Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

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.

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).

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.

Being good at what nobody is doing is better than being great at what everyone is doing. But being an expert in something nobody is doing is exponentially more valuable. To reap the residual results of knowledge, the first step is to leverage what others know. But the ultimate goal is to identify knowledge that is unique to you, and build on it. Is there something that seems hard for other people but easy for you? Something that draws on what you already know, making it easier to continuously learn and grow your competence? That is an opportunity for you to create unique knowledge.

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

You gain credibility. People come to you. Opportunities come to you. You gain incredible leverage when you are among the only people with that precise expertise. In other words, once you develop a reputation for knowing what no one else knows, opportunities flow to you for years.