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Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

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Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

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When you simply can’t try any harder, it’s time to find a different path.

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.

Not everything has to be so hard. Getting to the next level doesn’t have to mean chronic exhaustion. Making a contribution doesn’t have to come at the expense of your mental and physical health.

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

Instead of trying to get better results by pushing ever harder, we can make the most essential activities the easiest ones.

What could happen in your life if the easy but pointless things became harder and the essential things became easier?

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.

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. Producing a great result is good. Producing a great result with ease is better. Producing a great result with ease again and again is best.

“What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?”

“If you keep it simple, less can go wrong,”

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.

Our language helps to reveal our deeper assumptions. Think of these revealing phrases: When we accomplish something important, we say it took “blood, sweat, and tears.” 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.

What if the biggest thing keeping us from doing what matters is the false assumption that it has to take tremendous effort? What if, instead, we considered the possibility that the reason something feels hard is that we haven’t yet found the easier way to do it?

Our 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.

What if, rather than fighting our preprogrammed instinct to seek the easiest path, we could embrace it, even use it to our advantage? What if, instead of asking, “How can I tackle this really hard but essential project?,” we simply inverted the question and asked, “What if this essential project could be made easy?” 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.

Here is what I learned: trying too hard makes it harder to get the results you want.

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.

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.

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?’ ”

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?”

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.

Why would we simply endure essential activities when we can enjoy them instead?

By pairing essential activities with enjoyable ones, we can make tackling even the most tedious and overwhelming tasks more effortless.

But 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have.

When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack.

After I complain I will say something I am thankful for.

A good first step we can take is to ask this unusual question: What job have I hired this grudge to do?

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.

We hire a grudge to protect ourselves. We think that by being wary of the person or people who hurt us once, we can protect ourselves from being hurt again. We think the grudge creates emotional armor. But this too turns out to be a scam. The grudge makes us more vulnerable, more fearful. It becomes harder to trust, to let anybody in.

With grudges, we should hire slow (or not at all) and fire fast.

“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.

Relaxing is a responsibility.

Have you ever pushed yourself so far past the point of exhaustion one day that you wake up the next morning utterly depleted and need the entire day to rest? To stop this vicious cycle in its tracks, try this simple rule: Do not do more today than you can completely recover from today. Do not do more this week than you can completely recover from this week.

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

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.

Getting more sleep may be the single greatest gift we can give our bodies, our minds, and even, it turns out, our bottom lines.

“We spend a third of our lives asleep. Perhaps it is time for you to evaluate if you could be doing it better.”

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.

Dreams are fertile ground for creative solutions to what burdens us all day. But we often wake up with only wisps of ideas that quickly vanish if we fail to capture them. If 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.

Watson viewed Holmes’s seemingly superhuman ability to deduce a series of accurate facts from seemingly insignificant clues as something akin to magic. But of course, this is not magic. 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.

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.

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.

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.

We can help people in our lives do the same by putting aside our own opinions, advice, or judgment completely, by putting the other person’s truth above our own. 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.

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.

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.

Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance. Economists call this the law of diminishing returns: after a certain point, each extra unit of input produces a decreasing rate of output. For example, if I write for two hours I can produce two pages. But if I write for four hours I can produce three pages. The rate of output is slowing down. More effort at this point should be questioned. But sometimes overachievers double down on effort. They see the reduced output and mistakenly think the answer is to push even harder.

Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance.

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.

And so the most expensive naval project in Sweden’s history sailed less than a mile before being buried in the sea—all because the king had made the project almost impossible to safely complete by constantly redefining what “done” looked 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?

To avoid diminishing returns on your time and effort, establish clear conditions for what “done” looks like, get there, then stop.

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.

Vague Goal: “Lose weight.” What “Done” Looks Like: I look down at the weighing scale and see the number 177 staring back at me. Vague Goal: “Walk more.” What “Done” Looks Like: Reach ten thousand steps a day on my Fitbit for fourteen days in a row. Vague Goal: “Read more books.” What “Done” Looks Like: On my digital book reader it will say, “Finished,” next to War and Peace. Vague Goal: “Turn in the big report.” What “Done” Looks Like: Type up twelve pages full of concrete examples and actionable advice and be able to picture the customer saying, “It’s terrific!” Vague Goal: “Launch my product.” What “Done” Looks Like: Have ten beta users try the app for a week and give feedback. Vague Goal: “Complete podcast episode.” What “Done” Looks Like: The podcast is recorded and the file is uploaded.

“Swedish Death Cleaning” means getting rid of the clutter you have accumulated through your life while you are still alive.

What if we could all give ourselves such a gift by approaching our life’s goals as if they were a Swedish Death Cleaning project?

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.

This principle always reminds me of the line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Though she be but little she is fierce.” The first action may be the tiniest, easiest-to-overlook thing. But it is surprisingly fierce.

