Join me for an enriching conversation with Shane Parrish, the brain behind Farnam Street and author of "Clear Thinking". Hear his remarkable story of resilience and continuous learning, inspired by the true crime book "The Stopwatch Gang", and how he challenges us to think deeper, question biases, and embrace the complexities of the world through. We also discuss insights from Shane's former career as an intelligence agency employee, who served the Canadian equivalent of NSA. Experience the intensity and pressure of working in the intelligence world, their sense of patriotism, and the sacrifices that came with their job. His insights on the concept of positioning and its role in building lasting relationships is something not to be missed. Learn more from Shane here. Listen to Shane's podcast The Knowledge Project. Join my weekly newsletter. Learn more about my books and courses. Join The Essentialism Academy. Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook, and YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I explore the hidden trap of negative leverage and how it silently drains our resources and energy. I promise that you'll walk away from this episode with a deeper understanding of negative leverage and equipped with the tools to eliminate its presence in your life. By taking immediate action and avoiding unnecessary trade-offs, you'll find yourself investing more in what truly matters. After all, making negative leverage visible is the first step towards an improved life.  Join my weekly newsletter. Learn more about my books and courses. Join The Essentialism Academy. Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook, and YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Dr. Shah. Dr. Shah is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Previously to that he was responsible for USAID, including being on the very front lines of the response to the ebola crisis. Now, you may never have heard of Dr. Shah before. You may not have followed the story especially closely, but you can be absolutely sure that the work that he and others around him did prevented an unbelievably dire situation from happening around the world. As is often the case, we don't always remember the people that prevent problems. That's part of the problem. That's the disincentive, but in this episode, we get to celebrate somebody who did, and whatever our political persuasions happened to be, we can be grateful that people like Dr. Shah have stepped up to contribute in their way so that we can contribute in our way. Learn more from Dr. Shah here: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/big-bets/ Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever wanted to make a higher contribution, a big impact in the world, but felt perhaps a little hopeless about it all? In today's episode, which is part one of a two-part interview, we're welcoming Dr. Rajiv Shah, who is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. This is a global institution that has a mission to promote the wellbeing of humanity around the world, but even before that, a rather young looking Dr. Shah was also the USAID administrator where he was responsible for leading and reshaping the 20 billion dollar agency that has operations in 70 countries around the world to develop even stronger results. Dr. Shah is also the author of a new book, Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens. By the end of this episode, you will better understand the journey that Rajiv went on in order to be able to make this higher contribution. Learn more from Dr. Shah here: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/big-bets/ Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us have been told that if we are good at making decisions, we're good at everything, but this is wrong. What we know now is that making the right one-time decisions is the real game changer. In part four of this series on 10X leverage, you will learn why and then how to be able to make one-time decisions that can change your life. Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to part two of my conversation with Eduardo Briceño. Eduardo is among other things, the author of The Performance Paradox. It's all about turning the power of mindset into action. If you've ever heard of or been impacted by the growth mindset from Carol Dweck, then this book from Eduardo is about how you can take those ideas and really implement them. By the end of this episode, you'll be able to lead yourself and others to constantly improve and outperform your targets. Learn more about Eduardo here: https://briceno.com/ Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us have heard that knowledge is power, but I think that's wrong. What has the most value is unique knowledge. The key is knowing what no one else knows. By the end of this episode, you'll be able to understand not just why, but how to create the unique knowledge that can produce extraordinary residual results for you in your life. Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the years one of the things I have learned is that if we only focus on performing, our performance suffers. That idea is not new to me, but that precise language is from Eduardo Briceño. He's our guest today in part one of a two part interview. Before Eduardo became an author, a TED speaker, a thought leader in his own rights, his life was totally changed, as was mine by the research of Carol Dweck. Carol Dweck is currently a professor at Stanford and formerly of Columbia, who is best known for the Growth Mindset, that idea that intelligence itself is not fixed, that it can grow, that we can become more intelligent after years of helping to take those ideas out into the world, out into organizations. Eduardo is on his own journey and it's a journey that he's inviting us to go on. By the end of today's episode, you will be able to grow your skill level and your output simultaneously and for the long term. Learn more about Eduardo here: https://briceno.com/ Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever wanted to make a higher contribution in your life to be able to get better results, even 10X results, but at the same time you already feel like you're running out of space, stretched too thin, a little exhausted, or more than a little exhausted? Well, that's what this series is. This is part two in a series about how to use leverage to achieve 10X results without burning out. In the solo episode last week, I introduced this theme and I asked you to be able to pay attention to all the forms of leverage that you see, physical and metaphorical, across all of your life. By the end of today's episode, we'll dig deeply into one form of leverage so that you can use this lever to be able to take modest input but produce residual results that is results that come back to you again and again.  Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this part two of my interview with Rich Horwath, we dig into how Rich spent years providing strategic planning, coaching, advising, running sessions with corporations and executive teams. But as he was providing executive coaching to one of his clients, they said, "Well, listen, my bosses said I need to be more strategic, but what does it mean?" And that was the beginning of a whole new phase of Rich's life and his career as he started to think, well, really, what does it mean and how can we apply some of these tools and frameworks that have become so useful in the enterprise space and the business environment to help people in their lives? By the end of this episode, you'll have a better insight in not only how to be successful in the life of business, but also in the business of life. Learn more about Rich here: https://www.strategyskills.com/about/about-rich-horwath/ Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever been trapped by reactively doing things that just get results one time today? That just get you through the immediate, urgent needs of your life and don't seem to be able to get you ahead? I know I have, and for a lot of people, they really feel that this is the best that they can do, but we have learned by experience that there's a much, much better way than this: to shift between linear thinking and residual thinking, between linear results and residual results. This is part one of a five part series focused specifically on how you can achieve 10X results, however you want to measure that, but without burning out. This is loosely based on the last five chapters of Effortless, so if you have your copy, you can use that to be able to do further reading, and if you haven't got your copy yet, now is the time to begin. By the end of this episode, you will have learned the first lever that you can use to be able to break through to that next level, but without burning out. Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever felt an intuitive insight pull you towards a particular direction? Have you ever had an experience that you knew was right even though you didn't yet have evidence to support it? Well, today is part one in a two part series with Rich Horwath. Rich is the founder and CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute where he serves leadership teams as a strategy workshop facilitator, executive coach, and strategic advisor. By the end of this episode, you'll have the tools to figure out what you do well, and what you can stop doing in order to be more effective. Learn more about Rich here: https://www.strategyskills.com/about/about-rich-horwath/ Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is part four in a multi-part series about the relentless elimination of noise. Have you noticed that the noise is increasing everywhere? Have you felt that ridiculous increase of volume, the number of voices telling you what to do, what to worry about, what your life should be, could be, has to be, shouldn't have been? Have you noticed that the more you listen to all of those incessant, loud, persuasive voices out there, the less able you are to listen to the voices of the people closest to you, the people who in fact matter most to you, including listening to the voice within you. By the end of this episode, you'll have a concrete rule and tools for how to increase the volume of that voice within and decrease or eliminate those voices, all that noise, that is without. Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is part two of my conversation with Dr. Mauro Guillén, a Spanish-American sociologist, political economist, and management educator. I know him because he is the former dean of the Cambridge Business School. He's also a fellow at Queens College, so we share that in common too. He has built a series of research helping us look at those great trends, how they'll collide, and how they'll reshape the future of everything so that we can zoom out to get that perspective in order to zoom in and make tradeoffs that allow us to design a life that really matters. Learn more from Mauro here: https://www.queens.cam.ac.uk/professor-mauro-f-guillen Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is part three in a multi-part series about the relentless elimination of noise. Have you noticed the change in the level of noise in your life? Do you feel that you might be drowning in it because it's everywhere around you? Is it possible that it has affected, and perhaps quite a serious way, the quality of the most important relationships in your life, both personally and professionally? For years we've been aware and we've been talking about and writing about the impact of these distractions, of this noise on our productivity, but this is not its most important impact. Its most important impact is not to what we get done, but what this has done to our relationships. By the end of this episode, you'll be armed with additional tactics and strategies you can use right now to eliminate the noise so that you can have more meaningful conversations and connections with the people who matter most. Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is part one of my conversation with Dr. Mauro Guillén, a Spanish-American sociologist, political economist, and management educator. I know him because he is the former dean of the Cambridge Business School. He's also a fellow at Queens College, so we share that in common too. He has built a series of research helping us look at those great trends, how they'll collide, and how they'll reshape the future of everything so that we can zoom out to get that perspective in order to zoom in and make tradeoffs that allow us to design a life that really matters. Learn more from Mauro here: https://www.queens.cam.ac.uk/professor-mauro-f-guillen Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When was the last time that you were having a conversation with someone only to look up and find that they weren't listening at all? Instead, they've been pulled into one of their devices. What did you feel in that moment? Was it mildly irritating or did it trigger something deeper, something beyond mere frustration? Many of us think of this moment as being trivial, whether it's happened to us or whether we've done it to somebody else, but this is wrong. What we know now is that the need to be understood, to be seen, to be known is so jugular that even these small errors in communication between people can significantly impact both the quality of those relationships, but also the quality of our own lives. This is part two of a multi-part series about the relentless elimination of noise. By the end of this episode, you will be better able to eliminate the noise in your conversations. Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever wondered what kind of communication is necessary in order to be able to break through to the next level to have real innovation? What does it take? Well, today's guest is the absolutely perfect person to answer that question. I'm not sure there's anyone who could answer it better who's alive today. This is Ed Catmull. He's the co-founder of Pixar that went on to lead both Pixar and Disney's animation studios in what we could described as the second golden era of animation. You know the names of these movies, Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, and on and on and on. He not only helped to create new industry, he also created a new standard within animation the world over. By the end of this episode, you will have insights into how to actually have conversations that produce not just efficiency or productivity, but innovation, invention, breakthrough, and creativity. Learn more about Ed here: https://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/ed-catmull Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever felt bombarded by the amount of noise there is in the world today? I don't mean literal noise, but all of the digital noise, all of the internal mental noise, all of the noise between people that makes it hard to even understand what somebody else is thinking. Well, this is part one of a multi-part series on the relentless elimination of noise. By the end of this episode, you will have a single practice that you can utilize right now to push back the noise in your life so that you can see more clearly and discern the signal in the sound. Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today's episode, I have the absolute honor of having a conversation with Ed Catmull. He's the co-founder of Pixar. All of the hits that you think of when you think of Pixar's Studio and how it also went on to revolutionize Disney's Studio is the work of Ed Catmull and his immediate team. He's marking the 10th anniversary of a book he wrote called Creativity, Inc. which gives you a firsthand account of how people really work together and communicate together in order to produce brilliant creative outcomes. He also worked with Steve Jobs longer than any other person, more than 25 years in all, and saw the transformation of his leadership from a visionary iconoclast into someone capable of transforming not just Pixar, not just Disney, but also Apple. This is part one of a conversation that I've been looking forward to and enjoyed immensely. Learn more about Ed here: https://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/ed-catmull Join my weekly newsletter at GregMcKeown.com/1mw Learn more about my books and courses at GregMcKeown.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices