Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

START Make the first action the most obvious one. Break the first obvious action down into the tiniest, concrete step. Then name it.

Gain maximum learning from minimal viable effort. Start with a ten-minute microburst of focused activity to boost motivation and energy.

SIMPLIFY To simplify the process, don’t simplify the steps: simply remove them.

Recognize that not everything requires you to go the extra mile. Maximize the steps not taken.

Measure progress in the tiniest o...

PROGRESS When you start a project, start with rubbish. Adopt a “zero-draft” approach and just put some ...

Protect your progress from the harsh critic in your head.

PACE Set an effortless pace: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Reject the false economy of “powering through.” Create the right range: I will never do less...

This is what it means to achieve Effortless Results: not to achieve a result once through intense effort, but to effortlessly achieve a result again and again.

A person who does something every day, habitually, without thinking, without effort, is benefiting from residual action.

Residual results are like compound interest. Benjamin Franklin summarized the idea of compounding interest best when he said, “Money makes money.2 And the money that money makes, makes money.” Put another way, when we are generating compound interest, we are creating effortless wealth. This principle can be applied to many other pursuits as well.

Powerless Effort Versus Effortless Power A lever is a simple machine that makes work easier. It’s made up of a rigid beam that rests on top of a fulcrum. The longer the distance between the fulcrum and the spot on the beam where force is exerted, the less force is required to move a heavy object or lift a heavy load. The lever, in other words, multiplies the impact of the effort we put in. Whenever you have played on a seesaw, used a bottle opener or crowbar, or rowed a boat, you were using a lever. Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and mechanical engineer, is considered the first to have discovered the principle of leverage.4 He is thought to have said that if he had a long enough lever and the right place to stand, he could move the world. I am fascinated by how we can apply the principle of leverage in other areas. Here are a few (of many) examples:

Lever Modest Input, Residual Results Learning Personal capability compounds over time.

You develop a reputation once, but then opportunities flow to you for years.

You understand first principles deeply and then can easily apply them again and again. You establish a habit once, but ...

Teaching Sharing knowledge is powerful. Teach others to teach, and you get exponential impact. You craft the right story once, and it can live on for millennia. Th...

Automating Automate something once, and then forget about it as it continu...

Write up a cheat sheet once, and use it every day afterward. Write lines of code, or hire someone to write them, and then they will perfo...

You can write a book once, but then millions can read it even hun...

Trusting If you hire the right person once, they’ll produce results hundreds of times.

When you reduce friction on or across teams up front, collaboration flows smoothly on project after project. When you build a unified team where everybody knows who is doing what, it becomes easier to stay aligned on roles, responsibilities, regulations, rewards, and desired results. Preventing Solving a problem before it happens can save you endless time and aggravation later on. Strike a problem at its roots, and you can prevent it from resurfacing again and again. Preventing a crisis now is always easier than managing it in the future.

LEARN Leverage the Best of What Others Know

Of course, Newton’s writings didn’t offer step-by-step instructions for how to build an automotive engine, a jet plane, or a spacecraft. Instead, they offered something far more valuable: a set of principles that could later be applied to automotive engineering, aeronautics, space travel, and more.

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.

Seek Principles

When you understand why something happened or how something works, you can apply that knowledge again and again.

For example: A student who learns the fundamental principles of any discipline can then easily apply that understanding in a variety of ways over time. An entrepreneur who learns what their customers really want can apply that knowledge to any number of different products and services.

Learning the right thing once is a bargain. A one-time investment of energy up front yields Effortless Results again and again over time.

Then he looked for commonalities: principles that could explain how things worked consistently, across all three buckets. In bucket 1 he found Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In other words, the more force you exert on something, the more force that thing exerts back. In bucket 2 he found Mark Twain’s example of what happens if you pick up a cat by its tail: it will attack you. In bucket 3 he found something similar: how we treat other people is how they will treat us back. The commonality was a principle that he dubbed “mirrored reciprocation,” or, in simpler terms, “You get what you give.” Just think of all the ways we can apply that principle! Send a thank-you note, and you will get one back. Smile sincerely at someone, and they will smile back at you. Offer information to someone in a conversation, and they will tend to share information with you in return.

Grow a Knowledge Tree

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.” In other words, when we have the solid fundamentals of knowledge, we have somewhere to hang the additional information we learn. We can anchor it in the mental models we already understand.

Learn the Best of What Others Have Already Figured Out

A business raises the price of its product, yet sells more of that product. This does not make sense if you consider only the discipline of economics and its rule of supply and demand. But if you also consider the discipline of psychology, you understand that buyers think that a higher price means higher quality and therefore buy more.

the best new ideas usually come from combining existing knowledge in one field with an “intrusion of unusual combinations” from other disciplines.12

The exchange of ideas across disciplines breeds novelty. And turning the conventional into something novel is often the key to effortless creativity—not only in science but in areas ranging from investing, to music, to making movies.

How to Get the Most Out of Reading 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.

Reading a book is among the most high-leverage activities on earth.

To get the most out of your reading I recommend the following principles: Use the Lindy Effect.15 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.

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.

Know What No One Else Knows

In the world of high jumping there is before October 20, 1968, and there is after. Fosbury won gold that day at the Mexico Olympics, stunning the crowd with what had now been (nonderisively) dubbed the Fosbury Flop. Before him, no Olympic jumper had faced skyward. After him, all world record holders did. The power of Fosbury’s technique lay not only in its solid mechanical foundation but in its uniqueness.

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.

Star

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. For example: An entrepreneur with a great reputation will have investor capital flow to them again and again. A speaker with a great reputation will be offered more bookings than they can possibly accept. A teacher with a great reputation will have students lining up to take their class semester after semester.

A lawyer with a great reputation will have their pick of cases. A photojournalist with a great reputation will be sent on the best assignments, all over the world.

It happened to me with Essentialism. I wrote the book once, but readers reach out to me on a daily basis still. Gaining unique knowledge takes time, dedication, and effort. But invest in it once, and y...