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.
Richie, you have been up to some really interesting things. You’re a coach extraordinaire. You’re taking the path less traveled, and you seem to me to be in your element. Does that all sound true?
Richie Norton:
That sounds true. Sounds about right.
Greg McKeown:
You are with this new book, Anti Time Management. Like just that alone is so great because you know what world you’re in. You know, it’s in the time management space, so, you know, it’s like radical. It’s different. It’s upside down.
Richie Norton:
That’s right.
Greg McKeown:
How did you get here? Give me like the three-minute Reader’s Digest version of Richie Norton.
Richie Norton:
Well, I mean, that’s a great question, but it’s going to take longer than three minutes. Just joking, and I’ll make, I’ll make it really quick here. You know, I didn’t write Anti Time Management just to set out to be like anti-time management. I had a bunch of like different tragedies happen in my family, and over time, and as I’ve worked with different executives and different entrepreneurs and different people, I realized that all these things we were promised that we thought we’d have one day didn’t necessarily show up in the ways we thought we’d get there. And as I went back in time, I even started studying, like, specifically, where did this time management thing come from? I started realizing time management was never designed to give anyone their freedom. Time management was specifically designed, engineered, even, to control and to squeeze every drop of blood, sweat, and tears from workers.
Greg McKeown:
And that’s an interesting point you make there about engineered because it literally was an engineering enterprise built in the industrial age to be able to, as you say, get every ounce from people. Carry on.
Richie Norton:
Yeah. No, no. I’m so glad that we’re on the same wavelength. And so when I started realizing that, I thought, I actually went into it deeper. Like, who put this idea together and why? And it actually becomes this kind of dark history. There’s a guy named Frederick Taylor, who is known as the father of scientific management. And he came up with these time-motion studies, and it wasn’t that it was necessarily a bad thing. He was trying to figure out what was going on in his time. I mean, it was the second industrial revolution. People had moved from farms their working machines, and it was the first time that people were coming from all over the world to one spot to get work. And people who were, you know, previously couldn’t get work for various reasons were coming in to try and, you know, make a living, put food on the table. And what happened is they called it soldiering. Soldiering was a word to describe soldiers who would be enlisted against their will. And so they would go and do their thing, but they didn’t want to be there. So they would basically not do the thing.
And so this is what was happening at work. People would show up, and they wouldn’t do their thing. And he was wondering why. Again, no judgment on what’s right or wrong. This is just what he was seeing. And what he realized was, and this is, this is the first time in history this has ever happened in mass. What he realized was he had to separate the head from the body. This is the first time it’s ever happened in mass in history. And what that means is they would look at what these tradesmen were doing, and they said, job number one, take their knowledge. This is legit. You can read about it. Take their knowledge, job number two, tell them exactly what to do, when, where, and how.
You fast forward a little bit, and you go, that’s great. We have all these luxuries now because of mass production. And you go, yeah, let’s look a little bit deeper into, like, the railroads. And you go the railroads. What are you talking about? Well, this is where retirement plans came from. We want these people to work here for 20, 30, or 40 years. It’s going to take that long to build them anyways. Let’s tell them that one day when they’re 65, they’ll be able to retire. And we’re going to incentivize them with money, with ideas, with luxuries. Forty years from now, you understand that’s three generations, generation, one generation, and 20 years and generation, you know, 40 years from now, that’s me, my kids, and my grandkids.
So there’s no problem with saving your money. The problem was we started saving our dreams. So now we have multiple generations of people who have decided to basically bake a cake without sugar and expect it to be sweet. We have a whole generation of people who say that they will unconsciously time their values instead of valuing their time. When in reality today, the opportunity, I call it the castle-moat strategy, the opportunity to put your family, your purpose, your happiness, your caring, your generosity, which becomes your castle, your time, the opportunity to put that first and center and then allow your work to protect and support it is completely opposite from the way we’ve been. We’ve been taught to do it now for a hundred nearly 200 years.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I’m just syncing with you completely about all of this. That transformation as we went from the agrarian age to the industrial age was so successful. Of course, there’s the quintessentially Druker quote about it that this increased productivity by 50 times and that the challenge of our own age is to be able to increase productivity 50 times over. That hasn’t happened. But we shouldn’t understate the unbelievable transformation that was enabled by the mass production system. We talk about the revolutions of our own time, but it is nothing on the revolution that took place pre and post that industrial revolution. It was well-named. The number of choices available to people was so different before and afterward. I mean, the average American worker before the industrial age earned something close to a dollar a day. And so that’s half the level of the current UN statistic for extreme poverty. I mean the number of choices, I mean, we like to imagine the agrarian age was just delightful. Nevertheless, it was extremely hard just to survive.
