Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

Any time you feel like you’re on shaky ground with some meaningful challenge you’ve taken on, talk to yourself like you would talk to a toddler learning to walk: “You’ve taken the first step. You may feel wobbly now, but you’ve begun. You’re going to get there.” And remind yourself that every great achievement is rubbish at the beginning. Every one of them. As the 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.”

Margaret Atwood, the prolific author of eighteen books of poetry, eighteen novels, eleven books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, and eight children’s books, once wrote, “A word after a word after a word is power.” Even rubbish words are more powerful than a blank page. In fact, they are much more powerful, because there can be no magnum opus later without those rubbish words now. 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.

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.

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.

We can establish upper and lower bounds. Simply use the following rule: Never less than X, never more than Y.

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.

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.

As our lives become increasingly busy, overwhelming, and fast-paced, it’s tempting to seek out easy instructions or methods that we can apply to a problem right away, without expending much mental energy. This is a mistake. Why? 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. 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.”

Many people assume that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has a background in mechanical engineering and rocket science. But he actually didn’t know much about either subject when he started these ventures. He was once asked how he had downloaded whole, complex new disciplines into his brain so quickly: “I know you’ve read a lot of books and you hire a lot of smart people and soak up what they know, but you have to acknowledge you seem to have found a way to pack more knowledge into your head than nearly anyone else alive. How are you so good at it?” He replied: “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.”

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.” Jim Collins famously favored the hedgehog’s approach to succeeding in the business world, arguing that foxes lack focus and waste their energy. 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.” Different ideas in isolation represent linear knowledge. But those same ideas form residual knowledge when interconnected.

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. Unfortunately, very few people take advantage of this. The typical American reads (or partially reads) only four books a year. More than a quarter of Americans don’t read books at all. And this trend is worsening.

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.

Read to Absorb (Rather Than to Check a Box). There are books I have technically read but I can’t tell you anything about them. On the other hand, there are books I may not have read cover to cover, but I have returned to certain chapters or passages so often that they have become a part of me. Reading a book to earn the right of displaying it on your shelf misses the real point of the exercise. But absorbing yourself fully in a book changes who you are, just as if you had lived the experience yourself.

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.

Know What No One Else Knows

Knowledge may open the door to an opportunity, but unique knowledge produces perpetual opportunities.

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

Hiring someone trustworthy starts a simple and obvious first step, but one that many routinely overlook: making sure you are hiring someone honest and honorable, someone you can trust to uphold a high standard when nobody’s looking. But hiring someone who is trustworthy is also about hiring someone conscientious, someone you can trust to uphold their responsibilities, to use good judgment, to do what they say they’re going to do when they say they’re going to do it and to do it well. It’s someone you don’t have to supervise or micromanage, someone who understands the team’s goals and who cares as much as you do about the quality of the essential work to be done.

If this story were a Disney movie, this would be the part where I’d write about how Eve was healed and we all lived happily ever after. But after a round of successful treatments, she started to regress. The troubles returned. How could we have dealt with this setback had we depleted all our energy the first time around? It’s been two years now. Eve continues to get better. She still has some ways to go, but as I write this we have reason to believe she will be completely healed. She smiles, laughs, and jokes. She walks, runs, and wrestles. She reads, she writes. She is thriving again. What did I learn from this experience? Whatever has happened to you in life. Whatever hardship. Whatever pain. However significant those things are. They pale in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now.