an easier manifesto

realizing greatness

The Easier Project exists to support people in realizing their greatness. We’re here to share the principles behind performance and wellbeing, and to finally understand once and for all why sometimes we thrive and sometimes we struggle.
Currently, performance and excellence are pursued by guesswork and superstition, we’re here to change that.
In our years of experience with top performers, from pro athletes to global leaders, we learned that when someone understands how our potential works and uncovers the principles behind greatness, everything is easier. And excellence, breakthroughs and wellbeing become the norm.

1. there are no special ones

[greatness is ordinary]

It doesn’t take anything special to be at your best.

The possibility to be great is always available for everyone in every moment. In fact, that’s your default. You’re told that you need to add something to yourself in order to be great, but this only fuels insecurity (“you’re not enough”).
High-performance, however, is not an additive game but a subtractive one (performance = potential – interference). Your best moments are not the results of you adding something special, but glimpses of what your normal looks like. That’s why there are no reliable answers to the question “what did you do to perform so well?”: it’s not what you did, but what you didn’t do (ie. getting in the way of your greatness) that allowed you to shine.

Exercise: what shifts in you as you consider your best moments as examples of your normal, rather than the result of something special you added?

2. it’s not about you

[greatness is impersonal]

Self-consciousness is the enemy of greatness.

Taking things personally causes discouragement and discouragement is the biggest interference between you and the natural expression of your potential. Getting over yourself is what gets you back in the game. It looks like self-consciousness is a response to what’s happening outside, but you’re creating it by paying too much attention to your own thoughts about yourself. This is good news, because there’s nothing that anyone can say or do to make us feel self-conscious, unless we think it.

Exercise: take a torch light and enter a dark room; point the light in front of you, and see how helpful it is to see things clearly; now point the light straight at your eyes and notice how uncomfortable and unhelpful that is; it’s the same with our attention.
For the rest of the day, notice when you’re paying attention to your self-conscious thoughts and making something about you. How does it feel?

3. learning to sense potential

[greatness is infinite]

“Everything is possible” is always true.

This is different from positive thinking, or visualizing outcomes: those are self-soothing stories we make up and that need belief (which adds more thinking, therefore interference). Sensing potential (a.k.a. hope) means seeing the infinite possibilities always available in the present, and acting accordingly.
The opposite of sensing potential is the experience of scarcity: feeling like you’re running out of time, money or opportunities (“this is my only chance”). Anytime you experience scarcity, you know you’re interfering with your infinite potential.

Exercise: what are you experiencing as scarce right now? What if you didn’t have to experience it that way?

4. don’t try to be great

[greatness is enough]

Trying to be good gets in the way of your best.

It’s like trying to force the gears of an automatic car. Trying to live up to the mental checklist of what we think we should do distracts us from thriving in the moment.
When you understand how your potential works, you can let go of the gear stick and focus on the road instead. Your best will naturally emerge from there.

Exercise: take a break from self-improvement. Don’t try to be great. Don’t worry about it. If you notice that you’re thinking about it, as best you can, just drop that thought. Just for today: do your thing, enjoy it as best you can, let the system take care of the gears.

5. there are no prerequisites

[greatness is deliberate]

The only thing you need to be at your best is the willingness to go all-in, no matter what.

Innocently, we make up “prerequisites” before we can give ourselves permission to shine. Like a sort of Dumbo Feather. Maybe it’s a certain feeling (I need to feel angry before I give my best), or a situation (I need the stakes to be high), or anything else.
The result is that we are constantly looking outside, waiting for all the ducks to line up, and end up being tentative in our actions (holding back). But there are no prerequisites, choose to pour yourself in the game right now, and your best will come with you.

Exercise: are you willing to be great now? Make a list of all the prerequisites you think are needed for you to go all-in (circumstances, feelings, effort), and then explore the possibility that you don’t need any of those, and you can choose to fly right now.

6. it’s easier

[greatness is effortless]

It’s easier to have a great performance than a bad one.

