Greg McKeown:
Just before we get started here with the podcast episode, here’s another invitation to every single person listening. If you haven’t yet signed up for the less, but better course, it’s completely free. It has taken months to design. It comes with a workbook that you can print up and work through, a series of ten lessons, and also a 30-day email course. You don’t get an email every day; thank goodness, that’s overwhelming. But you do get one every three or four days that supports the ongoing journey. Actually, it’s not even that. It’s where to start.
If you have ever wondered where to start with Essentialism and with Effortless, this course is the answer. It’s completely free. It takes 10 seconds to sign up for you go to gregmckeown.com. You scroll down a little way. You sign up there, 10 seconds, you’re done. And that’s the place to start with that, let’s get to this episode.
So there’s one other idea here that I thought was, I mean, it’s interesting, not because we haven’t heard it before, but the idea. A few years ago, you gave your colleagues a challenge. Okay, one night a week, completely unplug. And, you know, that is no phones, no iPads, no computers, and you’re gonna have an analog evening. You institute a Tuesday night. So tech-free Tuesday. I’ve got lots of questions about it. Do you still do it? That’s my first question.
Laura Martin: Yes, I do.
Greg McKeown:
Do you? This week, you did it from what time to what time?
Laura Martin:
We do dinner time until the following morning.
Greg McKeown: So do you. So it’s like, like in the same way that breakfast comes from break the fast.
Laura Martin:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
You are breaking the fast. You are entering a fast.
Laura Martin:
Mm hmm.
Greg McKeown:
When you. When you end, when you have. When you start that meal. How old are your children?
Laura Martin:
They’re four. Two and one.
Greg McKeown:
So they have, they can be. You can make that choice for them. Okay, so that’s, that’s fine. But then, you and your husband also do it. Did you cheat a little bit on Tuesday?
Laura Martin:
No, I didn’t. I’m actually, now that I’ve seen the benefit of doing it one night a week, I’m pretty adamant about it. I already don’t use technology from about 8:30 until an hour after I wake up the following morning. So I already have that daily habit now because of the benefit I saw from doing it one night a week. So even on the nights that aren’t Tuesday, that might mean after my kids go to bed, doing some email or looking at social media between seven o’clock and 8:30. But I still have a bedtime for my phone.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so I’m jokingly wanting to ask the question like, “Yeah, and what else do you lie about?” But I’m not, I’m not. Was just saying that as a joke. But I am curious: what percentage of the time do you successfully not check your phone for the first hour of the day? What percentage of the last week did you do that?
Laura Martin:
Obviously, when I’m traveling and stuff, you know, that, which doesn’t happen very often. Like in the. In two weeks ago, I was traveling, so I was in a hotel room and woke up and didn’t have my regular routine. But I would say when I’m, when I’m home, like 80% to 90%, and it’s not because I’m so good at keeping that, it’s because I’ve set up systems which I talk about in the book. Like as you, I’m sure know, you can’t just trust yourself to, “Oh, my phone’s next to my bed. I’m not going to look at it for the first hour.”
It’s because it’s so far away that it’s actually more of a hassle for me to go look at it than it is for me to stay unplugged for the first hour of my day. So, I almost trick myself into having to do it.
Greg McKeown:
Well, you just make it harder to do it. And a little inconvenience, a little friction goes a long way. So how would you say it? You want a system that makes it as effortless as possible to do what’s essential and as challenging as possible to do what’s nonessential. And then that system, you know, you build that system, you keep tweaking it over time, and you are really doing something that, you know, your past self is doing something not just for your future self tomorrow morning, but for morning after morning after morning.
Laura Martin:
Exactly
Greg McKeown:
What other systems do you have in place to help push out this extremely consuming, you know, technology tentacles?
Laura Martin:
So I have actual as if I’m a teenager that has control on my phone of what I can open at what times I’ve set that up for myself, saying I’m not able to open any app that is not essential. So no social media, no LinkedIn, nothing. That is not what I would want to be focused on. I have that locked on my.
Greg McKeown:
No YouTube?
Laura Martin:
No YouTube, nothing. That is not something I would need, like an app that I use for my to-do list or email during the day. So I have those locked to the point where I truly cannot get in them without a code, and only my husband has the code. So that’s, again, a system that I’ve set up. So when you’re asking what percentage of the time, that’s 100% of the time. Unless occasionally I’m cooking dinner from a recipe from Instagram and I’ll say, can you unlock my phone so I can screenshot it? My husband will give me 1 minute, truly 1 minute, on the app to open it. Screenshot it. So it is, again, a system that I have so that.
