 Hey guys thanks for joining me on the show today. Today I'm in conversation with a guy called Greg McKeown based in California, though he's an Englishman and he is a two times New York Times best-selling author with his first book Essentialism that was huge and his latest book which we talked about Effortless. We talked for over an hour so we're going to split this show into two parts. So the first part today, second part, a couple of weeks time. Thanks again for being here. Enjoy this conversation. You're gonna love it. He's a great guy. Hey listen I really appreciate your time Greg and thanks for being on the show with me. I loved the book Effortless. I wanted to ask you, I'm always curious about what makes writers write about what they do. Why did you choose this subject and that title? I was interested to ask you first of all. You know every question can be answered in different ways can't it and there's sort of 10 different reasons but one honest reason is that when people read Essentialism I actually spoke about this theme in it but I felt like it sort of got to some degree missed because the framing of Essentialism is so clear between focusing on what's essential versus what's non-essential but that was the overarching narrative. But there's a secondary narrative in it and I think it's just as important as the first because it's not enough just to know what is essential even to choose it. If you then go at what matters most in the wrong way you will burn out and still not get the results that matter most and as I was you know I had that already in my mind then you suddenly hit into this era we're in where I think there's just two kinds of people there are people who are burned out and then there are people who know they are burned out and in that environment this subject that you know this frame this mindset has the power of relevancy right now and and in a sense it's bad news that it does I mean maybe it's good news for the book but it's sort of bad news for me and so I've just been delighted to see it seem to have relevancy you know it came in New York Times bestseller and then just over the weekend it was selected by The Times you know The London Times as one of the seven books in its genre for the year you know so great well done and and and beyond that it's just this sense I have when I'm working now with groups of like a maybe a doubling or even a tripling of demand versus the pre-pandemic period for the kind of work I do and like I said in a sense that's bad news but it shows that it's maybe it's not a great book but it's a great problem that it addresses and it has that that that relevancy right now. So how are you delivering that are you going into corporates and stuff small businesses large organizations and so on where is the demand for it? Yeah the demand is through you know conferences or internal events most of it's virtual but which is you know for me that's a really great thing. At the beginning when virtual was first sort of the thing I thought I don't know we're going to lose a lot and we do lose something but you gain something too I mean there's something to be said for the intimacy of just having a conversation you know we now speak to each other from our homes there's something about that that's beneficial and so but and practically I mean you know just a couple of days ago did you know we're able to do three keynotes on the same day you could it's impossible to do that prior to this but you're still reaching out into organizations of you know a lot of the tech companies Apple and Google and Twitter and these kinds of companies are still in that that range but but also really across you know across I would say all industries all major industries what's been interesting too is is now areas outside of the US particularly all through Central and South America there's something very interesting happening there with essentialism and effortless in Brazil for example I mean I would have mentioned that but that's because it's on my mind you know essentialism and effortless depending on the day will be outselling Harry Potter you know I mean like that's you know like that's ridiculous in the kind of genre that I'm in but I but something is meeting the zeitgeist there and and put it put aside you know my books as I'm working with these organizations they'll often share with me the you know like the the pulse survey results they're getting across their organizations and wellness is so much lower and it surprises them everyone thinks I will get a bit of a ding over the last year and a half but it's much lower and often than they're expecting and in South America especially so so you might have maybe 25 percent of the people will say it's possible to have a job at this company and still have have good well-being and that's a problem right that's a serious problem and that's the people that are employed in often well-run organizations and so and so yeah I think we're at a bit of a tipping point I think people thought they'd be done with the pandemic by now and so the fact that it seems like it's going to go on and on and on it's like yeah we've got to find a new way of working. What is the touch point for people Greg is it is it that they are battling complexity is the complexity of an artificial sort of man-made nature because you know there's good and bad complexity like fat there's good and bad versions of it as you know I know in the book you're dealing a lot with unnecessary complexity that a lot of organizations as you know seem to produce all the time unnecessary strutters of management multiple meetings that aren't necessary I mean when I'm in America I have a home in America in Phoenix Arizona and I love Phoenix I was just there yeah I had a place in Scottsdale but I used to get overwhelmed with the multiple choice in the Starbucks or the supermarket or the store the overwhelm and the complexity gave me in making what I thought would be a simple choice so this tendency to over complicate things your effortless soul speaks to that is that what people are people connecting those dots and realizing