Turning Habits Into Rituals to Live an Effortless Life with Greg McKeown

What You’ll Learn: 

[4:14]

Greg recalls his childhood growing up and his experience of becoming a father.

[7:30]

Hire hard, manage easy. This is the approach Greg takes when parenting his children. If you invest hard early on, parenting becomes a lot easier later on.

[8:08]

Greg talks about his experience with parenting his daughter the night before.

[14:18]

Mistake-free living is a very bad idea. Sometimes, what we want is to have no mistakes as a person, and no mistakes for your children. The level of control requ9ireed to do that would be astronomical. You want mistakes to happen and be as cheap as possible.

[17:29]

The health of a relationship is how quickly you can recover from making a mistake and apologizing.

[22:12]

Sometimes, we think that because teenagers are starting to look like adults, that they should act like them too. This is not the case.

[27:00]

Greg talks about giving his children an allowance with little risk so that they could experience disappointment when they didn’t have any money. This way, when they got older, they knew the risks associated with money and would think before they made a big purchase.

[30:00]

Encouraging someone to take risks will help them understand the property of risks when they get older.

[33:00]

Greg talks about the inspiration for his book Effortless.

[35:12]

Greg talks about his daughter’s neurological condition.

[38:04]

It’s not enough to do the right thing; you have to do things the right way as well.

[41:36]

Greg talks about three related levels of the book – state, action, and result. The question is how to get to that Effortless state.

[43:20]

After you complain, you immediately follow it with a statement of gratitude. People will have an instant reaction to this when you practice it in front of them.

[45:36]

Gratitude is a catalytic thing, it’s an upward spiral.

[46:50]

When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack.

[48:40]

There’s a difference between a chore, a habit, and a ritual.

[55:48]

Being in a state of effortlessness changes your experience. The experience actually changes because you’re paying attention to those little things in the moment. You start to see how the extraordinary exists in the mundane.

[57:10]

An exhaustive state is not a state of effortlessness. It’s a state of suffering.

[1:00:13]

Make a list of all the things you want to accomplish for the day and then check them off once you’ve done them.

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