Effortless

Effortless Plot Summary

Introduction

Life is hard, really hard, in all sorts of ways. 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. But what if, instead of pushing ourselves to, and in some cases well past, our limit, we sought out an easier path? 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 feeling battered and broken and still no closer to achieving our goal. Luckily, there is an alternative. We can find the effortless path.

Chapter 1: Invert Your Thinking: Ask 'What If This Could Be Easy?'

The principle of inverting our thinking is about challenging our assumptions and looking at problems from a different angle. Instead of asking, "Why is this so hard?", we can invert the question and ask, "What if this could be easy?" This simple shift in perspective can open up new possibilities and solutions we might have otherwise missed. Kim Jenkins wanted to do what really mattered. But it was hard not to feel overwhelmed. The university where she worked was undergoing an immense expansion. The client base had doubled in the last few years, but they were operating with virtually the same staff and resources as before. With the expansion of the organization had come an expansion of complexity everywhere. Processes had grown cumbersome, and now all of their projects and programs took more energy and time. She said, "I thought if I wasn't putting in tremendous effort, sacrificing any time for myself, then I was being incredibly selfish." Then one day, it hit her. This was all so much harder than it ought to be. And with that realization, she said, "I could see it all for what it was: layers and layers of unnecessary complexity. I could see how it was expanding all the time and how I was suffocating underneath all of it." She decided it was time to make a change: When faced with a task that felt impossibly hard, she would ask, "Is there an easier way?" She soon had the opportunity to put this method to the test when a faculty member called her and asked if she could have her videography team record a full semester of a class. In the past she would have jumped in with both feet, put her team to work for four months, and looked for ways to go above and beyond. This time she wondered if there was an easier way to get the desired results. A brief conversation revealed that the videos were intended for a single student who couldn't make every class due to a sports commitment. He didn't need a highly produced recording; he just needed a way to avoid falling behind in his class. So she thought, "What if they simply asked another student to record those lectures on a smartphone?" The professor was delighted with the solution, and it cost her just a couple of minutes of planning instead of months of work for her whole videography team. 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. 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?

Chapter 2: Pair Essential Tasks with Joy and Play

Too 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. At the same time, our nagging guilt about all the essential work we could be doing instead sucks all the joy out of otherwise enjoyable experiences. Separating important work from play makes life harder than it needs to be. Jane Tewson was pronounced dead in a refugee camp in Sudan in 1981. She had contracted both cerebral malaria and viral pneumonia. There were no drugs left to treat her. She recalls looking down at her own body and then returning to it. Her out-of-body experience proved to be a rebirth, in more ways than one. Tewson returned to the UK determined to do something about the suffering she had seen firsthand. She knew that to have a real impact she would need to get a lot of people involved. But she also knew the challenge charities face when trying to change people's perceptions, build support, and ultimately raise money. Suddenly Tewson had an idea—one that would affect the lives of millions of people. If she could make charitable giving "active, emotional, involving and fun," she thought, perhaps it could ease the whole interaction. Her idea was to pair something people already liked to do—in this case, watch comedy on TV—with contributing to the plight of people in need. The charity was called, brilliantly, Comic Relief. Comic Relief is best known for Red Nose Days, which attracted thirty million viewers on its first event: more than half the country. People in every corner of the country bought red clown noses, with the proceeds going to the charity. It raised £15 million in a single day. And it's since become a biannual ritual that, over the next thirty years, managed to raise £1 billion for the most disadvantaged people in Africa and for depressed areas within the UK. Giving to charity is important. Participating in a day of comedy is enjoyable. By bringing charity and comedy together, Tewson made giving easier. As a result, not only do more people participate, they actually look forward to participating again, year after year. We all have things we do consistently not because they are important but because we actively look forward to doing them. At the same time, we all have important activities we don't do consistently because we actively dread doing them. Not every essential activity is inherently enjoyable. But we can make them so. 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?

