Do what matters most and I'm gonna focus on the doing if you know that you've been doing a lot of talking and a lot of
ideating but you have him doing a lot of making or doing or leading or whatever your thing is
Just understand that that gap between the good life you want to live and where you are is
Probably bridged by certain types of doing that you have to start doing
So if you ever notice how hard it's become to focus these days to know what really matters to get out of the
Stuck zone start building momentum and actually finish the stuff that is truly important to you
It was already pretty hard in before times and now we might as well just go ahead and 10x that challenge and if you're feeling this
You're not alone. This struggle is real
But what if there was a way to quickly figure out what matters to focus on that to dislodge that wheel spinning and
Nershan get on stuck and go from idea to done to become a bit of a productivity Jedi
Well, that is what we are talking about in today's powerful best of conversation with one of my closest advisors and regular
collaborator
multi award-winning author of the book start finishing and founder of productive flourishing Charlie gilky
And we dive into Charlie's specific ideas around why so much of our effort to be productive fails and
How to rewire our brains and our schedules and our actions to more easily see beyond all of the distractions and focus in on the stuff that we've
Started choose what really matters what's worth finishing and then take immediate action to make it happen and along the way
We also explore how Charlie's really unique background as a philosopher military officer
Productivity strategist and consultant to creative professionals founders and fast growth entrepreneurial teams has shaped his powerful lens on going from
Idea to done so excited to share this best of conversation with you on Jonathan Fields and this his good life project
You
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It's always kind of interesting for me when I sit down in the studio with somebody who
Is not only a friend, but I actually know really really well and who who who we have actually
been co-conspirators and business and life and all such a different things and
As we sit here today you it is the eve of you launching a fantastic new book called start finishing and we're getting diving to that a whole bunch
but
I want to take a step back in time because what I've learned over the years to is that when I catch sit down with an old friend
There are also
gaps
Because as happens with friends you kind of just hit the ground rolling with whatever topics you're interested in in your current life
And very often you don't actually know a ton about what got them to that place in life
So we're gonna fill in a little bit of those gaps. So
When we first met it was what 10 years ago. It's not 10 years ago. Yeah, it's right 2009 South by Southwest
I went to see you at see give your book talk of career renegade at the time right what we doing in Austin Texas for like what was your intention at South by Southwest 10 years ago?
You know in 2009 South by Southwest was just
One of those mechas for creatives at the time. We didn't have a lot of other conferences and so this was
Deep enough into my work at productive flourishing that I just wanted to meet a lot of people and I just knew that there are these people that I've been reading and looking up to
There's like this is my chance to say hi and how much they've
Inspired me and so that was my main intention for that South by Southwest is just to meet all these people and put a
Physical face to a digital avatar
And so the primary connection there or the primary point was connection at that point. Yeah
I remember
Meeting you tell me the session matches with your recollection. We were at somebody's house in South Austin
I have no idea how how I got there whose house it was what we were actually doing there
But I remember certainly bumping into you and I was like
This guy's brain works in a way that my brain absolutely does not work and I need to understand this and go deeper and find out like what's behind all of this
What I learned really quickly is that
you're this
kind of weird blend of
philosopher king and
Unshakeable calm and also
operating and execution
Brilliant you think in systems and processes and frameworks and the way that my brain doesn't operate
And I know that not long before the time that I met you you actually spent a chunk of time in the military
I'm curious does
Do these parts of you start to really?
Become super developed
There or were they showing up earlier in your life too?
I
Think they were showing up earlier in my life and they were just cultivated to a way in the military experience and so
Prior to joining the military. I was in Boy Scouts
I'm an Eagle Scout and I always was in this place of
Never having the resources that I needed to do what I wanted to do and always having to figure out like okay
I want to go there
But I don't have what I need to get there
So how do I leverage or get in the right room or figure that out and so there's always been that way of working backwards in that way that just was really
Really amplified as an
Armored logistics officer because that's the point like you've got to get stuff here. You got to get stuff there and you have
limited limited resources to do that and
You know that part of my life especially being deployed for
Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was the best and worst time of my life. How so it was the best time because
It really required
Being your full self and ways and stretching and growth in ways that are unimaginable for most people
You know not just the combat aspect of things but the being away from family being in a new environment
Being 24 and being responsible for 46 people and
20 vehicles and then later on being the Battalion Plans officer which is the guy that writes all the plans and
Make sure everybody is getting where they need to go and again, that's an incredible responsibility at that age and
There was it was unrelenting in the sense of every day
It was just a growth opportunity every day and you didn't have chance to you didn't have a chance to naval gaze or figure it out
In that sort of meta way you just had to do it and so it was the best time because of that and some of the friendships that I formed and doing all of that
And it's the worst time because it pulled me out of my life before that I was pursuing my
PhD in philosophy. I was a graduate student that was a route. I was going and
So it introduced this major break in my life and
Again being away from my family for a year all the things that you know come with being a deployed soldier
So it was really terrible and really great at the same time and I just came back a changed person and
Changed in a way such that those frameworks
That way of thinking about the world the system in the systemic way of thinking about the world
doesn't leave you
And so like you know, I'll walk into a store and I'll start thinking just how is this operating and what could it go better and
What if they move this desk six feet to the left?
What would that open up and just small things and big things and I can't turn that off?
Yeah, how much of it do you think I mean because so it's interesting like when it when when I've talked to people who are all about systems process
Efficiency logistics in the past and again my brain doesn't work that way so I'm fascinated by people whose brains do work that way
usually that's been developed in the arena of
Money, you know, so the end game is how do we optimize efficiency?
How do we get more stuff done more effectively?