Now, building on this, what you’ve said, and building on this idea. You get into the industrial revolution, there’s this transformation of the human experience, and with it, the belief that this breakthrough management system can do everything. And you then step forward and say, I would like to rethink and reimagine how we might think about time and how we might think about the resources we have if we haven’t had that transformation take place. Take us from there.
Richie Norton:
Yeah. Definitely. And moving from it, you know. They say that fish discover water last. And that is kind of how it is today with how we manage our time, how we actually manage whether we have choices or not, whether we decide if we are going to accept the consequences of our choices or not. And on and on and on.
Let me kind of drive this home for a second. So, several years ago, my brother-in-law lived on and off with us for about five years. And out of nowhere, he passed away in his sleep at the age of 21.
Greg McKeown:
That’s just crazy.
Richie Norton:
And when this happened, it totally changed what we thought about life. You know, I thought we were going to live long. You’re going to do this thing. And he lived a great and wonderful life, but it just ended short. And a few years later, we had our fourth son, and we named him Gavin after my brother-in-law, who’s named Gavin. And this baby brought so much joy into our lives and, you know, kind of filled the hole in his own way that he could. But he had this cough, and the doctor said, You know, you guys are overprotective parents. Babies get coughs. The baby’s fine. And we would bring him back, and they say he’s fine. And they thought he had one thing or another, but he didn’t. It turned out after we, one night we brought him to an emergency room that he had something called pertussis, also known as whooping cough.
And we were in this hospital, and they’re doing what they can, they’re filling him with, you know, fluids, and there’s all these tubes and wires. And I remember a nurse came in, and she said, you guys need to stay the night, which was an odd thing to say because we obviously always stayed the night. We were always there. We never left. But she was trying to clue us in that this was the end. And I remember when they took all these wires out and all these tubes out, and I held my son for a second and then handed him to my wife, who was in a rocking chair. I’m on my knees, my hand on his heart. We’re singing in lullabies, and we’re just waiting for these, you know, last moments, these last heartbeats. And I remember after he passed away, my wife and I told our, you know, we said to ourselves like, this could destroy us and just could destroy our marriage, could destroy all the things that we love, you know, our values and these kinds of things.
But somehow, let’s try and live better for him, you know, because of him. Let’s, let’s try and get better, not bitter. And these are wild, you know, thoughts in the midst of grief. And I remember we left that hospital empty-handed. These stories go somewhere because a few years later, we had this mom ask my wife if we could babysit their kids. And we’re like, yeah. We didn’t know her. We were being nice. It was an urgent thing for her. It was a seven-year-old girl and one-year-old twins. And the mom didn’t come back, and we’re like, This is different.
Greg McKeown:
This is different.
Richie Norton:
This is different. You know? And eventually, child protective services comes, and I guess they’ve been following her. And anyway, they said, what are you going to do with these kids? We asked them, what are you going to do with these wonderful children? And they said, well, no one can take three kids at a time. They’re going to stay in our offices. And so we figured this out, and they’ll probably get separated. Like, no, you can’t do that. We’ll take care of ’em. And they said you can’t take care of ’em because you’re not foster certified. And I said, what can we do? And they said, maybe we can call it kinship placement because we put them, you know, the mom put them in your care. We’re like, great. So we ended up having them for two years.
