Effortless

But, "Effortless" seems to address the other side of the pandemic – the other side of the pandemic is that people have often got through this experience through grinding effort, where people are teetering right on the edge of burnout, or completely passed it.

So Effortless is saying, "Maybe we are sometimes doing the right things, but we're doing them in the wrong way. We're doing them in a heavier, overcomplicated, overthinking way that tends towards burnout, and perhaps there is a better way, perhaps we're making things more difficult than they need to be." That's really what Effortless is all about.

Rachel Salaman: But so many people – so many successful people – say that great results depend on hard work, are they wrong?

Greg McKeown: I think that hard work is such an important virtue and principle, it has its place – but it also isn't a "cure-all."

And when we try to make relentless work – endless hustle – the lifestyle, I think it's not well fitted to humans and human performance, and what it really takes to break through to the next level. So, my position to this is hard work has its place, but we will achieve far better results if we can find a way to do it without burning out.

Rachel Salaman: How effortless is your life?

Greg McKeown: I live in the real world. I don't like the idea sometimes people have [that] he thinks he's got all the answers, or somehow sits on top of the mountain like a guru. I married Anna, we have four children together, we live in that real world, we live in the wrestle, and what I would say is that, in some ways, I wrote this book for me, for us.

I'd already stripped many of the non-essentials from my life, but I still found that it was too much, I still found myself burdened. And then to top it off, while I was traveling once on business, I get a call from my son, it was right in the middle of one of my daughter's, Eve, having a massive tonic-clonic seizure. So, when you add that additional family crisis on top of everything else that was going on, I really just found myself hitting a wall, and I just thought, "Well what do you do in this situation, where responsibilities don't suddenly disappear? You still have three other children that need things from you. What do you do, how do you go forward?"

That was really the birth of this new journey: to discover are there ways to make what is most essential easier, to take life's inevitable burdens and make them not so burdensome? And it's grown into an enormously fruitful journey of exploration, first for our own survival, for our own sanity, but then also it's grown into something even more rewarding than that.

As I've studied this now, in-depth, over several years, I feel confident now that there really is a more effortless path, an easier way to do what matters.

Rachel Salaman: Yes. So how much do you think the lessons in your book are suitable for the workplace, and especially if we're working remotely in our own spaces?

Greg McKeown: Well, I think that they took shape amidst that reality. So, let's choose some specific things. One practical tool that we've started to use in our business as well is just a "done for the day" list. The endless to-do lists that we use... I mean, if they left us feeling at the end of the day, as we're going to sleep, satisfied, peaceful, relaxed, well great, keep doing them! But often, despite having worked hard, despite having achieved a great amount even, we get to the end of the day, and we're just stressed out about all the things that we haven't done for the next day.

So, one of the things that I find so useful, practical, is to start the day by saying, "OK, what is the work that will leave me satisfied by the end of today?" If I complete these things, I can put my hands up and say, "OK, walk away, no one gets hurt, we're done." You know, [you don't] go on a walk and somehow still be connected to work, you actually have a season of real relaxation, of really unplugging, because you're satisfied with what you have got done.

So, I just find that that simple practice alone, of "done for the day" – what's essential that, once it's done, I can feel good about what I've achieved – is a useful thing for both personal life and business life.

Rachel Salaman: Now your book looks at the effortless state, effortless action, effortless results. We could start with just a little definition, if you wouldn't mind, Greg. For you, what is the "effortless state"?

Greg McKeown: Effortless state is something that I think everyone has experienced sometimes, maybe not very much, but we've all had it: it's when you feel rested, physically; it's when you're mentally clear, emotionally kind of unburdened; and you can just be present with relative ease, you can be focused on what matters most without straining and forcing.

I think that the opposite of the effortless state is something that we're all so very familiar with, where we're just physically exhausted, even though we don't always recognize that that's what's going on, you know.

When we're physically exhausted our mind gets foggy. We tend – especially if we're actually on the edge of burnout – to start resenting the people around us, resenting every request anyone makes of us, so we start to interpret people's behavior in inaccurate ways, so we start to fall out with people, resent the latest request from our boss and so on.

So, it distorts everything, and then we're reacting to an inaccurate view of what's going on around us, making things worse even in our attempt to make them better. [We] tend to then be complaining a lot, and it's not so fun to be around people that are complaining a lot. Criticizing a lot, again, it's not necessarily fun to be around that – and that's true for us as well, because we have to be around ourselves more often than anyone else has to be around us.

So, there's this downward spiral that grows out of being in a state of suffering. And so just even the idea that there is an alternative, and that the alternative can be achieved in quite simple ways... For example, if you just follow B. J. Fogg – B. J. Fogg is the faculty member at Stanford who started the behavioral lab there, a colleague of mine – he uses what he calls "habit recipes," which the simplest form of this is, "After I 'X,' then I will 'Y'." You can apply that to shifting immediately from this state of suffering into an effortless state by this simple formula: after I complain, I will say something I am thankful for.

