Effortless

Introduction

Greg McKeown's Essentialism guides us in choosing the right things; his subsequent work, Effortless, then focuses on how to make those essential tasks easy to accomplish (i.e. doing the right things in the right way).

• High achievers have been conditioned to believe that success is paved with relentless work.
• Though working hard can be effective, it is often more exhausting than ever, and the more depleted we get, the more effort it takes to make any progress.
• Effortless offers actionable advice for ensuring the essential activities are the easiest ones to complete.

Not Everything Has to Be So Hard

In life, there are times to push hard and times to rest and recuperate.

• However, these days many of us are pushing harder and harder all the time. There is no cadence, only grinding effort.
• We think hard work is the key to everything we want in life, including success. However, the truth is hard work only produces better results, but this is true only to a point.
• Economists call this the law of diminishing returns: after a certain point, each extra input produces a decreasing rate of output.

Life is hard in all sorts of ways; hence, it is normal to feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the big, weighty challenges, as well as everyday frustrations and annoyances.

• For too long, our working culture has glorified burnout as a measure of success and self-worth; working endless hours is a success itself, and if you did not stay late at work, you must not have a very important job.
• Instead of trying to get better results by pushing ever harder, we can make the most essential activities the easiest ones.

Importantly, you cannot make everything in your life effortless. However, you can make more of the right things less impossible - then easier, then easy, and ultimately effortless.

Effortless State

You are like a supercomputer designed with the extremely powerful capability to learn quickly, solve problems intuitively, and compute the right next action effortlessly.

• However, when its hard drive gets cluttered with files and browsing data, a computer slows down, becoming less available to perform essential functions.
• Similarly, when our brains are at full capacity with outdated assumptions, negative emotions, toxic thought patterns and countless distractions of daily life, you have less mental energy available to perform what is most essential, and everything feels harder.
• Perceptual Load Theory explains that our brain's capacity is large but limited. Hence, when encountering new information, our brains have a choice about how to allocate the remaining cognitive resources. And because our brains are programmed to prioritize emotions with high "affective value" - like fear, resentment, or anger - this leaves us with even fewer mental resources to devote to making progress on the things that matter.

So, the first step toward making things more effortless is to clear the clutter in our heads and our hearts, to be restored to the original Effortless State.

• It is when you feel rested, at peace, focused and fully present in the moment, only then do you have a heightened awareness of what matters here and now, and can discern the right action and light the right path.

Invert: What If This Could Be Easy?

With the expansion of the organization came an expansion of complexity everywhere; hence, all of our projects and programs took more energy, time and sanity out of us.

• 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 is almost like a natural law for some people: Trivial things are easy; important things are hard. In our deeper assumptions, to accomplish hard-earned, important accomplishments, it takes blood, sweat and tears. Our mindset is often: "It won't be easy, but it is worth it."
• Instead of falling into the false assumption trap that tremendous effort is needed to do what matters, we should consider the possibility that the reason something feels hard is because we have not yet found the easier way to do it. Hence, when faced with a task that felt impossibly hard, try to ask, "Is there an easier way?"

NOTE: To invert means to turn an assumption or approach upside down, to work backward, or to ask, "What if the opposite were true?" Inversion can help you discover obvious insights you have missed because you are looking at the problem from only one point of view.

The Principle of Least Effort explains our tendency to take the path of least resistance to achieve what we want. In other words, our brain is wired to resist what it perceives as hard and welcome what it perceives as easy.

• To illustrate, we buy overpriced things from the nearby convenience store rather than going to the far store where prices are lower but require us to drive.
• From an evolutionary perspective, this bias for ease is useful for survival and progress.
• Rather than fighting our preprogrammed instinct to seek the easiest path, we could embrace or even use it to our advantage, by inverting the question: instead of "How can I tackle this really hard but essential project?" we ask, "What if this essential project could be made easy?"

