Transcript & Summary: The problem with most productivity advice

[00:00] - This video is brought to you by Storyblocks. More on them later. Look around and it won't take long to get a clear picture of how most of the world views productivity. Laziness is the enemy. Procrastination is a sin. And getting things done only comes through hard work. - You see these bags under my eyes? That's 'cause I don't sleep. How hungry are you? (growls) I just found out that granny's in the hospital, but guess what? I'm still gonna get it. I could eat a whole buffet. I just found out that grandma is dead, [00:30] and I'm still gonna hustle. - We've been conditioned to believe that the path to success is paved with hustle, sweat, and missing grandma's funeral. We think that in order to reach our goals, we need to prioritize our work, increase our output, and make huge sacrifices. And that's partly true. Hustle culture isn't a new idea. Some of the earliest immigrants that moved to America were Puritans, and their belief that hard work would deliver them from salvation is etched into the fabric of this society. [01:01] Immigrants know better than anyone that in order to provide for yourself and for your family, you need to become self-reliant. Whether you're starting your own business or report to a boss, increasing your productivity increases the chances that you can pay the bills. If you wanna achieve the American Dream or the equivalent in your country, you need to put your head down, work really hard, and often, really long hours. While it's not a bulletproof strategy, that kind of mindset leads to success much more often than the opposite. [01:28] But that's only half the story, because if we take this recipe as gospel, another problem begins to emerge. We start to equate hard with better and easy with lazy. But what if overworking is the reason that you're not getting anywhere? What if there was another way to reach your goals? And what if you've been thinking about productivity all wrong? That's exactly what Greg McKeown argues in his book "Effortless". I caught up with Greg to talk about how we can flip our hustle mindset, pursue meaningful goals, [01:57] and how we might be able to make our work and life just a little bit more effortless. (device chimes) I think one of my favorite things about your work is that you're really good at questioning assumptions. In your new book "Effortless", you argue that we often make life much harder than it needs to be. Why do you think that is? - Well, first of all, everyone's faced with a 10X dilemma right now. Otherwise insecure overachievers all want to get 10X results, but none of them can work 10X harder. And that's the 10X dilemma. [02:30] If they try to work 10X harder, then they just burn out, and they still haven't got the results that they really wanted to achieve. The mindset that we have to get rid of is a sort of Puritan idea, which not only taught that hard work is a virtue, which I absolutely think it is, but that also ease is something to be distrusted, that it's inherently something that we shouldn't be doing. And even our language shows that. We say "easy money", "an easy day's work", and all sorts of language that demonstrates that we shouldn't even consider it. [03:03] And that's been baked into our hustle culture, that the only way to get through to the next level is through backbreaking, exhausting, endless hours. And that's just not what the data shows. So we need a new mindset because the old mindset is just not true. - [Matt] When you've been conditioned to grit your teeth with every new challenge, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you have a choice in how you respond. Greg first started thinking about a different mindset when his family was faced with something completely outside of their control. [03:36] - In the midst of already feeling at the edge of my capabilities, despite eliminating non-essentials from my life, I then have a family emergency, where suddenly one of my daughters, Eve, 14 years old, suddenly becomes inexplicably sick. Neurologists would shrug their shoulders. "I just don't know what to tell you "because every test came back in the normal range." In that situation, we know what the essential mission is. We know that having her completely whole again is the goal, but how do you go about it? [04:09] It was in the midst of that I discovered not one path, but two. One path was actually the more obvious one, the one we thought was the only path at first. That looks like where you barely sleep. You're gonna do nothing else. You're gonna cancel every other appointment. There's nothing else but this. Be consumed in this problem because it's so important. But that, we found almost immediately was going to destroy everything, right? Then we're gonna burn out ourselves, burn out our family culture, our marriage, everything. [04:37] And fortunately, gracefully, we found that there was a second path, a different way of doing and being. That looked like instead of complaining about what we couldn't control, being grateful in everything that we possibly could. It looked like finding humor in the situation. It looked like getting around the piano and singing. It meant going on walks. And that different approach changed our state, made the state more effortless than it otherwise would've been. That gave us insight, so we knew which things to do and what not to do. [05:11] And it allowed us to endure for an undefined period of time. Well, it's been, let's say, two years since this all began, and she is, as of this conversation, completely back. I mean, really herself again, healed. And we are, of