Effortless Book Review

(The effortless state)

(How can we make it easier to focus?)

• Imagine, after a long and stressful day at work you return home. You’re ruminating on something your boss said, the kids want to play and start annoying you, your wife is growing annoyed at your lack of an entrance, you can’t find your running shoes, so you flip.
• Now imagine, you’ve done a workout which has made you feel stillness, had a hot shower and then return home - everything will be easier

“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 in that moment. You are able to do what matters most with ease.”

“Burnout is not a badge of honour.”

“Essentialism is about doing the right things, effortless is about doing them in the right way.”

Without effortless:

• With the effortless process, it’s like how fly-fishers use special polarised glasses. The glasses filter out the horizontal light waves bouncing off the water so they can see all the fish below.
• Without them, you can’t see the essential target (the fish)
• Doing things the hard way is like being blinded by that glare from the water

1.) Invert: (what if this could be easy?)

Carl Jacobi, the nineteenth-century German mathematician, developed a reputation as someone who could solve especially hard and intractable problems. He learned that to do that most easily, Man muss immer umkehren, which translates to “One must invert, always invert.”4 To invert means to turn an assumption or approach upside down, to work backward, to ask, “What if the opposite were true?”

• We have societal ingrained beliefs that important work must be hard and anything trivial is easy
• Language we use; “it took blood sweat and tears!”
• “Hard days work!” Rather than just “a days work”
• Easy money = illegal
• “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?”
• Evolutionarily we seek the path of least resistance; so we should embrace it!
• Get a lazy person to do the job because they’ll find an easier way
• We feel bad though about not “working tirelessly hard” - this comes from the puritan idea
• But trying too hard = mess ups

So:

• When something feels incredibly hard to do, all we need ask is: “what’s the simplest way to achieve this result?”

Seth Godin:

• “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?”

2.) Enjoy: (what if this could be fun?)

• Example; comic relief
• Pair the essential activities with the most enjoyable
• (Essential) (enjoyable)
• (Essential)(effortless)(enjoyable)
• Usually we say (work hard play hard)
• What if we changed this to; work easy play easy

3.) Release: (the power of letting go)

• A chapter largely focused on gratitude
• “When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have.”
• “When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack.”
• Linked to the happiness equation = being unhappy is extremely inefficient
• Do away with grudges:
• “What job have I hired this grudge to do?”
• Learn to accept: “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.”
• Each time you complain = reflect on something you’re grateful for

4.) Rest: (the art of doing nothing)

• “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.”
• The Hemmingway principle + the Zeigarnick effect - you’ll be more sustainably productive if you stop before you are drained
• Do morning deep work of:
• 3 sessions of no more than 90 mins each
• 10-15mins break in-between those sessions
• Training, recovery, nutrition, sleep, mindset (become an athlete)

5.) Notice: (how to see clearly)

• Call up the state of heightened perception by:
• 1.) prepare your space (2 mins)
• Clear your desk, reorganise your environment
• 2.) rest your body (2 mins)
• Sit comfortably, close your eyes, breathe
• 3.) relax your mind (2 mins)
• Meditate
• 4.) Release your heart. (2 mins)
• Allow yourself to forgive when thoughts of a grudge come to mind
• 5.) breathe in gratitude (2 mins)
• Relive a moment you’re grateful for

Part 2:

(Effortless action)

(How can we make the essential work easier to do?)

• Accomplishing more by trying less

1.) Define: (what done looks 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.”
• As Einstein said = 90% of the time thinking about the problem 10% of the time solving it (give examples of working in contraction)
• Do not enter into the zone of diminishing returns
• Done = the point just before the effort you’ve invested begins to be greater than the output achieved
• Define what done looks like, get there, then stop
• Examples between clarity and vagueness with defining ‘done’:
• Read more books = on my kindle it will say finished next to the brothers Karamazov
• Record my first YouTube video = record a 3 minute video about how stoicism has changed my life, chop edit it, upload it to YouTube & click publish
• Walk more = reach 10,000 steps on my Fitbit everyday for the next 2 weeks
• “If I complete everything on this list, will it leave me feeling satisfied by the end of the day?”
• “Is there some other important task that will haunt me all night if I don’t get to do it?”
• Swedish death cleaning = doing the tasks you wouldn’t want to leave undone before you die

2.) Start: (the first obvious action)

• Simply find the first obvious action
• Essential project / first obvious action / microburst
• (Remove clutter from the garage) (find the broom) (sweep out the shed and move bikes into the shed)
• (Record a YouTube video) (go through ideas list & pick one that resonates) (speak out lout & create the video script)

3.) Simplify: (start with zero)