Because at the end of the day we're trying to grow a company or business and enterprise and organization
Non-profit whatever it is
But you you develop those chops, you know the arena for you the cauldron was life and death
very different stakes
very different stakes and
There's a degree of
Intensity that comes with that because if you make a mistake people
Might not go home. Well, they might not go home alive and so you take it seriously in a different way and there's that sense of
continuous improvement in
the military
context is not again maximizing profit
It's maximizing the efficiency of your troops to accomplish the mission but more important than that bringing everybody home
Because no one wants the right that letter to families and
No one wants to be that person that made a mistake and that mistake cost them and there are so many things that happen
In combat and a military that are beyond your control
And so yeah, it definitely took that in and so even now all the stakes are not nearly as high
There's still that drive to
Smooth things out to make things more streamlined
And to really do the best with what we've got
The way I see it now is whether it's my company or some of the companies that I'm consulting with these are people's lives
You know, we show we spend so much of our life at work and when you look at the amount of waste that happens at work
And more important than that when you look at the amount of heartbreak that happens at work because
people are not utilized well
because
Leadership is not focusing them on what matters most people are not being appreciated for what they do it just breaks my heart
To see how much heartbreak happens at work and it breaks my heart to see how many people spend decades of their life
Doing something because of the story they've told themselves about how they need to be in this world and then looking back and saying is that it
All this time I put in and
And I still am not fundamentally happy. I still have not done the things
That I know I could have been doing and
While you may have you know zeros in your bank account or not. There's that sense of meaning if fulfillment
That is lacking and I think that's really heartbreaking
We have this one short life that we know of and life is really fickle, you know, that's the other thing that you learn from being
In the military and being deployed is that
At quarter of a second or a quarter of an inch
Can make the difference between
Someone going home and someone not between you going home healthy between you going home not being able to walk
and
And so and it's sometimes really
It's just a matter of luck
Right, and so we don't recognize how lucky we are every day
To be able to do the things that we do sometimes it's just moving and walking right that we take for granted
And so to spend decades
Of your life of this opportunity that you have in front of you
Not doing the things that fire you up and not making your unique contribution is really heartbreaking
Yeah, it means interesting to to
To have the experience that you had where you had so much on your shoulders in your early in mid-20s and
Awaken and then come home and awaken to the fact that okay, you saw this
When you were deployed and now you come home and you sort of see a
Similar pattern but in a different context a much broader context that for most people will last the vast majority of their waking years
You know was was that the reason I mean it's one of my curiosities that you know has been you were you're pursuing your PhD in philosophy before you go
You end up being deployed
You developed this fierce expertise in operational capability when you're actually in the military and then when you come back home
Instead of immediately diving back into the academic path which I know
Like you have a fierce desire to learn like you're someone who loves to devour knowledge and
And you and you did that to a certain extent
But the next move for you was to actually turn around and effectively
Start a company to be of service to other people
It is this all partly what what was behind you launching this endeavor which I could see back then was called productive flourishing
So yeah, it's really interesting because I came back in two weeks after being redeployed I was back in class
Back on my life right back doing my thing. I had figured all that out
I said everything up so that I was just going to slide back in not missing a step
Getting back to it and
I'm glad I did that at the same time that there's a reason why people need space from things like this right
Because about a year later I
realized that
Though I could excel as a philosopher it wasn't the way that I wanted to spin the rest of my life in
In the academic echo chamber talking to each other about all sorts of abstract things because I was like we are the people
That should be in the world solving problems like there are real things going on right now and it felt like such a waste of
Potential it felt like such a waste of people's lives and I'm not trying to you know
I dismiss
Academic philosophy or anything like that. I just knew for me
That there was more to life than that and being in those classrooms and
What I was studying a lot of was ethics
social political philosophy and especially
Economic development
Because what I
Understood and saw when I was overseas was yes, we're in the middle of this
War of ideology quote unquote
But at the same time we're in the middle of this vast
Contrast between the lives of people in the Middle East and their economic livelihood and the lives of people in the first world
and if we didn't address that gap
We're always going to be in the situation. We're always going to be in the situation
So I started studying a lot of that
And I started applying it to my life as like if I'm really about thriving if I'm really about
Helping people live the most of this one like we have where can I do that?
What's going to be the best place for me to do that and
The next best available option for me was to start productive flourishing start teaching people that and I kind of came to that after I started
productive flourishing because what I
My main pain when I started productive flourishing was I was this
creative idea bomber and
Had a bunch of ideas and a bunch of knowledge and a bunch of stuff that had to get out of me and I found a
really frustrating contrast between my ability as a
Logistics officer to move battalions of equipment and the do joint force military logistics coordination and
At the same time struggle with getting a 5,000 word essay done
What's that about right how can I do this and not do that and what can I apply from this world?
I've getting stuff done at this really excellent level and I don't have to say this
But the other thing and I've recently learned about myself recognized is that I
Served with the 101st Airborne division, right?
That was the parent unit that I was attached to and that is one of the armies like elite forces
So it's not just that I learned logistics in a military
Deployed context I learned it under the 100 first and
Excellence was just the way everything was done
everything was done and
I would say that was my first real
Professional experiences in the adult again. I was 24 and in my brain that was just the standard, right?
And so when I got out and didn't notice that standard I was like, huh?
What's what's this gap here?
But rolling it back a little bit I
started
Productive flourishing because I had this problem and I was reading all of the literature and I was trying to
Synthesize it and translate it and I was like well if I'm already doing that, you know fundamentally
I'm a teacher and trainer, right?
And I was like I'm already doing this for myself
Why don't I share it with the rest of the world because blogs were a thing then in a different way than they are now
And so that started and it started with very terrible names and very terrible niches because my first attempt was
teaching academics how to get stuff done and live a bigger a bigger bolder life and
And what caught on was a lot of the creatives I'm entrepreneurs found my work and loved it
And I was like this is really interesting. I didn't anticipate this
And so I started writing more for creatives and more for entrepreneurs
But it came to this point where I was like, you know, there's just fork in the road that I have in these careers that I have because I was
Simultaneously that still in the army still, you know, like a three-quarter time position with the army
I was still pursuing my PhD and now I had a business on my hands
And I reached that point that Seth Godin calls the dip
Where I realized I was not going to be excellent in all three of those
I was going to be mediocre at best and be struggling and juggling and
I didn't want that for myself and so it was really picking which of these
most
Advances the unique contribution that I have and allows me to live the fullest life possible and it was with productive flourishing and
so
It wasn't you know a lot of people start their businesses because
The either hater jobs or they're in a sole crush and managerial environment
It wasn't that for me as much as it was what's the best way for me to do what I'm out to do and that continues to evolve
And there may be some point in which there's another, you know, I get back in academia or whatever
But it's always that sort of evolving question for me. It's what's the best way to do this thing that I'm here to do
Yeah, is that a regular property like do you wake up once a week or once a day and sort of ask some variation of that question?
It tends to come for me in seasons actually and so summer is my
stupid faction and depression cycle
Hmm, so every summer I'm like don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't really want to do much of anything
I'm much less motivated
I'm just thinking how many other people listening to this go through something similar. Yeah, so it's a seasonal thing for me a lot a lot of times
And so every summer about I'm like hmm
As I start ramping up into fall
Am I ramping up in a way that is really pulling the best of what's possible for me now or am I playing last year script?
And what do I want this next year to look like so
And there was a very powerful prompt that I got during meditation a few years ago
So I'm about 40 now. I'll turn 40 in January and about the time I was 37. I was sitting there meditating one morning and
And this this prompt came to me was like what are you doing today to set up the season of your life that will be your 40s
Like that season of your life and I was like this is really what first off where is this coming from
but second
How do I want that season of my life to be different than this season of my life?
And I got some answers I didn't like
But so it comes for me every year, but it does come in sort of instantaneous like what are you doing now Charlie?
And are you stuck in last year's frame?
Are you keeping your eyes open to the possibilities that have been created or that you've created over the last year?