Well, the mom figured out her stuff. They went back to bio mom, which is a wonderful thing. Also a terrifying thing for obvious reasons. And I’m sharing these things because when we plan for life, we don’t necessarily plan for tragedies. We wouldn’t necessarily plan for the weird things that are going to happen that we never expected. We don’t plan for them. Our calendars are full, but we have empty lives, full calendars, empty lives. When in reality, a full calendar could be an empty calendar because the things are handled, and you’re creating space for the things that matter to you.
What are we working for? We’re not working for work’s sake, that’s for sure. And a little bit later, we’re driving somewhere; we’re going to go on this road trip with our family. We’re going to huddle up, you know, all these tragedies have happened in our lives. We’re missing, like our family went from, if you’re doing the math, four kids to three kids to six kids overnight, basically.
So we’re going to go on this road trip. Now we’re back down to three kids, and my wife has a stroke in the car and loses her memory. And I’m like, what are we going to do? You know, we don’t actually know it’s going. We go to the hospital, and the hospital says, yes, she had a stroke, but it doesn’t look like there’s any permanent damage. Go live your lives. Right? How do you do that? We ended up driving from New York all across the country to San Diego over six months, down to Mexico, into Canada, and back over to Hawaii. In Hawaii, my son gets hit by a car crossing the street on his bike. He’s in the hospital, he should be dead, but he’s not.
Someone said like, what did you learn from all these tragedies? And I came up with something that I call Gavin’s law after my brother-in-law and my son, which is live to start, start to live. Because when you live to start those ideas that are pressing on your mind, you really will start living. When people stop managing their time and start prioritizing their attention, they really do start living. And I think that’s so in line with, you know, some of the things that you share and you teach. And that’s why I love and respect you so much because what really matters isn’t always the thing that we think we’re working for. It’s something else.
Greg McKeown:
Well, it’s such an extraordinarily multifaceted conversation and story that you’ve just shared. And it sounds to me that those experiences have brought something forth from you. And I don’t mean that it’s brought forward these ideas because unless I’m reading it wrong, you probably were a student of these ideas before these experiences, but these experiences made them live, made them real, gave wait to the ideas. And I suspect it helped you to filter through the ones that you say, well that’s a nice idea over there. And that sounds good, but it does not stand up to the challenge of actually living that rawness of life.
Richie Norton:
It’s so true. And I truly believe that for anyone listening to this who’s going through a hard time, you know, grief is a tunnel, not a cave. And when you like work from that idea that your best days are ahead of you, regardless of what’s happened, that you can assign meaning to the things that have happened to you. You know, there was a time where I’m like, does God hate me? You know, why are all these things happening? I realize you know what, these things happen in isolation. They are only attached together because of me and I, the way I’m thinking about it. But I can love God unconditionally, go to work at the things that I’m done, that I want to get done. And it’s not about moving on because these things become a part of you. It’s about moving forward.
And as I’ve worked with very people, like very wealthy people, venture capitalists, the founders that have exited and executives everyday people, students like, you know, just people trying to do the best they can to be productive in business, in life. I started realizing that people were doing what I call like ghost-stepping. They’re doing all these things they think are productive and getting them to where they want to be. And they end up never getting that regardless of circumstance, living phantom lives. You know, Stephen Covey, a mentor of mine, he said, begin with the end in mind. He never said begin with means in mind. He never said begin with means in mind. And yet we’re obsessed with goals, habits, and strengths. They’ve become the crux of our existence. But those are tools. Those are methods. We forgot that a goal leads us to a destination.
We forgot that a habit leads us to becoming someone else. We forgot that a strength leads to creating something more, not just getting stronger or flexing. So when you move beyond the idea of goals, habits, and strengths to the direction you want to be, the place you want to be, the essence of what you want to become, the decision tree completely changes in how you live your life.
I’m a six sigma person. I’m a lean person. You know, you get rid of muda, you get rid of waste, you get rid of all the steps that are there. When people, when I wrote that, my last book called The Power of Starting Something Stupid. People would start their stupid idea, and they would be successful. They’d make money. They’d create all kinds of things. But then they say, I didn’t get what I wanted. Like, what do you mean you got exactly what you said you wanted? No, no, no. It was so crazy. I realized they wanted the success they thought would come from the thing they started, not the thing. So you have endlessly mindful, thoughtful people starting ideas and projects to lead them somewhere they want to get to instead of just doing the thing they wanted to do.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Richie Norton:
It’s bizarre. Two steps, you know? Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
Or 50 steps.