For some, the idea of working less hard feels uncomfortable, and we worry we will fall behind. We may also feel guilty for not "going the extra mile" each time. We have been conditioned over the course of our lifetimes to believe that in order to overachieve, we must also overdo.

• The truth, however, is that overthinking and trying too hard potentially make things harder for ourselves than they need to be.
• More importantly, if you can imagine how hard it is to push a business uphill, particularly when you are just starting, why not simply start a different business you can push downhill?
• Instead of investing extra work into what is hard, complicated and expensive, we should look for opportunities that are highly valuable, simple and easy, allowing us to solve the actual problem and produce massive results. It is our collective delusion that overwork and burnout are the necessary price and the only path to success. The easier path is not inferior or less noteworthy than the heroic uphill path to success.

Enjoy: What If This Could Be Fun?

We all have things we do consistently - not because they are important, but because we actively look forward to them. These might include listening to a particular podcast, watching a favorite TV show, singing karaoke, dancing to our favorite tunes, or playing games with friends.

• Conversely, we all have important activities we do inconsistently because we actively dread them, such as exercising, washing the dishes after dinner, or waking teenagers for school.

We often separate important work from trivial play, adhering to the popular saying, "I work hard, and then I can play hard."

• For many, there are essential things and there are enjoyable things - but this false dichotomy works against us in two significant ways.
• First, believing essential activities are tedious makes us more likely to put them off or avoid them completely.
• Second, the nagging guilt about all the essential work we should be doing sucks the joy out of otherwise enjoyable experiences.
• Separating important work from play, therefore, makes life harder than it needs to be. We need a clear realization: Why simply endure essential activities when we can enjoy them instead?
• By pairing essential activities with enjoyable ones, we can make even the most tedious and overwhelming tasks more effortless.

Many essential activities, while not particularly joyful in the moment, produce moments of joy later on.

• If you exercise and eat better, you will eventually be healthier and lose weight.
• If you read every day, you will eventually develop expertise.
• If you meditate regularly, you will eventually develop a greater sense of calm in your life.

However, these are all lag indicators, meaning you experience the reward long after the action has taken place - sometimes weeks, months, or years later.

• To ensure we experience immediate joy in the activity itself, we can bridge the lag time between the action and satisfaction by strategically pairing the essential activity with a reward (the enjoyable thing).
• For example, one can walk or run on the treadmill only while listening to a favorite daily podcast.

NOTE: This strategy is well illustrated by the Fourth Law of Behavior Change in Atomic Habits: Make It Satisfying. This law is based on the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided. By pairing a long-term essential activity (like running) with an immediate pleasure (like a favorite podcast), you create an instant reward that reinforces the habit and makes it effortless to repeat.

Release: The Power of Letting Go

Mindsets that have outlived their usefulness - such as outdated goals, suggestions, or ideas - may have snuck into our brain long ago and taken up permanent residence.

• These intruders are like unnecessary applications running silently in the background of your computer, accumulating one after another and slowing down all its other functionality.
• To reclaim this mental space, you need to purge these past regrets or grudges, outdated goals and obsessions.

When we fall victim to misfortune, it is hard not to obsess, lament or complain about all that we have lost.

• With enough secondhand griping and an endless stream of grumbling and whining, we get emotional cancer, where we start to perceive injustice in our lives.
• The more you complain, or the more you hear other people complain, the easier it is to find things to complain about. The more grateful you are, the more you have to be grateful for.
• When you focus on something that you are thankful for, the effect is instant. It immediately shifts you from a lack state (regrets, worries about the future, the feeling of being behind) and puts you into a have state (what is going right, what progress you are making, what potential exists in this moment). It reminds you of all the resources, all the assets, and all the skills you have at your disposal so you can use them to more easily do what matters most.

Gratitude is a powerful, catalytic force that starves negative emotions and generates a positive, self-sustaining system.

• Positive emotions open us to new perspectives and possibilities.
• Our openness encourages creative ideas and fosters social bonds.