Essential Project: Remove the clutter from the garage. First Obvious Action: Find the broom. Microburst: Sweep out the shed and move the bikes into the shed. Essential Project: Launch a product. First Obvious Action: Open a cloud-based document to put ideas in. Microburst: Brainstorm product features. Essential Project: Complete a large report. First Obvious Action: Pick up a pen and a piece of paper. Microburst: Draft an outline for the report.

When we’re struggling to name the first obvious action, we need to either make it a little easier to get started on what’s important now or make it a little harder to do something trivial instead. Looking at that first step or action through the lens of 2.5 seconds is the change that makes every other change possible. It is the habit of habits.

The Simplest Steps Are the Ones You Don’t Take It’s striking to me that Hartman spent months trying to make each step in the online ordering process simpler but never thought to try removing steps to make the process itself simpler. There is a huge difference between the two. No matter how simple the step, it’s still easier to take no step.

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.

could get so busy going the second mile I wouldn’t get the first mile done.

Going the extra mile in ways that are essential is one thing: a surgeon taking the extra step to prevent infection at the site of an incision, for example. But adding unnecessary, superficial embellishments is quite another. Here is a rule I have found helpful: Being asked to do X isn’t a good enough reason to do Y.

That’s what the goal for most presentations is supposed to be: to “just talk about your business.” So 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.

Evangelist told me that his biggest “aha” was that he and his team had been looking at their process the wrong way. They had started with an immensely complicated product and attempted to pare it down. 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.

That was it. Just two easy steps. 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.

You might be surprised at how many seemingly complex goals can be obtained, and how many seemingly complex tasks can be completed, in just a few steps. As sportswriter Andy Benoit observes, most geniuses “prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”

Similarly, 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.

Overachievers tend to struggle with the notion of starting with rubbish; they hold themselves to a high standard of perfection at every stage in the process. But the standard to which they hold themselves is neither realistic nor productive.

Is there something new you want to learn but feel overwhelmed by? Something that you know would add great value to you either personally or professionally but that you feel intimidated by because of the long road to mastery? Then try your own version of the “bag of beads” exercise and shift your focus to making as many mistakes as possible when you’re starting out. There is no mastery without mistakes. And there is no learning later without the courage to be rubbish.

Make Failure as Cheap as Possible 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. As Reid Hoffman, one of the PayPal Mafia and cofounder of LinkedIn, once told Ben Casnocha, his newly hired chief of staff, “In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10–20%…if it means you can move fast.” Ben recalls, “I felt empowered to make decisions with this ratio in mind, and it was incredibly liberating.”

“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.”

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.” And remind yourself that every great achievement is rubbish at the beginning. Every one of them. As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

So if you are feeling overwhelmed by an essential project because you think you have to produce something flawless from the outset, simply lower the bar to start. Whether it’s writing a book, composing a song, painting a canvas, or any other creative pursuit that calls to you, inspiration flows from the courage to start with rubbish. 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.

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.

Holding back when you still have steam in you might seem like a counterintuitive approach to getting important things done, but in fact, this kind of restraint is key to breakthrough productivity.

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 progress is not created equal.

“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast”—meaning, when you go slow, things are smoother, and when things are smooth, you can move faster.

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.

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: Hit my sales numbers for the month Lower Bound: Never less than five sales calls a day Upper Bound: Never more than ten sales calls a day Essential Project: Call my family every week for a month Lower Bound: Never talk for less than five minutes Upper Bound: Never talk for more than an hour 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 Essential Project: Complete the first draft of a book Lower Bound: Never less than five hundred words a day Upper Bound: Never more than one thousand words a 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.

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.

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…

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.

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…

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.…

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…

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.…

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…

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.…

This is what it means to achieve Effortless Results: not to achieve a result once through intense effort, but to effortlessly achieve a result again and again.

Linear results exist in every area of endeavor. For example: An employee who works an hour and gets paid for that hour has a linear income. A student who crams for a test, regurgitates facts, and gets a grade is acquiring linear knowledge. A person who decides to exercise for an hour today but tomorrow has to decide again whether to exercise has made a linear decision. An entrepreneur who makes money only when she is actively working to make it happen has a linear business model. A volunteer who serves once and makes an impact once has made a linear contribution. A person who exerts great effort to “make herself” do something today takes linear action. A father who has to remind his children to do the same chore every day is practicing linear parenting.

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. For example: An author who writes a book and is paid royalties for years is getting residual income. A student who learns first principles and can then apply that understanding in a variety of ways over time is acquiring residual knowledge. A person who makes the one-time decision to exercise every day has made a residual decision. An entrepreneur who sets up her business to work even when she is on vacation for six months has a residual business. A social entrepreneur who provides microloans that are repaid so they can be loaned out again and again is making a residual contribution. A person who does something every day, habitually, without thinking, without effort, is benefiting from residual action. A mother who delegates a whole chore to her child and makes it fun, so it happens every day without prodding, is practicing residual parenting.

