Stop trying to compete on speed – you’ll just exhaust yourself.
I’m sick of seeing yet another article on productivity tips. I’m even more annoyed with myself for constantly reading them. It’s like being on a hamster wheel, where you want to get off, but you still need to work out how stay upright and keep your legs going ever faster while you’re on it.
Productivity articles resonate with so many of us because time is the most precious resource we have, and it feels like we have ever less. If we squander our time then we can’t go to a store, or a bank and get more.
We are obsessed with how much we can get done in a day, and not how much we can become over a lifetime – it’s clear we have forgotten that we’re called human beings, and not human doings.
It doesn’t help that us human doings have a competitive urge. Michael Simmons articulates this important point in his Medium article on the pace of change in the world. He observes how life on earth is a big competition, born from the need of living creatures to survive. Over the life of our species we have competed for water, shelter, food, land, resources… That competitive drive has become a habit. Now we’re now locked in on the Treadmill of More: we want more money, more status, more experiences. Like Tantalus, our thirst for more is never slaked, and we pay with our time. We’ve forgotten what having enough feels like, if we ever knew.
The pace of change in our world is only accelerating, and many of us are feeling overwhelmed just keeping the lights on, let alone keeping up with the Joneses. How do we deal with this hamster wheel?
So far I can think of four responses:
1. Become a productivity junky
This is the option I’ve tried. I’ve studied time management and multi-tasking techniques. Some of these have proved useful, but not for the reasons I had expected.
I had been looking for ways to help me get more done with my time, but instead I found ways to avoid distraction and gain focus. In other words, I achieved far more in fewer pursuits because I learned how to cut out the noise. If this approach interests you, I recommend this very short (1 minute) Medium article on Warren Buffet’s method for achieving success through productivity.
2. Turn our competitive nature toward a common enemy
The ancient Greek city states, like Athens and Sparta, put their arguments with one another aside and came together to battle the Persians from 492 BCE. In modern times we can look to the coronavirus as an example of the world uniting (mostly) in our collective race for our lives.
Scientists and nations have shared information and resources to progress our understanding on the best way to combat Covid-19. Despite the relatively free flow of information we’ve also witnessed a lot of competition and hoarding of PPE and drug supplies – this is not been a perfect example – but it has shown us a possible way off the wheel.
3. The Infinite Game
Simon Sinek has popularized the findings of James P. Carse in his book, Finite and Infinite Games, A finite game has winners and losers but within infinite games the purpose is not to win but to keep playing. In his talks Simon Sinek considers the Vietnam War, in which he describes the Americans fighting a finite war, to win, and the Vietnamese fighting an infinite war, to survive.
Could we consider our own competition with one another differently, not in terms of winners and losers, but instead as simply whether we are ahead or behind, and where we all just want to be able to keep playing? Competition could take a different form, and transform from fighting with our adversaries to dancing with them.
4. Evolve beyond our need to compete, and just be happy with ‘enough’
This is my holy grail. I’m still very far from it. Sir Percival, I am not.
I believe our species will only survive if we can evolve beyond our wiring. Our inability to exhibit the behavioral flexibility demanded by a global pandemic has shown how far we are from such a goal. It makes me wonder if we have it within us to adapt at the pace required to overcome the behavioral issues of climate change. If we expect to ‘science’ our way out of this without also changing our lifestyles, en masse, we’re deluding ourselves.
When I first latched onto the importance of improving adaptability I took it to mean faster adaptability. I now see that every speed has a limit. A pursuit of speed alone would prove as helpful in the long term as my fetish for productivity hacks. We need more than speed to leap us off the rails of this steepening change curve – we need a collective leap.
With such a leap we would learn from history, and retain that knowledge beyond the living memory of a generation. Just as we leave history behind, how wonderful it would be to leave with it the quote from G.W.F. Hegel, “we learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”
We could free ourselves from the baggage of unconscious bias and respond objectively to situations based on their individual merit. We could see the world the way it is, and not cherry pick or manipulate evidence to support our preconceived notions just because we love that feeling of being right. Ascent would require us to leave our egos behind. It’s going to hurt!
The answer then is not to keep up with the pace of change but to evolve beyond a need to do so. Sounds easy when I say it like that but if it were easy we’d have already done it. I guess it’s good to have goals, especially one as important as this. If it proves possible then all our human doings wouldn’t feel quite so exhausting, and maybe we could find the space to become human beings.
