The Illusion of Productivity: I wasted 10,000 Hours.
Itโs funny looking backโafter I sold my previous company I developed an ego, I told myself how great I was. But in reality all my business choices were total failures and bad moves. I spent a lot of time on ridiculous thingsโobsessing over a business card that no one would ever see, redoing my website over and over and over, changing my taglines endlessly. Whatโs the name of my business? Oh, Iโd get different domain names. Everything except actually doing business. And even as I got through those things, I just kept making more and more mistakes. I was doing things that didnโt matter, avoiding the truly hard part, which was simply talking to a lot of people really fast and selling them stuff. That was the only thing that actually moved the needle, but I wasnโt doing it. Instead, I was keeping myself "busy." Of course, you can imagine that all this work didnโt do anything. So what did I think? That I wasnโt being productive enough. That I just couldnโt get enough done. And that became my main problemโor so I thought. Since I believed that was the issue, I started looking for all the optimization techniques. Getting up early, setting routines, journalingโall the things that everyone says you need to do. And that just became one more thing. And sure, all of that optimization mattersโbut only if youโre at least doing the right things in the first place. And thatโs the key: The biggest productivity boost you can make today is simply to only do the things you need to do. Nothing else. I donโt know why itโs so hard for us to do that. Self-sabotage? Fear of failure? Maybe. But we donโt always see it. Instead of trying to optimize your life, thereโs no point in even doing that until youโre actually working on the right things. So then the only question to ask is: What is the right thing to work on? And while that is different for everyone, the scariest part of that question is that I rarely look to myself to answer it. It was just the endless scrolling of social media that would leave me confused as to what to do. Iโd take in all these different opinions, strategies, and ideas, and instead of finding clarity, Iโd end up more lost than before.