Effortless

The Problem With Trying Harder

Greg McKeown's daughter Eve was fourteen when something went wrong. She had been a slim, blond, mischievous girl who climbed fifty-foot fir trees, caught lizards in her hands, and read James Herriot novels until her parents had to confiscate the flashlight. Then came the growth spurt. Then the fatigue. Then the slurred monotone, the right side of her body lagging behind the left, the two minutes it took her to write her name, the seizure that put her in the hospital. The neurologists furrowed their brows. One of them literally shrugged.

McKeown and his wife Anna faced a fork in the road that most parents would not even recognize as a choice. The obvious path was to attack on every front: twenty-four-hour worry, every neurologist in the country, all-night sessions in medical journals, every alternative treatment anyone had ever heard of. The other path looked almost irresponsible by comparison. They chose it anyway. They sang around the piano. They went on walks. They played games. They prayed, ate dinner together, laughed, and told stories. The reasoning was disarmingly simple. If you do not know how long the fire will need to burn, you cannot throw all the fuel on at the start.

That is the book in one anecdote. *Effortless* is McKeown's argument that past a certain point, more effort doesn't produce better performance — it sabotages it. The companion to his earlier *Essentialism* (which answered the question *what*), this book takes on the question *how*. If you've already cut your life down to the things that matter, you still have to do them. And doing them the way most of us were taught — head down, jaw clenched, sleep when you're dead — is not a strategy. It is a slow leak.