• The simplest steps are the ones you don’t take
• Start from zero and try to figure out the absolute minimum number of steps required to achieve the best outcome
• Video creation; Idea - research - creation - editing - upload - celebrate - repeat

...most geniuses “prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” Andy Benoit

4.) Progress: (the courage to be rubbish)

• My story = in university writing essay drafts - the best advice I ever got was to write a crappy first draft then let it mature like fine wine
• Edit edit edit and then you’d get the best final draft
• Language learning is the perfect example = most people don’t persist because they don’t want to look stupid
• The story of the Spanish teacher = students are to imagine they hold a bag of 1000 beads. Every time they make a mistake talking to someone in that language they’re to take out one bead. When the bag is empty = level 1 mastery

Make failure as cheap as possible:

• Try in low stakes situations
• e.g. with kids if you’re teaching them about money - get them to learn with £1 instead of £100,000 later in life
• George Bernard Shaw: “a life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

5.) Pace: (slow is smooth, smooth is fast)

• When you go slow, things are smoother, when things are smooth, you can move faster
• Joe Indvik:
• Elite military infantry move between a walk and a run - carefully treading while rhythmically scanning the battlefield in all directions
• Less experiences infantry will sprint into battle to give the impression of momentum - long term this is bad strategy as they may be rushed into an area they haven’t scanned or assessed
• Develop upper/lower bounds (to specify behaviour):
• Essential project:
• Call my family every week for a month
• LB = never talk less than 5 mins
• UB = never talk more than an hour
• Hit my sales numbers for the month
• LB = no less than 3 out reach attempts in the day
• UP = no more than 5 out reach attempts in the day
• Lower bound = staves off demotivation
• Upper bound = staves off burnout

Part 3:

(Effortless results)

(How can we get the highest return on the least effort?)

• Linear work vs residual work
• Liner = an employee who works an hour and gets paid for the hour
• A student who crams for a test to regurgitate it on the day = linear knowledge
• Someone who exercises today but has to decide whether to exercise tomorrow = linear decision
• A father who reminds his kids everyday to do the same chores = linear parenting
• Residual = an author who writes a book & gets paid for years = residual income
• Youtuber = who makes a killer video & gets subscribers for years to come (Wink wink ;))
• A student who learns first principles & applies them in multiple ways = residual learning
• A dad who dedicates 1 whole chore to a child & makes it fun = residual parenting
• The graph:
• Trust = hire the right person once = residual employee
• It can also work oppositely = bad residual results

1.) Learn: (leverage the best of what others know)

• Principles > methods (help us solve something continuously)
• First principles = the building blocks of knowledge
• Understanding why/how something happens = residual results
• Understanding what your audience wants = multiple applications
• Learning how to unify a team = the ability to unify future teams
• Understanding how to make a decision = you can make a decision forever
• Your wife likes pizza
• So you buy her one every night
• Novelty wears off
• But what if you understood what she really valued & liked
• Knowledge = like a tree (build the roots & logs, then focus on details like leaves and branches)
• Learn the best of what others have already figured out
• The hedgehog knows 1 big thing
• The fox knows many small things
• But the fox would fair better if it knew how to connect those multiple little things
• 1.) read old books which have stood the test of time
• 2.) read to absorb - not tick “read”
• 3.) summarise what you’ve learned and store it
• “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.”
• “Stand on the shoulders of giants & lever the best of what they know.”

3.) Automate: (do it once and never again)

• Automate what processes you can
• Remove as much necessity to make decisions as possible

4.) Trust: (the engine of high-leverage teams)

• In 2003 warren Buffett wanted to buy Mclane distribution ($23billion) provider of supply chain solutions owned by Walmart!
• How complex that must have been
• It took Buffett 2 hours and a hand shake to close the deal
• You can’t have high performing teams without trust
• You’ll check up on people, monitor them constantly, be on edge talking to them
• How fast does the truth travel?
• Higher people with integrity, intelligence, initiative
• High trust environment = expectations are clear. Goals are shared. Roles are clear, standards are articulated. The right results are prioritised.
• “The deal” = tie participant’s compensation to the outcome of the whole project rather than to the work they individually contribute. - this brings unity
• 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?

5.) Prevent: (solve the problem before it happens)

1.) what is a problem that irritates me repeatedly?

2.) what is the total cost of managing that over several years?

3.) what is the next step I can take immediately, in a few minutes to move toward solving it?

• e.g (hack the branches vs strike at the root)
• A parent bemoans having to tidy up all the time
• They reinforce the habit of tidying up after playing
• e.g. doctor treats a heart problem after years of medication and surgery
• The doctor encourages a lifestyle change to healthy eating, regular sleep & exercise
• Measure twice cut once

“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.”