Effortless by Greg Mckeown
Juan Carlos Zambrano
Gerente de Finanzas @ Tecnofarma Bolivia | Coaching ontologico
Introduction
NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE SO HARD
When you simply can’t try any harder, it’s time to find a different path.
What about you? Do you ever feel as though
These people are disciplined and focused. They are engaged and motivated. And yet, they are utterly exhausted
The Effortless Way
There is an ebb and flow to life. Rhythms are in everything we do. There are times to push hard and times to rest and recuperate. But these days many of us are pushing harder and harder all the time. There is no cadence, only grinding effort
Life is hard, really hard, in all sorts of ways, ranging from the complicated to the weighty, the sad to the exhausting. Disappointments are hard. Paying the bills is hard. Strained relationships are hard. Raising children is hard. Losing a loved one is hard. There are periods in our lives when every day can be hard.
This book may not make every hard thing easy to approach and carry, but I believe it can make many hard things easier
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
Burnout is not a badge of honor
It is true that hard work can equal better results. But this is true only to a point. After all, there’s an upper limit to how much time and effort we can invest. And the more depleted we get, the more our return on that effort dwindles. This cycle can continue until we are burned out and exhausted, and still haven’t produced the results we really want. You probably know this. You may be experiencing it right now.
But what if, instead, we took the opposite approach? If instead of pushing ourselves to, and in some cases well past, our limit, we sought out an easier path?
The Dilemma
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.
But as I sat in my hotel room that night, I wondered: What do you do if there are too many big rocks? What if the absolutely essential work simply does not fit within the limits of the container?
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.
I suspect you know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m guessing you know what it’s like to feel highly engaged by your work but on the edge of exhaustion. To be doing the best you can but still feel it isn’t enough. To have more essentials than you can fit into your day. To want to do more but simply don’t have the space. To be making progress on things that matter but too weary to derive any joy from your successes
We all want to do what matters. We want to get in shape, save for a home or for retirement, be fulfilled in our careers, and build closer relationships with people we work and live with. The problem isn’t a lack of motivation; if it were, we would all already be at our ideal weight, live within our means, have our dream job, and enjoy deep and meaningful relationships with all the people who matter most to us.
Motivation is not enough because it is a limited resource. To truly make progress on the things that matter, we need a whole new way to work and live.
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. This mindset, conscious or not, may have its roots in the Puritan idea that the act of doing hard things always has an inherent value. Puritanism went beyond embracing the hard; it extended to also distrusting the easy. But achieving our goals efficiently isn’t unambitious. It’s smart. It’s a liberating alternative to both hard work and laziness: one that allows us to preserve our sanity while still accomplishing everything we want.
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.
That’s the value proposition of Effortless. It’s about a whole new way to work and live. A way to achieve more with ease—to achieve more because you are at ease. A way to lighten life’s inevitable burdens, and get the right results without burning out.
Nothing but Net
This book is organized into three simple parts:
Part I: Effortless State
When our brains are at full capacity, everything feels harder. Fatigue slows us down. Outdated assumptions and emotions make new information harder to process. 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.
You have likely experienced this before. It’s when you feel rested, at peace, and focused. You’re fully present in the moment. You have a heightened awareness of what matters here and now. You feel capable of taking the right action.
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.
Part III: Effortless Results
When we take Effortless Action, we make it easier to get the results we want.
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
Anything Can Be Made Effortless, but Not Everything
Practice you will start to see that the easier way was there all along, just hidden from your view.
We’ve all experienced how the effortless way can feel. For example, have you ever
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
PART 1 - EFFORTLESS STATE
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.
Under optimal conditions, your brain works at incredible speeds. But just like a supercomputer, your brain does not always perform optimally
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.
A concept in cognitive psychology known as perceptual load theory explains why this is the case. Our brain’s processing capacity is large, but limited. It already processes over six thousand thoughts a day. So when we encounter new information, our brains have to make a choice about how to allocate the remaining cognitive resources. And because our brains are programmed to prioritize emotions with high “affective value”—like fear, resentment, or anger—these strong emotions will generally win out, leaving us with even fewer mental resources to devote to making progress on the things that matter
When your computer is running slowly, all you have to do is hit a few buttons to clear all the browsing data, and immediately the machine works smoother and faster. In a similar way, you can learn simple tactics to rid yourself of all the clutter slowing down
Effortless State, you feel lighter, in the two senses of the word. First, you feel less heavy—unburdened. You aren’t as weighed down. Suddenly you have more energy.
But lighter also means more full of light. When you remove the burdens in your heart and the distractions in your mind, you are able to see more clearly. You can discern the right action and light the right path.
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
Chapter 1 - INVERT
What If This Could Be Easy?
Hard Work May Not Be Well Named
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?
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. It’s our tendency to take the path of least resistance to achieve what we want.
From an evolutionary perspective, this bias for ease is useful. For most of human history it’s been crucial to our survival and progress. Just imagine if humans had a bias for the path of most resistance
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. This mindset, conscious or not, may have its roots in the Puritan idea that the act of doing hard things always has an inherent value. Puritanism went beyond embracing the hard; it extended to also distrusting the easy.
How to Try 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
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
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.
There’s no question that some goals are incredibly, almost impossibly, hard to achieve. However, even these can sometimes be made less hard, once we find an indirect approach.
Free of the assumptions that make your problem look hard, you would be surprised how often an easier solution appears
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?’”
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 we remove the complexity, even the slightest effort can move what matters forward
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?
In the illustration on this page, we see that when we remove the complexity, even the slightest effort can move what matters forward. Momentum grows with the force of gravity. Execution becomes more effortless.
When we shelve the false assumption that the easier path has to be the inferior path, obstacles fade away. And as these obstacles disappear, we can begin to uncover our Effortless State.
CHAPTER 2 - ENJOY
What If This Could Be Fun?
We all have things we do consistently not because they are important but because we actively look forward to doing them. Maybe it’s listening to a particular podcast
At the same time, we all have important activities we don’t do consistently because we actively dread doing them. Maybe it’s exercising
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
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
It’s no secret that many essential activities that are not particularly joyful in the moment produce moments of joy later on. If you exercise and eat better, you will eventually be healthier and lose weight
But essential activities don’t have to be enjoyed only in retrospect. We can also experience joy in the activity itself. We simply reduce the lag time between the action and satisfaction by pairing the essential activity with a reward
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
Don’t underestimate the power of the right soundtrack to ditch the drudgery and get into a groove
It’s not just that work and play can co-exist, it’s that they can complement each other. Together they make it easier to tap into our creativity and come up with novel ideas and solutions
In the same way that LEGO created Automatic Binding Bricks—designed to be stacked and attached in all sorts of combinations—you too can stack and combine your most essential and most joyful activities to construct new effortless experiences
Much has been written on habits. Less has been written about rituals. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably. But behavioral economists insist they are not the same thing at all.
