Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

Producing a great result is good. Producing a great result with ease is better. Producing a great result with ease again and again is best.

He didn’t just think that working endless hours would lead to success; he thought it was success.

The trouble, of course, is that over time these activities rarely add up to making progress on the goals we hope to achieve. They are easy but pointless.

As Lisa Jewell, author of some eighteen bestselling novels, put it, “Pace yourself. If you write too much, too quickly, you’ll go off at tangents and lose your way and if you write infrequently you’ll lose your momentum. A thousand words a day is a good ticking over amount.”

Margaret Atwood,

Distractions that keep us from being present in the moment can be like cataracts for our minds. They make noticing what matters harder. And the longer they are left untreated, the more debilitating they become. Less and less light comes in. We miss more and more. Eventually we become blind to what really matters most.

In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have found that the “now” we experience lasts only 2.5 seconds. This is our psychological present. One of the implications of this is that progress can happen in tiny increments.

Being asked to do X isn’t a good enough reason to do Y.