Yeah
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I mean two things jump out of me from that one is
That you
Wherever that prompt came from
I've seen that reflected in the way that you move into your decisions for years now and you have
There's this really interesting unique ability to think out ahead
To not be stuck in short-termism, but we're gonna circle back to that and a little further because you're
You're also not a fan of thinking too far ahead
So there's a really interesting tension there at that I want I want to circle back to but what what the other thing that jumped out of me is
So you mentioned summers or like the season first dupe of action and depression for you and
But so people couldn't see your face when you're talking about that
But you weren't bummed about it. You were kind of smiling almost like matter fat
Like well, this was almost it was kind of interesting slash
You know like good for me to recognize and acknowledges and just know this is just the way I am and I don't
Every every summer. It's not like this is a thing I have to battle
You know if I accept that this is kind of a thing that I just noticed in the pattern of my life
Then it allows you to sort of make peace with it and then build around it to a certain extent
Absolutely and thanks for seeing that because
If we were talking a decade ago, I may have been much I may have felt much different about my summer cycle
Because you're not supposed to feel that way and you're supposed to blah blah blah and all those things that we make ourselves but
One of the traps we fall into is that we think of ourselves like robots and we don't necessarily
Cognize that a lot and make that a conscious thought but we think that we should have a constant
Or a sort of regular amount of output a regular amount of the way that we feel and which is not that we're organic beings that respond to
Temperature and environment and seasons and things like that and so
being at peace with the
Fact that I'm a creature of this planet
And I'm sensitive to the seasons has given me a lot of peace and compassion for myself
But it's also from a strategic perspective. I know where to put projects and we're not to put projects, right?
And so during the summer is where I can't
Usually juggle 17 different projects, right? I do better having one project that I can work on
Two to four hours a day and when I'm done
I'm done and be at peace with that as opposed to my winter cycle, which is I call my supernova cycle where I can do a lot of things
I can work long hours and it's just sort of a natural natural thing for me
And so that's where I put that type of work usually right this year's different because of the book launch coming up
And so I've had to I've had more head trash
around
What I'm supposed to be doing right now and where my energy is and
Most days the more sane part of myself wins says you know what like no matter
What all you think you're going to do or you think you're supposed to do
You're only going to do X amount so that X plus Y the plus Y does it's just a tool to beat yourself up with you're not going to do it
so
How are you going to adjust your plans to do X and
How are you going to make peace with the fact that X is what you got?
and in many ways it's been a
great relearning experience
because it's a
Decade after it's like where I started I wasn't able to do everything that I wanted to do
How am I going to do it except for my approach and this season of my life is different than that season of my life
Because in that season of my life it was do more and do better
And this it's except where you are and leverage what you can do to the best way possible and learn to let the rest go
that do you feel like
Your sort of annual cycling is gives you work with so many people now like founder is creative professionals
larger organizations
So you have an interesting data set and interesting lens do you feel like this
Cycling that you feel on on the sort of like annualized basis is
Unusual unique to you. Or do you think pretty much everybody goes through it?
But we just don't identify it. I think pretty much everybody goes through it and
And where your energy may lie may be unique to you
But I think everyone has these eps and flows and organizations have eps and flows and
That's where
Inattentive leaders and managers get stuck and not stuck
They create a lot of problems for themselves and their teams because they're not recognizing that wait a second
my team's natural energetic state is here
I want them to be twice that so how do I crack the whip? How do I?
Motivate them how do I quote unquote empower them to get to where I want them to be as opposed to
How do I shift my expectations and my priorities to be clear on what they can do in this amount of time?
So I think everybody has it I think most of the time we don't slow down enough
To really get that like we you know slow down a little bit and it's like well, I just need to drink more caffeine
I just needed I need to alter who I am through other practices as opposed to saying where am I?
And what matters now? Yeah, it's so enchanted
You say my my sense has been I've experienced some some pretty major burnout over the last few years at different moments and and I it has
Take me way longer to own that then it should have because I know I would like to think of myself as somebody who sort of could perform
At an extreme level for an extended period of time and I've and it's brought me to my knees, you know
and and I had to own the fact that no I I actually cycle as well and what's what's been interesting for me
to note also is that
My you know nobody performs at the peak of their game on a sustained basis doesn't happen in athletics
It doesn't happen in music. It doesn't happen in business. It doesn't happen in relationships in life
And it's just like we were wired to sort of go through this you know like sine wave and I think one of the big learnings
partly from you has been that you know
So you describe it as when you hit winter it's your supernova window where you're just
Fearsely productive and creative and generative but if during your sort of like your downtime your slower time you force yourself
To to be as close to that supernova
Mode as you can be then when you actually hit that natural window
You then you don't have the juice left to actually perform at the level
You know you're capable of and it becomes even more frustrating. It's like this
compound effect that that really creates a negative spiral and
It absolutely does and I think the more you hone your cycles like that like I realized at this point that during that period where I'm on supernova
I am going to create enough work and problems and
Opportunities in that period that me and my team can work on for the rest of the year
Right like I don't have to create at that level for the rest of the year for
To do it and in fact if I did I would burn not only myself out but my team out
Right because there would just be such an influx of
New projects and new energy and new opportunities and new things
We know I my team has a codex of all the sort of hashtags and a short-hand language that we use and one is brace for impact
Right and there's when I've been on a trip or when I've been hanging out with friends and I show up Monday morning
And I'll just preface it with brace for impact right because I just know what my team is going to get on that day
I think I'm gonna need to start you
Yeah, and so
But you can't expect your team to do that at that level at all times or else you end up in that scaling trap
That's so many businesses get into
To where their team is constantly out of breath and
constantly just
Trying to do their best work from the bottom of the emotional and cognitive barrel because they've been worn out for so long and so
I look at it from a long game because if you choose your best work you choose that thing that you most want to do
You want to do that for the long for the long haul right you're talking about many decades
How do you do that over that amount of time?
Sustainably and how do you do it so that you don't go through these burnout cycles to where eventually
You throw out the baby with the bath water. You're just like I'm so burnt out. I can't do this. This is not for me
Well, it's not that it's not for you. It's the way that you're doing it is not for you
Yeah, I think that's that's so important because I think
For me the burnout didn't come because I was doing a
Whole bunch of stuff. I didn't want to be doing. I just wasn't doing it the way that was healthy or intelligent
Yeah, I actually loved a lot of what I was doing. It just I had to rewire the the way that I that I approached it
So as we sit here in the studio today you've been
I guess about a decade into productive flourishing right developing a
Tremendous body work frameworks process systems working with so many different people and you have a book out called start finishing so my curiosity with this is
Why does you feel the need to write this there?