Rituals are similar to habits in the sense that “when I do X, I also do Y.” But they are different from habits because of one key component: the psychological satisfaction you experience when you do them. Habits explain “what” you do, but rituals are about “how” you do it.
Rituals make essential habits easier to sustain by infusing the habits with meaning. For example, think of Marie Kondo’s approach to tidying up. She doesn’t simply invite us to get rid of the things cluttering our closets, she suggests a ritual for letting go. We are to thank the item we are discarding. We are to think about the ways in which items create joy.
Our rituals are habits we have put our thumbprint on. Our rituals are habits with a soul.
They have the power to transform a tedious task into an experience that creates joy.
When we invite joy into our daily routine, we are no longer yearning for the far-off day when it might arrive. That day is always today. When we attach small fragments of wonder to mundane tasks, we are no longer waiting for the time when we can finally allow ourselves to relax. That time is always now. As fun and laughs lighten more of our moments, we are drawn back further toward our natural, playful Effortless State
Chapter 3 - RELEASE
The Power of Letting Go
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
Focus on What You Have
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?
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.
When you focus on something you are thankful for, the effect is instant. It immediately shifts you from a lack state (regrets, worries about the future, the feeling of being behind) and puts you into a have state (what is going right, what progress you are making, what potential exists in this moment). It reminds you of all the resources, all the assets, all the skills you have at your disposal—so you can use them to more easily do what matters most.
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.
The broaden-and-build theory in psychology offers an explanation for why this is the case. Positive emotions open us to new perspectives and possibilities. Our openness encourages creative ideas and fosters social bonds. These things change us. They unlock new physical, intellectual, psychological, and social resources. They create “an upward spiral” that improves our odds of coping with the next challenge we face.
When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack.
Complaining, too, creates a self-sustaining cycle. But instead of making it easier to do what matters, this system makes it harder. A “downward spiral.” When we experience negative emotions our mindset narrows (think: fight, flight, or freeze). We are less open to new ideas and to other people. This weakens our personal physical, intellectual, and psychological resources. It depletes our reserves, making it harder to cope with the very challenges or frustrations that provoked our complaints in the first place. And so it goes
Put simply, a system is self-sustaining if it requires less and less investment of energy over time. Once it’s set in motion, maintaining it becomes easier, then easy, then eventually effortless.
We can apply this idea to make gratitude a habit, by using the following recipe: After I complain I will say something I am thankful for.
The moment I started applying this recipe, I was shocked to realize how much I was complaining. I think of myself as a positive, optimistic person. But once I started paying attention, I realized that I was actually complaining quite a lot, often without any awareness.
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.
A good first step we can take is to ask this unusual question: What job have I hired this grudge to do?
According to the late Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who had been named the world’s top management thinker, people don’t really buy products or services. Rather, they “hire” them to do a job.
In a similar way, we often hire a grudge to fulfill an emotional need that is not currently being met. But as we conduct a performance review, we discover grudges perform poorly. Grudges cost us resources but don’t deliver a satisfying return on our investment. So we must relieve a grudge of its duties.
Sometimes we hire a grudge to make us feel in control. We try to prove to ourselves and others that we are right and they are wrong. At first this can make us feel superior, even powerful. It gives us a sense of control, but one that is fleeting and false, because in reality a grudge controls you
There are times we hire a grudge to give us attention.
We can hire a grudge to get us off the hook
We hire a grudge to protect ourselves.
A good rule of thumb for building a grudge-free life. With grudges, we should hire slow (or not at all) and fire fast.
Accept What You Can’t Control
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” said Maya Angelou.
Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “the best thing one can do when it is raining, is to let it rain.
When we let go of our need to punish those who’ve hurt us, it’s not the culprit who is freed. We are freed. When we surrender grudges and complaints in favor of grace and compassion, it’s not an equal exchange. It’s a coup. And with every trade, we return closer to the calm of our Effortless State
Chapter 4 - REST
The Art of Doing Nothing
Rest proved an antidote for both pre-existing and future stress. It kept him grounded in the Effortless State
It may seem odd that we need to learn how to take a break. But in our 24/7 always-on culture, some people simply don’t know how to relax. Ironically, for them, doing nothing is painfully hard
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. Meanwhile, those who took fewer or shorter breaks performed less well.
“To maximize gains from long-term practice,” the study’s lead author, K. Anders Ericsson, concluded, “individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”
The easier way is to replenish our physical and mental energy continuously by taking short breaks. We can plan those breaks into our day. We can be like the peak performers who take advantage of their bodies’ natural rhythm.
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
When we are struggling, instead of doubling down on our efforts, we might consider pausing the action—even for one minute. We don’t need to fight these natural rhythms. We can flow with them. We can use them to our advantage. We can alternate between periods of exertion and renewal
Does it sometimes seem like you’re sleeping a lot less than you used to? Collectively we all are; research shows that today we get less sleep—almost two hours less on average—than fifty years ago
Getting more sleep may be the single greatest gift we can give our bodies, our minds, and even, it turns out, our bottom lines
The Silicon Valley mythology would have us believe that the founders of the most disruptive, world-changing companies have no time for something as trivial as sleep. After all, the origin stories of most successful start-ups tend to involve caffeine-fueled founders coding in a trance-like state for days and nights on end, until they ultimately emerge, pale and wild-eyed from lack of sleep, with their billion-dollar idea.
Research shows that Wise’s goals were well chosen. Deep sleep is crucial to many aspects of health; even if we manage a full night’s sleep, unless enough of that sleep is in a deep state, we’ll suffer from sleep deprivation. Unlike in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, in the deep sleep stage, your body and brain waves slow down
To try to maximize both deep sleep and sleep quality, Wise took some simple steps. He went to bed at the same time every night, turned off digital devices an hour before bed, and before turning in, took a hot shower. He then tracked his sleep on his smartwatch for a month. He noted his heart rate, time in bed, time asleep, quality of sleep, and percentage of deep sleep.
