Sometimes I feel as if our entire society has turned into one giant cargo cult. Whether it's OKRs or the latest tech fad or black turtlenecks, everyone looks at the last big hit, picks out some set of superficial features of the person at the top, and says, "Yeah, that is the key to success." No one ever steps back to think about causality or even what they actually want.
Brings to mind one of my favorite aphorisms: furious activity is no substitute for understanding. Very few people seem to subscribe to it, but I've gotten an enormous amount of mileage out of it over the years.
This is 100% me if you substitute social media browsing with distro hopping and text editor tinkering. Now I understand why redditors decided to call that subreddit "unixporn".
My solution: Stick with Fedora and Visual Studio Code, because I've spent at least 100 hours in the past month checking out Neovim, getting my first init.lua to work, messing around with configurations, making telescope work, make telescope look good. Then switched to Arch, try bspwm, Gnome, KDE, fonts.
Meanwhile, my fellow junior colleague is flexing all over me his Docker knowledge, his experience in unit testing and CI/CD, and generally things people actually pay you for.
I used to do that and it has helped me quite a bit. Now I know what distro's are good and I can bring up embedded systems much faster and what needs to be packaged.
I also have to have a particular font and color or it would be difficult to focus. Not sure why. Also if I use dark mode I start getting a headache. Not able to figure why it is so.
For Gvim my go to is Inconsolata font with white background. Similar case with the console.
Dark mode for some reason is very difficult for me and gives me a headache after sometime or makes my head heavy. It is strange because previously I used to use dark mode without any issues and was preferred. Later I switched to lighter/white background with dark foreground.
While this term gets overused, I think what we're really saying is that we're addicted to success. Or the idea that we will be successful if we are overly productive.
If you watch many of the people on social media who are "productivity gurus", you will notice that their philosophy of how to stay productive will shift as the content gets stale and they need something more novel to talk about with their growing audience. Many of them are just like you and me and cover the latest bestseller book or popular tweet that has merit to it, but then gets discarded after we realize it doesn't work in our lives.
In turn, they also become wildly successful by providing you surface level tips on how to be a little more productive each day.
While I used to be obsessed about this topic or what others call "hustle culture", I think you have to go through it before you realize how finite one's life really is. The overworking, the "always on"-ness, the comparison to others who happened to reach success earlier than us.
It all doesn't matter at the end of the day. The simplistic perspective is that you can take common occasions and make them great and you'll find success or at least a better understanding of your definition of "success".
I've come to realize that there is some kind of wisdom on not caring too much about outcomes, being in present and keeping things simple. For a long time, I believed in exactly opposite, success, over-optimize - whatever I do do it right way. Until during COVID, I found myself doing so many things, music, fitness, coding, photography, and later dating -- and you can constantly find endless amount of advise and new ways to do things on YouTube, while not realizing you are getting mentally exhausted. Trying to stay more in present, and keeping things simple now -- not to succumb to the mass-marketing campaign of whatever that something on internet usually is (most times it is marketing something, be it some product or themselves).
Exactly. I firmly believe that there's even a paradox to all this. The less you care, the more successful you can be. Almost like Office Space.
Doing a few things very well is what separates you from someone who does a hundred things not well at all.
Attention is your most previous resource and it's stolen from us everyday by others when we should reclaim it for ourselves and those few things that we're passionate for.
> Or the idea that we will be successful if we are overly productive.
I find this one the most fascinating. It implies a supreme confidence in the correctness of one's beliefs, which I simply have never had. As if to say, the only thing stopping my success is my ability to drive faster, but without any doubt that you're actually on the right road, heading the right direction, etc...
A mild defense of productivity porn. It was books like Ben Franklin's biography, Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich", and Wayne Dyers' books that made me realize that I could get ahead by sheer determination and working fairly smart.
They changed my life. It helped me get out of a fairly unpleasant home situation. I learned that I didn't need to be super smart or athletic or good looking to raise myself up a few steps on the (American) economic ladder. Grit, and putting myself in the way of success, and failing plenty, actually did propel me into a pretty damn good life.
I was listening to Zuckerberg's internal Facebook memo to employees and they're really going all out on VR, they think it'll go big, trying to generate monopolistic effects by subsidizing their VR hardware so that more people buy in, and buying VR studios.
Hustle and grind. Create 7 streams of income. Work 18 hour days - anything less and you're a loser destined for mediocrity. Read 5 books a week. Start trading stocks and crypto. Take cold showers, hit the gym. Optimize your schedule, log every minute spent. Ditch your loser friends and only hang out with likeminded - success breeds success. Sigma grindset. Moon or bust. If you're not worth $1 million liquid before 30, cut off your finger and work even harder. Analyze your productivity and always look for places to cut fat.
The production value is just immaculate. Every frame is so clearly meticulously constructed to portray the emptiest imaginable life. A man going nowhere at maximum speed, really more of an absence than a man. It's so very close to being too painful to be funny, and I've never even believed in the grind. Just pity for a wretched soul.
