Love Your Work

If you want to write a book, don’t ask, “How much money does the average book make?” In this context, “average” is meaningless. You’re in the world of Black Swans. The Black Swan is a book by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and I have found the ideas in it critical to navigating my career as an author. Here – in my own words – is my summary of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. These are the ideas I think about when I’m considering writing a new book.   Where does the term “Black Swan” come from? Imagine a world where you’ve only ever seen white swans. If someone asked you whether or not black swans existed, you might say no. You’ve seen thousands of swans, and they’ve all been white. Therefore, black swans don’t exist. You’ve mistaken an absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Just because you haven’t seen evidence of black swans, does not prove they don’t exist. What is a Black Swan? A positive Black Swan: In 2010, I wrote a blog post. That blog post prompted a publisher to reach out to me. I got a book deal. A negative Black Swan: A Las Vegas casino had an insurance policy. They protected against every cheating scenario they could imagine. They had the most popular show in Vegas, where magicians worked with giant live tigers. So they protected against the scenario of a tiger jumping into the audience. But they never imagined the tiger would maim one of the performers – Roy of Siegfried and Roy. Siegfried and Roy lost their careers. The casino lost $100 million. Both of these incidents are Black Swans: Black Swans are outliers: They’re not what we expect. Nothing in the past predicts a Black Swan. Black Swans have extreme impact: The impact could be positive, such as my book deal, or negative, such as the tiger attack, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We backwards-rationalize Black Swans: After a Black Swan happens, it seems obvious. We look back and come up with explanations for how it happened. This gives us the illusion that Black Swans are explainable and predictable. Note: COVID-19 is not a Black Swan. As Taleb has explained, global pandemics happen regularly. They’re uncommon, but they’re inevitable, and we know that. The Black Swan Turkey Imagine you’re a Turkey. Every day, humans come and feed you. You think humans are pretty good and nice. Each day you get new information to confirm this belief. A graph of your opinion of humans might look like this:     Notice the sharp drop-off at the end. That’s the day before Thanksgiving. Things seemed good, until they weren’t. History does not always predict the future. Events come along that shatter all assumptions we’ve made based upon past information. Mediocristan vs. Extremistan Black Swans happen in a place Taleb calls “Extremistan.” Extremistan is the opposite of “Mediocristan.” There’s a joke I like, “Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average, everyone there is a millionaire.” We’re attracted to the “average” and the predictable. But oftentimes the concept of “average” is misleading. Some things happen in Mediocristan and are predictable. The “average” is meaningful in Mediocristan. Other things happen in Extremistan and are unpredictable and extreme. The “average” is meaningless in Extremistan. Mediocristan is about “the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted.” Mediocristan is about risk spread out amongst many, to avoid surprises. An hourly-wage job at Starbucks is possible only in Mediocristan. Extremistan is about “the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted.” It’s where the Black Swans happen: random events you never expected, caused by forces you’ll never understand. Such as I experienced suddenly getting a book deal or working with a company that sold to Google. Mediocristan is about variables that fall within a predictable range. In the history of humanity, there’s never been a man 100 feet tall, or a woman 2,000 years old. Nobody has even come close to these extremes. Height and life expectancy follow a bell curve.   A bell curve. (Source: D Wells, Wikimedia Commons)   Distribution of height. (Source: Our World in Data)[/caption]     Extremistan is about variables that scale indefinitely. There’s no known limit to how rich a person can be. The “average” net worth of a U.S. family is about $700,000. But to be richer than half of all Americans you need only $100,000. Still, Jeff Bezos has more than $100,000,000,000.   Wealth distribution, by percentile, in the U.S. Jeff Bezos is 10x as wealthy as the highest point in this chart. (Wikipedia)[/caption] Why are Black Swans important? Understanding Black Swans can prepare you for the unexpected. If you learn about the impact that unexpected and extreme events can have, you can avoid foolish choices that expose you to negative Black Swans. Exposing yourself to Black Swans can make you successful. As we’ll talk about later, when you behave as if you’re in Mediocristan, you miss out on the positive Black Swans you’d find Extremistan. Businesses that thrive on Black Swans include venture capital, scientific research, and publishing. (Note: Another reason Black Swans are important is – as I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management – if it’s predictable, it can be automated. Your edge as a human is not in Mediocristan where the robots are taking over. It’s in Extremistan – in doing something nobody could expect.) Black Swan barrier: Platonicity One way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls “Platonicity.” Named after the philosopher, Plato, “Platonicity” is our desire to define things, and to pay more attention to things that have been defined. We create names for objects, we create terms (yes, such as “Platonicity”), and we invent nationalities. Because we’re so focused on things we define, we miss all the messier stuff that also matters. Taleb describes it as “[mistaking] the map for the territory.” (I once wrote about a similar concept, and called it Stuff and Things.) It’s helpful to categorize things, but it becomes a problem when we see a category as definitive, and don’t see the fuzzy boundaries between categories or revise them when we see new information that doesn’t fit how we categorize things. We’ve seen this in the gendered bathroom debate. We broke gender down into two categories. Based on that we made two bathrooms. But we’re realizing it’s not so simple. To be Platonic is to be top-down, formulaic, and close-minded. To be a-Platonic is to be bottom-up, open-minded, skeptical, and empirical. The Platonification of breast milk Doctors in the 1960s replicated breast milk in a laboratory, by replicating the components they could see in the milk (the things they had “Platonified”). It seemed to make no practical sense for women to go through the inconvenience of breast feeding when you could just use bottles and lab-made formula. There was an absence of evidence of what the benefits of breast milk were, and that was taken as evidence of absence of benefits. We didn’t know the full benefits of breast milk, but we assumed the components we could see were the only important parts. It turned out children who were not breast fed were later at an increased risk of some cancers. If the mothers themselves had breast fed, they would have had a reduced risk of breast cancer. Black Swan barrier: The Triplet of Opacity Another way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls “The Triplet of Opacity.” Those are: The Illusion of understanding. We think we understand what’s going on, but the world is more complicated and random than we know. The retrospective distortion. We assess things after the fact, so we backwards rationalize and come up with reasons why things happened. The overvaluation of information. We place too much emphasis on facts – the things we can “Platonify” – which blinds us from stuff that isn’t so easy to Platonify. How to make Black Swans happen? Since Platonification blinds us to Black Swans, and we suffer from the illusion of understanding and the retrospective distortion, it may seem silly to try to make Black Swans happen. You can’t engineer a Black Swan, but you can create the conditions for positive Black Swans to happen, as I talked about on episode 146. Tinker Top-down planning gives us the illusion of control, and keeps us in Mediocristan. Instead, tinker as much as possible, and learn to recognize opportunities when they present themselves. Taleb says the reason free markets work is not because they give rewards or drive incentives. Rather, free markets work because they let people get lucky through trial and error. (Then we explain away the brilliant things we did to arrive at this wonderful discovery.) Many discoveries come from searching for what you know, and finding what you didn’t expect. Europeans first learned of the American continent while searching for a route to India. I got my first book deal when I was trying to get votes for my speech proposal for a conference. Be patient Negative Black Swans happen suddenly, but positive Black Swans happen slowly. “It is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.” Black Swan discoveries take time to have an impact. The computer, the internet, and the laser all had a huge impacts, but were underappreciated after initial discovery. Charles H. Townes was teased by his colleagues for inventing the laser, because they thought it was useless. It turned out to be important to eyesight correction, surgery, and data storage and retrieval. Denarrate The triplet of opacity feeds into the “narrative fallacy.” We’re wired to come up with stories of why things happen, but Black Swans happen for unknown reasons. Taleb realized that as a stock trader, there was no way for him to get an informational edge. He realized any piece of news that came out would quickly be worked into the market price of any security. So, he stopped reading the news. He recognized that reading the news as a stock trader would just support the narrative fallacy. Taleb describes a study where sports bookmakers were given ten variables to predict horse races. When they were later given double the information, these bookmakers were no more accurate in their predictions – yet they were much more confident. So Taleb decided that by reading the news he wouldn’t get an edge and he would become overconfident. The Barbell Strategy The main method Taleb recommends for protecting against negative Black Swans while exposing oneself to positive Black Swans is what he calls the Barbell Strategy.   Think of a barbell, with weights on either side. On one side of the barbell is your sure bets – things where you have little chance of losing. On the other side of the barbell is your wildcards – things with unlimited upside. The Barbell Strategy in investing (Note: I’m not a finance expert and nothing I’m about to say is investment advice.) In investing, the sure bets would be treasury bills, cash, and gold. Obviously Black Swans could come along and make these bets not so sure bets, but they’re as sure as you can get. The wildcards would be highly-leveraged option trading, angel investments, or cryptocurrency. You have a decent chance of losing your money, but there’s almost no limit to how much you can gain. In an investing context, Taleb recommends putting 85–90% of your assets into the safe investments, and the remaining 10–15% in the speculative investments. What you’re avoiding is the stuff in the middle. People think index funds are safe because they historically gain about 7% a year, but the entire stock market has lost up to 30% of its value very quickly. Since we’re living in an increasingly complex world, there’s no telling what kind of Black Swan could come in the future and cause an even bigger drop. The Barbell Strategy in creative work I hadn’t realized before reading The Black Swan that I had used the Barbell Strategy to build my creative career. When I was first starting out, I made sure to get just enough freelance work to pay my bills. I also spent a portion of my time building passive income streams. The rest of the time, I spent tinkering and exploring my own ideas. After three years, I randomly landed a book deal to write Design for Hackers. Dan Ariely mentioned a Barbell Strategy in my latest podcast conversation with him. He says he “gambles with his time.” He spends some portion of his time on things that don’t make sense, such as collaborating with a mentalist on-stage in one of his speeches, or working with a cartoonist. My own Barbell Strategy has benefitted from Dan’s Barbell Strategy. A blog post I wrote as a “wildcard” – during one of my Weeks of Want – prompted Dan to reach out to me. I collaborated with him on a productivity app. We sold it to Google. That blog post also led to my third book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. There’s your The Black Swan summary! I hope you’ve found this The Black Swan summary useful and clear. Taleb’s writing can be confusing and even off-putting at first, but if you take the time to understand his ideas, they can help you navigate an uncertain world and find breakthrough opportunities. I highly recommend The Black Swan. It’s one of my favorite books.   Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays. Listener Showcase Abby Stoddard makes the Dunnit app – the "have-done lilst." It’s a minimalist tool designed to motivate action and build healthy habits. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/black-swan-summary 

