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I learn a lot from some people, and next to nothing from others.
This teacher I have, a teacher whom I don’t like as a person has taught me more than maybe all the other teachers combined with just a sentence here and a sentence there.
Why? Because he doesn’t teach anything that he doesn’t personally need, uses, and find useful.
It is hard to imagine why I’d like to follow someone’s example, a person’s whom I don’t like, but there we are: I am following his example in many different ways.
Of course he is younger. Much younger. And he is healthy. Of course he also teaches what more people want to learn…
But I do learn what I learn, and I am happy about that.
Everyone and their brother talk about productivity…
Productivity is the art of getting things done. Things that need be done, so you can get paid, so you can have health, so you can have a clean organized environment.
It is an efficiency measure. On the two armed scale in one cup goes the effort, the other cup the production.
Input and output. Their ratio can be called productivity.
Input can be measured in
- time,
- skills,
- passion,
- attention,
- intensity.
And when I detail it like that, you can see that we humans dilute our input.
- We take long breaks.
- We don’t have good skills.
- Withhold our passion.
- Get distracted, or
- try to do too many things at the same time.
- And are lame with our intensity.
And any activity will take as long as much time you allow it to take… That is Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.
It’s a law because human nature is stingy.
So let’s look at what would happen if we increased our input? any single element of input, by 1%.
The output would also increase by 1%.
Given that humanity’s average productivity is, currently, 1%, that would double your productivity.
The speed, the quality, the completeness, the quantity…
So you would have two possible outcomes for you: 1. you could ask for more money for it 2. you could finish what you are paid for, and use the time for what you really want to do.
Instead, what I see people do is this:
- Slow down.
- Their attention is not on the job, but on their phone, their daydreams, thinking about themselves
- Produce fake feverish activity, the make belief of work, busy-ness
- Hate their job, hate themselves, etc.
- Complain that they are not where they ‘should be’
- Think of dinner, the future, the past
- etc.
This is everybody.
Whether you are poor or rich, you give of yourself very little. And ostracize the ones that give a lot… The crabs that want to leave the crab bucket.
I have been observing this for nearly 40 years actively.
I noticed that people don’t see themselves.
They don’t see that they are stingy in every aspect of productivity. Remember I said productivity has the input side… Input can be measured in time, skills, passion, attention, intensity.
And in our input we are all shysters… We skimp on time. We don’t even consider developing our skills, getting better at them. Passion, are you kidding? Attention? all pretense. And what will people think of you if you increase your intensity, the amount of power you put into your work?
I think people just don’t believe that the benefits will be worth it. That the benefits will come back to them. Or not instantly enough.
So they don’t increase their input… instead they live a life of quiet desperation.
Because unless I am completely off my rocker, when you put more into it life becomes more enjoyable. Life, the moment to moment life, not just the end result.
At this point you think you’ve been giving life all you’ve got. And your experience is: I don’t have more to give.
The idea that you could DOUBLE your input feels ludicrous. But if you consider that you are only giving 1% of what you are capable of, then you look wide eyed and dumbfounded… huh?
The concept is to increase one element at a time, in tiny increments.
One of the easiest element is where your attention is. On yourself or on what you are doing.
Can you imagine checking your attention roughly every 5 minutes… And you would return it to what you are doing.
That doesn’t sound impossible, does it?
That would double your input.
Almost defies logic, right?
Also, especially if you have been really really stingy, the echo of the environment seems disproportionate to the increased input…
This is what one of my overeager clients reports. An overeager client who always starts before I ask her to do it.
For all her life she was below average in her input… one quarter of a percent. And just in the past month she has managed to bring it up to 3%.
The only thing she worked on is her attitude.
She didn’t increase her skills. She didn’t increase the time nor increased her intensity.
Just did what is a natural outfall from a newer, healthier, more wholesome attitude, where she didn’t protect her precious ‘I’, didn’t fight, didn’t blame others or herself as much as before.
This is the kind of work we’ll do in the 5-day Bring Purpose to Life challenge. It starts today, but you can enter any time.
Every person will work on the aspect that they have access to increase easiest. Easy is important. Because a quick win is encouraging.
Some people will invest more time. Others increase their intensity. Yet others increase their skills, tiny bit by tiny bit. And of course, some will opt to trimtab their attitude from where it’s at to more wholesome.
My job is two-fold. I need to lay out the process for them. I need to make sure they have some activity, some quick result that will make it really worth for them to invest whatever they will invest on the long haul. And I need to make sure they have a structure… so they don’t fall back to where they started, or below.
The Drink your Food challenge was a very useful step to many.
They, for the first time, managed to distinguish where their attention was. Whether it was with the chewing or somewhere else.
Without being able to do that the new challenge is a bigger step into the unknown than most people can manage.
So if you haven’t done the Drink your Food challenge, maybe you should start with that… And if you did it but didn’t get the result, didn’t manage to distinguish being present or not, then use the new challenge at first for that.
The student who increased her input 12-fold, got 10 of those 12 from the Drink your Food challenge. It shows to me how fundamental and new that ability was.
So risking that I am cutting my nose in spite of my face, I will repeat: until you get the distinction: present or not, you won’t be able to increase your production.
As Jodie says in her post on the challenge forum:
‘The Food Challenge is genius…it’s like kindergarten for learning what doing feels like for people like me who haven’t done it [much doing], so we can see how else it might work. Thank you, Sophie‘
Yeah. Most people want to start everything on the PhD level… and they fail. Because kindergarten is missing. Elementary school missing. High school is missing… etc.
And even if you have been that person, you know who you are, please don’t make that same mistake again. Enroll in kindergarten. Don’t rush through it. Do the work deeply, so you can learn more than is being taught.
And then you’ll have a foundation for many things that need that foundation…
So what should you do now?
Well, that depends on where you are at… If you have done the Drink your Food challenge and you are present that you are present to what you are doing, where your attention is at, then sign up to the new challenge…
If you did the Drink your Food challenge but haven’t managed to distinguish where your attention is at or coax it back to chewing: either continue with that challenge, but more attentively, or sign up to the new challenge, but do the process inside that new challenge. Especially if you are also sick. You can’t get well if you do things the way that has made you sick.
If you still think that thinking about yourself, is a good way to get better…
…then you are not in kindergarten yet… and that should be your first step. I know who you are. Do you?
There is a question that few will dare to ask: If you managed to increase your effectiveness, your input: could your illness go away? The answer is ‘no, not automatically’. But… but you’d become healable again. And that should make it worth it for you. I hope.
And if you only read my articles for entertainment, idle curiosity, then please stay with that… He who won’t be counseled, can’t be helped.
Anyway. More and more signs tell me that we live in a computer program, a simulation, an experiment that has run its course.
And we have proven ourselves not worthy.
Do what you will. The rest of your life depends on it… Not a whole lot. Just everything.
If you think you are ready for the ‘Bring purpose to life’ challenge, you can sign up here
Bring purpose to lifeOne worthwhile purpose could be to have time to do what YOU want to do. If there is nothing you really want to do… then don’t bother.
How do you know if there is anything?
Just look at your weekends. If you didn’t do what you wanted to do, something useful, then no… there is nothing you really want to do. That is most of you.
In the Lifeskills workshop it was clear to see… If you are any intelligent, some of you will buy the recording of that workshop. The rest: don’t bother. It is not for you.
The Lifeskills Workshop
