Greg McKeown:
Welcome. I’m your host, Greg McKeown. I’m the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Effortless and Essentialism. And I’m here with you on this journey to learn how to live a life that really matters. Today, we will share this new habit of highly effective people with you, along with actionable advice for putting it into practice. By the end of this episode, you will be able to lead better, whether you are the CEO or the CEO of your own life. Let’s begin. Remember to teach the ideas in this podcast episode to someone else within 24 to 48 hours of listening so they can hope again.
Okay, so to put this into context, we had a conversation. We went deep into the idea of project stacking, how to do it, why it’s such a game changer, why it’s not the same as multitasking. Why it’s not the way that we normally think about our separate, multiple projects that we’re just trying to juggle and keep, you know, alive. And this is about reinforcing mechanisms around purpose. For those that haven’t listened to that episode, go back and listen to the first episode of this. We’re here with Richie Norton again for part two of the conversation in which you are going to teach us the importance of changing how you are paid in order to change your life. Teach us how to do that, Richie.
Richie Norton:
You know, when I was 16 years old, I wanted money. You know, I wanted to spend money. I wanted to do my thing. And I’ve had odd jobs doing, you know, random things that made a little bit here and there. And I told my dad, I said, “Dad, I want to get a job,” thinking he would like help me get a job or tell me where to go or give me some encouragement. But he said something totally different. He said, “You don’t want a job.” And I was like, What? Like, you’re, you’re my dad. You’re supposed to encourage me to, like, to get a job. He says, “No, you don’t want a job.” I go, What do you mean? Like, worst dad ever? What, what is going on? He said, “No.” He said, “You’re going to be working your whole life.”
He said, “Your job as a kid is to go to school and have fun. Your job is to learn, get good grades.”
And I said, “Yeah, but cool, but I still want to make money.” Now, the way I thought I would make money was to go to like the county fair and pick up trash or get a job at the gas station, something like that. And he said, when I told him, yeah, I still want money. He said, I’m from San Diego, by the way, born and raised. I live in Hawaii now. He said, “Go to El Centro,” which was a few hours away. And he said, “Go to the farmers and ask the watermelon farmers if you can buy their irregular-sized watermelons, the ones they can’t sell to the grocery stores.”
I’m like, What? And so my younger brother and I took out the seats of our mini, our family minivan. He gave us a little bit of seed money, quote unquote seed money, and we drove all the way to this watermelon farm, and did exactly what he said. We filled up our van full of watermelons. They would’ve, I don’t know what they would do with them otherwise. And we drove back to our hometown. I called all my, my, the parents love my friends, and we had like a little stand at the park. And in one day we made more money selling watermelons than we would’ve made working the entire summer for a minimum wage.
Greg McKeown:
How much did money did you make on that day?
Richie Norton:
Man, it wasn’t that. I mean, I don’t, I don’t even remember, you know, if you several hundred dollars, you know what I mean? Like, whatever, whatever it was. And it was a lot to us at the time. It was a lot.
And I can’t remember what we did with it, and I didn’t even think of it at the time. It wasn’t until I reflected that I realized that moment actually changed the way I thought about money. It changed what I thought about it, because it wasn’t just, Oh, you don’t have to trade your times for dollars. Got it, got it, got it, got it. It was, I have options. And that is the blessing of the 21st century. All these companies who are like, I can’t attract talent or the talents leaving. Whereas some companies are attracting talent, and yes, some are starting their own businesses and doing their own thing. This is the first time in the history of the world, in generation now, meaning not just Gen Z or millennials, anyone who’s alive today, it’s the first time in history that everyone knows more or less, I get, there’s exceptions. Everyone knows they have an option and the switching costs aren’t as high as they were 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. That’s the difference.
And so when you look at somebody who is wealthy and doesn’t have time, but they value time, they value their values, and they don’t live them, you got to ask why, because it’s not how much you’re paid that changes your life to an extent. Of course, the more, the merrier. It’s how you work, change how you’re paid, change your life. I told myself over 20 years ago, this is before Facebook was a thing, when phones folded, I told myself I wanted to be able to take my kids and my wife, you know, to, to this, to school, pick ’em up after school, and that would work for my cell phone. And I’ve had jobs here and there. I’ve done all kinds of different things, you know, whatever.
