What You Will Learn from Effortless

This week, Ashto and Jonesy learn practical strategies to ease the process of completing essential tasks from the instant NYT bestseller Effortless. As implied by the title, this book is a guide that offers alternative solutions to lighten the struggle of completing your tasks. Proposed by Greg Mckeown, these strategies include: removing unnecessary steps, prioritising progress over perfection, and identifying the finish line of your project.

Hard work can produce better results, but there’s a limit to how much time and effort we can invest in a project. this cycle can continue until we are burned out and exhausted and still haven’t produced the results we really want. but what if, instead, we took the opposite approach? if instead of pushing ourselves to (and in some cases, well past) our limit, we sought out an easier path? Effortless offers you preventative measures that help you avoid burnout and, instead, be more productive with your time and energy to achieve excellent results.

Part One – Effortless State

You are like a supercomputer designed with extremely powerful capabilities. You’re built to learn quickly, solve problems intuitively, and compute the right next action effortlessly. Under optimal conditions, your brain works at incredible speeds; but just like a supercomputer, your brain does not always perform optimally.

Think about how a computer slows down when its hard drive gets cluttered with files and browsing data. The machine still has incredible computing power, but it’s less available to perform essential functions. Similarly, when your brain is cluttered with thoughts (like outdated assumptions, negative emotions, and toxic thought patterns) you have less mental energy available to perform what’s most essential. When your computer is running slowly, all you have to do is hit a few buttons to close a few tabs and shut down a bunch of programs that are running – and immediately the machine works smoother and faster. In a similar way, you can learn simple tactics to rid your mind of all the clutter slowing down the hard drive of your mind. By hitting a few key buttons, you can be restored to your original factory settings, your Effortless State.

When you return to your Effortless State, you feel lighter in two senses of the word. Firstly, you feel lighter as in less heavy and unburdened; because when you aren’t weighed down, suddenly you have more energy. When you remove the burdens in your heart and the distractions in your mind, you are able to see more clearly. You can discern the right action and light the right path. The Effortless State is one in which you are physically rested, emotionally unburdened, and mentally energised. You are completely present, attentive, and focused on what’s important at the moment. You are able to do what matters most with ease.

Invert: What if this could be easy?

All too often, we sacrifice our time, our energy, and even our sanity, almost believing that sacrifice is essential in and of itself. 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. If things are too easy they’re unimportant, anything that is hard to do must be important and worth doing. our language helps to deepen these assumptions. When we accomplish something important we say it took “blood, sweat and tears”. We say achievements were “hard-earned” (instead of just “earned”). We talk about “a hard day’s work” (instead of “a good day’s work” or just “a day’s work”). When we talk about “easy money”, it is looked down upon, often suggesting it was acquired through unscrupulous means.

This assumption is hardly ever questioned. We don’t even pause to consider that something important and valuable could be made easy. What if the biggest thing keeping up from doing what matters is the false assumption that it has to take tremendous effort? What if, instead, we consider the possibility that the reason something feels hard is that we haven’t yet found the easier way to do it?

When a strategy is so complex that each step feels akin to pushing a boulder up a hill, you should pause, invert the problem, and ask yourself, ‘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. As these obstacles disappear, we can begin to uncover our Effortless State.

Part Two= Effortless Action

Larry Silverberg is a “dynamicist” at North Carolina State University. that means he is an expert in the movement of physical things. for example, he has studied the movement of millions of free throws over twenty years. one thing he has found over the years is that the most important factor for successfully shooting a free throw is the speed at which you release the ball. Achieving the kinesthetic sweet spot takes practice and muscle memory. The goal is to get to the point where you try without trying, where your movement becomes smooth, natural, and instinctive. That is what is meant by effortless action. If you try too hard when shooting a free throw, you’ll tense up and move too fast. This is similar to what happens to many overachievers who have been conditioned to believe that more effort leads to better outcomes. When they invest a lot of effort and don’t see the results they want, they lean in harder. They work longer hours and obsess over the situation more. They are trained to see the lack of progress as a sign that more effort is required. What they haven’t learned is that past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance, it sabotages 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 you’re writing a book, you can write two good pages in two hours. If you write for four hours, you can produce three pages. The second two hours only yielded half of the results as the rate of output slowed down. Working another 2 hours won’t get you another 2 pages as it did at the beginning, so it probably won’t even get you another page. But sometimes, overachievers double down on effort, trying to chase those wins and squeeze out everything they can from themselves. What is the effect of this? not fewer positive returns, but in fact negative returns. We’re not just getting a smaller return on each additional investment, we are actually decreasing our overall output. The goal is to accomplish what matters by trying less, not more: to achieve our purpose with bridled intention, not overexertion.

Part Three = Effortless Results

Effortless results are not to just achieve results once through intense effort but to effortlessly achieve results again and again. Whenever your inputs create a one-time output you are getting linear results. Every day you start from zero – if you don’t put in the effort that day you don’t get results that day. It’s a one-to-one ratio, the number of efforts lines up with the results received.

Examples: an employee works for one day and gets paid for one day, a volunteer who works one morning and makes an impact has made a linear contribution, and an entrepreneur working as a freelancer that gets paid only when they work has a linear business model. A father who has to remind his kid to do the same chore every week is practising linear parenting. Linear results are limited – they can never exceed the amount of effort exerted.

Most people don’t realise that there is another alternative, residual results. With residual results, you exert effort once and reap the benefits again and again. Results continue to flow to you, and you get results while you’re sleeping, or even if you take the day off.

There are two ways to approach getting things done: the hard way is with powerless effort; the easy way is with effortless power.

Do it once and never again

One of Greg’s mates went in for knee surgery. at first, his knee felt better. But after a while, a weird pain came back. Eventually, he went back to the hospital, and they found that the surgeon had left a small piece of surgical equipment inside his knee when he stitched him back up. You wouldn’t expect this type of mistake from highly trained medical professionals. In the heat of complex surgery, they made a shockingly careless and completely avoidable mistake. The explanation for this is simple – they had relied on their memory, and as a result, they forgot an essential step in the process. We might say, ‘If only they were thinking, they wouldn’t have made a silly mistake like that.’ But really, we should say, ‘If only they didn’t have to think.’

Is There A Cheat Sheet for This?

Humans have a tremendous capacity for the storage of information. one computer scientist estimated that if our brain were a digital video recorder, it would have enough storage and memory to hold three million hours of TV/ movies. But, the problem is the RAM of our brain’s hard drive, the amount of information we can readily call up and use at any point in time is far more limited. this explains, at least partially, why highly intelligent people still forget where they left their keys, or why doctors with enormous training and expertise still leave little surgical instruments inside a patient’s knee. the limits of working memory breed avoidable errors. Gawande’s solution = make a checklist. Create a mini cheat sheet for yourself. Remove the requirement on your brain to remember everything,  to use effort every single time. Instead, invest the effort once to think about everything needed and write it down so that you no longer have to think about it ever again.

Conclusion

In each moment, we have a choice: Do I choose the heavier path 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 as complicated as we make it. Each of us has, as Robert Frost said, ‘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, effortless path.