Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

When you simply can’t try any harder, it’s time to find a different path.

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

Here is what I learned: I was doing all the right things for the right reasons. But I was doing them in the wrong way.

I was like a weightlifter trying to lift using the muscles in my lower back. A swimmer who hadn’t learned to breathe properly. A baker who was painstakingly kneading each loaf of bread by hand.

Not everything has to be so hard. Getting to the next level doesn’t have to mean chronic exhaustion. Making a contribution doesn’t have to come at the expense of your mental and physical health.

When the essentials become too hard to handle, you can either give up on them or you can find an easier way.

Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing ...

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

If the essential projects you’ve been putting off became enjoyable, while the pointless distractions lost their appeal completely?

When our brains are at full capacity, everything feels harder.

Outdated assumptions and emotions make new information harder

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

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

you can learn simple tactics to rid yourself of all the clutter slowing down the hard drive of your mind.

Even the smallest, most reasonable requests—a client asks for a piece of information via a confusing voicemail, or your child wants to be picked up from piano lessons—fill you with resentment.

Then, after a warm meal, a hot shower, and a good night’s sleep, things look completely different. You wake up clearheaded, grateful for another day.

Well-intentioned people had

added but never subtracted. They had taken work that used to be simple and made it maddeningly, unnecessarily complicated.

What if the biggest thing keeping us from doing what matters is the false assumption that it has to take tremendous effort? 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?

trying too hard makes it harder to get the results you want. Here is what I realized: behind almost every failure of my whole life I had made the same error. When I’d failed, it was rarely because I hadn’t tried hard enough, it was because I’d been trying too hard.

To invert means to turn an assumption or approach upside down, to work backward, to ask, “What if the opposite were true?” Inversion can help you discover obvious insights you have missed because you’re looking at the problem from only one point of view. It can highlight errors in our thinking. It can open our minds to new ways of doing things.

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.

When a strategy is so complex that each step feels akin to pushing a boulder up a hill, you should pause. Invert the problem. Ask, “What’s the simplest way to achieve this result?”

Why would we simply endure essential activities when we can enjoy them instead? By pairing essential activities with enjoyable ones, we can make tackling even the most tedious and overwhelming tasks more effortless.