that's what Greg's talking about well I'd say what I think you know let me answer that this way that when I'm in person with events I'll ask people to snap for various questions I'll say okay here are some things and I use that is a teaching device of course to get everyone to feel not alone that they're like well everyone's struggling with this thing but the thing that I get not just a response to but but they'll you know like laugh to two is just the idea that everything is harder than it needs to be okay just that's idea that everything's harder than it needs to be people can feel that and and it's a to me what it what is going on there is that it's an evidence of success even though it doesn't feel like it if you are successful over a long enough period of time if you have some relative stability over a long period of time and I know people don't feel that in a VUCA world where everything's so volatile and so on but actually you know even though even though the pandemic makes us feel things are crazy and even though we do have a volatility that we have to manage if you take a longer point of view of history you know if you say sort of over the last several thousand years we're living in absolutely incredibly good times and and even the the complexity as you say well well said that there's positive and negative complexity even the positive complexity is an evidence of success it's an evidence of interdependent collaboration you know international collaboration it's an absolute to me it's an absolute miracle you know when I when you work in a major city and you look at that the bus arrives exactly as when it's supposed to and and the and there's an uber drive that you can get that sort of voluntarily signing up for this and they're there when they say they're going to be just all of it works it's absolutely extraordinary so that that's as context it says well well now our job is is to how do we how do we remove the scar tissue from yesterday's success if we have massive failure failure simplifies it'll simplify everything and eventually if you don't voluntarily simplify then failure will simplify for you a great book on that called the the collapse of complex societies that really gets into the the historical premise for that and and so and so what what i'm of course i'm arguing for and what seems to be resonant for people is that you have to simplify before you have to you simplify you simplify because because it just makes life so much easier for you for your team for your customers uh i mean somebody just somebody just email me i don't know somehow reached out to me of the last the last maybe 48 hours and they said they said they went to the you know to the to the airport and they said they had to show their id six times between the time they arrived to the time they got on the plane six times he said i don't look any different do they really need six different points in the process is that really what is absolutely you know essential that that's just adding and adding and adding and there's no one in charge of making it effortless and the as soon as you discover that this it's a tremendous opportunity improving yourself but also your business um your competitive uh positioning with other people you're just easier to work with it's easier to get the job done uh and and loads of chance there but um you know the large you know within this age of mega institutions and the larger organization gets the more removed it gets from me and you from the the customer as it were and then you know these shows like undercover boss where the boss goes back in the trenches and suddenly becomes aware how crap it is to work for him or her because of the stupid policies signed off you know in some city miles away that trickles down and makes people's lives in misery and the morality is low and the multiple layers of as we just talked about stupid complex things like the multiple IDs it's that that I loved about the book and I thought this is scalable to a large degree don't you think I mean obviously it needs a lot of willingness to be vulnerable and open about the fact that we are detached from customers and we don't really care and these organizations as you know the bigger they get they're staffing more for systems and policies than they are for customers so it feels like it's getting more and more away from us I was on the phone the other day you know to Sky TV or your cable company yeah a freaking nightmare yes and so all the branding about you know we're here to serve and nothing's too much trouble all these branding on websites you get then when you show up to the hotel or the airline or whatever it's a nightmare so you kind of want to thrust that book in their hands and say read this because just the first chapter could revolutionize your business but there seems to be and have you had pushed back to this is what I'm thinking what would be the possible pushback to this yeah I mean so much to so much to riff on what you just said I mean what you said freaking nightmare how true that is how many things I mean that's why that line everything's harder than it needs to be is so resonant and it resonates with me sort of like an echo you know today I mean we just we just um we just starting Anna and I we were establishing the business in a new state yesterday and uh and as my wife and in literally literally we had to go through 100 steps I'm not exaggerating I'm talking actually 100 steps that there's no excuse for that it's an outrageous waste of time and and this sort of this is like the upside and downside of digitization because digitization allows in well it allows for automation right which is a tremendous possible advantage but it's like a light side and a dark side to it because the dark side is if you automate complexity there's a necessary complexity that every single person forever afterwards now has to go through 100 steps instead of five steps or one step you know I mean if I think about this process I went through yesterday I think they could have summarized it down to a single page got the key information they had I wasn't