But what I learned was I could be somewhere on the road making money, the same money I would’ve made from home. But if I would’ve done it from home, had I not had that positive constraint, that I would only work from my phone, I would’ve been stuck. So when people are trying to create freedom of time, you have to remember nothing is more directly tied to your lifestyle than how you work. You have, you have bad health. Got it. How you get paid determines where you live and what you do. You have bad relationships. Got it. How you get paid determines where you live and what you do. How you get paid changes everything about your life and every instance. That’s why it’s so important to think about it.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. That, that last part was interesting to me. You’ve got bad relationships. Got it. Explain that to me in other words.
Richie Norton:
In other words, when someone is trying, I’m not going to pretend like I’m a relationship expert or a health expert here, but when someone says, I want to have all these things, whatever their values are, those values lived as far as time is concerned, is a direct factor of how they are paid, not how much.
I’ll make it super real. These are not judgments, by the way. It’s just, it just, it is what it is today. If I said, by the way, I fully believe in making money and meaning, both need to be there. They don’t have to be separate. But if I were to say, or a college student straight out of college gets a job in New York, let’s say they like it, whatever their lifestyle is determined by how many hours they’re in the office in New York and living in New York. If that same person’s dream was actually to be fly fishing in Montana, then that dream won’t be lived until later when they could have, at the same time, possibly just moved to Montana, started fishing and made the same amount of money or more working from Montana, either doing New York stuff or not. That’s the opportunity of today.
Greg McKeown:
So what you’re saying, I think is, so you’re saying how you are paid is more important than what you are paid, because how you are paid is how you can start to construct a life that is more an alignment with your values, your dreams, your goals. All of that will be shaped by how you are paid. That’s what you’re saying.
Richie Norton:
That’s right. And let me use this cake analogy again real quick. If you said like a cake mix requires sugar and you baked the cake, you wouldn’t expect there to be sugar in it. But if you’re to say, I have a life of values and this is what people do. I have a life of values. One day I’ll live them. Time doesn’t work that way. The cake bakes without your values. You can’t live a life on value without living your values from the start. And ironically, you’re more productive when you put your values constraints in from the start. When I work with venture capitalists and I work with founders, yeah, they want to change the world. Got it. They also want to make a lot of money. You ask them what they really want once they have an exit and you bake that thing in from the start, they start removing the bottlenecks and they’re more able to sell because they’ve removed all these systems that they concrete in from the start. Like, it is magic When you say what I really want, and you really do that from the beginning, it changes how you think. This whole thing is about thinking at a totally different level.
Greg McKeown:
There’s a couple of things I’m thinking of here. I keep thinking about a conversation I had recently with a family member of somebody who has been in private equity and a venture capital for years and been really successful and is used as a metaphor. This is portfolio management. I’m using a portfolio for the prioritization of my values. And it doesn’t matter if I am, for a period of time living this value and, progressing professionally as long as, over the course of my life, my portfolio is in balance. Right? That was what was claimed. But the person telling me that story said, Well, yes, but in practice, that is not what’s happened. And they would admit that that’s not what’s happened.
Richie Norton:
That’s right.
Greg McKeown:
And I think it’s really so much better of a metaphor to say, Well, values is more like baking the cake. It gets baked at some point. And it’s a bit too extreme because it’s not like we can’t change. We always have the right to change.
Richie Norton:
Of course.
Greg McKeown:
We always have the right, to rethink and reprioritize. And that’s the idea. And make a new choice. And hope again, nevertheless, I don’t like how extreme the portfolio metaphor is on that side. Right? That seems to be saying, Oh yes, we’ll get it all in balanced later. It’s like, Yeah, but your children have left.
Richie Norton:
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah exactly.
Greg McKeown:
They’re not here anymore.
If you wanted to have relationships with your children when they were young, if that’s what you wanted, you can’t portfolio that later.
