Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

All progress is not created equal.

Since the end of the Cold War, the military has used the acronym VUCA to describe our global environment: one that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In response to this new normal, the military has developed several approaches we can apply to make it easier to do what matters on our own everyday battlegrounds.

“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast”—meaning, when you go slow, things are smoother, and when things are smooth, you can move faster.

Like the proverbial hare, this cycle of sprint-and-recover may seem fast in the moment, but long-term progress through the environment is slow and plagued by unidentified threats.”

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. This is just as true in life and work as it is on the battlefield. 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.

Finding the right range keeps us moving at a steady pace so we can make consistent progress. The lower bound should be high enough to keep us feeling motivated, and low enough that we can still achieve it even on days when we’re dealing with unexpected chaos. The upper bound should be high enough to constitute good progress, but not so high as to leave us feeling exhausted. Once we get into the rhythm, the progress begins to flow. We are able to take Effortless Action.

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.

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.

What is Effortless Action? Effortless Action means accomplishing more by trying less. You stop procrastinating and take the first obvious step. You arrive at the point of completion without overthinking. You make progress by pacing yourself rather than powering through. You overachieve without overexerting.

DEFINE To get started on an essential project, first define what “done” looks like. Establish clear conditions for completion, get there, then stop. Take sixty seconds to focus on your desired outcome. Write a “Done for the Day” list. Limit it to items that would constitute meaningful progress.

SIMPLIFY To simplify the process, don’t simplify the steps: simply remove them. Recognize that not everything requires you to go the extra mile. Maximize the steps not taken. Measure progress in the tiniest of increments.

PROGRESS When you start a project, start with rubbish. Adopt a “zero-draft” approach and just put some words, any words, on the page. Fail cheaply: make learning-sized mistakes. Protect your progress from the harsh critic in your head.

PACE Set an effortless pace: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Reject the false economy of “powering through.” Create the right range: I will never do less than X, never more than Y. Recognize that not all progress is created equal.

One reporter who interviewed Nash several years following his retirement described it this way: “Watching him shoot is akin to watching a stunningly elaborate automaton at work, his body moving with an exactness more reminiscent of clockwork than a fallible human being. At one point in our afternoon together, he homes in so precisely on his target that he stops having to move to retrieve the ball; instead, time after time, it descends through the rim in such a way that the fwip of the net sends it bouncing back to him, as if by magnetic force.”

Linear results are limited: they can never exceed the amount of effort exerted. What many people don’t realize, however, is that there exists a far better alternative.

Residual results are completely different. With residual results you exert effort once and reap the benefits again and again. Results continue to flow to you, whether you put in additional effort or not. 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.

Residual results are like compound interest. Benjamin Franklin summarized the idea of compounding interest best when he said, “Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes money.” Put another way, when we are generating compound interest, we are creating effortless wealth.

Kiva is a crowdsourcing platform that allows anyone to loan money, in any amount, to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and mechanical engineer, is considered the first to have discovered the principle of leverage. He is thought to have said that if he had a long enough lever and the right place to stand, he could move the world.

Of course, there can be drawbacks to levers too. Depending on which lever you push, an equally modest amount of effort can also produce amazingly bad residual results. A bad reputation can cost you opportunities for years. A bad habit can compromise your health for decades. Hire the wrong person, and they can negatively affect your business in a hundred ways. Write bad code, and users will be frustrated again and again. The direction the force will flow is entirely up to us.

There are two ways to approach getting things done: the hard way is with powerless effort, and the easy way is with effortless power. Levers give us effortless power.

A method may be useful once, to solve one specific type of problem. Principles, however, can be applied broadly and repeatedly. At their best, they are universal and timeless.

In fact, the word principia means “first principles, fundamental beginnings or elements.” First principles are like the building blocks of knowledge: once you understand them correctly you can apply them hundreds of times.

Harrington Emerson, the American efficiency engineer known for his pioneering contributions to the field of management, once said, “As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

Seek Principles Not all knowledge has ...

The commonality was a principle that he dubbed “mirrored reciprocation,” or, in simpler terms, “You get what you give.”

“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.”

If you invested $100 in Berkshire stock the day Munger came on board, you’d have over $1.8 million today.

Isaiah Berlin’s original 1953 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox revived the saying by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

But Archilochus’s comparison was always meant to suggest that the fox would fare better if it didn’t simply know many things but knew how to connect those things together. Munger is a fox who connects many things.

Munger’s approach to investing and life is the pursuit of what he calls “worldly wisdom.” He believes that by combining learnings from a range of disciplines—psychology, history, mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, and more—we produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Munger sees isolated facts as useless unless they “hang together on a latticework of theory.”

Often, the most useful knowledge comes from fields other than our own. As researchers from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management found in analyzing almost eighteen million scientific papers, the best new ideas usually come from combining existing knowledge in one field with an “intrusion of unusual combinations” from other disciplines.

This is why Munger is wise to “believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out.” As he puts it, “I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”

Blood Simple became known for its conventional neo-noir crime feel heightened by unpredictable twists and turns that were unusual for the genre. Northwestern professor Brian Uzzi describes this approach as taking “extreme novelty” and embedding it in “deep conventionality.”

Reading a book is among the most high-leverage activities on earth. 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. Reading, that is, reading to really understand, delivers residual results by any estimate.

Use the Lindy Effect. This law states that the life expectancy of a book is proportional to its current age—meaning, the older a book is, the higher the likelihood that it will survive into the future. So prioritize reading books that have lasted a long time. In other words, read the classics and the ancients.

Distill to Understand. When I finish reading a book, I like to take ten minutes to summarize what I learned from it on a single page in my own words. If you summarize the key learnings from a book you just read, you absorb it more deeply. The process of summarizing, of distilling ideas to their essential essence, helps us turn information into understanding, and understanding into unique knowledge.

In the world of high jumping there is before October 20, 1968, and there is after. Fosbury won gold that day at the Mexico Olympics, stunning the crowd with what had now been (nonderisively) dubbed the Fosbury Flop. Before him, no Olympic jumper had faced skyward. After him, all world record holders did.

Whenever we want a far-reaching impact, teaching others to teach can be a high-leverage strategy.

It amazes me how easy it is to forget previous generations. Most people cannot tell you the first and last names of their eight great-grandparents. Ponder that for a moment. The language we speak, the place we live, and the history we inherit are shaped by ancestors we don’t even know the names of.

A lot is lost in those decayed memories—so much that many of us, once we reach a certain age, find ourselves struck by a curiosity so powerful that we are compelled to track down any available clues about our ancestry.

Aesop was a storyteller and a slave. He lived more than 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. He had lessons he wanted to impart, and he did so through memorable stories. His stories were so easy to remember and share, they were passed down by word of mouth.

When You Learn to Teach, You Teach Yourself to Learn Teaching others is also an accelerated way to learn. Even thinking we might be called upon to teach can increase our engagement. 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. These messages should be not just easy to understand but also hard to misunderstand.

A. G. Lafley, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, called this the “Sesame Street Simple” rule. 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.