course, grateful for that. But if we'd burned ourselves out at the beginning, she literally might not have made it. That's why the way we do things is as important as the things we're trying to achieve. - I think that we're starting to finally see a turning of the tide when it comes to hustle culture. [05:50] Books like yours. Even my company is called Slow Growth. And so there's starting to be this slow movement of people talking about how we can reach our personal and professional goals a little bit slower. But I still think it's difficult for a lot of people to break away from that toxic workaholic mindset. So what are some ways that we can start to slow down without completely losing our progress? - One of the key things we can do to be able to slow down but in order to make higher progress in our lives [06:23] is to look at the pace that we're going at. A lot of insecure overachievers actually make their progress slower by pushing themselves to the absolute limit and beyond. I'm thinking here about the great Age of Exploration for a marvelous example of this. This is where everyone's attention, the imagination of the world, so to speak, was about who will discover the South Pole first, I mean, who will get there first. Because no one had ever done it, not in the history of the whole world. Two teams set off, [06:57] one a Norwegian team, one a British team. The British team took this insecure overachiever approach. That is, we're going to go to our absolute max, the furthest we can go in a day, every day. We'll do 20, 30, even 50 miles if the conditions allow it. Now, they thought that's the way to go fastest, but actually, what they got from that was a boom and bust cycle of execution. On the good weather days, they maxed out, but that meant they were exhausted on the bad weather days and made no progress at all [07:28] and felt the psychological burden of not making even an inch of progress forward. In fact, they bemoaned on those days, wrote in their journals, "We have the worst weather of any team "that's ever tried to do this." Meanwhile, the Norwegian team, the expedition leader said, "Here's the rule. "On the good weather days, we're going 15 miles. "No more, no less." And that meant on the bad weather days, they also went 15 miles, no more, no less. That pacing had a dramatic effect. Now, the plot thickens when they got within 45 miles [08:03] of the South Pole. They have perfect weather conditions, great sledding conditions. They know that if they put one big push, they can get there in one day. And to make it even harder, they don't know where the British team is. For all they know, the British team is ahead of them. And that's really a point of reflection. What would we do? What would you and I do faced in that moment? What would we do if we followed the norms of our times? I mean, we'd push. We'd just do one big push. Even now, I think I'd probably do that. [08:33] But they didn't. He said, "No, 15 miles." And they averaged 15 miles a day for the next three days. So what happens? He gets to the South Pole with his team intact more than 30 days faster than the British team. But not only did they make it there first, they also had enough energy and health to be able to make the massive journey back to Norway, intact, alive, which is non-trivial because the British team died on the way home. So when you read the biography, which is brilliant, about this story, [09:06] the biographer chose an unbelievable description of the progress made by the Norwegian team. He said, "They progressed every day without particular effort." And I find that, even now, breathtaking. What a thing to write! What a thing to say! How outrageous! It's the most physically arduous, literally impossible up to that point thing, but they achieved it "without particular effort". That's the spirit of what we can do differently. And a simple rule to live by for the rest of us is this. (air swooshes) Don't do more today [09:45] than you can completely recover from by tomorrow. - I'll get back to my interview with Greg in just a minute and how you can achieve effortless productivity. But first, a quick word from my sponsor, Storyblocks. So I've made Netflix documentaries, social content, and everything in between. And regardless of the platform, my bar for quality is insanely high. And from the moment I signed up for Storyblocks' Unlimited All Access subscription plan, I was blown away by their catalog of over one million royalty-free assets. [10:14] This is not the stock footage that you're used to. It's high-quality, includes real people, like, forget about about those corny actors, and has everything you need to tie up your videos effortlessly. Plus, it's not just video clips. You can also pull thousands of sound effects and music to add that extra oomph to your videos. (punch thuds) (fireworks exploding) (coffee trickles) (record scratches) Sorry, I got a little carried away there. Their affordable subscription plan means that I can download [10:38] as many clips as I need each month. If you wanna get started for yourself, visit story storyblocks.com/mattdavella to sign up for an Unlimited plan today. That's storyblocks.com/mattdavella. I've left a link in the description below this video. How do we take these principles, right, that we can learn from this story and apply them to our modern work life? With always-on notifications. We've got Slack. We've got Gmail in our pocket. How do we take this slow approach when it seems that everything in the world [11:11] and everybody in the world is trying to tell us to do more all the time and always beyond? - I think the key is not only to