Richie Norton:
That’s right.
Greg McKeown:
So at some point, things do get baked in.
Richie Norton:
That’s right.
Greg McKeown:
The second thing you said was this idea that you’ve got to actually start with the things you want to do later. And if you don’t do that, you will construct a life that is unsatisfying all the way along, hoping eventually you can shift at the end and make some sort of great Hail Mary moment in your life and end up where you want to end up. You have a metaphor for that. You talk about this castle and moat, which was what you were really going for. You mentioned this before, but describe it as it applies to this here.
Richie Norton:
So, I travel the world as you do. I’ve seen a lot of different castles, both, both like in, in Japan and all over Europe. I love going to Scotland, like, you know, all over England, you know, your town. I love these places, but it’s not every castle. But if you start looking at ’em closely, they usually situate the castle in a spot where it can be protected. And that’s either like by the ocean, the bluff, or an actual moat. And if you think about it, let’s just go back in time. If you think about the industrial revolution, the industry was the castle. The workers are working in the moat. So what most people do, and I’ll call out specifically entrepreneurs. They begin with the moat trying to build a castle when they could have, like tradition, started with the castle and then built a moat to protect it.
So in this sense, today, most people’s lives, their castle actually is their workplace, and their friends and family, time, and love are left on the fringe. You can change that. Your friends and family and love and time can be the center. And then, you intentionally decide what types of work to do and how to do it to support and protect that center. It’s a very different way of thinking.
I was doing this like book tour thing. I’m speaking everywhere. You know how it is. And this guy at the very end, like the last question, like times’ way over, right? He goes, “What did what did you learn after researching and, you know, interviewing thousands of people, researching hundreds of years of information?”
Like, I’m like, I just spoke for two hours on this man. You know, I didn’t say that you know. But he wanted something succinct. And I realized a couple of things. One, you can’t sacrifice what you love for success. When you sacrifice what you love for success, you get neither. Two, how you spend your time is how you show your love. And that hurts when you realize that’s true. And when you realize that’s true, you will build from your dream and your castle instead of endlessly toward it. You will protect your dream and your castle instead of leaving your people out in the cold on the fringe.
Greg McKeown:
Tell us those two things again. You can’t sacrifice your…
Richie Norton:
You can’t sacrifice what you love for success. When you sacrifice what you love for success, you get neither.
Greg McKeown:
And then the second?
Richie Norton:
How you spend your time is how you show your love.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. And what you said is that, that’s painful because
Richie Norton:
Nobody does it. The sad thing is we lie to ourselves. People ask like, “Well, what’s the hardest thing? What actually hurts me?” And it’s not like a real lie or even a white lie. It’s just more of a convincing. We tell ourselves, I’m doing this so that one day I can do this. I had a client say he was; before he was a client, it was a consult. And he said, “I want to spend two months out of the year in Italy.” And he said, he is going to quit his job. He’s making $250,000 a year.
And I go, Cool. Then what? He says, I’m going to make a gym. In fact, I need two gyms, and it’s going to take five years to be profitable. And I said, Cool. Okay, hold on. Who’s going to open and close these gyms? That’s the real question. He said he would. Okay, so you’re not going to hire someone. He said he was a micromanager. Got it. This is a metaphor for all of us. Right? Then I say, How old are your kids? He goes, 13 and 15. And I was nice to him, but I’m thinking, “Mr. Accountant, let’s do some math.” You’re telling me that when your kids are 18 and 20, you’re finally going to have time for them. That’s real math. That’s the stuff we don’t calendar for. That’s the stuff we should be putting first and letting our work support it. Not making our work falsely engineer something that will never be created.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I mean, all of this is important. All of it’s meaningful. I am slightly struggling to get this idea down about change how you are paid, change your life. Okay. Explain it just kind of one more time to me. This creates an economic moat. Are you just saying the order? You’re just saying build a business, be an entrepreneur, create a system where your freedom and your choices are maximized from the very second, from the moment you say, I’m going to create this. You build that into the recipe. That’s the point you’re making so that you get the order, right? You don’t just go, I’m going to go work up the ladder, going to go do somebody else’s thing till X time, and then I’m going to retire, and then I’m going to do what it is I really want to do over here. That’s what you’re saying. Is that correct?