Richie Norton:
Or 50.
Greg McKeown:
You know, I’m going to spend a whole lifetime following this strategy over here, and then that will lead me to this, which will lead me to this, which eventually gets me to the thing I really want to be doing.
Richie Norton:
You got it.
Greg McKeown:
Rather than, yeah, of course, there’s competency to be developed, and so one has to prepare to achieve the thing you want to achieve, but what a tragedy is and how regularly I’ve observed it when I’m coaching people that they really are developing competence in areas they do not wish to pursue.
Richie Norton:
Oh man, That’s such a good point. It’s so true. So true.
Greg McKeown:
So something I wanted to do here with you is I’ve learned, based on my experience, that you cannot teach a book. And so, I really wanted to select a section within your writing here. And it’s the idea of stacking your projects, project stacking versus what. So tell me what your observation is about what people usually do and why this is better.
Richie Norton:
Think about it this way, what people usually do. So under time management. Time management doesn’t mean you control time. It means who controls your time. This is a very important distinction because it was designed to control people, not to give people freedom. This is on purpose.
Greg McKeown:
The word It’s so painful.
Richie Norton:
Yeah. It’s painful. And how the word got into the self-help vernacular is maybe a mystery. Until you start realizing that management decided maybe we don’t need to manage people’s time anymore. We’ll let them manage themselves because that’s more efficient, you know?
And then, like an entrepreneur who, you know, leaves a company, will go, oh, you know, I want to, I want to, in general, I want more freedom and more time only to lose their freedom and time to the business. And that happens because they’re still borrowing their traditional time management systems from corporate and applying it to what they’re doing now. So not that much changed other than giving themselves even more jobs. Now they’re the CEO chairman, the vice presidents, and you know, the operations people. They’re everything. So people get confused on why their freedom doesn’t show up because they never measured for freedom from the start. They didn’t measure for time flow; they only measured for cash flow.
If you measure for having your time back, you will get your time back. In fact, you’ll actually be able to create a system where you actually have, maybe, let’s just say someone’s, oh, I don’t have enough time. When you have less time to do something, it becomes a positive constraint. It becomes a forcing function. No one is more productive than a procrastinator with an impending deadline. Does that make sense?
So when people say like, what’s project stacking? You go, well, in traditional time management, they control your time. Under anti-time management, you control your time. Under time management, they tell you what to do. Under anti-time management, you decide what to do. You know, at the end of the day, freedom of time is really, in essence, freedom of choice.
Am I autonomous? Am I available? And am I able? And if you’re not one of those things or all three of those things, or you’re only a certain piece or part of that puzzle, well, then you know the limits to your quote-unquote freedom in that circumstance. Like, I can go in a helicopter right now, but I’m not going to fly it. So I’m free to be in a helicopter. Not free to be the pilot. So you can decide what you want in life.
Project stacking is taking that long timeline of things that you think you need to do. Let’s pretend for now that they’re all necessary. And it’s then if you could picture it in your mind, lifting it from a horizontal long timeline to a vertical stack where this is not multitasking. It’s how one decision impacts all the projects you’re doing at the same time on purpose. They’re still independent, but in this sense, they’re interdependent.
So you could say, I have stuff I want to do with my family. I have stuff I want to do at work. I have stuff I want to do to influence others. I have stuff that I want to do for play in contribution. At some point, there’s overlap, and you can stack these things.