I tell you, I started doing that myself and the first thing I noticed was how much I complain, how much more I complain than I realized. I think of myself as quite intentionally positive and optimistic, but it was amazing how often I began sentences with, "Oh, that meeting went longer than expected. Oh, this didn't work, that didn't work." It's just part of the vernacular.

I found that the easiest shift was just, not to suddenly say, "Oh I'm never going to complain again," but whenever I do, just add on something I'm thankful for. And it will change your state so that you start to see all the other things that are in your favor or the other actual assets that you have.

And you can see this in business as well as in personal life, where, in the midst of the pandemic, some team cultures, some company cultures, have known how to focus on what is going right, what is going well, how they can build on that, and it's helped them to survive and even to thrive in what would otherwise be just really difficult times. That's the power, to me, of the difference between a state of suffering and an effortless state.

Rachel Salaman: One of the first tips in your book which I really liked was that we can make the most tedious essential tasks more enjoyable by adding an enjoyable element, like you have a story about returning voicemails from the hot tub. I just wondered if you could give us maybe a couple more examples like that?

Greg McKeown: By the way, that is for real, and I pushed the envelope even more on the hot tub strategy, just taking calls there as well, even sometimes just hold meetings there; it sounds, even as I say it, a little awkward, but it just goes to show how we assume that work has to be a certain type of experience. So, once you unlock the idea that it's OK for the most essential work, the important work, to be more enjoyable, lots happens.

I have a CEO friend who wanted to be running on his treadmill every day, but he rarely achieved it. There was a particular news program that he always likes to listen to, a podcast, and he just said, "OK, I'm only going to be allowed to listen to that if I'm walking or running on the treadmill." So that single shift means that he doesn't miss doing it now, he's just linked it with something he was already going to do anyway, already looking forward to, and instead of separating and saying, "Well I'm going to do the workout and then I'll feel good," he just combined that, he reduced the lag indicator, so that he experiences the joy in that moment.

Rachel Salaman: You also, in the section on "release," you offer some great tips that help us clear out minds. I particularly liked the ones around grudges and letting go of grudges. What are your favorites in that section?

Greg McKeown: The grudges thing is a big deal. If you thought about what productivity hack would help you the most, I think almost nobody would say, "Let's fire our grudges, let's get rid of them." So, the suggestion that I'm making here grows out of something that Clayton Christensen used to ask about all products and services – he said, "What am I hiring this product or service to do?" I just try to use that question with grudges, "What do we hire grudges to do?" We hire them, we hold onto them, we have them for a reason. And by looking at the reasons, it helps us to be able to evaluate their job performance – are our grudges doing what we hired them to do?

For example, we hire a grudge to make us feel one-up, powerful. Someone has done something to us, that makes us feel one-down, that hurt us, and so by hiring a grudge we go, "See, I'm in the upper position, I am superior, I am strong." But how does it perform that responsibility? Does a grudge actually produce that? No! It makes us feel far more vulnerable. It makes us feel weaker, it doesn't protect us, it doesn't make us feel strong, it leads us to feel that much more vulnerable with every other relationship that doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

We hire a grudge because it creates sometimes sympathy for us, we tell our story to other people, "Oh I can't believe that happened to you and I'll take your side of it." Well how does it perform against that? Well, if you pay a little more attention, you find people get pretty tired of that story and of that victimhood, that's one of the reasons we have to keep finding new people to tell the story to.

Basically, all of the things we hire grudges to do, they do not perform well. If we could take those resources and return them, to focus on what actually does matter and it is essential in our lives, is that not truly a more effortless way of doing life?

It doesn't mean that bad things don't happen to us, it just means we don't make it worse and harder still, and overcomplicating it by holding onto those grudges, somehow believing that they will make us better, that they will make life easier. They won't, they don't, they just keep us in a state of suffering.

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Rachel Salaman: In "Part 2" you move on from the "effortless state" to "effortless action," and you make the point that too much effort can actually harm a project or goal. How do you know what "done" looks like, as you put it?

Greg McKeown: Well, it's different for different projects, but I've experienced many times when a project just doesn't get a clear definition of what "done" looks like. So, as a result, you can just keep adding new specifications, you have mission creep, and it just makes it harder, not just to complete because you can't complete a project when you don't know what "done" looks like, so of course it makes it harder to complete, but it also makes it harder to begin because it's so overwhelming.

So, often people don't get halfway through a big project and quit, often they just start to imagine doing it and it's so big – because it's so vague – they don't even get going. So, the way we define what "done" looks like is we start by asking that question, "How will we know when we're done? What does done look like?" Let's just identify that, how will we know? OK, we can walk away, we can move forward. That question alone is powerful.

