There's a reason why Steven Covey's "7 Habits" is such a popular book, and it's because it delivers a fantastic framework - not a list of 1000 self-help tips - for building a life organized around your principles.
He spends a whole chapter talking about the tyranny of the "urgent" and how we often allow it to crowd out the "important"... and how essential it is to plan/balance the necessity of one vs. the desires of the other.
I think I realized this intuitively when I was about 20 or so, but when you have your principles defined and commit to them daily, everything else flows from there... When you have a driving purpose in life, everything from confidence to leadership to relational skills to technical skills and even your desire for being physically in-shape all develop and naturally flow out from your overarching desire to meet that purpose. Covey calls it "true north", and it's a great metaphor -- when you know "true north", all paths that don't bring you in that direction immediately and quickly become irrelevant to your life.
Even better, you rarely need self-help books along the way, simply because life will teach you all the unique lessons and tricks you need to learn as you strive intentionally towards that mission.
With that said, once you've decided that you're doing things that matter, hack away, because time is still the currency of life.
On the other hand, one of Covey's habits is "sharpen the saw." Which is just another metaphor for Lifehacking. If you take a few minutes to optimize your tool, your work will be easier. On the other hand, if you spend your day sharpening the saw, at some point it's not going to get usably sharper, and you're just wasting time. You've got to find a way to strike the balance.
Oh I'm in full agreement with you... I was just trying to elucidate the point that I felt like John needed to drive home - the importance of asking the big questions first, because only then will we have a direction in life that makes it easy to discard all the distractions... otherwise we're merely placing bandaids over lesions rather than curing the disease.
He spends a whole chapter talking about the tyranny of the "urgent" and how we often allow it to crowd out the "important"... and how essential it is to plan/balance the necessity of one vs. the desires of the other.
I think I realized this intuitively when I was about 20 or so, but when you have your principles defined and commit to them daily, everything else flows from there... When you have a driving purpose in life, everything from confidence to leadership to relational skills to technical skills and even your desire for being physically in-shape all develop and naturally flow out from your overarching desire to meet that purpose. Covey calls it "true north", and it's a great metaphor -- when you know "true north", all paths that don't bring you in that direction immediately and quickly become irrelevant to your life.
Even better, you rarely need self-help books along the way, simply because life will teach you all the unique lessons and tricks you need to learn as you strive intentionally towards that mission.
With that said, once you've decided that you're doing things that matter, hack away, because time is still the currency of life.