I had the pleasure of working with an old school engineer (worked at Microsoft, a few little start-ups, and I believe IBM, starting in the mid-eighties). After I showed him Senior Engineer, he'd drop quotes constantly. "I've slain...my enemies"
Computertime with Gooch is probably the weirdest and funniest, but I Have Delivered Value has me in stitches every time. Every time my any of my friends runs into an inconvenience, I ask if it's a blocker, and if it will prevent the KPIs of their life from growing quarter over quarter. Though actually, considering our narrator's ennui is preventing Galactus from knowing the end of the universe and thus from getting user info, maybe he should be a little more focused on deliverables
Virtual Coachella is a hilarious take on a dystopian hellscape (not far from our present time). I love it. Like a Black Mirror episode, only condensed so that every single second is brilliant and packed with jokes.
I instead use words like "meet", "create", or other concrete and discrete <verb-action> and try to otherwise avoid the managerial douche buzzwords IRL.
I submit it's unnecessary and pointlessly toolish to use such phrasing and lingo. People who speak that way deserve judgment; it's lazy and the buzzwords are variations on low entropy / meaningless vagaries.
I watched that multiple times after delivering a big feature I had to crunch on late last year. Of course my reward was a”meets expectations “ modest raise.
Reminds me when I had to sort some payments FE-wise which was a very trivial array sort (there was at most 50 payments per page, nothing impactful performance-wise) on a json array which had a timestamp value, but CTO got involved with this triviality for some reason and started blabbering of how business logic had to be on the backend.
I literally had a working feature branch in 10 minutes, but it ended up being a 6 weeks job involving architects, devops, 3 backend engineers to have a microservice implemented in GO (which basically no backender knew) to handle those payments sorting. I'm not kidding.
I didn't got a promotion to staff engineer or architect few months later because CTO was fixated with "micro services experts" which basically consisted of anyone putting Go on their CV and having an AWS certification.
The guys hired were so sweet, they would spend like months repeating in the daily every day they were doing analysis and understanding our architecture, just to produce after 8 weeks a pdf of few pages with their in-depth analysis of Kafka vs RabbitMQ which was basically a summary of their landing pages lol.
The funniest part about this video is how he gets absolutely nothing done professionally except read two emails. Driving around to flash his expensive (leased) car doesn't count.
These kinds of windows into a life explain how some entrepreneur/CEO types can be owner and/or CEO of like three businesses, on the board of a couple others, in some kind of advisory role on a couple startups, and so on, and still always seem to be starting or trying to get a hand in some new thing: it's because they don't really do jack shit.
Meanwhile the peons get an anti-moonlighting clause and absurd claims over any work done in off-hours.
Being an owner (with a title of CEO) means they aren't spending their labour, or time, but merely capital. Therefore, it's correct that they don't get jackshit done.
However, a real CEO, without any capital investment in the company themselves, would get fired if they did that imho. Or at least, if i were the owner, and that's what i observe the CEO i hired to run the company.
Not intentionally anyway. If it was intentional, it was to grab attention (like include a mistake in a tweet), but it seems serious and on-brand for an influencerpreneur.
None of that is inherently bad. He talks a lot of working hard to maintain multiple brands/companies while everything shown is pure vanity, which is why I thought it was satire.
I don’t know anything about what he does but in reality people don’t have time to work out twice a day, take long relaxing drives, meet their friends, eat healthy and do 5x the work of an average CEO.
After listening to "Tools of Titans" by Tim Ferris, this video accurately captures all the things it implies a hustler ought to do in a day. Except the actual advice is probably to do 2-3x more affirmations and crunches and smoothies and upside down hangs and meditation and so on.
I get up at 2AM, with a smile. Then do 7 hours of running after which I have my usual 3 racks of eggs for breakfast, whilst I speed read 3 books. I'm fluent in one language: the language of success, which I generously share to willing students on LinkedIn.
That song was so good at making what generally reads like a healthy lifestyle seem hollow and pointless. I love it, even as I question whether its effect on my teenaged self was a good one, or maybe just fueled my neuroticism. It makes me look at life a little bit more like an opportunity to be creative and make risky, weird choices and less like a continuous process of self improvement, for better or worse.
There was a trend called 'bulletproof coffee' that went around SV and the startup world about a decade ago, where you were supposed to drink coffee with two spoons of butter and some 'brain enhancing' MCT oil in it. Lots of CEOs went mad for it. I don't think I've heard of anyone still drinking it for a long time.
You can shave some slacking off time by skipping lunch and dinner and instead chugging some Silicon Valley energy drink mix, marketed with a fancy name.
Wasting time with meals is for unsuccessful losers!
I mean this is funny but this isn't at all what the post is about. What it means by "productivity porn" is only tangentially related with the hustle sigma male trillionaire grindset stuff.
I get that this is satire but could you expand on why people who want to be healthy + productive "have it wrong" (which I feel your satirical comment alludes to?)
You're "taking the piss" at people who value working hard/long hours, reading, trying to be successful financially, taking care of their health/fitness, cutting ties with loser friends (drug addicts? bums?)
Some people who push these values on social media care way more about the image of being a "successful person" than actually doing what it takes to achieve success (which rarely involves bragging about how hard you work on social media).
They're at best untrustworthy sources and at worst snakeoil salesmen.
Speaking of the latter there's a special brand of cognitive dissonance being shown here.
If there were some surefire way to be rich and happy, etc. in a very short period of time. A system so simple that anyone could follow it then why doesn't everyone?
If you really believe that these habits would make anyone successful then you have to explain why everyone isn't doing it.
And they convince others and themselves that it's because most people aren't willing to do what it takes. They won't sacrifice their comfort or friends or whatever to the point that it takes to be successful.
If you do all these things are still aren't rich and retired? Well it must mean you haven't sacrificed enough or worked hard enough or whatever!
The real answer is that none of these habits are a guarantee of success. Are they good ideas? Sure! Like for sure eat healthy, get enough sleep, read books, and work out.
Like everything though there are tradeoffs, often on your time, and moderation can be the key for most people. There are other inputs into your success and there's no one size fits all plan that works for everyone.
> Some people who push these values on social media care way more about the image of being a "successful person" than actually doing what it takes to achieve success (which rarely involves bragging about how hard you work on social media).
Devil's advocate but
you can measurably tell if you are financially successful (from working hard/long hours) and our healthy fitness wise (from going to the gym/eating clean/going for a run/etc.)
you can also measurably tell if you are in a good headspace from meditation/yoga/reading
I'm the first person to poop on people who "do it for the Gram" but...
Most people I know who post about being successful are the same people who wouldn't want their image hurt by being caught in a lie.
aka... they aren't really "fronting", they are really "about it" when it comes to living a "let's talk about it" lifestyle
It can be really hard to tell someone's career or life trajectory in the moment or even in 1, 2, or 5 years.
I'm 35 now so I have the benefit of hindsight looking back on the decisions different people my age have made and while I'd be the first to caution against potential bias in data I can say definitively that the people who were into FIRE or grindset or whatever before those terms even existed have ended up markedly worse off by their own definition of success than people who took more traditional routes.
There are exceptions, I know one person who made millions on cryptocurrency for example. But he's the one exception to the rule I can think of.
The rest ended up no better off than their peers who weren't out there posting every motivational quote on social media or eliminating their social lives to write and ebook about credit card reward points.
So was it worth it? I doubt it. The ROI seems to be negligible or even negative to me.
It turns out there was no shortcut to wealth and happiness after all.
Those paths are much more risky, a few make it big most don't. But that's the trade off people willingly make, a small shot at making it big, or living a normal upper middle class fully employed lifestyle.
The way I think about it is, if you are on a deserted island, but you have made a nice life for yourself, shelter, water, food.
Do you risk pulling it all down to make a raft to sail into the unknown searching for somewhere better.
May people stay put and justify their stagnant lifestyle by how they are slightly ahead of the people whos raft sunk and had to swim back and start over.
Those people are the movers the shakers of the world, they take in the risk for something more in life.
Every time you fail you are failing upwards, learning skills you didn't have before becoming stronger and building better rafts.
Sometimes, some people fail down too, and it damages them. If you think that all failure is 'failing up,' I'd suggest you haven't really failed, and have just experienced setbacks.
But that's never how it's sold - "do all these things and maybe increase your chance of becoming phenomenally successful by 1%".
Almost by definition a tiny percentage of people will ever be "phenomenally" successful. And the ones that do probably would do so with or without these sorts of "tips".
And most people that do then look back on their lives and point to certain things they did that sets them apart. Like an old person healthy at 100 saying they studiously avoided beans and that's the sole reason they're still fit and well.
That's not to say the advice isn't sound, maybe it is, but if it's advice based on N=1 I'm not about to change my lifestyle.
- Focused on getting passive income streams set up through real estate, stock investment, content creation, retail arbitrage, etc.
- Were particularly frugal with their money and avoided travel, parties, 'lifestyle creep', etc.
- Attempted to min/max their careers by switching jobs every 1.5 to 2 years and negotiating hard each time.
Are:
- Still not retired in their mid to late 30s.
- On track to retire in their early 50s.
- Slightly behind their peers in terms of career progression.
While those who joined big tech, worked hard, and let their equity compound are basically on pace to retire at the same age while also getting to spend their youth traveling, partying, and generally enjoying life.
Plus, I've found the people who were hyper focused on retiring early or achieving financial independence to be less happy and more self-critical about their financial decisions.
I believe that one reason for this is that FIRE, passive income, entrepreneurship, etc. attracts people who are looking for shortcuts.
This means that they are optimizing for the short term, which is counterproductive to success in any area of life.
Back in the 2010s we saw this with niche sites, ebooks, info products, etc.
It worked for some but it's probably safe to say that learning to code and getting a tech job would have had better ROI for most people who went down that route.
At the moment we are seeing this in the crypto space, where you have all these guys in their 20s who are "investing in crypto" (gambling) because they want a Lamborghini ASAP.
They would likely be better off learning to code and getting a tech job, but they can’t see it at the moment because they don’t have the perspective that comes with time.
> While those who joined big tech, worked hard, and let their equity compound are basically on pace to retire at the same age while also getting to spend their youth traveling, partying, and generally enjoying life.
I though joining big tech and riding raises and promotions is basically the mainstream way to FIRE these days? Side hustles are ridiculous small potatoes in comparison.
I think you have a somewhat distorted understanding of what FIRE means, or at least one that is different to my own understanding of the term.
I think of FIRE as essentially trying to optimise lifestyle and work in order to quickly reach a point where you don't need to work by paying attention to your income and expenses. This doesn't necessarily imply extreme frugality, and I think the mindset should actually make you more likely to go into big tech or the like because increasing income has a bigger impact than decreasing expenditure on for most people.
For sure there are people in the space who are trying to sell people on the idea that drinking coffee or not is the factor in when they will retire - but these people are fundamentally hucksters I think.
I've personally not done any of that and just became a home owner but it has only been possible from crypto investments in which I got extremely lucky. It had absolutely nothing to do with my tech career or how much extra work I do outside my 9-5.
If they built passive incomes, minmaxed their earnings and were financially frugal, they would have more income and less outgoing. How come they aren't financially retired by now - what went wrong with that plan?
>Plus, I've found the people who were hyper focused on retiring early or achieving financial independence to be less happy and more self-critical about their financial decisions.
I also wanted to comment on this.
What I have observed about FIRE folks is that they start optimizing everything for FIRE.
This isn't a healthy way to live, certainly not in the long run, and it's not like this goes away once they reach FIRE.
Here's an article where Mrs. Money Mustache shared how uncomfortable she was about her parents taking her and their son to the movies, then to an ice cream place.
It's really tempting to assuming the things you think are important are what actually result in success. Nobody sees all the possible lives they could have had.
Daily jogging seems like a healthy choice when you wheren’t hit by a car etc etc.
Add in all the actual lying and it's easy to get an incredibly distorted view of reality.
Avoiding jogging (in lieu of gaining obesity/any various degree of issues that come from lack of exercise) in fear of getting hit by a car seems irrational, wouldn't you agree?
You should strive for "perfect". If "perfect" is healthy and healthy means go for a run (with risks), you have to weigh it against the alternative (don't run, be unhealthy).
If you want to give useful advice it’s worth considering what might happen to those reading it not just your lucky history of avoiding problems. Avoiding jogging outside in favor of a treadmill is a net increase in safety without negative health impacts. Replacing it with an elliptical further reduces risks etc.
On the other hand if you want sell a lifestyle then treadmills etc are boring. Which is why a major reason so much popular advice is terrible.
> If you really believe that these habits would make anyone successful then you have to explain why everyone isn't doing it.
Everyone else isn't doing it, because it's really, really hard to stick to the habits.
Same reason why everyone else isn't walking with a ripped physique and six-pack. It's simple, just work out 3x a week and count your calories. Why isn't everyone shredded?
Nothing wrong with living a healthy lifestyle (healthy diet, working out, taking care of your mental health) and being ambitious about your career.
But these brofluencers (Andrew Tate being the latest one) just regurgitate and compound the same ol' to new levels. They mostly cater to young, impressionable, and desperate kids - promising that if you just follow these easy steps, then luck will come your way. And the whole hustle porn community fetishizes working every single waking hour ("the grind") doing something that everyone else is doing - your edge is to basically worker harder and cheaper than anyone else.
It's always the same "bro, just start a drop-shipping business for passive income, create your own brand of [saturated market item], also do [FX/Crypto/options] day trading. It's all about grinding, I promise bro - but first, buy my super alpha prestige mentoring package for $3k" spiel.
And if you're not driving a lambo, living in a mansion with your super model by the age of 30, you just didn't hustle and grind hard enough.
These communities tend to obsess over things like productivity - everything to save up space for the grind.
Valuing hard work, reading and trying to be financially successful is something completely unrelated to trying to do 18 hour work days, skimming several books a day, and running the hamster wheel off the peg and into the frying pan. Hard work is often what is required to be successful, but just mindlessly toiling away is not the key ingredient to success.
Also, what good is a friend who wouldn't come to your aid in the hardest of times?
I'd say you'll probably spend more money on medical bills I'd you were to work 18 hour days 5 days a week for any meaningful amount of time. Or one might be sorely mistaken about what constitutes 18 hour work days - does that include travel and eating time too?
That schedule seems untenable even in the fairly short run. If you really need to work 90-hour weeks, six days of fifteen hours (and just one day off in stead of two) feels much more like something you could keep up for at least a month, perhaps even more.
If nothing else, 18-hour workdays leave at the most five hours for sleep (and only one for everything else, like mealtimes and hygiene), so you'll be pretty damn bushed come Thursday and Friday. 15 hours of work would leave seven for sleep, and double your everything-else time to a luxurious two.
> 2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
>
> "This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."
As an example, let's talk about the "I missed my children's youth". You imagine an alternative life where you would have spent more time with your children, most likely idealized. But in reality, maybe it wouldn't have been a better life. You did things when you weren't with your children, some of them good things or at least leading to good things, these would be lost in your alternate life. And is it that much a difference seeing your children 4 hours instead of 2, maybe it will just make you regret not having 6 hours, a problem is if you are framing your alternative life in the context of your real life.
You only have one life, you can't see alternate realities, you don't know which are the better ones. But one thing for sure, if you regret "not living true to yourself", rest assured, nothing is more true than the life you actually lived, it is in these alternate realities that you are not yourself.
Don't take advise from the dying, take advise from the living. If someone has decided to spend more time with his children and feels better now, it can be valuable advise, because it is real life, not a fiction.
Where I live, dads spend much more time with their kids than their dads ever did, thanks to a shifting culture.
I'll hear them nag occasionally about not being able to play enough golf (they're also very young dads, and that gets better with time). But I know them well and I do not feel a single one of them is miserable because they spend too much time with their kids - they are very deeply fulfilled.
I'm sure the opposite is still perfectly possible - men that would prefer a traditional model where they could focus their time in energy on work, while the woman or extended family takes care of the kids. But this is not what I'm observing around me, in my small universe.
You also may not believe in regret, but regret very much exists - it is a universal human emotion, of which deathbed regrets are a particular case. Projecting what we will think about our lives in our final moments is as old as the stoics, and a very valuable exercise for many people.
Indeed, maybe a dying man may never have had the makeup or propensities to live the alternative life he fantasises on his deathbed. But if you believe in free will at all, then their insight is no less valuable.
Maybe you don't but as everybody is caught in his own world it doesn't matter...
What this thought expresses in my opinion is: I wish I lived a more balanced life!
what everybody seems to miss as it does not fit in the grand dream beeing sold: chance is the largest part of being successful. you can tip the scales marginally by working hard, but in truth the most important part is just luck...
This list has been circulating forever, following the publication of the book, and I believe they should be called "top five very theoretical and after the fact and with no empirical evidence they are regrets and they would do something different if in the same position of the dying".
Now, think of those who like to eat until they are full, those 7k calorie meals. There are many such cases, especially in the United States. After such a large meal, which would frighten weaker stomachs, if they were asked, "Do you regret eating like that?" they would almost certainly say yes. But they would do it again tomorrow, some would say because they have a medical condition, others because they love to eat and don't mind having problems with walking, diabetes, and all the assorted ailments that go hand in hand with overeating, or alcohol, or any combination of the two.
In a moment of tremendous weakness, of fear of crossing the Acheron, when asked "do you regret working so hard?" even the laziest worker the world has ever seen, the anti-Stakanov, would say, "yes, I do, it's one of my biggest regrets."
Some of my friends did not continue studying after middle school and sometimes say, "I would have/should have continued studying," regardless of the fact that at that time they were not inclined to open a textbook even with a gun pointed at their head. But in their minds, if they had a chance to go back in time and armed with motivation that they did not have at the time, they would study, of course they would.
But they only like the idea, not the action. They are the same people. And it's the same for those five regrets, the "if I had $10 million, I would give $9.5 million to charity." But they don't have that $10 million.
>but could you expand on why people who want to be healthy + productive "have it wrong"
First, because both healthy and productive have long become a rat race.
In that sense, it's not about some e.g. obese person wanting to lose weight anymore, or about some lazy person wanting to get their act together and be more productive, but increasingly about an obsession with dieting and working out, or with working all the time to "make it" and hustling constantly.
Second, because for many those aren't even their own goals, just things instilled in them by influencers, productivity and health peddlers, the media, and co, as a substitute for a meaningful work and a balanced way of life.
Third, because even those dubious goals are often not followed anyway, instead people obsess with productivity and health "porn", todo systems, micro-managing their day (or meals), measurbating, and so on, as opposed to a simple, natural approach to those things.
But obviously, it's not that you have fun eating because you're unhealthy, it's that you're unhealthy because you eat stuff for enjoyment.
Similarly, being unproductive isn't fun in itself, but having fun means almost by definition not being productive. If a hobby is productive, it's not really a hobby.
The more interesting take to me is that to live a meaningful life, you probably want to do a lot of things that are not labeled "productive", and take paths that are not labelled as "healthy".
For most of us the core of our life doesn't fit into neat categories, and trying to throw away stuff that aren't "productive" wouldn't help.
Not who you're replying to, but the problem I see with productivity porn is that it completely ignores the luck involved in success. We all have agency, but some people will work more hours and take more ice baths than everyone else and still end up poor and irrelevant. Some people are better off realizing they don't have "it" and taking a more relaxed approach to life.
> doing them all at once to the detriment of the others.
a situation comes to mind
a father who has to ignore his wife + children because he's addicted to "the grind/hustle" of working 12+ hour days and traveling... so he can make money... for his wife + children
is there true net detriment in that case? i'm sure the wife + children appreciate the extra income?
> i'm sure the wife + children appreciate the extra income?
Probably appreciate the money and resent the guy. Also, the wife also probably wants a professional career for herself (or to pursue activities away from home and the kids) -- so old-fashioned of you to guess she will want to play the housewife.
The children would probably prefer a father who was available.
If this guy is ignoring them, as you put it, that marriage will probably not end well, and the family itself will be tested.
If the guy is going to spend 12 hours daily away from home working, then "hit the gym", read 5 books a day, then travel a lot for work, maybe he doesn't want a family; maybe he could just donate a portion of his money to random strangers.
It depends, there's obviously a happy medium between the two extremes. Optimising for family happiness, sure. Optimising for making money and expecting that to return family happiness, probably not.
I'm fine with these things insofar as they are factually in service to a substantial undertaking. The routine cannot be the undertaking, nor am I impressed by such a routine in search of an undertaking. The camera should only be on the routine, the 'secrets of success', rarely as a glimpse behind the scenes. As a rule, the camera should be on the worthy venture.
It's like people who spend so much time optimizing their perfect productivity system that it doesn't leave any time for doing the things. Their entire life is about managing the productivity system.
Talking about the work !== doing the work. 9 times out of 10 you're better off doing something, anything, than worrying about productivity. Go do stuff.
Doing every productivity hack and good habit in something like Ferris's Tools of Titans is literally a full time job if not more.
If you abandon your drug addict friends and bums that only shows that somebody with a stronger character wouldn't fear aquiring their attributes nor would aquire them.
I'm open for different opinions, but in my view, being more productive for its own sake is fundamentally misinformed. Being productive means being more efficient at producing output. To get there, you need to put effort into optimizing your process. This effort is only worth it if you know that you NEED more output, in order to reach some OTHER goal. More efficiency in of itself is a misaligned goal. It doesn't lead to happyness. In fact, it seems to me, most of those gurus, and their followers seem to be about boasting their productivity dick. It's like flaunting money: a status symbol that doesn't make you happy in of itself. If you're making honey because you think just simply having money will make you happy, you'll be leading a miserable life.
That's not what the article is about but it relates to what you said.
I think that I actually 'L - O - L' at most three times a year when reading on my computer. "cut off your finger and work even harder." is the best one yet!
A just-out-of-college co-worker of mine pops into my LinkedIn feed regularly following people talking about “hard assets” and retiring from their corporate job by 40… I don’t know him well enough to say it, but I wonder if he realizes they now have the job of being a landlord and influencer… and anybody can yell numbers about revenue streams on a video (which they probably learned in their time in corporate America)
Swap out the financial goals with spiritual goals and that describes the daily routine of a cult member.
Most of them are designed to keep you busy with introspective or pointless busywork so you're too tired to protest or don't notice the things going on around you-- like the leader sleeping with your spouse while robbing you blind.
I was disheartened when I read about all these successful people and their lofty advice. I was more disheartened when I realized their advice is just the random stuff they happened to do that on their path to success, and that equivalent advice of the myriad failures that complement them would never be heard (and that both were of approximately equal value). Despite how in the overmind the notion of "correlation is not causation," this snake oil is surprisingly only beginning to go out of fashion.
I like to read self-help. I think it can actually change your life.
The problem is finding actual good self-help. Most stuff is garbage or dives too deep into a specific topic.
One of my favorite authors is Orison Swett Marden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orison_Swett_Marden) who writes well-rounded self-help and founded a magazine ironically called "Success". There's also Samuel Smiles who wrote the original title called "Self-Help".
If you go back in time far enough, you will come to the conclusion that most self-help stems back to certain influences at the time. You can go as far back as to the tao te ching, meditations, or even the bible. Not much of this stuff changes, but is repackaged with modern examples of successful people into bestsellers.
> You can go as far back as to the tao te ching, meditations, or even the bible.
The Tao Te Ching with the adjonction of its commentaries is a book on Confucian moral and ethic. The Meditations is a journal and also mostly a book about ethics. I think linking them to modern self-help books is somewhat disingenuous.
I deeply believe that if people actually stopped reading self-help books and read books about ethics instead the world would definitely be a far better place. “How to live a life worth living?” is after all a far more interesting question than “How to do the most of your life?”.
I bought and read Robert Kiyosaki - Rich Dad Poor Dad followed with Donald Trump - The Art of the Deal.
After reading these I felt worse than at the time I was actually mugged on the street. I think I paid like $20 for both books and muggers got something like $15 I had on me.
the irony is that they are just giving the audience what it wants - a causal formula for success. a guy just saying "i got really lucky" over and over would get no readership.
2. My cousin has a connection to cheap money and invited me into a social circle where I could use it
3. I was willing to make people angry and unhappy along the way
4. I somehow fit into someone else's plan, and I get some decent scraps of riches for existing and pretending to do something important
These seem to be the main keys to success. I will admit that someone who's completely incompetent is less likely to succeed with access to just one or two of the above (excluding 4, which can stand on its own for a period of time), but if he's got all of the first 3 or 4 alone, success is pretty well guaranteed, regardless of ability or worthiness. I'm sure there are exceptions, but the vast unwashed rabble of successful people I believe have something from the above list.
The Jewish people have their Sabbath, as a hispanic person myself, we have our Siesta. I spent over a decade in the tech industry and I'd literally be scoffed at for actually napping in a nap room or pod for 20min. Finally just started doing it in my car. But that's one of my practices that anchors me not only to my culture, but my Creator. It humbles me. And brings me joy. I hope everyone could find what their practice could be that would bring them this.
Take some time, at least once a year, to sit down with yourself and have a vision for your life not based on work or status (ie vacations or the acquisition of things). If that isn't enough to snap you out, go to a small village in Latin America or maybe like Matthew McConaughey discovered and talked about in his book, a quaint monastery in New Mexico. Stay there until it makes sense.
