Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

“Swedish Death Cleaning” means getting rid of the clutter you have accumulated through your life while you are still alive. It’s an alternative to the more typical practice of simply leaving this task for your loved ones to do for you later.

It may sound morbid, but it can be a liberating process. You are getting your house in order. You are getting things done—the way you want them done—while you still can. And you are lifting a painful and inevitable burden for the people you care about.

What if we could all give ourselves such a gift by approaching our life’s goals as if they were a Swedish Death Cleaning project?

Today, Netflix is found in 183 million households worldwide. So it’s almost hard to believe that it might not exist had Reed Hastings not been charged $40 by his local Blockbuster for losing the VHS tape of the Tom Hanks classic Apollo 13—prompting him to wonder if there might be a better way for people to borrow movies.

As a computer scientist who had studied at Stanford University in the 1980s, Hastings believed that within a decade or so the average household Internet connection would have the capacity to carry such massive amounts of data at such high speeds that entire movies could be instantly delivered on demand to one’s personal computer or TV. Hastings’s idea was to build Netflix as a DVD service first, “and then eventually the Internet would catch up with the postal system and pass it.”

The cofounders knew what “done” looked like—the massive global streaming service and content library Netflix is today—but instead of mapping out a complex, detailed plan to get there, Hastings and Randolph looked for the ridiculously simple first step that would inform them whether they should take a second step or just walk away. Mailing that single disk turned out to be the simplest, most obvious way to set their immense idea in motion.

You don’t have to be overwhelmed by essential projects. Often, when you name the first obvious step, you avoid spending too much mental energy thinking about the fifth, seventh, or twenty-third steps. It doesn’t matter if your project involves ten steps or a thousand. When you adopt this strategy, all you have to focus on is the very first step.

An alternative is offered by Fumio Sasaki in Goodbye, Things. He suggests that the first action be “Discard something right now.” He urges readers, “Don’t wait till you have finished this book. The best way to go about it is to hone your skills as you part with your possessions. Why not close this book this very moment and discard something?…This is the first step, right now.”

One key tenet of Silicon Valley thinking, and design thinking more generally, is the practice of building a minimum viable product. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, defines a minimum viable product as “that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least amount of effort.”

This principle always reminds me of the line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Though she be but little she is fierce.” The first action may be the tiniest, easiest-to-overlook thing. But it is surprisingly fierce.

The Power of 2.5 Seconds In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have found that the “now” we experience lasts only 2.5 seconds. This is our psychological present. One of the implications of this is that progress can happen in tiny increments.

When we’re struggling to name the first obvious action, we need to either make it a little easier to get started on what’s important now or make it a little harder to do something trivial instead. Looking at that first step or action through the lens of 2.5 seconds is the change that makes every other change possible. It is the habit of habits.

Recalling the experience, Hartman says his marching orders were clear: “The goal was to make it easier.” Bezos recognized that “the more steps there were, the more time they [the customer] had to change their mind. If you can get the user to buy it with one click they are more likely to make the purchase.”

Amazon filed a patent for the one-click process that lasted the better part of twenty years, giving them a huge advantage over online competitors. It’s impossible to isolate the precise value of that single innovation, but it has, clearly, been enormous.

It’s striking to me that Hartman spent months trying to make each step in the online ordering process simpler but never thought to try removing steps to make the process itself simpler. There is a huge difference between the two. No matter how simple the step, it’s still easier to take no step.

Suddenly I could see it: we were making this process so much more complicated than it had to be. By adding so many steps—even if just mentally—we were making it harder for ourselves to take any steps at all. So we took a step back and asked, “What are the minimum steps required to complete this?”

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. Eliminating them allows you to channel all your energy toward getting the important project done. In just about every realm, completion is infinitely better than adding superfluous steps that don’t add value.

My best friend growing up consistently put in fewer hours of work than me but got better grades. His secret? When the teacher asked him to do something, he did what was asked and nothing more. That’s it. I would go deep: I’d read beyond what I was asked to do, research more than was needed. I could get so busy going the second mile I wouldn’t get the first mile done.

They aren’t just a distraction for you; they’re also a distraction for your audience. That’s why, when I do presentations, I use six slides, with fewer than ten words total.

Mike Evangelist, one of the product designers in the meeting, was blown away. He said, “I still have the slides I prepared for that meeting, and they’re ridiculous in their complexity.” Only in retrospect could he clearly see that “all this other stuff was completely in the way.”

Evangelist told me that his biggest “aha” was that he and his team had been looking at their process the wrong way. They had started with an immensely complicated product and attempted to pare it down. But Jobs came at it from the opposite angle. He started at zero and tried to figure out the absolute minimum number of steps required to achieve the desired outcome.

