When I arrived, I was running on the fumes of my nervous energy.Īs the presentation began, my stomach sank. I ended up staying up all night rewriting my whole presentation: new slides, new handouts, all of which were, of course, untested.Īs I drove to the company’s offices the next morning I was exhausted. I got consumed with a new idea that I was convinced would wow them. I decided to scrap it all and start over. But I worried it didn’t look good enough. The afternoon before the first presentation, I decided to add some finishing touches. I had ready-made content they had already approved. It was exactly the career break I needed. They told me that if all went well they were prepared to hire me for the next year or more. But as I’ve learned many times in my own life, this bias can be costly.Īt a key moment in my career, a client at a high-profile technology company asked me to give three presentations on leadership. Puritanism went beyond embracing the hard it extended to also distrusting the easy. This mindset, conscious or not, may have its roots in the Puritan idea that the act of doing hard things always has an inherent value. We feel guilty for not “going the extra mile” each time.

You may be experiencing it right nowīut what if, instead, we took the opposite approach? If instead of pushing ourselves to, and in some cases well past, our limit, we sought out an easier path?įor some, the idea of working less hard feels uncomfortable. This cycle can continue until we are burnt out and exhausted, and still haven’t produced the results we really want. And the more depleted we get, the more our return on that effort dwindles. After all, there’s an upper limit to how much time and effort we can invest. It is true that hard work can equal better results.

That great things are reserved for those who bleed, for those who almost break. The implicit message is that if we aren’t perpetually exhausted, we must not be doing enough.

It doesn’t help that our culture glorifies burnout as a measure of success and self-worth. Strangely, some of us respond to feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by vowing to work even harder and longer. And these days it seems like it’s happening to more of us, more often than it used to. And it’s equally normal to feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the everyday frustrations and annoyances. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the big, weighty challenges. This book may not make every hard thing easy to approach and carry, but I believe it can make many hard things easier. I didn’t write this book to downplay these burdens I wrote it to help you lighten them. To try to pretend that a book can eliminate these hardships would be fanciful. There are periods in our lives when every day can be hard. Life is hard, really hard, in all sorts of ways, ranging from the complicated to the weighty, the sad to the exhausting. Perhaps it’s all the responsibilities, all the pressures that can suffocate us on a daily basis. Perhaps it’s financial worries or hardships. Perhaps it’s the loneliness and isolation. Perhaps it’s the endless fear and uncertainty about the future. The air is thin and it can feel surprisingly exhausting to make even an inch of progress. But there is something about modern life that’s like trying to hike at high altitude.

There is no cadence, only grinding effort. But these days many of us are pushing harder and harder all the time. There are times to push hard and times to rest and recuperate.

Effortless greg mckeown