Book SummaryEffortless, by Greg McKeown

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Effortless

In Effortless, business strategist and public speaker Greg McKeown gives advice on how to make the most of your time by making your life easier. In our professional and personal lives, we’re often taught that to achieve results, we must work as hard as we possibly can. McKeown says that it doesn’t have to be this way. What if we instead found easier routes to success and integrated them into our lives? In Effortless, McKeown explains how to do just that.

McKeown has dedicated his life to figuring out how to get the most out of our limited time and...

Effortless Summary Effortless Mindset

McKeown states that the first thing to do when trying to live more effortlessly is to adopt an effortless mindset: one where you’re focused, rested, and aware of your surroundings. When you establish an effortless mindset, you’re able to perform the most important and challenging tasks with relative ease. However, achieving an effortless mindset is difficult because we tend to overthink things, cling to false assumptions, and let negative thoughts and emotions hinder our ability to function efficiently. In this section, we’ll explore steps you can take to limit these hindrances and achieve an effortless mindset.

Effortless Flow

Ultimately, McKeown’s idea of an effortless mindset is not about finding a way to work without effort, but finding a way to make effort feel easy. In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi recommends a similar approach, advising that people try to achieve what he calls a “flow state.” People experience a flow state when they feel in control of their thoughts and feelings and voluntarily work hard to achieve something they deem...

Effortless Summary Effortless Progress

Once you reach an effortless mindset, you can take the next step: making effortless progress. By this, McKeown doesn’t mean you’ll achieve more with no effort but that you’ll achieve more with less effort. If you’re in a well-rested, attentive state, you can now add these simple tools to your arsenal to help get things done.

First, clearly define what you’re trying to achieve. Then, instead of overthinking, simply begin. As you progress, you’ll learn to simplify the process and work at a sustainable pace.

Know When You’re Finished

According to McKeown, before beginning a project, clearly define at what stage it will be complete. This may seem obvious, but it’s a step people often overlook, which costs them more time and energy later. This is because, at a certain point, the more you work on something, the less you get done—what economists call the law of diminishing returns. To avoid this, your definition of “done” should be set at the point just before the law of diminishing returns sets in. For example, if you’re working on a business presentation, tell yourself it’s completed when the vital material is portrayed clearly and concisely, without adding too many...

Effortless Summary Effortless Success

McKeown’s final stage of effortless productivity is learning how to apply your actions to produce consistent, compounding results. In the effortless progress section, we learned some tools to help get the most out of your daily effort. In this section, we’ll look at ways you can put in the one-time effort today that will pay dividends in the future, like understanding the principles behind everything you learn, automating processes, building trusting relationships, and fixing problems early. These tactics will help you get more out of life without having to go the extra mile.

Learn the Principles

McKeown argues that to get the most out of the things you learn, you should aim to understand the fundamentals behind the knowledge. Understanding the fundamentals will save you time and effort in the future.

If you understand how something works, you’ll retain the information longer, and you won’t waste time relearning things over and over again. If you understand why something happened, you can apply the information to other areas of your life and more easily make connections between various subjects. A classic example of this is understanding the principles of...

Shortform Exercise: Make Your Life Easier

No matter how productive or successful you are, there are always ways to make life easier for yourself. Let’s examine your daily actions and habits and think about ways to take a simpler path.

Think about the challenges you faced last week at work, at school, or in your personal life. What was the most difficult challenge you had to overcome? What made that challenge difficult?