The most visible project stack you can see happens at Apple all the time, all day long. They have this entire like suite of products that are all stacked together. Another one that’s varied. Look at Elon Musk. You got this car thing; you got this rocket ship thing; you got this solar thing. They’re actually all impacting one another. And he states that strategically it’s a tripod. So, in other words, project stacking allows you to be hyper reproductive on all the things you want to do and create the freedom of time and space around it.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So my understanding from what you’re describing is that if you can construct your system of execution to bring together the various elements of your life in such a way that they reinforce each other rather than you thinking about them as just separate projects, separate pieces of work, separate parts of my attention, then you gain this multiple, you know, this leverage to get in essence two for the price of one or three for the price of one. Or, in theory, five for the price of one. It’s a certain way of thinking if everything is designed in a way that it reinforces each other rather than separately, I work on this over here, and then I work on this separate thing over there, and everything is done like, its own world, its own separate universe. Am I understanding that right?
Richie Norton:
Yes. You say it way better than me. I just like you like say all these things for me. This is so good. No, you’re creating an ecosystem around you. And someone might say, first of all, the first person to hear this, they might say, well I can’t. These things are all separate.
First of all, you have to recognize that that was a choice. You chose that already. So there may be some fit, or there might not. I don’t know. You already chose this, but now that you’re aware. Let’s see if we can re-engineer this thing or create something new.
Aristotle called this final cause. Final cause, in my words, is the success after the success. It’s what’s the job of the goal? Why am I actually doing this? But not like why and purpose, more like, if this thing is done, then what’s going to happen? Because that’s what I really want. So in other words, he would say, Aristotle, like an acorn becomes an oak tree. Most people are planting all kinds of weird seeds that will never become an oak tree thinking they will.
So the four causes and final cause start like this. Like you need to have the thing or the idea, you need the materials to make it happen. You need the agent or the system or the mechanism for it to grow or to be created. And then you, it creates this thing. But if the goal academics use this example. If the goal is to create a table and then final causes the table, you have wood; you have a design; you have a contractor guy to put it together, and you have a table. But in the 21st century, you have to ask yourself what’s the purpose of a table, when I can go to Uber Eats? And the point of Uber Eats or any meal was really just to have a special dinner with some visitors that are in town. It’s one thing to have a table you’re going to have for generations and another to just have a special opportunity with other people. So once you think is the opportunity, the dinner is the opportunity to the people is the opportunity. Whatever you realize, you could be spending a lifetime building a table that never needed to be built.
So project stacking allows you to say what’s the job of the goal, the habit, the strength. And then, when you work from that, you start situating projects that have overlap. So one thing turns into many things and a very simple example. So simple, you and I write books, you and I are on podcasts. You and I can do that from wherever we want in the world of project stacking. And you can keep going on and on and on like that.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I’m really taken with this idea right now. And the, I mean, one way in which I am living it and, and people who regularly listen to this will is not news to them. But I just inadvertently was accepted into a doctorate program.
Richie Norton:
Congrats! Very cool.
Greg McKeown:
And, so then in writing a new book based on that same research, and then, of course, have this podcast in which I’m given an opportunity to learn and explore the ideas that lead towards that research. And so those are three very distinct challenges. Each one of them, if you thought about them separately, they’re each massive. Seriously. And if you didn’t do project stacking with them, I just think it’s impossible. There you go. Like, go. It’s something like that. And, and so, and if you try to do all three of them separately, a podcast on this theme, a new book on that theme, or by the way, a doctorate, like you would break. And to be honest, the jury is out as to whether I’m effective enough at project stacking to be able to do what I’m trying to do. It still feels on the edge of impossible sometimes, but there’s a magic to it as well. And I’ve experienced enough with it so far to believe in an almost limitless function here.
So, somebody who’s listening to this, we need to be able to give them actionable advice on how to do project stacking.
Richie Norton:
I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Like, and I’m going to try and say this like in a way that someone could do it as they’re listening to this. I like that. Okay, if someone were to take out a piece of paper and fold it in half long ways and on the left-hand side write down every single thing they feel like they have to do, they would eventually see that their entire life shows up and is staring back at them in the face right now on a one-half sheet of paper. And they would say, but I have all these other things that I’ve experienced. I’m trying to avoid certain traumas. I’m trying to create new things in the future. And you would have to accept the fact that the people around you, your spouse, your children, your coworkers, your friends, your family, and you on social media, they don’t see that. They only see how you show up. Only. That is life. And that’s the way it works for everyone.
