This makes a point against the "CEO morning routine" kind of approach, but from my point of view, it is not that different from that perspective on life. It still talks about "proactively moving towards #1 or top 25%", "be so good they can't ignore you", "10x work", "something extraordinary" etc.
Take that direction if that's what makes you tick. I've decided that that's not how I want to live my life, quit a 'prestigious' position, left the competitive career, and I now work as a teacher with "10x personal satisfaction".
Yeah exactly. I don’t even think he’s right about how pivotal a lot of them bellwether events he cites are. If you don’t nail the punchline in your marketing you can change the punchline or the marketing. So it’s important but because it can be changed you might find yourself taking another path than “home run marketing” that is still very successful. For all he’s decrying hustle culture he seems very immured in it.
Is that because of pay and CoL? I imagine if you work hard in your 40s and have a lot of financial success, transitioning to teaching might be less stressful.
If you already have a house and a fat 401k, just paying the bills at a certain age is fine.
The actual teaching is like 10% of the job at best and shrinking, school administrators have to be the dumbest category of people who hold advanced degrees (I don’t level that charge lightly), schools are heavily hierarchical and hard to influence toward improvement if you’re not in admin, constant methodology churn for all sorts of things based on whichever new “system” caught the superintendent’s fancy at their last district-funded drinking getaway er, I mean, conference. Which they’ll go on to half-understand, fail to apply the parts that make them uncomfortable, and of course doom the new program without its even having a chance. While creating a bunch of new work for the teachers and breaking stuff that was working fine. “Office” politics where the median would qualify as quite bad in the private sector.
Politicians and half the parents think you’re the enemy, in a very real way. No support from parents on discipline issues. Admin piss-pants scared of parents, too. Comp-vs-CoL varies wildly over the country, and mostly in the ways you’d expect, so it’s ok some places but it’s terrible in many others.
Only semi-related to satisfaction, but I was looking at a chart of suicide rates by industry recently[0]. And the lowest rate for both men and women was "Education services" and "Education, training, and library," aka teachers.
My guesses as to why:
- To teach is to be focused on the future, day after day. This is the opposite of dwelling on the past, which is commonly associated with depression, which is commonly associated with suicide.
- Teachers are surrounded by kids, and kids tend to change and develop drastically over the course of a year, usually for the better in terms of knowledge and maturity. Seeing that might inspire some optimism.
- Teachers are a crucial pillar of an impressionable community of hundreds of children at that. So they're less likely to trend toward suicide, because they feel less alone, more community, more accountability, and more responsibility.
- There's something inherently purposeful about teaching, at a deep biological level. Purposeful work leads to a purposeful life leads to lower chances of suicide.
it's certainly possible to be depressed due to dwelling on the future. i guess it'd be anxiety or if you're just in a terrible situation with no easy way out
Or maybe it's easy to just drop out of teaching? Versus a more specialized profession, like dentistry?
Also, you'll notice that the highest suicide professions are also the most physically dangerous. It stands to reason that suicide often follows a life-changing debilitating injury. That would be pretty rare in teaching.
The complexity of a field you are leaving doesnt make it hard to drop out. A dentist is very well prepared to be a hair stylist, but I've never heard of that choice.
Dentists also don't have a lot of job related debilitating injuries, aside from depressions.
But also - you can end up with class of unruly spoiled kids and experience burnout after burnout. You see almost any higher profession have much more money in their lives, despite having a massive amount of free time. But that free time ain't so huge as it may seem - good teachers keep preparing themselves even in their 50s for next day, grading, school bureaucracy etc.
I have a climbing buddy who is US origin and teaches smaller kids in Geneva, Switzerland in prestigious private school, all above applies hard for him. Got off this school year twice from burnout. Normally he has 1-2 bad kids but this year it was 10, every day was pure suffering for him and even with assistant it was above their capabilities. The thing is, its a profession that makes you unemployable elsewhere apart from basic blue collar jobs, so quitting is not really that good of an option.
