#Lifehacks

Succinctly:

1. Be open.
2. Make lotsa little bets. Collect free non-lottery tickets.
3. Always take care of your downside.

Luck is an attitude, not a thing. Be open to experiences and opportunities.

We don’t pay truck to the role of luck in successful people’s lives. I get irked with business biographies as unbalanced personality cults where luck or psychopathology noticeably outruns talent.

Smart, productive, and ambitious are table stakes these days. Luck, and having help (and being raised white, male, and in the West to be clear about entitlement), often play an outsized role in many success stories we lionize as self-made.

The individual point of action of the Great Resignation is quitting.

But how do you know when it’s time to go? If your place isn’t completely toxic or you’re not deeply unhappy, it can be hard to tell when giving up an “alright” thing should yield to a better opportunity, and the effort and risk of moving.

For any job you have, even a great one, you should have a proactive system for evaluating at regular intervals whether consider a change every quarter. There’s also a more reactive “gotta go now” checklist where hygiene issues or changed conditions are a consideration to pull the ripcord.

Productivity in about working a limited number of the right things with sustained focus.

This is what actually worked over years of a lot of personal productivity hacking experiments (and avoiding general hustle culture and cult of busyness garbage.).

1. Systems over Goals
2. Protected Time (aka Deep Work time)
3. Calendars: Blocking, Auto-Declines, and Meeting Hygiene
4. Limiting Work in Progress
5. Daily Highlight
6. Weekly Review
7. Have a Toolchain. Simple Tools are Best.
8. Delegate (Effectively)
9. Automate

1. Systems over Goals

If you haven’t read it, go read Atomic Habits by James Clear (or where I first encountered the idea, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adam’s How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big .).

I’m always trying to do too much. You probably are too.

Whether through insecurity, lack of assurance about my choices, or just wanting more, until recently, I spent way too much time trying to do it all. And failing. Todos would get ticked done but big rocks didn’t move.

During covid and lockdowns, forced to do less, it actually got better. Sure, a lot of productivity books say to do less, but there is a difference between reading it and living it.

I experimented with Improv last quarter to get me out of my comfort zone and a potential gateway drug to standup (and frankly, better communication). I’ve become a big fan of the form, had a blast, and surprised at how it’s spilled over usefully into business and real life.

Improv Itself

What the hell is Improv, anyway?

Usually the first question I get from people when I tell them I’m doing improv is some variation on this. Most people have heard the name, associate it with Saturday Night Live, Second City, Whose Line Is It Anyway? or some form of comedy but actually don’t know what it actually is.