3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

There is a very painful transition that everyone eventually needs to make in their career & productivity journey - from operator guy to idea guy.

At the beginning of your career, the only advantage you have is your work rate because you have no experience to draw on, and any natural talent is capped by your inexperience, so you just work hard to get ahead.

You answer all the emails, take all the “would love to connect” calls, you send the invoices, write the copy, hire the contractors.

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 more strategically at a high level.

Previously your job was to work hard, but not so much any more.

Here’s the problem; you’ve spent an entire career acclimatising yourself to getting stuff done.

You’ve built a monster which sucks in difficult, tedious tasks and spits out completed efforts.

You have created a link between being busy doing things you don’t want to do, and success.

The issue is that it’s really hard to work out what you truly want and determine whether or not you’re moving toward it, but it’s easy to see the number of emails you sent or how many hours you spent on calls.

Being busy is more satisfying than being effective.

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.

Ask yourself - is your job to press enter on emails? Or to actually move the mission forward?

This level of busyness also helps to make you feel important.

A full calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness.

“There’s no way I can be an unwanted piece of shit - look at how many calls I have today! Look at all the people who need my time and attention! I must be important. I must be valuable. Pls pls pls 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 actualising your potential anyway.

Another challenge is that conspicuous busyness is much more societally rewarded over quiet effectiveness.

We want other people to see how hard we’re working.

Even if the best thing for your mission’s outcomes was for you to go lie on the beach and think today, who is going to congratulate you for taking on that “challenge”?

Near-burnout is worn like a badge of honour to show fealty to the mission.

Obvious productivity is more praised than private efficacy.

Here’s the thing - almost everyone’s life goal is where “I just don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do” but what happens when you start to get there?

So much of your self-worth is derived from overcoming hard things and pushing yourself through difficult tasks you don’t want to do - so imagine that you DO reach your goal, where do you find satisfaction from now?

This is why it’s so difficult to let go of doing grunt work and being permanently busy, even when your precise goal was to get here.

Finally, why is it so hard to take pleasure in our successes?

Well, largely because you are constantly peering over the shoulder of the present moment to see what’s coming next.

Even during the act of attaining a goal, you are already looking past it, getting ready to move the goal posts further away.

We are all chasing a sense of completion but we never actually allow ourselves to savour any tastes of completion that we get along the way.

— h/t Joe Hudson & Brett Kisler for breaking my brain with these insights

MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent.
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This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
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Saturday.
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THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​Asian supremacy.

“Asian women now earn more, on average, than White men in the U.S.” — Steve Stewart-Williams

2.
​Don't invest in someone based on how much you like them.

“Invest in someone based on how much they invest in you.

And if we just did that, we would save ourselves from 80% of the heartbreak that we're ever going to experience in our lives.” — Matthew Hussey

3.
​Favourable conditions never come.

“There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.

The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable.

Favourable conditions never come.” — C.S. Lewis

LIFE HACK

HRV Resonance Breathing.

I’ve fallen in love with this.

Breathing at the right rate causes huge swings in your HRV that balances your nervous system.

Ohm is the best tool for this.

A beautiful lamp with an FDA quality heart rate sensor stone on the top, you pick the stone up and breathe along to its rhythm as it gives feedback in real time to maximise your HRV.

12-20 minutes a day has research-backed impacts on HRV.

Super easy to stay consistent because YOU CAN LITERALLY DO IT WHILE LYING IN BED WATCHING A MOVIE.

Amazing if you wake up in the middle of the night and struggle to get back to sleep. Also makes a sick gift for someone else.

​​It’s available for pre-order now and you can reserve yours for $99​.​

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Big love,
Chris x

Try my productivity drink Neutonic.
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PS
I'm looking for a killer Social Media Manager & Personal Brand Content Creator in the US. Apply here.​