Just giving perspective, I am not teacher and probably wouldn't enjoy doing it. Preferring work hard and then have some cool time in the mountains during evenings/weekend or travel for holidays. But I consider it massively underpaid profession, those folks deserve same recognition as doctors are getting (with logic that doctors 'just' treat current problems, but teachers literally hold future of mankind in their hands and mold it, and in this world you cca always get what you pay for).
Without strong routines and habits my life would be a mess and I would still be working at McDonalds. With ADHD I need routines and habits to not fall into the abyss. Maybe it works for some people, but not me.
E: also I used all those habits and routines to achieve my own goals and run a business for a decade.
I guess in that case, it's hopeless, don't try, since you can't have absolute certainty of the imperviousness of your new routine then just continue improv-jazzing through life.
Is that better?
Of course that's utterly insane. If you have ADHD then you should be putting more effort into routinization, not less and certainly not making up reasons that you can't even try.
This reads as needlessly hostile, maybe from assuming the worst interpretation of what kohbo is saying.
Charitably, I read it as 'Telling someone to get good at the thing they are struggling with doesn't work'. This is similar to the oft seen adages of 'just do things to make you happy to fix your depression' met with sarcastic 'gee thanks, I'm cured' responses.
Certain habits, skills, etc, might be more important for some people to focus on than others to manage debilitating effects, but that importance comes with the consequence of those same feats being harder.
“What do you do if your habit framework gets jostled”
“You adapt to it — don’t let fear of inevitable challenges prevent you from starting”
“No thanks I have ADHD”
Okay, what other possible answer is there? There’s no way to guarantee your habits don’t get jostled and there’s no method to correct it than adapting. Any specific adaptation method is also notably harder for ADHD folks too. Yes, it is harder, that’s why in order to succeed at this thing one needs to work harder. Any Quick Tip that’d make this easier for an ADHD person would make it easier for everyone else too, ergo it’d be the default advice, and it’d still be harder for an ADHD person to apply.
I think it's fair to say "you adapt" is ~useless advice for everyone, FWIW.
You need a certain amount of flexibility anyway. Travel happens, etc, when running a business. I know I will be less productive and just plan podcasts or whatever in an airplane. It’s okay to relax during travel for me. I get my thinking and work done other times.
During Covid when my entire routine process was disrupted by work from home where I couldn’t do my daily thing I basically became the least productive person on my team. On days where my morning is severely disrupted basically the whole day is shot.
I generally can adapt to long term new situations by inventing new routines but I fall apart without structure.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge it’s a bad thing but it is what it is. I’m sure the commenter above is similar
That is part of ADHD. Knowing you just can’t function the same in some environments. Plan ahead, know your routines and such resume when you are back to a more controlled environment. Set expectations with business partners, work deadlines, etc.
Personally it takes me a couple days to re-cement a routine after missing a day. Which means I can maintain my routines as long as I don't miss more than a day or two a week. I used to schedule a weekly rest day with no routines and no checklists, but now with kids I just let those days fall as needed.
The real issue is skipping several days in a row. If I drop my routines for a weeklong vacation it takes more than a month to build them back.
One thing I've discovered for myself is that the routine doesn't decay as quickly if I at least maintain a placeholder. For example, even if I don't have time to do an exercise routine I can usually do five pushups. Even if I can't meditate for ten minutes, I can still sit and breathe for a minute. Even if I can't do all the dishes before bed, I can scrape them off. That makes it much easier to resume the routine. It doesn't deepen the rut but it does prevent it from being washed away.
Cal Newport tells stories about some amazing people in the past that we think of today as A+ players and very productive. But by today's standards, they would be considered loafers!
People fall en masse in the productivity = output/time trap because they have no direction. We are all chasing money and status, and it shows. People we regard as great past personalities are considered great for the outcomes they obtained, not for 'griding/hustling' non stop.
I honestly think that the necessity to busy ourselves is a symptom of a deep malaise. Very few people even feel able to consider greater collective outcomes. We need to keep the wheel spinning and the creditors at bay.