Today is the day! My new book, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available everywhere! Writing this book has been a long journey. Over the past ten years, I slowly discovered the things I share in the book, and I also scrapped several drafts, before I finally got it right. I’m very excited to share with you a cohesive system for managing your energy, instead of your time – to be productive when creativity matters. If you bought the Preview Edition of Mind Management, Not Time Management, I’ll be sending you the First Edition. Otherwise, go buy it today. In five years of this podcast, this is the single biggest event – this is my single biggest ask – go buy this book! It’s available wherever books are sold. Or go straight to Amazon. I’m going to share with you a sample from the first chapter today. Chapter 1: Mind Management, Not Time Management “There’s only twenty-four hours in a day.” The natural conclusion we’re supposed to draw from this common observation is: If there are only so many hours in a day, you should make the most of each of those precious hours. Time management, it seems, is critically important. When you start managing your time, you find you really are getting more done. You’re keeping a calendar, so you don’t forget things. You’re building routines, so you can get repeating tasks done faster. You’re learning keyboard shortcuts for the apps you use every day. You may even start saying “no” to some opportunities, so you can make better use of your time. But it becomes harder and harder to get more out of your time. Your calendar becomes jam-packed with a kaleidoscope of colored blocks. You start “speed reading,” and listening to audiobooks and podcasts on 3x speed. You start cutting out all but the most essential activities that move you toward your goals. No more lunches with your friends – you’ll eat at your desk. Next, you figure, you can get more out of your time if you do two things at once. So you start multitasking. You’re checking your email while brushing your teeth. You’re holding conference calls while driving to work. You start searching for extra bits of time, like loose change under couch cushions. You used to sleep eight hours a night, but now you’ll sleep five. You can check emails at family dinners. You can steal a couple extra hours of work on your laptop after everyone in the house has gone to bed. You’re tired all the time. It seems there’s not enough coffee in the world to keep you going. Your anxiety levels are sky-high, and you’re becoming forgetful. You’re always in a rush. With each new tactic you learn, each new “life hack,” each new shortcut, life gets more hectic. You would start outsourcing some of the load, but you’re so busy and so exhausted, you can’t even explain what’s keeping you so busy. The harder you try to get more out of your time, it seems, the less time you have. Even if you did have the time, you still wouldn’t have the energy. Until one day you realize: “There’s only twenty-four hours in a day.” Maybe that doesn’t mean what I thought it meant? I thought it meant I should get the most done in the least amount of time possible. What I’m learning is, if there’s only twenty-four hours in a day, that means there’s a limit. I can only get so much out of my time. “Time management” is like squeezing blood from a stone. This story is not too different from my own. For my entire adult life, I have been a productivity enthusiast, with time management as one of my key strategies for getting more done. It started in college. As a graphic design student, I learned all the keyboard shortcuts I could for Photoshop. I used training software to teach myself to type faster. When I graduated and got a job, I constantly experimented with different ways of keeping a to-do list and prioritizing my tasks. I pontificated with any colleague who would listen about how to cut down on the number of emails in my inbox. One thing I loved about working in Silicon Valley was that there was no shortage of tech geeks with whom I could swap tips on the latest productivity apps. Eventually, I ran out of ways to get more done in less time, and my quest went on a detour. That led me to embark on the adventure I’m sharing in this book. Four years ago, I found myself sitting on the bare hardwood floor of my apartment in Chicago, eating lunch from a takeout container with a plastic fork. I had no furniture, no plates, no silverware. I had sold my last chair to some guy from Craigslist fifteen minutes prior. I was about to embark on my most audacious productivity experiment yet. As I looked around at the three suitcases which housed my final remaining possessions, and the painters erasing from the walls any trace that I had lived there for seven years, I was trying to wrap my head around one fact: That night, I would fall asleep in another country. For the foreseeable future, I would be a foreigner – an extranjero – in a land with a checkered history, where I barely spoke the language. It all started, six years earlier, with an email. It was the kind of email that would trip up most spam filters. I wasn’t being offered true love, millions of dollars from an offshore bank account, or improved performance in bed. I was being offered a book deal. I had never thought of myself as a writer. In fact, I hated writing as a kid. As I considered accepting that book deal offer, every author I talked to warned me that writing a book is extremely hard work, with little chance of success. But I figured, How hard can it be?, and signed my first literary contract. I didn’t know how to write a book, but the most obvious method was: time management. I needed to make sure I had the time to write the book. In an attempt to meet my tight deadline, I used every time management technique I could think of. I scheduled writing sessions on my calendar. I developed a morning routine to start writing as quickly as possible after waking up. I “time boxed,” to limit the time I would spend on pieces of the project. Still, I didn’t have enough time. I fired my clients. I cancelled dates and turned down party invitations. I started outsourcing my grocery shopping, my meal preparation, even household chores. If there was anything I had to do myself, I made sure to “batch” it into blocks of time when I could do it all at once. Writing the book became my one and only focus. I cleared away any time I could, and I dedicated it to writing. But it still wasn’t enough. I spent most of my day hunched over my keyboard, rocking back and forth in agony. I felt actual physical pain in my stomach and chest. My fingers felt as if they had been overtaken by rigor mortis. I struggled to write even a single sentence. I was spending plenty of time on my book, but I wasn’t getting anything done. My case of writer’s block was so bad that, weeks after signing my contract, I accepted a last-minute invitation to go on a retreat to Costa Rica. Logically, it wasn’t the best use of my time, but I desperately hoped that a change of scenery would work some kind of magic. A few days into the trip, I was more worried than ever. According to my contract, if my manuscript wasn’t twenty-five percent finished within a few weeks, the deal was off. Yet I still hadn’t written a single word. Unless a miracle happened, I would write a check to the publisher to return my advance, and I would humiliatingly face my friends, family, and blog readers to tell them I had failed. Does that sound like a lot of pressure? It was. I went for a walk, so I could feel sorry for myself, by myself. I was dragging my feet down the gravel road, head hung down and arms crossed over my chest. How could I be so foolish?, I wondered. Not only had I committed to writing a 50,000-word book – with detailed illustrations – despite having little writing experience beyond a few blog posts, but I had wasted time and money going on this retreat. Then, I heard someone call out. I looked up, and on the next road over was a man waving and yelling, ¿¡Como estáááás!? I had briefly noticed the man moments before. His fists had been wrapped around the simple wires of a fence, his arms stretched out in front of him as he leaned back in ecstasy, singing to himself. I had felt vaguely embarrassed for him, assuming he didn’t know someone else was around. As the man motioned for someone to come to him, I hesitated. It looked as if he was motioning to me, but that seemed unlikely. Yet I looked around, and saw nobody. I had just passed a fork in the road, and the fence the man stood behind was on the other side of the fork. I didn’t want to backtrack, because I felt I should return to the house and try to write. But I felt rude for ignoring his friendly invitation. So, I reluctantly retraced my steps, and walked over to the man, still unsure of what he wanted. What followed was the first conversation I ever had entirely in Spanish. Though, I’m using the word “conversation” loosely. The man – Diego was his name – taught me the words for the sun, the beach, the rain and the sea. It turned out Diego just wanted to chat. My conversation with Diego was refreshing. I was used to everyone ignoring each other on the crowded streets of Chicago, but here was a man who wanted to talk to someone on the next road over about nothing in particular. I was suddenly in such a relaxed state of mind that, after bidding Diego farewell, it was several minutes before I noticed I was going the wrong way. I had continued down Diego’s side of the fork in the road. When I realized this, I panicked at the prospect of getting lost in a foreign country, but then I shrugged it off and decided to keep going. It turned out I got back to the house just fine anyway. Between the pep talk I got from my friend Noah Kagan – as described in my book, The Heart to Start – and my conversation with Diego, I felt as if I had turned over a new leaf. I set my laptop on a desk on the interior balcony of the house. There, looking out at the sapphire blue Pacific Ocean, I had my first breakthrough writing session. What once seemed impossible, now seemed easy. After an hour of writing, I had most of a chapter drafted. It suddenly seemed as if I might make my deadline after all. That random conversation on a gravel road in Costa Rica became the seed of an idea that would eventually drive me to sell everything I owned and buy a one-way ticket to South America. I had discovered that making progress on my first book wasn’t so much about having the time to write. It was about being in the right state of mind to do the work at hand. I had discovered that today’s productivity isn’t so much about time management as it is about mind management. Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/buy-mind-management