Richie Norton:
That’s correct. And also, I love being interviewed by you because a lot of times I don’t get the opportunity to explain, you know what I mean? They just want to just keep going. So I’m loving this opportunity, so I appreciate it. Let me say it at a top level, and let me make it like super real. So at a top level today, people sacrifice their personal priorities for their professional priorities. Let’s be generous. 80% of the time. It’s more. The opportunity is to allow your professional priorities to support your personal ones. And that is a factor of how you work, not how much money you’re paid.
Greg McKeown:
And what do you mean by that? It’s a function of how you work.
Richie Norton:
Good question. Let me make it like extremely specific. If I’m an executive and I have to be in the office 40 to 60 hours a week, my lifestyle is determined. Not just those hours but when I have other stuff, including my two weeks off, my weekends, my retirement, all carefully planned out factors of time management. On the other end. If that same person had the same job function, and again, don’t get caught up in these analogies. This can be like applied in a broad, you know, a way, but that same role function, result creation, role type job, that same thing. If it could be done from the top of a mountain or a boat, or while I’m in Scotland or in Japan, my lifestyle is 180 degrees different than my counterpart.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So are you talking about how I’m being paid, or are you talking about just the flexibility of work?
Richie Norton:
Hmm. I could talk about flexibility of work, and those two go hand in hand. Of course.
Greg McKeown:
But isn’t that what you are just saying? I mean, you are saying if I can do it from the top of a mountain, if I can do it from here and there and whatever, I mean, isn’t that just, hey, work from anywhere thinking? Or are you advocating primarily don’t bother taking the job? Create your own business, your own lifestyle around these values, around this flexibility with the criteria of time, freedom, and health up front.
Richie Norton:
No. Yeah, that’s a good question. To be real, I’m not actually advocating for anything more than somebody being honest with themselves about their values, what they are and how to live them. So these principles I’m teaching actually help people work way more, way more than they would ever even conceive because they’ll be not just 10 x 100 x. And the thing that, I’m not just saying this. I’ve seen it, I’ve studied it, I’ve taught it, I’ve done it.
So I’m saying if someone says, I want to be able to pick my kid up from school. If their job requires them to not be able to pick up their kid from school, their lifestyle has been determined by how they’re paid, not how much. Whereas the same person in a different, you know, department getting paid the same, if they had the flexibility using that word to go and pick up their kid from school their life, yes Is more flexible because of how they’re paid, not how much nor the result.
Greg McKeown:
So I think what you’re saying is it could be that you create it by being an entrepreneur. It could be that you do it by negotiating differently at work. You are agnostic about that. But what you’re saying is you need to do a self-assessment, says who controls how I work.
Richie Norton:
That is it. That’s the whole point. It’s not how I control my time. It’s who controls my time. You got to remember where I’m coming from, which we haven’t talked about. Like a lot of my clients are doctors, lawyers, dentists, psychiatrists, psychologists. I know nothing about that stuff. They’re the experts. They’re coming to me to figure out a better business model. They’re coming to me to figure out how to get their life back. They’re coming to me to figure out how to be more productive and do it in ways that take tiny, tiny decisions to make big, big things happen. Of course, tons of entrepreneurs and you know, I, I coach CEOs, all this stuff comes down. What are they asking over and over and over? Richie, How should I spend my time? I don’t know how you spend your time. What do you want to do in life? Now we can align it. So when people say, I don’t have the life I want, there’s a number of different directions we could go. But at the core, if you change every part of your life, but not how you get paid, not much in your life’s going to change.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, but this is killing me. What do you mean by if you don’t change how you get paid?
