What If It Doesn’t Have to Be Hard? (Productive Flourishing Pulse #469)
Or, As Hard As You Think
It’s mid-February. We’ve made it through the majority of winter in the northern hemisphere.
Are we the worse for wear? Are our lips chapped?
For many of us, the answer to both is yes.
But is winter as hard as it’s made out to be — or are we making things harder by telling a certain story (that winter equals misery)?
Not to literally quote Shakespeare, but: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (It’s Hamlet, for those curious.)
Take heart: it's not uniquely a "you" problem. Sometimes we all just make things harder than they need to be, whether in the stories we tell ourselves, or the way we approach our work.
Lots of us carry around the deep-seated belief that if we don’t sweat and exert maximum effort, we will miss out on success.
We are hardwired to believe “harder” = more worthwhile. Likewise, “doing more” = better.
At what cost to us?
Do these beliefs get us any closer to thriving? What we’re mostly creating is a Wall of Hard. To refer to a classic one-liner from Charlie:
“If being more productive means Doing More Things, you can let me off the bus now.”
Productivity isn’t about doing painful stuff more rapidly. It’s about doing what matters.
You’ll lose less time by pausing and taking a moment to wonder:
Is there an easier way?
Is there a way to move towards this goal that makes more sense or (equally important) feels better?
What’s your practice and process along the way?
It’s not only about what you’ll get at the end, but who you’re becoming through exerting the effort.
Now that there’s so little left of winter, there may be just enough time left to enjoy it for what it is and embrace the process.
Use February to reset your projects, but also to shift how you think about those projects — and which best-work projects you want to keep moving forward.
That’ll take some unlearning and relearning.
Time to begin that work and practice.
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Reads and Seeds
My recommendations — an eclectic mix of bits and longer reads that have meant a lot recently:
- on Why We Need “Political Content” on Social Media: “Business, employment, entrepreneurship, marketing, self-promotion, coaching, creating content... each has a politics. And if we don't identify and analyze that politics, then we let the status quo continue — which certainly works for some but absolutely doesn't work for others.”
- , a meditation guru and coach, has sent out his newsletter every single day since 2016. It’s readable in under a minute. From a recent note: “If you're wondering what's going to happen when you go nomadic or start your passion project, the reality is, you can’t know… because you’re viewing it from your comfort zone. The comfort zone magnifies worst-case scenarios. But the entirety of your life experience has been preparing you for this change. So if you have an unambiguous, heartfelt desire to act, then act.” Watch him explain to Rich Roll how (and why) he lives out of a backpack.
You’ve heard this idea that hunter-gatherers historically worked ~15 hours per week (and in the 21st century, we work far more than the average medieval peasant)? James Suzman’s seminal anthropology book Affluence Without Abundance: What We Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Civilization1 gave us the hunter-gatherer insight — and the bonus takeaway that if civilization is measured by its endurance over time, the Bushmen of the Kalahari are by far the most successful in human history.
This piece in The New Yorker by the wondrous Zadie Smith on her teenage fall from grace, namely off a windowsill, from the second story of her family’s house in North London at 17: “Considering the current existence of teen-agers, I try to remind myself that [...] two of my favorite, intimate self-cures continue to be readily available: people and books. Being with people. Reading books.”
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