And then you say, Who was I 10 years ago? Because as we record this in 2022, 10 years ago in 2012, you and I were different. Different people, different goals, different income, different circumstances, different family situations, different where, you know, place where we lived. We don’t even want our 2012 goals in 2022 because they’re either irrelevant or we’re over ’em. And so it’s weird that we’re setting goals in for 2032 when we know we’re not even going to want them because it’s going to be irrelevant. Things have changed. That’s why it’s so important to rescue. This is why I was saying a timeline. It’s so important to rescue your dreams from the end of a timeline and bring them front and center because you already know you want that thing.
So work from it. Goals from experience are tasks, goals, outside experience. Our growth and growth inherently means we don’t know how to get there because we haven’t done it yet. So when you have this half sheet of paper that stares you back in the faith face, you go, wow. Then if you were to circle only the few things you like and want to do, and I specifically said like and want on purpose, not your strengths. If you circle only the things you like and want to do, which could be your strengths as well, and you ride ’em on the right-hand side, you now see how your life is imbalanced. I call this a life balance sheet because here’s all the things you feel like you have to do, and here’s the things you only want to do. This is only your current situation. We’re not talking about the past or the future. This is today. This is an inventory check.
So then you go, wow, my life is really imbalanced. Balance is a terrible term, by the way, for work and life because balance inherently in physics means motionless, stale, stagnant, doesn’t move. We want our life. No one wants work-life balance. In reality, we want what we think would come from balance. And to get that, you have to be in motion. You have to create an imbalance in the direction you want it to go.
So now we can use some really simple tools that most people know about. Go down the list. I call it edo, E, D, O. Eliminate the things you don’t really have to do. Delegate out the ones that you could delegate. Outsource the ones you don’t want.
And people will say, I can’t for all these reasons. Fair. And we can talk about that. But as an exercise, for now, put an E a D or an O. And what you’ll find out is the things that are left over are the same things on the right-hand side. And in that sense, your life has become instantly, in theory, balanced, which allows us to now use Parkinson’s Law work expands the amount of time given to use the Pareto Principle, 80/20 rule. Now you can focus on the 20% you like and want to do and add to it. You open up 80% of your time. You now have 80% more time to do what you like or something new. And in this sense, not everyone is a polymath, but in the sense, you can live a polymathic lifestyle because you can do many different projects simultaneously if you want through project stacking because they’re all on purpose. That’s why you can do so many different things, even though they may or may not be integrated exactly. They are because they’re fit to purpose.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So it’s a couple of things to unpack there. So I’ve folded my sheet of paper. Okay. Started writing down my list of things. Yeah. As you were sharing that, I think I did it wrong because I think you’re saying on the left-hand side of the sheet of paper, I need to write all the things I think I have to do. That’s the master list of just all the stuff. And then, then you are saying I should be drawing from that. What are the things as you say I like or want to do and, and you are saying I should like, like kind of draw an arrow from that left-hand side to the right-hand side for each of those things, sort of rewrite those things on the right-hand side. Is that correct?
Richie Norton:
Sure. So keep going with what you’re saying, but just so everyone knows, all we’re doing is talking at what’s happened today. We haven’t talked about your future goals or dreams, but we’ve just made space for them. Yes.
Greg McKeown:
Right. The idea is to curate this list. There you go. Using a single criteria or, I guess, two. But a joint criteria, I like it and I want it to be doing it. I like doing it, and I want to be doing it. Okay. So now I’m left with, you know, let’s say it’s, as you say, approximately 20% of the items. Everything that doesn’t make it to the second half of the page, that’s what I’m going through in saying eliminate it, delegate it, or outsource it. Eliminate, delegate, or outsource. What’s, what’s the difference between delegate and outsource?