Richie Norton:
So let me flip it around. Maybe it’ll make sense. People say, Richie, I want to hire people, I want to do all this stuff. There’s this weird quiet quitting thing happening. People want to work a little bit. Someone want to come to the home and some who want to come into work. Some don’t. The whole thing gets eliminated. As soon as you say, the whole conversation is irrelevant. When you say delegate results, not methods, people that are controlled by methods have a limited choice in how they operate. because the idea is that principles and frameworks will change, obviously based on the individual’s wants, needs and desires, and circumstances. But in this sense, and maybe it’s just the terms of saying how you get paid. Because I’m not talking about whether you get it in the form of a check or a wire, although that would change your life if you have to go to the bank versus just having it show up in your account. What I’m really saying here is, if I tell myself as my own boss and an entrepreneur that I have to do X, Y, Z, then my lifestyle has a constraint around X, Y, Z. If I don’t like that constraint, ask a better question, get a better answer. Who can I outsource, delegate or eliminate this, you know, thing? Or is there another way to do this? And in general, even inside certain businesses, they can operate differently. In other words, how you’re operating your business determines when, where and what you do.
Greg McKeown:
So when you use the term how you get paid, it’s really to do with
Richie Norton:
Operations
Greg McKeown:
How you work.
Richie Norton:
That’s right.
Greg McKeown:
That’s an interesting contrast for me to get my head around right now. But you’re saying it’s not who pays you. It’s how you get work done. You can be an entrepreneur, or you can work for somebody else. Okay. That is a separate delineation. Sure. But it’s also true that even after you make that, you could be an entrepreneur and still be controlled by the system you’ve created and still have your values completely out of alignment. So it’s clearly not quit your job; start your own thing, then you’ll have the freedom. So that’s not what it is because you could be in either category and not have what you want.
So let’s say you are in either of those situations, and you are successful with what you are saying what would that mean? If you say, how do you get paid changes your life, what is the change you need to make as an entrepreneur or an employee that would produce what it is you’re trying to say here?
Richie Norton:
Yeah, I like that. And I’m going to oversimplify in a terrible way, categorically, I’ll say it. Another way of saying how you get paid or how you operate. I’ll say it in terms of time. When you’re spending your time one way, you’re not spending it another. Work-life flexibility is a factor of autonomy. Can I make a decision ability? Am I able, or do I have the resources, and am I available?
Now, let’s just talk about availability for a second. If someone isn’t available or something they love because they’re working, they do not have, in that instance, the flexibility or the choice to do something about it. Of course, they do. But if they choose not to, they’ve made the decision. So, in other words, how you spend your time dictates how you spend other time.
This is a categorical fact. Like there’s no way around it. It is what it is. So when someone says to me, “Richie, I want to do all these businesses. I want to do all these things, or I want to keep my job, or I want to, I want to get a raise.” Or, more likely, they’ll come to me and say, “I just became the CEO. What do I do? I don’t want to lose my wife in the process.” I hear this often.
Then we have to ask a bigger question. Not where do you want to be in 10 years? It’s too far away. What has to happen over the next two years for you to feel like you’re happy and successful. Oh, can we bring this home? And then what you find is, I’ll make this super real now. What you find is someone will say, I just want more time with my kids.
Now, do you have to change your whole job or do all these things? No, you prioritize your attention. Five minutes on the trampoline with your kids is more important to them than an hour at the park with you on your phone. So to say, like, what does someone have to do? The idea is obviously decide who you want to be, and then you’ll know what to do, and you want to get granular. So we have, of course, your purposes turn into priorities, turned to projects, turn into the way you get paid. Because if you start with the way you get paid, you already created a decision tree that was decided for you. When you decide how I want to live, you can create a way to be paid in a way that supports you. It’s a different way of thinking.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. Okay. But now we’re back to that phrase again. The way you get paid. What do you mean by that?
Richie Norton:
The way you operate, the way you work. How long you work, why you have to, I mean just, I mean, Okay, okay, okay, okay. An architect does not build buildings. They draw them. A general contractor doesn’t pick up a hammer unless they want to. They sub it all out. There’s a difference between the guy swinging the hammer and the guy who is a general contractor. How you get paid changes how you spend your time.
Greg McKeown:
So, can someone be an employee in a hierarchical structure and change the way they’re getting paid based on what you’re describing?
