Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

The implicit message is that if we aren’t perpetually exhausted, we must not be doing enough.

what does one do when they’ve stripped life down to the essentials and it’s still too much?

Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing them in the right way.

Motivation is not enough because it is a limited resource.

What could happen in your life if the easy but pointless things became harder and the essential things became easier? If the essential projects you’ve been putting off became enjoyable, while the pointless distractions lost their appeal completely?

the first step toward making things more effortless is to clear the clutter in our heads and our hearts.

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.

“If you keep it simple, less can go wrong,”

When faced with a task that felt impossibly hard, she would ask, “Is there an easier way?”

complexity of modern life has created a false dichotomy between things that are “essential and hard” and things that are “easy and trivial.”

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

What if, instead, we considered the possibility that the reason something feels hard is that we haven’t yet found the easier way to do it?

Here is what I learned: trying too hard makes it harder to get the results you want.

We are conditioned over the course of our lifetimes to believe that in order to overachieve we must also overdo.

Effortless Inversion means looking at problems from the opposite perspective. It means asking, “What if this could be easy?” It means learning to solve problems from a state of focus, clarity, and calm. It means getting good at getting things done by putting in less effort.

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.

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

Not every essential activity is inherently enjoyable. But we can make them so.

So often we separate important work from trivial play. People say, “I work hard and then I can play hard.”

Believing essential activities are, almost by definition, tedious, we are more likely to put them off or avoid them completely.

It’s no secret that many essential activities that are not particularly joyful in the moment produce moments of joy later on.

There is power in pairing our most enjoyable activities with our most essential ones.

Our rituals are habits we have put our thumbprint on. Our rituals are habits with a soul.

Complaining, too, creates a self-sustaining cycle. But instead of making it easier to do what matters, this system makes it harder. A “downward spiral.” When we experience negative emotions our mindset narrows (think: fight, flight, or freeze).

After I complain I will say something I am thankful for.

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.

When we are struggling, instead of doubling down on our efforts, we might consider pausing the action—even for one minute.

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.

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

Use this habit recipe: “Each time I complain I will say something I am thankful for.”

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

Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance.

Negative returns: the point where we are not merely getting a smaller return on each additional investment, we are actually decreasing our overall output.

to get an important project done it’s absolutely necessary to define what “done” looks like.

when you have an important project to deliver, take sixty seconds to close your eyes and actually visualize what it would look like to cross it off as done:

Often, when you name the first obvious step, you avoid spending too much mental energy thinking about the fifth, seventh, or twenty-third steps.

Instead of procrastinating, wasting enormous amounts of time and effort planning for a million possible scenarios, or charging full steam ahead at the risk of traveling miles down the wrong path, 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.

When we’re struggling to name the first obvious action, we need to either make it a little easier to get started on what’s important now or make it a little harder to do something trivial instead.

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

I could get so busy going the second mile I wouldn’t get the first mile done.

Being asked to do X isn’t a good enough reason to do Y.

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

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.

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.

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

To make effortless progress on what matters, learning-sized mistakes must be encouraged.

letting go of the absurd pressure to always do everything perfectly.

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.”

“A word after a word after a word is power.”