I'm a routine guy, so I'm biased, but I find myself agreeing with the values in this post, while feeling that a routing enables those values. For example,
> This is why I’m so positive on sending outbound emails to interesting people, hosting dinners and events that bring together smart folks...
I find that I'm much better at this kind of proactive outreach when I have routines that push me towards this.
The non-routine approach tends to break down when you need to collaborate IME (though many companies are successfully asynchronous).
The little daily things add up, not doing exercise can significantly impact not only your weight / insulin levels, exercise is to release endorphins for the day to help make better decisions and live a happier life. Daily routines of the .05x stack up. That's the point. 1% better a day in any given area of life is still better than 0. Who cares about the 10x, why is that even a factor? Just be a good human and contribute the most you can, when you can.
The author lost me when he started talking about "10x work."
I don't need to be more productive. I accomplish plenty in both my work life and my real life. If anything, I need to accomplish fewer things and spend more time living in the moment.
Indeed. Are you going to get 10x pay for 10x work? No. Very rarely, for certain types of contractor. But this particular type of hustle culture is more like buying 10x lottery tickets - you do get 10x more chances to hit it big, but from a low baseline.
Although if I were, I could stop at noon on Monday and do something for me the rest of the week?
(If only it worked like that! Suppose it somewhat does if you're self-employed, sole trader something or another. But realistically even then there's customers or something, some external factor that needs at least some work most days or at a moment's notice.)
Reading things that don't necessarily apply directly to oneself can still be informative, and possibly establish other connections by virtue of secondary points.
10x work is code for doing the fun stuff and ignoring the grunt work. For every person focused on 10x there are a half-dozen cleaning up all the not-fun work they choose to ignore. Fun 10x work is the stuff that has 10x positive impacts, but ignores all the grunt work that has 100x negative impacts when not done properly. Finding a way to shoehorn the word "AI" into your next product launch: Fun. Talking to Microsoft legal department about the implications of using AI in your product: not fun. Selecting new color swatches for product lines: fun. Sorting out labor contracts to avoid a strike: not fun, but monumentally more important. (See recent Westjet strike and resulting travel disruptions over a long weekend.)
100% agree. I've worked with what could be considered "10x programmers" and their wake was almost always littered with time-consuming tech debt and housekeeping chores they didn't do, or they did something very fast that was off-the-mark because they didn't have the hard "hash-it-out" conversations before plowing ahead with an inaccurate end goal.
> Our careers are defined by the highest moments of its biggest upside swings.
The author makes this logical attempt to "refute the paradigm of fitter, happier, more productive routines as the secret to success" but starts with this completely subjective premise which is kind of hidden in this word salad sentence.
"Success" by other definitions can be greatly enhanced by routine and regularity. If I define my career by the time I have available to myself while making enough money the a routine helps tremendously. I can focus and get things done so I can stop working. That's success!
Sound like the writer didn't like routines and created the logic backwards from there. There are many things in life that are low impact on their own, but have a cumulative effect. Yeah yoga in the morning isn't 10X... I guess the only option is to be a chump or go straight to max dosage of anabolic steroids.
I felt like I would agree with this article more than I did.
I'm definitely one of those people who has fallen into the slump of do a bunch of the same things every day, rinse, and repeat, largely driven by the requests of others. I do despise it, but at the same time, I wish I worked some more routine into my day so I can make more progress on the things that matter to me. But largely I feel burnt out from the routine of others that is imposed upon me, and it causes an almost visceral reaction to adding more planned time to my day.
But I think where I really didn't connect was the framing. The "productivity" thing, as if my goal in life should be to maximize output. The author frames routine as a robotic state, but I'd argue productivity maximization is an even more robotic trait.
It's really okay to have some hours in your day where you both don't have a routine and don't "accomplish" anything.
The only case I see is against "10x" and overachievement in general. My morning yoga routine keeps me in shape and healthy. It's very pedestrian, I don't try to improve much, but it works. Maybe people should learn to relax a little and think about what's really important.
