Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

Sometimes we hire a grudge to make us feel in control. We try to prove to ourselves and others that we are right and they are wrong. At first this can make us feel superior, even powerful. It gives us a sense of control, but one that is fleeting and false, because in reality a grudge controls you.

Like Wormtongue in service to the king of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings, a grudge pretends to be subservient to us but really takes over. It also keeps us trapped in a never-ending loo...

There are times we hire a grudge to give us attention. When people hear our story of victimhood, we get their support and sympathy. We are thus incentivized to tell our story again and again. This is easy and even satisfying in the moment. But it delivers an unsatisfying ending. Behind the sympathy people express, there is also...

We can hire a grudge to get us off the hook. As long as we have someone to blame, we don’t have to take responsibility for our anger. We are granted implicit permission to wallow in the negativity w...

Again, this feels freeing in the short term, but in the long term our prize is not freedom. Our prize is living captive to our anger,...

We think the grudge creates emotional armor. But this too turns out to be a scam. The grudge makes us more vulnerable, more fearful. It becomes harder to trust, to let anybody in.

“Hire slow, fire fast.”

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” said Maya Angelou.

“For after all,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “the best thing one can do when it is raining, is to let it rain.”

When we let go of our need to punish those who’ve hurt us, it’s not the culprit who is freed. We are freed. When we surrender grudges and complaints in favor of grace and compassion, it’s not an equal exchange. It’s a coup. And with every trade, we return closer to the calm of our Effortless State.

He was clearheaded about what he could and couldn’t take on. He was able to make decisions more quickly and execute them more efficiently. Rest proved an antidote for both pre-existing and future stress. It kept him grounded in the Effortless State.

Maddon sees the advantage of a different approach. He said, “I didn’t have enough chance to do nothing last offseason. I want more of an opportunity to do nothing, and I mean that in a positive way. When you get this downtime, to be able to do nothing well, that’s my goal.”

Recent research in physiology supports Maddon’s counterintuitive response. Studies show that peak physical and mental performance requires a rhythm of exerting and renewing energy—and not just for athletes.

Relaxing is a responsibility. “To maximize gains from long-term practice,” the study’s lead author, K. Anders Ericsson, concluded, “individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”

We can miss the signs that we’ve reached the end of an energy cycle. We can ignore the loss of focus, low energy, and fidgeting. We can power through. We can artificially try to compensate with caffeine or sugar to get past our energy slump. But in the end, our fatigue catches up with us, making essential work much harder than it needs

The easier way is to replenish our physical and mental energy continuously by taking short breaks. We can plan those breaks into our day. We can be like the peak performers who take advantage of their bodies’ natural rhythm.

We can do the following: 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 m...

So Bergeron immediately shifted her approach. Her entire life became about five things: training, recovery, nutrition, sleep, and mindset. And the results have been remarkable. That year, with Bergeron as her coach, Davíðsdóttir not only qualified for the championship games but became the 2015 champion.

When we are struggling, instead of doubling down on our efforts, we might consider pausing the action—even for one minute. We don’t need to fight these natural rhythms. We can flow with them. We can use them to our advantage. We can alternate between periods of exertion and renewal.

Sleep deprivation is insidious. In one study, people who got less than six hours of sleep per night saw a decline in their motor skills and their cognitive abilities and nodded off more frequently. No surprise. But even more concerning was the finding that we are quite bad at noticing the cumulative impact sleep deprivation has on our minds and bodies.

“Routine nightly sleep for fewer than six hours results in cognitive performance deficits, even if we feel we have adapted to it.” Getting more sleep may be the single greatest gift we can give our bodies, our minds, and even, it turns out, our bottom lines.

Why the hot shower? Recent sleep science found that participants who used water-based passive body heating—also known as a bath—before bed slept sooner, longer, and better. This seems counterintuitive considering that our sleep cycles are associated with a drop in core body temperature. But according to this research, the key is the timing of the bath or shower: ninety minutes before bedtime.

The lead author explains that the warm water triggers our body’s cooling mechanism, sending warmer blood from our core outward and shedding heat through our hands and feet. This “efficient removal of body heat and decline in body temperature” speeds up the natural cooling that makes it easier to fall asleep.

As Wise points out, “We spend a third of our lives asleep. Perhaps it is time for you to evaluate if you could be doing it better.”

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’s influences were the art of the impressionist period and the Renaissance. His formal education was in fine arts in Madrid. Given this background, we would expect Dalí to have painted accurate, lifelike depictions. How, then, did he break free from these classical techniques to create haunting juxtapositions between reality and dreams? He napped—at least the surrealist version of a nap.

