Ep-003: 80-20 Book Breakdown—Effortless by Greg McKeown (Part I)
About 80-20 Book Breakdowns
On 80-20 Book Breakdowns, Anthony Sanni unpacks carefully curated ideas from select books with the goal of getting at the vital few (80-20) concepts that can be used to enhance fulfillment, productivity and overall well-being.
Episode Summary
This episode is part 1 of 2 episodes of a deep dive into select ideas and insights from Greg McKeown's book--Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters.
In it I explore key ideas and insights with an aim to making them real and practical tools for helping you do more by doing less.
Some of the main points (TVF Timestamps):
It is not enough to be efficient, but to be efficient at the right things (07:21)
Why play and work should go together (09:37)
The magic ingredient that makes routines and habits more effortless (13:18)
Discover what is even better than streamlining and empowering steps in a process (22:36)
Notes and References
Greg McKeown’s first book: Essentialism
This current book: Effortless
Efficiency and effectiveness quote is attributed to Peter Drucker.
Anthony’s Book: The Law of The Vital Few
Gary Vaynerchuk’s Video
Full Transcript
Note: This transcript has been slightly modified from the exact spoken word to enhance comprehension and readability.
Intro:
Most things don't matter, but the few that matter, matter a lot, welcome to 80 20 productivity. The show dedicated to helping you do more by doing less so that you can have more time and energy to enjoy life to the fullest. Now here's your host author, speaker and productivity nerd, Anthony Sanni.
Preamble to Part I
Hello, Anthony Sanni here. Welcome to the first 80 20 productivity book breakdown. And on this episode, we're breaking down Greg McKeown's new book, Effortless, make it easier to do what matters most. When I first recorded this podcast episode, I was intending for it to be just about half an hour long. But it ended up going well over an hour, there was just so much to unpack in the selected bits that I was going to talk about on the podcast.
So what I've decided to do is present this in two parts. So what you're going to listen to next is the first part. And then the next part will be released. Right after. So feel free to listen to this one, go take action on it. Think about it, digest it, and then come back and listen to part two. Or if you want, you can listen to part one and two back to Beth, but remember what matters more than how much knowledge you take in is how much knowledge you use.
So with that, here we go with part one of 80 20 productivity book breakdown of Greg McKeown's Effortless, make it easier to do what matters most. Enjoy
Intro to Effortless and the author
On this episode, we're going to be doing a book breakdown of Greg McKeown's new work Effortless. Now, if you don't know who Greg McKeown is, Greg McKeown is the author of the wildly successful book of 2014 Essentialism. And what he does and Effortless is that he builds on the ideas he put forward in essential wisdom.
Essentialism is a very 80 20 book. A lot of the ideas in Essentialism draw on 80 20, the concept of factor sparsity and how few things matter, but they matter a lot.
McKeown wrote a very influential book in Essentialism, but we're not talking about Essentialism today. Essentialism may come later. I want to talk about his most recent work.
Essentialism came out in 2014, his most recent work Effortless with the subtitle: make it easier to do what matters most, came out in April of 2021. So a much more recent work. And it contains a lot of insights and ideas that I want to share as we go through this 80 20 book breakdown. So without further ado, let's get into it.
How 80-20 Book Breakdowns will work
Effortless is a very interesting book. And because it is our very first 80 20 book breakdown, I’m going to be letting you know what the format of these book breakdowns are going to be using Effortless as our very first one.
So the book breakdowns will play out this way. We'll start off with an overall impression—what I felt about the book, give you a bit of a summary of the book.
And then I'll go into insights that stood out for me. Now, keep in mind. These are insights that stood out for me.
My suspicion is if you were to read the book, you might get other ideas from the book. Any well-written well-researched book will offer a lot of different insights to different people.
But what I will share are what my insights were and the things that jumped out to me in the book. I've been very selective because as much as I have tons of notes for myself, and even though I've selected these ones for myself, I believe they'll also be useful to you.
80 20 books are going to break down overall impression first, and then we'll get into my thoughts—the things that stood out for me. That's what I'm going to call the book analysis. So we'll analyze it. I might pull in insights from other books. Don't worry if you haven't read them, I'll always give context to them.
And then some of the questions I have as well will be in the analysis. So the noteworthy bits, some commentary on them, some questions, there might be questions that I felt were not answered in the book and questionsthat I felt could take the conversation further if we were going to apply the principles in the book.
Then wrap up with the overall final thoughts on the book. So let's get into Effortless, make it easier to do what matters most by Greg McKeown.