actually starting a corporation I have all the incorporation details already established it's just doing business in that state all they need is a picture of that original statement of articles and that's it that's all they'd have everything they need it would be perfectly sensible for them and instead you've got all this noise so so I don't think that I don't get a lot of pushback like this doesn't make sense to us what it is is that what it is I think is that is that no one's creating unintentional complexity on purpose so complexity grows by accident so what you need instead you need you know you need your effortless ambassador you need your effortless you know Mr what I'm looking for evangelist who is is looking out for this right and and if you can get there to the point that you have an effortless you create a culture of looking for this you you know you become like a bit like let's say a company like Southwest maybe uh I mean Southwest Airlines is that there's that moment in their history quite early on in their history they're trying to be the low-cost carrier to the you know to the to the country they're all their competitors are creating this a new ticketing machine that's going to cost them millions of dollars to set up and then of course many more millions to maintain over years and then they're having this discussion that team meeting the executive meeting and somebody says do we care what continental thinks is a ticket and they're all like intuitive we don't care about that just because other people are doing it's not good enough reason for us to do it and the art solution they came up with is they just used their existing system and printed on it this is your ticket just to the over instead of your receipt you also got that it it doubled up as your receipt and your ticket that's what I'm trying to say and uh and they saved millions of dollars and all that time and all that energy that's just one small insight into a certain way of thinking that says just because everyone else is doing it or just because we did it in the past none of that's good enough reason for now let's just keep removing all the stuff and the and the best the best business leaders I think uh you know that the real breakthrough people are doing this they're they're very good at at removing complexity they're constantly doing in the you know this is Jeff Bezos at Ammons this is Steve Jobs at Apple they have had disproportionate results because they keep making it easier and easier for the end user and their obsession around that uh is I think exemplary actually I used to have rant regularly when I flew before we could all fly as as much as we could about pretty shareways because pretty shareways branding was we here to fly and to serve and I can tell you they do one of those and it's not the second in England we kind of all felt you know they fly but they're very snobbish very stuck up it feels like a club you're entering into kind of thing especially if you fly economy you're lucky to be there right exactly and you kind of realized and then when I flew with Virgin occasionally the difference the contrast between the two that the trickle down values of Branson have it been fun and playful and growth oriented and investing individuals I remember you know being in a Virgin business lounge in Perth Australia and I asked the lady at the check-in in the business lounge what was the password for the day for the lounge and the password was joyful but in in British Airways lounge is this Budapest or Las Vegas or Romania and I thought those things meant it don't they well I thought clearly in Virgin they made sure that the cultural engineering traveled as far as the choice of a password in a lounge and so in that lounge on that morning everybody was using this word joyful there wouldn't normally be in your vocabulary that day especially in a business lounge and people were saying to each other what's the password and so you heard this word joyful been thrown around is it one L or two L's and all this and people typing the word joyful and I thought what a brilliant masterstroke it was because it was such an odd word to have in that hectic stressful environment of the lounge whereas Las Vegas Budapest it so was typical the password told me everything about the interface between who's in charge and trickling down to us as the users between Virgin and BA and the difference as you know between values and culture values being beliefs and culture being behavior and making the culture the same thing as what you believe is the trick most people don't seem to be able to pull off it's rare that what they say they're branding is what they deliver right yeah there's so many places to go with that too but while we're still if we have this throughput of like airlines and travel and what what is and what it isn't and and I was in I was in Storm Ida a couple of months ago so it's coming into New Jersey airport and and I arrived everything seemed fine but by the time we got on the plane you know the storms were in we sit on the plane for an hour we come back in the within an hour of that there's like rain coming in through the ceilings and everything so I go to the lounge right it's the united lounge don't mind calling them out and I'm in there and there is this there is you cannot leave the airport you cannot fly out of the airport you can't drive out the airport you can't walk out the airport but you are stuck there and for an undefinable amount of time and starting it I don't remember 845 maybe it was 945 I can't remember but whatever the time that that lounge ends they just started screaming at their customers to leave and they got higher and higher and higher till they're literally actually yelling at people through the microphone you have to leave right now and I just was like like I'm I actually didn't feel bothered I didn't feel angry about any of it I didn't feel emotional about it but I did to find out why why they thought this was a good choice you know and so I did talk to someone about it that was there you know the closest thing to a manager on site