And the good thing is now I don’t ever find myself opening my phone and looking for social media apps because I’ve had that for so long that my brain knows it’s not an option unless it’s seven to 8:30 on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
Greg McKeown:
And you chose them yourself. So you’re not feeling controlled or at least in theory or not, because you’re just being, how would we say, agenic about it to you are using your agency, but you’re building your agency into a system to push back. I mean this. Any other systems?
Laura Martin:
I mean, sleeping with my phone completely downstairs. We already talked about that. Having an alarm.
Greg McKeown:
The phone goes downstairs, you know, so it’s not just in another room; it’s different.
Laura Martin:
It’s farther. Exactly. So am I going to wake up in the morning and walk all the way downstairs instead of having coffee, which is up in my room to look at my email? No, that’s. I’m too tired to do that. Having an alarm set on my phone nightly for when to put it to bed so that if I am using it and get distracted. “Oh, look, it’s the phone’s bedtime.”
I don’t pick up my phone when I’m in the morning, and part of my morning routine. Instead, I have a wearable device so that if I have anything urgent come up, but I can’t waste time on a wearable device. You’re not scrolling on anything when you’re getting notifications.
Greg McKeown:
I see. So you’re using it. So you do have a digital device on you though.
Laura Martin:
After the first hour?
Greg McKeown:
After the first hour, yes. Ok.
Laura Martin:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
So you’re still not having to get pulled right into a phone because it’s pretty hard to do anything from a wearable phone.
Laura Martin:
I also, when I’m in, like, this meeting, I pulled up this meeting, and I closed all of my other tabs. So I do one tab working so that when I’m focused on a deck, I’m not seeing emails, I’m not seeing chats. I do a lot to customize what comes in. So I don’t get notifications for every email. I get notifications for five people that I’ve deemed as important or certain words like urgent that are important. So I think it’s about customizing again, same as setting up that schedule, getting ahead of your future self, who’s going to engage with anything that’s there and only letting you see what you need to.
Greg McKeown:
What’s the most valuable technical hack that either the most valuable to you personally or the thing that others that you’ve shared with have given you feedback about this one has disproportionately been useful?
Laura Martin:
For this topic? For digital detox, I think setting up a label in your email that is indicative of your VIP or your most important and really keeping that small. So, three to five people or three topics, not, oh, sometimes. Basically, if I was out on a plane, I would still want to open and see this right away. It’s something I really need to see. And so, creating one label that indicates all of those that hack allows you to see in your inbox when those things come in. So if you are in between meetings and you just look, you’re able to see it, but also it allows you to then create notifications based on that label. So now that label becomes, again, it’s kind of defining those top three priorities. And then, in this sense, you’re associating that with digital interruption and saying, I only want to see when emails from that label hit my inbox, and that’s what I want to be notified about.
So people get a lot of anxiety saying, I’m just going to turn off all notifications or I’m not because that feels too extreme. So it’s that safety net of saying, “I’ll still see what I need to when I need to, but I won’t see that email that can easily wait until tomorrow afternoon.”
Greg McKeown:
Are you familiar with the brick technology?
Laura Martin:
No.
Greg McKeown:
I think they would probably describe themselves as a startup still. But I was given the lead from Stephen M. Well, Stephen Covey, the sixth, I think is technically…so his, father, Stephen M. Covey is grandfather Stephen R. Covey, and so on. Right. But he, he’s been using it. And so I bought the technology for myself as well. And for a couple of members of my family, it’s a little, I don’t know, it’s like a matchbox-size device, and it lives in a single location.
You can take it with you. It’s magnetized. But you set up profiles within the app, and you take your phone, and you touch it to the brick, and this blanks out whatever apps you don’t want under those circumstances. So you could have a data app, or you can have a working app, or you could have a. You could even have a sitting down to dinner app, not an app, but a setting. And so. And the only way you can then change it is to take your phone and, go back to the brick, touch it again to get permission to come out of it. And so I found it very easy to set up, very low tech.
It sort of has the feeling, even though it’s not, it has the feeling of analog. And. And I’ve really enjoyed the experimentation with it so far, but it’s. So. Thank you to Stephen, who may be listening to this conversation now, but anything else, now answer the question that you thought I was asking, which is across everything, not just digital detox, but just across everything, what do you think the most useful tactic is to being able to live in an uptime way?
