The Illusion of Productivity: I wasted 10,000 Hours.
It’s funny looking back—after 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 things—obsessing over a business card that no one would ever see, redoing my website over and over and over, changing my taglines endlessly. What’s the name of my business? Oh, I’d 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t doing it. Instead, I was keeping myself "busy." Of course, you can imagine that all this work didn’t do anything. So what did I think? That I wasn’t being productive enough. That I just couldn’t get enough done. And that became my main problem—or so I thought. Since I believed that was the issue, I started looking for all the optimization techniques. Getting up early, setting routines, journaling—all the things that everyone says you need to do. And that just became one more thing. And sure, all of that optimization matters—but only if you’re at least doing the right things in the first place. And that’s the key: The biggest productivity boost you can make today is simply to only do the things you need to do. Nothing else. I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to do that. Self-sabotage? Fear of failure? Maybe. But we don’t always see it. Instead of trying to optimize your life, there’s no point in even doing that until you’re 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. I’d take in all these different opinions, strategies, and ideas, and instead of finding clarity, I’d end up more lost than before.