This is silly. You do the routine stuff so that when the "10x" opportunities come, you are fit to execute on them. It's like saying pro athletes shouldn't spend all that boring time in the gym - just score some points! Maybe the author is trying to point out that it's easy to think that the routine stuff is the ultimate point, which is fair, but I fear (young) people will read this and think (as I used to) that all they have to do is go with the flow and be naturally brilliant.
Well said. It is much of the "the harder you work, the luckier you get". But with most things, blind execution won't work. Reflection and introspection are needed to shape your ever evolving journey. Do whatever works for you, just do so intentionally!
This characteristic is pervasive in this author's writing, in my opinion. I can't tell if he's willfully missing the obvious underlying truth in order to get contrarian hype clicks or if he really just doesn't notice things like what you're pointing out.
“I don’t believe small changes can build to big ones” - lots of people
The latter is the much more likely error. Apparently or proximally low-impact routines like exercise, meditation, journaling, reading, etc. are frequently advocated specifically because they are extremely high impact but do not look like they are.
Inversely, permanently improv-jazzing through life and frenetically jumping from “high impact activity” to “high impact activity” feels productive, but if you succeed at this you are almost certain to burn yourself out before it really matters. And much more likely is that there really aren’t that many high impact things you can be doing, so what it actually looks like is either 1) waiting for something high impact enough to justify action, which never just comes to you, or 2) shifting your priorities to start treating highly available low-impact things as if they are high impact.
In the event you do have a series of high-impact things to do in rapid succession, you’re going to be totally dependent on your routines to sustain that work, so you had better hope you built them prior.
There's no "one size fits all" solution. Some folks work best when they highly structure their time, some folks with less or almost no structure. Experiment and find what works best for you.
Personally, I find it best to block out some time for things I want to get done and things I must get done. Those are my daily routines. :) Everything else, I fit in on the fly.
You often don't know which work was "10x" except in retrospect, so this advice is a little like recommending people only invest in the stocks that are going to go up.
One way or another, you will have a routine. We are creatures of habit. It can either work for you or against you.
This seems mostly a diatribe against chasing "productivity" in disguise, with anti-routine as the clickbait hook, bait-and-switch. Habits are powerful in part because they allow you to reduce overhead. If your auto-pilot routine is to doomscroll, why would this be less stressful than a yoga session?
> The question is how to create the most opportunities at achieving that, not how to execute perfect little habits.
Say, wouldn't it be nice if there was some tool we could leverage to do that?
Yoga and meditation isn't about advancing your career.
For what it's worth, the most productive people I know seem to do basically no planning, but respond to almost everything immediately in the moment. Replying to emails as soon as they see them, making a phone call to have the conversation right now, etc.
By focusing on speed, they are able to accomplish a very large amount and never let a backlog build up. In some ways this feels closely aligned with the author's point. But these people are also spending a lot of time on what the author would call "1x" work (replying to emails, etc).
Our careers are defined by the highest moments of its biggest upside swings.
The "highest moment of biggest upside swing" can be likened to winning a jack pot. A not solid career or life advice.
In my opinion, our careers are defined by the "area under curve" of achievements.
Bruce Lee gradually became a megastar by exercising and learning, gradually, not by hitting someone's head in a convoluted flying rotating high knee kick that is not repeatable at all.
Lee chased a lot of opportunities, like any actor looking for a break. And also a victim of a somewhat random early death from cerebral edema, seemingly unrelated to all his martial arts.
121 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadTake that direction if that's what makes you tick. I've decided that that's not how I want to live my life, quit a 'prestigious' position, left the competitive career, and I now work as a teacher with "10x personal satisfaction".
I don't know what country you're speaking from, but here in the US teaching seems to have an extremely low job satisfaction rate.
If you already have a house and a fat 401k, just paying the bills at a certain age is fine.
The actual teaching is like 10% of the job at best and shrinking, school administrators have to be the dumbest category of people who hold advanced degrees (I don’t level that charge lightly), schools are heavily hierarchical and hard to influence toward improvement if you’re not in admin, constant methodology churn for all sorts of things based on whichever new “system” caught the superintendent’s fancy at their last district-funded drinking getaway er, I mean, conference. Which they’ll go on to half-understand, fail to apply the parts that make them uncomfortable, and of course doom the new program without its even having a chance. While creating a bunch of new work for the teachers and breaking stuff that was working fine. “Office” politics where the median would qualify as quite bad in the private sector.