When I first heard of Getting Things Done, I was skeptical. How could it possibly live up to the fanaticism of its cult following? But once I saw the power of the “next action,” of “someday/maybes,” and of organizing tasks by “context,” I knew there was a good reason for the hype: “GTD” works. More than fifteen years later, GTD still helps me stay productive and in control of all of the things going on in life and work. GTD has helped me write three books, build a business, and move to South America. I regularly re-read it, and I always find new ways to apply its principles and techniques. Here’s my Getting Things Done book summary – in my own words – after many years of practice and two podcast interviews with author David Allen. The principles that make GTD work These are not “principles” as expressed in the Getting Things Done book, but this is my summary of its most important ideas. 1. Trusted System: GTD is your “trusted system” The most important idea behind GTD is to get everything out of your head and into a “trusted system.” What is a trusted system? A “trusted” system is a system in which you can “trust” that you will engage appropriately with everything in the system. 2. Appropriate Engagement: Your trusted system helps you “engage appropriately” GTD handles a wider breadth of things than your typical to-do list/calendar combination. Because GTD helps you “engage appropriately” with everything. What does it mean to “engage appropriately?” That means you’re doing no more and no less than is necessary to achieve your goal. You can trust your system will remind you to buy cat food only when you’re physically capable of buying cat food, and before you run out of cat food. You can also trust your system to hold ideas that you may or may not act upon. If you daydream about moving abroad, you can trust your system to hold that idea and remind you periodically, so you won’t forget to do whatever you do or don’t want to do about it. So GTD handles everything from important tasks that must get done to fleeting thoughts that you merely might want to do something about. 3. Close Open Loops: GTD keeps your mind free of “open loops” Build a trusted system that helps you engage appropriately with everything, and your mental energy will be free to handle whatever is going on in the moment. This is because your trusted system keeps your mind free of open loops. If you can’t trust that you’ll buy cat food before you run out, you’ll be thinking about it. If you can’t trust that you’ll revisit that idea about moving abroad, you’ll be thinking about it. You’ll have open loops in your mind. These open loops use mental energy that you could use on other things. These open loops also make you feel like a victim of the things you have to do. It’s demoralizing to keep reminding yourself something needs to get done because you’re also reminding yourself that you haven’t followed through. If you trust it will get done, you don’t have to remind yourself. As David Allen says, ”Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.” 4. Bottom-Up: GTD is a “bottom-up” approach to personal organization By getting control of the ground-level things in your life, you have more energy to think about the higher-level things. By trusting that you’ll buy cat food, you have more energy to think about how your idea to move abroad fits into your long-term goals and your life purpose. One quick exercise to get a taste of GTD One quick way to get a taste of GTD: Write down every single thing that’s on your mind that either needs to get done, or that may need to get done. Don’t worry about doing those things, just get them out of your head. You may feel a little overwhelmed from writing all of those things down, but you probably also feel a lot lighter. You’ve just done the first of the five key steps to mastering GTD. The five-step process of GTD Capture: Capture everything. Anything you need to act on or might need to act on needs to be captured. Get it out of your head and into the system. Clarify: With each thing, you’re asking yourself Is this actionable? If it’s not actionable, what should you do with it? If it is actionable, what’s the “next action” (more on this soon). Organize: Put the thing in the right place. If it’s actionable, it’s in your task management system. If you don’t need it, it goes in the trash. If you might need it, you store it for reference. Reflect: Review and think about the things in your system, regularly. How often? Often enough to keep them out of your mind, which helps you trust your “trusted system.” Engage: Do what you intended to do with the things. That might be taking action, that might be not taking action. Whatever action you do take, that’s the “next action.” Identify the “next action” If you take away only one idea from this Getting Things Done book summary, it should be the “next action.” The “next action” is what it sounds like: What is the next thing you can do about this thing you’re thinking about? I used to write vague items on my to-do list: I’d write “Mom,” to remind me Mom’s birthday was coming up, and that I needed to buy her a gift. Look at how many steps removed “Mom” was from the next action! You might think the next action was to buy Mom a gift, but it wasn’t. Instead, the next action was “brainstorm gift ideas for Mom.” That’s easier to act upon than just “Mom.” You might not think it makes a difference. But – like closing open loops – identifying the next action saves mental energy. When you look at your to-do list you don’t have to wonder what action to take. And sometimes you don’t need to take action at all. Keep a “someday/maybes” list If you take away only two ideas from this Getting Things Done book summary, it should be the “next action,” and the “someday/maybes” list. Why? Because these are the two ideas that free up the most energy. The next action makes it easier to act. Your someday/maybe list makes it easier to not act. Before I knew about someday/maybe, I’d make one of two mistakes: I’d either write something down on my to-do list, not realizing I didn’t really intend to do it, or I’d recognize that I didn’t really intend to do it, and so not write it down, and thus keep thinking about it. Both of these were the wrong way. Your someday/maybes list lets you capture things you would like to do, only it’s not the right time or you’re not yet sure you want to do them. Because the things you someday or maybe want to do are in your “trusted system” you close the loops, and you stop thinking about them. But for your someday/maybe list to work, you have to review it regularly. Do a “weekly review” If you take only three ideas from this Getting Things Done book summary, it should be the “next action,” the “someday/maybes” list, and the “weekly review.” Because the weekly review is what puts the “trusted” in “trusted system.” Remember the five-step process behind GTD: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage. Capturing, Clarifying, and Organizing help you identify what to do and be sure you’ll do it. Reflecting – which you do in your weekly review – helps you feel confident nothing is falling through the cracks. Find a time once a week where you consistently have the time and energy to Reflect on your life and work. Make sure you’ve Captured, Clarified, and Organized everything. I do my weekly review on Sunday afternoons. Some people like Fridays. It is really a game-changing habit. There’s your Getting Things Done book summary! (some final ideas) Those are the most important ideas behind GTD from my fifteen years of using it. There is of course a whole book’s worth of ideas behind the system. I highly recommend you pick up the book. Honorable mention includes: Contexts: Assign a “context” to your tasks, such as “@home” or “@office.” Some to-do items, you can only do in certain places. Projects: If you think it’s a task, it’s often a “project.” (If it takes more than one task to achieve your desired outcome). Two-Minute Rule: If you’re Clarifying, and you come across a next action that will take two minutes or less, do it right away. Download your free “GTD toolkit” I’ve been using GTD for more than fifteen years. It’s helped me write three books, build a business, and travel the world. Want to know which tools I count on to get things done? I’ll instantly send you the tools I count on most if you sign up to my newsletter here. Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/getting-things-done/

In the game of golf, there’s an expression: “Drive for show, putt for dough.” What it means is: If you want to win tournaments, practice putting. It makes sense. In a standard even-par round of golf, putts make up half of all strokes. You’ll use your driver less than half the number of times you’ll use your putter. There’s more strokes to get rid of in the putting part of the game. “Drive for show, putt for dough” makes sense – but it’s wrong. Why? It can tell us a lot about other places in life and work with “raised floors.” Golf is a reality-distortion field First, a little background on the game of golf, for those unfamiliar. You’ve got a roughly one-and-a-half-inch ball, you’re trying to hit into a roughly four-inch hole. That hole is anywhere from one-hundred yards away to five-hundred yards away. A one-hundred yard hole is a short par 3. A five-hundred yard hole is a long par 5. Meaning you have three strokes to get the ball in the hole for the par 3, and you have five strokes to get the ball in the hole on the par 5 – that is, to shoot even par. In between these distances are the more-common par 4s. So you’re hitting a tiny ball with a chunk of metal on the end of a long stick, and you’re trying to get it into a tiny hole a few football fields away. It’s insanely difficult, and trying to accomplish this will challenge your perception of reality. So no wonder the common wisdom in golf is wrong: It’s hard enough to make solid contact with the ball. It’s even harder to look back on a round, or even a hole, and have a clear picture of what the hell happened and how you could do it better. Golf is essentially a reality-distortion field. It’s endlessly multivariate. It’s full of hidden risks and difficult decisions. It’s also frustrating and emotionally challenging, which makes it even harder to see reality and improve. So, yes, golf is a good analog to life. Seeing reality in Golf Mark Broadie of Columbia University wanted to make it easier to see reality in the game of golf. So, he collected a ton of data. He got detailed data of more than 100,000 shots from 200 men and women of all ages and skill levels. He knew where each shot started, where each shot ended, whether the shot was from the sand or the fairway or tall grass – he even knew whether each putt was uphill or downhill, left-breaking or right-breaking. This is a lot of data. At the time, if you were a stats-minded golfer, you were counting how many fairways you hit in your drives, how many greens you hit in regulation (A “green in regulation” is par minus-two, because the goal is to average only two putts on each hole.) Since you believed you were “putting for dough,” you were also counting how many putts you had. But this information stats-minded golfers were collecting didn’t really help. Maybe you had only 28 putts instead of the standard 36 putts, but the reason you had so few putts was because you didn’t hit any greens, so you were hitting the green from a shorter distance and thus your putts were shorter and easier to make. It didn’t help you see reality. If anything, it made reality harder to see. The “strokes-gained” method of seeing reality But Mark Broadie revolutionized golf stats. He developed a system called “strokes gained.” Basically, for your skill level, where on the course are you gaining strokes and losing strokes? Your average PGA Tour golfer hitting from the tee on a 400-yard hole – a par 4 – averages 3.99 strokes. From 8 feet, he averages 1.5 strokes. So imagine a golfer who is better than other pros from 8 feet. Instead of 1.5 strokes on average, he takes 1.3 strokes. Yet this golfer still averages 3.99 strokes from 400 yards off the tee. He’s better than other pros from 8 feet, but somehow just as good as other pros from 400 yards. That means somewhere between the tee and that 8-foot putt, he’s losing a fraction of a stroke – 0.2 strokes to be exact. It’s almost like for every single shot on the course, the golfer is starting with a new “par” based upon the distance from the hole and the conditions of the shot. If you crunch all of that data, you can find exactly where your game needs work. Why “putt for dough” is wrong After crunching all this data, Mark Broadie discovered why “putt for dough” is wrong: Putts make up 50% of the strokes in a standard even-par round of golf. But Broadie found that putting performance only accounts for 15% of