Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

To be in the Effortless State is to be aware, alert, and present, even in the face of fast-moving information and the endless onslaught of distractions. And that’s no small thing, because in that state of heightened attention we see differently. We are able to laser in on the things that are important. We notice things that were always right under our noses but that we missed before.

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.

First, when people fear being judged, it drowns out their inner voice. They are able to focus only on what they think we want to hear, rather than on what they actually see or feel. Second, the moment our judgments and opinions are voiced, they compete for the limited mental space others need to draw their own conclusions.

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.

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.

Negative returns: the point where we are not merely getting a smaller return on each additional investment, we are actually decreasing our overall output. For example, there is a point in writing where you start making a manuscript worse by working on it longer. The same can be said for composing a song, drafting a blueprint, preparing a legal argument, or writing computer code, along with many other endeavors. You are fatigued. Your judgment is impaired. Every ounce of extra effort you put in now is detrimental. It is an example of false economy to continue at this point.

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.

What’s curious about this approach is how different it is from our lived experience. Haven’t you found that when you do your very best work, the experience feels effortless? You act almost without thinking. You make things happen without even trying to make things happen. You are in the zone, in flow, in peak performance. This is the sweet spot for doing what matters.

To avoid diminishing returns on your time and effort, establish clear conditions for what “done” looks like, get there, then stop.

“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.

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.” When I read that, I did just as Sasaki suggested: I stopped reading and discarded an old dried-up marker. It was so doable. And it felt good, so I spent ten more minutes discarding other things: old business cards, too-short pencils, a pile of magazines I knew I’d never read, a tangled mess of charging cables I’d stashed away “just in case I ever need them.” In fact, while writing about this I was inspired to stop and discard the cardboard box that once held my not-so-new headphone set. And again I kept going, discarding even more things. Such is the power of taking the first, concrete, physical step: it ignites a subsequent surge of focused Effortless Action.

Of course, 2.5 seconds is enough time to get caught up in nonessential activities too. The big tech companies understand this in their relentless competition for our attention. They are constantly testing new ways to offer us smaller units of information: 280 characters on Twitter, “likes” on Facebook and Instagram, newsfeeds we can scroll through and absorb at a glance. These bite-sized activities may not feel like wasting time—after all, we think, what’s a few seconds? The trouble, of course, is that over time these activities rarely add up to making progress on the goals we hope to achieve. They are easy but pointless.

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?”

In just about every realm, completion is infinitely better than adding superfluous steps that don’t add value.

Not Everything Needs the Extra Mile 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.

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.

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.

If there are processes in your life that seem to involve an inordinate number of steps, try starting from zero. Then see if you can find your way back to those same results, only take fewer steps.

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

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.

For example, when our children were younger, Anna and I wanted them to have the chance to be rubbish with money while the stakes were low. After all, we’d much rather they made mistakes with their allowance at the ages of eight and ten than make mistakes with their life savings as adults. So we gave them three glass jars: one for charity, one for saving, and one for spending. When they received their allowance, it was up to them to divide up the money. We didn’t try to advise them on how much should go to saving or spending. We wanted them to make the decisions, especially the rubbish ones. For example, our son once spent $40 he’d saved on an electric racing car, and he regretted it afterward. He wished he had that money for a major LEGO purchase he was saving up for. Now he is a teenager and is saving up for a major service mission he wants to go on that will cost thousands of dollars, and I am confident he won’t regret it. That’s because he got to learn from his mistakes while the risks were lower. I call these kinds of mistakes learning-sized mistakes.

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.”

They accomplished a feat that had eluded adventurers for millennia. Of course, not every day was easy. But even under the harshest of conditions, the goal was doable, thanks to that one simple rule: they would not exceed fifteen miles a day, no matter what.

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.

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.”

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. This is particularly true in conflicts where the ability to move in a coordinated fashion while staying alert to possible threats from every direction—and often while carrying weapons—is key. If you stop or move too slowly, you become an easy target. “But if you move too fast, you get surrounded and outflanked,” as consultant Joe Indvik writes.