Benjamin Franklin summarized the idea of compounding interest best when he said, “Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes money.”

Lever: Learning Modest Input, Residual Results Personal capability compounds over time. You develop a reputation once, but then opportunities flow to you for years. You understand first principles deeply and then can easily apply them again and again. You establish a habit once, but then it serves you for a lifetime. 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. Lever: Automating Modest Input, Residual Results Automate something once, and then forget about it as it continues to work perpetually. Write up a cheat sheet once, and use it every day afterward. Write lines of code, or hire someone to write them, and then they will perform the same actions thousands of times. You can write a book once, but then millions can read it even hundreds of years later. Lever: Trusting Modest Input, Residual Results If you hire the right person once, they’ll produce results hundreds of times. When you reduce friction on or across teams up front, collaboration flows smoothly on project after project. When you build a unified team where everybody knows who is doing what, it becomes easier to stay aligned on roles, responsibilities, regulations, rewards, and desired results. Lever: Preventing Modest Input, Residual Results Solving a problem before it happens can save you endless time and aggravation later on. Strike a problem at its roots, and you can prevent it from resurfacing again and again. Preventing a crisis now is always easier than managing it in the future.

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.

A method may be useful once, to solve one specific type of problem. Principles, however, can be applied broadly and repeatedly. At their best, they are universal and timeless. Specific methods, in other words, produce only linear results. If it’s residual results we’re after, we must look to principles. In fact, the word principia means “first principles, fundamental beginnings or elements.” First principles are like the building blocks of knowledge: once you understand them correctly you can apply them hundreds of times.

“As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

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.

“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.”

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.

Reading a book is among the most high-leverage activities on earth.

So prioritize reading books that have lasted a long time. In other words, read the classics and the ancients.

absorbing yourself fully in a book changes who you are, just as if you had lived the experience yourself.

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.

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.

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.

never had fully been before, of how much of ourselves we take with us in the end. Unintentionally, we often leave only pathetically small clues for those who come after us.

It turns out there is a far simpler way to pass our history on to future generations: through the sharing of family stories. Stories are bridges from past to present. They make history come alive. They expand our sense of self.

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.

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.

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. Make the most essential things the easiest ones to teach and the easiest ones to learn.

“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.

The checklist isn’t just useful for highly specialized tasks like flying an airplane. As the world gets more complex, we all need tools to help us remember what’s important. The beauty of the checklist is that the thinking has been done ahead of time. It’s been taken out of the equation. Or rather, it has been baked into the equation. So instead of getting these essential things right occasionally, we get them right every time.

The idea of a cheat sheet is simply to get things out of your brain so you can do them automatically, without having to rely on memory.

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.

Automation is anything that performs a function with minimal human assistance or effort.

Consider taking the high-tech, low-effort path for the essential, and the low-tech, high-effort path for the nonessential.

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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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? 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.

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.

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.

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? The goal is to find the most annoying thing that can be solved in the least amount of time.

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.

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. Hack at the Branches: An educator constantly complains about students not paying attention in class. Strike at the Root: An educator signs a social contract with parents and students regarding expectations before the year begins. Hack at the Branches: A student is exhausted from always pulling all-nighters before an assignment is due. Strike at the Root: A student spends sixty seconds blocking off time to work on assignments every day for a week before they are due. Hack at the Branches: A parent bemoans having to tidy up after their children every day. Strike at the Root: A parent reinforces a positive habit around tidying up.

“The key to this process is time. The sooner you identify a problem, the more likely you are to avert a dangerous situation.” Just as you can find small actions to make your life easier in the future, you can look for small actions that will prevent your life from becoming more complicated. This principle applies in every type of endeavor.

Often, measuring something just once (or not at all) produces first-order consequences: the consequences are the direct and immediate results of our actions.

But the chain of consequences, of course, didn’t stop there. In an interrelated world, a single action can also have second-order and third-order consequences.

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.

We needed to find ways to make every day a little easier. Why? Because we needed to be able to sustain this effort for an unknown length of time. It was not negotiable: we simply could not now or ever burn out. If your job is to keep the fires burning for an indefinite period of time, you can’t throw all the fuel on the flames at the beginning.

Instead, we decided to focus on the simple things, the easy things, the things we could control: We got around the piano and sang. We went on walks. We read books. We played games. We looked for the positive and pointed it out. We prayed together. We ate dinner together. We toasted each other. We told stories. We laughed. We were grateful. We did these things each day, and immediately we noticed an almost magical force at play. We felt less burdened. We were less exhausted. We didn’t burn out.

What did I learn from this experience? 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. 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.

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?

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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