Laura Martin:
I think if we’re talking in the weeds tactic, I certainly think the setup of email to mimic your laundry has been the thing that time and time again people have come back to me and said, “This stuck with me. I’ve stayed this for nine years. I continue. It clears brain space in my head.”
So thinking of your dryer like your inbox, you don’t pull out one thing, address it, fold it, walk it all the way up to flights. You don’t pull out your pair of pants and say, this is still wet. I’ll mark it as unread, throw it back in for my future self to deal with later. End of the day, I’m just going to start this whole thing over and deal with it tomorrow. So, a lot of people do their email that way. They pick and choose. They do one thing at a time. They match some socks before they pull out. It’s just not systematic, and it clutters our brain. You don’t open your dryer 15 times a day when you don’t plan on doing anything with it. So that’s how we’re doing our email.
So instead, you want to think of email like laundry, where you empty the dryer, which is what I call inbox zero, does not mean everything has been folded. It just means I took it all out and put it in baskets to set future me up for what I need to do next. Things I need to fold, things I need to hang, and things I need to read or respond, revisit, read.
And then I actually schedule time to do those baskets all sequentially so that I’m batching them and getting in the energy of read, read, read, read, read, matching it where my energy is for the day. I’m not wasting primo-focus time on reading industry articles, which is what happens if you’re just kind of fishing in your inbox. And then I always know where that pink shirt is because I’ve separated it whether I folded it or not.
And just having more of an approach of, you know, sorting is separate, then responding is separate than reading and not mixing them all up. And so I feel like that is a mindset shift, but also a structure shift of how you’re actually looking at your email and managing it. And for some reason, people totally understand laundry in that way and do not to their email that way. So I think that one thing is something that really shifts for people: how they stay focused and on top of their email.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I really like that. And I mean, one can argue that in, in a sense, you can argue, I think that email is like the least prioritized productivity tool that’s ever been created. I mean, it is actually quite shocking to me that the an absence of deep prioritization logic within email. So, of course, what you’ve just described is an improvement of just literally taking one item out of the dryer at many, many times a day and going back and forth and back and forth.
So clearly that’s better. But the underlying logic of email, I think is so, is so shocking in a sense. You know, it’s just. Okay, well, the highest, the thing that gets the highest attention is the latest thing that came in. Most technologies still, but maybe you found something that I don’t know about, but most it doesn’t allow you just even to move your emails up and down like in a priority order.
Laura Martin:
Gmail has priority inbox, which basically takes into account how you’re interacting with emails. So do you open emails always from this person? Is it sent directly to you versus the whole company? So it does some of that sorting for you, but.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, but that’s not what I want. I want to be able to move email number 22 to number one.
Laura Martin:
Tell me number one.
Greg McKeown:
I don’t think that’s, I don’t think it’s a technically hard thing to do. It just is. It just isn’t embedded in it.
Laura Martin:
No, because it’s all based on wanting you to look at the most recent, which is that. Yeah, good point.
Greg McKeown:
The latest in is your highest priority. I’m not kidding. If this could be changed as a result of this conversation and we actually get with the programs, I’m not kidding. It would make a massive difference in the world to simply allow people within Gmail alone, just that single platform,
Laura Martin:
To reorder.
Greg McKeown:
To be able to simply reorder email, not have to put it into the separate baskets. I understand the point, but to not just to be able to prioritize, even within that separate basket, to be able to go, “Here’s the top item. When I get back to this basket, that is the first item I want to fold.”
To be able to do that in the main inbox. I think it’s such a technically doable thing, but where I think it takes me, at least in my thinking, is the degree to which technology is built upon assumptions that technologists held when they created them. And so everything that we can say about the benefit of automated systems, it is also true. Like, the opposite is also true.
So it’s not just, you know, I’ve worked with Silicon Valley for the last 15 years. I think I’ve worked with every major tech company and many of the minor ones, and of course, including Google, multiple times. And there is still a kind of drinking of the Kool Aid in Silicon Valley, by which I mean, they only think about the asymmetric advantage in general. It’s still seen as “Well, we’re going to change the world. It’s going to be so great. We’re going to do this great thing.”
And it’s like, “Yeah, great, but about what about the asymmetric disadvantage, that is the unintended consequences of what’s being done.”