Richie Norton:
I mean, the answer is, of course, there’s like a million different ways, but we have to get specific about who it is. And this isn’t something I advocate for or endorse, but quiet quitting has been the topic of the century, of the 21st century. At least 2022. Kids have already decided what they’re doing about that thing. So you could be super productive. But the thing is, I don’t focus on methods and means. Those are part of the framework because you can use a different habit for a different goal. Those are interchangeable. How someone can change what they want to do certainly depends on what they actually want. If this person wants to go to Italy for two weeks this year, please stop saving up your holidays and just go. At the end of the day, this is about ownership, responsibility, and making a decision. And you’re right. If you decided to take a job that has no ability to be flexible, you need to own the consequence as a choice, not an actual consequence. It was something you chose.
Greg McKeown:
But when you use the phrase how you get paid, does that mean that somebody listening to this should be going and renegotiating how they get paid? Or are they just renegotiating the range of constraints that they’re working under?
Richie Norton:
That’s a good specific question. So we’re assuming that someone already has a job and they don’t like, maybe they like what they’re doing, but they feel like there’s certain things they want to do, possibly either at work professionally or at home. I mean, that person should definitely talk to someone about figuring that out. Like, yes, you know, back in the day, they called us, they called themselves, the workers, automatons, they called themselves wooden men. That era is over.
If you’re in a job where you have actual human feelings, and you talk to someone, and they say, I will never let you change, ever. Get out of there. Because I believe in organizations that have conversations. So yeah. Talk about changing the way, changing it up. No big deal. It’s a normal thing.
Greg McKeown:
I think you are saying that change how you are paid, change your life means get out of working for other people so that you are paid independently of someone who can constrict and control how you do your work.
Richie Norton:
Yes. I’m 100% saying that. And I’m saying if someone doesn’t want to be an entrepreneur, they can change the different types and methods and systems within their own organization if they’re allowed. Of course, if they’re not allowed, well, then they have a choice. And the choice is, do I accept my destiny? This is what is really about. I love that you keep asking the question cause you’re getting to the core of it. You and I work with people who tell themselves they can’t, and it’s just not true. And if it is true, accept it and then make a decision. So yes, if you want to quit your job and start your business, cool, but do it in a way that creates time and doesn’t take it away from your values. If you want to stay in your job, but you don’t like what’s happening there. Are you going to forever lead a life of drudgery for 40 years? My mom just turned 65. Does she now get to live her life? Of course not. Silly. She’s been living it the whole time. And every human should have that opportunity.
Greg McKeown:
The thing that I am apparently being hung up on is the word paid.
Richie Norton:
Let me give you an example. And we might be getting caught up on the paid word being interchanged with how you operate, what you do, essentially how you spend your time. But in many instances, if someone signs up to get a job, they’re going to tell them, these are the things you must do here, when, and where. And that’s how you get paid. And in that sense, the terms of your work are set up, and the rest of your time is up for grabs. So when people are able to prioritize what they love and want to do, first, you start to create and crowd out distractions.
Side note, when I work with the executives that say there’s all these people that are staying here two hours later to show me how productive they are.
I say, “Oh yeah, are they more productive?”
And they say, “No, I wonder why they’re still here. Why didn’t they get it done in the time we asked them to?”
So there’s a bizarre game going on.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So there’s a way of taking the phrase how you get paid. Yes. And you can emphasize each side of the sentence, you could say, how do you get paid? Right? Like the different ways one can be paid. But I think what you are saying is it’s about how, how you work in whatever job is paying you in whatever business is paying you.
Richie Norton:
That is correct. This isn’t a perfect fit, but this is a real thing that, that recently happened. So, I had a client who is a lawyer, I won’t say his name. And he called up and said, “I got to quit my job. Like, I can’t handle this.”
And I go, “How much are you getting paid?” He’s getting paid tons. And I go, “You’re going to seriously quit your job?”
And he’s like, “Yes.”