the strokes that separate the wheat from the chaff. From Broadie’s fascinating book, Every Shot Counts: Between the best pros and average pros, between pros and amateurs, and between good amateurs and poor amateurs, the numbers show that putting contributes about 15% to the difference in scores. Tee-to-green shots explain the remaining 85% of score differences. In fact, if you took a golfer who usually shoots 90, and you gave that golfer the putting skill of a pro – who usually shoots 20 or 25 strokes less – that amateur golfer’s score would drop not by 20 or 25 strokes, but by four strokes. Instead of shooting 90, this amateur golfer with the putting skills of a pro would shoot 86. Golfers have been saying putting is the most important part of the game since the early 1800s. Mark Broadie’s work didn’t come around until the early 2000s. How could popular wisdom get it so wrong for so long? “Raised floors” can’t be lowered This is what I call a “raised floor.” It’s an area where you have a standard of performance. Since that standard of performance seems to have lots of room for improvement, you think you can improve that performance. But there’s a floor. It’s a raised floor, and you can’t lower it. We know no unassisted human will run a 10-second mile. We know there’s a raised floor, and that if you want to run a mile in record time, it’s a matter of shaving off fractions of a second. Why golfers focus on “raised floors” Yet golfers, for the longest time, thought it was putting that mattered most. Why? If you know anything about perception, you can see a few ways putting would seem like the most important part of the game. Putting is the action you’re usually making when you reach your goal – when the ball finally goes in the hole. Putting is also where you miss the hole, sometimes by a hair. When you reach the green in three strokes from 500 yards away, you have a ten-foot put for birdie, and you end up taking three more strokes to get in the hole – that’s frustrating! Three strokes for 500 yards, three strokes for ten feet – it seems clear where you need improvement. Because it’s frustrating, because it causes golfers to feel an emotion, putting seems more relevant. These examples are components of the “availability bias.” That we remember things that are easy to remember – such as “lipping out” a put or three-putting from ten feet. The availability bias is why people are often more worried about dying in plane crashes than in car crashes, despite the fact they’re far more likely to die in a car crash. Look out for “raised floors” Raised floors are in other areas of your life and work, and they can waste your energy. How many calories can you cut from your diet, really? How much can you cut your spending, really? How much time can you save, really? Don’t lower the floor. Raise the ceiling. If putting isn’t the biggest part of golf, what is? Among the top 40 PGA Tour golfers, putting accounted for 15% of the game, driving 28%, and shots from around the green 17%. The most important part of the game: approach shots – that is, shots to the green from long distances – these accounted for 40% of the game. The greatest golfer ever, Tiger Woods, gets his advantage not from great putting, but from great approach shots. In the data Mark Broadie has analyzed, when hitting from the 150–200-yard range, Tiger Woods hit his shots three or four feet closer to the hole than other pros. Those approach shots alone gave Tiger a 1.3 stroke per round advantage. There’s four rounds in a tournament. It only takes one stroke to win. 1.3 strokes per round is a lot. So instead of getting good at the short game of golf, get good at the long game of golf. Instead of cutting more calories from your diet – as we learned from the Body by Science book summary on episode 160 – build muscle that burns calories. Instead of struggling to cut your spending, make more money. Instead of stressing yourself out to save more time, manage your energy. Don’t lower the floor – raise the ceiling. Image: In the Style of Kairouan, Paul Klee Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/raised-floors/ 

Each November, writers around the world make a commitment. They commit to writing a novel within a month. It’s called NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writer’s Month. Since 2013, software developers have also been making a commitment. They’ve committed to generating a novel within a month. It’s called NaNoGenMo – National Novel Generation Month. The novels these programmers create – if you can call them novels – can tell us a lot about the future of work. How well can AI write a novel? (Not at all, really.) The novels that programmers generate are all over the board. One “novel” was just Moby Dick, written backwards. Another “novel” was called Paradissssse Lossssst. It was a reproduction of John Milton’s epic poem, but with each “s” in the poem replaced with a varying number of other s’s. But, some programmers take the task a little more seriously. They train AI models and see what they come up with. One such model is called GPT-2. GPT-2 was once considered too dangerous to release to the public, because you could supposedly generate subversive content en-masse, and do some pretty nefarious things. Kind of like [Russia did with a farm of human-generated content around the 2016 election]. And what is this advanced AI model able to generate? So far, nothing impressive. Programmer and author of [aiweirdness.com] Janelle Shane tweeted, “Struggling with crafting the first sentence of your novel? Be comforted by the fact that AI is struggling even more.” The sentence this AI model generated for Janelle: “I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.” Not exactly Tolstoy. The follow up to GPT-2 is now out, so we’ll see this year what kind of novel GPT-3 can generate, but if Janelle Shane’s experiments so far are any indication, humans will still have the edge. She asked GPT-3 how many eyes a horse had. It kept telling her: [four]. Your edge as a human lies in your creativity According to Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI Superpowers, forty- to fifty-percent of jobs will be replaced by AI and automation within the next couple of decades. But humans won’t be replaced across the board. It’s the creativity- and strategy-based jobs that will be the most secure. If your job is an “optimization-based” job, you might want to start reinventing yourself. If your primary work is maximizing a tax refund, calculating an insurance premium, or even diagnosing an illness, your job involves so-called “narrow tasks.” These tasks are already being automated, or soon will be automated. You could type out 50,000 nonsense words in about a day. A computer can generate 50,000 words faster than you can blink. But, you could write a novel in a month. A computer can’t write a novel at all. Which means your edge as a human is not in typing the words faster. Your edge as a human is in thinking the thoughts behind the words. This doesn’t just apply to writing novels. If you’re an entrepreneur building a world-changing startup or a social worker helping a family navigate taking care of a sick loved-one, your creativity matters. No AI will be able to do what you do for a very long time – if ever. So when a computer can do in the blink of an eye something that would take us all day, and when our creativity is the one thing keeping us relevant, that has powerful implications on how we get things done. Time management isn’t built for creative work Remember from episode 226 when we learned about [Frederick Taylor]? How he stood next to a worker with a stopwatch and timed every action and broke down all of those actions into a series of steps? He optimized time as a “production unit.” But creativity doesn’t work like stacking bricks or moving chunks of iron. Remember there are three big realities about creativity that make it incompatible with the “time management” paradigm: Great ideas come in an instant One idea can be infinitely more valuable than another idea You can’t connect inputs directly to outputs In a world where creativity not only matters, it’s arguably the only thing that matters, the ways that time management is incompatible with creativity are big problems. They’re especially big problems because the more you’re watching the clock – the more you’re a [“clock-time” person], like we talked about on episode 235, the less creative you’re going to be. So the things that used to make us more productive, now make us less productive. We can’t try to do more things in less time. We can’t multitask. We can’t skip out on sleep or otherwise neglect our health. If you want to kill creativity: Get five hours of sleep a night, fight traffic for two hours a day, and start each day with a piping hot thermos of a psychoactive drug. This is the unfortunate and inescapable reality of most Americans today. Don’t expect technology to be creative for you, use technology for you to be creative Will an unassisted AI be winning the Nobel Prize in literature in the next ten years? Some might think so. I’m no AI expert, but I’m skeptical. Remember from Episode 237 that [the birthday problem] shows us how hard it is for us humans to understand how complex some things are. GPT-3 is one-hundred times more powerful than GPT-2. But is it one-hundred times better at writing a novel? We’ll see – I doubt it. Does that make AI and other technologies useless in creative work? Far from it. We can use technology not only to lift us out of drudgery, but to assist us in being creative. Here’s just some of the ways I use technology to be more creative: I live in a cheaper country, where I can have more flexibility to do work with unpredictable success ([Extremistan] like we talked about in the previous episode). When I moved to South America, I mourned the loss of easy access to paper books. But now, five years later, I have many thousands of highlights of the most important ideas I’ve come across in my reading. This is because I’ve been forced to read almost everything on Kindle. I can quickly and easily search through those highlights. This makes writing new books much easier than it would be otherwise. I’m able to live in South America because of cheap air travel, access to massive amounts of knowledge through the internet, and global publishing power, communication, and electronic banking. Not to mention easy Spanish translation in the palm of my hand. Aside from those Kindle highlights, I can store, organize, and quickly retrieve relevant information I’ve previously consumed or taken notes on. I can quickly reference old ideas and connect them to make new ideas. I’m able to test out my ideas and get instant feedback on what’s working or not through Twitter, and email, website, and podcast stats. Amazon’s algorithms help relevant readers find my books, which earns me money so I can write more. There are starting to be some glimmers of AI assisting us in creativity in some more direct ways. A new service called [Sudowrite] won’t write a novel for you, but it uses GPT-3 to suggest characters or plot twists for your novel. If you combine advances in AI models with the trends there are in studying the structure of stories, it’s not hard to see a future where AI plays a big role in assisting writers in coming up with stories. But for now, don’t expect technology to be creative for you. Instead, use technology to help you be more creative. New times call for new measures. When we’re trying to define what it means to be more productive, we can’t apply thinking from the industrial age when we’re in the midst of the creative age. Image: [Traverse Beams, by Patrick Henry Bruce] Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/the-creative-age/

