Greg McKeown:
Welcome. I’m Greg McKeown, your host in the What’s Essential Podcast and also the author of Essentialism and Effortless. Come with me on an explanation of self-discovery. On this podcast, we decipher what really matters as we unravel the chaos and complexity of day-to-day living in order to learn how to build an essential life. Ever since writing Effortless, and especially recently, I’ve been thinking about how important it is to build systems that work for you and not against you. Too much of my life, and too much of my life recently, I’ve been spending time making results happen by persevering. So, I was really intrigued when Carey Nieuwhof wrote a new book and sent it to me, At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, & Priorities Working in Your Favor. And it’s those last three words, in your favor, stacking the deck in your favor instead of them being stacked against you.
Carey is a friend of mine. He’s an influential podcaster in his own right. A thought leader. He mentors people all over the world, and so I’ve invented him in to mentor me, and you. So, let’s get to it.
Carey, welcome to the What’s Essential podcast.
Right before we got on the air here, I asked you what you’ve been up to the last couple of weeks, you said you were preparing for a month off from the business. And then you said something like, maybe you have the words for it. You said no cheating.
Carey Nieuwhof:
Yes. No cheating.
Greg McKeown:
Just really unplugged. And, you said, fortunately, the business is getting to the point, or is that the point that it can do that. And I think that’s worth getting into. Because it seems to me that a lot of people design or end up with lives. And then businesses that are so dependent on them. They are they have to be or feel they have to be linked to their phones every second of every day, doing email, what you’re always on the things won’t work without them. And in this way, I think make life much harder than it needs to be for themselves. And so can you just talk to me about that? And you know, what have you learned about building a business that can operate when you aren’t there?
Carey Nieuwhof:
Yeah, I’ve learned a lot about it. And I learned it the hard way. And the way I think about it, Greg is, and I’ll give you the framework and then sort of explain the narrative. Yeah, but no cheating means no hour of email in the morning while the kids are asleep while my kids are grown now. But you know, that kind of thing, which I did too often when I was in my 30s. My kids were young. I would cheat that way. I’ve tried working on vacation.
Listen, I love what I do. I loved it. When I was in ministry as a pastor, I love running a business right now just to help people thrive in life and leadership. Like, I love that stuff. So this is the poison, right? It doesn’t feel like work if you’re doing what you’re enjoying. You can justify it.
Last summer, I finished up this book At Your Best, which releases, as you mentioned, this September, and you know, as final edits, and I’m like, “That’s it, no more working vacations,” because I wasn’t very good at work. And I wasn’t very good at vacation. I don’t know, that was my best writing because I kept thinking about when are we gonna go to the beach. And then when I was at the beach, it was like, “Okay, I got to do some more writing.” Because when are you ever done a book rank like never right. So that was my experience. And I’ve taken a week off for two weeks off and totally unplugged. But my company now is really, in its current form, started as a hobby, just a blogger and podcaster. And then, you know, millions of people showed up and I’m like, “Holy cow, what is this?”
And I hired an assistant and then hired another one. And then podcast manager. So now we have eight. There are eight on the team. So now we’re at the point we’re not a startup anymore. And I’ve really built into a team. My assistant has only been with me for a few months, but she’s really, really good. And I’m like, okay, we’re ready. And we’re ready to move to what I call level two as a company. So, level one is exactly what you hinted at. It’s where most businesses operate. And I call it level one, where nothing operates without you. So when I was a pastor at small churches, you know, back when I started Yeah, almost nothing did run without me. Yeah, hire someone to cover Sundays, and everything else waits till you’re back. You know, you think about a mom and pop shop, lots of people run their own businesses or a boutique or an Etsy store. And, like, if you’re not actually there to do the shipping and receiving, like, there’s no shipping and receiving. And you often don’t have the financial margin to hire someone, even at minimum wage.
So Mom and Pop get there before dawn, and they leave after dusk. They’re tired. They get maybe a week off if they’re lucky, and they run ragged all the time and most businesses run that way white collar blue collar, the owner, the founder runs everything. That’s level one. Then there’s level two, which is like things run without you; you can take a week off, two weeks off, a month off, and not cheap, like not cheap. You know, if there’s an emergency, sure someone on your team will text you or whatever. But you can really automate it and get things down.
