The Effortless Path to High Performance

This essay was inspired by the brilliant work of Greg McKeown. His two books, Essentialism and Effortless, are potent antidotes to modern-day burnout. Essentialism lays out his philosophy on how to focus on what truly matters, while Effortless explores how to make achieving those things as simple as possible. This essay is both a distillation and a personal riff on my favorite ideas from these books.

“A missile doesn’t work by hitting a target. A missile works by avoiding all of the non-targets.”

Our Great War

Today we’re inundated by more inputs, options, and data than ever before. Worse, we’re all personally responsible for choosing what’s relevant, and ignoring ever-increasing noise 24/7. This is our generation’s Great War, and most are losing — succumbing to burnout, distraction, or by failing to achieve what matters most.

The word “noise” comes from the same Latin route as Nausea. Like a small boat in 70 foot swells, we’re tossed about by millions of great things we could do, and it’s making us sick.

The To-do list

Like many people, I write a daily to-do list — but I write it twice. List #1 is everything in my mind, in no particular order. For List #2, I rank…