Think - Part Two
Last year around this time, I reflected on one of the most important things my father taught me: to think.
Father's Day was last weekend, and I'm reflecting again on that sage advice, which I heard so many times as a kid but didn’t really embrace until much later in life.
I’ve been refocusing this blog on the intersection of productivity and identity, two concepts not frequently mentioned in the same breath. This has me considering how to "think" in a new way: how can a focus on genuine, tough, and thorough thought help us be more productive?
Two thoughts for today:
- Intentionality is everything
Productivity methods, no matter which you turn to, revolve around intentionality. It’s applying a system, a tool, or a practice to a thing that could be made better. More efficient. But if applied without intention, none of that will help a bit.
You have to intentionally select the method. And then intentionally apply and assess it. This is why so many people run into problems with productivity advice—they are trying to take something that works well for one person and map it onto their own processes without considering whether that system is actually the right fit.
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Highly effective productivity systems aren't off-the-shelf models. It's the tinkering and customization to suit your own unique brain and lifestyle that truly makes a productivity system sing.
In other words, you truly have to think about what you are doing, rather than blindly applying a system, crossing your fingers, and hoping for the best.
- Thinking --> Struggle --> Growth & Satisfaction
There's a difference between quick gains you can get from implementing a shiny new tool and the deeper progress you can make when you fully lean into a well considered system.
We like to avoid struggle, and for understandable reasons. Struggle is hard. We just want the low hanging fruit, and if all of that has already been picked, we want to find some way to lower the higher up fruit so that we can reach it without bothering to find a ladder.
But solving a tough problem and earning the result is how you carve the deeper grooves of growth. It's where you actually learn how to do a thing, instead of just having the thing done for you, that you internalize the lesson and fully benefit from it. It's finding the ladder to reach that higher fruit, or perhaps constructing a makeshift ladder from materials around you. Or maybe it's building a machine that shakes the tree and drops the fruit down on you so you don't need a ladder at all. I don't know. This metaphor is getting a tad ridiculous.
Thoughtful struggle is about more than just growth. According to Arthur C. Brooks, one of the world's foremost experts on happiness, struggle is also an essential ingredient of genuine satisfaction.
The bad news, then, is that it's never as simple as clicking a few buttons. No single app, carelessly applied, will fit your exact needs and instantly 10x your productivity (no matter how slick the marketing campaign that tries to make that seem like reality).
But I firmly believe that this is also the good news, because along the way you'll have to click a whole lot of buttons and try a bunch of things out until you find something that really does work for you. And at the end of it, you won't just have a system that helps you get stuff done in the short term, but you will have grown substantially along the way. It's a harder path, but a much more meaningful one, to be sure.
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Thinking is harder than not thinking. Growing is harder than not growing. But that higher up fruit is oh so much sweeter.
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p.s. Here's this week's guaranteed-to-be-terrible WordPress-generated AI photo based on the text of this post. One wonders if WordPress will ever generate something I'd be excited to use as anything other than a punchline. I have my doubts.
