If you’ve ever pursued a big goal, you know that great results require hard work (and lots of it). The sacrifice and struggle associated with accomplishment are part of the puritan work ethic, the up-by-the-bootstraps mythology many of us have been marinating in since birth. But what if that collective tough-it-out story and the beliefs behind it are making things harder for us than they need to be?
In his new book, “Effortless: How to Make It Easy to Do What Matters,” author Greg McKeown puts forth a simple yet bold principle: Getting great results doesn’t have to be so hard.
As someone who grew up steeped in the belief that hard work is noble and shortcuts are character defects, making things easier for myself feels like sacrilege. No pain, no gain, right?
Maybe not. Think back to the times when you were producing your best results. Was it all grinding hard work? Or were there moments when you were operating in the coveted (and much written about) state of flow? When things came easily, when you were so fully immersed in the activity you were performing at a high level, yet it felt effortless?
In “Effortless,” McKeown suggests that we can create more of this for ourselves by shifting our thinking and changing some of our habits.
“We’ve been conditioned to believe if we want to overachieve, we have to overexert, over-think and over-do,” McKeown writes. “That if we aren’t perpetually exhausted, we’re not doing enough. The problem is the more depleted we get, the harder it is to make progress.”
Have you ever had the experience of putting forth more effort for diminishing returns? I certainly have, like when you find yourself reworking the same presentation, and it’s not getting any better, or you keep rereading the same documents and finding yourself even more muddled. “Instead of pushing yourself harder,” McKeown suggests, “you can choose an easier path.”
McKeown provides concrete strategies for making the most essential activities the easiest ones. His recommendations range from shifting your mental approach, to defining expectations differently at the start of a project, to leveraging the best of what others have to offer.
For example, to shift your mental approach, it’s crucial that we recognize how frequently unhelpful (and often unconscious) emotions drift into our day, cluttering our minds and diverting our attention. McKeown, whose previous book was “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” explains that our brains prioritize emotions with high affective value like fear, resentment, or anger – these win out “leaving us with fewer mental resources to make progress on the things that matter.”
If you’re trying to get a critical and complex project done, if you’re struggling with focus, the problem might not be the challenge of the project itself. Instead, it may be the mental load of unrelated emotions that are cluttering the hard drive of your brain.
McKeown describes our brain’s cognitive overload like a slow-running computer, that speeds up when you clear the browsing data; we can hit reset on our minds to get to our original effortless state. Small things like a warm meal, a shower and a good night’s sleep make once challenging things feel doable.
In “Effortless,” McKeown writes “Life is hard, really hard, in all sorts of ways ranging from the complex to the weighty, the sad to the exhausting. To pretend that we can eliminate these hardships would be fanciful.” His research and recommendations are “not meant to downplay these burdens, but to lighten them.”
One strategy for making important things easier is to look for simpler solutions. Far from dumbing down your challenges and goals, the mental discipline of stripping away complexity enables you to see crucial issues more clearly.
As you consider what’s most important to you, McKeown suggests asking yourself, “How am I making things harder than they need to be? When you have your answer to that question, you will have something of great value: You will know what to do next.”
Lisa Earle McLeod is an advisor, consultant, and speaker, who works with senior executives and sales teams around the world. Her bestselling books include “Selling with Noble Purpose” and “Leading with Noble Purpose.”