We think that struggle is a sign “we’re giving it our all”, that’s why we respect that feeling. But when you struggle what’s actually happening is that you’re trapping all your energy within, contracting your freedom of mind, instead of staying loose (no interference).
How do you stay “loose”? By realizing that everyone is loose until they tighten up. Free is the default. It looks like “hard” comes from the circumstances, but you create hard in your mind, and that costs energy.
When you lose interest for hard, and start respecting the feeling of ease, your experience of anything will become easier, and you’ll inevitably do better.

Exercise: the feeling of loving the challenge (rising to the occasion) is the natural function of our greatness. It’s what happens when we don’t get in the way. But often people mistake this for pressure, tension, tightness and they fall in the misunderstanding that “pressure makes me do well”. But they’re two completely different feelings. One gives you energies, the other drains you. Can you think of examples of both? Notice the difference in you.

7. play without gloves

[greatness is intimacy]

Listen to yourself, not to your thoughts.

You probably spend a lot of time in your head, and this disconnects you from the game. Like going on a date with someone but then focusing on your phone instead. You lose intimacy with the moment: your thoughts become interference and create a barrier between you and your best. It’s like playing basketball wearing ski gloves.
Underneath your thoughts you’ll find your potential. You can learn to develop a feel for it. That’s all you need: the more you get a feel for it, the more intimate you’ll become with your performance, the more your best will naturally emerge when you show up in the arena.

Exercise: go on a date with your potential. Let go of your judgment, all the shoulds, the what ifs, the assumptions and simply get a feel for the infinite life force in you. Notice how it feels in your body, notice where it tends to hide.

8. offer yourself to the game

[greatness is generous]

Performance is a generous act: learn to give yourself unconditionally.

Giving yourself is a gift, a duty, and simply the most wonderful thing we can do for and with ourselves. This has nothing to do with putting others first. The “game” could be a meeting, a football match, or taking care of yourself or your career. But there’s a difference between taking care of yourself, and making self-care mean anything about you. You can always choose to pour your attention on the game, even when your insecure thoughts suggest otherwise. When you’re not generous (too focused on what the outcome will mean for you), you’re more likely to go in overdrive, and become reckless, try “hail marys”, desperately trying to grab what seems to be slipping from your hands.

Exercise: break some plates. Deliberately choose to throw yourself without reserves in something that seems bigger than you. Don’t worry about failing, if you’re doing this right that’s likely to happen and that’s the point. See what happens.

9. your A-game is more reliable than you think

[greatness is awareness]

Potential is bigger than your intellect and it’s triggered by presence, not will.

The amount of trust you develop in your infinite potential defines how much room you’ll leave for it. And as you do, it will carry you forward more often. This is not “believing in yourself” but seeing with your own eyes that this is simply how potential works: your best shows up with you as you get in the game, 100% of the times, if you let it.
As long as it looks like it’s on you to make it happen, you’ll get in the way and create interference. Once you see that your job is simply to show up fully present and be aware of your greatness, you realize that it’s not on you to “bring you’re A-game”. You can stop worrying about it, and you’ll experience it more.

Exercise: list 3 examples of moments when you felt the wind suddenly filling your sails. Going from “trying” to being connected to something bigger and “disappearing” into the flow of the game. Almost being carried by an invisible wave.

10. champion’s mentality

[greatness is like rain]

It really doesn’t matter whether you’re playing well or not: as long as you keep going back to presence and freedom of mind, you’ll play the best game that it’s possible to play in that moment.

The rain rains. It doesn’t care about where it lands and what happens to the soil.
Anytime you care too much about the outcome of your actions, you stop being a force of nature. It’s process, not outcome. Judgment (good/bad, right/wrong) is the biggest source of mental interference.

Exercise: pick an hour, or a day, and rain. Don’t concern yourself with outcome, feedback, don’t try to assess how you’re doing. Just rain.

11. right. now.

[greatness is in real time]

You can only be great right now, and you can always be great right now.