And you just think about email itself. It’s amazing. I mean, of course, there’s an advantage to having email, but for 20 years, it’s been our primary productivity tool, and you can’t prioritize within it other than kind of around the periphery. So, okay, you’re going to help us actually…
Laura Martin:
I’ll take that back.
Greg McKeown:
We need to find. Imagine what would happen if you could do it, because then the competitors would have to do it because it’d just be such a distinct advantage, and now everyone would be able to actually just prioritize their email and the same way as you can prioritize a to-do list. Imagine if you had, imagine if every list you ever make, a to-do list you ever make, you couldn’t prioritize. Yeah, that would be so weird, isn’t it? The first thing you do, you make the list, and then you put it in order, prioritize it which ones do I really, match it, next.
Can’t do it with email. Okay.
Laura Martin:
It’s good feedback.
Greg McKeown:
No, but I don’t feel it from you. I don’t.
Laura Martin:
I agree.
Greg McKeown:
I know you hear me, but I don’t feel you saying, “I’m gonna help find who can fix this.”
Laura Martin:
I promise you, I’m going to take that piece of feedback to a person. Who can make a difference, who can actually do it.
Greg McKeown:
Can they fix it?
Laura Martin:
You know, that’s up to them. I can only do. I can only. I’m not the engineer on Gmail.
Greg McKeown:
Do you want to cc me so I can help be a second witness?
Laura Martin:
Yes, I will.
Greg McKeown:
I have, I have public commitment here. I’m not kidding. I would sign up for that in a heartbeat. That is a clear yes. The idea of making that single change would be so valuable.
Laura Martin:
I think where one of the thoughts comes is just that email is one piece of your overall action. So something like our tasks product does allow you to do that. And it assumes that you’re adding tasks from places like meetings that you’re in, or chat, which has become super popular, a place for instant, you know, email is kind of the old way of getting all of your actions. So if you’re able to reorder your email, it’s still not taking into account action items that you have from lots of other platforms. So I think…
Greg McKeown:
That is spoken like somebody who lives inside of G suite and trains and teaches people on YouTube how to use specific functionality within it.
Laura Martin:
Yeah, but I think. Don’t you agree that if you have actions, if you took an action from our conversation today and I didn’t send you an email about it, your email can’t be your complete to-do list? It’s only a piece of it.
Greg McKeown:
Believe me, that’s 100% true. But in practical terms, people use, people use email as their to-do list. That’s a huge strategic error. But people do it, you know, that’s why what are they checking on the phone in the morning? I know it’s not just email, but it definitely includes email.
Laura Martin:
Right.
Greg McKeown:
Email. And then any text came in, checkd the messaging thing, maybe check social media, like, because a whole set of things that people go through, their little system, their digital system.
And so I’m not suggesting that that is ideal. I’m suggesting it is the default.
Laura Martin:
That’s the way. Yes.
Greg McKeown:
Well, I don’t think was Gmail ever was email, or of course, as a subset of that, Gmail ever supposed to become the primary means of communication or execution inside of organizations or society at large. No, no one ever thought that that’s how it would suddenly function. And then you take an email and you shove it onto mobile devices. Of course, it’s been, you know, we’re like almost probably ten years since that shift took place.
Maybe a little longer even than ten years now. Well, that’s terrible because now a tool that was designed for at least a laptop sized space and to be able to write something properly is now being turned into almost a texting machine. So people are using it in that way as well. Anyway.
Laura Martin:
I don’t think we connected with our future selves on how to use email, how we were going to use it, and how to set it up. And like you said, I think even when I coach people, and they’re still folding things away, that’s still because they’re thinking of a file system. So I think sometimes we don’t always, they’re thinking, a paper used to come on my desk, I used to have to put that paper in a folder.
So I should do the same with my email versus using the ability to search a giant pile of that. And so I think a lot of people just have’t, we don’t always catch up with the technology on the best ways to use it.
Greg McKeown:
Well, yeah, you can liken this to radio, right? Like when radio first came into existence, it was just theater that was being broadcast by audio and then television looked just like radio that you could see. It takes a while for people to use the new technology to discover what it is independent of what the thing was before. But I still stand by this fundamental idea with email that it has been, it has been robust, it has survived, it continues to survive. And yes, it’s less used now by, by young people coming into the workplace. It is used far less. I mean, texting is used more, messaging, yes, is used definitely more because it didn’t exist years ago in a serious way.
