Greg McKeown

You write it because life is a catastrophe.

And it is for almost everybody, almost all of the time.

That's what I've learned listening to people.

Oh.

That, I don't think I've ever spoken truer words than that.

So effortless is an attempt at saying, look, if you can't work harder, if you already did that, if you're already doing that, then what if there is a gentler, wiser, smarter, better, even easier way

to take off some of that edge, make life that a little more livable, a little more doable, a little less exhausting, a little less harsh on you and everyone around you.

And so it's, I wrote that as a kind of, it's like an insecure overachievers guide to healthy productivity.

And I really have, have enjoyed being able to see people find that at the right time.

For 10 years, I have been asking the question, what is the primary bottleneck to living out essentialism or effortless living?

ideas in practice in the world of relationships, teams, organizations, what's the primary bottleneck?

And my, the answer to my surprise is that it isn't talent.

It's not strategy.

It's not execution.

The primary bottleneck is like confident misunderstanding.

We are wrong.

We think we're right.

And we act upon that.

And that's it.

Well, one of the things that's interesting about that to me is just in essentialism itself, there's this idea of the paradox of success. So it's four stages. You have clarity, leads to success, leads to options and opportunities. All of that sounds like the right problem to have, and maybe it is, but it doesn't make them less problems. especially if it leads to the undisciplined pursuit of more.