Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

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 them in the right way.

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

What could happen in your life if the easy but pointless things became harder and the essential things became easier? 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? Such a shift would stack the deck in our favor. It would change everything. It does change everything.

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? Such a shift would stack the deck in our favor. It would change everything. It does change everything.

Third, the ball arcs through the air and goes into the basket. It makes that satisfying swish: the sound of a perfectly executed free throw. It’s not a fluke. They can do it again and again. This is what it feels like to achieve Effortless Results.

Part II: Effortless Action Once we are in the Effortless State, it becomes easier to take Effortless Action. But we may still encounter complexity that makes it hard to start or advance an essential project.

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.

There are two types of results: linear and residual. Whenever your efforts yield a one-time benefit, you are getting a linear result. Every day you start from zero; if you don’t put in the effort today then you don’t get the result today. It’s a one-to-one ratio; the amount of effort you put in equals the results received. But what if those results could flow to us repeatedly, without further effort on our part? With residual results you put in the effort once and reap the benefits again and again. 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.

Effortless Action alone produces linear results. But when we apply Effortless Action to high-leverage activities, the return on our effort compounds, like interest on a savings account. This is how we produce residual results.

Producing a great result is good. Producing a great result with ease is better. Producing a great result with ease again and again is best. That is w...

We’ve all experienced how the effortless way can feel. For example, have you ever been in a relaxed state and found it easier to get in “the zone”? stopped trying so hard and actually got better results? done something once that has benefited you multiple times? My motivation for writing this book is singular: to help you experience more of this, more of the time. Of course, you can’t make everything in your life effortless. But you can make more of the right things less impossible—then easier, then easy, and ultimately effortless.

The best free throw shooter ever is not Michael Jordan or Steph Curry. It’s Elena Delle Donne. Her success rate at the free throw line across her career is 93.4 percent. That’s not just the highest in WNBA history but higher than any player in NBA history as well. If you look at her postseason record it’s even higher: 96.4 percent. Put simply: she is the best free throw shooter ever.1 Her secret is to trust the simple process she has practiced since eighth grade. She steps up to the line, finds the dot with her right foot, lines up her feet, takes three dribbles, makes an L with her arm, then lifts and flicks.

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

The most important part of the process? “Not overthinking it. The biggest thing on the foul line is you can’t let...

You are like a supercomputer designed with extremely powerful capabilities. You’re built to be able to learn quickly, solve problems intuitively, and compute the right next action effortlessly. Under optimal conditions, your brain works at incredible speeds.2 But just like a supercomputer, your brain does not always perform optimally. Think about how a computer slows down when its hard drive gets cluttered with files and browsing data. The machine still has incredible computing power, but it’s less available to perform essential functions. Similarly, when your brain is filled with clutter—like outdated assumptions, negative emotions, and toxic thought patterns—you have less mental energy available to perform what’s most essential.

Similarly, when your brain is filled with clutter—like outdated assumptions, negative emotions, and toxic thought patterns—you have less mental energy available to perform what’s most essential.

The Effortless State is one in which you are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in that moment. You are able to do what matters most with ease.

“I could see it all for what it was: layers and layers of unnecessary complexity. I could see how it was expanding all the time and how I was suffocating underneath all of it.”

“What if they simply asked another student to record those lectures on a smartphone?” “The professor was delighted with the solution,” Kim said. And it cost her just a couple of minutes of planning instead of months of work for her whole videography team.

All too often, we sacrifice our time, our energy, and even our sanity, almost believing that sacrifice is essential in and of itself.

It’s curious to me how we default to sayings like “It won’t be easy, but it’s worth it” or “It’s going to be really hard to make that happen, but we should try.” It’s like we all automatically accept that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one.

The Path of Least Effort Our brain is wired to resist what it perceives as hard and welcome what it perceives as easy. This bias is sometimes called the cognitive ease principle, or the principle of least effort.3 It’s our tendency to take the path of least resistance to achieve what we want.

It’s our tendency to take the path of least resistance to achieve what we want. We don’t need to look far to see the principle in action. We buy something at the overpriced convenience store on the corner because it’s easier than getting in the car and driving to the store where prices are lower. We put our dishes in the sink instead of the dishwasher because one less step is required.

What if, rather than fighting our preprogrammed instinct to seek the easiest path, we could embrace it, even use it to our advantage? What if, instead of asking, “How can I tackle this really hard but essential project?,” we simply inverted the question and asked, “What if this essential project could be made easy?”

What if, instead of asking, “How can I tackle this really hard but essential project?,” we simply inverted the question and asked, “What if this essential project could be made easy?”

Here is what I learned: 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. 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.

