Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host David Stein today's episode 455. It's titled Easier Investing, Richer Life,

Tips, Ladders, to Annuities. A couple years ago I read a book titled Effortless by Greg McEwen.

It was a follow-up to his best-selling book, Essentialism.

McEwen describes essentialism as doing the right things, whereas effortless is about doing them in the right way.

And he wrote that follow-up book because he was doing the right things, the essential things, but was completely burned out.

And so then he had to change how he was going about doing things.

And there were three main focuses, one an effortless state,

which he called clearing the clutter,

just getting rid of the excess.

Effortless action was focused on simplifying the process.

And effortless results, taking effortless actions on high-leverage activities, so that we get these results that compound overtime like interest.

After reading that book, I spend a lot of time thinking about is there a simpler way to go about doing whatever I'm doing

Are there steps that I can eliminate is there a way just to make things easier?

It reminds me of a concept taught by Nesim Nicholas Talleb

in his book, Skin in the game, via Negativa.

It's the idea that by removing things, that act of removing things is

more powerful and less air-prone than adding things. So I spent a lot of time

thinking about what could I get rid of? What could I remove? How can we make this easier?

And this occurred to me when I was at the post office the other day. I had sold a sweater online the person that bought it was in Canada

Loprell and my daughter had had tried to mail it once and it turns out the

documentation to send a package to Canada was a little more

complicated than they had anticipated and it was my package so I needed to go send it.

...