Effortless Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Effortless

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Zusammenfassung von Effortless

Name: Effortless
Rating: 4.3 (428 reviews)
Author: Greg McKeown

Greg McKeown

Make It Easy to Get the Right Things Done

4.3 (428 Bewertungen)

19 Min.

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Effortless
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What’s in it for me?

Not everything in life has to be difficult. And yet many believe that achieving anything worthwhile requires maximum effort. Just think of how people say that “hard work pays off,” or refer to putting “blood, sweat, and tears” into a project. But working this hard doesn’t always guarantee great results.

So how about trying a different approach? Instead of exhausting yourself and burning out, why not take the effortless route, and get more by doing less? It may sound too good to be true, but it is possible. And these blinks will show you how.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

how a bathtub can make your work easier;
the small step that launched Netflix; and
why a bad start can be a good thing.

Making things effortless starts with getting into the Effortless State, and ends in Effortless Results.

Have you ever marveled at how top athletes make everything look easy? Think of basketball players taking shots, for example. They dribble the ball for a few seconds, bend their knees, and then flick the ball straight into the net. They make this shot over and over again, and it seems completely effortless.

Now, there’s definitely a lot of practice involved in perfecting basketball shots. But something else that helps is getting into the right state of mind. With this approach, anything you do can look and feel effortless, too.

The key message here is: Making things effortless starts with getting into the Effortless State, and ends in Effortless Results.

To perform as effortlessly as a seasoned basketball player, you first need to get into the Effortless State. Here, your mind is focused and free of limiting assumptions, and your body is well-rested and full of energy. In this state, anything you attempt is a breeze.

Achieving the Effortless State requires you to overcome mental clutter. In the same way that a powerful computer slows down when the hard drive is full, your mind also slows down when it’s packed with unhelpful patterns and assumptions. And, just as clearing the hard drive speeds up the computer, freeing your mind of negative thoughts puts you in the Effortless State.

In the Effortless State you can take Effortless Action. This means doing less, but achieving more. Many believe that putting in more work leads to better results – but this isn’t true. After a certain point, working harder actually reduces performance, making the additional effort pointless.

For instance, the author writes two pages in two hours – so you’d assume that doubling the time would double the output. However, a four-hour-long session results in only three pages. Economists call this phenomenon the law of diminishing returns, and, in addition to producing disappointing results, it leads to exhaustion. But with Effortless Action, you reach your goal without doing more work than necessary.

And when you apply Effortless Action to the right activities, the results will keep rolling in. This is what it means to achieve Effortless Results, and it’s how Kiva, a crowdfunding platform, helps millions of entrepreneurs. Kiva allows anyone to lend money to entrepreneurs, and once the money is repaid, it’s lent to other entrepreneurs. So a single action produces results over and over again.

Through the Effortless State, Effortless Actions, and Effortless Results, you can make anything easy to accomplish.

Looking for easier or more enjoyable methods gets us into the Effortless State.

Sometimes, we rack our brains over problems, only to realize that we’re making things more complicated than they need to be. This was the case when Kim, a multimedia designer at a university, was asked to record a semester’s worth of lectures for her course. Already overwhelmed by work, Kim decided to look for an easy way to fulfill the request.

Instead of filming and editing videos every week, she first asked what the videos were for. After learning they were for a student who couldn’t attend class in person, she suggested that another student record the lectures on a smartphone. By releasing the assumption that the solution was complicated, Kim achieved her goal effortlessly. This is just one way of getting into the Effortless State.

Use Effortless Action to accomplish a lot without overexerting yourself.

Imagine this: You’ve been assigned a big project at work, and, eager to impress, you start planning right away. You brainstorm ideas, figure out what resources you’ll need, and create timelines. By the time you’re done planning, the project has so many different aspects that you’re already overwhelmed by how much effort it will require.

But with a few Effortless Action techniques, working on this project – or any other, for that matter – doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

Progress is effortless when you’re not afraid to start with rubbish.

In 1959, industrialist Henry Kremer created a prize for anyone who could build a human-powered airplane. This was about 50 years after the first successful flight, so the challenge seemed doable. But the prize went unclaimed for over 17 years.

The man who finally won it was Paul MacCready. He realized that participants were building expensive machines that looked impressive but failed the flight test. His approach was to build something cheap and easy to fix. This way, he could test and crash the plane several times, and use the lessons from each attempt to redesign and build a better version. This is a great example of making progress through Effortless Action.

Knowledge and automation are levers that produce Effortless Results.

You know how some things require constant effort in order to maintain results? For instance, employees work every month for a salary. They can’t do one month’s worth of work and expect to keep getting paid when they stop. The output will never exceed the input.

Such linear results are inevitable in certain situations, but they’re not the only possible results. You can apply effort once, and reap the rewards over and over again. Think of how authors get royalties for years after writing one book. These recurring benefits are examples of Effortless Results, and you can achieve them with the help of levers.

You can ensure Effortless Results by working with trustworthy people, and solving problems before they happen.

We all work and interact with other people in one way or another. And, unfortunately, navigating these relationships and making them productive can be hard.

We might struggle to get on the same page, or to communicate. Sometimes, there’s conflict that makes every interaction difficult. Or we might not be sure that those around us are capable of doing what’s needed. Because of this, reaching a goal or getting results requires a lot more effort.

Du möchtest die gesamte Zusammenfassung von Effortless sehen?

Kernaussagen in Effortless

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Zeitsparende Empfehlungen

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Podcasts in Kurzform ^Neu

Kernaussagen wichtiger Podcasts im Kurzformat mit den neuen „Shortcasts”

Worum geht es in Effortless?

Effortless (2021) challenges the idea that achieving anything worthwhile means overexerting ourselves. This easy-to-follow guide breaks down how to make tasks and projects feel easy, actions we can take to maximize our efforts, and techniques for increasing outputs while keeping our inputs low.

Bestes Zitat aus Effortless

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

—Greg McKeown

Wer Effortless lesen sollte

Workaholics looking for a better way
Leaders who want their teams to work smarter
Students under pressure to overachieve

Über den Autor

Greg McKeown is a sought-after speaker, author, strategist, and the host of the podcast What’s Essential. He’s been featured by the likes of Fast Company, the New York Times, and Fortune, and has written for Harvard Business Review. McKeown’s 2014 book, Essentialism, is a New York Times best seller, and he’s also a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum.

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