But the third level, which is exceptionally difficult, in my research, only a tiny fraction of businesses ever get there or any organization not for profits as well, is that things grow without you. So I’m a founder, I founded a church, I founded a company now that’s what I’m doing these days. And, you know, the real challenge at the church is it got way bigger than I thought. And you know, it’s the church, don’t screw that up, like that’s not yours. If I start a company running into the ground, okay, that’s on me. But like, don’t mess this up. And so we got to the point where it would run without me. And now, I’m pleased to say five, almost six years on the other side of stepping out of the lead pastor role. It is growing without me and thriving without me. And I think that’s where every leader wants to be.
Greg McKeown:
What do you think it’s going to take to go from level two to level three?
Carey Nieuwhof:
That’s a great question. So what it takes is a couple of things. Number one, it takes you as a leader to relinquish control. I don’t need to sign off on every page. I don’t need to sign off on every email. I don’t need to sign off on every decision. So there’s, there’s something where you could say to yourself, “Oh, you don’t understand, Greg, the organization needs me.” Right?
But you could, you could actually, if you sat with therapists for a little while, you might realize No, you need the organization to need you. That’s your problem. So, number one, the leader has to cut that tie. The leader has to say the company, the business has a different identity than I do my future, even though it’s my name, like isn’t tied up with a company to get a separate that and sever and be happy sitting at the beach like you might go through withdrawal once or twice. But you’re not like, “Oh, I’m just checking in. Is everything okay?”
No, you have to cut that. So that takes maturity, and it took me years to get there. The second thing is you need a team who can who can actually be equipped to make decisions that will actually grow the company. So they’re no longer asking what would Kerry do? What would Greg do? They’re saying, you know, in terms of my company, which is Carey Nieuwhof Communications, just again, the name was available. So not particularly creative. You know, our mission is to help people thrive in Life and Leadership. That’s it. And we want to help people live in a way today that will help them thrive tomorrow. So we do podcasts, blog posts, courses, all that stuff.
I have now hopefully embedded the culture in them deeply enough, given them clarity in the organization and what their role is, and hired competent, smart people who can make quality team based decisions. And when they get good at that, like I would say we are moving from level one to level two. Now, this year in our company, give it a year or two, we may be able to move to level three, where even if I’m not on permanent vacation, like for a month or two or whatever, they are now making decisions that are growing the company and then if I remove myself from that the quality of their decision making and their ownership and the mission, and their ownership of the culture is strong enough that they can they can run the whole thing themselves. And this is really hard on the ego, do a better job than I would do if I was making those decisions. And whew, that one’s tough. And that took quite a bit of counseling for me to get through that.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, this reminds me of a few things. Steve Jobs was once asked, you know, what’s his favorite innovation? You know, is it the Mac is it the iPhone? Is that the iPad and so on? And his answer was Apple, and I thought that was, you know, another brilliant insight from Steve in terms of how he was thinking. He was thinking of the company, in a sense, as a product. That I’m, I’m thinking of this, because this is the most important product, if this is done right, then it can produce many, many products. And you know, outlive himself.
Carey Nieuwhof:
And you know, as a leader, as a founder, as a CEO, you’re sort of the face of the company or the decision maker, but you get the credit, but you also get the blame, right? If something doesn’t go well. So that, I think, forces us to say, “Well, let me just be in on that meeting, or at least brief me about it.” So it’s a real growth area for me as well. Greg,
Greg McKeown:
What’s the longest you’ve gone without checking your phone?
Carey Nieuwhof:
I don’t think I like the answer. Probably a day. And I’ll tell you why. And this is the challenge. I don’t have a work phone. You know, my phone is like, okay, where are we going to go for lunch today when I’m on holidays now? Yeah, probably the short answer to that is probably a day. Even when we were camping. We were totally off the grid. There was no power, no cell reception, nothing like that. would check it for the time in the stored weather forecast. But like, you can’t go online. That was when we were in the wilderness last summer. So if you count that three days, yeah. Like without the phone is one thing without things on my phone? Easy. I’m gonna do a month without apps on my phone, no Slack, no email. Now, but like without my phone? That’s a really interesting question.
