their clarity would lead to success. There was real alignment between if you knew exactly what you were trying to do at the right time, then you could generate success. And then I noticed that success breeded lots of options and opportunities for these companies. Well, that sounds like the right problem to have.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bargain. I violated something more important, more essential for something less important but less essential. And what I learned from that was the simplest of lessons, which is if you don't prioritize your life. Someone else will. And so that gave me fire for the deed to really dig into the subject, to try and understand better why it is that we make these kinds of prioritization decisions and what we can do to be perhaps better at it and to actually live our life according to the things that we've identified as mattering most.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, one of the initiating moments was when I received an email from my colleague at the time saying, Moment or at that time between all the different competing expectations and responsibilities that as we go into the hospital, it's Thursday night. We're in the middle of our daughter's born in the middle of the night. Friday comes along and I am still feeling torn and I'm still feeling, look, I probably ought to go. How can I go? How can I keep everybody happy? How can I do both? And so to my shame, I went to the meeting. I remember afterwards being told, you know, look, the client will respect you for the choice you just made. And I don't know that they did feel that the look on their faces didn't evince that sort of confidence to me. But even if they had, you know, it's obvious to you, to me, to everybody listening that I made a fool's.”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's awfully nice of you to say that. That's very humbling. Here I was thinking we were going to have a bad conversation. And now I feel like. No, I feel like we might go somewhere It's nice of you”
2019-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #355: Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT