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Average rating3.9
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Times (UK) Best Book of the Year • From the author of the million-copy-selling Essentialism comes an empowering guide to achieving your goals. It all starts with a simple principle: Not everything has to be so hard. “In a world beset by burnout, Greg McKeown’s work is essential.”—Daniel H. Pink, author of When, Drive, and To Sell Is Human “At a time when fear, uncertainty, and our ever-growing list of responsibilities have come to feel like much too much to handle, Effortless couldn’t be timelier, or more necessary.”—Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play Do you ever feel like: • You’re teetering right on the edge of burnout? • You want to make a higher contribution, but lack the energy? • You’re running faster but not moving closer to your goals? • Everything is so much harder than it used to be? As high achievers, we’ve been conditioned to believe that the path to success is paved with relentless work. That if we want to overachieve, we have to overexert, overthink, and overdo. That if we aren’t perpetually exhausted, we’re not doing enough. But lately, working hard is more exhausting than ever. And the more depleted we get, the more effort it takes to make progress. Stuck in an endless loop of “Zoom, eat, sleep, repeat,” we’re often working twice as hard to achieve half as much. Getting ahead doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it. No matter what challenges or obstacles we face, there is a better way: instead of pushing ourselves harder, we can find an easier path. Effortless offers actionable advice for making the most essential activities the easiest ones, so you can achieve the results you want, without burning out. Effortless teaches you how to: • Turn tedious tasks into enjoyable rituals • Prevent frustration by solving problems before they arise • Set a sustainable pace instead of powering through • Make one-time choices that eliminate many future decisions • Simplify your processes by removing unnecessary steps • Make relationships easier to maintain and manage • And much more The effortless way isn't the lazy way. It's the smart way. It may even be the only way. Not every hard thing in life can be made easy. But we can make it easier to do more of what matters most.
Reviews with the most likes.
As a huge fan of McKeown's first book Essentialism (which I reread periodically), I had really high expectations for this. But unfortunately it lacked strength and felt too obvious. Many aspects of this book can be found in Gretchen Rubin's much more detailed book Better than Before, such as the Strategy of Pairing.
Very good core message with a few valuable insights to take forward. Much like Essentialism, the book seemed to really stretch out the concepts with long winded explanations which is common with best sellers of the genre. Overall, a very positive experience and a book I'd happily recommend.
So many good nuggets in this book. I don't remember loving Essentialism - I thought it was a great book, but it didn't cover a lot of new ground for me. But I'm also a natural minimalist and I read a lot of this kind of thing, so purely a personal opinion, and still a book worth reading.
Effortless, I'd like to own. He begins by discussing this myth that everything good must be hard/take effort, and references the fact that it might be due in part to Puritanism. Yes, but also overwork and the productivity cult are a product of Capitalism that could be an entire book in and of itself (and probably is). Stopping to think about that fact alone is worth the price of admission, but there are many practical tips that are incredibly valuable. The one that most stood out to me was to set an upper limit on tasks/habits. I have a set schedule for business development projects: minimum 30 minutes. I tend to go way over. The simple idea of setting a limit (no more than 1 hour per session) is kind of brilliant, and it's the kind of gem you'll find in Effortless.
You will not find any deep dive into habit development here, which I appreciate. For that we have Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit, and James Clear's inestimable Atomic Habits.
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