Why the hot shower? Recent sleep science found that participants who used water-based passive body heating—also known as a bath—before bed slept sooner, longer, and better.
The idea of taking regular naps is appealing to most people I have spoken with. Yet they find it almost impossible to do in practice. What makes it so hard?
We are conditioned to feel guilty when we nap instead of “getting things done.” It’s a perfect storm of the fear of missing out, the false economy of powering through, and the stigma of napping as something just plain lazy or even childish.
It’s about time we started thinking about naps differently. The recipe for taking an Effortless Nap is as follows:
Notice when your fatigue has gotten to the point that you feel it is real work to concentrate.
Block out light and noise using an eye mask and a noise canceller or earplugs.
Set an alarm for a desired time.
As you try to fall asleep, banish all thoughts about what you “could be doing.” Your to-do’s will all still be there when you wake up. Only now, you’ll be able to get them done faster, and with greater ease
Chapter 5 - NOTICE
How to See Clearly
It is the difference between seeing and observing, between watching and noticing, between being and being present.
Listening isn’t hard; it’s stopping our mind from wandering that’s hard.
Being in the moment isn’t hard; not thinking about the past and future all the time is hard.
It’s not the noticing itself that’s hard. It’s ignoring all the noise in our environment that is hard.
At least it is at first. But once we remove some of the thoughts, the worries, and the external distractions clouding our vision, we see that Holmes’s “magic” becomes a little easier.
Distractions that keep us from being present in the moment can be like cataracts for our minds. They make noticing what matters harder. And the longer they are left untreated, the more debilitating they become. Less and less light comes in. We miss more and more. Eventually we become blind to what really matters most
Fortunately, cataracts can be removed. As we remove the cataract, the light gets to the retina again, and we can see the things we were missing before, clearly and easily
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. And that’s no small thing, because in that state of heightened attention we see differently. We are able to laser in on the things that are important. We notice things that were always right under our noses but that we missed before.
Too often we are with people physically but are still not present with them mentally. We struggle to truly notice them, to see them clearly
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.”
When we’re fully present with people, it has an impact. Not just in that moment either. The experience of feeling like the most important person in the world even for the briefest of moments can stay with us for a disproportionate time after the moment has passed. There is a curiously magical power of presence
When we are fully present with another person, we see them more clearly. And we help them see themselves more clearly as well
The Clearness Committee
First, when people fear being judged, it drowns out their inner voice. They are able to focus only on what they think we want to hear, rather than on what they actually see or feel. Second, the moment our judgments and opinions are voiced, they compete for the limited mental space others need to draw their own conclusions
Contrast this with a practice used by the Quakers called the Clearness Committee.
When someone in the community (the “focus person”) is facing an important dilemma, they often ask a few people they trust (the “Elders”) to come together to form a committee. The purpose is not for the committee to tell them what to do. The purpose is to help them figure it out for themselves. And in order to do this, the committee must remove judgment from the equation.
The greatest gift we can offer to others is not our skill or our money or our effort. It is simply us. None of us have infinite reserves of focus and attention to give away. But in the Effortless State, it becomes far easier to give the gift of our intentional focus to the people and things we really care about
How can we call up this state of heightened perception and focus on demand? I recommend the following daily practice
1: Prepare Your Space (two minutes)
Find a quiet place. Turn off your phone. Let people know you will be taking ten minutes.
Take a moment to clear off your desk. To put things back in their proper place.
2: Rest Your Body (two minutes)
Sit comfortably with your back straight. Close your eyes. Roll your shoulders. Move your head from side to side. Release tension in every part of your body. Breathe normally and naturally.
3: Relax Your Mind (two minutes)
It’s natural for your mind to be full of thoughts. Just acknowledge them. Notice them. Let them come and let them go.
4: Release Your Heart (two minutes)
If thoughts of someone who has wronged you arise, say, “I forgive you,” and imagine you are cutting a chain that tethers you to them.
5: Breathe in Gratitude (two minutes)
Relive a moment in your life that you are really thankful for. Experience it again, using all of your senses. Remember where you were, how you felt, and who you were with. Really breathe the gratitude in. Repeat this step three times.
An Effortless Summary
Part I: Effortless State
What is the Effortless State?
The Effortless State is an experience many of us have had when we are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely aware, alert, present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in this moment. You are able to focus on what matters most with ease.
INVERT
Instead of asking, “Why is this so hard?,” invert the question by asking, “What if this could be easy?
Challenge the assumption that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one.
Make the impossible possible by finding an indirect approach.
When faced with work that feels overwhelming, ask, “How am I making this harder than it needs to be?
ENJOY
Pair the most essential activities with the most enjoyable ones.
Accept that work and play can co-exist.
Turn tedious tasks into meaningful rituals.
Allow laughter and fun to lighten more of your moments.
RELEASE
Let go of emotional burdens you don’t need to keep carrying.
Remember: When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack.
Use this habit recipe: “Each time I complain I will say something I am thankful for.
Relieve a grudge of its duties by asking, “What job have I hired this grudge to do?
REST
Discover the art of doing nothing.
Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow.
Break down essential work into three sessions of no more than ninety minutes each.
Take an effortless nap.
NOTICE
Achieve a state of heightened awareness by harnessing the power of presence.
Train your brain to focus on the important and ignore the irrelevant.
To see others more clearly, set aside your opinions, advice, and judgment, and put their truth above your own.
Clear the clutter in your physical environment before clearing the clutter in your mind
PART II EFFORTLESS ACTION
Larry Silverberg is a “dynamicist” at North Carolina State University. That simply means he is an expert in the movement of physical things. For example, he has studied the movement of millions of free throws over twenty years.
One thing he has found over the years is that the most important factor for successfully shooting a free throw is the speed at which you release the ball. To achieve the kinesthetic sweet spot takes practice and muscle memory. The goal is to get to the point where you try without trying—where your movement becomes smooth, natural, and instinctive.
That is what is meant by Effortless Action.
If you try too hard when shooting a free throw, you’ll tense up and move too fast. This is similar to what happens to many overachievers who have been conditioned to believe that more effort leads to better outcomes. When they invest a lot of effort and don’t see the results they want, they lean in harder
Economists call this the law of diminishing returns: after a certain point, each extra unit of input produces a decreasing rate of output
Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance
Negative returns: the point where we are not merely getting a smaller return on each additional investment, we are actually decreasing our overall output
It’s not just that overall output suffers; it’s a recipe for burnout as well
What’s curious about this approach is how different it is from our lived experience. Haven’t you found that when you do your very best work, the experience feels effortless? You act almost without thinking. You make things happen without even trying to make things happen. You are in the zone, in flow, in peak performance
This is the sweet spot for doing what matters.