There's no lack of books on the market about you know like getting stuff done about productivity
It's a big category and I also know about you that you don't do things just because you can like there's there's got to be a reason like what what did you see was missing that made you say
This is something I need to do because writing a book takes a lot of time and energy and takes you away from a lot of other things
So what in your mind knowing the way your brain works justifies you saying this has to happen
So part of it is strategically there's a
Book shaped hole in my business of this book because if you go to productive flourishing right now
Before the book is out you can't get the
cohesive journey and the cohesive material and coherent material on all the stuff that have been creating for the last decade
And so it ended up being this sort of gap in that people would want to really start doing more of their best work and
And it's hours of clicking around productive flourishing trying to figure out what it is as opposed to a systemic or a systematic approach to it
So that's one but more importantly than that
I think it's more of what's the heart of my work that makes me continue to write about productivity and it's really interesting because
Jonathan, you know, there's around 2014 I wrote a post called foundations are meant to be built on not flown over and
And what I found with so many of my
Entrepreneurs and executives and things like that we love to talk about the big ideas
We love to talk about the big strategy. We love to talk about all that stuff
Except for when you look at where the real constraint in their business was or where the real constraint in their
Opportunities that was was the fact that they couldn't execute on the ideas they already had right and we just wanted to fly over sort of this
scheduling and time management and project management and you know aligns building
We want to sort of fly over all of that and just talk about the big ideas, but those big ideas weren't happening
and so it came from the sense of frustration in a lot of ways with some of my set of some of my set of clients and peers
It's like no, no, no, no, no, we're not skipping over this piece because it will trip you up at some point
So that was sort of facing that set of people, but when I looked down the Scandi the productivity literature and
Even the personal development literature. I think there wasn't
the hybrid I wanted to see that took the real reasons why we do and don't do things and
Made it with the real ways we can get stuff done. There is always this divorce between
deeper motivation and
deeper systems and deeper processes for getting stuff done and so
We ended up in this sort of bipolar literature and bipolar place where you end up with really good
Montras for how to get stuff done, but doesn't actually help you once you start getting into the thrashing of the project or
One doesn't help you once you start it or you have a bunch of solutions that don't solve the real reasons you don't get stuff done
And so for me I needed to create it for that reason so that I can say like okay this book
does both at least to the best of my ability, right and
Looking at some of the other book ideas and other things that I want to write about
It's going to come back to getting stuff done because I'm neo-Ristotelian in the sense of we become by doing
Right so no matter what you want to do in the world or what you want to be in the world
There's some doing that you have to do to become that and
Whether it's being a great parent or whether it's being a great member of your community whether it's being a great pill of your church
It doesn't matter what that is all that being
Has some doing attached to it and enough of us. I think are over committed
To the being side of things and we try to be all of the things and we don't fully understand
How much doing we've also committed ourselves to doing until we look around and there's just a
Field of drop balls and broken promises and regrets and so
Interestingly one of what I find it interesting is that one of the pillars of my sort of principles of productivity is actually self-compassion and
I wanted to write the book
For multiple reasons, but one of them is so that
people can see what's going on in their world and
Understand that they're not uniquely defective that they're not
Constitutionally wired to never be able to get their shit together that are not faded to struggle
They're just making more promises
With their mouth that their hands can't cash
Right, they're promising themselves and they set up expectations for themselves that then there's no way possible for them
To actually live up to everything that they've said they're going to do and be
So when we pull down and say you know what there are fewer things
That we're going to focus on and commit to but we're going to do those well and we're going to finish them
Then we start to see the sense of satisfaction
Then we start to see that sense of happiness and then we start to thrive in our careers
Because we become those creatives
That you can trust when they say they're going to do something they're going to do it
When they set out to achieve a certain goal. They're going to do it and there's a rare breed of creatives
You know, we have a bad sort of rap of being all talk or being a lot of talk and not so much follow through but it turns out
Time and time again. I've seen this with people that I've interviewed on my podcast all the research that it and all my clients like the name of the game is follow through
Right and you increase your ability to finish the things that matter most
You know you knock out those
three projects of the year that really really matter and you let the rest go
That hasn't like this compound interest effect on your career that you just don't get when you're half finishing 17 things
Yeah completely agree and I feel like there's also
When you when you shift those gears, you know, and you actually you
Learn all the steps in the process and and the way to actually
Focusing on the smaller number of things and actually go from idea to
Completing it, you know like when you start finishing and you do that repeatedly
It's I feel like
Once you do that you go through that cycle a handful of times
It's almost like your identity begins to shift as well
So you you you start to identify not as a person with a lot of great ideas
Who rarely ever gets them done?
But you start to identify as the person who's accomplishing who is like who is who is doing the big things and you identify as somebody who is actually completing and putting
Good things out into the world and and that shift in identity creates this sort of like spiraling effect have you seen that also?
Absolutely, absolutely because at a certain point you develop this theory of yourself and
When you're not finishing a lot of times the theory of yourself is that you're not a finisher that you know
You can't get it done or that you know
You over commit you you have all this head trash about who you are and then that's what you project out in the world
And that's what you see you can create and you develop a confirmation bias about that once you do start finishing
I think what you realize is the word can't for most for all intents and purposes doesn't exist in your
In your psychology or in your language
It's you're choosing to do certain things over choosing to do others thing because you've done many great things already
and that shift from
Can I do it or that sounds like a good idea to like no?
I can do a lot of things, but what matters most now?
Yeah, it's such an identity shift and I've seen it in the way people's people carry themselves from posture
I've seen people I've seen it in the way that people
mysteriously start losing weight
Right, I've seen it in the way where all of a sudden money starts flowing their way
There's all these outer changes that happen from that inner identity shift
Because I think you know, I call it creative constipation and then
Creative constipation is just it's kind of what it sounds like you take into all of these ideas you take in all of this
Inspiration you watch all the TED talks you read all the books you listen to all the podcast and at a certain point you get full
But you're not pushing it through you're not doing anything with it and you become toxic and
You become to that point to where like there's this resentment of a new idea or a new thing coming in because you know that you're not going to be able to do it because you got everything else going on and
as humans we do one of two things we either create or we destroy and
There's a certain point when you're in creative constipation and you're not
Shipping what matters most to you that you'll start destroying the things around you
You'll start destroying the relationships and through your resentment of frustration and you being the martyr and you finding ways to
Insert yourself into other people's lives and projects
You'll destroy your resources you'll go on shopping benches or you'll go you'll eat a bunch or you'll do whatever thing that you have and or
You'll start destroying yourself
Through the ways that you stories that you tell yourself
Through all the ways you find evidence about why you can't do something and why you're uniquely defective and why failures of the past
Meaning that you're gonna have a failure tomorrow
so I think we don't fully recognize the cost of
Of not doing our best work in that way like we think it's something we can get to but I will want to put it more on just
an essential
Way to find your happiness both long-term but also in that presence because there's that shift
When this week you made a dent in your best work this week you got something done versus being the to-do list ninja
You know where you put 82 things on your list you crank them out at the end of the week you look back and you're like
But really like I didn't do the thing. I'm no closer to doing the thing and everybody has a thing
That's the other thing that I noticed like I'm gonna talk about best work and it's got a few unique factors to it
But it's that work that your soul most yearns to do
And everybody's got a project they put in a
Physical drawer and a mental drawer and a virtual drawer that they're going to get to at some point when
You know someday when the time is right or when their boss is less of a butthole or when their kids are in college or whatever
We've always punted that to someday some some later day everybody has that
but there's that sense of
deep satisfaction
When you quit the bullshit when you quit the quote unquote researching
When you quit all the conversations about doing the work and you actually do the work and
And
It's surprising how simple it is to actually do it and yet we don't
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Yeah, it's interesting too because
That you you hear a lot in sort of self-help pop psychology
This line you can do anything
Maybe for heartbeat when you're listening to you speak like oh, that's what he's saying I can do anything
But in fact, it's like you're saying the exact opposite
Yeah, um displacement is a real thing and displacement is just the idea that choosing to do one thing
Means that there's a near infinity of things you've chosen not to do right and so we too often conflate you can do it anything
With you can do everything
Right and while I might say you can do anything
I would also say what are you gonna choose not to do so that you can do that thing?
