It's All So Simple, Mum, It's All So Simple

I want to tell you a story.  It’s not my story.  I heard it in the car the other day, whilst listening to a podcast.  When alone in the car I am either talking to my Mum or one of my siblings or listening to a podcast.  Being in the car by myself, sitting in traffic, is one of the most joyful parts of my day.

This time, the story wasn’t joyful though.  In fact, it totally knocked me for six and tears were streaming down my face.

The story was told by the extraordinary Greg McKeown in his conversation with the equally extraordinary Tim Ferris.  I cannot recommend this conversation highly enough (I have listened to it twice).  It’s an hour and forty-seven minutes long.  (I know you don’t have an hour and forty-seven minutes available to listen to it in one go.  It took four days of traffic for me to listen to it.  Podcasts have just become a habit for me – I get in the car and press play on my podcast app and return right to where I left off.)

Greg has just released a new book titled ‘Effortless: Make it Easier to Do What Matters Most’.  The conversation was varied but the focus was on this concept of living effortlessly, about making life easy instead of difficult, about taking the easier path or the ‘lighter’ path as Greg calls it. 

These two great minds tackled questions such as, what are we making harder than it should be?  Does it have to be so difficult?  What if it could be easy?

What problem is it in our life that we are trying to fix by applying more work, by working harder, by increasing the volume?  How can we shift that – how can we move into the effortless state?

I haven’t read the book (yet) but Greg gave plenty of tools and principles in the podcast.  One big one was letting go of grudges and emotional burdens that no longer serve us.  Just by holding onto them we make life harder than it needs to be – the act of holding them uses a huge amount of mental hardware and energy and makes everything seem more difficult.

Towards the end of the conversation Tim asked Greg about writing the book and whether there was anything that he ‘had to leave behind on the cutting room floor that was particularly difficult to leave out.’

Here came the story, in Greg’s words. 

“There is one story, one that I always wonder whether I made the right decision with it.  It’s a particularly powerful story of a mother who is with her very sick son, at the very, what turned out to be the very end of his life.  She was sitting next to him in the bed and then, as literally as life was draining out of him, she climbs up into the bed to be right next to him, knowing that the end is really close.  And hears him say, and these turn out to be his very last words, sort of in that in between phase when you are still here but somehow not fully, he just said “It’s all so simple, Mum, it’s all so simple.”

And to me, that sort of message, that sort of moment is of great value because I think that the spirit of that is just look at anything you’re doing that is making life more complicated than it needs to be, where you are over thinking it, where you are over straining, where you are over exerting, and you may find the very thing that’s going to help you move forward.  You know it may be as simple, it may be as easy as that.”

And that’s it. 

I could keep writing and explain how we apply this concept to our money or investing process (which we absolutely should) but I don’t want to trivialize the huge weight of that moment if it struck you the same way it struck me.

I am just going to say, in Greg’s words, there is a lighter way to do life.  If in doubt, pick the lighter way and think of those words, ‘it’s all so simple, Mum, it’s all so simple.’

Georgie

georgie@libertywealth.ky