WORK LESS, WORRY LESS, SUCCEED MORE, ENJOY MORE
BY RICHARD KOCH
- Below you can find my highlights from the book (it is not meant to be a summary)
- Quotes are edited for readability when context is required, and bolded to help structure the notes.
- Skim and stop on the bold paragraphs that catch your interest. If it resonates, you can purchase the full book here.
The “destination” is … also the fun of getting there. This is typical of life lived to the full. It’s important to know what you want to achieve and what you don’t want to achieve; and it is of equal or greater importance to know how you want to live, how you don’t want to live, what person you want to be, and what person you don’t want to be.
Find the route to transform your life, so you get more results with less worry and less effort. When you’ve discovered and selected the authentic parts of yourself and made them work smoothly and easily, you’ll be unique, highly valuable… and yes, very happy too. Even if you’re not sure it will work, try it. If it fails, move on to your second choice of route — but only if it too offers more with less.
It’s true hard work never killed anyone, but I figure, why take the chance? – Ronald Reagan
Having an idea, or a fantasy, or a passion — and acting on it. Stepping out of a life of duty, where everything runs on predictable lines dictated by other people, into a life created by your own imagination. Forgetting about hard work and using the greatest of all human attributes, our ability to move between the world as it is and the world in our minds. Thinking, imagining, creating, enjoying.
Other animals can work hard, only humans can think hard. Other animals are programmed by evolution. People are too, but we can also program ourselves and change the world we find into a world we prefer. The whole edifice of modern civilization rests not on drudgery, muscle power, repetition, or long hours of work, but on insight, inspiration, inventiveness, originality, and enterprise.
What’s different about them? Devotion to hard slog or great new ideas? What about Ronald Reagan? John F Kennedy? Winston Churchill? Albert Einstein? Charles Darwin? William Shakespeare? Christopher Columbus? Jesus Christ? These giants weren’t chained to their desks. What they all did was to spend time on what mattered to them, on a few essentials where they exerted leadership, and little or no time on the mass of trivia occupying their hard-working contemporaries.
Make a great mental leap: dissociate effort from reward. Focus on the outcomes that you want and find the easiest way to them with least effort, least sacrifice, and most pleasure. Concentrate on what produces extraordinary results without extraordinary effort. Be efficient but relaxed. First, think results. Then get them with least energy:
What are these few vital activities? What are the really valuable things that you do so much better than other people? 80 percent of your value to other people comes from 20 percent or less of what you do. 80 percent of your achievements arrive in 20 percent or fewer of the circumstances in which you find yourself. You shine at specific times, in particular ways, with certain people. When? Where? Why? 80 percent of what you want comes from 20 percent of the tactics or behavior that you adopt. What behavior has results out of all proportion to energy?
If you are smart, but not lazy, work on laziness. To do everything, simply because you can, lowers effectiveness. Concentrate on the really important things that get amazing results. Do only the few things with greatest benefit. It’s amazing how often people dispute this advice. If you think you’re not so smart — and to think this, you have to be quite intelligent after all — work on your knowledge and expertise in a very narrow area, where extraordinary results are available for modest effort.
Stop inessential things. There’s a limit to how much time we can spend on the magic activities without diluting quality. Force ourselves to do less. Win time to find more vital areas to work on and more effective things to do.” Time to concentrate on what matters. If you don’t like the word ‘lazy,’ try ‘relaxed.’ Do what you enjoy, do it calmly and without worries.
Thinking is often disturbing, sometimes even frightening. Burying ourselves in trivia is less threatening. Enjoyment, not effort or education, is the key to success. Hurrah! Stars are not all-rounders. The top people have massive strengths — and equally massive downsides. Their weaknesses don’t matter. What leads to extraordinary results is concentration on the strengths, honing these to Olympian standards.
Balance is mediocrity. Focus all your energy on one area. Meet all the experts. See how they work, what kind of lives they lead. Mimic them. Observe many formulae. Adapt or combine them or invent your own. Experiment. See what delivers more with less. Work is more fun than fun (Noel Coward).
In success as in everything else, less is more. Quality is more valuable than quantity, giving is more satisfying than consuming, abundant time trumps abundant goods, serenity is better than striving, and love given generates love received. What we all want deep down is abundant time, security, affection, peace, tranquility, spiritual awareness, self-confidence, and a sense that we are expressing ourselves and creating things of great value to other people. True success is being able to spend our time how we like, fulfilling our unique talent, being valuable to people we value, and being loved.
Be very clear, therefore, what success means for you and seek that, not the world’s definition of success, a tawdry, second-hand concept that everyone professes to believe but nobody actually experiences and enjoys.
You don’t always have to change your job to enjoy it more. Maybe you can simply change the way you do it. Could you do something to add meaning and value to your job?
In the First World War, sailors whose ships had sunk floated around in lifeboats, cold and hungry, for days, sometimes for a week or so. Then they’d start to die. The mystery was that a greater proportion of the younger sailors died first. How could this be? The young mariners were fitter and should have lasted longer. Eventually it was realized that many older men had been sunk before, or knew a colleague who’d been sunk and had been rescued alive. Simply knowing that they’d been saved before reinforced the will to live. They knew there was a route to survival. They didn’t fret or worry. They knew that hanging on to life worked. It was decided to brief all crew that they might be stuck in lifeboats for many days, yet that they would then likely be rescued alive. Survival rates soared.
If you put just one or two well-thought-through 80/20 actions into practice, you’ll find that they work.
The greatest force in the world? Compound interest, said Albert Einstein. Note: this applies not just to money but also relationship, projects, hobbies… all benefits lie in the longterm gains of compound interest.
How far will your new-found riches deepen and improve your friendships and relationships, which add the most joy to life? Money and material preoccupations pale into the background when we create and experience the bonds of true love and affection.
“There’s only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.” wrote George Sand. Carl Gustav Jung, the great psychologist, said, “We need other people to be truly ourselves.” We make sense of life through relationships.
We have more relationships, but they mean less. Modern life is making it more and more difficult to find, nurture, and sustain love and relationships. Perhaps without realizing it, certainly without resisting it, most of us are opting for a higher quantity of lower-quality relationships. And our romantic relationship is ever more endangered or elusive.
Urgent work obligations and modern technology are eating into family life. Twenty years ago, half of all married Americans claimed that “our whole family usually eats together”; now that proportion is down to a third.
The more internet relationships were established and the more time spent on the web, the more lonely and depressed people tended to become. True, email and chat rooms increased the quantity of relationships, but these were shallow; and the time spent on them detracted from more important relationships with family and friends. Intensive, face-to-face contact with a few people turns out to be essential for security and happiness. Less is more.
(With more money, they want more relationships, not realizing that more is less.)
We’re becoming utterly transfixed by one obsession — more with more. We want more money, more goods, more friends, more relationships, more sex, more attention, more comfort, more houses, more travel, more gadgets, and more public acknowledgment. We are prepared to pay dearly for these aspirations. We worry more and spend more time, more attention, more energy — and, frankly, more of our souls and ourselves — to work to invest or pay for more stuff. Yet the economy works well because it follows a different principle, that of more with less.
Economic life is a constant quest for more with less: better, faster, and yet cheaper goods and services. Less is made more. Human happiness — like true personal success — is immutably driven by the same laws: less is more, and more with less. There is an unavoidable tradeoff between quality and quantity. More means worse. It is only by focusing on what is genuinely important to us — the few people, relationships, activities, and causes that we really care about — that we become centered, authentic, powerful, loving, and loved. There is no other way.
Focus on less is more: what is important for your happiness — satisfying work, a sense of personal purpose, and above all a few high-quality relationships — which require, and will amply repay, unstinting time and emotional commitment.
We can focus attention on a few key relationships; we don’t have to worry about the unimportant relationships. Unless you are devoting at least 80 percent of your “relationship energy” to the 20 percent of key relationships, you can increase your happiness by doing so.
Satisfaction can soar even without increasing the total amount of “relationship energy,” simply by focusing energy on key relationships. Action to hike happiness: Redirect energy so that at least 80 percent of “relationship energy” goes into your few key relationships.
We can only care deeply about a few people. Unless we limit the number of people who are central to our lives, nobody will be. The ultimate tradeoff between quantity and quality comes with the one relationship that can be central to our happiness.
Everyone in their top 10 percent of extremely happy people was in a romantic relationship (with only one exception in the study). Another revealing fact is that 40 percent of married Americans say that they are “extremely happy,” while only 23 percent of Americans who have not yet married claim the same. Finding the right partner is a ticket to happiness for many people. Yet the time, effort, and intelligence that we devote to finding a mate is often very limited.
Choose an optimistic partner, or one willing to learn optimism; it can be learned.
Nine times out of ten, correctly predicts divorce. Professor Gottman’s danger signals are frequent fierce arguments, criticizing the mate in personal terms, showing contempt, being chilly or withdrawn, and being unable to take criticism. Ensure that you have a trial period in which the two of you get closer without final commitment.
Choose your lover after deep deliberation. Don’t drift into a relationship. Search far and wide for the right person. Know the few qualities that you most want in a partner. Experiment. Test whether the relationship really works before you fully commit. Take your time. There are many stages and gradations of commitment — don’t rush them. An increasing sense of certainty should develop naturally. Any relationship only has a few vital requirements. Often we don’t enquire closely enough what these are.
“In our marriage, this is what really matters to her.” She wants me to be home on time. She wants to always be able to rely on me. She loves flowers. She loves me supporting her in her projects. She adores surprises. These are not necessarily the things that I would most want to do for her. I could take her to candlelit dinners, I could buy her the car I’d like myself, take her on great vacations, I could do all sorts of other things, but nothing would impress her if I haven’t met the basic few needs that mean most to her. Don’t do for others what you would like yourself. Do what your partner wants.
Aside from family, whose death would leave you desolated? Count those people. Those are your key friends, the 20 percent who contribute 80 percent of meaning and value to you. Most people come up with 10 or fewer names, although they usually know 100 or 200 people. My address book lists 207 friends, but only 18 of these are truly significant to me. These friends are less than 9 percent of the total, yet give me at least 90 percent of “friendship pleasure.”
