Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing them in the right way.

What could happen in your life if the easy but pointless things became harder and the essential things became easier?

So the first step toward making things more effortless is to clear the clutter in our heads and our hearts.

Perfectionism makes essential projects hard to start, self-doubt makes them hard to finish, and trying to do too much, too fast, makes it hard to sustain momentum.

Whenever your efforts yield a one-time benefit, you are getting a linear result.

With residual results you put in the effort once and reap the benefits again and again. Results flow to you while you are sleeping. Results flow to you when you are taking the day off. Residual results can be virtually infinite.

Effortless Action alone produces linear results. But when we apply Effortless Action to high-leverage activities, the return on our effort compounds, like interest on a savings account. This is how we produce residual results.

A concept in cognitive psychology known as perceptual load theory explains why this is the case. Our brain’s processing capacity is large, but limited. It already processes over six thousand thoughts a day. So when we encounter new information, our brains have to make a choice about how to allocate the remaining cognitive resources. And because our brains are programmed to prioritize emotions with high “affective value”—like fear, resentment, or anger—these strong emotions will generally win out, leaving us with even fewer mental resources to devote to making progress on the things that matter.

The Effortless State is one in which you are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in that moment. You are able to do what matters most with ease.

we all automatically accept that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one.

What if, instead, we considered the possibility that the reason something feels hard is that we haven’t yet found the easier way to do it?

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.

When we feel overwhelmed, it may not be because the situation is inherently overwhelming. It may be because we are overcomplicating something in our own heads. Asking the question “What if this could be easy?” is a way to reset our thinking. It may seem almost impossibly simple. And that’s exactly why it works.

When we remove the complexity, even the slightest effort can move what matters forward.

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?”

We live in a complaint culture that gets high on expressing outrage: especially on social media, which often seems like an endless stream of grumbling and whining about what is unsatisfactory or unacceptable. Even if we don’t get caught up in it directly, it can still affect us. With enough secondhand griping, we get emotional cancer. We start to perceive more injustices in our own lives. Those

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). It reminds you of all the resources, all the assets, all the skills you have at your disposal—so you can use them to more easily do what matters most.

Do not do more today than you can completely recover from today. Do not do more this week than you can completely recover from this week.

Dedicate mornings to essential work. Break down that work into three sessions of no more than ninety minutes each. Take a short break (ten to fifteen minutes) in between sessions to rest and recover.

People who sleep less than seven hours a night are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, asthma, arthritis, depression, and diabetes and are almost eight times more likely to be overweight.

Getting more sleep may be the single greatest gift we can give our bodies, our minds, and even, it turns out, our bottom lines.

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.

We don’t need to agree with the other person on everything. But we do need to be present with them, to really notice them, to give them our full attention—maybe not always, but as frequently as we can.

The greatest gift we can offer to others is not our skill or our money or our effort. It is simply us.

Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance.

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

if you think of most of the essential projects you are working on, how clear is your idea of what completion looks like?

tinkering can improve things significantly—at first. But there comes a point where the law of diminishing returns sets in—a point where our efforts begin to outpace our improvements.

I define “done” as the point just before the effort invested begins to be greater than the output achieved.

Getting clear on what “done” looks like doesn’t just help you finish; it also helps you get started.

We often get overwhelmed because we misjudge what the first step is: what we think is the first step is actually several steps. But once we break that step down into concrete, physical actions, that first obvious action begins to feel effortless.

In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have found that the “now” we experience lasts only 2.5 seconds.

What are the minimum steps required for completion?

To be clear, identifying the minimum number of steps is not the same as “phoning it in” or producing something you are not proud of. Unnecessary steps are just that: unnecessary.

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.

started at zero and tried to figure out the absolute minimum number of steps required to achieve the desired outcome.

“Simplicity—the art of maximizing the steps not taken—is essential.” In other words, regardless of what our ultimate goal is, we should focus on only those steps that add value.

Similarly, in your own pursuit of what matters, if you want to “build a better airplane,” don’t try to get everything exactly right the first time. Instead, 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.

So if you are feeling overwhelmed by an essential project because you think you have to produce something flawless from the outset, simply lower the bar to start.

inspiration flows from the courage to start with rubbish.

By embracing imperfection, by having the courage to be rubbish, we can begin. And once we begin, we become a little less rubbish, and then a little less. And eventually, out of the rubbish come exceptional, effortless breakthroughs in the things that matter.

When we’re trying to achieve something that matters to us, it’s tempting to want to sprint out of the gate. The problem is that going too fast at the beginning will almost always slow us down the rest of the way.

Whether it’s “miles per day” or “words per day” or “hours per day,” there are few better ways to achieve effortless pace than to set an upper bound.

One is captured in the military mantra “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast”—meaning, when you go slow, things are smoother, and when things are smooth, you can move faster.

When you go slow, things are smoother. You have time to observe, to plan, to coordinate efforts. But go too slow and you may get stuck or lose your momentum.

To make progress despite the complexity and uncertainty we encounter on a daily basis, we need to choose the right range and keep within it.

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

Finding the right range keeps us moving at a steady pace so we can make consistent progress.