Dalí would sit in a chair, wrists dangling over the edges of the armrests. In one hand, he would grip a heavy metal key between his thumb and forefinger. On the floor, directly underneath the key, he would place an upside-down plate. Dalí would close his eyes and relax. The moment he drifted off to sleep, his grip on the key would release. Clang! Dalí’s eyes would snap open.

And he would be filled with new inspiration for his next strange work. 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 sep...

Watson asks Holmes why his explanations seem so obvious, yet so out of reach until shared. “I believe that my eyes are as good as yours,” Watson says. “Quite so,” Holmes responds, throwing himself down into an armchair. “You see, but you do not observe.” Holmes then asks him how many steps there are leading up from the hall downstairs. Watson has traversed this staircase hundreds of times. Yet he has no answer. “You have not observed,” Holmes says, triumphant. “And yet you have seen.”

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.

These distractions are like cataracts in your eyes. Left untreated, cataracts only multiply and worsen; and with them, so does your vision. It becomes harder to read. You have to strain to see the person you’re speaking with. It’s not safe to get behind the wheel. The less light that gets into the retina, the harder everything becomes. Ultimately, cataracts can lead to total blindness.

Being present is, as Eckhart Tolle has said, “ease itself.”

When we’re fully present with people, it has an impact. Not just in that moment either. The experience of feeling like the most important person in the world even for the briefest of moments can stay with us for a disproportionate time after the moment has passed. There is a curiously magical power of presence.

As Parker Palmer, an expert in the Clearness Committee process, has written, “Each of us has an inner teacher, a voice of truth, that offers the guidance and power we need to deal with our problems.” The intent of the exercise is to help people amplify this inner voice and gain clarity on how to move forward.

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. But in the Effortless State, it becomes far easier to give the gift of our intentional focus to the people and things we really care about.

What is the Effortless State? The Effortless State is an experience many of us have had when we are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely aware, alert, present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in this moment. You are able to focus on what matters most with ease.

INVERT Instead of asking, “Why is this so hard?,” invert the question by asking, “What if this could be easy?” Challenge the assumption that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one. Make the impossible possible by finding an indirect approach. When faced with work that feels overwhelming, ask, “How am I making this harder than it needs to be?”

ENJOY Pair the most essential activities with the most enjoyable ones. Accept that work and play can co-exist. Turn tedious tasks into meaningful rituals. Allow laughter and fun to lighten more of your moments.

RELEASE Let go of emotional burdens you don’t need to keep carrying. Remember: When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack. Use this habit recipe: “Each time I complain I will say something I am thankful for.” Relieve a grudge of its duties by asking, “What job have I hired this grudge to do?”

REST Discover the art of doing nothing. Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow. Break down essential work into three sessions of no more than ninety minutes each. Take an effortless nap.

NOTICE Achieve a state of heightened awareness by harnessing the power of presence. Train your brain to focus on the important and ignore the irrelevant. 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.

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.

It is an example of false economy to continue at this point. It’s not just that overall output suffers; it’s a recipe for burnout as well. This is an example of overexertion, or in everyday parlance, trying too hard.

Perhaps you have experienced this yourself. Trying too hard in a social setting makes it harder to connect authentically with someone else. Trying too hard for a promotion can reek of desperation and, therefore, make you seem less desirable. Trying too hard to get to sleep can make it almost impossible to wind down. Trying too hard to look intelligent rarely impresses the people you want to impress. Trying too hard to be cool, to relax, to feel good, all make it harder to be cool, relax, or feel good. That’s the trouble with overexertion.

In Eastern philosophy the masters call this sweet spot wu wei (pronounced Oo-Way). Wu means “not have” or “without.” Wei means “do,” “act,” or “effort.” So wu wei, literally “without action” or “without effort,” means “trying without trying,” “action without action,” or “effortless doing.”

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. That’s because you cannot, by definition, complete a project without a clearly defined end point. You can spin your wheels working on it. You can tinker with it. You can (and likely will) abandon it. But to get an important project done it’s absolutely necessary to define what “done” looks like.

Getting clear on what “done” looks like doesn’t just help you finish; it also helps you get started. All too often, we procrastinate or struggle to take the first steps on a project because we don’t have a clear finish line in mind. As soon as you define what “done” looks like, you give your conscious and unconscious mind a clear instruction. Things click into gear and you can begin charting a course toward that end state.

“Done” isn’t always going to apply to an individual task or project. We have all experienced the overwhelmed feeling that comes from staring down the barrel of a seemingly infinite “to do” list—one that has usually become longer by the end of the day than it was at the beginning. It creates an unwinnable war.