Chapter 3: Release the Burden of Past and Future

When we fall victim to misfortune, it's hard not to obsess, lament, or complain about all that we have lost. In fact, complaining is one of the easiest things to do. It's so easy many of us do it incessantly: when someone is late to meet us, when our neighbors are too loud, when there are no parking spaces on the one day we are running late, when we watch the news, and so on. Chris Williams knew what mattered in his life. His family wasn't just the most important thing; for him, it was the only thing. Then, one freezing night in February 2007, the car he was driving was hit broadside by an erratic teenage driver. Williams's wife, their unborn baby, his nine-year-old daughter, and his eleven-year-old son were all killed. His six-year-old son was seriously injured, and his fourteen-year-old son, who was at a friend's house at the time of the crash, would never be the same after that day. We would all expect Chris to be swallowed up, body and soul, by this experience. None of us would fault him for being overcome by fury through his grief. It's the most natural thing to imagine: his resentment closing around him, scarring him, following him around for decades. Which is what made Williams's choice in that moment so breathtaking. Minutes after the crash, sitting amid the twisted metal and broken bodies, Williams had an eye-of-the-storm moment of clarity. Not the next day, not a year later, but right there, at this unimaginably violent scene, he saw two possible lives ahead of him. The first future was one where he indulged his rage and bitterness, born in that moment. Choosing that future, he knew, meant he would be carrying the burden of those emotions for the rest of his life. It meant passing on those burdens to his surviving sons, inflicting emotional scars that might never heal. The second future was one free from those burdens—one where he could be present for his surviving children as they recovered from the physical and psychological trauma they had sustained. It was one filled with purpose and meaning. It might have been the harder choice to make in that moment, but it was unquestionably the one that would lead to an easier life. In that remarkable moment, he decided to forgive. That is not to say he did not feel anger, or did not suffer, because he did. But what he didn't do was make the suffering even harder for himself by wallowing in resentment and fury. Instead, he turned his energy, his life force, toward letting go. 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? Williams's story shows the opposite pattern. And if he could choose the path of forgiveness after the unthinkable tragedy he endured, surely we can all let go of the grudges that we have been holding on to, which have made it harder to focus on the things we truly care about. 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: 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. Four hundred years ago, Gustav II, the king of Sweden, saw the vital need to upgrade his armada of ships. He wanted to protect his people from the growing naval powers that surrounded them. His attention was drawn to building a giant military warship. He found a shipbuilder, Henrik Hybertsson, and tasked him to build what became known as the Vasa. This project was of utmost importance to King Gustav—so much so that he allocated a forest of one thousand trees to provide the lumber for the project. He opened the royal coffers too. He assured Hybertsson that he would have an almost unlimited budget to complete the project successfully. Unfortunately, the king did not have a clear vision of what the final product would look like. Or rather, he kept changing his vision of what the final product would look like. At first the ship was to be 108 feet long with thirty-two cannons on deck. Later the length was changed to 120 feet, even though the lumber had already been cut to the original specifications. But no sooner had Henrik's team made the necessary adjustments than the target shifted again. Tremendous effort was exerted by some four hundred people to make this happen. But even as they approached completion, the king changed his mind again, asking for sixty-four large cannons instead. The stress of the news is said to have given Henrik a fatal heart attack. Still, the endless project continued, this time under Henrik's assistant, Hein Jacobsson. Budgets continued to escalate. The effort continued to expand. And the king continued changing the end goal. And so it was that on August 10, 1628, the Vasa left the Stockholm port for its maiden voyage still unfinished and before it had been properly tested to ensure it could survive the conditions of the high seas. Meanwhile, the king had found the time to plan a celebration to commemorate the expedition; there were fireworks, there were foreign diplomats, there was pageantry. Then suddenly, a gust of wind caught the sails of the ship, causing the massive vessel to tilt severely over to one side. As the cannons tipped into the sea, water entered through the gunports. Despite a strenuous, all-out effort on the part of the crew, water almost instantly flooded onto the gun deck and into the hold, further destabilizing the ship. Tragically, it took just fifty minutes for the Vasa to completely sink, taking fifty-three crew members with it. Getting clear on what "done" looks like doesn't just help you finish; it also helps you get started. All too often, we procrastinate or struggle to take the first steps on a project because we don't have a clear finish line in mind. As soon as you define what "done" looks like, you give your conscious and unconscious mind a clear instruction. Things click into gear and you can begin charting a course toward that end state. 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. Getting the outcome clear focuses you like nothing else can. All of your resources shift into gear to bring that outcome to fruition.

Chapter 5: Take 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. Today, Netflix is found in 183 million households worldwide. So it's almost hard to believe that it might not exist had Reed Hastings not been charged $40 by his local Blockbuster for losing the VHS tape of the Tom Hanks classic Apollo 13—prompting him to wonder if there might be a better way for people to borrow movies. As a computer scientist who had studied at Stanford University in the 1980s, Hastings believed that within a decade or so the average household Internet connection would have the capacity to carry such massive amounts of data at such high speeds that entire movies could be instantly delivered on demand to one's personal computer or TV. Hastings's idea was to build Netflix as a DVD service first, "and then eventually the Internet would catch up with the postal system and pass it." Hastings's ultimate vision for Netflix was a huge, complex undertaking, spanning many years and relying on technology that didn't yet exist. He could have started by laying out a multiyear, multiphase process. He could have made projections about when the speed of the Internet would surpass that of a FedEx truck hurtling down the highway, drafted multiple business plans for multiple scenarios, examined dozens or hundreds of variables such as the cost of shipping DVDs, the number of uses each disk can withstand, the losses the company could expect to take on unreturned or damaged DVDs, and so on. Instead, Hastings mailed himself a single CD. Hastings understood that unless DVDs could reliably be shipped through the mail and not get damaged or destroyed in transit the idea didn't have a chance. So he and his cofounder, Marc Randolph, went to a record store in Santa Cruz and bought a used CD. Then, Randolph recalls, they went to one of the little gift shop stores on Pacific Avenue and bought themselves "one of those little blue envelopes that you put the greeting cards in." They wrote Reed's home address on the envelope, stuck the CD inside, and mailed it with a single first-class stamp. "By the next day when he came to pick me up," Randolph says, "he had the envelope in his hand. It had arrived to his house with the un-broken CD in it. That was the moment where the two of us looked at each other and said, 'This idea just might work.'" The concept was big—huge really. It was long term and ambitious. The cofounders knew what "done" looked like—the massive global streaming service and content library Netflix is today—but instead of mapping out a complex, detailed plan to get there, Hastings and Randolph looked for the ridiculously simple first step that would inform them whether they should take a second step or just walk away. Mailing that single disk turned out to be the simplest, most obvious way to set their immense idea in motion. 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.

