Transcription
This next lesson, I think, might be the best thing I've written in probably about a year. So, I listened to a podcast from Joe Hudson, and he just blew me away with this insight around productivity. It really concretized something that I've been thinking about for ages, which I love, and hopefully, it'll be useful to you as well. I realized there's a very painful transition that everybody eventually needs to make in their career and their productivity journey: to go from operator guy to idea guy.
At the beginning of your career, the only advantage that you have is your work rate, because you've got no experience to draw on, and any natural talent you have is capped by the fact that you've got no experience to unlock it. So you just work hard to get ahead. You answer all of the emails, you take all of the "would love to connect" calls, you send the invoices, write the copy, hire the contractors—everything; it's all you. But eventually, that stage of your journey expires, and you need to let it go. Maybe you have staff to delegate to now; maybe you've been given a promotion and need to be thinking at a more strategic, high level. Previously, your job is to work hard, but not so much anymore. And Joe Hudson says your job isn't to work hard; your job is to have great ideas.
But here's the problem: you've spent an entire career acclimatizing yourself to getting stuff done. You've built a monster inside of you which sucks in difficult, tedious tasks and spits out completed efforts. You've created a link between being busy doing things you don't want to do and success. The issue is, it's really hard to work out what you truly want and determine whether or not you're moving toward it, but it's really easy to see the number of emails that you sent or how many hours you spent on calls today. Being busy is more satisfying than being effective, and it's very hard to work out if your productivity efforts are actually useful or if they're just a dopamine fix that allows you to check the "done" box and feel like you completed something. So ask yourself: is your job to press Enter on emails or to actually move the mission forward? You can't confuse the first one for the second one.
Another challenge is this: this level of busyness helps to make you feel important. A full calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness. You think to yourself, "There's no way that I can be an unwanted piece of..." Look at how many calls I have today; look at all the people who need my time and attention. I have to be important; I have to be valuable. Please, please, please assuage my deep feelings of insufficiency. You are hooked on the dopamine of "I got stuff done today," because even if this wasn't a great use of your day, at least you don't feel useless, and you didn't have any time to consider that you might not be fully actualizing your potential in any case, because you're drowning in emails.
Another challenge is that conspicuous busyness is much more societally rewarded than quiet effectiveness. We want other people to see how hard we're working, even if the best thing for your mission's outcome was for you to go and lie on the beach today and think. Who's going to congratulate you for taking on *that* challenge? Like, let's just think for a second: the best thing that you could do for your professional outcomes, your personal outcomes, your net worth, your mental health, your physical—everything, all of that—would be going offline, lying on a beach and getting a bit of a tan. Maybe, maybe you grab an ice cream. Um, there's a dog there for a little while; you play with the dog—it's somebody else's dog—you play with the dog, uh, and then you come back and you have an early night. From every objective metric, that makes your life and the lives of the people around you better. Who's giving you an award for that? Dude, "Well done today, really, really well done."
Well, if we assume that the reason that we do the work, the reason that we do any work, is to move us toward a goal that ultimately we want, why would we assume that sending useless emails that don't move the project forward should be more applauded than going to the beach, which does? And it's because we still have this Industrial Age Puritan work ethic mindset around what working hard looks like. And again, it's this conspicuous productivity, or obvious busyness near burnout, is worn like a badge of honor to show your fealty to the mission. Obvious productivity is more praised than private efficacy. And here's the thing: almost everyone's life goal is where they get to a point where they can say, "I just don't want to have to do anything I don't want to do anymore." But what happens when you get there? Because so much of your self-worth is derived from overcoming hard things and pushing yourself through difficult tasks that you don't want to do. So imagine that you do reach your goal of not having to do things you don't want to do anymore—where are you going to find your satisfaction from now? This is why it's so difficult to let go of grunt work and to let go of being permanently busy, even when your precise goal was to get here, to the point where you don't need to do grunt work and you don't need to be permanently busy.
I guess, finally, as well, there's a question of why is it so hard to take pleasure in our successes? And a big part of that is largely because you're constantly peering over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming next. You're always just sort of looking past what is in front of you or what's happening right now. So even during the act of attaining a goal, you're already looking past it a little bit, getting ready to move the goalposts that you just this second kicked the ball into further away down the field. We are all chasing a sense of completion, but we never actually allow ourselves to savor any tastes of completion that we get along the way. We assume that one day we're going to arrive, and that day never comes because we never give ourselves a break. And then we realize that the path we were speed-running through was actually the one to our grave. And how many people—I mean, what's that, the five most common regrets, deathbed regrets? One of them: "I wish I hadn't worked so much." I mean, if you're going to outsource it to people that are on their deathbed, they've got no reason to lie. "I wish that I kept in touch with my friends," "I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy," "I wish I'd lived my own life and not the one that others expected of me," "I wish I'd kept…" I mean, look, this insight around: what is your productivity for? What are you working this hard for? What is it that you're trying to achieve? Are you here to crank widgets and to keep your Slack at zero and to send emails? Are you here to move your life meaningfully toward the thing that you want? The problem is, Slack and calls and emails are much easier and more obvious for you to judge than, "Did I get myself toward a life that I want?" That's really amorphous and tough. But I buried myself in work, or I only slept four hours last night. We use the proxy thing that, in the beginning of our journey when we were doing grunt work, was supposed to be predictive of where we were going to end up. We use that mindset for the rest of time.
And look, if you're starting out on a career journey or you're at the bottom of a ladder of something new, this might sting a bit because you're hearing about a transition that you, as of yet, don't have to make and aren't going to get to make for quite a while. But you need to keep it in the back of your mind, because if you don't like the grunt work in the beginning, the only thing worse than that is doing it when you no longer need to do it, when you've managed to get somewhere closer up the top of the ladder, and um, refusing to let go of it is going to cap your progress and your happiness, and it's going to trap you in thought patterns that you really don't want. And it's a difficult transition—the existential loneliness that you have to deal with, where it's like, "But I was… everybody needs me; everybody wanted me; I was so busy all of the time." It's like, "Yeah, dude, you need to ask yourself sort of deeper questions now, and you need to genuinely consider whether a 30-minute walk is the best thing that you can do for your business or your relationship or your family or whatever it might be." Um, and that's just… I don't know… why is that less sexy than, you know, sitting down and grinding out whatever needs to be—the house cleaning, the emails, the, you know, hardcore workout, whatever it might be? It's like you need to learn to chill out a little bit more, and uh, that'll actually, in some weird roundabout way, move you closer to your goals, too. It's interesting. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that clip, the full-length episode is available right here. If you hurry up and press it… come on!