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

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MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent. You should subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Piers Morgan - an assessment of Trump, the state of the UK, Elon Musk, whether wokeism is dead, the future of mainstream media, Biden’s pardons and more.

Thursday.
3.25M Q&A - I’m back again. I answer questions about beautiful women, my plans for marriage, what I’ve learned from Chris Bumstead and why there’s no intros on audio any more.

Saturday.
Steve Magness - what science and neurobiology say about how nervous people should overcome their anxiety to perform at their peak. So so so good.

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THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​Small penguins who don’t have offspring get divorced.

"Widely believed to mate for life, little penguins (Eudyptula minor) turn out to have a “divorce” rate more than ten times higher than modern Americans.

And it’s all down to kids: Couples that don’t produce offspring are more likely to split up than those that do.

Some suggest that the same is true of humans, and that it’s a built-in evolutionary tendency." — Steve Stewart-Williams

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2.
​The Internal Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule says “Treat others the way you want to be treated.”

The Internal Golden Rule says “Treat yourself like others should have treated you.”

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3.
​Nostalgia is always more beautiful.

“Notice that, while lots of people are happy to tell you about Golden Ages, nobody ever seems to think one is happening right now.

Maybe that’s because the only place a Golden Age can ever happen is in our memory.” – Adam Mastroianni

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LIFE HACK

Just get another hour’s sleep tonight.

You almost certainly need it.

Give yourself the gift of an early bedtime.
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Big love,
Chris x

Try my productivity drink Neutonic.
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PS
Really, go to bed early.