Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

But absorbing yourself fully in a book changes who you are, just as if you had lived the experience yourself.

The process of summarizing, of distilling ideas to their essential essence, helps us turn information into understanding, and understanding into unique knowledge.

Being good at what nobody is doing is better than being great at what everyone is doing. But being an expert in something nobody is doing is exponentially more valuable.

Stories have the power to turn any audience into a roomful of teachers.

We focus more intently. We listen to understand. We think about the underlying logic so we can put the ideas into our own words.

If you try to teach people everything about everything, you run the risk of teaching them nothing. You will achieve residual results faster if you clearly identify—then simplify—the most important messages you want to teach others to teach.

Don’t go for the overly sophisticated message. Don’t go for the one that makes you sound smart. Go for the straightforward message that can be easily understood and repeated.

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them”—another

The staggering volume and complexity of know-how has exceeded experts’ ability to manage it.

So what we need is not more knowledge but new skills and strategies that allow us to apply that knowledge without taxing our working memory.

The beauty of the checklist is that the thinking has been done ahead of time.

The idea of a cheat sheet is simply to get things out of your brain so you can do them automatically, without having to rely on memory.

Automation is anything that performs a function with minimal human assistance or effort.

We needed to find ways to make every day a little easier. Why? Because we needed to be able to sustain this effort for an unknown length of time.

Whatever has happened to you in life. Whatever hardship. Whatever pain. However significant those things are. They pale in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now.