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

NOTE: This is the Law of Attraction at work: positive emotion attracts positive thought, leading to increased focus, confidence, and ease in approaching our tasks.

When we let go of the need to punish those who have hurt us, it is not the culprit who is freed, but we are.

• Whenever we surrender grudges and complaints in favor of grace and compassion, the exchange is uneven. With every trade, we are returned closer to the calm of the Effortless State.

Rest: The Art of Doing Nothing

Rest proved to be the antidote for both pre-existing and future stress.

• With sufficient rest, energy is restored, and one can meet challenges with relative ease - the Effortless State.
• Yet, in our 24/7, always-on culture, many people simply do not know how to relax, finding inactivity painfully hard. They push themselves so far past the point of exhaustion that they wake up utterly depleted and fundamentally needing rest.

Studies show that peak physical and mental performance require a rhythm of exertion and renewal.

• To maximize long-term gains, individuals must avoid exhaustion and limit practice to an amount from which daily, complete recovery is possible.
• The easiest way to maintain energy is to continuously replenish your physical and mental reserves by taking short breaks.

The fact that people get less sleep today is far from inconsequential.

• Those who sleep less than seven hours a night is more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, asthma, arthritis, depression, and diabetes; they are also almost eight times more likely to be overweight.
• Sleep deprivation causes a decline in motor skills and cognitive abilities, and they nod off more frequently. It undermines alertness, creativity, social competence - all qualities critical for high-striving entrepreneurs.
• Routine nightly sleep for fewer than six hours results in cognitive performance deficits, even if we feel we have adapted to it.

If you do not achieve optimal amount of quality or deep sleep at night, consider an effortless nap to counter sleep debt.

• While the idea of taking a regular nap is appealing to most people, many do not practice it due to the guilt of not getting things done and the tradition of "sleep shaming."

Notice: How to See Clearly

It feels difficult to be present in the moment - to be laser-focused on one person, conversation, or experience - when we are constantly juggling so many other demands on our attention. Yet, the difficulty lies not in the task itself.

• Listening is not hard; the challenge is stopping our mind from wandering.
• Being present is not hard; the challenge is not constantly thinking about the past and future.
• Noticing is not hard; the challenge is ignoring the environmental noise.

Ultimately, distractions keep us from the present moment and obscure what truly matters.

• Only when we remove external distractions can we become fully present and achieve a state of heightened awareness. This allows us to see things we were missing before, clearly and easily, even amid a rapid flow of information and an endless onslaught of distractions.
• With brain training, everyone can improve their ability to focus on the important and filter out the irrelevant.
• To truly see others, set aside your opinions, advice and judgment, and prioritize their truth above your own.

Effortless Action

Even when we are in the Effortless State, we may still encounter complexity that makes starting or advancing essential projects difficult.

• Perfectionism makes essential projects hard to start, self-doubt makes them hard to finish, and trying to do too much or too fast makes it hard to sustain momentum.

In Eastern philosophy, the masters refer to Effortless Action as wu wei (无为), which literally means "without action" or "without effort".

• This is the state where actions become smooth, natural, and instinctive - as though you accomplish something without even trying.

Define: What "Done" Looks Like

If you want to make a task hard - indeed, truly impossible - to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible.

• By definition, you cannot complete a project without a clearly defined end point simply because you will keep tinkering with the final vision.
• Therefore, to get important work done, it is absolutely necessary to define what "done" looks like.
• Without this clarity, the Law of Diminishing Returns may set in, creating a point where the time and effort we invest exceeds the tangible improvements we gain.

Furthermore, defining "done" helps us get started.

• We often procrastinate or struggle with the first step because we lack a clear finish line.

It takes only a minute of concentration to clarify what "done" looks like.

• Vague: "Read more books." Clear: "Finish reading War and Peace."
• Vague: "Launch my product." Clear: "Have ten beta users try the app for a week and give feedback."

