Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

by Greg McKeown

“Working longer and harder had been the solution to every problem,” McGinnis said. But all of a sudden, he realized, “The marginal return of working harder was, in fact, negative.”

Or he could find an easier way to achieve the success he wanted. He chose the third option. He stepped down from his role at AIG but stayed on as a consultant. He stopped working eighty hours a week. He started going home at five. He no longer emailed on the weekends. He also stopped treating sleep like a necessary evil. He started walking, running, and eating better. He lost twenty-five pounds. He started enjoying his life, and his work, again.

Strangely, some of us respond to feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by vowing to work even harder and longer. It doesn’t help that our culture glorifies burnout as a measure of success and self-worth. The implicit message is that if we aren’t perpetually exhausted, we must not be doing enough. That great things are reserved for those who bleed, for those who almost break. Crushing volume is somehow now the goal.

I had always held to: that to achieve everything we want without becoming impossibly busy or overextended, we simply need to discipline ourselves to only say “yes” to essential activities and “no” to everything else. But now I found myself wondering: what does one do when they’ve stripped life down to the essentials and it’s still too much?

if you prioritize the most important things first, then there will be room in your life not only for what matters most but also for other things too. But do the reverse, and you’ll get the trivial things done but run out of space for the things that really matter.

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.

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. For some, the idea of working less hard feels uncomfortable. We feel lazy. We fear we’ll fall behind. We feel guilty for not “going the extra mile” each time.

The countless distractions of daily life make it difficult to see what matters clearly. So the first step toward making things more effortless is to clear the clutter in our heads and our hearts.

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.

I made a disciplined pursuit of uncovering answers to the essential question “How can I make it easier to do what matters most?”

In other words, the secret to Donne’s success is her ability to get into what I call the Effortless State. 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.

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.

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.

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?

Our survival as a species grows out of innate preference for taking the path of least effort.

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?”

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 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.

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.

Southwest cofounder Herb Kelleher insisted there had to be a better way: “We are sitting in a management meeting trying to figure out what to do,” he recalls, “when someone piped up and asked ‘Do we really give a damn what United thinks a ticket is?9 Isn’t it more important what we think a ticket is?’ Reflexively, we all said, ‘No, we only care what we think a ticket is.’ So then the manager says, ‘Then why don’t we just print out a single piece of paper that says ‘This is a Ticket.’”

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 are highly valuable and simple and easy.

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?”

Giving to charity is important. Participating in a day of comedy is enjoyable. By bringing charity and comedy together, Tewson made giving easier. As a result, not only do more people participate, they actually look forward to participating again, year after year.

But essential work can be enjoyable once we put aside the Puritan notion that anything worth doing must entail backbreaking effort. 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.

But how long have you tried to force yourself to do the important but difficult thing through sheer determination, instead of making it fun?

Don’t underestimate the power of the right soundtrack to ditch the drudgery and get into a groove.

often did. Armed with our building blocks of joy, we decided to build a new experience we’d look forward to: We got out the dark-chocolate-covered almonds. We put on “Feeling Good” by Michael Bublé in the background (on repeat). We treated it more like a date than a mundane obligation. That was when I noticed an element of the meeting I’d previously overlooked: the whole exercise involved tidying up a messy area, the family finances! Just noticing that creating order out of chaos was a part of the experience gave me a tangible and immediate benefit. We turned a task we had in the past barely endured into a ritual we looked forward to.

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

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.

We live in a complaint culture that gets high on expressing outrage: especially on social media, which often seems like an endless stream of grumbling and whining about what is unsatisfactory or unacceptable.

Complaining is the quintessential example of something that is “easy but trivial.” In fact, it’s one of the easiest things for us to do. But toxic thoughts like these, however trivial, quickly accumulate. And the more mental space they occupy, the harder it becomes to return to the Effortless State.

Gratitude is a powerful, catalytic thing. It starves negative emotions of the oxygen they need to survive. It also generates a positive, self-sustaining system wherever and whenever it is applied.

It would have been easy for Anna to get pulled into the negativity. It would have been easy for her to come home in the evening and complain about the other woman’s complaining. Instead, she decided to actively look for things to be grateful for in her co-worker. At first, this was hard to do. But then Anna realized that a lot of the negatives about this woman, if looked at a little differently, could be inverted into positives.

So I resolved to attach gratitude to each and every complaint. When I caught myself saying, “Getting through airport security was a hassle today,” I would add, “I am thankful to be safely on the plane.”

After a couple of days of using this rule, I noticed I would start to catch myself midcomplaint and quickly finish my sentence with words of gratitude. It wasn’t long before I would catch myself simply thinking about complaining—and I would think of something I was thankful for instead. At first this shift was deliberate and hard; then it was deliberate and easier; then, eventually, effortless.

It was this: “Hire slow, fire fast.”10 It is a good rule of thumb for growing a business and a good rule of thumb for building a grudge-free life. With grudges, we should hire slow (or not at all) and fire fast.

“For after all,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “the best thing one can do when it is raining, is to let it rain.”13

Love

Studies show that peak physical and mental performance requires a rhythm of exerting and renewing energy—and not just for athletes. In fact, one study found that 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.3 Meanwhile, those who took fewer or shorter breaks performed less well.

try this simple rule: Do not do more today than you can completely recover from today. Do not do more this week than you can completely recover from this week.

We can do the following: Dedicate mornings to essential work. Break down that work into three sessions of no more than ninety minutes each. Take a short break (ten to fifteen minutes) in between sessions to rest and recover.

Small NBA players typically train their agility and quickness. But Curry took a different approach; he opted to focus on training his brain.

This dizzying exercise is designed to improve Curry’s attention by building what Payne calls “neurocognitive efficiency.” With each drill in the sequence, he’s processing more and more information while remaining focused on the task.

The results revealed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that professional athletes were better at processing complex, fast-moving information than the other groups. But even more useful for those of us unlikely to make the NBA was the fact that all groups improved, very quickly, with practice.7 Everyone got better at focusing on the important and ignoring the irrelevant.

To be in the Effortless State is to be aware, alert, and present, even in the face of fast-moving information and the endless onslaught of distractions.

There is no such thing as an effortless relationship. But there are ways we can make it easier to keep a relationship strong. We don’t need to agree with the other person on everything. But we do need to be present with them, to really notice them, to give them our full attention—maybe not always, but as frequently as we can. Being present is, as Eckhart Tolle has said, “ease itself.”10

When we are fully present with another person, we see them more clearly. And we help them see themselves more clearly as well.

Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance. Economists call this the law of diminishing returns: