Effortless

by Greg McKeown

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 you’re running faster but not moving any closer to your goals? you want to make a higher contribution but lack the energy? you’re teetering right on the edge of burnout? things are so much harder than they ought to be?

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.

Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing them in the right way.

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.

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.

Similarly, when your brain is filled with clutter—like outdated assumptions, negative emotions, and toxic thought patterns—you have less mental energy available to perform what’s most essential.

A concept in cognitive psychology known as perceptual load theory explains why this is the case.3 Our brain’s processing capacity is large, but limited. It already processes over six thousand thoughts a day.4 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.

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.

When we accomplish something important, we say it took “blood, sweat, and tears.”2 We say important achievements are “hard-earned” when we might just say “earned.” We recommend a “hard day’s work” when “day’s work” would suffice. Then there are the ways our language betrays our distrust of ease. When we talk of “easy money,” we are implying it was obtained through illegal or questionable means. We use the phrase “That’s easy for you to say” as a criticism, usually when we are seeking to invalidate someone’s opinion.

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.

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.

To invert means to turn an assumption or approach upside down, to work backward, to ask, “What if the opposite were true?”

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.

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

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 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.

Anna and I once made our own list of twenty building blocks of joy and shared them with each other. They included “tidying up a room, or drawer or cupboard that was a mess (i.e., creating order from chaos),” “listening to a particular song, on repeat, again and again,” and “eating dark chocolate covered almonds.” These lists were easy to create. And once we had them it became even easier to create signature experiences that were essential and enjoyable.

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.

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.

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.

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.8

In a similar way, we often hire a grudge to fulfill an emotional need that is not currently being met.