Rachel Salaman: Now a lot has been said and written about the importance of failure in ultimate success, and you put this nicely in your book as "the courage to be rubbish." Now this idea makes sense, of course, but it doesn't sound very effortless. Could you make the connection between failing and reducing effort?

Greg McKeown: Oh yeah. I mean, there's a British industrialist, Henry Kremer, who launched the Kremer Prize, which illustrates this I think more beautifully. He had a prize, £50,000 – this is back in 1959 – for any team who could create an aircraft that could fly a figure eight around two pylons, half a mile apart. And then also £100,000 for a second prize for the first person who can fly a human-powered plane across the English Channel.

Now for context, all this is basically a workable flying bicycle. And he thought it was really realistic because, you know, this is like a full half century after the Wright Brothers make their flight around Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, it's 40 years since the first non-stop transatlantic flight, it's only a decade before there'll be people walking on the moon, so he thinks it's going to be really realistic. But, it turns out that, for 17 years, teams try and totally fail.

So that's the scene when Paul Macready comes along, who is saddled with debt, he has no team, in fact, really just friends and family. So, he gets his young son to be his test pilot, and while all of these other teams for 17 years have basically built big, complex, elegant airplanes, and not coming close to achieving it, he starts looking at the problem from a completely different perspective.

He's looking at it, "Why have they not succeeded, why can they not achieve this?" And it hits him that everyone's been trying to solve the wrong problem. The real challenge wasn't to build this elegant aircraft – that can do the figure eight on the field around the two pylons, that I talked about – it was instead to build a light aircraft, no matter how ugly it is, that could be repaired, modified and redesigned fast.

So, the key idea was that there was an easy way to do this. And what he had to do was make it so that they could crash the plane cheaply – and fix it fast. So, the plane he puts together, it was called The Gossamer Condor, it weighs like 55 pounds, it looks amateurish compared to the sleeker models, but the advantage was that he could go out, test it, crash it, get some broom handle, tape, stick it back together, test it again.

So, in one day they might crash the plane four or five times, and in five minutes they'd be back up in the air, every time. Whereas, their competitors would bring their plane out, try to fly it, crash it, six months before they try it again. They'd go back to the drawing board, "OK, we got all of this wrong, let's try this all again, revamp everything, go try it again."

That's why they failed, it's that failure along the way was way too expensive. So, there's all sorts of ways we make failure more expensive than it needs to be, but the key is to make it as cheap as possible.

By the way, the end is that Macready's team succeeds, so they do win the first prize, and then, two years later – this was on the 223rd flight, I might add – they crossed the English Channel as well [and] win the second prize. The brilliant insight wasn't some insight into the science of flight, it was simply realizing that all that elegance and sophistication was actually an impediment to the progress.

Similarly, as we are trying in our own work, in our own pursuits of what matters most to build a better airplane, we need to embrace the rubbish, no matter how ugly it is, so that we can crash, repair, modify and redesign fast in our own world. It's a far easier path, the learning, growing and making progress on what's essential.

Rachel Salaman: The last section of your book is called "Effortless Results," and the concepts of linear and residual results is central to this. I wondered if you could help us understand what those are and the difference between them?

Greg McKeown: Yeah. Basically, a student who crams for a test, regurgitates facts, gets the grade, they're just acquiring linear knowledge – that is, one effort produces one result. A person who decides to exercise for an hour today, but tomorrow has to decide again whether to exercise, they've made a linear decision. An entrepreneur who makes money only when he or she is actively working to make it happen, has a linear business model.

Basically, we wouldn't normally call any of this linear, we would just call this work. This is what we think of when we think of effort: put one effort in, get one reward out. And it's so normal that we don't even think there's an alternative. But residual results are completely distinct.

With residual results you exert effort once and reap the benefits again and again, results continue to flow to you whether you put in additional effort or not. So they flow to you while you're sleeping, they flow to you if you're taking the day off. As an author, I can see the difference in one concrete way, right? If I write a book then you're paid royalties for years and years, it's residual income. A social entrepreneur who provides microloans that are repaid, so that they can be loaned out again and again, is making a residual contribution, and the difference is so enormous.

A friend of mine, Jessica Jackley, was doing volunteer service in East Africa and she meets a local fishmonger, Catherine. And Catherine has a problem because she has to pay for fish from a middle-man, and so she's always in a subsistence situation – it's like the perfect illustration, actually, of linear effort. I mean, every day she's paying for this fish from the middle-man because she can't afford to go and build the relationships, take the time off of work to go over and actually set up a proper relationship with the fisheries themselves, so she can never get ahead.