Nevertheless, email continues to just have its march, and talk about like a zombie productivity tool and so we still have to do this basic thing to it. I’m looking forward to that. Ironically, that email that I’m going to be cc’d on to see if we can’t actually do something about this. I have talked about this all over the world,
Laura Martin:
Okay.
Greg McKeown:
And I haven’t till now really seriously thought about actually going to the different tech companies and saying fix it.
But now we’re going to start a new 20% project.
Laura Martin:
Sounds good.
Greg McKeown:
Let’s fix, fix Gmail for the world. Give us the final word what? Wait. No, I’m going to give you the final question. The premise that technology is built upon assumptions is sort of obvious but also sort of terrifying because we just receive the tools as they have been created, and then we use them or don’t use them. I would say pretty unaware that the builders had specific intents, or there was, you know, there’s thinking that went behind it.
I have asked, although I’m not trying to be rude about it, would. Would I want Mark Zuckerberg to be my relationship coach? And I’m not trying to be harsh about that to him personally. I’m just saying, well, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe that wouldn’t, really. That’s. Maybe that’s not his core competence. Well, if that’s not, and Instagram and so on is built on top of a whole set of assumptions, some of which he brought to the table originally and now exists invisibly affecting how people communicate, how people work together, and so on, and causing many, many unintended consequences, we assume unintended.
And so the question coming back to you, I’m going to make it one more statement. I want your response to it; sort of a favorite question I’ve put to a couple of guests recently with very different responses. So here it is. The device in your pocket is not a phone. It is a $3 trillion, military grade, connection stealing, orienting, addictive producing machine, and we’re no match for it. True or false?
Laura Martin:
I would say false because I believe that whether it’s a tool, whether it’s a device, or whether it’s your time, your intention is your only power that you carry. And so if you are applying intention to the way you use that device, to the way that you use your time, all of those things become your control. So, as I mentioned, taking the time to set up that system for myself, being locked out of those apps, that was me applying intention to a device that now works for me, not against me. I think a lot of people forget that no tool is going to solve all your problems. People are looking for the hottest new productivity tool.
No device is going to be your biggest problem. I think that it’s always about how you are using your own intention, your own systems within all of those things, that makes the biggest difference in your overall well being and your productivity.
Greg McKeown:
I heard two things from you there. One was something like this. “Well, the device in my pocket isn’t that.” You know, like, it may be that you didn’t really address that, but it may be that for other people, but it isn’t, for me.
I have had high agency about this. I have been agenic about this. I have put the phone in its place. I’ve put the device in its place. I have studied the choices available to me from a very specific technical perspective over these last, you know, 14-ish years.
Now, for me, it is possible living it. And I’m doing it. I’m doing it more often than I’m not doing it because the systems are in place. So that addresses the winnow match for it because you’re saying, well, we can be, but we can make these deliberate choices, which I like. I love that response.
The question still lingers. Is that what it is for lots of people? For most people, for billions of people?
Laura Martin:
I can’t speak to billions of people. I only can speak to myself. I’m a big proponent of you are only in control of yourself. And so I think that even with my coaching, people say to me, “Well, there’s a pandemic. How am I supposed to get anything done? Or everything’s working against me, or I have a new team, or I have a new manager, and all of these things you’re saying, but I have all these situations that I’m supposed to believe in that are out there, and they’re all raining down on me.”
All I can focus on, all that we all can focus on is that own umbrella in a storm. So you can spend time lamenting about the storm, or you can spend time building that foolproof umbrella, that place, for yourself, to really have that intention. So I think that what you’re talking about is the storm. What is the big intention? How is it working out there? And I think my focus has always been, your own personal intention, which is why the book says personal productivity.
Greg McKeown:
It’s a lovely metaphor, and it’s a lovely response, and I really, genuinely do like it because, of course, what we can do in life is focus on what we can do something about, and that gives us more power, or we can focus on what we can’t do anything about, and that disempowers us. So, at the individual level, that aligns with me, and I can like it and agree with you. And at the same time, the only thing I still feel like pushing back on is using the metaphor of the weather.
Some things are not randomly happening, right? So let’s say the weather is randomly happening, or at least in a sense that we really have so little control over it that it’s close to randomness. Technology, the technology weather isn’t random. People are making technologists choose to build tools and incentivize addiction.
Laura Martin:
I think.
Greg McKeown:
You don’t think that’s true.
Laura Martin:
Well, I think that you could say that about advertising 100 years ago. You could say these ads are built to speak to your self worth and to get you to buy this product. I think that that could be argued for so many things that you are.