What are you really gonna commit in your life to be able to do that thing?
There's some things that you know, I'm five foot ten. I'm never gonna be a world champion basketball player
Right, it's just not possible especially given that I'm 40 and I don't like basketball
There's a lot going against me with that right?
So I'm not gonna say I can be you know LeBron James
Can't do that so within the realm of
creative space though
there's a lot
Of room to maneuver and grow and become whatever you want to be and
It's gonna come at a cost of all the things you have to choose not to do and choose to do to get there and so
I talk a lot about displacement in the sense of I want people to really understand
That we have this one precious life and I've been talking for a long time about what I call project world and
Project world is the idea that when we look at our lives
It's kind of carved up in the three to five year chunks of a project capital P project
both personally and professionally right and so I'll talk personally first
We go through these phases of relationships
We go through this phases of growth like if you're a teen if you're a kid
You know you go through that sort of pre teenage stage then you go through that teenage stage then you go through that you know
Leaving your parents house which could be college or could be whatever
But there's sort of three to five year chunks to define your life
Relationships a lot of times like getting married. There's a three to five year cycle
We can go through that time and time again in your career
It's the same thing you take a job
You're in a position for three to five years and you move on to another job
And so life is sort of split up into these chunks and
And one of the reasons people I think it's stuck and
Decide not to do the best work is because I think they're making a non-reversible life-long choice like if I do this thing
I have to make this one choice and then for the rest of my days. I'm gonna be doing that thing
You know that the grace about project world is when loser draw in three to five years
You're gonna be moving on to something else
Right, and you're not making that to sit that that life-long sort of decision and
What are you really focusing your time energy and attention on for this next three to five years?
As I was doing research for the book I stumbled upon a
Insight from Stuart Brand via Kevin Kelly via Tim Ferriss and one of
Is either tribe or mentors or tools of patents and Stuart's idea was any significant project takes at least five years to see through
Any real significant project takes five years to see through and of course I did what I do and I was like
Okay, so most of us live to be 85 is a reasonable
Conjecture when you look at life spans in the United States. So take your age
Subtract your age from 85 and divide by five
That's the amount of significant projects you have left in your life
Does what's on your schedule next week
Reflect what you would want to be on that list and if not how are you gonna make that change because if you don't make the change
What you're gonna look at is all of these years all of these projects that you didn't get to because you chose
To do something else in your life and I know especially in productivity and personal development. There's so much
Infosist on the choices we make a lot of times that are divorced from the actual context of our lives, right and I understand
That some of us have different degrees of privilege that allows us to choose in different ways, right?
If you're if you got more money you have a broader range of choices that you may be able to make than if you're a
Single mom is working two jobs to put food on the table and
What I would say in certain scenarios like that is that be honest about
Those priorities that you have right if your priority is to
Make sure your kids have a good life or that you do the best you can that is a project and so in my language a project is
Anything that requires time energy and attention
not just economic work
And the reason I talk about it that way is because after thousands of conversations with people
What they tend to think is that we have this mental switch that goes off and it's like a new day
equals
16 hours of open space of things to do and so I should be able to feel that with all this but every new day starts with
12 hours of routines and habits and stuff you got to do
Before you even like wake up. There's that much work to do
But because we have so cleanly made the division between economic work and life
We only tend to count the economic work and then we wonder why we're not getting things done nearly as much because that's actually a small percentage of our life
Right, we're not it's like you're not spending the time you say is really important with your family or you're not spending the time to
Exercise on a regular basis or create helpful food or develop relationships
Yeah, because those are the things where we just think well
I'll just get it done in the margins. Yeah, I'll just get it done in the margins and I was talking to somebody
I think Angela will be fine with me talking so I'll say it was Angela because it was in fact Angela where we were talking about
Her fitness goals and how she wanted to work out and I was like well, so now I'll pause here
Angela's also a coach. I'm a coach and when you have a partnership where you're both coaches
It can be quite precarious, right? I'm to have these conversations sometimes you're not wanting to be coached by your partner
But it was one of the plays not the probably
Substitute sometimes we're pretty much all pretty much all the time and so it's always a precarious conversation
And this is also my body of work, which makes it even worse, right?
So she's like, oh no, I know what's coming on this one and so she was talking about
Going to your classes and things like that and I was like so how are you scheduling and how are you doing that?
She's like well, you know, so look at my schedule and then I try to find a class that fits my schedule
And I was like honey like we on our small we on our own business
You could find the classes that work for you first and get those scheduled two three weeks in advance and then build your work around that
Right build your economic work around that and of course she knew it in a certain way
But it requires prioritizing herself in a certain way and so when you dig two or three levels under why we make sort of decisions like that
What I was really getting at and she knew was Angela
You need to see
Your worth and your value and you need to see that this particular goal that you have is more important
than the economic work that you're prioritizing
And until we are willing
To claim our importance and claim that things like that matter on the personal side what I'm quote personal side
We are going to default to
prioritizing actually
prioritizing economic work and
Then what happens in the moment in the year or over the course of a lifetime is that it's actually
This personal stuff that truly does matter to us
They get kicked into the someday maybe land and
Then we look back and you're like but I never went on those trips. I
Never ran the marathon. I
Never built a guitar. I never did the things because I never could justify it economically
I never did put it in my schedule and say I'm doing that and
I think when we start looking at everything as a project
There requires time-interesting attention and
Looking at the fact that what is fundamental to our thriving is often
Not economically relevant then we could say yes
Economic work is really important
And it's just a portion of my life. It is not my life all these other things are important
So yes, I am making this choice to make less money or to do less work there
Because this two weeks of spending time with my kid or my aging parent or
This new puppy or fixing my backyard or whatever it is is actually
Critical to living the good life
the part of the your ability to then
Make the decision but then actually make it happen is
also
Getting sometimes I guess I would call it brutally honest about
The band with that you actually have available to accomplish any of these things and
And my experience has been that I lie to myself about that and everyone who I've ever worked with
Lies to themselves about that as well
You your approach to you have a process which basically really helps you get very honest about it very quickly and
Then reorient the projects the personal projects the the career projects the all these different in in a way that
Actually reflects what you truly have available. It's this approach
You know like by framing it as as as deconstructed as analyzing like what are your available blocks?