Work out how much time you spend with your key friends and with other friends. You may be surprised. You’re more likely to spend time with neighbors whom you like moderately than with your best friends if they’re in a distant town. You’d probably be happier the other way round. Try to live near your best friends. In any case, see them frequently.
Modern norms are out of kilter with our deepest needs for love and affection. In pursuit of more with more, many of society’s most “successful” people are putting their jobs and careers first, and trying to fill the emotional hole that this creates by expanding the number and variety of relationships that they enjoy. Inevitably, most of these relationships are superficial and unsatisfying. In devoting energy to a large number of relationships and to work, they deprive themselves of the meaning and joy that flow from a few central relationships and one love affair. In relationships, above all, less is more.
Once we pursue more with more, we can never, ever win, never be satisfied. “Luxurious food and drinks,” Epicurus said, “do not produce freedom from harm or a healthy condition. We must regard wealth beyond what is natural as no more use than water to a container that is full to overflowing.”
What if it really is possible to get more with less? Then we can experience the marvelous parts of modern life — the challenge of exciting work, the discovery of our talents, material plenty — while also relishing control of our time and rich personal relationships. We square the circle by focusing on our high-value activities — those of high value to other people and to ourselves — and cutting out the trivial ones. We simplify, we purify, we intensify, and we relax, all at once.
More with more is like the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone professes that this is the way to live, although nobody who searches their own soul can really see the point.
Many of us believe that ambition, effort, and striving are good, that we must develop our abilities and reach for the stars. We feel guilty if we are not competing, struggling to go further. You can leave the treadmill with a light heart, however, since: The vast majority of our desires don’t lead to more than fleeting happiness.
To be happy we need to focus our demands, boiling them down to the few that are most important to us and result in our happiness. When other desires come along we exclude them, not because they are the work of the devil, but because we know they won’t make us happy. We stop worrying. We simplify.
Stretching and cultivating ourselves is good: we become happier, more individual, and more use to other people. But striving to the point that we’re stressed out, time poor, snappy, and unhappy is stupid. We do more good when we are relaxed and focused. We add most to the happiness of those we love when we are happy ourselves. We are happiest when we simplify our lives down to the essentials that work best for us.
“I tried various ways of making money, but on one condition — that I had to enjoy it and express myself at the same time. The weird thing is that in the past five years I have begun to make good money again too, while self-employed and doing precisely what I choose.”
Having made the commitment to less is more, the process of finding it is not that hard. Why? It’s a process of subtraction. We don’t need to do more — we need to do less. We don’t have to reach the unknown. We can simplify back down to the best and most fulfilling parts of the life we already have. We don’t try to get more. We give up grasping. We let go, relax. Our natural happiness inside is released.
We don’t strive for more “effective habits.” We drop habits that don’t work for us. We stop spending time on anything that doesn’t bring us happiness and fulfillment, that isn’t necessary for our living or the happiness of the people we care about.
We don’t have to say “yes” when people ask us to do things. We just ask ourselves, “Is this something I really want to do, is it part of the life I want?” If the task doesn’t connect in some way with our purpose, we say “no.” We do less. We enjoy more.
The 50/5 Way. 50 percent of what we do usually leads to a trivial amount (5 percent) of happiness and results.
Think about what’s simple, economical, and makes you happy. Could you imagine a life where most days were full of your favorite simple luxuries? How can you move toward this ideal life? No need to attempt to think positively, just to act positively.
All you have to do is reflect, then act:
- 80/20 destination: work out what you want: the few things that are most important to you.
- 80/20 route: the easiest route for you: the few actions that will produce the results you want with the least strain and stress.
- 80/20 action: take the few most important next steps along the route.
It is better to act constructively than to have the right answer and not act. Each of us has to find our own answer, or adapt someone else’s answer to our own circumstances.
The treadmill of modern life relentlessly cranks up, we run faster and faster, but never arrive at happiness. Like running at the gym, we sweat, we get tired, yet we stay where we were. The fast track bestows only the illusion of speed. Like a theme park rollercoaster, it’s scary and thrilling, yet it takes us nowhere.
If speeding up takes us nowhere, slowing down can take us everywhere. Contrary to common opinion, less is more. Only by concentrating on the few important and vital things, and refusing to worry over the mass of trivial ones, can we find happiness. Only by doing less can we live more. Only by insisting on more with less can we fulfill our individual destiny.
We have to reject the modern treadmill and stop doing what other ambitious people are doing. To reject more with more in favor of more with less requires less labor and yields greater happiness and fulfillment, yet also demands a degree of intellectual courage. We have to work out where less can be more and stick to our guns when friends and colleagues think we’re nuts.
Effort is effortless when driven by desire and love. Too often we’re driven not by desire, not by what we love, but by the dead hand of guilt, worry, or duty. Duty, John Fowles wrote, “largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.” Duty wastes life energy.
Yes, you must stand out from the crowd. Yes, it requires a different attitude. Yes, you must cast off the sticky chains of modern convention. Yes, it takes action. But you can do it. Decide now that you will. Start to do it! Once you get the hang of it, it will seem the easiest way of all.
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