How to Make Your Life Effortless

Essentialism is the discipline of choosing the right things to focus on – the things most vital to your success. Effortlessness is the art of doing those things well – simply and efficiently “so that you can sustain the effort and not just achieve success, but to be able to be successful at success.”

So began my conversation with Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and Effortless: Make it Easier to Do What Matters Most, and host of the What’s Essential podcast. Greg has dedicated his career to discovering why some people break through to the next level—and others don’t. He is an author, a speaker, and an active social innovator, having worked with clients such as Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, Pixar, Salesforce.com and more. In this conversation he shared his wisdom around why we tend to get in our own way, and how we can better focus on identifying what’s essential and making it effortless.

Listen to the full conversation on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform, or just click the audio player above.

Essential things aren’t always the most difficult

“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are burned out and those who know they’re burned out," Greg shared.  Some of this comes from our collective instinct that for something to be essential, it must be difficult. 

“There is this assumption that the more essential a thing is, the harder it's going to be. And there is a kind of Puritan type logic that reinforces that…It’s like a distrust of the easy. If something’s easy it must be trivial.”  

“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are burned out and those who know they’re burned out."

So, he explains, we fall into the traps of perfectionism and overachieving – but often we’re just making things harder than they need to be. The essential thing may be as simple as taking a moment of silence to process what you’ve learned. It may be sitting with someone important to you as they experience a challenge. 

Sometimes what’s essential is the simplest thing we can do.

But sometimes essential things are difficult or complex – and our job is to make them as effortless as...

Keep reading on Quick and Dirty Tips