Walk me through this concept of blocks because I found that just extraordinarily
Powerful and also eye opening when I actually you understood okay
So I have these four different types of blocks and when I start to map that out my life. I was like wow
This is this explains so much to me about why I'm not doing certain things and why I'm doing certain things and
What I might be able to rework in order to actually create a much more
satisfying overall balance. Yeah, thanks for that
So a few things about block planning first right one of the traps that we fall into is that we actually think that we have
Any sense of estimating time
I've had long something takes and we're terrible at it consistently terrible at it
So we can't tell the difference between something that's gonna take 75 minutes and 90 minutes, right?
But we make up a lot of stuff
and so we end up
just trying again
To treat ourselves like robots like we have that degree of consistency and we don't and
So once you let go of that idea and we go and sort of a block planning is much more intuitive
So there are four types of blocks that I encourage people to think through so one is a focus block
Which is that block of time where you do the highest level work that you can do whether that's creative work or whether that strategic work
It's usually solo time of just when you get what's ever inside out of you and those blocks are 90 to 120 minutes long
Right and why that long because that's about the time that it takes you to really dig in to getting something done
Do all the translation or do all the transitions do that thing and
And start to exit and it's about the time that matches
Our bio rhythms as well if we go through circadian rhythms about every two hours our body will recycle
Right, that's when you need to go to the bathroom
Because your body goes to these natural two-hour cycles. Yeah, after about two hours
I I realize I've just read that sentence
Third time
Still not entirely sure what it says. Yeah, and so it accounts for that and what I do need to say because sometimes people confuse it
No, that's not two hours of you sitting there typing
That's that entire block of time where you do all of the coffee getting and you do the bathroom
But you don't switch to another project or you switch you don't switch to another tool
Right, so those are your focus blocks and the second is your
Social blocks and these are the blocks of time that you are interacting with another human, right?
And so it could be a meeting if you're in a service profession
It could be that that's the time that you're working with clients and things like that
And those also tend to be about 90 minutes 220 even though or 90 to 120 minutes
Even though we like to tell ourselves it's going to be 60 minutes and we stack ourselves from meeting to meeting
So why is it 90 to 120 minutes because when you look at the amount of time that it takes you to really
transition into prep mentally and emotionally for a meeting and then to down cycle and
Then the reality is most of the time you will you meet with other people
Where there's work that needs to happen that it's generated from that whether you need send emails so and so forth, right?
And so we don't give ourselves nearly enough time for this
And then we end up in task debt because we we don't have a place for that in the schedule
Which leads me to admin blocks which are 30 to 30 minutes to an hour long
Where you do all the email and the phone calls and you just batch all of that stuff and get it done and you're in that mode
Right, I'm getting it done and then the last one is your recovery blocks and you know interesting on this one Jonathan
I I used to not talk about recovery blocks because it's on that self-care side
So recover blocks are what they sound like they're when you do the self-care or the are the bits that
You know are you treating yourself like you're human?
So there could be meditation it could be sleeping it could be eating it could be exercise
It could be whatever it is that helps you recharge and take care of yourself
And I didn't talk about them a lot except for a notice in my work
I have a time to write to down with clients and I'm one of those people that I
Don't really have a emotional difference between
Helping someone figure out what their schedule needs to look like
Versus figuring out what the business model of their you know or their team composition
It's all worked to me and it's all equally enjoyable
And so I would be looking at their calendar calendar and be like so where's lunch?
Like what and you look at you know six meetings stack back
But like where are you eating and like oh well, I just kind of fit it in
Except for I also remember the conversation that I had with them about them not eating lunch
It's like you're not actually fitting the sin right whereas exercise. Where is all of these things?
And so I made I became more adamant about people thinking about their recovery blocks and making sure that they're on their schedule
Because otherwise work or other things slide into those blocks and you just don't get it done
And it becomes one of those things but
Fundamentally what I want people to focus on when it comes to their best work projects
Or when it comes to like doing the work that they most want to do is let's focus blocks
Because we have far fewer of those
than most people think
And that is what drives your projects and if you don't have enough focus blocks
You're not going to get the momentum that you want and if you have none
What you're going to end up doing is committing to ideas
That don't have room on your schedule to do and so
There are just things to think about like what I will tell most people is if you can't find three focus blocks for a project every week
You won't actually make any momentum on that project
It'll continue to be one of those things that you're like oh, I'll do it next week or I do it next week or I do it next week
And you'll continue to punt it and it's not that
There's anything wrong with you. It's just there's not enough room in your schedule and you're trying to do you know
We learned about
Block planning in school if you had those little shapeshord sort of things where you like got to put the triangle and the triangle hole in the
Circle in the circle hole
But unfortunately what we do when we actually look at our work is we keep trying to cram
The square into the circle hole right we chief try keep trying to cram our focused time our focused work
Into the in-between of meetings and social media and emails
And we wonder why we're not getting to work because it really does take you know 90 minutes to two hours to dig into that
Make significant progress and exit from that and a lot of times I've noticed that because of the way people stack their days
They're not even allowing themselves the chance to get into doing their work because they know they don't have enough time
To get into it and get out of it. So what's the point might as well jump to Facebook?
You know you might as well, you know see whatever deals on Amazon that you didn't need today
But you're gonna find out anyways, right and so changing that into saying how do I reorient my schedule?