have a minimum boundary, right? Like a lower bound of focused energy on a particular project, but always to have an upper bound. So when I decide, okay, I'm gonna write a journal every day, minimum bound, one sentence a day. Make it very low and doable. (slow reflective music) But my upper bound was five sentences a day. And by having the upper bound, it left enough in the tank to do day 2 and 3 and 4 and 5. [11:48] And this, of course, is now more than 10 years ago. I don't think I've missed a day in 10 years. That's not some extraordinary accomplishment. It's just the power of having an upper and lower bound. But the same can be done for just our schedules. We say, have a time you start work, have the routine the same every day, but also a done-for-the-day time. My time through the last couple of years has been 5 pm. So I call out to my family like a town crier when it gets to 5 pm as my accountability moment. [12:19] You know, "It's five o'clock!" Or of course, sometimes, "It's 5:03!" or whatever. But it gives you an excuse to be done. Otherwise, in our Zoom, eat, sleep, repeat life, when we're looking at our Fitbit at the end of the day and it says literally 300 steps, there's just no natural bound. There's no natural end. So an end-of-the-day time gives us that space to then recuperate and relax and rest before the day gets going again the next day. Another specific way to apply what we're talking about here [12:54] is to have a done-for-the-day list. So instead of having a to-do list that gets longer by the end of the day than it was at the beginning, you have a simple list, and you think through, "What do I need to do today "to feel satisfied by the end of the day?" And when you complete the list, you're done. No more sneaky work. (laughs) You actually take the time to recuperate, to rest. And it's like a slingshot. You're able to get into the next day with the energy to be able to do the most important work [13:26] and to do it sustainably. - It seems really counterintuitive for a lot of people, this idea that rest is productive and rest is a vital part of success. Why do you think that is? Why do you think people inherently think that rest is actually gonna hold us back or slow us down when in fact, in the long run, sure, maybe in a day or a week or so, it may actually slow you down, but in the long run, it's gonna get you to the South Pole? - We've been conned by an Industrial Age mindset of human productivity. [14:02] As the Industrial Revolution came into existence, it increased productivity 50 times. And that's real, and it transformed totally the productivity of the world and the quality of life of the world. And that's well-documented and almost miraculous to compare what life was before, not the romanticized version of it, but just how desperately hard life was before that. So there's this great transformation. And the risk, as with every transformation, is you throw the baby out with the bath water. The old way, let's get rid of it. [14:40] Everything can now be applied to this new factory-based system. And the nature of a factory is you wanted on 24/7, or at least you think you do. And so those ideas got applied into management and also into people's story about their own productivity. Well, we're not machines. We're biological creatures. And so the data we need to look at is not a factory system but what actually helps humans perform. And for at least the last 25 years, the top-performing experts in biological systems... You can think of the top coaches, the top athletes, [15:17] the top performers in almost every industry have collected data to demonstrate that the very highest performers rest far more. And it allows them to do concentrated, focused work when they are working, but they're also taking complete... They build rituals of rest and recuperation. And that really is a very different thing than just saying, "Oh, we'll go and rest." Most insecure overachievers don't even know how to rest. I mean, literally their competence at rest is at 0 on a scale of 1 to 10. So it's very uncomfortable to suddenly rest [15:54] or to suddenly even go on vacation. They don't know how to do these things. So you have to admit that level of competence and develop rituals that recuperate you individually. And as you do that, you're going to find how false the old view is and how productive it is to actually build in these rituals of rest and relaxation and to take that seriously like it's a responsibility. - When I think about Greg's advice in the context of my own journey as a filmmaker and YouTuber, (gentle string music) it's easy to see all the ways [16:25] that I've made life harder for myself. I have no doubt that I wouldn't be successful today without putting forth a massive amount of effort. But when I look back, I can see that there were times when I pushed myself too far and many days that I didn't give myself enough time to fully recover for the next day. And I still make these mistakes. And I'm sure that Greg makes these mistakes as well. The point isn't to be perfect, but instead to inch our way closer to finding happiness while in the pursuit of building a meaningful life. [16:58] And one of the ways that Greg recommends that we do this is to ask ourselves the question, "What if this were effortless?" So when you feel yourself instinctively going towards that path of most resistance, ask yourself the question, "What if this were effortless?" I hope you enjoyed this video. Thanks so much to Greg for sitting down and chatting with me. It's always fun to learn about what he's been up to. And I hope that this video helped you out. See you next time.