In Eastern philosophy the masters call this sweet spot wu wei (pronounced Oo-Way).
The goal is to accomplish what matters by trying less, not more: to achieve our purpose with bridled intention, not overexertion. This is what is meant by Effortless Action
Chapter 6 - DEFINE
What “Done” Looks Like
If you want to make something hard, indeed truly impossible, to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible. That’s because you cannot, by definition, complete a project without a clearly defined end point. You can spin your wheels working on it. You can tinker with it. You can (and likely will) abandon it. But to get an important project done it’s absolutely necessary to define what “done” looks like.
This insight may sound obvious. But if you think of most of the essential projects you are working on, how clear is your idea of what completion looks like?
Sometimes important projects remain undone because we keep tinkering with them endlessly
To avoid diminishing returns on your time and effort, establish clear conditions for what “done” looks like, get there, then stop
We all have essential projects we want to complete. But often we find ourselves spinning our wheels, unable to get our project over the line. Often, the solution is simply to decide what “getting it over the line” actually looks like.
It’s surprising how much clarity on this you can achieve in a one-minute burst of concentration. For example, when you have an important project to deliver, take sixty seconds to close your eyes and actually visualize what it would look like to cross it off as done: “I’ve addressed each of the questions the client posed and proofread it once.” It takes only one minute of concentration to clarify what “done” looks like.
“Done” isn’t always going to apply to an individual task or project. We have all experienced the overwhelmed feeling that comes from staring down the barrel of a seemingly infinite “to do” list—one that has usually become longer by the end of the day than it was at the beginning
A Done for the Day list is not a list of everything we theoretically could do today, or a list of everything we would love to get done. These things will inevitably extend far beyond the limited time available. Instead, this is a list of what will constitute meaningful and essential progress. As you write the list, one test is to imagine how you will feel once this work is completed
“Swedish Death Cleaning” means getting rid of the clutter you have accumulated through your life while you are still alive. It’s an alternative to the more typical practice of simply leaving this task for your loved ones to do for you later. It may sound morbid, but it can be a liberating process. You are getting your house in order.
The philosophy behind Swedish Death Cleaning can apply to the way we live in other ways as well. For many years I have been inspired by the idea that, whether we’re aware of it or not, each one of us has an essential mission in life. We all harbor a sense of purpose, unique purpose, and it is our life’s work to figure out what that is and to achieve it. It’s the question “What does ‘done’ look like?” writ large
Chapter 7 - START
The First Obvious Action
You don’t have to be overwhelmed by essential projects. Often, when you name the first obvious step, you avoid spending too much mental energy thinking about the fifth, seventh, or twenty-third steps. It doesn’t matter if your project involves ten steps or a thousand. When you adopt this strategy, all you have to focus on is the very first step
We often get overwhelmed because we misjudge what the first step is: what we think is the first step is actually several steps. But once we break that step down into concrete, physical actions, that first obvious action begins to feel effortless
The first action may be the tiniest, easiest-to-overlook thing. But it is surprisingly fierce.
A microburst is a meteorological surge that causes powerful winds and storms for a brief but intense period, often just ten to fifteen minutes. A column of wind drops from a rain cloud at speeds of up to sixty miles per hour, hitting the ground with such force that it can fell fully grown trees
In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have found that the “now” we experience lasts only 2.5 seconds. This is our psychological present. One of the implications of this is that progress can happen in tiny increments.
Two and a half seconds is enough time to shift our focus: to put the phone down, close the browser, take a deep breath. It’s enough time to open a book, take out a blank sheet of paper, lace up our running shoes, or open up the junk drawer and fish out our tape measure.
These bite-sized activities may not feel like wasting time—after all, we think, what’s a few seconds? The trouble, of course, is that over time these activities rarely add up to making progress on the goals we hope to achieve. They are easy but pointless.
Chapter 8 - SIMPLIFY
Start with Zero
Amazon filed a patent for the one-click process that lasted the better part of twenty years, giving them a huge advantage over online competitors. It’s impossible to isolate the precise value of that single innovation, but it has, clearly, been enormous.
There is a huge difference between the two.
No matter how simple the step, it’s still easier to take no step
Universally, the single question that can save you untold headaches and get you moving on priority projects that seem overwhelmingly hard or complex is as follows:
What are the minimum steps required for completion?
To be clear, identifying the minimum number of steps is not the same as “phoning it in” or producing something you are not proud of. Unnecessary steps are just that: unnecessary. Eliminating them allows you to channel all your energy toward getting the important project done. In just about every realm, completion is infinitely better than adding superfluous steps that don’t add value. And completion is something to be proud of:
In order to succeed at something, you have to get it done
The next time you have to write a report, give a presentation, or make a sales pitch, resist the temptation to add unnecessary extras. They aren’t just a distraction for you; they’re also a distraction for your audience. That’s why, when I do presentations, I use six slides, with fewer than ten words total.
There is rarely a need to go that second mile beyond what’s essential. It’s better to go just the first mile than to not go anywhere at all.
When a team of Apple’s best product designers met with Steve Jobs to present their design for what eventually became the iDVD—a now-defunct application that allowed users to burn music, movies, and digital photo files stored on their computers onto a physical DVD—they expected their boss to be wowed. It was a beautiful, clean design, and while it had a number of features and functions, they were proud of how they had streamlined the original version of the product, which had required a thousand-page user manual.
But as the team soon learned, Jobs had something else in mind. He walked to the whiteboard and drew a rectangle. Then he said, “Here’s the new application. It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says BURN. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.
If there are processes in your life that seem to involve an inordinate number of steps, try starting from zero. Then see if you can find your way back to those same results, only take fewer steps
In February 2001, seventeen independent-minded people met at the Lodge at Snowbird (a ski resort in Utah, up in the Wasatch Mountains) to relax, talk, eat, ski, and discuss software. What came out of their conversations that weekend was a now widely read document called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development.” In it, they codified a set of principles for developing better software by removing obstacles and friction to create an effortless user experience
领英推荐
One of the twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto states, “Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.” By this they mean that the goal is to create value for the customer, and if this can be done with less code and fewer features, that is exactly what ought to be done.