You got to remember, it is weird, me being the super entrepreneur, do your own thing. But my goal isn’t just go do your own thing. It’s what are your values? Don’t time your values, value your time. So I said, Would there be a way, because you want to start this new real estate thing on the side, and that was going to become his new thing. And I’m thinking, because I, again, I’m a family person. I’m thinking about his spouse, thinking about his kids. I’m thinking of the stress, I’m thinking of the ignorance he has in thinking he has to go buy a building and get overhead with 10 guys working for him. You don’t have to do that. So I’m thinking through all these things for him, right? And we talk about that, and I go, what if there is a way you could stay at your job? He’s a, he’s a corporate lawyer, he works inside, gets a salary. What if there’s a way you could work there still and start this thing and have more time?
Our brains work like a calculator. I can’t do this. Yes, you’re right. But if you start using an algebraic type question, how can I do this thing without that bad thing by next Tuesday, it opens space in your mind.
So I opened that space for him, and over time, I’ll save you all the details. But over that time, he did. He went to them and had a conversation. He said, Here’s what I’ve done for you. Here’s what I want to be doing. But over here, I have all these time constraints working here for you. And I don’t want to leave the company, but I’m going to have to if you keep making me go to these meetings every day. They’re a waste of my time. I don’t need to come in more than once a week. If that. And they agreed. He kept his salary, comes into the office less, gets more done, starts a side business, no overhead.
Like it’s a conversation, it’s different, and it’s going to change. But when you work from your values, you have more power in the conversation as opposed to thinking that the man’s going to like tell you if you can have flexibility or not. I do not believe that the corporate benefits of flexibility are for people. They are for the corporation. And so you have to, like come from that power, and then it changes.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. The phrase that we might say for my own precision is something like how we work to get paid changes our life.
Richie Norton:
That’s right. Boom. I love you, man.
Greg McKeown:
We’ve got there. We’re feeling good about that.
Richie Norton:
I love you so much. The world has come back together.
Greg McKeown:
We put the worlds to right. And in the process of doing this, I did create in front of me as sort of have to do an almost OCD. I created a two-by-two with the entrepreneur and employee on the y-axis and fixed work versus autonomous work, something like that on the x-axis. And that is a helpful thing. So this painful process of getting to clarity on this subject is helpful because, typically, we do think of it being entrepreneurship equals autonomy. Right? Which would be our top right quadrant. Right? So quadrant two versus fixed an employee. Like those are the two options we have. But in practice, it is certainly true, and our conversation bears this out. But it’s certainly true that you could be an entrepreneur and be fixed in your autonomy. That’s clearly the case. People start the business for freedom but actually end up just being consumed because of how they choose to work in their business. And the example you just gave illustrates that maybe it’s more constrained. You can’t do it as you don’t have as much control. Nevertheless, you could negotiate to be able to improve how we work to get paid.
Richie Norton:
And you know, we’ve seen this before, like you, you mentioned agrarian work, then to industry, then Peter Drucker, 1959, he says knowledge workers. And you go, today, knowledge is ubiquitous. And so you have this in America, people are getting raises that maybe 3- 4% a year is not keeping up with inflation. And you have these employers that are saying, come back to the office, and they’re saying, why aren’t they? Well, they’re losing talent to similar jobs at similar corporations who are allowing them the meaning, the flexibility of the freedom that they want. So, in other words, you’re right, you can get paid a million different ways, but how you decide how you’re going to work or what you choose to do, you know, and how you’re going to work just determines how you spend your time. And if you want to spend your time differently, then you have to choose how to work differently.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. That makes so much sense. And I love this idea of making the determination, the decision up front to bake into the way we work, the freedom, the health, the space to think, the space to build relationships. That all of that is at the beginning of our design.
Now, from there, really, I think what you’re saying is that you’re broadly agnostic about which strategy you pursue. There are trade-offs in any career path you take from there. But you should still be starting with this first principle of values first and building a structure of how to work that enables the protection of those values.
Richie Norton:
It’s beautiful. You said it so well. I love how, honestly, I love how you’re digging into this, and you’re taking it so seriously and like thinking about it. I honestly appreciate it man. Thank you so much. This is so good.
