Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most - by Greg McKeown
Date read: 2021-05-02How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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A follow-up from his first book, Essentialism, the author asks himself the question: "How can I make that which is most essential in my life easier to do?" He found after practicing essentialism that he was finding it very difficult to keep up with just the essential things. This book offers some good advice, although I had either known about it or had heard of the stories before. Just a few new pieces of info but good for anyone struggling with finding it hard to focus on what's important after they've removed non-essential things in their life.
Contents:
My Notes
When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack.
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.
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.
Consider taking the high-tech, low-effort path for the essential, and the low-tech, high-effort path for the nonessential.
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.
Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing them in the right way.
What could happen in your life if the easy but pointless things became harder and the essential things became easier?
Whenever your efforts yield a one-time benefit, you are getting a linear result. With residual results you put in the effort once and reap the benefits again and again. For example, a person who makes the one-time decision to exercise every day has made a residual decision.
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.
The problem is that the complexity of modern life has created a false dichotomy between things that are “essential and hard” and things that are “easy and trivial.” It’s almost like a natural law for some people: Trivial things are easy. Important things are hard.
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?”
When I’d failed, it was rarely because I hadn’t tried hard enough, it was because I’d been trying too hard.
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.
By pairing essential activities with enjoyable ones, we can make tackling even the most tedious and overwhelming tasks more effortless.
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?
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.
Our rituals are habits with a soul.
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?
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.
Have you ever held on to a grudge against people who hurt you? Wasted precious mental energy being angry, hurt, annoyed, or resentful? How long has the wound been festering? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades?
A good first step we can take is to ask this unusual question: What job have I hired this grudge to do?
With grudges, we should hire slow (or not at all) and fire fast.
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.
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.
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 key is the timing of the bath or shower: ninety minutes before bedtime. The lead author explains that the warm water triggers our body’s cooling mechanism, sending warmer blood from our core outward and shedding heat through our hands and feet. This “efficient removal of body heat and decline in body temperature” speeds up the natural cooling that makes it easier to fall asleep.
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.
When you are seeking inspiration, the easiest thing you can do is rest your eyes. Sit in your favorite chair. Whether you use an alarm or a key, keep a pencil handy and write down whatever comes to mind when your eyes snap open.
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.
Use this habit recipe: “Each time I complain I will say something I am thankful for.”
Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance.
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.
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.
I define “done” as the point just before the effort invested begins to be greater than the output achieved.
Instead of procrastinating, wasting enormous amounts of time and effort planning for a million possible scenarios, or charging full steam ahead at the risk of traveling miles down the wrong path, we can opt for taking the minimum viable first action: the action that will allow us to gain the maximum learning from the least amount of effort.
No matter how simple the step, it’s still easier to take no step.
What are the minimum steps required for completion?
That’s why, when I do presentations, I use six slides, with fewer than ten words total.
But Jobs came at it from the opposite angle. He started at zero and tried to figure out the absolute minimum number of steps required to achieve the desired outcome.
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.
Regardless of what our ultimate goal is, we should focus on only those steps that add value. Every nonessential step comes with an opportunity cost, so for each nonessential step removed, we gain more time, energy, and cognitive resources to put toward what’s essential.
Any time you feel like you’re on shaky ground with some meaningful challenge you’ve taken on, talk to yourself like you would talk to a toddler learning to walk: “You’ve taken the first step. You may feel wobbly now, but you’ve begun. You’re going to get there.”
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.
“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast”—meaning, when you go slow, things are smoother, and when things are smooth, you can move faster.
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.
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.
“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.
He believes that by combining learnings from a range of disciplines—psychology, history, mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, and more—we produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Munger sees isolated facts as useless unless they “hang together on a latticework of theory.”
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. The process of summarizing, of distilling ideas to their essential essence, helps us turn information into understanding, and understanding into unique knowledge.
Knowledge may open the door to an opportunity, but unique knowledge produces perpetual opportunities.
Whenever we want a far-reaching impact, teaching others to teach can be a high-leverage strategy.
If you try to teach people everything about everything, you run the risk of teaching them nothing.
These messages should be not just easy to understand but also hard to misunderstand.
The “Sesame Street Simple” rule. Don’t go for the overly sophisticated message. Don’t go for the one that makes you sound smart. Go for the straightforward message that can be easily understood and repeated.
“As many essential steps and activities as possible should be automated.”
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.
Automation can work for you or against you. If nonessential activities are automated, they too continue to happen without you thinking about it.
High-Trust Agreement 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?
What is a problem that irritates me repeatedly? What is the total cost of managing that over several years? What is the next step I can take immediately, in a few minutes, to move toward solving it?
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.
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.