Politicians and half the parents think you’re the enemy, in a very real way. No support from parents on discipline issues. Admin piss-pants scared of parents, too. Comp-vs-CoL varies wildly over the country, and mostly in the ways you’d expect, so it’s ok some places but it’s terrible in many others.
My guesses as to why:
- To teach is to be focused on the future, day after day. This is the opposite of dwelling on the past, which is commonly associated with depression, which is commonly associated with suicide.
- Teachers are surrounded by kids, and kids tend to change and develop drastically over the course of a year, usually for the better in terms of knowledge and maturity. Seeing that might inspire some optimism.
- Teachers are a crucial pillar of an impressionable community of hundreds of children at that. So they're less likely to trend toward suicide, because they feel less alone, more community, more accountability, and more responsibility.
- There's something inherently purposeful about teaching, at a deep biological level. Purposeful work leads to a purposeful life leads to lower chances of suicide.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7250a2.htm
Also, you'll notice that the highest suicide professions are also the most physically dangerous. It stands to reason that suicide often follows a life-changing debilitating injury. That would be pretty rare in teaching.
Dentists also don't have a lot of job related debilitating injuries, aside from depressions.
I have a climbing buddy who is US origin and teaches smaller kids in Geneva, Switzerland in prestigious private school, all above applies hard for him. Got off this school year twice from burnout. Normally he has 1-2 bad kids but this year it was 10, every day was pure suffering for him and even with assistant it was above their capabilities. The thing is, its a profession that makes you unemployable elsewhere apart from basic blue collar jobs, so quitting is not really that good of an option.
Just giving perspective, I am not teacher and probably wouldn't enjoy doing it. Preferring work hard and then have some cool time in the mountains during evenings/weekend or travel for holidays. But I consider it massively underpaid profession, those folks deserve same recognition as doctors are getting (with logic that doctors 'just' treat current problems, but teachers literally hold future of mankind in their hands and mold it, and in this world you cca always get what you pay for).
E: also I used all those habits and routines to achieve my own goals and run a business for a decade.
Is that better?
Of course that's utterly insane. If you have ADHD then you should be putting more effort into routinization, not less and certainly not making up reasons that you can't even try.
Charitably, I read it as 'Telling someone to get good at the thing they are struggling with doesn't work'. This is similar to the oft seen adages of 'just do things to make you happy to fix your depression' met with sarcastic 'gee thanks, I'm cured' responses.
Certain habits, skills, etc, might be more important for some people to focus on than others to manage debilitating effects, but that importance comes with the consequence of those same feats being harder.
“You adapt to it — don’t let fear of inevitable challenges prevent you from starting”
“No thanks I have ADHD”
Okay, what other possible answer is there? There’s no way to guarantee your habits don’t get jostled and there’s no method to correct it than adapting. Any specific adaptation method is also notably harder for ADHD folks too. Yes, it is harder, that’s why in order to succeed at this thing one needs to work harder. Any Quick Tip that’d make this easier for an ADHD person would make it easier for everyone else too, ergo it’d be the default advice, and it’d still be harder for an ADHD person to apply.
I think it's fair to say "you adapt" is ~useless advice for everyone, FWIW.
Despite the insistence of many in our parents' generations, ADHD is not a disorder of not applying oneself hard enough.
I generally can adapt to long term new situations by inventing new routines but I fall apart without structure.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge it’s a bad thing but it is what it is. I’m sure the commenter above is similar
The real issue is skipping several days in a row. If I drop my routines for a weeklong vacation it takes more than a month to build them back.
One thing I've discovered for myself is that the routine doesn't decay as quickly if I at least maintain a placeholder. For example, even if I don't have time to do an exercise routine I can usually do five pushups. Even if I can't meditate for ten minutes, I can still sit and breathe for a minute. Even if I can't do all the dishes before bed, I can scrape them off. That makes it much easier to resume the routine. It doesn't deepen the rut but it does prevent it from being washed away.