While this principle refers to the process of software development, we can adapt it to any everyday process by saying, “Simplicity—the art of maximizing the steps not taken—is essential.” In other words, regardless of what our ultimate goal is, we should focus on only those steps that add value
Chapter 9 - PROGRESS
The Courage to Be Rubbish
In your own pursuit of what matters, if you want to “build a better airplane,” don’t try to get everything exactly right the first time. Instead, embrace the rubbish “no matter how ugly it is” so you can crash, repair, modify, and redesign fast. It’s a far easier path for learning, growing, and making progress on what’s essential
Many of us are kept back from producing something wonderful because we misunderstand the creative process. We see something exceptional or beautiful in its finished state and we imagine it started out as a beautiful, Baby Yoda version of what we are looking at. But exactly the opposite is true
Ed Catmull, the former CEO of Pixar, once said, “We all start out ugly. Every one of Pixar’s stories starts out that way.” Their earliest sketches are, according to Catmull, “awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.” This is why Catmull has always worked hard to foster a culture that creates space for such “rubbish”: because he understands there would be no Buzz Lightyear without hundreds of awful ideas along the way. As he puts it, “Pixar is set up to protect our director’s ugly baby.
There is no mastery without mistakes. And there is no learning later without the courage to be rubbish.
Giving ourselves permission to fail takes courage. It feels scary. It makes us vulnerable. The higher the stakes, the more courage is required. So given that our reserves of courage are limited, we want to find ways to experience—and learn from—failure as cheaply as possible
To make effortless progress on what matters, learning-sized mistakes must be encouraged. This isn’t giving yourself—or others—permission to consistently produce poor-quality work; it’s simply letting go of the absurd pressure to always do everything perfectly.
Not surprisingly, Reid also advocates the same philosophy in entrepreneurship and business. “If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release,” he says, “you released it too late.” Or put another way, “When it comes to product launches, imperfect is perfect.
Another way we can make failure as cheap as possible for ourselves is simply to protect our rubbish from the harsh critic in our heads. Instead of shaming yourself for hitting your serve into the net, celebrate the fact that you’re on the court to begin with. Instead of belittling yourself for even the tiniest of errors, be proud of the fact that you are unlikely to make that same mistake ever again
I have met many people who feel a calling to write a book. But they often give up before writing even the first draft of the first chapter. Their belief that each sentence has to be perfect—or close to perfect—to be worthy of the page keeps them from even starting the process. I recommend they adopt a “zero-draft” approach. That is, write a version of that first chapter that’s so rough it wouldn’t even qualify as a first draft
The idea with the zero draft is to write anything. The more rubbish the better. It doesn’t have to be seen by anyone. It never has to be judged. Don’t even think of it as a draft; it’s just words on a page. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get your creative juices flowing this way. As American poet and memoirist Maya Angelou put it, “When I am writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced I’m serious and says ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’ ”
By embracing imperfection, by having the courage to be rubbish, we can begin. And once we begin, we become a little less rubbish, and then a little less. And eventually, out of the rubbish come exceptional, effortless breakthroughs in the things that matter
Chapter 10 - PACE
Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast
The False Economy of Powering Through
When we try to make too much progress on a goal or project right out of the gate, we can get trapped in a vicious cycle: we get tired, so then we take a break, but then we think we have to make up for the time lost, so we sprint again
When we’re trying to achieve something that matters to us, it’s tempting to want to sprint out of the gate. The problem is that going too fast at the beginning will almost always slow us down the rest of the way
The costs of this boom-and-bust approach to getting important projects done is too high: we feel exhausted on the days we sprint hard, drained and demoralized on the days we don’t, and more often than not we wind up like those British explorers, feeling battered and broken and still no closer to achieving our goal.
Luckily, there is an alternative. We can find the effortless pace
Whether it’s “miles per day” or “words per day” or “hours per day,” there are few better ways to achieve effortless pace than to set an upper bound.
All of us want to achieve our desired outcomes (complete the manuscript, run the 5K, launch the product) as quickly as possible. So it makes sense that we all prefer days when we make more progress than less. After all, few things in life are as satisfying as the feeling of accomplishment. But in our overenthusiasm for getting things done, we may make the mistake of thinking that all progress is created equal.
All progress is not created equal
When you go slow, things are smoother. You have time to observe, to plan, to coordinate efforts. But go too slow and you may get stuck or lose your momentum. This is just as true in life and work as it is on the battlefield. To make progress despite the complexity and uncertainty we encounter on a daily basis, we need to choose the right range and keep within it.
Even when we want to make consistent, steady progress on a priority project, life often intervenes. We may have planned to spend the morning at our desk and instead find ourselves stuck in meetings. We may have blocked off hours on our calendar for important work and instead find ourselves dealing with a toddler meltdown. Then to compensate for our perceived lack of productivity, we work all the way through the weekend, in a mad rush for progress. We know this comes at a cost: low-quality work, increased guilt, and reduced confidence.
There’s an easier alternative. We can establish upper and lower bounds. Simply use the following rule: Never less than X, never more than Y
Essential Project: Finish reading Les Misérables in six months
Lower Bound: Never less than five pages a day
Upper Bound: Never more than twenty-five pages a day
Essential Project: Complete an online class
Lower Bound: Never less than signing in to the class every day
Upper Bound: Never more than fifty minutes taking one practice test each day
Finding the right range keeps us moving at a steady pace so we can make consistent progress. The lower bound should be high enough to keep us feeling motivated, and low enough that we can still achieve it even on days when we’re dealing with unexpected chaos. The upper bound should be high enough to constitute good progress, but not so high as to leave us feeling exhausted. Once we get into the rhythm, the progress begins to flow. We are able to take Effortless Action
An Effortless Summary
Part I: Effortless State
What is the Effortless State?
The Effortless State is an experience many of us have had when we are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energized. You are completely aware, alert, present, attentive, and focused on what’s important in this moment. You are able to focus on what matters most with ease.
INVERT
Instead of asking, “Why is this so hard?,” invert the question by asking, “What if this could be easy?”
Challenge the assumption that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one.
Make the impossible possible by finding an indirect approach.
When faced with work that feels overwhelming, ask, “How am I making this harder than it needs to be?”
ENJOY
Pair the most essential activities with the most enjoyable ones.
Accept that work and play can co-exist.
Turn tedious tasks into meaningful rituals.
