Productivity Principles

“Life Is hard if you live it the easy way. Life is easy if you live it the hard way. ”

Principles

1/ Everyone can be productive. Everyone can be incredibly creative. Some are more creative and productive inside of a structure of achievement and others are more productive outside of structure. Some people are paint by numbers and others like a blank canvas. Which one are you?
Do you need a framework to feel productive… a checklist of 10 things to do?
Creatives can often rattle off the list of 10 things to do but don’t put them down formally.

Identifying your unique talents. Finding the gifts that you came with, inate and inborn. Then you take that talent and practice it and hone it until it becomes a strength. Tiger Woods had an inate inborn ability to play golf. The strength had to be trained, honed and practiced to become a world class talent.

2/ Managing Time is actually about managing yourself. Stepehn Covey said that managing time is a misnomer, we can’t manage time it’s about managing ourselves. Time is an external thing we can’t be responsible for time. Managing ourselves is about getting control of ourselves. When we try to manage ourselves we start to realize that we don’t have as much control as we thought.

We are robotic… we get up every day and do the same things over and over again, think the same thoughts and feel the same emotions. We tell ourselves we can change if we want to but we just don’t want to. It’s a great trick we play on ourselves. If you doubt this then just try fasting for the next 36 hours, only drink water. See how much control you have over your feelings. Within 12 hours your mind will take over with jibberish. Can’t really manage time, time just flows. Try to manage time it will come to frustration. We can only manage ourselves. When we say we will manage ourselves better we are taking full responsibility for ourselves.

3/ We have three brains not just one. Primal brain or limbic system (brain stem). This is where the omigdilla is. Next is the mamalian brain (reptile part)or emotional brain and the outside is your cortex where the front lobes are, the intellectural part of you lives. Dr. Paul Mc Clean says our three brains grew on top of each other as we evolved. We think we are our thinking brain, but the two original brains that are concerned with sex, power, controlling others and getting approval from others actually control us. They take over on the thinking part of our brain and control it. The 3 brains are not well connected with each other and therefore we experience conflict as they pull at each other. If we can understand the 3 brains and integrate them together we can live with much less conflict.

4/ Habit is Destiny. First you shape your habits and then they shape you. The 3 brains effectively have freeways in our brain. When we think a thought over and over it lays this stuff called milin that lays pathways in our brain. The more we think a thought the more milin we lay, releasing emotional chemicals into our body. All of this gradually becomes our habits.

5/ Internal chaos creates external chaos. Self explanatory. If you are seeing someone who’s home or office is in chaos, guess what is going on inside. The outside is just an outer manifestation.

6/ Focusing our talent and our strength on our biggest opportunity. Work on your biggest opportunity everyday and you will have huge success. If you save $1.00 every day for 56 years you will be a millionaire.

7/ Your future can be an extension of your past or it can be something new that you create. Most people just extend their past. They don’t have a frame of reference for something different. You need to change your paradigm, create your future to have something different happen. Let go of your stories and your explanations. Can’t become the best you while holding onto your stories.

8/ Focus on what you want to create not on what you want to avoid. Some are more motivated to move away from what we don’t want rather than move towards what they do want. Easier to move towards what you do want.

9/ Choose, don’t decide. What’s the difference between choose and decide. Decide has the word cide that is used in words like homicide and suicide which means to cut off possibility. I need to decide from my few options and cut myself off from the others. Choose means to pick what you want. I need to choose from my multiple options. I am choosing and I am in control.

10/ Balance organization with restricting creativity. Most super structured people could use a bit more go with the flow…. Those who are totally creative can usually use a little more structure. Where could you use a bit more structure in your life. Where could you go with the flow a bit more. If you are a creative and totally structure yourself you will kill your creativity. If you are a structured person you can’t add in

11/ You must go to the next level to wake up productive. You can’t solve the problems you have created at the same level they were created at. Einstein. You have to move to a new level of thinking. Find someone 5-10 years down the road from you with vaster experience and have them mentor you. They give you altitude. Then you can get to the next best version of you.