Each day, create a "done for the day" list that explicitly defines what constitutes meaningful, essential progress.

• This list is not an inventory of everything we theoretically could do, or everything we would simply like to get done.

"Swedish Death Cleaning" means getting rid of the clutter you have accumulated throughout your life while you are still alive.

Start: The First Obvious Action

Instead of mapping out a complex, detailed plan, you only have to focus on the very first step.

• We often get overwhelmed because we mistakenly define the first step: what we perceive as the start is often several steps combined.
• Take the simplest, most obvious first step (your minimum viable action) to set even the most immense idea in motion.
• Remember, even if the end state is desirable, if the initial step does not feel easily doable, many people will simply abandon the project before they even begin.

Simplify: Start With Zero

When we mentally add too many steps to a project, we make it overwhelmingly hard or complex for ourselves to take any action at all.

• Hence, step back to zero and ask: "What are the absolute minimum steps required to complete this?"
• Every nonessential step comes with an opportunity cost. For each one removed, we gain more time, energy and cognitive resources to put toward what is essential.
• In just about every realm, completion is infinitely better than adding superfluous steps that do not add value.
• Remember, going the extra mile in ways that are essential is one thing, but adding unnecessary, superficial embellishments is quite another.

Another key idea is that no matter how simple a step, it is often still easier to take no step.

• Consider the friction removed when a customer can check out an order with a one-click purchase, without having to fill in shipping address, contact details, and credit card.
• Hence, adopting Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - is essential to any everyday process, regardless of the ultimate goal.

Progress: The Courage to be Rubbish

In pursuit of what matters, do not try to get everything exactly right the first time.

• Many overachievers, however, struggle with the notion of starting with "rubbish." They hold themselves to an unrealistic standard of perfection at every stage, but this standard is neither realistic nor productive.
• Instead of chasing elegance or an exceptional finished state, prioritize genuine functional progress.
• It is a far easier path where you can crash, repair, modify, and redesign quickly, leading to faster learning, growth, and progress on what is essential.
• For example, many people cite learning a new language as essential but never practice due to embarrassment. They want to be flawless or, at least, not make fools of themselves from the start. However, when it comes to language, embracing mistakes leads to accelerated learning.

Giving ourselves permission to fail takes courage; the higher the stakes, the more courage is required.

• 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, small, learning-sized mistakes must be encouraged.
• This is not giving yourself or others permission to consistently produce poor quality; it is simply letting go of the absurd pressure to always do everything perfectly.
• We should protect our "rubbish" from the harsh critic in our heads.
• Instead of shaming yourself or belittling yourself for even the tiniest error, celebrate the fact that you already took the first step and are unlikely to make the same mistake again.
• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
• Adopt a "zero-draft" approach, where you do not think of it as a draft, but simply "working on rubbish".
• Stop being overwhelmed by the need to produce something flawless from the outset, and simply lower the bar to start.
• By embracing imperfection, by having the courage to be "rubbish", we can begin. Once we begin, we become a little less "rubbish", and then a little less. Eventually, out of the "rubbish" come exceptional, effortless breakthroughs in the things that matter.

Pace: Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

When we try to make too much progress on a goal right out of the gate, we get trapped in a vicious cycle: we sprint until exhaustion, take a break, feel pressure to make up for lost time, and then sprint again.

• The cost 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 do not, and often wind up feeling battered, broken, and still no closer to achieving our goal.

A better, effortless approach is to make consistent, steady progress on priority projects.

• Holding back when you still have steam might seem like a counterintuitive approach to getting things done, but this kind of restraint is actually key to breakthrough productivity.
• In our enthusiasm for getting things done, we may mistakenly think that all progress is created equal. So much in life is actually out of our control - such as the weather, a car breakdown, or our kids falling sick.

Hence, finding the right balance 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, yet low enough that we can still achieve it even on days when we are 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.

Effortless Results

There are two types of results: linear and residual.

• Whenever your efforts yield a one-time benefit, you're getting a linear result. Every day you start from zero; if you do not put in the effort today, you would not get the result today. It is a one-to-one ratio: the amount of effort you put in equals the results received.
• 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.
• With residual results, you put in the effort once and reap the benefits again and again, without further effort on your part. Hence, residual results can be virtually infinite, working like compounding interest on a savings account.
• An author who writes a book and is paid royalties for years is getting residual income.
• A person who makes the one-time decision to exercise every day has made a residual decision.
• A person who does something every day, habitually, without thinking, and without effort, is benefiting from residual action.

Learn: Leverage the Best of What Others Know

As our lives become increasingly busy, overwhelming and fast-paced, it is tempting to seek out easy instructions or methods that we can apply to a problem right away, without expending much mental energy.

• However, a method may be useful only once, to solve one specific type of problem, producing only linear results.
• Principles, however, can be applied broadly and repeatedly. At their best, they are universal and timeless.
• An entrepreneur who learns what their customers truly want can apply that knowledge to any number of different products and services.
• A manager who learns how to unify their team can apply that approach with many future teams.
• Look for commonalities to identify these guiding principles.

When acquiring knowledge, try to view it as a semantic tree.

• Make sure you understand the fundamental principles - the trunk and big branches - before you learn the leaves (the details). This ensures that new information can be easily anchored into your existing foundation of knowledge.

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.

• Different ideas in isolation represent linear knowledge, but those same ideas form residual knowledge when interconnected.
• Often, the most useful knowledge comes from fields other than our own.

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.
• To get the most out of your reading, follow these principles: read the classics and the ancients (following the Lindy Effect), read to absorb (rather than simply to check a box), and distill to understand by summarizing the key learnings.

To reap the residual results of knowledge, the first step is to leverage what others know.

• But the ultimate goal is to identify knowledge that is unique to you and build on it.
• Once you develop a reputation for knowing what no one else knows, opportunities will flow to you for years.

Lift: Harness the Strength of Ten

Teaching others to teach is a high-leverage strategy whenever we aim for a far-reaching impact.

Sharing memorable stories is an easy way for people to remember and share information, much like Aesop's Fables.

Teaching others is also an accelerated way to learn.

• Even anticipating that we might be called upon to teach can dramatically increase our engagement: we focus more intently, listen to truly understand, and think deeply about the underlying logic so we can put the ideas into our own words.

To achieve residual results faster, you need to clearly articulate and simplify the most important core messages you want others to disseminate.

• The messages should not only be easy to understand but also hard to misunderstand, following the "Sesame Street Simple" rule.
• Avoid overly sophisticated messages that only serve to make you sound smart.
• Otherwise, if you try to teach people everything about everything, you run the risk of teaching them nothing.
• Make the most essential concepts the easiest ones to teach and the easiest ones to learn.

Automate: Do It Once and Never Again

The vast amount of knowledge humankind has acquired in so many disciplines has fueled extraordinary scientific, technological, and humanistic progress.

• However, this progress has a downside: the staggering volume and complexity of know-how has exceeded experts' ability to manage it.

Humans have a tremendous capacity for the storage of memories, but a far more limited working memory.

• Hence, extreme complexity only increases the cognitive load, making us that much more prone to errors.
• The checklist is a modest but marvelous tool to help us remember every essential step, using as few mental resources as possible.
• To illustrate, an employee uses daily software to make it easy to prioritize their day. A manager creates an agenda for their weekly meeting to ensure they cover the most important topics.
• 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.
• Hence, seek single choices that eliminate future decisions.

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

• Some technology utilized includes the washing machine, dishwasher, refrigerator, programmable thermostat, automatic bill payment, automatic flight and hotel price checking, automatic budgeting with an app that tracks spending, and the futuristic self-driving car.
• Companies introduce self-service features for rudimentary customer tasks - such as requesting an itinerary or checking a delivery status - primarily to save on operating costs.

