One [Deceptively] Simple Question
Read time: 3min
This week’s imagination upgrade? Nine words that could change your life.
They come from the Introduction to Tim Ferriss's book Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best In The World.
The book is a compilation of tactics, tools, and habits from 130+ of the world's top performers. The stories of these iconic entrepreneurs, elite athletes, and billionaire investors can help you answer life's most challenging questions.
I find myself flipping through it whenever I need a boost, a reframe, or a bit of inspiration.
The Question?
"What would it look like if this were easy?"
"What would this look like if it were easy? is such a lovely and deceptively leveraged question. It's easy to convince yourself that things need to be hard, that if you're not redlining, you're not trying hard enough. This leads us to look for paths of most resistance, often creating unnecessary hardship in the process.
But what happens if we frame things in terms of elegance instead of strain? Sometimes, we find incredible results with ease instead of stress. Sometimes, we "solve" the problem by completely reframing it."
Tim Ferriss - Tribe Of Mentors
This question can send our imagination into overdrive because we are so used to accepting and even expecting great difficulty when taking on something challenging or new.
But ask yourself - What if it was easy? It’s a worthy thought experiment.
What would you have to do differently?
What might you eliminate?
What new resource or mentor would you seek to get you to the finish line faster?
I teach a particular technique in my Inspired Actions™ course for actors and educators.
The framework is a reliable, repeatable system for crafting storytelling that gets results in the audition room.
It was born out of years of coaching actors one-on-one, refining a step-by-step process I could hand them to "make it easy."
"Easy" doesn't mean doing the same thing and expecting different results. That sounds hard.
So this week- when you hit a wall - don't look for the nearest sledgehammer.
Reach for a question that has even more power…
What would it look like if this were easy?