and I'm just like it's just a missed opportunity like it's such a no-brainer right to keep this open it's such a no-brainer to just go look there's loads going on everyone's trying to find a quiet corner somewhere there's no beds for anybody at least here there's a comfortable seat for a few extra people it's so obvious yes to keep it going yes and and and and he's just you know he wasn't super rude about it but he wasn't open to it he just was like well look that's the contract that's what we have to do and that's the policy and it's like that's not it's not good you know it doesn't doesn't look good for United that's the answer well it's a policy that we have to mess over our you know our customers what I find amazing Greg is how do these corporates find these rule-quoting system adhering Nazis that when you deal with them they just court policy even though they know what they're telling you is ridiculous like I was on BA I was in economy sat near the front between me and business class was the curtain you know I I need a pillow there's no pillows so I say to the cabin crew lady can I have a pillow I'm sorry sir we don't have any there's a pile of pillows in front of me I said well there's a pile there there for business class people it's that and she looked at me as if to say I know that that is a stupid answer but that's what I'm supposed to tell you so when she'd gone I went and grabbed the pillow and she saw me do it and she didn't care she just didn't want to be the one to appear to permit me to do it it's that these organizations find these people that are that are willing to conform to what they know even as a decent human being a kind human outside of the job they still stick to these rules it's like it's like the bog on Star Trek the micros entity yeah there's you know there's a lot here right because okay so let's let's deepen this conversation you know to it to quite quite an intense place right okay I want to go one level down and then and then even a level darker still so so I interviewed well ten maybe maybe more years ago um Phil Zimbardo who was the uh you know the the architect behind the Stanford Prison Experiment which was you know pretty clearly even on the face of it an unethical experiment however interesting it was I'm sure of course you know this is this is the the prison experiment that he took select students some would be prison guards some would be prisoners and this is supposed to be two weeks it didn't last two weeks it had to be cancelled before the end of two weeks because even within that time the prison guards became so uh so uh you know seditious or you know wicked I don't know what the right word is I'm looking for but uh and and the and the the the prisoners themselves became so um they capitulated so completely to these demands that eventually it pulled away now there's a few levels to go with this right we always want to believe that in a situation like that we would be the good person right but statistically we won't be and and so that's sort of the dark part of this I mean he he told me in fact I just was chatting with him you know just he's not he's not very well now but um but just like within the last week or two and and he told me that his is the only person involved in anything to do with this that that had a concern about it and raised that concern from the beginning was his girlfriend at the time she was the only one who had enough sort of ethical you know uh sensitivity to to raise it rather than to capitulate that included all the people that were involved in it in organizing it and approving it and all the rest of it right okay let me go one level deeper even even more sinister the same kind of process right I have ancestors that that were affected by both Nazi Germany but also also the pogroms in Russia right and so I have Jewish ancestry and we want to believe I want to believe right that I would be schindler right or someone like him that I would be one of these freedom fighters that would be on the trains getting people out as but the statistically this is very very very very unlikely the number of people who are willing to be that counter-cultural is exceedingly small and so it it's beyond our conversation to try and like get to the bottom of it but to try and answer that question of how can I live myself in such a way that I would not capitulate to whatever the the forces are that are at play today is uh is that's a non-trivial it's not just a thought experiment that's a non-trivial pursuit uh to try and understand that and and I think that you have to sort of you know I know that we're not talking when we talk about policy inside of VA or united or whatever we're not talking about this anything like the kind of stakes of life and death the morality these other examples are but I think they're still the same kind of human dynamics at play because it's about power differential and maintaining your position in some hierarchy and your willingness to support a position that makes no sense to you and it violates something inside of you right now and to not allow that to govern you to not capitulate doesn't mean you have to become a big rebellion rebellious person either but that you say that there are things I will not do I'm going to let the humanity of the person in front of me matter more than the policy and and uh yeah I don't see much in way of modern educational systems and then the just to suggest that I know I know I'm riffing a long time here now but let me just one more element there's John John Goodman I've just been reading his book he wrote a book called the undercover story I'm trying to find it now the undercover story of American education he spent 10 years studying the causes how the modern educational system was created it came out with pressure and and now this guy he the author of that book was three times New York City teacher of the year twice New York State teacher of the year so he's not coming at this from you know like just an outside observer like he's he's as good as they get when it comes to teaching but his basic discovery he after he won