Remember, the effort we invest in automating our most mundane but essential tasks yields significant and repeated benefits later on.

• However, automating nonessential activities can work against us, such as automatic renew subscriptions.

Trust: The Engine of High-Leverage Teams

All of us interact with other human beings, both in work and in personal life.

• To preserve these relationships, you have to allocate mental resources, such as deciding when and where to eat with a big group of friends or family.

Trust can be a lever for turning modest effort into residual results.

• When you have trust in your relationships, they take less effort to maintain and manage. You can quickly split work among team members. People can talk about problems openly and honestly when they arise. Members share valuable information rather than hoard it. Nobody minds asking questions when they do not understand something. The speed and quality of decisions go up, while political infighting goes down. Essentially, everyone performs exponentially better because you can focus 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 every word for how it might be interpreted. You feel the need to check up on them: remind them of deadlines, hover over their shoulders, and review their work. You would not delegate anything, assuming you are better off just doing it yourself. Without high levels of trust, you cannot have a high-performing team.
• Trust is the lubricant in the team's engine that keeps everyone working together smoothly, allowing the group to function continuously.

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.
• 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.
• Who we hire is a disproportionately important decision that influences a thousand other decisions. Each new hire may well influence future hires, gradually shifting the norms and the culture over time.
• Often, there will be pressure to fill a role immediately, as the vacancy creates a short-term headache. But while hiring quickly may lighten the load at first, hiring well will lighten the load consistently and repeatedly, saving you many more headaches in the long run.

When you can say these four little words, “I trust your judgment” - and mean them - it is like magic.

• Team members feel empowered to take risks and grow.
• Trust is strengthened and 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.

Building a high-trust structure

• 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.
• While each person on the team may work competently enough on their own, if there are no clear workflows or if miscommunication occurs, some efforts get duplicated while others slip through the cracks. The end result is late or poor completion, going over budget, and everyone is blaming each other.
• When leading a team of colleagues, create a high-trust agreement based on these five R's:
• 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?
• Importantly, aligning the incentives in this way encourages the different parties to act as one team and to make decisions that benefit the whole project rather than their own self-interest. They not only feel a sense of ownership but are motivated to take initiative to make the whole experience more efficient.

Prevent: Solve the Problem Before It Happens

Prevention is the most obvious way to achieve residual results.

Many of us put up with problems - both big and small - for far longer than we have to, failing to take rectifying action to resolve the issue once and for all.

• Sometimes we get so used to the little irritations that we fail to recognize them as a problem worth fixing.
• In the "long tail of time management", we find the most annoying things that occur repeatedly and solve them in the least amount of time, reaping the benefits over a long period.

When we are merely managing a problem, we are hacking at the branches.

• If you have spent a lot of time hacking at the branches, you may have become good at it.
• But if that is all you are doing, the problem will keep coming back to haunt you.
• It is merely being managed, never solved.

To prevent a problem before it even arises, we must strike at the root.

• 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.
• The key to this process is time. The sooner you identify a problem, the more likely you are to avert a dangerous situation.

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 do not just prevent that first domino from toppling; we prevent the entire chain reaction.

Now: What Happens Next Matters Most

The word "now" comes from the 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 - it pales in comparison to the power you have to choose what to do now.

• Life does not have to be as hard and complicated as we make it.
• No matter what challenges, obstacles, or hardships we encounter along the way, we can always look for the easier, simpler path.

Summary

Effortless serves as a follow-up to the bestselling book Essentialism.

• Many people tried to apply the principles of Essentialism in their lives - focusing only on what truly matters.
• However, they often found that when things did not go smoothly, the stress of managing these essential tasks became overwhelming, leading to burnout.

This challenge prompted the author to develop a new idea: what if the solution is to make the most important work the easiest to do?

• Effortless revisits several concepts from its predecessor with a fresh perspective, specifically complementing the execution strategies discussed in Part 3 of Essentialism.
• In fact, one could view it as the missing second part of the original book.