Greg McKeown:
The longest I went without internet access was two and a half weeks on a family vacation. And the children still talk about it. They don’t say, remember those two and a half weeks? You didn’t have your phone? No, they still remember the experience. Now. It’s not just because of that. But there was no question that it was different than I felt different, that the experience was different. Because you are, you’re really getting away from the typical routines and habits and rituals that have been created. So that you can without really any attempt to do so, look at your life.
I remember a friend once saying to me, “Greg, I’m too busy living to think about life.”
But I think that’s I think that’s true for entrepreneurs. I think that’s true for a lot of people in today’s environment, that they’re too busy checking email to think about their life or think about their business or think about what they’re doing.
Carey Nieuwhof:
I think it would be, you know, I’m a person of faith as you are, Greg. And so I think if I put a spiritual element that this was gonna be like a spiritual retreat for me, time of prayer growth, meditation…
Greg McKeown:
Digital detox.
Carey Nieuwhof:
Yeah. Like Cal’s digital detox Cal Newports digital detox. Yeah, I think that would make it easier. But if I’m trying to go about my everyday life, like it kind of is, you know, part of what I do for fun. Hmm. And I barbecue. It’s like, well, where am I gonna get a great recipe? I have a couple of bucks. But you know, online, I’m going to figure out how to nail this brisket.
Greg McKeown:
In all of the work that you’ve done on leadership development, what do you find is the most frequent challenge people raise with you?
Carey Nieuwhof:
Yeah, there are a lot. But I would say what comes up again and again and again, especially in the last three or four years, leaders are exhausted, they’re tired, they’re overwhelmed. They’re overworked. They’re over-committed. And largely because of what we’ve been talking about, you know, work used to fit into a nice little bundle.
I’m old enough to remember going to the office and not being able to take the office home with you. Right, like when I was in law, you know, it was only one year, but like, if you brought a file home, you literally brought the file home, like a manila envelope full of legal papers. And if you lose them, you get fired. And now, unfortunately, you know, if you were going to the law firm, which I don’t anymore, you have your file with you 24/7 through the VPN, and it goes with you to the beach, and your job goes with you. And a lot of us, you know, some people have worked phones, but a lot of us everything is fused up on your life. And so, as a result, you’re watching Disney Plus with your daughter, and you get a text from your VP who’s like, “Hey, what are we gonna do about this? The clients waiting.”
And you’re like, “Okay,” and there’s no break. So people are overwhelmed, overworked, over-committed. And probably, I think, on the edge of burnout, like not going to your doctor, take a pill, or take a sabbatical level of burnout. But just where I call it middle, mid grade burnout, where the functions of life continue, but the joy of life is gone. In other words, you can do your job, you can go to the beach with your family, you can have that function on the weekend with your friends. But the joy of it’s gone, the joy just got sucked out. That’s what I see from leaders again and again.
Greg McKeown:
It’s an interesting distinction. You’re not talking about diagnosable medical burnout. But as sort of precondition to that.
Carey Nieuwhof:
Yeah, like a life condition. And you’re right; I was really excited a couple of years ago to see that burnout was actually now an official diagnosis. You can go to your doctor and get diagnosed with it because I think it puts a label on something. It was a term I think only invented in the 1970s. I was doing research for At Your Best, and I think it was like they came up with it in like the early 70s to describe really doctors who felt burned out, and then it kind of spread, and then it was a workplace condition, but now I think it’s a life condition because I talked to stay at home parents who feel burned out students who feel burned out retired people who feel burned out in it’s that drone of never really being off and sometimes you know never really being on you’re just in this perpetual gray zone
Greg McKeown:
For a certain group of people. And I think that group of people is, has grown significantly over the last year and a half. It’s not universal. But there are a lot of people living. I only half-jokingly say, “There are only two kinds of people in the world right now. There are people who are burned out. And then there are people who know they’re burned out.”
