- Everything must be paid for twice - You pay once in dollars for the thing, and you pay a second time in time/energy/effort to get the benefit of the thing you paid for.
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How a Simple Math Equation Can Transform Your Productivity - An example: 0.8 * 0.2 = 0.16. Lesson: When we operate at a fraction, we compromise the output.
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Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind) - Develop an awareness of your mental states. Figure out what you are good at in each state. Apply your todo list to your mental state and do the things you are good at in whatever mental state you are in.
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Articulate and Incompetent - "An articulate, logical, and consistent argument is not required to have any relationship with actual reality. Temperament and experience does." When we look back at our successes, our verbal brain can make up all kinds of reasons, in retrospect, why we succeeded. Often, success depends on intuition. Intuition is poorly articulated. To get intuition: "Increase your vocabulary of granular words to describe emotions and sensations."
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"Squid, Zen and The Abyss." - There's a LOT in this one, but it's mostly about how to break out of the thinking ruts our verbal brain keeps us trapped in:
A system that endlessly repeats the same behaviors enters the “frozen zone.” A business or individual that cannot innovate and play, becomes fragile, then dies....
The thing that gets between you and seeing the world clearly is all your protections, traumas, and defenses. In a business context, this is “the way things have always been done.” This is something that can actually get worse with age; we get more attached to our professional identity, status, and material possessions. But if you can’t evolve as fast as our accelerating world, you risk being left behind. As management icon Peter Drucker put it: “the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself but to act with yesterday’s logic.”
The absolutely critical, yet oft-neglected, implication is that your old model needs to be destroyed before it can be replaced. This is usually INCREDIBLY UNPLEASANT. - The importance trap - Doing unimportant things makes you lucky. You know that whole thing about marking the things you do as important or urgent, and stay out of things that are neither important nor urgent. If you maximize your time on important and urgent things, you lose out on the ability to let your mind go, relax the analytical, and lose yourself in a hobby.
Quadrant II [Important, but not Urgent] builds up your existing strengths, while Quadrant IV [Not Important or Urgent] exposes you to new abilities and trains you in less immediately needed skills. These “unimportant” activities are chosen by your subconscious. Your subconscious knows what you need.[1] Your conscious brain is much worse than your subconscious at identifying and prioritizing, because it’s too busy thinking of Quadrant II things. That’s why Quadrant IV activities invariably turn out to be useful, even though it doesn’t look like it when you’re doing them.[2]