13 Life-Changing Ideas You’ve Never Heard Of - George Mack - #801

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is George Mack. He's a writer, marketer and an entrepreneur. George is one of my favourite writers and probably delivers the highest insights per minute of anyone on Twitter. And today we get to go through some of my favourite ideas from him over the last few months on human nature, tribalism, happiness and politics. Expect to learn what the busy trap is and how to avoid it. The biggest differences between the US and the UK, the contrarian argument for why money doesn't buy happiness, why strategic ignorance is so important, George's favourite story about Charlie Munger, the lessons we both learned celebrating his 30th birthday in Miami, and much more. For those of you who enjoyed the vlog we put up on YouTube last week and said, who's that guy sat at the table? He's really interesting. And I loved his idea about a bear or bull market for mustaches. This is him. And you get to hear two hours of him. And he's on fine form today. Lots and lots to take away. So get ready for this one. Also, people of Australia, I will be inside you very soon. Brisbane, Wednesday, 6th of November, Melbourne, Friday, the 8th of November, and Sydney, Saturday, the 9th of November. Tickets will be available very soon. They will be available tomorrow morning from chriswilliamson.live.australia. So go there, sign up, you can get presale tickets available right now. And I will see you on the other side of the planet. Pretty sure some people think there's a conspiracy that Australia doesn't exist and it's all fake. So I guess I'll get to find out. See you soon. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome George Mack.
What's the busy trap?

**George Mack** (2:02)
The busy trap is the idea that we're busy today because we were busy yesterday, and we'll be busy tomorrow because we're busy today. And it's this never-ending busyness that we get busier because we're busy now. Weirdly, I was looking at Google Trends earlier, and if you look at the word busy from 2004, it's like the Apple stock price. It just, each year, we get about 10% more busier, and we're constantly hitting the peak every single year of people searching the word busy.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
Right, so busyness is getting busier.

**George Mack** (2:31)
Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (2:31)
Right. And what do you mean when you say that you waste years not being able to waste hours?

**George Mack** (2:36)
So this is a quote from Amos Tversky, who was Daniel Kahneman's writing partner on Thinking Fast and Slow. And when you hear it, it's like, as a writer, you're like, why didn't I write that? That is so good. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. And it's this idea that because we're so busy, we never get round to actually asking the bigger questions. We're constantly on the C plus tasks rather than the A plus tasks. And one of the memes I posted with this essay, it's two guys working extremely hard, like being super busy. And there's one guy in the corner who's like, you're right, lads, can I give you a bit of help? And he goes, we're too busy. And the guy's carrying a wheel. And these guys are carrying everything, but they're too busy to realize that there's a wheel out there. And I think Tversky's point with that is by having a few extra hours in your schedule, you may change your annual direction here or there. But if you're constantly compressing everything into some kind of maximum efficiency, you end up wasting years as a result.

**Chris Williamson** (3:35)
Why is the busy trap a trap? Why do we default to busy as opposed to defaulting to lots of spare time?

**George Mack** (3:43)
I think, well, there's, to quote the philosopher Molly May, there's only 24 hours in the day, Chris, which is a lie, by the way, which is a lie. I'm not having to go to Molly, but there's actually 16 hours in the day. Like, I find the fact that we talk about 24 hours when we sleep for eight hours is absurd. It's like confusing your revenue with your profit. It's putting up the Shopify screenshot. It's like, how much did you spend on other things there? So you have, let's say, 16 hours a day, and that's pretty lindy. Like, that's been consistent throughout human history, our experience of time. Meanwhile, the amount of activities we can now do, the amount of content that gets uploaded to YouTube every minute, the amount of Slack messages that are coming through, the amount of emails that are coming through, the digital, the beauty of digital systems is it's so high leverage. The, as you're sat here right now, there's probably 5,000 people watching a clip of Chris as we speak in the next couple of minutes. And that, at the digital level for yourself, is a constant problem because you only have 16 hours in the day, yet there's things that are constantly coming through. Unless you're proactively trying to put systems in place, you will just get destroyed by the busy trap.