Chapter 6: Learn the Best of What Others Know

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. Like a tree that can support the growth of new branches as it grows thicker and stronger, our brains can now grow connections, incorporating that new information into our existing foundation of knowledge. Meanwhile, unproductive connections eventually become weaker and, like dead branches, break off. 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, build a better solar battery, and send a spacecraft to Mars. He is living proof that by understanding things at their most fundamental level, we can apply them in new and surprising ways. As vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, ninety-six-year-old Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's right-hand man. But he's also an investing legend in his own right. In the 1960s and '70s, Munger ran a firm that achieved returns of over 24 percent per year. If you invested $100 in Berkshire stock the day Munger came on board, you'd have over $1.8 million today. Munger's approach to investing and life is the pursuit of what he calls "worldly wisdom." 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." 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.

Chapter 7: Trust as the Engine of High-Performing Teams

When you have trust in your relationships, they take less effort to maintain and manage. You can quickly split work between team members. People can talk about problems when they come up, openly and honestly. Members share valuable information rather than hoard it. Nobody minds asking questions when they don't understand something. The speed and quality of decisions go up. Political infighting goes down. You may even enjoy the experience of working together. And you perform exponentially better, because you're able to focus all your energy and attention on getting important things done, rather than on simply getting along. In 2003, Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in the world and the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, was interested in buying McLane Distribution, a $23 billion provider of supply chain solutions that was owned by Wal-Mart. We'd be safe to assume that making that happen would be a huge and extraordinarily complex undertaking. Just the due diligence, or the process of confirming that what he had been told about the business was accurate, would take monumental effort. It would require dozens of attorneys reading every contract, equipment lease, real estate purchase document, and union agreement. It would take a small army of accountants going over every line item on the company's annual, quarterly, and monthly financial statements, combing through every asset, lien, and debt. It would take a team of compliance officers to audit, investigate, and verify every capital expenditure, legacy technology, and stated risk. It would likely involve looking into relationships with McLane's top customers. All of this could easily have added up to millions of dollars and taken six months or more to complete. Which makes what actually happened so incredible: Buffett closed the McLane deal over a single two-hour meeting and a handshake. Just twenty-nine days later the purchase was complete. Buffett wrote, "We did no 'due diligence.'" On the basis of his prior experience, he concluded he "knew everything would be exactly as Wal-Mart said it would be—and it was." A two-hour meeting and a handshake? With no due diligence! Think of the time, money, and effort saved, based on the simple fact that one party trusted the other to be true to their word. It's an example of how trust can be a lever for turning modest effort into residual results. The best way to leverage trust to get residual results is simply to select trustworthy people to be around. 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. When you can say these four little words, "I trust your judgment"—and mean them—it's like magic. Team members feel empowered. They take a risk. They grow. Trust is strengthened. And then it tends to spread. As executive coach 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. It's like skimping on a shoddy oil filter. It might keep the engine running smoothly in the short term, but the moment that filter starts leaking, it will cause problems throughout the system.

Summary

Whatever has happened to you in life. Whatever hardship. Whatever pain. However significant those things are. They pale in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now. 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. In each moment, we have a choice: Do I choose the heavier or the lighter path? 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.

About Author

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Greg McKeown

Greg McKeown is a business writer, consultant, and researcher specializing in leadership, strategy design, collective intelligence and human systems. He has authored or co-authored books, including the Wall Street Journal Bestseller, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (Harper Business, June 2010), and journal articles.Originally from England, he is now an American citizen, living in Southern California. Greg holds a B.A. in Communications (with an emphasis in journalism) from Brigham Young University and an MBA from Stanford University.The World Economic Forum inducted Greg into the Forum of Young Global Leaders.Greg is currently CEO of McKeown, Inc., a leadership and strategy design agency. He has taught at companies that include Apple, Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter, and VMware. Prior to this, Greg worked for Heidrick & Struggles' Global Leadership Practice assessing senior executives around the world. His work included a project for Mark Hurd (then CEO of Hewlett Packard) assessing the top 300 executives at HP.Greg is an active Social Innovator and currently serves as a board member for Washington D.C. policy group, Resolve, and as a mentor with 2Seeds, a non-profit incubator for agricultural projects in Africa. And he is a regular keynote speaker at non-profits groups including The Kauffman Fellows Program, St. Jude and the Minnesota Community Education Association.

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