To put my focus blocks
During the times of my day where I'm most likely to be creative and
Focused and high energy makes a world of difference and you're we're just playing with time here
Right we're not we haven't changed the amount of available time
We just changed how we've used that time in ways that are better at getting you to where you must want to be
Yeah, so I mean it's a combination of one
owning the fact that
The focus blocks like the work that we need to do in those focus blocks is
Invariably going to take you're just going further and further further behind than beating yourself up and then becoming
You know just own the fact that this is gonna take way longer than I I think yes
Even I'm smart. I'm accomplished all the yada yada yada and still it's going to take more than I think it's gonna take
So let me set aside the time so that I actually feel like I can I can
Get real work that matters done the other thing I took from that is that if you can't find
At least three of those blocks
per week on a regular basis
To do that for for a project
Then it's probably a really good idea
To say no to it because the only thing that you're gonna be building into your your week in your life is
frustration rather than momentum
Absolutely, and here's where displacement comes back in right saying no to that new project
What you have to get real about is you are prioritizing something in your life already and so
Rather than saying no, I can't right because I don't have time the real true story is
No, I'm choosing not to do that project because I'm choosing to do these other things
And that can be a point of frustration for a lot of people right because they don't like that that's actually what's going on
But I think that is the wedge in your life
That allows you to start saying okay, I think if I want to do differently I need to choose differently
Right and the other thing that about focus blocks that are really important is it's 90 to 120 minutes
When we look at how much time we're watching TV when we look at how much time we're on
Distracting sites when we look at how much time we're shopping when we look at how much time we're doing things that are either wasteful
or
If we really had to counterpose those activities versus the work we're most called to do it's no brainer
Right to do the work so it's not like you have to go dramatically change your life
It's just you have to start stealing time from things that are either wasteful or
Don't nourish you as much and so this is you know
three fewer Netflix benches, right?
This is two less you know two times of you not going out to eat because that's really time intensive when you think about it
right
there are ways that you can steal back this time and
And you know whether we want to tell the John Grisham story where he wrote most of his novels two hours in the morning before he went to work
Like there are so many stories where we have stolen that time and
Put it to things or people who take a longer lunch breaks and work on their projects during their longer lunch breaks and you know
There are so many different ways to maneuver and
The other thing that I want to remind folks is that we'll really squander a day right?
We will really like a full day. That's what we hope for like I just want a full day or want a full week and then I'm going to do the thing
Except for when that full week happens
What I've seen across countless clients and countless conversations is one
That's when your body tries to claw back all the recovery that it hasn't been getting so you end up sleeping a lot and
Inventing out because it's like oh, I can do it now right I actually have space in my schedule
and the second thing that will happen is
That you will start thinking okay. How am I going to spend this whole day
Working on something and you'll burn your body out instead of saying I need a whole day
I would want you to be thinking okay. What are the three focus blocks for the day?
What are the three
Significant chunks of a project that you can do in three and in those three as and be super clear about what that needs to be
So that you don't get to end at the end of that full day and you're like I just been clicking all day like I'm no further along
Which creates the story in this head trash in this pattern to where you start resenting doing that because you look at every time
You've done that in the past and you've either slept the whole day or you've clicked the whole day and you haven't gotten what you wanted out of it
And that makes a lot of sense and I have experienced that personally as I'm sure a lot of people have
The other thing that I think it it makes sense that for us to touch on sort of like a wall or sort of in this zone
Is the idea of time of day? I have for two reasons right one. I have found that my brain works in different ways at different times of the day
You know if you ask me to be hyper creative and hyper productive, you know like at four o'clock
It's gonna be a completely different experience than if you asked me to do it early in the morning or even late at night
And so when you think about not just how many of these
Four different blocks do I have in my life realistically and then how many of the focus blocks do I have available to get the stuff that really matters
Don the other thing I found super helpful. I know you're a big advocate for is
Understanding when in your day. Does it make sense?
Actually build these interest scheduled because it can make I have been so surprised it makes a profound difference
What time of day I actually do these?
Absolutely and and that experience is not unusual right there are roughly speaking three different chronotypes
That we all fall into and that's that early morning sometimes called larks
That is the you know night owl which we normally call people who have later sessions and then
There's this emus this third damn pink call some third birds
But I like calling them emus right that are people who are really on fire in the afternoon neither in the morning nor in the evening like the afternoon as their sweet spot and
And again unfortunately we we've live in this industrial
Reduction this society that makes that puts us on this like first shift nine to five schedule
And that's when you have to do all your work and even when we go solo we adopt that mindset right that nine to five is when you work
But really if you're a lark
The reality is about seven to maybe one o'clock is your peak zone
Right outside of that you're going to be doing lower level work you're going to be burned out you're going to be tired
So and so far then even if you get an evening session on top of that like working in the afternoon
She's not going to be your thing when we start talking about focus blocks and you just sort of invert that for every chronotype
it makes such a huge difference and
The reality is I want to be more stark about this if you try to do your deepest work in
In an off peak cycle
It's going to be a road of frustration because you're not going to do it or
You're going to do it and you're gonna wake up and look at what you've done and be really frustrated about how bad it is
And how much time you wasted in doing it right and so
Again using displacement as our friend here. It's really helpful to think if I don't I'm a morning person myself
Right if I don't do it in the morning. It's not going to happen
It is not going to happen
So choosing to do all the other things besides that in the morning means that I've also chosen not to do this thing
and
That choice or that sort of recognition is really powerful when it comes to
How we focus and how we set ourselves up first of the first success and
Again, I want people to really be thinking yes
You can talk about taking every day and you know if you're a morning person doing it from 7 to 2 and doing all that
Yes, that's one way you can do it
But I also want to say like maybe it's just Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the morning that you still a one block
Every one of us like the world
Can live without you for two hours. I promise you right?
