Termagants and Curmudgeons

Each of us cherishes some form of the two narratives that I call The Story and The Script.

The Story

The Story represents your past. It is the condensed version of your life, highlighting some of your proudest moments and reflecting some of your most challenging ones. You invoke the story when you want to describe who you are or to explain why you behave the way you do.

"I am wary of relationships because my former partners let me down."

"I can't be happy at work because I don't respond well to authority."

"I'm great with kids because I grew up with four younger siblings."

"I was captain of the debate team in high school."

The Story is a little bit like that Zen tale of two monks in the way that we carry it around:

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.

Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.

“Come on, girl,” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud. Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”

“I left the girl there,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”

The Script

The Script represents your future. It is that idealized version of how you expect your life to play out.

"I'm going to college and then will work for three years before going back for my graduate degree."

"I'm going to get an MBA and go to work for a Wall Street firm."

"By the time I'm 30, I'll get married and move to the suburbs."

"When I retire, I'll travel the world."

Quite often, The Script includes many such scenarios tied together into a larger saga so that each event in the future depends on accomplishing the one before.

Here’s an old anecdote from India to illustrate:

At Tirupati lived a Brahman in poor circumstances, who received on a certain day a pot of flour as a present from a certain merchant. He took it and, being very tired, seated himself on the verandah of a house and soliloquized thus, “If I sell this pot of flour, I shall get half a rupee for it, with which I can purchase a kid. This, in short time, will produce a flock. I will then sell them, and buy cows, buffaloes, etc., and thus in a few years I shall be the master of three thousand head of cattle. I will then purchase a mansion, which I will furnish elegantly, and marry a beautiful damsel who will crown my happiness by giving birth to a son. My wife will be particularly fond of me, but I shall not allow her too much freedom, and shall sometimes send her away with a kick when she comes to caress me.”

Thus thinking, he thrust out his leg like one really going to kick, struck the pot and broke it in to pieces. The flour got mixed with dirt, and all his ideas of happiness vanished.

Breaking Free

I was having a conversation with a colleague who asked me how I manage to work on so many different things. “Where do you find the time?” In the process of dissecting my time management process, I explained how you could gain a whole day every week by cutting out a few activities. Every day that I choose to work remotely rather than commute to work, I gain three hours. Every day that I choose not to watch TV, it’s two hours. In a five-day week, that’s over 24 hours that I just freed up to work on important stuff.

Enhance the quality of your quality time

There’s a sign that sits on my desk. It says:

This simple message is a constant reminder for me to be in the moment, focus on what’s happening in my environment and cherish the experience that I’m having. It’s the key to being mindful. Mindfulness increases the value of the time you spend on important things. By being mindful, you’re increasing the meaning of your involvement in the activity of the moment. Decide what’s important to you and spend time on that, even if it’s binge-watching a Netflix show or Netflix and chill. You want to get to that point in life where all your time is quality time. Except for that minute slice of life when you inevitably have to hang out at the DMV.

Take control

If you went through the exercise of finding out what your time is worth, then you will start noticing activities that don’t make sense anymore. That hot new food truck that everyone lines up for? Maybe it doesn’t make sense to stand in line. Why wait to be the first in line for a new game or shoe or gadget when you can get the same item a week later without standing in line? It might even make sense for you to pay someone for their spot on the line. Does it make more sense to take a cab or take the subway? Should you go see a movie in the theater or wait for it to be released on Amazon? Should you stand in line at Starbucks or make your coffee at home?

Don’t save time, gain time.

In your life, start thinking of ways in which you can gain time. Most people talk about saving time as if it is something you can put in a bank to spend later. Time keeps chugging along no matter what you do. The only thing you have control over is what you spend your time doing. Success to me means spending time on what’s important. If you’ve decided what’s important in your life and you wisely choose what to spend your time on, then you will be successful. Choosing wisely also means you stop spending time on unimportant things.

You may have come across a version of this advice:

First, some questions

About five years ago, I walked around my office asking coworkers a simple question – “Why do you work?” I got a lot of surprised looks. They were working sixteen-hour days, not seeing their kids grow up. They took pride in not using up all their vacation days. What kind of a question was that to ask? “Tell me why you work,” I would prod.

Their answers fell into a few broad categories: saving for kids education, trying to pay off the mortgage, having enough for retirement. I would then offer them another scenario: What if you could take the equity in your home and buy a property outright in another part of the country? What if that part of the country has in-state tuition that’s so low that you don’t need to worry about saving for college? Two major reasons for working just went away. Would you still work?

Today I ask, “What will you do when you retire?” When they tell me, I respond, “Why don’t you just do that now?” Most people’s fantasies of retirement are tied into what they will do once they have accumulated a certain amount of money. If your future is tied into money and having certain amounts of it, then yes, you have to wait. In the new world where time is currency, focusing on money is a sure way to live an unfulfilled life.

Turning money on its head

20th century thinking held that you had to own things in order to be successful. You had to have a better car, a better house, more money, a better job. Success was measured in terms of things. In order to have more things, you had to have more money. In the 21st century, technology and connectedness have made it possible to have experiences without the burden of owning something. The transformation that has occurred is that experiences are more readily available for a fraction of the cost. It turns out that’s what we wanted all along. Why own a designer dress when you can rent the runway?

Here’s what it costs to own a car in America in 2015:

Does this still make sense in a world where you can call up a ride via an app on your phone and be driven anywhere you want? Will it make sense in a world of autonomous vehicles?

Technology enables experiences

There’s a factoid I keep hearing at social gatherings and repeated ad nauseam in watercooler conversations that goes like this:

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

What is interesting is that this has become a mainstream topic of conversation. The quote comes from a piece by Tom Goodwin. Later in the same article, he captures the essence of what’s at play:

The Internet is the most powerful mechanism we can imagine to match perfectly individuals that need something, and people with something to offer. 

The ability to share experiences drives down the total cost of ownership of the things we own. Suddenly, money is not as important as it once was. You can have a richer life with less money than you thought you needed.

Hacking your stuff is a conscious decision you make to live a more fulfilling life in this new world of experiences that’s driven by technology. The less stuff you own, the more time you have to spend on what’s important.

More reading

Our Year of Living Airbnb

Living home-free requires the right temperament. If I’m anything to go by, it’s a combination of wanderlust and an urge to diversify the risk of, say, being stuck next to a construction site.

Could Self-Driving Cars Spell the End of Ownership?

The utilization rate of automobiles in the U.S. is about 5%. For the remaining 95% of the time (23 hours), our cars just sit there, a slow, awful cash burn, like condos at the beach.

Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department

If you commit to using the concepts of The Core to live your life more fully, you'll have to do daily battle with the lizard. The lizard is that part of your consciousness that's focused on keeping you safe, telling you to avoid risky behavior. The lizard is your first instinctive response to uncomfortable situations. It is the collective wisdom of generations of your ancestors who struggled to stay alive so that you could be born. The lizard is selfish and motivated by fear.

The only way you're going to be able to overcome the lizard to get used to the sound of its voice. When you hear that voice, say to yourself, "I hear the lizard speaking. The lizard is telling me what to do. I know better than the lizard. Here's what I'm going to do instead." This is the only way you can stay in control. The lizard will fight and bite. The lizard does not like to be suppressed. Its suggestions are geared towards killing creativity and promoting the average. The more you get used to confronting the lizard, the more confidence you will have to overcome its suggestions.

If you’re ready for a year-end purge to make space for more time to think and to do what’s important, start by using the KonMari method to organize your life. This past week, I procrastinated on the clothing step but got cracking with the books and over 100 books have been dispatched to new homes! While working through the KonMari process, I was struck by how conceptually similar it is to GTD and how both lead to that ‘Aah’ sense of relief when you start practicing them.

Collect

At the beginning, both methods ask you to collect everything. GTD includes a mind sweep that focuses on getting everything out of your head. KonMari asks you to dump everything on the floor. Both methods recognize that you can start organizing only once you have full inventory of all your stuff. There’s perhaps an implicit shock value that acts as a call to action once you realize just how much stuff exists – whether it’s clothes in your closet, books on your bookshelves, thoughts in your head, or to-do lists on slips of paper.

Ask

Once you’ve collected everything, there’s a key question you must ask yourself. With GTD, “Is it actionable?” Answering this question determines whether something you’ve collected needs to be done or not. It also helps you decide how you will organize it and actually get it done. The critical question with KonMari is, “Does it spark joy?” Things that don’t spark joy detract from your enjoyment of life and are to be discarded.

