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.

Instead of trying to get better results by pushing ever harder, we can make the most essential activities the easiest ones.

Once we are in the Effortless State, it becomes easier to take Effortless Action. But we may still encounter complexity that makes it hard to start or advance an essential project. 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.

George Eliot, “What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?”

What if, instead of asking, “How can I tackle this really hard but essential project?,” we simply inverted the question and asked, “What if this essential project could be made easy?”

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.

Free of the assumptions that make your problem look hard, you would be surprised how often an easier solution appears.

Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, has said, “I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of doing strategy is to solve the easiest problem.”

When we shelve the false assumption that the easier path has to be the inferior path, obstacles fade away.

Have you ever found that the more you complain—and the more you read and hear other people complain—the easier it is to find things to complain about? On the other hand, have you ever found that the more grateful you are, the more you have to be grateful for?

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

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. In fact, one study found that the best-performing athletes, musicians, chess players, and writers all honed their skills in the same way: by practicing in the morning, in three sessions of sixty to ninety minutes, with breaks in between. Meanwhile, those who took fewer or shorter breaks performed less well.

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 minutes) in between sessions to rest and recover.

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.

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.”

“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.”

Distractions that keep us from being present in the moment can be like cataracts for our minds. They make noticing what matters harder. And the longer they are left untreated, the more debilitating they become. Less and less light comes in. We miss more and more. Eventually we become blind to what really matters most.

In an article titled “Steph Curry Literally Sees the World Differently Than You Do,” reporter Drake Baer writes, “Just by looking at Curry, you would never guess that he’s the most dominant player in the league. He’s six-foot-three, 190 lbs.

Recent science helps explain why. One study found that by training our attentional muscles we can improve our processing of complex information moving at great speed.

If you try too hard when shooting a free throw, you’ll tense up and move too fast. This is similar to what happens to many overachievers who have been conditioned to believe that more effort leads to better outcomes. When they invest a lot of effort and don’t see the results they want, they lean in harder. They work longer hours. They obsess over the situation more. They are trained to see the lack of progress as a sign that yet more effort is required. What they haven’t learned is that: Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance.

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.

The concept was big—huge really. It was long term and ambitious. 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.

That first step may seem too trivial to name. But more often than not, a step as tiny as buying a tape measure provides the momentum we need to take the next step, then the next step after that.

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.

What are the minimum steps required for completion?

That’s what the goal for most presentations is supposed to be: to “just talk about your business.” So the next time you have to write a report, give a presentation, or make a sales pitch, resist the temptation to add unnecessary extras. 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.

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.

“Simplicity—the art of maximizing the steps not taken—is essential.”

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.”

embracing mistakes leads to accelerated learning. 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. The faster they make those mistakes, the faster they will progress.

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

Not surprisingly, Reid also advocates the same philosophy in entrepreneurship and business. “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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

When faced with work that feels overwhelming, ask, “How am I making this harder than it needs to be?”

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.

To simplify the process, don’t simplify the steps: simply remove them. Recognize that not everything requires you to go the extra mile.

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. This principle can be applied to many other pursuits as well.

Specific methods, in other words, produce only linear results. If it’s residual results we’re after, we must look to principles. 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.”

how we treat other people is how they will treat us back.

“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.”

The power of Fosbury’s technique lay not only in its solid mechanical foundation but in its uniqueness. It was so different from what others had been doing for decades that it caused a hockey-stick-shaped spike in high-jump world records. Who knows how long such progress would otherwise have taken with only incremental advances in technique? Fosbury achieved the dream harbored by every serious athlete: he transformed his sport forever.

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.

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.

Then a different idea was floated: to simplify the message to a short whiteboard sketch that could be explained in under ten minutes. The head of marketing taught it to a pilot group first. Then he had them practice coming to the front of the room and teaching it to one another. Then he sent them off to go and teach it to their teams. Everyone was expected not only to learn it but also to learn how to teach it. Anyone could be asked to stand up in front of any group and teach it at any time. Within just a few weeks, the inconsistencies disappeared. An HR rep in Germany could explain it. A finance manager in California could explain it in the exact same way. This meant that customers were getting the same message as well. Pretty soon, the impact began to multiply. What had once involved months of frustrating effort became a virtually effortless path to success.

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.

Make the most essential things the easiest ones to teach and the easiest ones to learn.

Alfred North Whitehead, the British mathematician turned American philosopher, once said, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them”—another way of saying, “As many essential steps and activities as possible should be automated.”