Richie Norton:
Glad you asked. And you gotta remember, too, it’s not going to all happen at one time, but even when you remove one thing, let’s say it frees up an hour, it also frees up a month’s worth of bandwidth in your head. Like, this is real stuff. So to me, you know, eliminate, people are like, I can’t eliminate anything. You’d be surprised. Delegate to me, means you’re not paying someone else. You’re also not dumping your trash on someone else. Someone out there likes to do the things that you don’t like to do, and they may already be within your company, your family, or somewhere. So you delegate it. This assumes you can do it. It’s done. It’s off your plate. It still gets done. Not by you. You gotta remember the guy who started time management. He did not live within scientific management. He was playing tennis. He was traveling Europe. He smelled the roses. That’s the irony. And because we’re trying to learn, teach people how to be the owners of their time, not the operators of someone else’s time. That’s what I’m teaching.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, no, I love the contrast of how Taylor lived versus what he was trying to optimize for inside of a management system. So coming back to this, then what is outsourcing?
Richie Norton:
Outsourcing is where you pay someone. So you would pay somebody to mow your lawn or, or you know, clean your house or do your taxes, create your funnels, do your marketing. I don’t know. It could be whatever you don’t want to do.
Greg McKeown:
Well, the point you are making, then, is the difference between delegation and outsourcing as delegating as you’re not paying somebody and outsourcing as you’re paying someone.
Richie Norton:
Yeah, that’s right. Okay. And this, the distinction between what you like and want to do is important. People don’t like what they’re good at forever. If so, there would be no career transitions. There would be no people moving from one career to another. And this is the problem when we’re told through strengths tests that managers have decided maybe not on purpose, but it’s been done this way, maybe even on accident. That means that person will do that thing forever. They will not move up because we’re not in the business of helping people learn and be better. We’re in the business of making money. This person will continue to do this thing forever. So when you don’t like your strengths, it actually is exhausting. Why would you keep digging ditches even though you’re good at it when the hole doesn’t need to be dug at all? So these are important exchanges. What you like and want to do energizes you.
Greg McKeown:
So I like all of that. Now, this doesn’t strike me as project stacking how to.
Richie Norton:
So let’s say this is step one of three steps. Okay? So, step two would be, I call it, the four P’s. What do I really want? Create your North star, personally, professionally, people, and play. From that, you can now decide what your real priorities are because remember this, since kindergarten, we were taught that a priority means you do it last. That was how they controlled us. You get your jelly bean at the end of the day. We continued that into our sixties and seventies. It’s bizarre. So now we have to go; oh, my priority should be first. Cause prior priority means prior precede proceed. Now you create a project. This is project stacking. Instead of saying, I will write a book. I will do a podcast. I will quit my job. I will be a better executive. No, I am a better executive. I am a podcaster, I am an entrepreneur. I have a book project. I have a writing project. I have a podcast project. And in that sense, because you’re attaching it to your north star, all these things can happen at the same time if you want them to. Or rather, it’s kinda like knocking down one domino and allowing all the other dominoes to fall down because of it. On the cover of the book, I have a drawing of a prism where one decision creates multiple options. Where in the opposite, most people are doing many different things to try and get one output and never get it.
Greg McKeown:
I think what makes project stacking possible and productive is the idea of reinforcing strategy. That one piece reinforces another piece. All of these tactics, all of these various projects reinforce each other rather than take away from each other. And it’s one of the reasons why we’ve got to be careful not to be too comparative and competitive and just grab what we think is what somebody else is doing and just add it into our own lives and just go, oh, well, they’re doing it. I’ll do it too. Because then we are doing exactly the opposite of project stacking. We’re doing project separation, you know, on mass, which is doing 50 different things in 50 different directions. And it’s just killing us. It doesn’t lead to joy. It doesn’t lead to satisfaction. It doesn’t lead to growth. Nevertheless, the idea is if we want to be utilized at our highest point of contribution, if we want to do something and become something that currently feels impossible, something beyond our current constraints so that we can make a far better contribution, we have to learn a different way of operating.
And yet, at the same time, if I’m honest, I don’t really know quite how to do it. And I don’t just mean I don’t know the steps. I don’t know how to formulate my life in such a way that the level of project stacking that is required can really be done and joyfully and effortlessly. It doesn’t mean that the ideas of Essentialism and Effortless are somehow questioned for me that these are the principles that have allowed, allowed me o be in this place. But if you want to increase that contribution in a significant way one has to learn this beyond, beyond what I currently know confidently how to do.