Greg McKeown:
You know, I appreciate that so much. And to me, this is what the work-from-home battle is all about.
Richie Norton:
It’s true.
Greg McKeown:
And my view is that, is that these corporations will lose. That’s my position. Now, I don’t know how long they’ll lose. I don’t know if it’s permanent or not, but I think they will lose for a generation. I do not believe that you can put employees back into the bottle. Not while the pandemic is fresh in people’s minds, where they were asked in an instant to pivot, to be able to work virtually, and to be as productive as they were before. And in a lot of cases, more productive than they were before. And that they did it and were applauded for doing it. And then suddenly, how can you possibly make the argument afterward? Well, you know, but I mean, Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you need to be back in the office because that’s where real productivity happens. It’s just like, it’s a completely untenable position. And so, the corporations will lose as long as there are some of the corporations that embrace work from anywhere. So as long as you have a number of Airbnbs, it won’t be enough if it’s only Airbnb. But if a number of companies that say work from anywhere. We really do embrace it. So, or a hybrid system of some kind, as long as there’s that, I do not see people putting the gen back in the bottle on this.
Richie Norton:
You’re right, you’re right. And the opportunity for people like you and me who are coaches or consultants or, you know, working with executives, what whatever it looks like that we are, like, this is the conversations. I’m sure you’re having them. They’re the conversations I’m having with executives. They’re like, how do I have and work with these employees? What is this new freelancer world? What is this like? There is so much opportunity here for everyone, the employer, the employee, coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs. This is like literally the beginning of something super expansive, like beyond what we can even imagine right now.
Greg McKeown:
I once thought about writing a book with the title The Last Monarchy. That is the inevitable fall of hierarchy in the birth of the intelligent organization. And the premise of that really is that in an age of platforms where okay, the largest hotel company in the world owns no hotels. And so on. That you say, well, these are platform-based enterprises. What hasn’t yet happened, and the pandemic massively accelerated the possibility of it happening, is for everyone to be in the platform. So, you know, it’s like, well, why not?
As soon as you, I mean that’s the advantage of, of the digitization. There are disadvantages, plenty of them, but the advantage is work from anywhere. That’s its primary value. You can, as many people did, sell up in their, you know, the, the big city they were in, go somewhere else where they actually wanted to be, be around family. Many people made pretty permanent strategic trade-offs to embrace the upside of this forcing function that you have to do everything virtually. And people are going to switch back because they’re just told with no actual evidence. Well, yes, it’d be better if you’re in the office. That’s just better. You’re like, better for who? You know, prove it. I mean, people are just not going to do this. It’s just, I think it’s amazing. I mean, I’ve done work with these companies, and so I’m not trying to knock them with it, but
Richie Norton:
Of course.
Greg McKeown:
It’s fascinating to watch these, you know, to watch even Apple just genuinely struggle to enforce We’re going back. You know, this, we’re doing it. It’s like this horse is out of the stable. And it’s a very strange, I think it’s a very strange moment, but I think it is a sea change moment in being able to people to at least begin to sense their agency in how they work to get paid.
Richie Norton:
There you go.
Greg McKeown:
Hey, listen, this has been, this has been fun. Thank you for staying with it with us. Thank you for taking so much time. It’s been delightful conversations together. Thank you for both conversations, and thank you for your thinking and your interesting work on anti-time management. I’m confident that we’re going to hear lots from you in the future and that your journey has just begun. Thank you so much, Richie Norton, for being on the podcast today.
Richie Norton:
Thank you, brother. It’s an honor.
Greg McKeown:
If you have found value in this episode, please write a review on Apple Podcasts. The first five people to write a review of this episode will receive year-long access to the Essentialism Academy. Just send a photo of your review to info@ gregmckeown.com. Also, do yourself a favor and subscribe to the podcast so that you can receive these episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays effortlessly. The book Effortless and Essentialism, together, are designed as a formula to be able to help you to not only know that your most important work is always ahead of you but to be able to do that most important work that is always ahead of you. We’ll continue the conversation next time.