Subject: “IMMEDIATE Action Reqeusted [sic]” They misspelled “requested,” which had the unintended effect of highlighting that this email was urgent. There were some documents attached to the email. They wanted me to review the documents and sign them. Then, I would get a wire of money to my bank account – from Google, Inc. I had no idea this email was coming. It was a nice surprise, since it was my birthday. It was all thanks to a decision I made three years prior. Three years prior, I cleared my schedule and declared what I call a “Week of Want.” I gave myself an entire week to work on whatever I wanted. I had no plan at the time – that was the point of my Week of Want. Three years later, here I was getting a surprise paycheck, thanks to that Week of Want. Creative work happens in “Extremistan” What was happening was a [Black Swan]. A rare and unpredictable event – in this case, a positive one. If you made several copies of the universe, and repeated my decision from three years prior, in most of those parallel universes, I probably wouldn’t end up getting money wired to my bank account from Google. That’s because creative work happens in Extremistan. Nassim Taleb introduced Extremistan in his book, [The Black Swan]. Extremistan is a world of Black Swans – rare and unpredictable events. Creative work does not happen in “Mediocristan” Other kinds of work happens in the opposite of Extremistan – what Taleb calls Mediocristan. Mediocristan is a world that’s stable and predictable. Serving coffee is a good example of work that happens Mediocristan. There’s a steady supply of coffee, and a steady demand for coffee. If you get a job at Starbucks, they can more or less predict that supply and demand, as well as their overhead costs. So, they can pay you by the hour. When your line of work is thinking of ideas and bringing those ideas into the world, you can’t get paid by the hour. Beyoncé does not get paid by the hour to make her music, even though she’s Beyoncé, and her next record is guaranteed to sell. Much less is the world’s next Beyoncé getting paid by the hour. Nobody knows she’s the next Beyoncé. If you made copies of the universe, in many of those parallel universes, she wouldn’t even become the next Beyoncé. You need clear priorities in Extremistan When you’re working in a pure Mediocristan, you don’t even need priorities. You know exactly what needs to be done, and you do it. When you’re working in Extremistan, you do need clear priorities. There are a million things you could do – a million things that might work – so you have to be ruthless with your priorities. You have to be ruthless in what you say yes to and what you say no to, and in trying to find some way to objectively see what the results are so you can make better decisions in the future. Clear priorities have a dark side But clear priorities have a dark side. It’s that when you have clear priorities, you only put your money on the sure bets. And when all of your money is on sure bets, you aren’t even gambling anymore. You’ve moved yourself from Extremistan to Mediocristan. You can keep steady paychecks coming, but you’ll never hit the jackpot. So employ the Barbell Strategy So how do you give yourself the opportunity to hit it big, without going bust? You need to spend some time in Extremistan. Taleb calls it “The Barbell Strategy”: Imagine a barbell, with fat weights on the ends, and a thin bar in the middle. On one end of the barbell is your sure bets. If you’re investing, that’s treasury bills. On the other end of the barbell is your risky bets. If you’re investing, that might be options, or cryptocurrencies. What you’re avoiding is the stuff in the middle. Don’t make big bets where you can lose your shirt, and avoid the seemingly-conservative investments in which you can actually lose a lot. Give yourself a “Week of Want” One way I spend time in Extremistan is by giving myself a “Week of Want.” In a week of want, I clear as much as I can from my schedule for a whole week, and I let myself explore whatever is interesting to me. In 2012, after publishing my first book, I gave myself a Week of Want. I spent most of my week reflecting on the experience of writing that first book. Why did it seem nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me to write that book? I reflected on the grab-bag of rituals and routines I eventually developed to keep my writing process moving forward. I shared my thoughts in a blog post, called [Mind Management (Not Time Management)]. Nothing happened right away. That’s the nature of creative work. There’s often a delay before your bets pay off. But another year and a half later, I got an email. The renowned behavioral scientist, Dan Ariely, had read my blog post, and wondered if I’d like to help him with a productivity app he was building. Another year and a half after that, I got a surprise payday from Google. Google bought that productivity app. The Week of Want is a way of “gambling with your time.” [Dan Ariely] himself talked about gambling with his own time back on episode 203. He’ll spend some amount of his time on things that don’t make sense, such as working with a cartoonist, or inviting a mentalist to perform at one of his speeches. The Week of Want exposes you to “asymmetric opportunities,” like [Tynan] talked about on episode 145. Oftentimes we hold ourselves back from pursuing a silly idea. There’s very little downside to pursuing the idea, but the potential upside is unlimited. Why “want?” The Week of Want is a great way to make sure you spend a little time in Extremistan. But it has another valuable purpose, and that purpose lies in the idea of “want.” When we’re spending all of our energy on what we feel we should do, we soon forget what we want to do. But remember that creative work is unpredictable. Even when we think really hard about what we should do, a lot of the time we’re going to be wrong. Additionally, the things we want to be doing are powerful. The things we want to be doing are the things we’re curious about. And curiosity is powerful in two ways. One: Curiosity is motivational fuel. You can work harder on something you’re curious about. Two: Curiosity is a path to originality. Your curiosity will lead you down multiple paths. When those paths converge, you’ll be where no one else has been. Why a week? You may recognize elements of the Week of Want in Google’s famous “twenty-percent time” strategy. When Google was first starting out, they allowed their engineers to spend twenty percent of their time on whatever project they wanted. The strategy worked great. Some of Google’s best products were created during twenty-percent time – including Gmail and AdSense. I’ve heard some people say that they spend one day a week on a side-project. Hey, that’s a good use of the barbell strategy, and it will expose you to positive Black Swans more than not working on a side project at all. But there’s something special about spending an entire week doing whatever you want. Working on what you want to work on, and doing so for an entire week, takes you further and further from the norm. It brings you deeper and deeper into the territory where you’ll discover truly original ideas. When I asked neuroscientist John Kounios – way back on [episode 8] – about the benefits of taking an entire week to do what I want, he said there were two potential ways that could improve creative thinking. One: Doing what you want improves your mood, which leads to better ideas. He explained, “It gives you pleasure, puts you in a positive mood, and it’s something you can sustain over the week – and then it can lead to creative insights.” Two: Taking a whole week puts you in a deeper state of creativity. Dr. Kounios said that the “insightful state of mind is very fragile.... It’s easier to get into an analytical state of mind than it is to get into a creative, insightful, state of mind. So if you can create this whole block of time for a week, it allows you to really sink into that state.” Week of Want rules To do your own week of want, clear away as much as you can for a week. Act like you’re going on vacation. Set up the out-of-office autoresponder on your email. Approach the Week of Want with no expectations as to what you’ll discover during that week. The goal of the Week of Want is much less about actually finding great ideas. It’s more about reconnecting with the feeling of wanting in the first place. We so regularly do the things we feel we should do, we soon forget what it feels like to want to do something at all. Image: [Insula Dulcamara, by Paul Klee] Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/week-want/ 

In New York City, sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, a young art student sat for a portrait. The artist who painted this portrait won a prestigious award for that portrait. The young woman who sat for the portrait suddenly became a sought-after model. She could actually earn money sitting for portraits. She needed that money. Her family was poor, and art school -- especially art school in New York City -- was expensive. But she decided to never model again. The tough decision that made a good artist a great artist This young artist later recalled the moment she decided to stop sitting for portraits. She drew a line down the middle of a sheet of paper, so that there were now two columns. At the top of one column, she wrote “yes.” At the top of the other column, she wrote “no.” She said, “The essential question was always, if you do this, can you do that?” Here’s one thing that probably focused her attention on the question of whether or not she could keep modeling: She had skipped class to sit for that prize-winning portrait. So, if she was going to model, could she go to class? If she was going to model, could she put in the work necessary to achieve her dream of becoming a great artist? Her answer was, “no,” she could not keep modeling. And art history should thank her for it. Her name was Georgia O’Keeffe, and she lived on to become one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. One of her paintings was sold at auction several years ago for more than forty million dollars. The unearned can hurt more than it helps I don’t want to assume that because O’Keeffe is one of my favorite artists -- not just for her work but also for her contrarian personality -- that you, too know who I’m talking about. You’ve seen her work: abstract close-ups of flowers and cattle skulls, paintings of the desert landscape surrounding the New Mexico estate where she spent most of her time. This story about quitting modeling has one good lesson in it: That if you want to be great at something, you sometimes have to quit something else that you’re merely good at. That’s a valuable lesson. It’s the obvious one. It’s not the lesson I want to talk about. I want to talk about the unearned. That when you accept something you didn’t earn, it often hurts you more than it helps you. Money you didn’t earn will make you foolish with finances. Flattery you didn’t earn will make you settle for mediocrity. Power you didn’t earn will disconnect you from reality. If you want to become great at what you do, you have to be on the lookout for the unearned. You have to shun the unearned. The unearned is an easy path to mediocrity When I tweeted about the dangers of the unearned, most people agreed. Some people were suspicious. “What about Universal Basic Income?,” they’d say. I don’t have an opinion on Universal Basic Income. I haven’t thought about it enough. But this is not about Universal Basic Income. As I understand it UBI would be about getting your basic needs met. Do you have a roof over your head, and food in your stomach? Having a roof over your head and food in your stomach is a good thing, especially if you don’t have to work for it. But beyond that, the unearned becomes dangerous. When I’m talking about the dangers of the unearned, I’m not talking about the basics. When you have your basic needs met, it’s an easy path to mediocrity. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I happen to think it would be nice if we lived in a society where more people could get by being mediocre. That competition wouldn’t be so fierce that you need to be the very best in your field to have a chance at survival. But, this isn’t about basic needs. This isn’t about mediocrity. The unearned is an easy path to mediocrity, and that’s fine. But if you want to be great, you need to be on the lookout for the unearned. The unearned is an easy path to mediocrity, but the unearned is an obstacle to mastery. The great Georgia O’Keeffe shunned the unearned Yes, Georgia O’Keeffe could have “earned” money sitting for portraits in the sense that she would be doing the work of sitting. But she didn’t want it. Much of what she would have “earned” would have been unearned. What Georgia didn’t earn was being an attractive young woman, that people wanted to paint portraits of. That didn’t get her much in the early 1900’s. She couldn’t even vote. She was a young woman, trying to make it as an artist in America. At the time, that was unheard of. Georgia instinctively knew the dangers of what she could get being an attractive young woman, and she actively rejected those things. Even then she was already dressing daily in her trademark black frock. She sewed them herself, and they happened to have the effect of hiding her figure. As Georgia grew into a famous artist, she consistently shunned the unearned when others tried to categorize her not just as an artist, but as a “woman artist.” When Peggy Guggenheim invited Georgia to exhibit her work in a show of women painters, Georgia rejected the invitation and proclaimed, “I am not a woman painter!” What would have been the harm of Georgia exhibiting in a collection of women artists? Certainly her achievements as an artist were more difficult because of her standing in society as a woman. But she still saw exhibitions like this as the unearned. It would cloud her judgement of what really mattered. What really mattered was not being a great “woman artist.” What really mattered was being a great artist. The artist whose work was forgotten We normally don’t think that someone in a marginalized class as getting much of anything unearned. So maybe the dangers of the unearned will be more clear if we look at the man who painted that prize-winning portrait of Georgia which launched her potential modeling career. The painter of that portrait was a classmate of Georgia’s. He also went on to become a successful painter. He studied in Paris, he won numerous awards, he rubbed shoulders with the great painters of his time. People like Robert Henri and Edward Hopper. He was regularly commissioned to paint portraits of famous actors. He was inducted into the National Academy of Design, which includes members such as architects Frank Ghery and Frank Lloyd Wright. At the height of his fame, Esquire magazine named him America’s most important living artist. His name was Eugene Speicher Ever heard of him? Me neither. After a successful career as an artist in his lifetime, Speicher has been forgotten. His work used to be exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, most of his work has been sold off to smaller museums, or taken off display. In 2014, as one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings was being sold for more than forty million dollars, one museum in New York did hold a retrospective exhibition of Speicher’s work. No, it wasn’t the Met or the Guggenheim. It was a small museum, somewhere between Manhattan and Albany. The big question behind this exhibition: How is it possible that Eugene Speicher was so successful and famous during his lifetime, only to be -- as one critic put it -- “virtually erased from the canon of American art history.” In articles about the exhibition, critics threw about theories: Was it because he switched from portraiture to landscape painting? Was it the financial pressures of supporting a family? It’s funny, in terms of the impact of his art, Speicher didn’t achieve mastery like Georgia did. You could say he achieved mediocrity. He embraced the unearned and stayed mediocre I have a theory why Speicher’s work was forgotten: He never got really good. He didn’t shun the unearned. Worse yet, Speicher embraced the unearned. To say Eugene Speicher has been forgotten is an exaggeration. He does live on in art history for one incident. This incident supports my theory. When Speicher asked Georgia to sit for what would become a prize-winning portrait, Georgia hesitated. She wasn’t sure it was worth skipping class to sit for that portrait. And that’s when Speicher showed his true colors. Georgia later recalled what Speicher said: “It doesn’t matter what you do, I’m going to be a great painter, and you will probably end up teaching painting in some girls’ school.” Talk about not shunning the unearned. Speicher thought he could shovel the unearned into his coffers. He knew that just because he was a man, he had a better shot at making it as an artist than Georgia had. The unearned: An easy path to mediocrity, an obstacle to mastery Look at these two differing attitudes when it comes the unearned: Georgia didn’t even want to sit for portraits. It may have helped pay for art school tuition, but it was going to take away from the work that mattered. The work of becoming a great artist. Speicher thought that, because he was a man, he was entitled to a successful career as an artist. Speicher floated through his career, earning commissions, being invited to display his work in exhibitions. He was good enough to get a little further, with the help of the unearned. Georgia didn’t want a single thing she didn’t earn. Because she didn’t have money -- not even the money she could have made sitting for portraits -- she had to drop out of art school and leave New York. She supported herself through various jobs around the country. It probably looked like Speicher was right, at least for a little while, one of those jobs was, indeed, teaching at some girls’ school. But, Georgia got the last laugh. Eugene Speicher -- well, the thing he’s most famous for today -- is that he painted a portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. Images: Revolution of the Viaduct, Paul Klee; [Georgia O’Keeffe (“Patsy”), Eugene Speicher]; [Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1*, Georgia O’Keeffe] Thanks for sharing my work! On Twitter, thank you to @jovvvian, @allenthird, @niceguylife2, and @coreyhainesco.   My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/shun-the-unearned/ 

Here’s a brain teaser for you: Imagine we’ve got a room full of people. We’re trying to figure if any two people in the room have the same birthday. For us to reach a fifty-percent probability that there are two people in the room with the exact same birthday, how many people need to be in the room? I told you this was a brain teaser, so suffice to say that the answer -- to how many people need to be in a room for there to be a fifty-percent probability that two people have the exact same birthday -- is not what you would intuitively expect. The “birthday problem” tells a lot about how we fail to see hidden complexity For the sake of this puzzle, let’s assume there are no twins, no leap year birthdays, and there are no seasonal variations. No spike in birthdays nine months after Christmas or some big snowstorm. Most people start with a rough calculation like this: There’s 365 days in a year, so for there to be two people in the room with the same birthday, take 365, divide it by two -- you’ve got about 180, give or take. With 180 people in a room it seems you’d have about a fifty-percent chance that two of them have the same birthday. This intuitive calculation is wrong. It’s very wrong. If you had 180 people in a room, the chances that two of them will have the same birthday is damn close to 100%. Even if there were only 100 people in the room, rather than 180, the chances that two of them would have the same birthday would be 99.99997%. The actual answer is fun to know, but it also tells us a lot about our minds. It tells us a lot about how bad we are at understanding complexity. It tells us a lot about how complexity tends to get out of hand, and weigh us down, and cause us to stagnate. Complexity creep. If we know the answer to what is known as the birthday problem, maybe -- just maybe -- we can fight against complexity creep: That insidious tendency for us to make things more complex and more complex and more complex, until we find ourselves paralyzed. And there’s a flip side. If you can understand complexity creep -- if you can understand how things that seem simple are actually complex, you can also use that to your advantage. Each “one thing” interacts with every other thing So how do you actually find the answer to the birthday problem? Let me start by saying that if you have trouble following the next minute or so, don’t worry about it. That’s the point. Our brains aren’t wired to intuitively understand this. On a basic level, you wouldn’t just calculate based upon the total number of people in the room and the total number of potential birthdays. In actuality, you would calculate based upon potential interactions amongst the birthdays of every person within the room. Like this: If there’s only one person in the room, there’s a 365 out of 365 -- 100% -- chance that person does not share a birthday with another person in the room. There are no other people in the room, after all. Add a second person, and there’s a 364 out of 365 chance that person does not share a birthday with the first person in the room. With each person you add, you take away one from the numerator of that fraction. With the third person, instead of 364, it’s a 363 out of 365 chance that person does not share a birthday with either of the first two people in the room. So on and on, that numerator gets lower -- from 363 to 362 to 361 -- with each additional person in the room. So far, there’s five people in the room, and a 361 out of 365 chance that fifth person does not share a birthday with any of the other four people in that room. That’s a 98.9% chance of no match. A merely 1.1% chance that this fifth person shares a birthday with one of the other four people in the room. But wait. If there are five people in a room, the chances that any two of them share the same birthday is not 1.1%. It’s 2.7%. More than double. Why? Because with each person you add, there’s a probability that a person shares a birthday with one of the other people. But as we add people to the room, each person’s individual probability is added to the total probability. This total probability is an aggregate of all probabilities we calculated each time we added a person to the room. So adding a 1.1% probability with the fifth person to get a total 2.7% probability may not sound like much, but when you keep adding people, that new probability you’re adding onto the total probability gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The answer: The number of people who have to be in the room for us to have a fifty-percent probability that two of those people share the same birthday is: twenty-three. If there are only twenty-three people in the room, there’s about at fifty-percent chance two of them have the same birthday. We aren’t wired to see complexity. We’re wired for survival. I don’t know about you, but when I first heard this puzzle, that is not the answer I expected. In fact, even now that I understand how these odds are calculated, it’s still hard for me to believe. But as I say, we’re not wired to understand these things. We’re individual creatures, wired to survive, wired to take mental shortcuts that drive us toward safety and pleasure and help us avoid pain. In the millions of years of human evolution, I can’t think of any good reason for a human to understand the hidden complexity we see demonstrated in the birthday problem. Things were simple: How many berries are in that bush? Not How does each of those berries interact with every other berry? If there’s anything we want to know about besides those berries, it’s Is there a tiger in that bush? But, we aren’t hunting and gathering in the Sahara anymore. We live in a dizzyingly complex and interconnected world. We’re getting a lesson on this in the coronavirus pandemic. Since the beginning, those of us who aren’t trained epidemiologists have struggled to comprehend how quickly a virus can spread. How a five-percent-per-day increase in cases starts to really add up. If and when we reach herd immunity -- that will probably be equally as counterintuitive to our primitive brains. Keep complexity from holding you back as a creator Understanding complexity creep, and understanding that we struggle to understand complexity creep, also applies to our work as creators. Because the single most valuable thing you have as a creator is your creative energy. The better you can make use of that energy, the more and better work you can do. It’s hard to make use of that energy if you’re being weighed down by hidden complexity. This is something I’m personally looking out for a lot lately. Remember when I told you about the time I killed that $150,000 passive income stream, back on Episode 214? That was about mitigating hidden complexity. Here I had