Richie Norton:
I mean, absolutely. That’s why we keep writing new books, right? New lessons, new learned things. But, and I truly believe it’s not a behavior change until it’s a lesson learned. Right. But what you’re saying, though, is actually right in line with what this concept is. The idea of project stacking versus project separation is that one small asymmetric decision creates giant results and becomes, in that sense, one thing instead of a thousand things to do. It is the most clear line to eliminate a bunch of things you didn’t, didn’t have to do. Making it incredibly, not just, I like to use the word effectual because it’s aligned with your actual purpose, not just the next step. So in that sense, it’s effortless because you just eliminated a thousand steps with one decision.
Greg McKeown:
I think what the meeting of the minds is here is that purpose is the underlying driver that makes project stacking possible and marvelous. If there isn’t a clear, deep sense of purpose about what you’re really trying to do and what it’s all about eventually, and how you can connect those long-term aspirations to this very moment, then project stacking will just fall away into project separation. It, it will just, it will just be overwhelming and nothing but overwhelming. It won’t be satisfying and overwhelming. It won’t be exciting and exhausting. It will just be exhausting. Yes. And what I think, what I think I’m personally experiencing, is that I do find it a bit exhausting right now, but it’s exciting too. Deeply, deeply exciting, and meaningful. And a sense, a sense that there is a way to construct life. That is, that is extraordinary.
Thats the possibility. But I, I feel like a work in progress. I feel like a transition. And, sometimes, sometimes that’s a little painful, and sometimes it’s enjoyable. But I can feel, you know, I have a shoulder right now that has been causing me pain for several months. And I thought it was one diagnosis, but it was sort of wrongly diagnosed. And it’s just this, basically this frozen shoulder. And the antidote for this is that you’re to stretch, and it’s extremely painful to stretch it multiple times a day to match my other shoulder. And that’s what you’re to do, right? Every hour to go through this, this sort of painful experience. Yes. And, and that, that feels a little bit analogous to this, this transformation that I think is possible that you can construct a life that’s not just in general purposeful. It’s not just I’ve set some goals that mean something.
And that’s why I love the term and why I, why, why I, I wanted to talk about this with you. Yeah. Projects, stacking that layer by layer, all these different things, reinforce each other and, and these various goals help one another. And that, and that you have to do a lot of negotiation around the journey. So, for example, as I’m leaving to go to Cambridge University and do this research, I have to keep on remembering my own agency. And in, in the dialogue. That’s right. Or just remembering it. There is a dialogue that I can talk to these professors and say, Well, instead of doing that final, could we instead do research that’s specifically aligned with what I’m trying to understand right now for the purposes of this book? Yes. It’s, it’s, it’s so that none of that is possible unless you have a clear sense of what your, let’s call it, 10 x aspiration for contribution is. But you have to keep remembering every time you feel, oh, this is too much. How can we discuss this, talk about this, negotiate this so that they can work together? And so it’s not a take it or leave it scenario.
Richie Norton:
That’s right.
Greg McKeown:
It’s continually evolving this so that they actually do reinforce each other.
Richie Norton:
Absolutely. You said it so well, you know, I, I always tell myself and, and clients when they say, well, well, how, because the first question is always how. And it’s like, don’t worry about how, let’s decide on what and why you’re going to do this thing. And then we can figure out how, you know, it might be somebody else or might be a system. But in reality, the most important thing is whatever is most important to you. So to me, time freedom is the most important. Now you could say my family is the most important. And, you know, you can keep going on and on, but at some point, you decide on one thing and they all tie together. So when I create a project, when I write a book, when I do a podcast, when I do something else, I’ll tell you about my other companies, too, just real quick so you can understand how this all comes together. But I ask myself, how will this create more time for me now and in the future when most people never even consider that question. They think this thing will give them more time, but they say, How can I make more money? That is, they’re solving for the wrong problem.
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 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 with part two.