Allow laughter and fun to lighten more of your moments.
RELEASE
Let go of emotional burdens you don’t need to keep carrying.
Remember: When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack.
Use this habit recipe: “Each time I complain I will say something I am thankful for.”
Relieve a grudge of its duties by asking, “What job have I hired this grudge to do?”
REST
Discover the art of doing nothing.
Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow.
Break down essential work into three sessions of no more than ninety minutes each.
Take an effortless nap
NOTICE
Achieve a state of heightened awareness by harnessing the power of presence.
Train your brain to focus on the important and ignore the irrelevant.
To see others more clearly, set aside your opinions, advice, and judgment, and put their truth above your own.
Clear the clutter in your physical environment before clearing the clutter in your mind.
Part II: Effortless Action
What is Effortless Action?
Effortless Action means accomplishing more by trying less. You stop procrastinating and take the first obvious step. You arrive at the point of completion without overthinking. You make progress by pacing yourself rather than powering through. You overachieve without overexerting.
DEFINE
To get started on an essential project, first define what “done” looks like.
Establish clear conditions for completion, get there, then stop.
Take sixty seconds to focus on your desired outcome.
Write a “Done for the Day” list. Limit it to items that would constitute meaningful progress.
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 of increments.
PROGRESS
When you start a project, start with rubbish.
Adopt a “zero-draft” approach and just put some words, any words, on the page.
Fail cheaply: make learning-sized mistakes.
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 than X, never more than Y.
Recognize that not all progress is created equal.
EFFORTLESS RESULTS PART III
Effortless Results: not to achieve a result once through intense effort, but to effortlessly achieve a result again and again
What do I mean? Whenever your inputs create a one-time output 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. Linear results exist in every area of endeavor
Linear results are limited: they can never exceed the amount of effort exerted. What many people don’t realize, however, is that there exists a far better alternative.
Residual results are completely different. With residual results you exert effort once and reap the benefits again and again. Results continue to flow to you, whether you put in additional effort or not. 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
Does it sound like I’m exaggerating? I’m not. The thought of getting perpetual results might seem improbable if you are used to taking one action and getting one result. But there are tools we can use to turn our modest effort into Effortless Results, again and again.
Residual results are like compound interest. Benjamin Franklin summarized the idea of compounding interest best when he said, “Money makes money. 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
Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and mechanical engineer, is considered the first to have discovered the principle of leverage. 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: Teaching
Modest Input, Residual Results
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.
The more we teach, the more we ourselves learn.
Of course, there can be drawbacks to levers too. Depending on which lever you push, an equally modest amount of effort can also produce amazingly bad residual results. A bad reputation can cost you opportunities for years. A bad habit can compromise your health for decades
There are two ways to approach getting things done: the hard way is with powerless effort, and the easy way is with effortless power. Levers give us effortless power. The next few chapters will show how to use this powerful tool to produce the right results
Chapter 11 - LEARN
Leverage the Best of What Others Know
Seek Principles
Not all knowledge has lasting value.
Some knowledge is useful just once. For example, you memorize a fact for a test and immediately forget the material the moment the test is over
Other knowledge is useful countless times. When you understand why something happened or how something works, you can apply that knowledge again and again
Learning the right thing once is a bargain. A one-time investment of energy up front yields Effortless Results again and again over time
What if, instead of repeating this method (a few too many times), I’d sought out a principle that captured who my wife really was: what she really valued, what consistently delighted her (for more than three evenings in a row). It takes more investment up front to gain this depth of insight. However, once you have it, you can apply it again and again
Many people assume that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has a background in mechanical engineering and rocket science. But he actually didn’t know much about either subject when he started these ventures.
He was once asked how he had downloaded whole, complex new disciplines into his brain so quickly: “I know you’ve read a lot of books and you hire a lot of smart people and soak up what they know, but you have to acknowledge you seem to have found a way to pack more knowledge into your head than nearly anyone else alive. 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
Musk’s approach is supported by the science of how we learn. Neuroplasticity is our brain’s ability to change, both at the individual neuron level and at the very complex level of learning a new skill, like learning how to make a rocket. Learning something new is often a series of attempts, failures, and adjustments. Neural connections that result in success are reinforced and grow stronger
This is how Musk’s search for the fundamentals, the first principles, has allowed him to revolutionize the energy industry, launch broadband satellites into space, design a system for high-speed hyperloop travel
Often, the most useful knowledge comes from fields other than our own. As researchers from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management found in analyzing almost eighteen million scientific papers, the best new ideas usually come from combining existing knowledge in one field with an “intrusion of unusual combinations” from other disciplines
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
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
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. 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. If you summarize the key learnings from a book you just read, you absorb it more deeply
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
Chapter 12 - LIFT
Harness the Strength of Ten
Whenever we want a far-reaching impact, teaching others to teach can be a high-leverage strategy
There is no better way to teach than through the power of stories
We love stories. We understand stories. We remember stories. And that means it’s easier to share, or to teach, stories. Stories have the power to turn any audience into a roomful of teachers.
Teaching others is also an accelerated way to learn. Even thinking we might be called upon to teach can increase our engagement. We focus more intently. We listen to understand. We think about the underlying logic so we can put the ideas into our own words
Think about how hard it is to recall the route we’ve taken dozens of times until we have to give someone else directions—or how hard it is to fully absorb the plot of a novel you read until you’ve described it to someone
If you try to teach people everything about everything, you run the risk of teaching them nothing. You will achieve residual results faster if you clearly identify—then simplify—the most important messages you want to teach others to teach
These messages should be not just easy to understand but also hard to misunderstand
Make the most essential things the easiest ones to teach and the easiest ones to learn.
Chapter 13 - AUTOMATE
Do It Once and Never Again
Alfred North Whitehead, the British mathematician turned American philosopher, once said, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them”—another way of saying, “As many essential steps and activities as possible should be automated
Extreme complexity only increases the cognitive load, making us that much more prone to errors. So what we need is not more knowledge but new skills and strategies that allow us to apply that knowledge without taxing our working memory. Or as Gawande put it, we need a strategy “that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human tendencies. And there is such a strategy—though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies”
A cheat sheet is one of the most effective, albeit low-tech, tools we have at our disposal to automate almost anything that really matters. The checklist is one type. Here are a few others:
Making decisions is mentally draining. Making decisions that will satisfy dozens of other people, each with different preferences, constraints, and priorities, is both mentally draining and close to impossible. That single decision made so many years ago eliminated this burden for seven generations of Richardses—and counting. Nobody has to do the work of coordinating everyone’s schedules and choosing a destination, booking hotels, and planning activities in order for the whole family to spend time together. It is automatic and, compared to some family vacation planning I have seen, effortless
High Tech = Low Effort
Automation is anything that performs a function with minimal human assistance or effort. And it’s happening everywhere. Some of it is so normal we don’t really think of it as automation: the washing machine, dishwasher, refrigerator. It’s only when these things malfunction or break that we stop to think about how much time and effort they save us on a daily basis.
