Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

When you remove the burdens in your heart and the distractions in your mind, you are able to see more clearly.

It’s like we all automatically accept that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one.

We are conditioned over the course of our lifetimes to believe that in order to overachieve we must also overdo. As a result, we make things harder for ourselves than they need to be.

Asking the question “What if this could be easy?” is a way to reset our thinking.

Our rituals are habits we have put our thumbprint on. Our rituals are habits with a soul. They have the power to transform a tedious task into an experience that creates joy.

We live in a complaint culture that gets high on expressing outrage: especially on social media, which often seems like an endless stream of grumbling and whining about what is unsatisfactory or unacceptable.

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

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.

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.

accomplish what matters by trying less, not more:

Ask yourself, “If I complete everything on this list, will it leave me feeling satisfied by the end of the day? Is there some other important task that will haunt me all night if I don’t get to it?”

we can opt for taking the minimum viable first action: the action that will allow us to gain the maximum learning from the least amount of effort.

“What are the minimum steps required to complete this?”

regardless of what our ultimate goal is, we should focus on only those steps that add value.

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.

Instead of asking, “Why is this so hard?,” invert the question by asking, “What if this could be easy?”

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

Clear the clutter in your physical environment before clearing the clutter in your mind.

Effortless Action means accomplishing more by trying less.

To simplify the process, don’t simplify the steps: simply remove them.

Recognize that not everything requires you to go the extra mile.

Adopt a “zero-draft” approach and just put some words, any words, on the page.

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.

Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow.

Train your brain to focus on the important and ignore the irrelevant.

The spirit of this is clear: each new moment is a chance to start over. A chance to make a new choice.

life doesn’t have to be as hard and complicated as we make it.