And, and so especially if the kind you’re describing, where, where it’s like, you’re sacrificing more and more of your joy, more of the, let’s say, the color of life. I know myself when I literally when I take a nap. When I wake up from the nap, the world seems more colorful, literally, to me. And I’m not sure whether that’s like psychological or I don’t know quite what is causing that. But it’s an experience I’ve had many times, and I think, well, it can’t actually well can’t be more colorful; something’s changed within me within my physiology. And I think that’s not a bad metaphor, though, for the idea that people get more and more exhausted, more and more burned out, and sort of slow away. And so their life just is less colorful. What?
Give me maybe your top three immediately actionable suggestions for what somebody can do. Who is sacrificing this joy for living because of burnout? What can they do right now?
Carey Nieuwhof:
A couple of things are number one, to name it. Just acknowledge it. I’ll give you a link to something at the end: they can take a free burnout quiz. Again, I’m not a doctor, but we’ve run 1000s of leaders through this quiz. And it’s very illuminating.
So, little signs for you to pay attention to your passion is gone. You no longer feel the highs and lows, right? You hear good news, and you’re like, oh, okay, or maybe you have a good game face. But, like on the inside, you’re flat, or you hear terrible news like so and so just died or was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And again, you’ve got manners; you know what to say, but on the inside, you don’t feel it even though you know that person. Those are signs of burnout.
So if that’s you, even those two out of, I think we got 11 signs to look for. I mean, really pay attention to that, and just kind of go for help. So that would be, I call that, tell someone just tell someone. Tell your doctor, tell somebody who’s for you Tell, tell a friend who’s in a position to help you about that.
The second thing I would do is this could produce some immediate results is think of your day in terms of timezones. So we all get 24 equal hours in a day, but not all hours are created equal. I’m a morning person Greg. Would you call yourself a morning person? Afternoon evening, like when do you kind of come alive most in the day?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I would say I would say morning.
Carey Nieuwhof:
Yeah, morning. Yeah, me too. About 7 to 11. And most of us have three to five peak hours a day. For a lot of people, it’s in the morning; some, it’s the afternoon; half my teams the afternoon. Some are night owls like I come alive at 8 pm. Great, I’m going to bed at that point, but I’m also up at five.
So I call that your green zone those three to five really productive hours. Think of that as your green zone. And then you probably got a couple of hours minus four to six in the afternoon when I’m pretty tired. That’s your red zone. You’re like trying to stay awake in the meeting. Trying to fall asleep at your desk, you need extra caffeine that kind of thing. And then everything else in between in the workday is yellow. And the problem a lot of people run into is is they take their best work, the thing that is most important in your case as an author or speaker working on that talk, finishing it, and they leave it for the cracks. They end up doing it in the redzone because everything got in the way, and if you’re gifted at it, you’ll do a good job.
The thing that really helped me is I started doing what I was best at when I was at my best. And did all the stuff that was most important in the green zone, and man, it like supercharged my productivity? So I would say do that what are you best at what is your most important work? Not necessarily the most urgent but the most important. And you make those distinctions, Greg, in Effortless, like, what are the most important things you can do get those done in your green zone, the time when you’re at your best and let everything else Wait, you’ll get way more done, you’ll be better at it. It’s great. That’s a second thing.
The third thing I would do is don’t look to time off to refuel you as much as we’ve been talking about vacation. That’s awesome. But so many people today are stumbling into their vacation. So mine starts two days from now. I’m not that tired. I feel like I go for another month or two, which is awesome. The challenge with that is, you know, you stumble into your vacation exhausted, you get better, you go back after a week, two weeks, a month, whatever you get. And by 11 am, your first day back, you’re like hit by the train, it’s over, you’re exhausted already. And that’s because the problem wasn’t how you spent your time off. It’s how you spend your time on. And so the mantra that I’ve adopted, and this is the third thing, is try to figure out how to live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. What sleep do you need? What work do you need to do? What do you need to say no to? How do you avoid over committing? What do you need to do today that will help you thrive tomorrow? And if you can do that you can enjoy your time off, but you’re not going to need it to continually refuel you. And it can’t it can’t do that, you know, a sustainable pace. is the cure for an unsustainable pace, not time off.
