Transcription
Well, I'm here in my beloved Rome, shooting this course for you. So, I will say bravo or brava for you reaching the second part of our first month of work together, helping you become an everyday hero who dominates your domain, pushes master work into the world, and creates a world-class life that you adore, while making the world a better place.
Well, as you know, the next 10 days are all about maximizing your productivity. And I'm going to get right into it by walking you through the four laws of peerless productivity. In other words, you won't even have a peer in your industry or in your field if you live by these four laws.
Now, please remember, small daily improvements, when done consistently over time, lead to stunning results. Not what you do once a quarter or once a year. That's valuable. It's what you do every day. Consistency is the mother of mastery. Consistency is the mother of mastery.
As I wrote about in The Everyday Hero Manifesto, I remember giving a presentation, I think it was at the Titan Summit, an event I used to do for industry heavyweights many years ago. And at the end, I, I believe I gave everything I could give. And he came up to me, goes, "Robin, I want to give you a compliment." And I said, "Oh yeah, what's that?" And he said, "You're really consistent." And I thought to myself, I just gave my heart and soul. I thought I gave the best I had to give. And all you can say, all he could say is, "I'm consistent."
And then that night, I went back to my hotel room, and I was thinking and reflecting. And I went, "You know, he was a college football star, and he's an athlete. And for an athlete, to be consistent is everything." You know, you show up for your workouts consistently, you deliver world-class consistently.
As I thought about it more, I think about my favorite restaurant here in Rome. Every time I order the tagliolini con tartufo, the pasta with truffles, it tastes the same. Every time I order the dessert, it tastes the same. Every time I go there, the user experience and the way the the servers treat everyone is the same. I think about the greatest hotels I've been to, consistent. I think about my favorite Chinese restaurant in my hometown. It's called Bay View Court. Always consistent. But food, always tastes so fresh. It's always packed the same. It's always the same. So consistency really is the mother of mastery.
And live these four laws on a daily basis. And those micro wins will stack into a tsunami of transformation. Let's get into the first law.
An addiction to distraction is the death of creative production. An addiction to distraction is the death of creative production. I have never seen so many people who are checked out because they're just addicted to technology. I've never seen so many cyber zombies. I've never seen so many people literally, you see them walking on the street, and they're walking and they check their phone for notifications. They walk a bit more, they check it again. See people at a bus stop or a train station or in a shopping mall. You see people in offices, and they're checking their phones when they're being paid to be working. That is really unethical when you think about it. They're being paid by their employer to work, and they're not only checking their phones, which is causing them to do very poor quality work over the hour, but they're also really reducing their cognitive focus. So an addiction, a distraction, is the death of your creative production.
You want to make sure that you turn your phone off a lot. You turn off your notifications. Get rid of most of your apps. And you know, how did they operate 100 years ago? I think they were, in many ways, much more productive and much more creative. Because to be really creative, you need to get into flow state. To be really creative, you need to drop into that place of transient hypofrontality that I talked about in an earlier lesson. And almost operate in brain waves of theta. That's when you enter that secret orbit of creativity known only to the people we revere as the great creatives, the great poets, the Rumi's, or the Shakespeare's, or the Michelangelo's, or Da Vinci's, or the Rembrandt's and Van Gogh's.
Which hopefully elegantly brings me to the second law of peerless productivity, which is genius loves aloneness. Genius loves aloneness. I think Blaise Pascal said it more elegantly than I ever could. He said, "Most of man's miseries derive from his inability to sit quietly in a room with himself." You can be in the world, you can change the game. You don't get to do both.
If you look at Ernest Hemingway, if you look at Stephen King, study Maya Angelou, if you look at Hedy Lamarr, you look at Madame Curie, if you look at Vincent Van Gogh, these people all had one thing in common. If you look at Aristotle Onassis, if you look at Bill Gates, if you look at Nelson Mandela, these people all understood the transformational value of solitude and being alone and writing in a journal and being reflective to form their philosophy and to capture their visions. And so genius loves aloneness.
Please, and don't leave this to chance. Schedule on a regular basis, every week, periods where you go off into your dream room, or maybe it's a public library, or maybe you go to the seaside. And you bring your journal, and you're alone, and you think, and you create, and you dream, and you ideate, and you write down who what you want to stand for, and you write down what you're going to achieve in the next quarter, and the next year, in the next five years.
Which brings me to the third law of peerless productivity. It is better to produce one masterwork than one million mediocrities. I watch most people in business right now, and they're, they're subscribing to the hustle and grind culture. And they use busyness as a badge of honor. And if they're not working, they feel guilty. And they suffer from FOMO, fear of missing out. And they're following the herd. They're getting up early, they're working all day, they're working into the night time. And they think they are going to be more productive.
Well, that kind of way of working comes from an old era. That way of working comes from when we were, fact, the factory age. You work longer at the factory line, you produce more products. That's more productive for the owner of the factory. We now live in the cognitive economy. We are actually paid to produce magic. We are paid to innovate. We are paid to think. So why would we operate from an old way of working that worked 150, 200 years ago?
The new way of working is oscillation. The new way to work is to work in cycles or seasons. I call it the twin cycles of elite performance. You've got the high excellent cycle. Work for five hours intensely, bringing the fullness of your gifts, your work. And then pull back and recover. Related that is, it's better to push one masterwork out into the world that allows you to influence the entire marketplace than do what most people do. You work all day constantly. You're constantly putting out different pieces of work. And because you're putting out so much work, it's not very good.
It took Shah Jahan 21 years to build the Taj Mahal. It took Michelangelo four years to do the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Great work takes time. If you look at all the great novels, you look at all the great movies, you look at all the great architectural monuments. I mean, like I say, I'm here in Rome. I love Piazza Navona. I look at, you know, Bernini's arc, Bernini's structure in the Four Rivers at the center of Piazza Navona. I mean, that wasn't done in a day. It wasn't done in a week. It wasn't done in a short period of time. Because genius requires intensity and detail and craft, and then recovery, and then ingenuity and optimization. It is better to release one War and Peace. It is better to release one Citizen Kane. It is better to do one Eiffel Tower that stands the test of time, than put out a million mediocrities. So be a minimalist, be a multiple masterwork creator, and don't push mediocrity out in the marketplace by working 24/7.
Which brings me to law number four. Recovery is not separate from exponential productivity. It is part of the process. What most people see is, "Oh, I'll be productive. Let me be a great producer." Which it's all about time management and getting up early and scheduling and using their days well. But they don't think about rest and refueling.
When I think about productivity, I think that rest is a necessity. It's not a luxury. You can only be an elite producer if you rest a lot. You can only get big things done if you're fresh and you're energized and you're creative and you're inspired. And you can only be inspired and fresh and creative at your best if you take the time to rest and recover and to nap and to be in nature and have great meals with your family and to take travels and to read and to watch great films. And then do the two massage protocol and to sleep properly. So rest is the elite producer's secret weapon. Make sure you live this law as well.
If you really want to experience peerless productivity, that's this lesson. Remember the four laws. Watch this video again because I know it has some contrarian ideas, but very valuable ideas to help you achieve peerless productivity, which is my great prayer for you.