Most people want to be productive because they want to feel valued by others. But if you have to look to your own value from others, you've already lost, and will continue to lose forever.
Be. You. Slowly. and you'll find you're more valuable than you ever thought.
As an Indian I loved my afternoon sleep during the holidays. During school days I would come home and sleep for an hour while reading something. I really loved my sleep. When I started work I hated that my sleep was reduced drastically. Sleeping late working on personal projects played havoc on my sleep. Now in WFH I sleep for an hour or more in the evening which would have been wasted commuting.
I have seen my cognitive skills decrease because of lack of sleep. Now I am just chilling and catching up with rest and chilling and don't give a crap about work or projects.
Once you realize you only work for (aka being bribed by) BigCo to snuff out their competition it pretty much removes the guilt of not working. I used to have gray hair coming in, and after I stopped being a try-hard the color came back. I was looking so old and tired always, now I am looking and feeling spry! Enjoy life and donate all of the bribes you don’t need to people who need it through direct action so they can have a chance to nap too.
>Once you realize you only work for (aka being bribed by) BigCo to snuff out their competition it pretty much removes the guilt of not working.
Yes. Exactly. There is no real innovation. All that I see nowadays is corporate drama of passing the blame around, climbing the ladder with politics and all the wrong people put in interesting and important positions. There are a lot of cult like people who take pride in this fake drama and I am definitely not one.
All I want now is to retire with a good enough corpus by coasting so that I have enough to work on my personal projects, eat healthy, sleep well coupled with some sports and exercise.
Sometimes, bugs can even be helpful to humanity? Imagine a World of Warcraft bug that broke the game for a week, forcing the WoW addicts to go out and see the sunshine
Definitely I wouldn't feel much pressure, as a WoW dev (had I been one).
I can resonate; I also love napping. Naturally, my body does not require much sleep, but napping is like having one of those 5 hours energy drink, without actually having it. Sometimes, I'm up from it in just 20 mins w\o an alarm and there are times when I don't wake up with an alarm even after 1 hour - it goes for 2ish hours.
From my experience, Italians and in the south of France. The French also shut everything down on Sundays.
In the middle east I’ve also seen people napping in mosques. The large ones remain nice and cool during the hot summer day. Mind you, it was Ramadan, so that might have changed things.
Overall, I expect people in hot climates to sleep through the mid day heat and go back to work later. I for one envy them.
I mean, it makes sense. It's fairly well encoded into the genetics that determine our circadian rhythms. There is a dip in energy levels, corresponding to changed brain waves, that occurs at approximately midday. That 1pm drowsiness is your body just trying to do mammal things.
> Most people want to be productive because they want to feel valued by others. But if you have to look to your own value from others, you've already lost, and will continue to lose forever.
There’s a book about this called “4000 weeks” (thanks for the correction). Basically, all the popular productivity hacks are nonsense, and just make you busier. You do this because of a fear of death. Accept that you will die soon, so just stick to the important stuff.
A virtuous life is always better than a lazy or vicious life. So you die having lived a better life. And (at least for us catholics AFAIK), a virtuous life leads to heavens.
As a US Catholic, I find much greater value in family time, volunteering, and jus the regular things I do to help people in my community. Work productivity is not on my list of "virtues".
Catholics have far better news than that you get to heaven on the basis of personal productivity. Consider these questions: When and why was toil introduced? Did the prodigal son have riches when he returned to the father to justify himself? Did the Pharisees need to have bread with them? Did the crowd have enough bread? Who provided sufficient bread: the vine or the lost sheep? If virtue is productivity, then why does God say that there is a rest for his people? Did he rest on the seventh day because he was not as virtuous as Pharaoh's taskmasters?
Industriousness is wise, but all is vanity and the fool when he dies goes to the same place as the wise.
Just to give some context: a single talent was worth about 6,000 denarii. A denarius was the usual payment for a day's labour. That single talent was a sum of money worth roughly twenty years of labor. In the parable the person doesn't earn that twenty years of labor. They have twenty years of labor handed to them with no effort on their part. The rebuke wasn't: you should have woken up at 4 AM. You should have exercised. You should have taken a cold shower. You should have eaten with one hand while handling emails with another. Ten hour days or you are a loser. It was practically milquetoast; you could have at least put the money in the bank.
> Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. But Martha was distracted with all her preparations; and she came up to Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Then tell her to help me.” But the Lord answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”
Joking, obviously. But it is amusing how many people (Kurzweil, Harari) seriously have faith in this (and believe there is something novel in this pursuit).
I know that submissions with no substance are frowned upon here, but I just wanted to tell you that for some reason your comment is the funniest one I read in quite some time.
Maybe because of my lifelong struggle with productivity and procrastination... Cheers!
Achieving something evokes a feeling of loss that you have to bear until you've found whatever is next. It's not unlike experiencing a death or break-up. This happens when you finish a book, video game, or TV show you've invested a fair bit of time in. We are driven to cope with this feeling by seeking what's next.
That's not my experience. I need to be making progress to be sane. Achieving something small everyday makes me have confidence in life and a sense of control. This is crucial to keep existential dread at bay. I have a calendar where I track life events (good and bad). It's wonderful to look back and remember that, tlin the last two years, even though I feel like I haven't changed, actually a lot has.
Kind of orthogonal to this conversation, but... with increasing temperatures, I find myself wondering at what point more parts of the US might switch to a formal siesta or even nighttime hours. Last summer my area had a month+ of 100+ degree days, and this year it looks like we will have at least several weeks of it. People, especially outdoor workers, simply can't be expected to work in that for a full on day - people would die. So it makes me wonder if we will start to see interesting shifts in the work day as happens in other parts of the country.
This is more possible with WFH now. I sleep for about an hour a day on work hours and I don't work later to make it back up. Still only get positive feedback about the work I get done.
Alain De Botton has a fantastic book about this called "Status Anxiety"[1].
The book gave me a fresh perspective on how to avoid being trapped in the race to prove yourself to others.
One of the original, and most effective, competition hacks is to convince people that you sleep less than they do.
When someone tells you they sleep 5 hours a night then run two miles and take a 15-minute cold shower then start their work day, 85% of the time they are lying, 10% of the time you will have already noticed the effects of chronic sleep deprivation, and 5% of the time it's drugs.
But this has been a surefire way to put your competitors on the back foot for hundreds, probably thousands of years.
Also no breaks at work, lunch is for wimps. Refer to Will Smith saying how he would die on a treadmill rather than lose. Watch overwork porn like Suits or any legal drama.
If you read enough of those "day in the life" articles in newspapers about the daily routine of famous/successful people, you realise that they are probably complete fabrications. Even if it's not for competition purposes, convincing people that you do mad stuff like get up at 2am for a kale cleanse, followed by three hours of meditation is fun. And on top of that, it adds to the razzle-dazzle and gets people talking about you. That's why Michael Jackson pretended to sleep in an oxygen tent.
IIRC, Jocko Willink believes that his ability to function on little sleep is genetic, he just doesn't need much of it.
He has mentioned that this was a running joke in the Seal teams, which presumably consist of people already selected for their ability to function on little sleep, not your average "7 - 8 hours of sleep" folks.
But then normal people who need an average amount of sleep start "getting after it" by waking up at 4.30 AM because that's what Jocko does.
You can wake up at 4.30 AM as a normal person, but you'd need to go to sleep at 8.30 PM - 9.30 PM for that to be sustainable.
You can't "discipline equals freedom" yourself into optimal performance under perpetual sleep deprivation.
When you listen to Jocko talk about himself, you are not getting an honest accounting about an actual human being
Your are being given a story created by Jocko to build the Jocko mythos. Jocko will not let any truths get in the way of a good story about the mythical Jocko. His artisinal leather boots and cologne don't sell themselves, you know.
So I should update the above to include some percentage who are lying about having this mutation, and an extremely minuscule likelihood your sales manager actually happens to have it. Second prize is a set of 23andMe test kits.
Not saying they don't exist. But I've yet to meet someone who only sleeps 5 hours a day, doesn't have bags under the eyes, and doesn't fall asleep in every meeting.
Tricking competition like that is really a zero sum game when it comes to mental health. I don't recommend doing that at all. You don't want to be in an environment like that even if you've contributed to its existence, you're not in control anymore.
"im not productive" === "im not happy / socially isolated and my self esteem is low" this statement probably holds true for 99% who "relate" to this shite.
Stop lying to yourself, more work wont make you happy - It didnt the first time.
There is no easy fix, disabling social media wont fix it. Most gains of that nature are short lived.
For real results its long term work on yourself and changes to your environment (I'm just getting started on my journey of solving this dont take it from me, talk to people > 10 years old than you or read a philosophy book > 500 years old)
I can't find an online article where Merlin Mann discusses this but I remember very vividly him talking about why he stopped posting on 43Folders.com a decade ago. 43Folders was a GTD productivity porn site and after while Merlin decided that he didn't want to be "giving drugs to addicts" and stopped posting little "5 ways to write a better task title" articles for all the same reasons OP is writing about here.
A beautiful piece, thank you. But this is more about him prioritizing family over his book. It must have been on a podcast I remember him talking about how he kind of had a crisis of faith over running 43folders and stopped doing little "life hack" posts.
The premise is that there's a viewer that watches a bunch of self-improvement videos, but never enacts any of the suggestions. The presenter's argument is that change happens when you understand and digest the suggestions you've been given and it naturally comes to mind. In order to digest the changes, you need to avoid chain consuming content, reflect on what you read or watched, and to be patient.
The analogy that really stuck with me is you don't read the textbook over and over again to learn, you read the textbook and quiz yourself. Similarly, to change yourself, you don't read informational articles one after another, you need to sit down and think about what you read at least once right after you read it and ideally multiple times until it's ingrained in your brain. After the concept is ingrained in your brain, then you can start taking the advice. In some cases you can just start doing things differently, but often it's hard because you're not clear on what you need to do differently, you fail, then you become demotivated.
Brings to mind one of my favorite aphorisms: furious activity is no substitute for understanding. Very few people seem to subscribe to it, but I've gotten an enormous amount of mileage out of it over the years.