Then Jessica sees the situation, and she could have helped in another linear way: she could have just given her $500, which is how much it would take for her to be able to afford to leave, for enough time to go set up these relationships and pay for the fish in advance and so on, that would have been a really good thing to do. But she just had had enough experience that they suddenly go, "Well what if we approach this in a microloans approach?" And this is how Kiva was born. [A] crowd-sourcing platform where anyone can loan money, in any amount, to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

The loan is paid back, and 98 percent of the time it is in the form of a Kiva credit, so that, as a creditor, you can just keep sending out the same amount of money to many different people, just keep on reusing that same amount. So instead of giving a one-time gift for $500, Jessica and company built a platform that has now distributed over $1.3 billion in loans – that is the actual difference between linear results and residual results.

Rachel Salaman: You write eloquently about learning as well, and this is the final part of your book. What are your key takeaways here?

Greg McKeown: I would say that one of the distinctions is something I mentioned just in passing about knowledge. If you are only ever learning just to take an exam, pass a test, and go on – and I'm not, somehow, super against that, but what you get is of a certain value: you learn it, you memorize it just for the moment, it's done, you get the grade, you move on. There's a very big difference where somebody says, "I want to learn the principle, I want to understand the first principle."

To use Elon Musk's term for this, he was asked once, "How have you been able to download whole, complex new disciplines into your brain so quickly?" I mean, he's literally asked that question, and it's a reasonable question because, most people don't know this, but even though he's founder of Tesla, Space X, he really has no background whatsoever in mechanical engineering or rocket science. And one of his answers to that is he said, "It's important to view knowledge as a sort of semantic tree, where you understand the fundamental principles, that's the trunk. If you can understand the deeper principles then you can very quickly, in an accelerated way, hang on that new knowledge... The branches and the leaves are all the additional pieces of information – you have a place to put them."

And I think that's one of the main distinctions I'm trying to make, is again that difference between linear learning, where you're just sort of understanding a leaf here, a leaf there, versus residual learning, where you really understand the first principles, the deepest core ideas within a field. Because, here's the advantage, is that once you understand first principles you can apply them 100 ways, 100 new ways, ways that other people in that field aren't applying them.

Rachel Salaman: Your book also looks at an effortless approach for organizations as well as individuals, and hiring the right people is a key area here. Could you talk about the "three I's" approach to hiring?

Greg McKeown: Yes. So let's just connect the dots again. If you try to do something yourself, that's linear effort, OK, "I'm going to do it once and get that reward once." Hiring people is inherently a residual proposal – if you hire one person, you will get results from that hire many, many times.

So, as with many other residual results, there's an upside and a downside. When you're dealing with residual results, if you get the hire wrong, for example, you will deal with that problem many, many times, because every decision they make that's out of alignment with the values of the organization, for example, or they're deeply dishonest in their conduct with you, for example. I mean, any of those things multiply over time.

What I've found as a really helpful "three I's" test is from Warren Buffett, who said, "You need to look for people with integrity, intelligence and initiative."

Rachel Salaman: Those are the three I's.

Greg McKeown: Those are the three I's: integrity, intelligence and initiative. And integrity's the most important one because, without that, the other two can hurt you.

What I've found since I discovered that is what a useful, practical test that is when you're looking to hire somebody. You literally can just go through the evidence of all three, because if you can find the one right person – high integrity, high intelligence, high initiative – they're so much more valuable than finding somebody that maybe is lower on those three elements, that it's worth the additional effort up front.

And that's sort of the tradeoff involved here: with residual results, you might put a little more effort in to produce the right residual result, but it's an incredible bargain because, down the road, you're still producing the positive results again and again. And you're also of course avoiding all those residual negative results of hiring wrong.

Rachel Salaman: Well just finally, Greg, you write and speak with such passion about this topic, could you briefly share why you think we should all embrace this approach, the effortless approach?

Greg McKeown: Life is hard. The question is, are there ways we can make it less burdensome, a little easier? And one of the things I think we can start to recognize is that in every moment, in this moment, no matter what's happened in the past, no matter how many mistakes you've made, no matter how many hard things have happened to you, awful things, you still have a moment, in every new moment, to either take an even harder path or whether you can take an easier, lighter path that is always before us.

We can really ask ourselves, "How am I making this harder than it needs to be, my life harder than it needs to be, my work life harder than it needs to be?" And when we have the answer to that we'll have something quite precious, because we'll know what to do next. I do think, in some ways, it really is as simple, as easy as that.

Rachel Salaman: Greg McKeown, thanks very much for joining us today.

Greg McKeown: Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Greg's book again is "Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters." You can hear a book insight review podcast about his earlier bestseller, Essentialism, on the Mind Tools site, and another on Multipliers, which he co-wrote with Liz Wiseman.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Mind Tools Expert Interview from Emerald Works. Until then, goodbye.