all these awards he wrote an article I think Washington Post or Wall Street Journal must be Washington Post I suppose saying I quit I think and then he went on and did all this research and when I started reading it I almost started to shake with anger because he's named so brilliantly the problems and the assumptions underneath this modern education system and that feeds into the modern you know the modern you know we live in a corporate environment corporatism is taken over the rise of corporatism the fall almost everything else in that environment you are not being rewarded for being yourself you're not being rewarded for being uniquely you for pursuing your own conscience it's not that's not the prioritization you're sitting in rows you've got to support what's being told you've got to do and and and he he captures this so well and this I think you have to start very young to be able to do something different he uses the example you use the contrast between virgin and ba and he uses a story when Richard Branson's mother drops him off hours from home when he's seven years old and says okay you got it your job is to get home hours and hours from over it took him I think the rest of like I think it took him seven hours to make it home that's seven years old something like that by the time he got home hey of course that's a you know maybe that's a very foolish thing that she did but the goal was to give him experience not words not talk but experience out in the real world to go do something by the time he gets home he knows how to do stuff an independent voice and an independent way of thinking and he's he's he's often referenced his mother as being absolute key for why he even could be an entrepreneur or why he was able to revolutionize industries in the way that he went on to do so I see all this as being connected into how you raise people and teach them and work with them and then what they're going to do at that point of where where where policy violates conscience and which thing they're going to be dominated by you can't train people for 25 years to follow policy and then expect them to follow conscience right you've got to actually have conscience be primary the priority all the way through if you want to develop you know I think a society that works better well there's an interesting you know I think it was a 2018 survey amongst millennials asked why did they quit their jobs 70% of them said we didn't quit the job we quit the boss yeah we love what we do but we don't love who we do it for and this this cry of we we want to work somewhere and for someone uh that sees us to whom we matter we to whom we matter more than helping them make more money we matter as human beings our potential is important to them our flourishing in that organization I was speaking to my mentorship group that I do online a couple of times a month with people all of the world and speaking yesterday about this massive global shift that's taking place whatever people call it my term for it is moving from this old command and obey style leadership to servant leadership and I think you know the out of spring of 2011 and the crash of 2008 and brexit and trump and all of this stuff around the world is not least indicative of this grassroots revolution against leaders that are not listening despite them promising that they will in the pre-election meetings and then after elected and it cost David Cameron his job as you know because he was convinced that we would all vote to stay because he's in the echo chamber of the London bubble where they're all saying it's a given and when the country got a voice outside of London because our country is very London centric as you know when we got a voice outside of London especially up north we all said hell we Brussels went out of here because we never voted to go in and so now we're given a given a voice it surprised him and cost him his job but it wasn't a surprise to millions of us in the country this out of touch elite leadership in all walks of life and I think the wild card of trump to a degree don't you think was we're sick and tired of these career politicians what have we got to lose I don't know what they think now but what have we got to lose by this wild card of this business guy who doesn't claim to be a politician and with at least with trump I felt as a communicator and a teacher in communication around the world we have a masterclass in communication the thing with trump was um what he said is what he meant there was no double speak there was no shading of it he just said that right and there's something about that plain speak that people kind of appreciated and it made connection with him to use your word effortless compared to connection with politicians that never answered the question and he left confused with the outcome this surge in the world to me that shifting um it's shifting the tectonic plates in terms of leadership on these massive global shifts and as you know the 17th century enlightenment finished up in the 18th century french revolution eventually the people as you know have had enough and something's going to have to give and I think we're seeing that with you know Greta Thunberg and all these grass grassroots level um uprisings and revolutions of the george floyd episode and the awareness that brought to what the black people have been aware of for generations and the outcry that we are not being listened to and systemically we have been abused I think as you say it is a tipping point uh arrow that we are in and that's why I think your book was so amazing and I understand completely why it has the appeal it does well I hope you enjoyed that conversation I told you to be good thanks for being here I really appreciate your time and attention that you give me in bin on the podcast with me hey I'd love you to leave a comment or leave a review it helps the ratings of the show if you guys do that if you don't subscribe maybe hit subscribe now I become part of the podcast tribe here with me thank you have a fantastic day appreciate love you guys and I will speak to you all soon