How to Work Effortlessly

That resistance.

Each time you’re about to engage in your work, there it stands. The force that drains you of your will-power and energy even before you’ve started the work.

What if I showed you the way to lock that bastard away so that once and for all, we can all just simply be productive and happy doing whatever we need to do.

In this article, I’ll show you how you can work effortlessly, as if you’re threading on water and the wind gently guiding you along as you enjoy the journey.

Let’s kill that bastard.

WHAT’S IT LIKE TO WORK EFFORTLESSLY

To work effortlessly means you’re doing what needs to be done with minimum stress and tension.

It means that you don’t have to force it. You don’t have to discipline yourself.

Working effortlessly is exciting, enjoyable and easy.

Working effortfully is stressful, meh and not fun at all.

Working effortlessly is zen. Working effortfully is not zen at all.

It’s almost meditative. Not the effortful meditation, but meditation as if you’re one with the wind. Flowing freely and effortlessly to wherever you’re supposed to flow.

Work becomes natural and you fall into the flow easily. You flow and you flow. And suddenly, hours have passed, you’re done with the work and you haven’t felt the strain at all.

Also you’re not getting tired because working effortlessly is an energizing practice.

You are in alignment with who you are and where you need to be. Your strengths, your passion, your values and your vision are all in alignment.

You’re calm and focused. Very focused.

You don’t think. You do.

You enter into momentum and you’re unstoppable.

As I’ve alluded to in the last sentences… to work effortlessly you need to reach alignment, focus, minimize thoughts and eventually enter into flow and momentum.

Let’s begin.

FIRST STEP: ALIGNMENT

What the heck is alignment?

Alignment is the critical foundation to maximize your joy, your potential and even your energy.

It is also the first step that you have to master if you want to work effortlessly.

To be in alignment is to first be clear about your strengths, your passion, your values and your vision. And then you have to align all of these elements into your daily routine and long term goal.

It sounds difficult. And it is actually. But you don’t have to have perfect alignment from the get-go. It’s a gradual process of increasing self-awareness and self-knowledge through exploration and experience.

Let me briefly touch upon the four elements you have to align:

YOUR STRENGTHS

Everyone has strengths.

For some it’s easy to notice because it’s specific like when you’re good with the piano from when you were very little.

For others (like it was for me) it is more difficult to notice.

They will be easier to notice if you change the way you look at the nature of strengths.

Don’t think of them as specific skills that you’re good at.

But think of natural curiosities, natural ways of thinking that differentiates you from others or as natural motivations in life.

Anything that differentiates you from others is your strength.

You might be very empathetic to the people around you. That’s your strength.

You might not be empathetic at all, but very logical and curious about how the world works. That’s your strength.

You might easily jump from one interest to another and even this is a result of your strength.

Basically anything that’s natural and easy to you which differentiates you from others. We all have it.

The easiest way to learn about your natural strengths is to read about your dominant and auxiliary cognitive functions in the MBTI personality theory.

Take one or two tests to see which personality type you are and then google “[your personality type] dominant cognitive function” and then auxiliary cognitive function.

The dominant function is your main strength because it’s basically your way of being. And the auxiliary function is like your main assistant so another strength.

MBTI was the single best thing that helped me drastically progress in my personal development journey. It’s crazy how much you can learn about yourself.

If you have any difficulties with typing and the theory, you can always talk to me. I’m a MBTI nerd. I love that shit.

Ok this wasn’t brief at all.

I’ll try to be briefer with the rest of the elements. They’re pretty much self-explanatory.

YOUR PASSION

Your passion is mostly a result of your strengths and your growth environment.

Once you identify your strengths, it will be easy to learn what your passion is.

Here are some questions to help identify your passion:

What do you do when you’re not working?

What have you loved to do since you were little (that doesn’t involve addictions and easy dopamine hits)?

What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about money?

Is there anything productive or purposeful that you can do that’s enjoyable?

What do you like doing when you’re at your optimal state?

What is your obsession?

What are you afraid to accept as your career and calling?

Passion is a tricky thing to discover especially if you have low self-esteem.

It might take several guesses and you might have to try several things until you really stumble upon your true passion, but you’ll know it when it comes.

Get on our discord server and we can try identifying your passion or strengths.

YOUR VALUES

Your values are your preferred ways of being and ways of doing.

They are the rules you like to set for yourself. It might even be the rule to have no rules, in which case, your value would be that of flexibility and exploration.

Your values can be standards of behavior such as your standards of how productive you want to be.

They can be different traits you want to embody in everyday life such as being grateful and appreciative or being loving towards other people or traits of excellence in work.

If you watch successful people and read books you will also find values that they embody that you want to replicate in yourself.

You’ll notice they have a handful of themes they like to talk about… they’re possible values that you want to embody.

Lastly, your values will evolve and you will integrate new values over time. It’s a constant process of growth where you integrate new values that make you stronger.

YOUR VISION

The vision is how you visualize your future self and future life.

What do you want to accomplish in 30 years? Get excited.

Imagine your ideal self. What do you do? How does your day look? How do you look? Where do you live? How do you serve the humanity?

How big an impact are you having in the world through your strengths and passion in the long term future?

Think of it as a very long term goal and an orientation of striving.

The vision must excite you and provide you with immense energy and motivation.

NOW JUST ALIGN THESE (EASY PEASY, NOT REALLY, BUT YEAH)

Once you have truly identified your strengths, your passion, your values and your vision, alignment should happen by itself.

Sometimes you might have well identified your strengths, your values and vision… but your passion is still not right. Once you identify your true passion, everything will click.

Sometimes you might lack in the values department and once you integrate the lacking value, that might be the key for you to accept your passion and create a new vision. This is basically how it looked for me.

How do you know that you’ve reached alignment?

Everything suddenly becomes clear. You’re excited af. You know what you should do, how you should do it and where you want to go.

You’re confident in your abilities to succeed and you know you will enjoy the journey because it’s in alignment with your strengths, passion and your vision.

You’re authentic.

You can be scared because you’re no longer running away from your true passion.

It’s clear what you should do and you can’t procrastinate because it’s either do or die.

There is no other option. That’s it.

SECOND STEP: FOCUS

After you’re in alignment, you need focus to work effortlessly.

Whatever the time of the day it is, it has to be clear what you should be doing.

And what you should be doing must be in alignment with your goals and vision.

If you’ve mastered alignment then it will be easy to identify your focus.

First take a look at your strengths, your passion, your values and vision.

Then try to set a daily routine where you’re embodying as much of your values as possible and your passions are in accordance with the long term vision that you want to achieve.

To focus, you have to clear away all the distractions and learn to say NO to opportunities and distractions that don’t serve your vision and your happiness.

You have to master the 80%/20% rule and focus on doing the most valuable tasks.

Each time you sit to work you’ll know that you’re doing the most important task.

If you can’t identify the most important task, then you should make it a task to learn about your craft so that you can identify such things.

But if you’re already working within your strengths and passion, it should be easy to identify what you should focus on.

For me currently as I’ve just started working on this blog, my focus now is to just create masterpieces of posts so that I can fill this blog with at least 60 articles before I start working on distribution and awareness.

My focus is: Write posts. Clear and simple. Cut away all distractions and focus on writing.

THIRD STEP: MINIMIZE THOUGHTS

The third step allows you to transition from focus to flow.

Have you ever sat down to start working on your most important task and suddenly you get a flood of thoughts and possible other activities to do?

Our resisting and procrastinating mind will keep throwing random thoughts at us.

Maybe you should do this first.

You’re still not in your zone to write.

You’re not this, you’re not that. Do this, do that.

If you’ve already mastered alignment and you’re focused without any distractions, then you will be able to minimize thoughts.

But they still come.

The way to master the thoughts is to answer with action.

Don’t play the same game, answering thoughts with different thoughts.

Either just do the thing proposed or if you can sense it’s procrastinatory in nature don’t indulge the thought, instead, just start doing what you were planning to do.

Answer thoughts with action. Just do what needs to be done. And very very soon you’ll notice you’re already in the flow.

FOURTH STEP: ENTER FLOW AND MOMENTUM

After you’ve started executing, then just keep at it until you finish the task.

Little thoughts might pop up randomly but it will be easy to dismiss them because you know you’re already in the flow. And you know that any distraction will be the destruction of the precious momentum you have created.

Once you enter flow, you will be working effortlessly.

Within this state, hours can fly by and you won’t feel a thing.

After you’ve finished whatever you’ve set out to do, you will notice that you have been working effortlessly, time has flown by, and you have a masterful work finished in front of you.

ARE YOU READY TO MASTER EFFORTLESS WORK?

Phew, if you’ve read all the way to here then you really have it in you to master this skill and reach beyond.

You’re one of the rare people who want to do the best work AND enjoy the process at the same time. You don’t make compromises when it comes to choosing between success and happiness.

It has been a long post and you have lots of work to do. But believe me, this is the single most important thing that you have to do if you want to reach your greatest heights.

Open up a notepad right now and start writing up your strengths, your passion, your values and vision.

GET EXCITED.

It might take you an hour to get in alignment or days of self-awareness, research and sorting out. Or this post might be the spark that gets you seriously start the journey of self-exploration in which case it might take months until you perfect it.

But as I’ve already said, it doesn’t have to be perfect from the first day.

Get the first version out. Whatever feels RIGHT for you right now, that’s the best version. And from then you keep growing and striving and updating your values and your vision.

Next time you start working, ask yourself whether you’re doing your most valuable task that’s in alignment with your EXCITING vision.

Try to cut away distractions and answer the random thoughts with ACTION.

And then you’ll enter flow and then just keep that momentum going.

Whatever questions you might have, I’m here to serve you so don’t hesitate to ask.