#2 - Effortless by Greg McKeown

Mindful Reading

A discussion of the book Effortless by Greg McKeown.
Effortless, as it says on the cover, is about making it easier to do what matters most. Put differently, making it easier to do the essential things, and hard to do the pointless. The book looks at various situations where people take the difficult path and various situations where people take the effortless path. In some sense, the books claim is that often, we equate success with working hard and working endless hours, but, it doesn't have to be that way. As the title of the introductory chapter says, "not everything has to be so hard", in other words, often, there is an effortless way. Whether that's solving a challenging problem, generating wealth, or dealing with the difficulties of being human; "not everything has to be so hard".
The book is split into three parts:

• Part 1: Effortless State - "How can we make it easier to focus?"
  How can we get into that effortless state? Think along the lines of what many know as the flow state. Where we don't feel like we're continually fighting an uphill battle, but rather we feel we're in the flow state - "rested, at peace, and focused". pg. 15
• Part 2: Effortless Action - "How can we make essential work easier to do?"
  How can we make the work we do, the actions, effortless? Where it's easy to do what matters. It's "about simplifying the process to make the work itself easier to do." pg. 17
• Part 3: Effortless Results - "How can we get the highest return on the least effort?"
  How can we make it effortless to get results? That is, getting results without continued effort, these results are what Greg calls residual results - think along the lines of automation and compound interest. We should use leavers that give us leverage to get residual results. There are various levers, 5 of which are: learning, teaching, automating, trusting, and preventing. The effortless results section looks at those leavers.

Those are the three main parts of the book, and lastly, to end the introduction, here is a sentence and a story that sum up the book well:
The sentence goes: "Of course, you can't make everything in your life effortless, but you can make more of the right things less impossible - then easier, then easy, and ultimately effortless" pg. 19
And the story goes, "Discovering the effortless way of living is like using special polarized sunglasses while fly-fishing. Without them, the glare on the water makes it difficult to see anything swimming below the surface. But as soon as you put them on, their angled surface filters out the horizontal light waves coming off the water, blocking the glare. Suddenly, you can see all the fish underneath. When we're accustomed to doing things the hard way, it's like being blinded by the glare coming off the water. But once you start putting these ideas into practice you will start to see that the easier way was there all along, just hidden from your view." pg. 17-18

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