A student who crams for a test, regurgitates facts, and gets a grade is acquiring linear knowledge. A person who decides to exercise for an hour today but tomorrow has to decide again whether to exercise has made a linear decision. An entrepreneur who makes money only when she is actively working to make it happen has a linear business model. A volunteer who serves once and makes an impact once has made a linear contribution. A person who exerts great effort to “make herself” do something today takes linear action. A father who has to remind his children to do the same chore every day is practicing linear parenting.

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.

An author who writes a book and is paid royalties for years is getting residual income. A student who learns first principles and can then apply that understanding in a variety o...

A person who makes the one-time decision to exercise every day has made a residual decision. An entrepreneur who sets up her business to work even when she is on vacation for six months has a residual business. A social entrepreneur who provides microloans that are repaid so they can be loaned out again and again is making a residual contribution. A person who does something every day, habitually, without thinking, without effort, is benefiting from residual action. A mother who dele...

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.

It is no exaggeration to say that they changed the world. Without them, we couldn’t have built the automobile, invented the jet plane, or put a man on the moon. Of course, Newton’s writings didn’t offer step-by-step instructions for how to build an automotive engine, a jet plane, or a spacecraft. Instead, they offered something far more valuable: a set of principles that could later be applied to automotive engineering, aeronautics, space travel, and more.

First principles are like the building blocks of knowledge: once you understand them correctly you can apply them hundreds of times.

“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.” In other words, when we have the solid fundamentals of knowledge, we have somewhere to hang the additional information we learn. We can anchor it in the mental models we already understand.

This is how Musk’s search for the fundamentals, the first principles, has allowed him to revolutionize the energy industry, launch broadband satellites into space, design a system for high-speed hyperloop travel, build a better solar battery, and send a spacecraft to Mars. He is living proof that by understanding things at their most fundamental level, we can apply them in new and surprising ways.

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.

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.

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

A cheat sheet is one of the most effective, albeit low-tech, tools we have at our disposal to automate almost anything that really matters.

The idea of a cheat sheet is simply to get things out of your brain so you can do them automatically, without having to rely on memory.

Blocking off time for the things that matter may sound simple in theory. But in practice it can be difficult to do consistently, because reality gets in the way. Yet the effort we invest in automating our most mundane but essential tasks yields significant and repeated benefits later on.

Consider taking the high-tech, low-effort path for the essential, and the low-tech, high-effort path for the nonessential.

A two-hour meeting and a handshake? With no due diligence! Think of the time, money, and effort saved, based on the simple fact that one party trusted the other to be true to their word. It’s an example of how trust can be a lever for turning modest effort into residual results.

Inside every team are many people with interrelated roles and responsibilities, moving at high speeds. Without trust, conflicting goals, priorities, and agendas rub up against each other, creating friction and wearing everyone down. If the team runs out of trust, it is likely to stall or sputter out. Trust is like the engine oil for that team. It’s the lubricant that keeps these people working together smoothly, so the team can continue to function.

Warren Buffett uses three criteria for determining who is trustworthy enough to hire or to do business with. He looks for people with integrity, intelligence, and initiative, though he adds that without the first, the other two can backfire. I call this “The Three I’s Rule.”

There are three parties to every relationship: Person A, Person B, and the structure that governs them.

Every relationship has a structure, even if it’s an unspoken, unclear one. A low-trust structure is one where expectations are unclear, where goals are incompatible or at odds, where people don’t know who is doing what, where the rules are ambiguous and nobody knows what the standards for success are, and where the priorities are unclear and the incentives misaligned.

A high-trust structure is one where expectations are clear. Goals are shared, roles are clearly delineated, the rules and standards are articulated, and the right results are prioritized, incentivized, and rewarded—consistently, not just sometimes.

Why do so many of us put up with problems—big and small—for so much longer than we have to? Because on any given day it usually takes less time to manage a problem than to solve it. In John’s case, while thirty seconds of jostling was annoying, it still took less time than dislodging the tray and resolving the problem.

If you’ve spent a lot of time hacking at the branches, you may have become good at it. But if that is all you are doing, the problem will keep coming back to haunt you. It is merely being managed, never solved. Are there any recurring problems or frustrations in your life or work? Rather than simply hacking at the branches, try striking at the root.