How will you know when the presentation, proposal, project, or task is finished? Because once you get to that point, you stop. Greg took from this experience of failure that you should never do more today than you can recover from tomorrow. Also, know what “done” looks like. Fumbling through unfamiliar material, he bombed. It was hard work and took him most of the night, so he arrived tired, and unprepared. The night before the presentation Greg decided he would rework the slides and the messaging.

If it went well, he would secure a pipeline of work that could last years. A big moment in his career was being asked to share his successful presentation on leadership to a large corporate organisation. Greg’s own lesson that hard is not always better Turn it upside down and ask yourself before you start a project or task What if this could be easy? Then make sure you're not taking extra steps or adding complexity where it's not needed. If you assume all worthwhile things take enormous effort, try inverting the assumption. What if we considered the possibility that the reason something feels hard is that we haven’t yet found the easier way to do it? But sometimes we make things harder than they need to be, and this leads us down the wrong path.

Ask yourself: What if this could be easy?Įssentialism author says we make things harderīest known for his million-copy bestseller Essentialism, Greg says we can all improve work that feels overwhelming by asking How am I making this harder than it needs to be? We all know that making an effort leads to better results. Before you start a major project or task, take a beat. Greg McKeown, author of Effortless – Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most, said in our book club interview it's about challenging the assumption that the 'right' way is inevitably the harder one. Take a beat – Hold on, could this be easy? This is the theme of Greg McKeown's new book Effortless the counter-intuitive idea that easier could be better. The CD arrived un-broken and Netflix became a goer. They mailed themselves a music CD in the post to see if it would break (DVDs in 1997 were harder to buy). Instead, he and co-founder Marc Randolph chose an effortless path. Computer scientist Reed Hastings could have started Netflix in the most complicated way possible.

Effortless mckeown