Overview of Effortless: Making it Easier to Do What Matters
Well, it starts right away with my overall impression of the book. This book picks off where Essentialism left off. And there's a quote early on in the book that says Essentialism is about doing the right things, effortlessness is about doing things the right way. And because we will be talking a lot more in the next few episodes about effortlessness or the law of least effort as we explore 80 20 under the theme same principal, many names (and if you, if you're interested in that, definitely subscribe to the podcast so that you don't miss those episodes when they come out), but when, when Greg says Essentialism is about doing the right things, effortlessness is about doing things the right way. Greg's way is the least hard, you know, the way that is easiest in his terms, and this can be something this can easily be misunderstood.
But my overall impression of the book is that the writer McKeown is trying to do a few things.
First of all, he's trying to get us to think about work differently, to think about work, not in terms of hard work.
Basically to believe work, doesn't have to be hard to be meaningful or to be impactful, which is a very, it seems like such a simple thought, but the whole work ethic, particularly the work ethic that's predominant in north America and in many parts of the world is harder work is more valuable. And Greg seeks to, to debunk that in this book.
The Order and Arrangement
The book is split into three sections as many nonfiction books, these days tend to be.
The first section is the effortless state. And this explores mindsets behind the effortless way of life. The mindsets of it, then there was part two, which is effortless action, and this is where McKeown explores ways to carry out actions, ways to perform work, and then part three is effortless results.
That was a very interesting one where he talks about learning and automation and trust and building trust among teams and how results can be gotten through effortlessness. The subtitle of that is how can we get the highest return on the least effort
So that's how the book breaks down.
TVF Takeaways (The Analysis)
All right. So now let's get right into the meat and potatoes of the 80 20 book break down—the analysis of the book.
We'll start right off with the first chapter. Now in the first chapter, it makes an interesting and important connection between this book and his previous book. And I've alluded to it already where he says Essentialism is about doing the right things.
Not enough to be efficient, but to be efficient at the right things
Effortlessness is about doing things the right way. And the right way to McKeown's mind appears to be the way of least effort. I feel listening to 80 20 productivity, you know, that we are all about values, effort, and the interplay between the two that the podcast is literally how to do more by doing less.
And so this piqued my interest, not surprising that McKeown would go this route, especially because his first book was really big on the principle of what we call on the podcast, 80-20, but really it's that whole concept of “not everything matters.” And he was calling you to focus on what matters there, but here he's assuming that you found what matters and now you want to go about achieving that with the least effort.
So if I were to sum this idea up in this book, it's like, if you, if you're familiar the work of the management guru can't recall his name right now. He's the one who famously said that efficiency is doing things right, but effectiveness is doing the right things and I'm going to get his name for sure and stick it in the show notes, but very popular quote on productivity to say, just because you're doing things efficiently, fast, doing them correctly with skill doesn't mean you're doing the right things. I believe it was the late and great Stephen Covey, who said you don't want to climb the ladder of success only to find out it was leaning against the wrong wall.
That's another parallel of this thought is it's not enough to just be efficient. You want to be effective. That is being efficient at the right things. And that's what I think McKeown is getting at in this book.
Separating important work from play makes life harder
There's another interesting concept that I enjoy from McKeown's work and one that's applicable to 80 20 productivity. And that's the concept that separating important work from play makes life harder than it needs to be. And in this analysis, let's go ahead and unpack that for a minute.
Let's go ahead and unpack that because this was under the effortless state and a lot of it is the idea that you should be enjoying your work and McKeown's approach to this is don't separate your work from your play, if at all possible.
Now, as we said, we'll explore some questions. This is powerful and interesting. In principle, you hear a lot of people talk about this, right? You want to be doing the thing that doesn't feel like work.
Interestingly, just today, I was listening to a speech by Gary Vaynerchuk, very popular in the online space, runs a huge media company, very successful, and he was talking about how his work is his hobby. He actually used those words “My work is my hobby.”
And you hear a lot of entrepreneurs say that, they tell you—especially the successful ones—they tell you, find something you love, something you're passionate about. And that's not been universally accepted. You have the flip side, which says, just get good at something. And when you get good at it, you will learn to love it. That's the other side that you could also look at it, but McKeown makes an argument here. If you really want to live effortlessly, it's important that you don't separate play from work. That when it's, when you separate play from work, life becomes harder than it needs to be.
And I think the important thing to take away here is that harder than it needs to be. So if I were to unpack this, I would say it's not so much that you can't be successful, even if you're doing something you're not necessarily… maybe something you don't necessarily enjoy very much. The, the things the insight here, the idea here is life would be a lot more effortless if work and play converge for you.
So that's the first takeaway is see if there's a way you can make the things you enjoy, the things that feel like play for you. If you can make them a part of your work, or if you can find elements in your work that feels like play that way you are in a more effortless state when you perform those activities when you do that work.
