Skip to content

Effortless

About the Book

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 harder it is 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. 1

Why This Book

Effortless aligns with Stage 5 — Integration, particularly with its focus on reducing friction between intent and execution. Both seek to reduce friction by creating systems to sustain effort with minimal resistance. In this book, McKeown talks about making essential actions simple, sustainable, and repeatable. This parallels the Path's approach to building environments, routines, and triggers that reduce friction and dependence on willpower. The book's central concept, the "Effortless State", reflects Stage 5's goal of designing conditions to make aligned actions the path of least resistance.

Effortless complements the Path by providing further specific behavioural and procedural techniques for simplifying and automating essential actions. This adds a more pragmatic and applicable layer on top of the Path's more conceptual principles of Integration, helping you translate the philosophy into reality. While Effortless translates the concepts into practical methods and examples, its framing, once again, remains tied to productivity and performance, while the Path's intent lies in alignment and authorship. However, the strategies may still be useful and applicable, provided they are applied to what truly matters as opposed to external productivity metrics.

  1. Source: Effortless — Greg McKeown ↩