The world can just do whatever it's going to do for that amount of time for you to focus on your work and what matters to you
And
That's where we start talking about boundaries
Because a lot of times we don't set the boundary that we need for that and so whether it's a scheduling app or whether it's whatever it is
We know we work better in the morning
And yet we still take morning meetings
Why right because your client needs a read because somebody needs it turns out time and time again
that
We have far more ability to choose our schedule even in a corporate environment
Right
Then we really assert and so we end up in these periods to where we're sitting in the meeting
right here in our peak zone
And know at a certain point that the work is not going to get done and yet we still try to take it home with us and get it done
It just makes such a difference. I'm so hard that it's
If people were to do one thing I would say you know
Take the time to figure out when you're at your peak
I'm an experiment with putting some focus blocks in there and just stealing two hours at a time
Yeah, how would you recommend that people actually do that like what's the is there a simple process to
Figure out what time of day that zone is for you? Yes
So we have some tools on our website that they help helps people track this
But what I've learned is a really great tool
Our really great way of backing into it is think about how you would operate on a vacation when you've already rested
It tends to give you an idea of when you would naturally do different types of things right because you don't have the
External constraint of other people's schedules and other people's priorities right
So part of it can be
Momotory journaling where you look at every hour and say how do I feel on a scale of you know one to ten and my creative or am I not creative
Um would be another way that you can do it
What I've experienced with this one Jonathan is most people already know
Um, they really do know
And they haven't allowed themselves to
make their schedules
match
Their chronotype they keep trying to make their chronotype match their schedules and it doesn't work
Yeah, right
And then you end up being a person who either never finishes stuff or you're finishing all the stuff that doesn't matter
and then you start
And then you go into that cycle of then you know like I am the type of person who doesn't finish it and that
Labels you as an identity of that person and then
You the thing that also stood out to me from what you were just sharing is this idea of so many of us I think feel
Constrained we feel like we can't actually choose that in our work and in our lives because
You know, so I'm a parent and I know that
For you know like many years a certain time where where I am
Hyper generative and creative and productive would be a time where I actually want to be really present for my family
So I have I have made a choice
To give up a certain amount of that because one of the things that matters to me most in the world
Is being there the people that I love most dearly
But also it's it's actually what I realized over the years is it's more
Complex than that. It's more nuanced than that because when I do that
every day
I feel great about the fact that I'm showing up for my family
But then slowly over time what starts to build up is a certain recognition that I'm not coming close to doing my best work
professionally and there's a certain amount of
That flows through to my mode of being all day every day and then when I think I'm you know
I'm here and I'm present for my family
I'm actually a little bit frustrated and pissed off when I'm with my family because
I'm not actually doing the stuff that fills me up and nurses me on the contribution side of things and
What I think I'm doing in the name of being present for my family is actually not only hurting my ability to do my best work in the world
But it's also hurting my ability to be fully present and loving and open when and with my family
And I've realized over time that I really do have to do this balance where sometimes it actually makes sense for me to say you know what
One of the best things that I can do for my family is to actually take these two hours and
Go and do incredible work because then when I come back for the other button you know time that I'm with them
I'm gonna I'm gonna really be there. I'm gonna be in my my my state of mind my state of being will be very very different
And that's a much higher quality of time with them
But that's not an easy thing to come to
Yeah, I'm so glad
I'm so glad you put that out as the example and also that you were honest about their frustrate their frustration and resentment that comes with that right
Because I think there's not enough space especially for parents who are creative folks
To
Be in that tension, but you feel you feel shame
Only in that actually. Yeah, you know because you you're like I shouldn't feel that way. Yeah, so like um
I used to call it mom guilt
Right because I've noticed so many of my clients and students who are moms they have this huge sense of guilt
About claiming that boundary and going to the coffee shop per two hours, right and leaving leaving their kids behind
But more importantly than that guilt is the guilt they feel and the shame they feel about being frustrated and resentful
About that choice and what's not happening and the story that they start telling themselves is I'm not able to do
I'm not able to do my work because of my kids
Right, and so they start pushing
their
Challenges and struggles on their kids when they realize it's really about their choices
And so in that scenario, I agree with you 100% in the sense of
the simple
Choice is to be present all the be omnipresent right
The cost of that choice is that in the end you're never really present
Right and there is that sense of fulfillment completion
um satisfaction that happens when you carve away that two hours or you carve away that morning
Um and let's be frank if you got a teenager the mornings are a great time to steal anyways
Because it's not like they want to interact with you in the morning anyways, right
And then you come back in your hole in a way and you can be extraordinarily present
Extremely generous with your time extraordinarily focused
Because you don't have all the wheels turning in the back of your mind about like the way that you're gonna have to
Re-calibrate your schedule or your project or what choices you're gonna have to make because you didn't get it done and
You know how you feel about the fact that you didn't get it done and so
I think too many of us approach our relationships with our emotional
creative
mental and spiritual wells empty in the name of being present
But how are we showing up in those in those moments and is that the type of presence you would want to have
I would much rather have personally
I would much rather have an hour or 30 minutes of angeles
really
clear focused time
Where she feels like she's gotten everything that she's needed outside of our relationship
I don't know that 30 minutes of that
than four hours of
Sort of that quarter time where she's trying to do everything else and trying to be with me and trying to do
It's like no, no, no, like I can wait
Right go do your thing and come back and I try to be that way with with her and with my friends and in the sense of like if I'm not in that place
I'm gonna tell you like I'm really not in that place right now and I'd rather
unless it's a really
I'm a momentous occasion like someone graduating or someone leaving for and you just have that period of time
I'd rather us find times where we're aligned energetically
We're aligned in interests
And we're aligned and sort of our general life satisfaction that hang out and be truly truly present
Then to be projecting that frustration or that tension into the into the relationship because it's got to go somewhere
Yeah, and I think it's you know, it's the difference between
just being present and
bringing your
Most fully actualized aware and available self
To that moment of being present. It's not an easy thing to do
We all have complex lives. We all have people outside of quote work
You know who play various roles in our lives and who we want to be therefore and at the same time
When we are not doing work that in some way allows us to actualize that deeper part of ourselves
It flows through to everything else and that's why you know like when I think about the work that you've been doing when I think about this book start finishing
It's it's it's on the surface is about yes like here's a really cool methodology to start finishing the the work that you're doing in the world
But bigger picture
It's actually a methodology to allow you to do the work that matters most
Most effectively so that you can then spend the greatest amount of time
being present and engaged
In all of the parts of your life. It's not matter most to me. I guess it comes to starting kind of comfortable circle because in the beginning
I asked you like why this book you know like well, it's kind of part productivity book
But it's also kind of part you know like self-improvement book and I guess is that ripple effect?
I think so and I would want to say it in a bit more nuanced way
What I want people to really get into is the work of their lives
Right so that we see that there and and work is not a for letter work for me in the sense of it's something we want to get away from
We want to minimize so and so forth. It's this really sacred stuff that we get to do
Only a parent can parent their child in the way that they're going to do it
Right only certain people can be leaders in their communities in the way that they're going to do it
The only a particular creative is going to create in the way that she creates
Whatever that is. I want people to see that this
life work
Can be prioritized
I won't go as far as they should be prioritized because people have had their own priorities
But it can be prioritized and that for many people
That's where deep satisfaction deep flourishing comes from
And so yes, it's a book that will help you do your economic work
I'm just as exciting excited about the fact that it's a book that will help you do the work of your life and make sure
that
What you need to do to become the type of person that you most want to be is on your schedule
and is on your project deck and has the
Group of people around you supporting that goal just like what you would do any other economic work that matters to you right
Yeah
um
This feels a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out in the studio today
Um in the context of this container of a good life project if I offer out the phrase to live a good life what comes up
Do what matters most
Right and I'm going to focus on the doing right. I won't say stop talking and start doing
But I will say like if you know that you've been doing a lot of talking and a lot of
A lot of ideating but you have him doing a lot of making or doing or leading or whatever your thing is
Um just understand that that gap between the good life you want to live
And where you are
Is probably bridged by certain types of doing
That you have to start doing
Hmm. Thank you. Thank you
Hey before you leave if you love this episode safe
That you will also love the conversation that we had with Brad Feld about focusing in on what really matters in life or what he calls
Picking or 2% and putting everything up against it. You'll find a link to Brad's episode in the show notes
This episode of Good Life project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me Jonathan Fields
Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez Chris to forecorder crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Del for her research on this episode
And of course if you haven't already done so please go ahead and follow Good Life project in your favorite listening app
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Until next time I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life project