Cal Newport tells stories about some amazing people in the past that we think of today as A+ players and very productive. But by today's standards, they would be considered loafers!
I honestly think that the necessity to busy ourselves is a symptom of a deep malaise. Very few people even feel able to consider greater collective outcomes. We need to keep the wheel spinning and the creditors at bay.
> This is why I’m so positive on sending outbound emails to interesting people, hosting dinners and events that bring together smart folks...
I find that I'm much better at this kind of proactive outreach when I have routines that push me towards this.
The non-routine approach tends to break down when you need to collaborate IME (though many companies are successfully asynchronous).
I don't need to be more productive. I accomplish plenty in both my work life and my real life. If anything, I need to accomplish fewer things and spend more time living in the moment.
If you own the company, quite possibly yes.
Otherwise, very very unlikely.
(If only it worked like that! Suppose it somewhat does if you're self-employed, sole trader something or another. But realistically even then there's customers or something, some external factor that needs at least some work most days or at a moment's notice.)
The author makes this logical attempt to "refute the paradigm of fitter, happier, more productive routines as the secret to success" but starts with this completely subjective premise which is kind of hidden in this word salad sentence.
"Success" by other definitions can be greatly enhanced by routine and regularity. If I define my career by the time I have available to myself while making enough money the a routine helps tremendously. I can focus and get things done so I can stop working. That's success!
I'm definitely one of those people who has fallen into the slump of do a bunch of the same things every day, rinse, and repeat, largely driven by the requests of others. I do despise it, but at the same time, I wish I worked some more routine into my day so I can make more progress on the things that matter to me. But largely I feel burnt out from the routine of others that is imposed upon me, and it causes an almost visceral reaction to adding more planned time to my day.
But I think where I really didn't connect was the framing. The "productivity" thing, as if my goal in life should be to maximize output. The author frames routine as a robotic state, but I'd argue productivity maximization is an even more robotic trait.
It's really okay to have some hours in your day where you both don't have a routine and don't "accomplish" anything.
I suspect many oafs do a lot less effective work than that during a week.
Source: have been such an oaf after a period of burnout
“I don’t believe small changes can build to big ones” - lots of people
The latter is the much more likely error. Apparently or proximally low-impact routines like exercise, meditation, journaling, reading, etc. are frequently advocated specifically because they are extremely high impact but do not look like they are.
Inversely, permanently improv-jazzing through life and frenetically jumping from “high impact activity” to “high impact activity” feels productive, but if you succeed at this you are almost certain to burn yourself out before it really matters. And much more likely is that there really aren’t that many high impact things you can be doing, so what it actually looks like is either 1) waiting for something high impact enough to justify action, which never just comes to you, or 2) shifting your priorities to start treating highly available low-impact things as if they are high impact.
In the event you do have a series of high-impact things to do in rapid succession, you’re going to be totally dependent on your routines to sustain that work, so you had better hope you built them prior.
Personally, I find it best to block out some time for things I want to get done and things I must get done. Those are my daily routines. :) Everything else, I fit in on the fly.
This seems mostly a diatribe against chasing "productivity" in disguise, with anti-routine as the clickbait hook, bait-and-switch. Habits are powerful in part because they allow you to reduce overhead. If your auto-pilot routine is to doomscroll, why would this be less stressful than a yoga session?
> The question is how to create the most opportunities at achieving that, not how to execute perfect little habits.
Say, wouldn't it be nice if there was some tool we could leverage to do that?
Yoga and meditation isn't about advancing your career.
By focusing on speed, they are able to accomplish a very large amount and never let a backlog build up. In some ways this feels closely aligned with the author's point. But these people are also spending a lot of time on what the author would call "1x" work (replying to emails, etc).
In my opinion, our careers are defined by the "area under curve" of achievements.
Bruce Lee gradually became a megastar by exercising and learning, gradually, not by hitting someone's head in a convoluted flying rotating high knee kick that is not repeatable at all.