One of the ways that I've started to approach that …now I'm fortunate that things like going out to speak, writing, recording this podcast and even designing courses and learning materials and all my consulting, those things are fun for me. I enjoy researching. I enjoy learning. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy interacting with people. I enjoy making things and I enjoy all these activities, but there are still bits of it that I don't necessarily enjoy. So looking at this idea that separating important work from play makes life harder than it needs to be... It's got me thinking about how can I either (a) incorporate more play in my work or (b) find the things that I enjoy—things that feel like play in my work.
And that leaves the question: what do you do with the rest? But maybe we'll explore that as we go further.
Turn Routines into Rituals
The next idea I want to explore is the idea that rituals make essential habits easier to sustain by infusing habits with meaning. Now, when I read this, I literally had to take a pause. Because as much as I read these books for you, dear listeners—so we can have these deep dives and these analysis and conversations—I also read these books for myself, obviously, and that's what I think makes it more useful for you is when we can dive deeper and see what these things really mean.
If you have been interested in productivity, you probably have heard about the concept of a morning routine, right? Anthony Robbins supposedly had a morning routine at some point where he took an ice bath.
You hear about some pretty simple morning routines. Then you hear about some really complicated morning routines. Some people wake up and run at 5:00 AM for a mile or whatever, but the concept of a morning routine—the concept of the power of a morning routine—is taken almost without argument, in the world of productivity and to expand that even, further success chasing, is: you want to have a morning routine. You want to have a morning routine that works.
The insight I glean from McKeown's work here is turning a routine into a ritual. And I really liked that turning routines into rituals. I don't know that he actually used that phrase, but that's how I have it coded it in my mind is: what can I do to turn my routine into a ritual because it says
“rituals make essential habits easier to sustain by infusing habits with meaning:
…habits with meaning.
McKeown's choice of language was very interesting in this particular section of the book, because he stuck more with the language of habits, but the examples he gave implied routines. So that's why I'm using the language of turning routines into rituals, because that makes it easier for me. And I hope that makes it easier for you as well.
But his intent seems to be the same is—he’s suggesting that we infuse habits with meaning. And that will turn them into rituals, but the game of this is ultimately to make them easier.
So we're keeping with the theme of least effort, keeping with the theme of effortlessness and he's attacking the issues of having too much effort in our routines.
And he suggests or what I gleaned from that is what's making them difficult is they don't have meaning.
So I started to analyze some of my routines and habits. And I realized that truthfully, the routines and habits that have been the easiest to sustain have been the ones that have become rich, have become infused with meaning for me personally.
For example, the routine of giving my daughter a shower in the evening, it's like this whole production for her and I, and that's an evening routine that became meaningful to me when I learned that the last few minutes or the last hour or so of the day for a child has immense impact.
Yeah. I figure, Hey, if there's a certain portion of the day that's going to give me a disproportionately large positive impact in my child's life, I wanted to be in there because I love my child. And that's important.
So that routine of showering, the whole production that goes around it and laying her down to bed to sleep, tucking her in and all that stuff, that routine is now a ritual because it's infused with meaning.
That, for me, a big light bulb went off in my head when I read that—to know that I had been doing that unconsciously, but now we can do that more consciously was huge.
So my suggestion to you is this—what routines, (if you don't have a morning routine, I recommend you start one and build one)—but if you do, how much of that routine holds meaning for you?
Do you wake up and meditate? What meaning have you attached to that?
Do you exercise what meaning? I mean, we could really go deep in the rabbit hole of meaning, but as much as you can infuse meaning into the things you do into the habits specifically, and I'll say the routines, that would make a big difference in how easy it will be for you to sustain those along the path of effortlessness.
Define Your Done
The next bit that jumped out to me is this idea—the idea to define your done, define your done.
McKeown very elegantly puts forward what appears to be a simple idea, but it strikes right at the heart of the reason why so many people find it difficult to live effortless lives. And because we're on 80 20 productivity here, and we will be exploring a lot of these concepts as we go along in future episodes, this concept of defining your done gets really interesting because what he talks about here is—when you start a project, when you start a task, when you start a “thing”—defining what done looks like is important because what a lot of people end up doing is they keep going and going. And then they want to make it 10% better and then 5% better and then 2% better. And then 1% better. And they are just never done.
The psychology is clear behind this, right? It just makes it harder. And you get into that realm of diminishing returns. And that's a very important concept in 80 20 productivity is understanding diminishing returns.
In our terms, we would say you would get 80% of the way there with 20% of the effort. To put it in 80 20 terms.
So the question now becomes is 80% good enough? If it is, okay, 80% would be our definition of done. If it isn't well, then what is good enough and how much more effort beyond the 20% would we have to put in to get it to that point? Is it 85? Is it 90…
But defining done is critical to living effortlessly because what it means is you will put in enough effort to get to done, and then you stop!