We’ve become so accustomed to the complexity of all the processes in our lives, we ra...

One of the twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto states, “Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.” By this they mean that the goal is to create value for the customer, and if this can be done with less code and fewer features, that is exactly what ought to be done.

While this principle refers to the process of software development, we can adapt it to any everyday process by saying, “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. Every nonessential step comes with an opportunity cost, so for each nonessential step removed, we gain more time, energy, and cognitive resources to put toward what’s essential.

As sportswriter Andy Benoit observes, most geniuses “prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”

Over the course of just a few months, the Gossamer Condor made some 222 flights—sometimes several in a single day. Some of his competitors’ machines didn’t achieve that in their lifetimes. It was on its 223rd flight that the Condor completed the figure eight challenge and won the first Kremer Prize. Two years later MacCready would win the second Kremer Prize when the Gossamer Albatross successfully crossed the English Channel.

His most brilliant insight wasn’t some advanced breakthrough in the science of flight. It was simply that focusing on the elegance and sophistication of the aircraft was actually an impediment to progress.

An ugly aircraft that could be crashed, repaired, and redesigned fast would make it much easier to make progress on what really mattered: building a plane that could, as MacCready put it, “turn left, turn right, go up high enough [at] the beginning and the end of the flight.”

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 eas...

Ed Catmull, the former CEO of Pixar, once said, “We all start out ugly. Every one of Pixar’s stories starts out that way.” Their earliest sketches are, according to Catmull, “awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.” This is why Catmull has always worked hard to foster a culture that creates space for such “rubbish”: because he understands there would be no Buzz Lightyear without hundreds of awful ideas along the way. As he puts it, “Pixar is set up to protect our director’s ugly baby.”

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 the standard to which they hold themselves is neither realistic nor productive.

For example, many people cite learning a new language as an essential project, a dream that matters to them. But they never practice because they are embarrassed. They want to be flawless—or at least not make fools of themselves—from the start.

But a friend of mine who teaches Spanish sees it differently. As an exceptional student himself (with a JD from Stanford Law School followed by a doctorate from Princeton as well), he has learned that when it comes to l...

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. T...

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

To make effortless progress on what matters, learning-sized mistakes must be encouraged. This isn’t giving yourself—or others—permission to consistently produce poor-quality work; it’s simply letting go of the absurd pressure to always do everything perfectly.

“If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release,” he says, “you released it too late.” Or put another way, “When it comes to product launches, imperfect is perfect.”

Protect Your Rubbish from the Harsh Critic in Your Head Another way we can make failure as cheap as possible for ourselves is simply to protect our rubbish from the harsh critic in our heads. Instead of shaming yourself for hitting your serve into the net, celebrate the fact that you’re on the court to begin with. Instead of belittling yourself for even the tiniest of errors, be proud of the fact that you are unlikely to make that same mistake ever again.

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

The idea with the zero draft is to write anything. The more rubbish the better. It doesn’t have to be seen by anyone. It never has to be judged. Don’t even think of it as a draft; it’s just words on a page. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get your creative juices flowing this way.

As American poet and memoirist Maya Angelou put it, “When I am writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced I’m serious and says ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’

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. Whether it’s writing a book, composing a song, painting a canvas, or any other creative pursuit that calls to you, 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.

Rain or shine, Amundsen “would not allow the daily 15 miles to be exceeded.” While Scott allowed his team to rest only on the days “when it froze” and pushed his team to the point of “inhuman exertion” on the days “when it thawed,” Amundsen “insisted on plenty of rest” and kept a steady pace for the duration of the trip to the South Pole.

This one simple difference between their approaches can explain why Amundsen’s team made it to the top while Scott’s team perished. Setting a steady, consistent, sustainable pace was ultimately what allowed the party from Norway to reach their destination “without particular effort,” as Roland Hunford, the author of a fascinating book on this race to the South Pole, explains. Without particular effort?

The False Economy of Powering Through When we try to make too much progress on a goal or project right out of the gate, we can get trapped in a vicious cycle: we get tired, so then we take a break, but then we think we have to make up for the time lost, so we sprint again.

The costs of this boom-and-bust approach to getting important projects done is too high: we feel exhausted on the days we sprint hard, drained and demoralized on the days we don’t, and more often than not we wind up like those British explorers, feeling battered and broken and still no closer to achieving our goal.

Holding back when you still have steam in you might seem like a counterintuitive approach to getting important things done, but in fact, this kind of restraint is key to breakthrough productivity.

As Lisa Jewell, author of some eighteen bestselling novels, put it, “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.”

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.