Hierarchy or Helpfulness?

“Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

I bet you’ve noticed that it can be hard to find people in today’s world who seem interested in being helpful. This is, in some ways, remarkable in the context of human history, because until not that long ago, anyone who couldn’t cooperate couldn’t survive. The good of one’s tribe or village had to be a consideration in decision making, because it was extremely difficult to navigate the world alone. In the last several hundred years, advances in technology that were previously unthinkable have changed our living conditions beyond recognition. Those of us in countries with more access to such advances now can have a great deal more ease and independence in our lives, which has given rise to greater expressions of individuality. The prevailing philosophy has shifted to include what has amounted to an obsession with individual achievement.

Now, freeing people to use their creativity and produce the products of their unique visions has produced a lot of brilliant work, and there’s nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, obsession with doing everything individually has, it seems to me, produced a lot of loneliness, anxiety, and limitation for a lot of people too. Not everyone is wired to be a James Bond-style army of one. Humans evolved as social animals, and for most of us, it’s very difficult to feel as much alone as many people now do.

This week I want to share a video about cooperation that I watched this week, because I think it’s interesting and applicable to a lot of situations. It’s targeted to people in the business world, so if your interests don’t run along those lines, just hang in there until about four minutes in, when I think the importance to any group of people kicks in. The thesis is about how a commitment to helpfulness in yourself and those around you can change your ability to get more done, and more quickly. When we stop acting like only the obvious leader of any group has notable value to offer, we become more willing to both be helpful, and leverage the helpfulness of others, which is enormously powerful.

How can you augment the presence of this circle of helpfulness in your life? Think about that this week, and see what you notice about where you could use more of this, and how you might begin to create it. I’ll be writing more on this topic next week!

Is Now the Best Time for Change?

“Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties. ”

— Emil Nolde

Last week we looked at some of the reasons why it can be difficult to create change in your life. We'll continue the same line of inquiry this week with some information about how our brains function and how we can best set ourselves up for success given their needs and limitations.  In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock lays out the conclusions of a wide array of scientific studies on brain functioning. If you're someone who wants to be highly efficient and productive, you might want to read it yourself, but I'll let you in here on a few ideas it offers that are relevant to this discussion.  This is just a quick summary, so some of these concepts may not seem self-explanatory, but the evidence for them is there.

• Completing actions you know how to do on "autopilot" is easy for your body as it doesn't require the expenditure of much energy. Learning new things, on the other hand, is an energy-intensive activity that can quickly drain your brain's reserves
• Even processing new experiences when you're not trying to learn anything at all is taxing. Evolution has encouraged us to be wary of the new because anything unfamiliar might be a threat. Too much newness tends to ramp up our fight/flight/freeze response, which quickly exhausts resources and switches off our reasoning functions
• Dialing down internal distractions, otherwise known as "inhibition," is another demanding task that burns through resources quickly. Deliberately focusing on something to the exclusion of all else takes effort, so you can only do this effectively for a relatively short time before you'll need to take a break to refuel. Rock does not immediately specify, but food, sleep, deep breathing, and exercise all help us to recover from such efforts
• Switching focus back and forth  rapidly as we do when multi-tasking is also draining, and doing this decreases our efficiency such that studies show no net gain in efficiency.  Multi-tasking takes the same amount of time and energy as doing each task separately because of the efficiency we lose. It also decreases the quality of our work. The only exception to this is when one of the tasks is so ingrained as to be an "autopilot" task for you
• As much as we'd like to think that we can work at full attention all day, studies show that we only get a certain amount of highly effective thinking time per day.  This makes it essential to be smart about how we prioritize the most important tasks so they can be addressed during our most energized moments

I hope you're noticing the through-line that when we try to work against our physical needs, we make the likelihood of our success in creating new habits much harder than it has to be. I think there's a reason why so many people find that exercising or adding a daily practice to their lives works better first thing in the morning. Not only do scheduling surprises tend to get in the way less, but we tend to have the most physical/mental resources available to us before the day's onslaught of requests and requirements starts to bombard us and use them up.

How can you start to be more strategic about moving your most important and most demanding tasks to your highest-energy times of day? (Maybe these aren't typically morning for you—we're all different, and you should absolutely notice what works for you most consistently and leverage it for yourself as you continue to learn.)  How can you protect these times from random interruptions so that easier tasks only land outside of them?  Maybe that means turning off your phone during these periods of more intense work.  Maybe that means putting a Do Not Disturb sign on your door so that everyone in your house knows that this is private time.  Maybe you'll decide to get up a little earlier so that you can get started on your day when the world is quieter, or wait until after coffee and a healthy breakfast before attempting deep concentration.  I encourage you to start thinking about this and experiment with how these principles can help you move more quickly, and with less friction, toward your most exciting goals.  Life is busy, but with some intentional planning, we can often carve out more ways to be productive than it might seem if we just blunder through our days putting out fires.  And when you find a scheduling pattern that helps, celebrate it!  Small victories add up to bigger ones over time.

Consumption vs. Creation

“I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.”

— Miles Davis

Here's something I've found helpful in my work in supporting productivity: Understanding the difference between consumption mode and creation mode. If you're reading this, the world you were born into has encouraged you to default to consumption mode through your education (memorize what we give you and repeat), the ubiquity of advertising (trust us, you need to buy this), politics (here's the party line), organized religion (this is what you should believe and do), family (here's who you are), and on and on. There's great reward for accepting and conforming to what is handed to us, and that's not necessarily a bad thing! Humans are social animals, so being part of groups is essential to our health and well being. Societal structures help us to create and maintain the stability needed to foster decent standards of living and opportunities to pursue our own personal flavor of happiness, while still feeling like we're part of something larger than ourselves. But it's all too easy to become entranced by all the expectations we encounter, and caught up in endless contemplation of what's expected. Not to mention anxiety about whether we're measuring up, and what will happen if we don't. 

If that's where we're living, we're not going to spend much time in creation mode. Creativity thrives outside the strictures of imposed expectations. It requires that you free your mind from established patterns and allow your own unique internal spark to lead the way to something fresh and new. For children, this is easy. For the first several years of life, they don't understand or care much about what anyone else thinks unless behaving a certain way leads to a catastrophic withdrawal of love by family members, but even then they're likely to try to get around the rules. As they get older, they will often realize that it's a lot safer and easier to conform to expectations, lose the imaginary friend, and at the very least perfect an extremely convincing impression of a compliant member of all applicable groups.  The desire to be accepted and belong is very compelling during the teen years in particular; if we're not careful, we can get stuck in the patterns of fear-driven compliance, which tends to keep our lives small and confining.

If you want to have access to your creative engine, or work up to being a creative genius, priming the pump with inspiration is important, but it's also essential to turn off the barrage of information and expectation from outside.  You must learn to think of yourself as a creator, prioritize making time and space for creative urges to bubble up, and be ready to take action to bring your creations into reality.  How you share them with others is up to you, but you'll never get started if you don't find ways to carve out an oasis of self.  You may find that this is hard to do because it's so easy to be pulled every which way by so many other things that seem important, especially when you have no guarantee of what you'll produce during this time.  You may feel pressure to come out of it with concrete results, and frustration if you don't.  It takes courage to stand for something you want that takes solitary effort, especially when it takes time to find one's stride—and it always does when starting something new.  How can you know how music you can write in a given amount of time until you try?  Obviously you can't!  Especially if you've never written a song before in your life.  

Even if the steps toward a goal seem very methodical and concrete, you will find that you need to bring your creativity to bear on how to accomplish each task, since you are a unique human being with many needs and desires to balance throughout your project.  Sticking with the program requires focus and discipline, and the decision to put aside distractions to bring about the result you want.

No matter what you're working toward, you'll be more successful if you acknowledge that you are choosing to be in creation mode when it's time to work.  Acknowledge yourself for having the strength of spirit to go out on a limb alone over the dark chasm of the unknown.  Appreciate your desire and your ability to bring new ideas and constructs into being.  Focus on bringing forth rather than bringing in.  And make sure you still allow yourself some consumption time in order to relax, renew, and stimulate new thoughts and sensations that will feed into your work. You may have noticed that ideas tend to crop up at unexpected moments when you're relaxing and doing undemanding tasks like taking a walk or a shower.  This time is important too, because your mind isn't engaged in anything demanding, but you're also not trying too hard either.  The right mix of time spent in various states of mind will be something for you to experiment with as you pursue your most productive and satisfying life.

This distinction between consumption and creative mode has really helped me to remember what's important to me as I forego other interesting activities that might otherwise distract me from producing the stuff of my goals.  I hope this concept helps you to find a balance between the two that suits your forward movement in the context of your unique life.