Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

When you simply can’t try any harder, it’s time to find a different path.

Instead of trying to get better results by pushing ever harder, we can make the most essential activities the easiest ones.

It’s our tendency to take the path of least resistance to achieve what we want.

Here is what I learned: trying too hard makes it harder to get the results you want.

Effortless Inversion means looking at problems from the opposite perspective. It means asking, “What if this could be easy?” It means learning to solve problems from a state of focus, clarity, and calm. It means getting good at getting things done by putting in less effort.

Asking the question “What if this could be easy?” is a way to reset our thinking.

When a strategy is so complex that each step feels akin to pushing a boulder up a hill, you should pause. Invert the problem. Ask, “What’s the simplest way to achieve this result?”

But essential work can be enjoyable once we put aside the Puritan notion that anything worth doing must entail backbreaking effort.

“The act of folding is far more than making clothes compact for storage. It is an act of caring, an expression of love and appreciation for the way these clothes support your lifestyle. Therefore, when we fold, we should put our heart into it, thanking our clothes for protecting our bodies.”

When we invite joy into our daily routine, we are no longer yearning for the far-off day when it might arrive. That day is always today.

When we fall victim to misfortune, it’s hard not to obsess, lament, or complain about all that we have lost.

Have you ever found that the more you complain—and the more you read and hear other people complain—the easier it is to find things to complain about?

When you focus on something you are thankful for, the effect is instant. It immediately shifts you from a lack state (regrets, worries about the future, the feeling of being behind) and puts you into a have state (what is going right, what progress you are making, what potential exists in this moment).

But what he didn’t do was make the suffering even harder for himself by wallowing in resentment and fury.

We are conditioned to feel guilty when we nap instead of “getting things done.” It’s a perfect storm of the fear of missing out, the false economy of powering through, and the stigma of napping as something just plain lazy or even childish.

Dalí explained that in that “fugitive moment when you had barely lost consciousness and during which you cannot be assured of having really slept” he was “in equilibrium on the taut and invisible wire that separates sleep from waking.”

Watson asks Holmes why his explanations seem so obvious, yet so out of reach until shared.

It feels hard to be present in the moment, to be laser focused on one person or conversation or experience, when we are constantly juggling so many other demands on our attention.

Listening isn’t hard; it’s stopping our mind from wandering that’s hard. Being in the moment isn’t hard; not thinking about the past and future all the time is hard. It’s not the noticing itself that’s hard. It’s ignoring all the noise in our environment that is hard.

relationship. The one that does the most damage is the third kind. It signals that these two people do not see each other. They are not playing the same game, or even the same sport.

Can a fleeting moment leave such a lasting trace as to shape the trajectory of a life?

The greatest gift we can offer to others is not our skill or our money or our effort. It is simply us. None of us have infinite reserves of focus and attention to give away.

Remember: When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have.

Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow.

To see others more clearly, set aside your opinions, advice, and judgment, and put their truth above your own.

Clear the clutter in your physical environment before clearing the clutter in your mind.

Economists call this the law of diminishing returns: after a certain point, each extra unit of input produces a decreasing rate of output.

The goal is to accomplish what matters by trying less, not more: to achieve our purpose with bridled intention, not overexertion.

If you want to make something hard, indeed truly impossible, to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible.

“Swedish Death Cleaning” means getting rid of the clutter you have accumulated through your life while you are still alive.

They loved the idea of eliminating everything but the possessions that sparked joy for them. Unfortunately, some of them didn’t get quite that far. That’s because before you even get started, the Konmari Method requires you to “tidy your entire house all at once.” The end state is, of course, desirable. But if the first step doesn’t feel doable, many people will simply give up before they start.

They are constantly testing new ways to offer us smaller units of information: 280 characters on Twitter, “likes” on Facebook and Instagram, newsfeeds we can scroll through and absorb at a glance.

Going the extra mile in ways that are essential is one thing: a surgeon taking the extra step to prevent infection at the site of an incision, for example. But adding unnecessary, superficial embellishments is quite another. Here is a rule I have found helpful: Being asked to do X isn’t a good enough reason to do Y.

There is rarely a need to go that second mile beyond what’s essential. It’s better to go just the first mile than to not go anywhere at all.

embrace the rubbish “no matter how ugly it is” so you can crash, repair, modify, and redesign fast. It’s a far easier path for learning, growing, and making progress on what’s essential.

Overachievers tend to struggle with the notion of starting with rubbish; they hold themselves to a high standard of perfection at every stage in the process.

But they never practice because they are embarrassed. They want to be flawless—or at least not make fools of themselves—from the start.

He teaches his language students to imagine they have a bag full of one thousand beads. Every time they make a mistake talking to someone else in the language they take out one bead. When the bag is empty they will have achieved level 1 mastery. The faster they make those mistakes, the faster they will progress.

There is no mastery without mistakes. And there is no learning later without the courage to be rubbish.

“A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

Setting a steady, consistent, sustainable pace was ultimately what allowed the party from Norway to reach their destination “without particular effort,”

“Pace yourself. If you write too much, too quickly, you’ll go off at tangents and lose your way and if you write infrequently you’ll lose your momentum. A thousand words a day is a good ticking over amount.”

We can establish upper and lower bounds. Simply use the following rule: Never less than X, never more than Y.

A method may be useful once, to solve one specific type of problem. Principles, however, can be applied broadly and repeatedly.

Bucket 1 was the oldest and largest data set: the inorganic universe. It was physics and geology, covering the more than thirteen billion years since the dawn of the universe. Bucket 2 was biology, everything alive on planet Earth. That covered about three billion years. Bucket 3 was the whole of human history: the relatively short period we have been around as a species.

In bucket 1 he found Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In other words, the more force you exert on something, the more force that thing exerts back. In bucket 2 he found Mark Twain’s example of what happens if you pick up a cat by its tail: it will attack you. In bucket 3 he found something similar: how we treat other people is how they will treat us back.

“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

“believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out.”

For an investment more or less equivalent to the length of a single workday (and a few dollars), you can gain access to what the smartest people have already figured out.

So prioritize reading books that have lasted a long time.