Greatness is always one thought away. And, by definition, in the now there is no outcome (future) and also no past. Replicating past excellence gets in the way of your current excellence. The game is so much easier to play when you can see it in real time (instead of playing the game in your head).

Exercise: notice where you are trying to replicate past excellence (yours or others) or focusing on future excellence (one day I will…), rather than getting curious about the way your greatness will unfold this time.

12. the right tool for the job

[greatness is unreasonable]

You don’t need mental toughness unless you’re pushing with your will, instead of riding your greatness.

Our intellect is great for many things, but it’s terrible at running the show. If I try to cut a table with a pocketknife I’ll struggle. Yet, the knife isn’t broken, nor it needs to be “tougher”: it’s simply not the right tool for the job. And it’s exhausting.
On the contrary, in our best performances, we feel energized, not drained. That’s because we tapped into our greatness (which has nothing to do with our intellect) instead of squeezing every drop out of our willpower. We try to grind our way through performance using our thinking (which adds even more interference), rather than getting out of the way and letting our greatness emerge. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’re currently getting results or not: if performing leaves you mentally drained, you’re using the wrong fuel and eventually you’ll burn out.

Exercise: list 3 moments when you felt energized after a performance, and 3 moments when you were drained (even if things went well in the end). What differences do you notice?

13. behaviors are just the consequence

[greatness is fluid]

Problems are irrelevant: how’s your spirit?

If you’re driving with the windshield covered in mud, you’ll probably take a few wrong turns, get lost or worse. It would make little sense to analyze each specific turn, or why you crashed at the junction, and what to do about it. What you did with the car is just the consequence of the mud, therefore irrelevant.
This is true for your performance: you see the mistakes, the loss of determination, the lack of communication and so on, and you “try hard” to fix all of that, but those behaviors are just the consequence of mental interference (made worse, funny enough, by all that “fixing”). Let that clear up, and you’ll see how all those behaviors will shift and improve automatically. Your feelings are the guide: if your spirit is going down, you’re adding more mud. Try to jump off that train of thoughts, no matter how real or urgent it feels.

Exercise: notice how the same strategy sometimes lifts your spirit and works perfectly, and other times is useless or even makes things worse. This is because it’s never the specific strategy that changes the game, but whether your spirit rises.

14. you can’t win

[greatness is an infinite game]

You can’t “win at greatness”. You play to keep playing.

“Winning the trophy” is a finite game, which shrinks your potential. It adds scarcity and self-consciousness. But if you show up every day to “express your greatness” you find yourself in an infinite game: one that you play to keep playing. Think about it, are you ever going to be done? When you achieve your next goal, are you going to give up on greatness? This is a lifelong gift. When you get that there’s no finish line, and the game of expressing greatness is all there is, you naturally enjoy the ride and allow yourself to go all-in, no need for mantras or reminders, it’s simply the only option that makes sense. You’ll achieve your goals and win the finite games as a consequence of you choosing to play the infinite one.

Exercise: go about today like there was no finish line. Play like you knew you would stay in the game for the next 50 years.

15. deal with it

[greatness is you]

You can’t fix what isn’t broken, and as soon as you stop, you’ll soar.

All the things you think you’re lacking (confidence, toughness, resilience, you name it) are already your default settings. Lack of awareness combined with the misuse of your thinking is what gets in the way. Anytime your thoughts disappear in your performance, you feel authentic and alive: that’s who you really are.
The moments we shine (example: playing football for a football player) are the ones when we’re most ourselves (as in not too focused on all our stories, we’re just playing). That’s when we experience passion. We think it comes from the “thing” (like football), but actually what we love is being ourselves. And we can do that anytime, anywhere. When an athlete says “I lost love for the game”, the game has nothing to do with it. They simply got too much in their head and disconnected with themselves, therefore experiencing less love. But they are just one thought away from falling in love with the game again.

Exercise: be yourself. But not the tiny version you made up in your mind. Be yourself: the full expression of infinite potential. How? Just show up and throw yourself fully into anything you do, in real time.