Greg McKeown:
Like cigarettes in the fifties.
Laura Martin:
Right. It’s like the marketing, I guess, the product. There’s two types of people. There’s people who say I smoke because of these ads or people who say I have chosen not to smoke.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, but you’re still, here’s what you’re doing, which I don’t mind at all, but I just want to point out that I think you’re doing it, which is you’re shifting the conversation back to, “The person listening to this right now can make the choices they can make. They do not have to feel disempowered by anything other people are doing. A person can choose not to smoke even if there’s a system of tobacco industry that’s selling certain things and it’s pushing a certain agenda, and it’s…” you know, I mean, we could go back into all the things that were done and all the things that were being said.
You can still choose not to smoke. That’s what you’re saying. Yes. But as somebody who’s semi, semi spokesperson for Google…
Laura Martin:
That’s what I was going to say. I’m not speaking on behalf of. I’m, my focus is personal productivity. And so when I’m working with our product teams, which I do, I’m not a spokesperson for Google as a whole and how they are treating devices, et cetera, but I would say that I am working with our product teams and carrying these principles. So, for example, when we created focus time in Google Calendar, I was in all those discussions and suggested and supported that notifications would be automatically muted during that time.
That is an example of saying, “Okay, when people want to focus, how are we and our products enabling them to do that in a way that is not interrupt and focused on actually zoning in?”
So that really is my focus and that’s the lens that I’ve taken to those things.
Greg McKeown:
Laura, you have just sophisticatedly made my argument for me because what you just said is a person with a, well, I’ll call it this for obvious reasons, with an essentialist mindset who then creates technology, will create it differently. That is precisely the point I’m making, and somebody who has a nonessentialist mindset, either by default, because many, many people that create technology, and I suspect email was among them by default, created something that tends towards nonessentialism or is created on a nonessentialist premise, or if they’re doing it by design because there’s an enormous financial incentive to do it, which the idea of ignoring that, I think, is. I don’t know. I don’t have the right language for it, but it cannot be ignored.
You know, it’s almost impossible to get anybody to believe a thing that they’re paid not to believe. You know, it’s hard to do it. But this is my idea, and I wonder, this is like the thought experiment to me is, what is the conversation we’re having? Is this like straightening deck ches on the Titanic? You know, is the system so nonessentialist, so sophisticated in its ability to adapt to the preferences of the person?
And I would definitely put YouTube at the top of this list. I think YouTube has an enormous benefits. The amount that you can learn, that any. You can learn anything from anyone effectively, pretty much for free, and the best teachers in the world that you can access. I mean, of course, I can make a case for the upside, the asymmetric benefits. I’m not a Luddite about technology, but the degree, you know, back to, like Sergei’s original, don’t be evil.
I’m like, “Well, there’s some evidence to show that they’re not being serious enough about that because there’s so much incentive to keep creating technology that is hooking to an audience.”
Laura Martin:
So what you’re saying is that technological leaders need to read your books and listen to your podcast to understand the essential attitude.
Greg McKeown:
I mean, they need to. I absolutely think that they need an essentialist type. I mean, that’s funny the way that you kind of called me on that, but that. But I think that they need a kind. Yes, they need an essentialist mindset. They need to because technology is an accelerator of the assumptions underneath it. And I don’t. I don’t trust. I don’t trust technologists who are being paid enormous amounts to build nonessentialist systems, to build essentialist systems.
I mean, I’m not saying they can’t. I’m just saying it’s pretty rare if you’re being paid an enormous amount of money to hook people. To not hook people. You know, of course, any company that can find an addictive thing, you know, whether that’s. You know, whether that’s caffeine or whether it’s alcohol or whether it’s technology addiction, like, “Yeah, it’s a great system.”
So you’re just trying to make money from it. But I think it’s we ought to look at it for what it is, which is not just all upside, but nonessentialist in its core.
Laura Martin:
I think that in my coaching and in my work and in my book, I think all of those places I again, give the personal tools, I think you can choose to focus on what you can do. You can choose to focus on what’s going on out there. You could choose to focus on the storm. You can choose to focus on the umbrella. So, all of my coaching has shown me that the umbrella can make a difference and is your point of control.
And so that’s where I choose to focus.
Greg McKeown:
I like that. Great. It’s a great comment and it’s been a great conversation. Laura, thanks for being on the podcast.
Laura Martin:
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