Other forms of automation haven’t been around as long but are still familiar enough that we don’t notice them anymore: automatic bill pay, the programmable thermostat, your virtual assistant reminding you what’s on your shopping list, and so on
These tools are getting smarter all the time. Your virtual assistant can use AI algorithms to analyze your past buying patterns to tell you when you might be running out of shampoo or toothpaste. Your thermostat can learn how warm or cool you like to keep your home throughout the day and adjust itself accordingly
The time and cost savings from this single change were so significant that today the company is rolling out a whole host of self-service features that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to meet customers’ varied and ever-evolving needs
How can we use technology to automate the things that really matter in our own everyday lives?
Essential Domains: Your health
Effortless Automation:
Schedule your annual physical as a recurring appointment on the same day each year, and your dentist appointments on the same day every six months.
Sign up for regular delivery and automated payment of your recurring medicines from your pharmacy.
Set your phone to turn on “nightlight” mode two hours before bedtime.
Essential Domains: Your relationships
Effortless Automation:
Set up regular calls or get-togethers with the people who matter most.
Set calendar reminders for friend and family member birthdays.
Preorder flowers or gifts to be sent on key birthdays, anniversaries, or other annual events.
Essential Domains: Your finances
Effortless Automation:
Have a percentage of your paycheck automatically deposited in savings each month.
Schedule a weekly meeting to review your finances as a family, and annual meetings with a financial adviser
Automate budgeting with an app that tracks your spending.
Set up regular monthly or annual donations to your most valued charities.
Essential Domains: Your home
Effortless Automation:
Subscribe for regular online purchases of key items for the home.
Create an annual safety checklist for things like smoke detectors and fire extinguishers.
Set up recurring shopping lists in a grocery store app.
Delegate meal planning to an app based on your health goals
Essential Domains: Your career
Effortless Automation:
Schedule recurring meetings with a mentor.
Schedule an hour every quarter to review your personal career goals.
Block off five minutes every morning to read an article on an important topic not directly related to your job.
Essential Domains: Your fun
Effortless Automation
Block off one hour each day for something that brings you joy
Blocking off time for the things that matter may sound simple in theory. But in practice it can be difficult to do consistently, because reality gets in the way. Yet the effort we invest in automating our most mundane but essential tasks yields significant and repeated benefits later on
Chapter 14 - TRUST
The Engine of High-Leverage Teams
All of us work with other human beings in some capacity. Some of us do it in highly matrixed organizations where we report to more than one person, deal with internal and external customers, and have to coordinate across siloed departments and/or functional groups. Some of us work in and across smaller teams that are expected to function nimbly, get things done quickly, and produce more with fewer resources. Even those of us who work for ourselves have to manage relationships with clients and customers, coordinate deliverables with suppliers and partners, and so on. Each of these environments adds layers of complexity: some avoidable, others not
No matter the context, working with other people can be overwhelming. You have to allocate mental resources. You have to preserve relationships. You have to align diverse or competing priorities. Just think of the effort involved in deciding where to eat when you’re getting together with a big group of friends or family. The more people involved, the higher the coordination costs. Even easy decisions can become much harder than they need to be.
There is an easier way to get the right things done together.
When you have trust in your relationships, they take less effort to maintain and manage. You can quickly split work between team members
When you have low trust on teams, everything is hard. Just sending a text or an email is exhausting as you weigh up every word for how it might be taken. When the response comes back you may experience a jolt of anxiety. Every conversation feels like it’s a grind. When you don’t trust that someone will deliver, you will feel you need to check up on them: remind them of deadlines, hover over them, review their work. Or you won’t delegate anything at all, assuming you’re better off just doing it yourself. The work can start to stall altogether.
You can’t have a high-performing team without high levels of trust
We all know that you need to add oil to a car engine in order to keep it operating. But not everyone understands exactly why. It’s because inside the engine, the many fast-moving parts can create friction when they rub up against each other. The oil is the lubricant that keeps those parts sliding smoothly, instead of wearing each other down. This is why, if the engine runs out of oil, your car will stall or even grind to a halt
Without trust, conflicting goals, priorities, and agendas rub up against each other, creating friction and wearing everyone down. If the team runs out of trust, it is likely to stall or sputter out. Trust is like the engine oil for that team. It’s the lubricant that keeps these people working together smoothly, so the team can continue to function
The best way to leverage trust to get residual results is simply to select trustworthy people to be around
Hiring someone trustworthy starts a simple and obvious first step, but one that many routinely overlook: making sure you are hiring someone honest and honorable, someone you can trust to uphold a high standard when nobody’s looking. But hiring someone who is trustworthy is also about hiring someone conscientious, someone you can trust to uphold their responsibilities, to use good judgment, to do what they say they’re going to do when they say they’re going to do it and to do it well. It’s someone you don’t have to supervise or micromanage, someone who understands the team’s goals and who cares as much as you do about the quality of the essential work to be done
Warren Buffett uses three criteria for determining who is trustworthy enough to hire or to do business with. He looks for people with integrity, intelligence, and initiative, though he adds that without the first, the other two can backfire
I call this “The Three I’s Rule.
Kim Scott writes in her bestselling book Radical Candor, “When people trust you and believe you care about them, they are more likely to…engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again.
Hiring someone is a single decision that produces Effortless Results. You get it right once, and that person adds value hundreds of times over. You get it wrong once, and it can cost you repeatedly
There are three parties to every relationship: Person A, Person B, and the structure that governs them.
When trust becomes an issue, most people point at the other person. The manager blames the employee; the employee blames the manager. The teacher blames the student; the student blames the teacher. The parent blames the child; the child blames the parent. Sometimes we are able to recognize that we were the ones at fault. But we rarely think to blame the structure of the relationship itself.
