Greg McKeown on Finding Your Purpose

Greg Mckeown

The way that my binder works, like the first section is all about direction. Sort of, let's say, essential intent for my whole life. Like what really, really matters. It's as succinct as possible. It's a few pages in total. That's always the place to begin, right? Because I want to come back and get centered in what I have come to learn is closest approximation to the purpose of it all. And I literally have to come back to it, right? Like you've heard the metaphor before, but you know, the idea of a flight is off track 90% of the time, like an airplane literally only gets to where it's supposed to get to at the time it's Supposed to get there because it readjusts constantly along the way. And I feel like that myself. So like, for example, I don't think that I'm better at being an essentialist than anybody else. I think if there's any advantage I've had in that journey, it's that I just really admit that I'm a non-essentialist easily. And so it's this idea, like there's only two kinds of people in the world. There are people who are lost and there are people who know they are lost. It's like, I know how easy it is for me to get lost.

Tim Ferriss

Never heard that. That's good. I'm

Greg Mckeown

Looking that definitely I will look properly at those few pages once a week, right? Like every Sunday morning, I will look through that. I will read through it. I'll underline things.

Tim Ferriss

That's in your calendar. Yes. Sunday morning.

Greg Mckeown

That's right. And, but, but then at other times through the week, if I feel that sensation, I know people feel this, you know, that just sort of feels a bit crazy. It's feeling just a bit frenetic and frantic. Like what? I just texted Anna yesterday. Like, man, in the morning, I'm like, man, I just feel so lost. And I don't mean for the last six months. I mean, for the last half hour, what is, I don't feel so lost right now. Okay. That's right. That's the signal. Go back, get centered, take a moment. What really is the intent? What matters in your life? Okay. Now from that, you know, and then you start designing your day and I have some thoughts specifically about that, but you know, you're asking the year process. I guess you're asking my system. So that's once a week. Okay. So for per day, let's get to that. So I've come to call this the one, two, three method. I do not do it every day, man. I wish I was doing it every day, but I do it more often than I don't do it. And it's simply this, and it has to be written down for me in paper and pen, like not in technology, free of technology. And I try now more often than not to have this power half an hour, right? Like where I don't go to text and email or apps or my phone for the first 30 minutes. And I do that. I haven't been doing great at that recently, but I still do that more often than I don't. And so in that, then instead of doing that, I'm in my planner and I'm literally writing, okay, what's the essential for today? What's the one most essential today, most important person, most important action for that person. Number two is I write two

Greg Mckeown

Looking that definitely I will look properly at those few pages once a week, right? Like every Sunday morning, I will look through that. I will read through it. I'll underline things.

Tim Ferriss

That's in your calendar. Yes. Sunday morning.

Greg Mckeown

That's right. And, but, but then at other times through the week, if I feel that sensation, I know people feel this, you know, that just sort of feels a bit crazy. It's feeling just a bit frenetic and frantic. Like what? I just texted Anna yesterday. Like, man, in the morning, I'm like, man, I just feel so lost. And I don't mean for the last six months. I mean, for the last half hour, what is, I don't feel so lost right now. Okay. That's right. That's the signal. Go back, get centered, take a moment. What really is the intent? What matters in your life? Okay. Now from that, you know, and then you start designing your day and I have some thoughts specifically

Tim Ferriss

Is there anything else that comes to mind if you had to add something else to the answer of the question of what you see in some of the secular examples who seem to really be able to travel The road less traveled in the way that we've been discussing it? Else come to mind it doesn't have to be specific to any type of patriarchal blessing like document or compass per se but but just someone who is in general good at operating kind of top Down if that makes sense as opposed to like here are the thousand things that i could do in a reactive sense and then let me try to pick a handful of those as my priorities people who very Good at operating kind of top down.

Greg Mckeown

It's hard for me to get out of the thread that I'm on about this because, because what I'm learning is that, I mean, we've talked already about this idea of sort of the highest aspiration. You're looking towards something bigger than you, self-transcending. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, is wrong. It's wrong like Maslow said it was wrong and nobody updated the documentation.

Tim Ferriss

Oh, I can't wait. This is new to me. All right.

Greg Mckeown

Yeah. So before he died, before Maslow died, he wrote a final book in which he updated his model and just no one, I don't know why, I don't know what was going on precisely, but it just got ignored. And some reason that model just is in every single psychology book that's ever been written and it's everywhere, everywhere. The highest need is self-actualization. And he changed that before he died to self-transcendence. But that's the highest ideal.