something that was making me some money. I wasn’t doing any work on it. But I sensed that complexity lurked within. There was the complexity of opportunity costs. It was occupying space within my brain. Our thoughts have opportunity costs. When you choose to think of one thing, you choose not to think of another thing. That’s hard to see when you’re too busy thinking. There was the complexity of Black Swans. Day to day, I wasn’t doing any work on this site. But one day, something could have happened like a server could go down, and next thing I’d know, I’d be thinking about this other website, and not about the more important parts of my business. I still don’t know what I missed out on by killing that website. That’s the nature of complexity creep. You can’t see it, you kind of have to act on faith. But I do know that it’s a relief to have it out of my life. It’s created space for me to work on this podcast and my upcoming book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. Hidden complexity in everyday life You can see complexity creep in your life, too. Ever since I sold everything and moved to South America, I’ve been trying to practice practical minimalism. I had a furnished apartment, which got rid of lots of complexity. I just got my first unfurnished apartment in Colombia, and every day, I see complexity creep in to take my precious energy. It’s in buying furniture and having to pay bills I didn’t have to pay before. It’s in deciding whether or not to purchase an item: It looks like it will make my life better or easier, but it’s never just “one more thing.” Like the birthday problem, it’s one more thing, and the way that thing interacts with everything else. Leverage hidden complexity. Turn small things into big things. I promised you that hidden complexity isn’t only a thing to be avoided. It’s also a thing to be leveraged. If one little thing can also interact with many other things, that means a small thing can lead to bigger things. That’s what we see in the power of tiny habits, like BJ Fogg talked about in episode 107. That’s the power of something like the Ten-Minute Hack. I’ve noticed it myself lately as I’ve been focusing more on Twitter: That a tiny tweet can lead to a Love Mondays newsletter, which can lead to a podcast episode, which can become a book. Hidden complexity can weigh you down, or hidden complexity can be leveraged to lift you up. Both the devil and the angel are in the details. Image: Flowers in Stone, Paul Klee My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/complexity-creep/

When I was working with Timeful -- the productivity app co-founded by behavioral scientist and Love Your Work guest, Dan Ariely -- we had a great feature. You could put todo items on your calendar. You could estimate how long a todo item was going to take, and then you could drag that todo item onto your calendar. It would be right there on the timeline, along with any other events you had planned for the day. This todo-items-on-calendar thing was a handy feature. It makes sense, really. Too many of us have a todo list a mile long. We know what we intend to do, but we have no idea when we’ll actually do those things. When Timeful built this feature, and I finally got to use it regularly, I made a discovery. We’re really bad at estimating time. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Our vision is distorted by our “time worship.” Our perception of time is warped My own faulty time estimates went both ways. I might think it would take me less than fifteen minutes to respond to an email. I’d be shocked to discover that it took half an hour. I might think it would take an hour to draft a blog post, and I’d be pleasantly surprised to see I could do it in only ten minutes. Instinctively, we know that our perception of time is warped. We know the saying that “time flies when we’re having fun.” Our perception of time changes. It changes according to our mood, our personality, or the number of events that happen within a certain amount of time. But if our perception of time is so warped, why is time so important to us? Why do we treat time as if it’s the only thing that matters? Why do we practice “time worship?” The way we measure time is arbitrary It turns out, the way we measure time is pretty arbitrary. There’s nothing in the natural world that says that we should divide our days up by twenty-four hours, with sixty minutes in each of those hours, with sixty seconds in each of those minutes. Our heart may beat about sixty times a minute, but if we’re exercising, it could be 160 times a minute. We breathe about fourteen times a minute, but if we’re running, it might be forty times a minute. Aside from the rotation of the earth and the earth’s revolutions around the sun, there’s nothing about the natural world that says we need to measure the time the way we do. Dividing the day up into twenty-four hours, sixty minutes an hour, sixty seconds a minute -- that’s leftover from a 4,000-year-old Babylonian numbering system. And hours weren’t even originally a fixed length of time! Back in the days of sundials, hours were relative to the amount of daylight in the day. Hours in one season were shorter than hours in another season. It wasn’t even until the late 16^th^ century that there was a mechanical clock that kept track of sixty minutes in an hour. To measure seconds, we had to wait until a century later -- the 17^th^ century. Even the earth’s rotations are unreliable Yet even with this mechanical precision, the way we measure time doesn’t totally match up with the natural world. In an atomic clock, 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation in the caesium-133 atom represents one second. The atomic clock uses this atom’s radiation to keep time, because it’s one of the most reproducible and stable things in all of nature. Certainly more reliable than grains of sand falling through an hourglass, or even the vibrations of a quartz crystal. But still, even with the help of one of the most reproducible and stable things in all of nature, the atomic clock is not perfect. We still have to add an extra second -- a “leap second” -- to our measurement of time. We add a leap second eight times a decade. It’s hard to match mechanical or even atomic precision to time, in part, because even the thing that time is based upon isn’t perfect. There are tiny, portions of a millisecond, differences in the length of a day -- that is, the amount of time it takes for the earth to rotate. These differences fluctuate over the course of multiple years and throughout the year, as well as every several days. So why does time rule our lives? So if our perception of time is warped, if our measurement of time is arbitrary, if even the things upon which we measure time are unreliable, why are we so reliant on time? Most of us wake up to an alarm clock. We break for lunch at a certain time. We meet for coffee at a certain time, through synchronized clocks on our phones. We go to bed at a certain time. You probably looked at how long this podcast episode was before you decided to listen to it. One reason we’re so reliant on time is because keeping track of time is useful. It allows us to do more things in less time. It allows us to coordinate with others, so we can synchronize complex systems that make our world work. Keeping track of time helps us make connecting flights, it makes sure the grocery store shelves are stocked, and it even helps us remember to do things we might otherwise forget. Time is our “God value” (and it shouldn’t be) In a complex world, there are only so many ways you can make a decision. This is where values become critical. Values help us choose which factors are the most important in a given decision. The “right” decision in any situation varies according to our values. If we value family over money, we’ll decide one way. If we value money over our mental health, we’ll decide yet another way. We use different values in different situations to make different decisions. But we tend to have some values that dominate over all of the others. Whatever we value the most is what author Mark Manson would call our “God value.” Too often, time is our God value. Too often, time is the one big factor we use to make decisions. It’s time worship, and it’s bad. Time worship at work Think about the way time is used in many organizations. In many companies, you can see the open slots on the calendars of your coworkers. You can then fill those open slots by inviting your coworkers to meetings. This is easy to miss, so I’ll spell it out. The logic is as follows: This time is open. Time filled is better than time not filled. Therefore, I will fill this open time with a meeting. Time is the God value in this decision. When we’re on the receiving end of these invitations, we also tend to think of it only in terms of time. Again: Time filled is better than time not filled. There is unfilled time, therefore, I will fill it with this event. Again, time is the God value. Notice that we also tend to negotiate with time. Ever been really focused on something, only to have a coworker tap you on the shoulder and ask, “Got a minute?” A minute. That’s the thing they want from you. Time is the God value. If you hesitate, maybe they’ll assure you, “This will only take a minute.” Your focus is broken, and someone is impeding on that focus. Maybe you’re a little annoyed. But you don’t want to look uncooperative, so you go along with it. You stop what you’re doing, and help your coworker out. Then somehow, you burn away the rest of your afternoon trying to get back to where you were before that coworker tapped you on the shoulder. You lost a whole afternoon of productivity, all because time is the God value in your office. You lost a whole afternoon of productivity all because of time worship. Time worship in life There are some situations where other values take over. You won’t stop delivering a eulogy to check your stock prices because it will take “just a minute.” You won’t stop having sex to answer a text message because it will take “just a minute.” (The text-message response, that is.) It’s obviously inappropriate in both cases to treat time as the God value. Yet there are too many other situations where time shouldn’t be our God value, yet it is. Time worship permeates throughout our culture, affecting the way we treat one another. Am I the only one annoyed when a waiter slams a check on the table before you’ve finished chewing your last bite? The logic is a remnant of Taylorism, which I talked about on episode 226: The amount of time a table is open for business is a “production unit.” The more paying customers you can fit within that time, the better. It’s not the waiter’s fault. In the U.S., there’s a good chance I’m a “clock-time” person -- as I talked about on the previous episode -- ready to get moving to my next activity. There’s a good chance I’ll be annoyed if the check isn’t on my table by the time I’m done with the act of eating. Time worship in schools Consider the way we use time as a God value in schools. We send children to school not according to when they’re awake and ready to learn. Instead, we send them according to time. When can parents drop them off? When are busses available? Down with time worship. Up with performance. Daniel Pink’s When outlines a number of drawbacks for sending kids to school whenever it’s convenient: Testing kids late in the day leads to a reduced test performance on par with missing two weeks of school a year, or having parents with lower income or education. By contrast, rescheduling schooling according to what works with kids’ energy levels improve learning. Having math early in the day improved students’ math GPAs. Providing breaks improves performance. Overall, Pink finds, “delaying school starting times improves motivation, boosts emotional well-being, reduces depression, and lessens impulsivity.” Fortunately, both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC have issued policy statements recommending that middle schools and high schools start later in the morning, to better accomodate the shifted sleep rhythms of adolescents. And it’s not just in schools that we could improve performance by reducing time worship. Olympic records tend to be broken in the late afternoon or early evening. Jurors produce less-discriminatory verdicts in the morning. Hospital workers who are well-rested and are working with fresh energy wash their hands more, diagnose diseases more accurately, and make fewer life-threatening errors. That’s right, time worship kills people. Think of time descriptively, not prescriptively What’s the alternative to time worship? Don’t think of time as prescriptive, think of time as descriptive. You can use time as a general guide, but using time as a mold into which to forcefully fit activities is unnatural, and ineffective. Next time you’re making a decision, and you start to think about how much time it’s going to take, try a mental shift. Instead of asking how the decision will affect your time, think about how it will affect your: focus, momentum, mood, motivation, mental state, energy level -- literally anything other than your time! Stop the time worship! Image: Separation in the Evening, Paul Klee Thanks for sharing my work! In Instagram, thank you to @letterbworld, @poor_bjorns_book_lab, @livroschatos. My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/time-worship/