Every relationship has a structure, even if it’s an unspoken, unclear one. A low-trust structure is one where expectations are unclear, where goals are incompatible or at odds, where people don’t know who is doing what, where the rules are ambiguous and nobody knows what the standards for success are, and where the priorities are unclear and the incentives misaligned
A high-trust structure is one where expectations are clear. Goals are shared, roles are clearly delineated, the rules and standards are articulated, and the right results are prioritized, incentivized, and rewarded—consistently, not just sometimes.
Most people can agree that this type of relationship is preferable. The problem is that low-trust relationship structures generally happen by default rather than by design
Results: What results do we want?
Roles: Who is doing what?
Rules: What minimum viable standards must be kept?
Resources: What resources (people, money, tools) are available and needed?
Rewards: How will progress be evaluated and rewarded?
Taking a little time to build a foundation of trust is a valuable investment in any relationship. It’s a lever that turns a modest effort into residual results
Chapter 15 - PREVENT
Solve the Problem Before It Happens
We might not think of prevention as the most obvious way to achieve residual results. But what else can you call it when a single intervention saves an incalculable number of future lives and solves a centuries-long problem once and for all?
Why do so many of us put up with problems—big and small—for so much longer than we have to?
Because on any given day it usually takes less time to manage a problem than to solve it
But looking at the equation from a longer-term perspective changes our calculation. Once we add up the cumulative costs of the time and frustration from today, plus tomorrow, plus hundreds of tomorrows after that, suddenly it makes sense to invest in solving the problem once and for all
This is what I call the long tail of time management. When we invest our time in actions with a long tail, we continue to reap the benefits over a long period.
Sometimes we get so used to the little irritations—like a pencil tray lodged in a desk drawer—it doesn’t even occur to us to do anything about them. Even if we are bothered by them and we complain about them, we still don’t really see them as a problem worth fixing. But what we often fail to recognize is that some tasks that seem “not worth it” in the moment may save us one hundred times the time and aggravation over the long run.
To break this habit, ask yourself:
1:What is a problem that irritates me repeatedly?
2:What is the total cost of managing that over several years?
3:What is the next step I can take immediately, in a few minutes, to move toward solving it?
The goal is to find the most annoying thing that can be solved in the least amount of time.
Once you start asking these questions, you’ll start noticing the small actions you can take to make your life easier in the future
Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” When we’re merely managing a problem, we’re hacking at the branches. To prevent the problem before it even arises, we should strike at the root.
If you’ve spent a lot of time hacking at the branches, you may have become good at it. But if that is all you are doing, the problem will keep coming back to haunt you. It is merely being managed, never solved
Are there any recurring problems or frustrations in your life or work? Rather than simply hacking at the branches, try striking at the root. For example:
Hack at the Branches: A doctor treats a heart problem through years of medication followed by highly invasive surgery.
Strike at the Root: A doctor encourages patients to eat right, exercise, and schedule regular checkups
Hack at the Branches: An employee apologizes for completing a project late: repeatedly, to multiple parties.
Strike at the Root: An employee improves their process so the project is done on time
Research shows that patients often display subtle warning signs six to eight hours before a heart attack. But hospital staff members often wait to see more evidence of a serious issue before bringing these small problems to the attention of doctors. Meanwhile, the window of opportunity to prevent a crisis is closing
The lesson is one that many of us learned doing arts and crafts as children: measure twice and cut once.
Often, measuring something just once (or not at all) produces first-order consequences: the consequences are the direct and immediate results of our actions
Mistakes are dominoes: they have a cascading effect. When we strike at the root by catching our mistakes before they can do any damage, we don’t just prevent that first domino from toppling, we prevent the entire chain reaction
An Effortless Summary
Part III: Effortless Results
What are Effortless Results?
You’ve continued to cultivate your Effortless State. You’ve started to take Effortless Action with clarity of objective, tiny, obvious first steps, and a consistent pace. You are achieving the results you want, more easily. But now you want those results to continue to flow to you, again and again, with as little additional effort as possible. You are ready to achieve Effortless Results.
LEARN
Learn principles, not just facts and methods.
Understand first principles deeply and then apply them again and again.
Stand on the shoulders of giants and leverage the best of what they know.
Develop unique knowledge, and it will open the door to perpetual opportunity.
LIFT
Use teaching as a lever to harness the strength of ten.
Achieve far-reaching impact by teaching others to teach.
Live what you teach, and notice how much you learn.
Tell stories that are easily understood and repeated.
AUTOMATE
Free up space in your brain by automating as many essential tasks as possible.
Use checklists to get it right every time, without having to rely on memory.
Seek single choices that eliminate future decisions.
Take the high-tech path for the essential and the low-tech path for the nonessential.
TRUST
Leverage trust as the engine oil of frictionless and high-functioning teams.
Make the right hire once, and it will continue to produce results again and again.
Follow the Three I’s Rule: hire people with integrity, intelligence, and initiative.
Design high-trust agreements to clarify results, roles, rules, resources, and rewards
PREVENT
Don’t just manage the problem. Solve it before it happens.
Seek simple actions today that can prevent complications tomorrow.
Invest two minutes of effort once to end recurring frustrations.
Catch mistakes before they happen; measure twice, so you only have to cut once
Conclusion - NOW
What Happens Next Matters Most
The word now comes from a Latin phrase, novus homo, which means “a new man” or “man newly ennobled.” The spirit of this is clear: each new moment is a chance to start over. A chance to make a new choice
Just think how the trajectory of a life can shift in the most fleeting of moments. The moments where we take control: “I choose,” “I decide,” “I promise,” or “From now on….” The moments we let go of emotional burdens: “I forgive you,” “I am thankful,” or “I’m willing to accept that.” Or the moments when we make something right: “Please forgive me,” “Let’s start over,” “I won’t give up on you,” or “I love you.” In each new moment, we have the power to shape all subsequent moments
Whatever has happened to you in life. Whatever hardship. Whatever pain….They pale in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now
In each moment, we have a choice: Do I choose the heavier or the lighter path?
We watched our daughter diminish into a shell of her former self—and return from it. This is the personal experience that inspired me to write this book. To put into words what we learned, what we gained. To share with you the principles and practices of how to lighten our essential journey in life
If you take away just one message from this book, I hope it is this: life doesn’t have to be as hard and complicated as we make it. Each of us has, as Robert Frost wrote, “promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” No matter what challenges, obstacles, or hardships we encounter along the way, we can always look for the easier, simpler path
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