What would this look like if it were easy?

Tim Ferriss couldn’t breathe.

It was his 40th birthday. And for the first time in his life, the #1 New York Times bestselling author, angel start-up investor, and host of one of the most popular podcasts in the world didn’t have a plan.

Where should he go from here? What goals were worth pursuing? How could he live the second half of his life with even greater purpose and focus than he had thus far?

The questions flooded him with anxiety.

Then he remembered a prompt that he had used many times before: What would this look like if it 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, creating unnecessary hardship in the process.

But what happens if we frame things in terms of elegance instead of strain? In doing so, we sometimes find incredible results with ease instead of stress. Sometimes, we “solve” the problem by simply rewording it.

Tim Ferriss

He exhaled.

Returning to his journal, he scribbled ideas until they filled the page. Eventually, his toils gave birth to a seed of possibility…

What if I assembled a tribe of mentors to help me?

From that moment of clarity, Tim found the inspiration for his next project, and published Tribe of Mentors less than twelve months later.

Are you being confronted by a problem that feels insurmountable?

Spinning your tires and going nowhere?

Banging your head against the wall in frustration?

Stop and ask: What would this look like if it were easy?

It’s one question that helps answer many others.