# books / Effortless - Greg Mckeown

Essentialism is one of my favourite books. Effortless was less impactful. The content didn’t feel so original.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. —Matt. 11:30

what does one do when they’ve stripped life down to the essentials and it’s still too much?

Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in history, who has described the investment strategy at Berkshire Hathaway as “lethargy bordering on sloth.”12 They are not looking to invest in companies that will require enormous effort to achieve profitability. They are looking for investments that are easy to say yes to: no-brainer businesses that are simple to run and have long-term competitive advantages. In Buffett’s words, “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

It’s tempting to think it has to be hard to matter. Tim Ferriss asks the question: “What would this look like if it were easy?”

It doesn’t have to hurt. There might be an easier path.

The third kind of response is “turning away.” Now your partner doesn’t address the comment about the weather at all and instead responds with something entirely unrelated, like “Have you taken the car for the oil change yet?” The ball has just been hit straight into the net. Game over. Now you have to harness the energy (mental and physical) to start the volley anew. According to Gottman’s research, both of the first two responses—even the argumentative one—are generally healthy for a relationship. The one that does the most damage is the third kind. It signals that these two people do not see each other.

to get an important project done it’s absolutely necessary to define what “done” looks like.

Yes! Avoid the asymptote of “nearly there”.

This principle always reminds me of the line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Though she be but little she is fierce.” The first action may be the tiniest, easiest-to-overlook thing. But it is surprisingly fierce.

Take the first step.

No matter how simple the step, it’s still easier to take no step.

So the project stalled. Whenever we thought about picking it back up again, we felt overwhelmed. Days started to slip by with no progress being made. After a couple of weeks of this, I happened to be researching process simplification in complex organizations. Suddenly I could see it: we were making this process so much more complicated than it had to be.

Evangelist told me that his biggest “aha” was that he and his team had been looking at their process the wrong way. They had started with an immensely complicated product and attempted to pare it down. But Jobs came at it from the opposite angle. He started at zero and tried to figure out the absolute minimum number of steps required to achieve the desired outcome.

An ugly aircraft that could be crashed, repaired, and redesigned fast would make it much easier to make progress on what really mattered

Iteration speed over all else.

worked hard to foster a culture that creates space for such “rubbish”: because he understands there would be no Buzz Lightyear without hundreds of awful ideas along the way.

Overachievers tend to struggle with the notion of starting with rubbish; they hold themselves to a high standard of perfection at every stage in the process. But the standard to which they hold themselves is neither realistic nor productive.

“Edit later” is the advice I most consistently forget.

Isaiah Berlin’s original 1953 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox revived the saying by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Jim Collins famously favored the hedgehog’s approach to succeeding in the business world, arguing that foxes lack focus and waste their energy. But Archilochus’s comparison was always meant to suggest that the fox would fare better if it didn’t simply know many things but knew how to connect those things together. Munger is a fox who connects many things.

Fitting knowledge into a bigger picture is understanding. Seeing how new pieces might fit is insight.

Being good at what nobody is doing is better than being great at what everyone is doing. But being an expert in something nobody is doing is exponentially more valuable.

Whenever we want a far-reaching impact, teaching others to teach can be a high-leverage strategy.

“For two years I have been bothered by that every single day.” How long would it take to solve it? Two minutes. John solved it right then. Why do so many of us put up with problems—big and small—for so much longer than we have to?

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”