Today, we're going to do one of two-part series called Making Work Effortless.
But more specifically, making the essential tasks, that one thing that you do, making
that feel like the easiest ones, the effortless ones.
And a huge shout out to Greg McKeon in his book called Effortless and maybe, well, best
known for his other book called Essentialism.
These are two incredible resources, definitely worth reading.
So the reason why we struggle with this idea is that we, most of us, are brought up in
a culture where we feel that good things or things that are worthwhile have to be difficult.
They have to be hard.
In fact, we have huge suspicion on anything that sounds too easy, especially if it's good.
And we say, you know, it's too good to be true.
So when we hear about easy money, you know, or we hear people, we say things, well, that's
easy for you to say, it's easy for you because, you know, we have in our minds this basic
assumption that if it's good and if it's worthwhile pursuing, it's going to be harder.
And so if it's going to be that hard to do, well, when things get tough, I only have two
choices.
If I'm going to succeed, then I'm either going to have to try harder or lower my expectation
and goals.
This is a huge mental trap that many leaders fall in because we've already assumed that
anything that's easily gained, we assume that it was gained in a, you know, in a disreputable
manner.
That something inappropriate happened for you to achieve something so great in such
a way.
And so we are very suspicious and in our day of high energy social media, we make all these
promises and so it's really confusing for us.
But let's put that aside for a minute and just think about your contribution in the
business.
We've talked a great deal throughout this training that there's that one thing that
you do that drives 80% of your contribution, the 20-80 rule, the Pareto principle.
What if that 20% is so delightful to you that brings you so much energy?
It's your A seat.
You have more energy at the end of doing it than when you started it.
What if that were your case and that you had some sort of cognitive control where all the
switching costs were reduced that you're able to work in such a way that it felt effortless.
Even though you're putting in hours, they feel effortless and energizing to you.
This modality exists.
And that's what we're talking about today.
You know, not everything has to be so hard.
And so when we get this feeling that if we aren't perpetually exhausted, we're not
doing enough.
Well, we have to reframe that because that's not sustainable and neither is it healthy.
So making a contribution doesn't have to come at the expense of your mental and physical
health.
And you know, one of the things in Greg's first book, Essentialism, was really about
doing the right thing, figuring out that one essential thing you do.
His second book, Effortless, is about doing them in the right way.
So you might be doing the essential thing, that one big contribution, that 20% thing
that moves the ball forward, but are you doing it in the right way?
Because there is a way to work and make it feel effortless to you.
So instead of trying to get results by just pushing harder, what if we can make these
essential activities the easiest ones that you do?
So over the next two sessions, we're going to be talking about practical things we can
do to achieve that.
So to get right into it, I want to ask a whole new idea, a new thought.
What would happen in your life if the easy and pointless things became more challenging
and the essential things became easier?
So the pointless things, which are easy right now, what if they became more challenging
and the essential things became easier?
In other words, what if we inverted, if we flipped this whole mindset upside down?
If the essential projects and work you've been putting off, what if those became enjoyable
while the pointless distractions like social media, watching TV and so on, all lost their
appeal completely?
See, it's not about just discipline, it's about flipping your mindset.
It's about inverting your mindset into this different state of thinking.
Perfectionism, for instance, makes essential projects hard to start because we've set such
a high bar.
So self-doubt makes them hard to finish.
and perfection makes them hard to start. And mostly we fail because we try to do too much,
too fast and we make it hard to sustain that kind of momentum. This is the core idea of this
inverted mindset. So there's a different state of working. Instead of grinding it hard, working
hard and if it's not working hard, try even harder or lower my expectations and goals
and being suspicious of anything that's easy. What if this inverted state where the easy,
simple, pointless stuff becomes harder to do and the stuff that's really essential becomes
a delight and easier to do? So Greg calls this the effortless state and how we can make it
much easier to make that effortless state our new natural state. So in the effortless state
you really are functioning from a place of rest. A physically rested, emotionally unburdened,
mentally energized and so you show up very differently in your job. You show up very
differently to a project because you're very present, you're very attentive and you focus
on what's important at the moment. And so in this situation the things that matter most you
learn to achieve with ease because you become very present and attentive in that moment.
So when you're in this effortless state you definitely feel lighter.
Our body language betrays our distrust of ease. When we talk about all this,
I don't know this sounds too good to be true and all that stuff but this is actually based on
research. There is research and even timeless principles that show that a sense of lightness
in what you do on things that are essential is actually what goes together. So what if that
essential project that you've been putting off could be made easy and delightful to do?
So we're going to dig just for a minute longer into this concept of inversion and inversion
works like this. We ask one simple question. What if this could be easy? What if this could be easy?
You see because trying too hard is when we overthink it, we over-engineer it, we try too hard
and what that does is that's what's draining the energy out of us. That's what's literally
pulling out of us that feeling of this is just too much of a load to carry. So as a result
you know we often you know don't succeed at important projects just because we made them
hard. So what inversion does, inversion means to turn this assumption that it has to be hard
to the opposite. We flip it upside down. What if the opposite were true? So that's the second
question. What if this could be easy? What if the opposite were true? Meaning I could get this done
on time. That this could be a joy. You know what if this could be easy? So that's what inversion is.
You know the CEO of LinkedIn said, I've come to learn that part of the business strategy is to
solve the simplest, easiest and most valuable problem first and in actuality part of doing
strategy is to solve the easiest problem. So what is the easiest problem at the project you're
looking at right now? When a strategy is so complex that each step feels like you know you're pushing
this boulder uphill, you know that's the time to pause, flip your mindset, do the inversion thing
and say what's the simplest way to achieve this result? So that's the third question. First
question, what if this could be easy? Second question, what if the opposite were true? Third question,
what's the simplest way to achieve this result? And here's the fourth and final question, what if
this could be fun? So why would we endure the essential activities that really mark our
contribution to the organization? What if we could enjoy them instead? What if they were a delight
to us? You know we often say it brilliant, delight leads to discipline. It's a lot harder to have
discipline lead to delight. That's pushing the boulder uphill. So I want to give you
one practical suggestion that Greg gives and that is to try to make something more fun, to make it
feel more fun.
easy is combine something that you love with something that's essential.
I think he tells the story himself of having to return phone calls
to customers is pretty exhausting but he has to do it because he has
these high-level customers and clients who are all C-level people.
But he also loves sitting in the hot tub sipping wine at the end of the day so he
combined the two. So sitting in the hot tub with the wine started to call people
and so what happens is you've linked something you love and enjoy with
something that's essential. It's essential to make the calls and it's a
whole lot of fun to sit in the hot tub and sip his wine. You know we've had our
team members combine all sorts of things like that two things like one person
knew that you know they really had to brainstorm and and come up with new
innovative things but also loved to go on you know long walks. So combined the
long walks and that's when they did their thinking and took a recording
device and combined two things. So what one thing do you love that you could
combine with an essential activity? And with these two tools the effortless
inversion the idea of inverting your mindset so you can what if the
essential things could be easy? What if the opposite were true that it was not
hard? What if I could have fun doing this and what is the simplest way to achieve
this result? And what one thing do I love that I could easily combine with this
essential thing to make it really effective? Enjoy putting this into
practice you're gonna have a lot of fun doing it.