That idea will set a lot of people, free. It can set you and I free from continuing to work on something because we never defined what done look like.
I'll give you an example. When I was writing my book, The Law of the Vital Few, I remember a friend of mine, back in the university used to say, (cause then we would write poetry together—well not together—we wouldn’t write poetry together—but we both fancied ourselves poets, let me put it that way), and we would help each other. I would write poetry, he would critique and he would write and I would critique it.
And one day we were walking down, I'll never forget walking down the street of campus. It was an afternoon. We just had lunch. And I was telling him about this poem that I was writing and I was writing it and I was working on it and tweaking it and fixing it.
And he just looked at me and said, well, you know, there's this quote from a famous poet. And I said, what's the quote? And my friend looks at me and he says, “a poem is never finished. It is only abandoned.” A poem is never finished. It is only abandoned. I never forgot that—it is only abandoned.
And I remember when I was writing my book, The Law of the Vital Few, it was tempting to just continue to obsess over every little detail.
I remember my publisher being fairly exasperated at how much I wanted things to be quote perfect. But a point came where I had to decide and say, okay, what does... (this was long before McKeown even wrote his book), I had to d to come to a point where I had to decide –what is done for this book?
I still wanted the book to be at a very high standard, but the book needed to be done. It needed to get out there into people's hands, where it could help people. What is done? I finally decided what done looked like for me. And once that decision was made, it was so liberating because once we got to done, we stopped.
Since the book came out, I think there has been like one or two minor changes that have come up. But here's the thing: those changes would not have come up, those improvements if the book had not gone out.
So this was a big one for me. It's such a simple concept—define your done, under the section of one minute of clarity in McKeown's book, Effortless, but it's a big enough idea that it could really change things in your life and help you, I believe live the 80 20 way—where you set out to do something, define what done looks like, and then put in enough effort to get to done. And then you stop!
Stop streamlining or empowering existing steps and start eliminating steps instead
The next idea that McKeown explores, at least that stood out for me is: instead of streamlining or empowering existing steps, consider eliminating steps altogether. Instead of streamlining or empowering existing steps, consider eliminating steps all together.
How can we apply this in our own lives?
I've seen this happen in my work, in consulting, with my own business and when I talk to people everywhere. People get so used to how things are done. There's this idea that more is better, more is better, more steps, more complexity….
Whereas if we just stepped back and thought, okay, well, what's essential (to use McKeown's language from his previous book), what is really at the core of this? And if we took these steps out, would it make any difference?
So when you look at your work, whether it's your organization, whether it's you personally, hey, maybe it's even how you get dressed in the morning or how you dress your child. It applies to so many aspects of life—personal and professional—instead of streamlining or empowering existing steps, consider eliminating steps altogether.
We could unpack that a little bit more because when you look at streamlining a step, that has the illusion of efficiency, doesn't it? It has the illusion. If you can cut a step down from taking 10 minutes to taking two minutes, it feels like you've become more efficient. You've improved your productivity. Yes?
But if the step was unnecessary, Then why did you have to do it at all?
Now, the question becomes, what is the goal? (And we'll talk about that. When we dive into law of least effort, our deep dive into that in the upcoming episodes on the show) But the goal is important here because you can't eliminate steps without some reference.
I’ll give you an example. Again, putting this podcast together, I thought initially about all kinds of bells and whistles, like for every episode, I would have a cover art specifically made for that episode. And the cover art would have some depiction of the content or some depiction of the guests on the show.
But then I did some research and found out yes, cover art is important, but it wasn't important enough for me, for the goals of this podcast to go through a bunch of trouble, either (a) learning, how to do that stuff. Or (b) hiring someone to do that stuff for every single episode. The diminishing returns just didn't make it worth it for me.
And so what I did was I invested in getting a graphic designer to create a really nice cover art for the show, at least nice in my sense, something that spoke to what we do on the show, and then just leave enough space so that if in the future we decided to expand or to add that stuff for special emphasis, we could always do that.
Here's my point: why streamline or empower a step of complicating things every episode, by having to create new cover art for every episode, if that step doesn't really work for the ultimate goal—if it doesn't really contribute to the ultimate goal of the podcast, which is creating useful, insightful thought-provoking content for my listeners.
So look at your life, look at your work. Look at your process, your business, your day-to-day. Are you getting better at steps in a process, are you streamlining or empowering steps in the process that really don't matter?
Outro
Thank you for listening to part one of the 80 20 book breakdown of Greg McKeown's Effortless.
We'll pick up where we left off in part two. Until then, focused on the 20% that makes the most difference.