Before I moved to Colombia, I lived several “mini lives” in Medellín. I came and lived here for a few months. I escaped the very worst portion of the Chicago winters. There was a phenomenon I experienced every time I came here, which taught me a lot about how I think about time. It always happened right around the three week mark. Getting used to a slower pace of life The pace of life in Medellín is different from the pace of life in Chicago. It’s slower. People talk slower, people walk slower. That thing where you stand on the right side of the escalator so people can pass on the left -- yeah, people don’t really do that here. They stand wherever they like. It’s usually not a problem. It’s rare that anyone climbs up the escalator while it’s moving, anyway. Whenever I came on a trip to Medellín, the same thing happened: The first week, the slower pace of life was refreshing. The second week, as I was trying to get into a routine, it started to get annoying. The third week, some incident would occur, and I would -- I’m not proud to say -- lose my shit. A comedy of errors The last time I went through this transition, it was a concert malfunction. I showed up to the theater to see a concert, and the gates were locked. A chulito wrapper rolled by in the wind, like a tumbleweed. Nobody was around, except a stray cat. Is it the wrong day? I confirmed on the website: The concert is today, at this time, at this place. So where is everybody? As I walked around the building, looking for another entrance, I saw a security guard. He told me the concert was cancelled. Something broken on the ceiling of the theater. This was especially aggravating because of everything I had gone through to get these tickets. My foreign credit card didn’t work on the ticket website, so I had to go to a physical ticket kiosk. But then the girl working the kiosk said the system was down. So I came back the next day, and the system was also down. No, it wasn’t “still” down -- it was just down “again.” So I waited in a nearby chair in the mall for forty-five minutes. Then I finally got my tickets. And now the concert is cancelled. I go to the ticket booth at the theater to get my money back. But they tell me I can’t do that here -- I have to go to a special kiosk, across town. Oh, and I can’t do it today -- they won’t be ready to process my refund until tomorrow. I take the afternoon off to go get my refund. After standing in line for half an hour, they tell me they can’t process my refund on my foreign credit card. I have to fill out a form, which they’ll mail to the home office in Bogotá. I should get my refund within ten days. I’m always wary that I’m an immigrant living in another country -- that sometimes the way they do things in that country makes no sense to me. I never want to come off as the “impatient gringo.” But at this point, I become the impatient gringo. I demand my money back, and recount the whole experience to the clerk. In my perturbed state, my Spanish is even more embarrassingly broken. I give in, fill out the form, and leave the ticket kiosk -- without my money. And I’ve been through this enough times to know what’s coming. Out on the sidewalk, in an instant, as if a switch were flipped in my brain, I go from steaming with anger, to calm as a clam. Months worth of pent-up tension melts away from the muscles in my neck and back. I feel relaxed -- almost high. Flipping the “temporal switch” I call this moment the “temporal switch.” I’ve talked to other expats about this phenomenon, and they report something similar. That when you first come to Medellín, it takes awhile to get into the rhythm of life here. But once you’re in that rhythm, you’re more relaxed, more laid back. You’re even happier. You might wonder what my concert catastrophe has to do with the rhythm of life in Colombia. I might be wrong, but somehow it seems that malfunctions are incredibly common here. It certainly seems so to myself and other expats that live here, and even Colombians agree. (If the concert incident is any support for this theory, I’ll add that I never did get a refund -- I ended up calling AMEX to do a chargeback.) These malfunctions have a symbiotic relationship with the rhythm of life. The internal chatter I experience whenever I make the temporal switch might provide some insight. I’m telling myself, “Things aren’t going to work out the first time you try them. You might as well relax, go with the flow, and enjoy the moment.” So perhaps everyone is telling themselves that. “Things aren’t going to work out the first time you try them.” That could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In any case, even if things don’t work out on the first try, don’t worry. It will work out eventually. As the Colombians say, ¡No pasa nada! Some people are on “clock-time.” Other people are on “event-time.” The main reason I chose Colombia as a place to double down on writing was that I simply do better writing while I’m here. I think this temporal switch has a lot to do with that. In his global studies in attitudes about time, social psychologist Robert Levine identified two distinct approaches to time: There’s clock-time, and there’s event-time. Clock-time people schedule according to the time on the clock. Lunch is at this time, this meeting will end at this time, and the next meeting will begin at this other time. Event-time people schedule according to events. When I’m hungry, I’ll eat lunch. This meeting will end once we’ve met the objective, and if that doesn’t take all afternoon, we’ll have this other meeting after that one. Event-time and the “eight-day” week I went through the temporal switch several times before I knew about these two time orientations. Now that I know about clock-time and event-time, much of the behavior that I found puzzling now makes sense. There’s no better illustration of event-time than how Colombians view a week. If a Colombian wants to meet with you a week from now, they will say, “en ocho dias” -- in eight days. The first time I heard this, I was incredibly confused. Today is Wednesday, so -- ocho dias: next Thursday? I was surprised to learn that the eight-day “week” is the standard here in Colombia, as well as many other event-time countries. If today is Wednesday, eight days from now is also Wednesday. As a clock-time person, I was initially convinced that this was objectively wrong. Counting on the clock, the meeting will take place more or less exactly seven days from now -- seven rotations of the earth. But if you think about it from an event-time perspective, it’s not wrong at all. Today is an event, which has not yet ended. There will be six additional days -- each day its own event -- between now and the meeting. The day the meeting takes place is an event in itself. Add that up -- one, six, one, -- and you’ve got eight days between now and the meeting which takes place a week from now. This is not the Beatles’ Eight Days a Week. That was a malapropism -- said by a chauffeur to illustrate that he was working hard. Instead, this is literally how event-time people see the week. It’s a refreshing thought, really: Today counts. Both clock-time and event-time have their place It can come off as politically incorrect to even point out these different attitudes about time. If any of these observations sound judgemental to you, stop and think: Is it because one approach sounds better to you than the other? Well there’s your problem! Both event-time and clock-time are useful, for different contexts. Researchers Tamar Avnet and Anne-Laure Sellier found that both clock-time and event-time approaches can lead to good outcomes. It depends what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re trying to be efficient, clock-time is the way to go. If you’re stacking bricks, Frederick Taylor’s approach to timing movements will get the wall up faster. It’s a clock-time approach. But if you’re trying to be effective, event-time is the way to go. If you’re trying to think of the perfect gift for your tenth wedding anniversary, getting it right is more important than doing it quickly. Avnet and Sellier’s study also demonstrated that clock-time and event-time approaches aren’t strictly cultural. Most of us change our approach based upon what we’re trying to accomplish. It’s when we use a clock-time approach, when an event-time approach would be better, that we get ourselves into trouble. Clock-time is a creativity killer Think about the things you’ve learned in previous episodes of Love Your Work. Remember from episode 218 that creative work follows four distinct stages. Remember from episode 226 that when Frederick Taylor tried to treat time as a production unit] his productivity eventually collapsed. Consider this study from Stanford. They found that the busier knowledge workers were, the less creative they were. The more they struggled to fit work into the time available, the more they let creativity fall by the wayside. Remember some of the ways that creative work is not like moving chunks of iron or stacking bricks. Ideas can be worthless, or they can be priceless. Ideas can also arrive in an instant. And when they do arrive, the moment they arrive is often far removed from the work that produced the idea. When the work you’re doing right now isn’t immediately bringing results, and when those results may come unpredictably -- at any time -- you can see how working on clock-time is a stressful recipe. Use time as a guide, not as restriction So what’s the solution? Should you be a clock-time person, or should you be an event-time person? Obviously, if you can’t do anything on-time, you’re going to have a tough time. You’ll disrespect people by showing up late, you’ll miss deadlines. You’ll end up racing against the clock. But I prefer to think of time as descriptive, not prescriptive. The minutes and hours on the clock are not little boxes that you need to stuff work into. The minutes and hours on the clock are instead rough measurements for how to allocate your energy. Time is a useful proxy for measuring and dividing up energy. It’s not a strict template for guiding every action you take. If you read roughly an hour a day, you’ll read a lot of books. If you meditate roughly fifteen minutes a day, you’ll be more present the rest of your day. If you brainstorm something for five minutes today, the solution will come to you sometime tomorrow. If instead, you’re trying to finish reading a chapter in the next ten minutes, or you’re trying to come up with the perfect company strategy before the meeting ends at noon, your efforts are just going to backfire. Avnet and Sellier have found that people who depend too much on the clock to dictate their schedules are less present, are less able to savor positive emotions, and are less open to the unpredictable and emerging opportunities that are inherent to creative work. Pay attention to how you’re scheduling your work. Ask yourself: Am I working according to the clock -- trying to fit work into restricted time; or am I working according to events -- trying to get it right? If you’re trying to be creative, try to practice less clock-time, and more event-time. Image: Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Giacomo Balla My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/clock-time-event-time/