Greg McKeown:
How can people set a more sustainable pace?
Carey Nieuwhof:
I think you have to look at a couple of categories. One would be you have to limit what you say no to what you say yes to. And again, your stuff into centralism still challenges me to this day. That whole idea of it’s not a 90 It’s a zero, right? Not 100 and zero. Yeah, that is that is super challenging and very difficult to master. I’m still working on it. But most of us just start with way too much input because we’re people pleasers. We don’t know what to do.
The second thing is you have to figure out like what do you need to refuel you? spiritually? Whatever that is for you. What do you need, so my day starts with an hour would just be really quiet. I pray I reflect. I personally read the scriptures. That’s what I do in the morning. It’s really a powerful time for me when I do that, well sometimes it’s 15 minutes. Sometimes, it’s an hour; I’m an empty nester, so it’s easier now. I did that anchors me in a day. I ignored physical margin before, but I realized, okay, I need to exercise I need to pay attention to what I eat. I need to pay attention to how much I sleep. And I used to pride myself before I burned out 15 years ago on how little sleep I got. Now I’m a napper I will try to get seven to nine hours a day of sleep. And I’ve been looking at the patterns of athletes; top athletes do that. Because they know if they’re gonna explode on the court for that hour or two hours, they need to be rested to do it. So, pay attention to your physical margin and then your emotional margin. For me, it was a lot of counseling and some really good coaching, leadership coaching. But you know, if you’re always flying off the handle at home, or you’re upset with your inner circle at work, and they don’t know whether they can talk to you, those are signs, and I got to get enough margin in my life, physically, emotionally, relationally, spiritually and even financially, that I’m in a place where I’m I’m coming with something to give. And when I do that, that is living in a way today that will help me thrive tomorrow. So even in the busy seasons like this a really busy week getting ready to sign off for a little while. super busy week. I’m still gonna sleep seven or eight hours tonight. And because I know my work is going to suffer tomorrow if I don’t.
Greg McKeown:
What is something you were hoping I wouldn’t ask?
Carey Nieuwhof:
Oh, that’s great. Nobody’s asked me that or something I wouldn’t ask. Here’s
Greg McKeown:
Give me your first thought.
Carey Nieuwhof:
What are you most afraid of in leadership?
Greg McKeown:
What are you most afraid of in leadership. Do you mean in your own leadership? What are you most afraid of in your own leadership?
Carey Nieuwhof:
It’s strange. There are two answers that surface, so I asked the question and gave you a hybrid answer. Okay. I don’t know if that’s fair. But you caught me off guard. I would say laziness, which is really irrational. That’s probably one of the reasons, you know, I’m working really hard at getting a month off like laziness. I tell my wife that I’m like, I’m afraid of being lazy. She’s like, “You’re the last person who would be lazy.” But like, where does that come from?
And then, honestly, just to be transparent, this one hurts a little bit, but irrelevancy, like, did I live my life in vain? That may be that may be connected to my unwillingness to walk away from my phone. But I would say it might be the fear that none of this actually mattered in the end or that I didn’t make a difference. Irrelevance.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, those they do seem to form a sort of trifecta relationship, at least on the surface, like fear of fear of irrelevance. fear of being lazy of wasting, you know, perceiving to waste a moment to write day and night, like you’re running out of time, to call upon Hamilton’s phraseology and the musical. Carey, give us the final word?
Carey Nieuwhof:
I would just say one of the most important things you can figure out is how you’re going to spend your days and try to spend them in a way that living in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. The problem we see so often with overwhelm is that people look to time off to heal them. And the problem is time off won’t heal you. And the problem is how you spend time on how you can spend your time on can you live at a sustainable pace that will help you live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow; if you can crack that nut, and I’d love to help, however I could. Then you are going to live effortlessly, and you are going to figure out what’s really essential, and you will find time for that.
Greg McKeown:
Carey, it’s been a real pleasure to have you. Thank you for being on the What’s Essential podcast.
Carey Nieuwhof:
It’s been a joy, absolute joy. Thank you, Greg.
