Greg McKeown: Effortless

• Remember: When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack. Use this habit recipe: “Each time I complain I will say something I am thankful for.”
• Develop unique knowledge, and it will open the door to perpetual opportunity.
• What are the minimum steps required for completion? To be clear, identifying the minimum number of steps is not the same as “phoning it in” or producing something you are not proud of. Unnecessary steps are just that: unnecessary. Eliminating them allows you to channel all your energy toward getting the important project done.
• “A word after a word after a word is power.” Even rubbish words are more powerful than a blank page. In fact, they are much more powerful, because there can be no magnum opus later without those rubbish words now.
• to compensate for our perceived lack of productivity, we work all the way through the weekend, in a mad rush for progress. We know this comes at a cost: low-quality work, increased guilt, and reduced confidence. There’s an easier alternative. We can establish upper and lower bounds. Simply use the following rule: Never less than X, never more than Y.
• To get started on an essential project, first define what “done” looks like.
• Make the first action the most obvious one. Break the first obvious action down into the tiniest, concrete step. Then name it.
• Recognize that not everything requires you to go the extra mile.
• Adopt a “zero-draft” approach and just put some words, any words, on the page
• It turns out there is a far simpler way to pass our history on to future generations: through the sharing of family stories. Stories are bridges from past to present. They make history come alive. They expand our sense of self.
• The beauty of the checklist is that the thinking has been done ahead of time. It’s been taken out of the equation. Or rather, it has been baked into the equation. So instead of getting these essential things right occasionally, we get them right every time.
• For many years I have been inspired by the idea that, whether we’re aware of it or not, each one of us has an essential mission in life. We all harbor a sense of purpose, unique purpose, and it is our life’s work to figure out what that is and to achieve it. It’s the question “What does ‘done’ look like?” writ large.
• As I reflected on how this had all gone so wrong, the answer was obvious. Nailing this presentation was so important to me, I had overthought it. I’d overengineered it. I’d tried too hard. And as a result, I’d snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Here is what I learned: trying too hard makes it harder to get the results you want.
• Why the hot shower? Recent sleep science found that participants who used water-based passive body heating—also known as a bath—before bed slept sooner, longer, and better. This seems counterintuitive considering that our sleep cycles are associated with a drop in core body temperature. But according to this research, the key is the timing of the bath or shower: ninety minutes before bedtime. The lead author explains that the warm water triggers our body’s cooling mechanism, sending warmer blood from our core outward and shedding heat through our hands and feet. This “efficient removal of body heat and decline in body temperature” speeds up the natural cooling that makes it easier to fall asleep
• What are we to make of these one-word stories? These are not timid descriptions. You would think these people were describing someone who had moved mountains for them. But they weren’t. They were describing a person who was fully present for them. When we are fully present with another person, we see them more clearly. And we help them see themselves more clearly as well.
• INVERT. Instead of asking, “Why is this so hard?,” invert the question by asking, “What if this could be easy?” Challenge the assumption that the “right” way is, inevitably, the harder one. Make the impossible possible by finding an indirect approach. When faced with work that feels overwhelming, ask, “How am I making this harder than it needs to be
• When you can say these four little words, “I trust your judgment”—and mean them—it’s like magic. Team members feel empowered. They take a risk. They grow. Trust is strengthened. And then it tends to spread.