Effortless Inversion Carl Jacobi, the nineteenth-century German mathematician, developed a reputation as someone who could solve especially hard and intractable problems. He learned that to do that most easily, Man muss immer umkehren, which translates to “One must invert, always invert.”4 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. There are two ways to achieve all the things that really matter. We can (a) gain superhuman powers so we can do all the impossibly hard but worthwhile work or (b) get better at making the impossibly hard but worthwhile work easier. Once we invert the question, even everyday tasks that seem too overwhelming to tackle become easier.

I walked outside and asked if he wanted the printer for free. He said yes, and took it. The problem was solved within two minutes of asking the question.

When we feel overwhelmed, it may not be because the situation is inherently overwhelming. It may be because we are overcomplicating something in our own heads. 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.

Can You Push Something Downhill? Marketing author Seth Godin once shared the following: “If you can think about how hard it is to push a business uphill, particularly when you’re just getting started, one answer is to say: ‘Why don’t you just start a different business you can push downhill?’”10

Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, has said, “I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of doing strategy is to solve the easiest problem.”

We think that to be extraordinarily successful we have to do the things that are hard and complicated. Instead, we can look for opportunities that...

When we remove the complexity, even the slightest effort can move what matters forward.

Take, for example, Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in history, who has described the investment strategy at Berkshire Hathaway as “lethargy bordering on sloth.”12 They are not looking to invest in companies that will require enormous effort to achieve profitability. They are looking for investments that are easy to say yes to: no-brainer businesses that are simple to run and have long-term competitive advantages.

In Buffett’s words, “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

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 th...

Why would we simply endure essential activities when we can enjoy them instead?

So often we separate important work from trivial play. People say, “I work hard and then I can play hard.” For many people there are essential things and then there are enjoyable things. But this false dichotomy works against us in two ways.

Believing essential activities are, almost by definition, tedious, we are more likely to put them off or avoid them completely. At the same time, our nagging guilt about all the essential work we could be doing instead sucks all the joy out of otherwise enjoyable experiences. Fun becomes “the dark playground.”5 Separating important work from play makes life harder than it needs to be.

By pairing essential activities with enjoyable ones, we can make tackling even the most tedious and overwhelming tasks more effortless.

pairing the essential activity with a reward. Once, after a week of travel, I came home to find a backlog of voicemails to respond to. This task initially felt arduous and burdensome. My first thought was “Why do I have so many messages?”—which indicates that I must have been a bit burned-out. But then I realized I was asking the wrong question. So instead I asked, “How can I make calling these people back enjoyable?” After just a few seconds the idea came to make the calls from my hot tub. That changed the whole experience. It put me in a good mood. I told each person that I was calling from the hot tub, and they laughed about it. When I’d finished calling everyone back I almost felt disappointed. I wished I had more people to call.

There is power in pairing our most enjoyable activities with our most essential ones. After all, you’re probably going to do the enjoyable things anyway. You’re going to watch your favorite show, or listen to the new audiobook you just discovered, or relax in your hot tub at some point. So why not pair it with running on the treadmill or doing the dishes or returning phone calls? Perhaps that seems obvious. But how long have you tried to force yourself to do the important but difficult thing through sheer determination, instead of making it fun? One leader I have worked with sees running on a treadmill every day as an essential habit. Yet he was inconsistent about it until he paired it with an enjoyable daily practice he never missed: listening to his favorite daily podcast. Now he gets to listen to the podcast only if he is walking or running on the treadmill.

One leader I have worked with sees running on a treadmill every day as an essential habit. Yet he was inconsistent about it until he paired it with an enjoyable daily practice he never missed: listening to his favorite daily podcast. Now he gets to listen to the podcast only if he is walking or running on the treadmill. He doesn’t reward himself after he has finished his workout; he rewards himself during. Ever since he made this essential practice enjoyable, he has found it easy to continue doing it consistently.

He doesn’t reward himself after he has finished his workout; he re...

In that moment I clearly saw that not one part of me actually wanted to own a Stormtrooper costume. The idea had been added as a “to-do” in my brain three decades before, then had slipped beneath my consciousness. Evidently, it had been in my head all this time, taking up mental space.

Do you have any items like this, living rent-free in your mind? Outdated goals, suggestions, or ideas that snuck into your brain long ago and took up permanent residence? Mindsets that have outlived their usefulness but have been part of you for so long, you barely even notice them?

Stormtroopers take many forms: regrets that continue to haunt us, grudges we can’t seem to let go of, expectations that were realistic at some point but are now getting in our way. These intruders are like unnecessary applications running in the background of your computer, slowing down all its other functionality. At first they might not seem to affect your speed and agility. But as they keep accumulating, one after another, eventually your operating system starts to run slower.

Have you ever found that the more you complain—and the more you read and hear other people complain—the easier it is to find things to complain about? On the other hand, have you ever found that the more grateful you are, the more you have to be grateful for?