Three Things On My Mind This Week
(Note: This was first posted here on Substack.)
Feel Good Productivity
What if the key to unlocking your productivity potential lies not in relentless hustle but in the simple act of feeling good?
I don’t consider myself a productivity enthusiast, though I have read a few books on the topic. I very much appreciate downtime, especially under the sun, and am cautious not to make my life into an exercise in maximizing output all of the time.
This is why I enjoyed Ali Abdaal’s approach in his book, Feel Good Productivity.
“Individuals who frequently experience positive emotions aren’t just more sociable, optimistic and creative. They also accomplish more. These people bring an infectious energy to their environment, proving more likely to enjoy fulfilling relationships, get higher salaries and truly shine in their professional lives. Those who cultivate positive emotions at work morph into better problem-solvers, planners, creative thinkers and resilient go-getters. They’re less stressed, attract higher evaluations from their superiors and show a higher degree of loyalty to their organisations. Put simply: success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.”
There are several insightful points in this read, but what stuck with me is the power of focusing on just feeling good as a mechanism for being more productive.
After all, what are we talking about when we discuss the value of confidence or charisma in the workplace? Those are outward manifestations of someone who genuinely feels good about themselves.
I have written at length about body language and its impacts on career success. But even that approach as I describe it involves positioning yourself to feel more confident and project it. You feel good in addition to looking confident.
It’s easy to draw this out as well. If you want to be successful and productive at work or in other areas of your life, focus on making yourself feel great. Sleep well. Eat well. Exercise. Stretch. Breathe deeply. Take breaks.
“The people who seem to get the most done are often those who’ve turned doing nothing for large chunks of time into a fine art. In one study, the software company Draugiem Group set out to find out how much time people spent on various tasks and how it related to each worker’s productivity. The workers who were most productive were not the ones who chained themselves to their desks. Nor were they the ones who gave themselves a healthy-sounding five-minute break every hour. The most productive workers gave themselves an almost unbelievable amount of time off: a work-to-break ratio of fifty-two minutes of work to seventeen minutes of rest.”
Loneliness and Addiction
In Johann Hari’s sweeping narrative, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, she cites research that contradicted the once-established narrative surrounding drug addiction.
It was previously understood that drug addiction was purely chemical and physical. Once you begin consuming, you get hooked and can’t get off. This was long verified by rat studies where they were placed in cages and given access to drugs such as morphine, became addicted, and consumed more and more until they killed themselves.
One researcher, Bruce Alexander, noted that the rats being tested were always isolated for observation, alone and bored in their cages. He wondered if changing that ecosystem would change the research.
After setting up a wonderful “Rat Park”, where rats were kept together for bonding and play, with plentiful access to toys and other rat amenities, Alexander found the residents of Rat Park using 80 percent less morphine than those rats that were kept in isolation. This led him to a theory that “If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.”
Later in the book, this theory seems confirmed when discussing a Swiss clinic where heroin is legally administered to addicts. Being a heroin addict is like a full-time job, where you wake up in the morning and spend your day trying to figure out a way to get the money to buy your drugs, whether that involves stealing, prostitution, or other means. You get your fix, call it a day, and wake up the next morning to do it all over again.
Once the addicts can walk into this Swiss clinic and have the heroin administered legally, suddenly they have entire days and lives to fill with relationships, work, etc. The clinic finds that new patients begin by increasing their heroin dose, but over time, as they develop more constructive and enriching lives and become more ingrained into society, they voluntarily reduce their intake. “Users can stay on this program for as long as they want, but the average patient will come here for three years, and at the end of that time, only 15 percent are still using every day.”
Drugs are the focus of the book, but one can see how this same theory about isolation leading to addiction might apply to other compulsive behaviors, from gambling to social media to porn.
One of my cardinal vices for the last several years has been travel. While rewarding and healthy in many ways, it’s also a form of escapism. Heading out of the country allows me to leave my world behind. And as soon as I return from one adventure, I am anxious until I plan the next. Interestingly, and supporting Alexander’s theory, I noticed that once I became the guardian of a wonderful little puppy, my travel cravings and need for escape were relaxed.
The Company You Keep
A subscriber, captivated by my sharp insights and bulletproof wisdom, asked me to write any advice I have on “how not to let other peoples’ energy interfere with yours.”
I think there are two ways to think about this situation.
There are good, happy, well-meaning people in our lives who fall on hard times and have bad days. This can affect their energy and bring you down, for sure. But these are likely people in your life that enrich it most other days, and it’s worth being a shoulder to cry on to help them through a tough time. If you need to break the negative energy, you can try to move the conversation in a direction that focuses on the positive over the negative, and give them time and space to recover.
But some people are perpetually negative and toxic. Everyone has people in their life, maybe at work or through a family connection, who always look for the downside or try to bring others down. These energy vampires can ruin any situation and pull us into bad days, weeks, or — in intimate and family relationships — bad years.
The only solution is avoidance.
Rule #10 in Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power is “Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and the Unlucky.” He states, “You can die from someone else’s misery—emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.”
We are often far too generous with whom we spend our time. Just as we wouldn’t spend much close time around someone with the flu, we should keep our distance from the perpetually negative.
I have always found the adage “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” to be on point. In most areas of my life – career, financial, social, physical health, etc. – I can think of a couple of people close to me who are more advanced than I am, and a couple of others who are less progressed. As I have grown in some ways, the people I spend more time with have shifted accordingly.
This is a useful tool in any area that you wish to progress, as you can help yourself advance by surrounding yourself with people who are more like what you want to become.
For example, when Covid started, the gym shut down and for years I have not had a membership to one. I have worked out at my apartment gym and gone on runs outside to stay in shape. While I felt like I was in great shape, recently I joined a serious, quality gym. Now, at 5 am each morning, I am surrounded by people who exercise professionally. At first, this was intimidating, but it quickly became energizing, and I am finding myself elevating my game in response to my new surroundings.
This same principle holds with energy vampires and toxic people. If you spend time around them, you will become more like them. To have things to discuss with them, you will start having to look for the problem in every situation.
Avoid them like the plague. Identify people who have sunnier outlooks on life and find ways to spend time with them.
“There is nothing to be gained by associating with those who infect you with their misery; there is only power and good fortune to be obtained by associating with the fortunate. Ignore this law at your peril.”