Organize

After you’ve answered the critical question, both methods offer counterintuitive ways of looking at your stuff. With GTD, action choice is determined by context, not priority. As I mentioned in an earlier post, success with GTD hinges on your acceptance of organization by context. Contexts help you evaluate what gets done, when it gets done and where it gets done. When following Konmari, you tidy by category, not location. So rather than moving from room to room, you decide what you’re going to organize and then do it all at once. So all your clothes get organized at once, then your books and so on. So by switching your mindset so that you’re focusing on contexts or categories, you find that you’re hacking your stuff in a more effective manner.

Prime time was a uniquely 20th century artifact, driven by television. With television, time was chunky, analog and sequential. You watched soaps during the day, the news at 6 and 11 and late night shows after that. Until the rise of digital capabilities, you couldn't pause or rewind TV, so if you missed a show, or a few minutes of one, that was it. You missed out on the experience. You needed to be present in a specific spot at a specific time.

Today, it's quite likely that you don't stay up on Saturday nights to watch Saturday Night Live. You watch clips of it the next day -- only the ones that are trending, hopefully. You do the same with the late night shows.

Netflix seems to have understood this new reality, which is why you get a whole season of shows at once. If you want to binge-watch, go ahead. If you want to watch them one at a time and stretch the experience over months, that's fine too. Our modern experience of time is fluid rather than discrete, digital rather than analog and non-linear rather than sequential. Experiences that were once time-bound are no longer restricted to certain portions of the day.

Once you're comfortable with the notion that you no longer have to do specific things at specific times, you're free to question why anything needs to be done that way. Why wake up at 6 am to catch a 7 am train so you can get to your desk at 9 am? Why work from 9 to 5? Why do meetings have to be 30 minutes long? Why plan and report corporate results quarterly? Why take summer vacations? Why are Saturday and Sunday the weekend?

There is a TED talk by Steven Strogatz called "The Science of Sync," in which he shares a video that shows the flocking and shoaling behavior of birds and fish. Among the insights you learn is that very simple rules drive this behavior. For example, despite apparent complexity, each individual bird or fish simply tries to maintain a fixed distance from its nearest neighbors and generally behaves selfishly. If you've watched an elevator or subway car gradually fill up, you may have seen that even humans seem to follow these rules.

Whether human or bird or fish, it appears that we instinctively know three  things. First, that there is safety in numbers. Second, that it's safest to be inconspicuous, to be part of the crowd, to fit in, to be average. And third, “don’t be eaten.”

But we are humans, not birds or fish or rats or ants. So why do we behave this way, even when our survival is not at risk? Why do we frequently adopt this behavior as our default approach to life? Perhaps it's because it allows us to get by with a minimal expenditure of physical and mental energy. It's just easy.

But using your superpower means you have to abandon the safest path. It means you have to stop being average. It means you agree to use all the mental and physical energy that’s required to deliver your mission. It means you have to stand apart from the shoal. And that's risky. It can feel scary and uncomfortable. It's supposed to.

So you have to resolve to become more comfortable with discomfort. You do this by challenging yourself each day to do something that makes you uncomfortable. Speaking up in a meeting makes you uncomfortable? Introducing yourself at a party? How about talking to a large group of people? Do you sometimes fear you might say or do the wrong thing to annoy someone else?

Start doing that which makes you queasy, and keep doing it until you're comfortable with the queasiness -- when you can accept that feeling in the pit of your stomach; when you can talk over the top of that little voice in your head. What you lose in the process is stuff you need to lose. What you'll gain is the confidence you need to accomplish greater things.

So don't be afraid of rocking the boat because you'll never know what the boat is made of until you rock it.

p.s. Sometimes the boat is you.

p.p.s. As your confidence increases, never forget that great responsibility is expected of those with great power.

At a grocery store in a  nearby town, a bright-eyed young man named Rafael works in the produce department. Each morning as he stocks the fruit and carefully arranges the displays, his eyes drift to the squat boxes of berries lined up and neatly stacked. He reads off the labels and quietly mouths the words, one by one: "Strawberries. Blackberries. Blueberries. Raspberries."

He thinks back to his childhood and time spent climbing trees and walls, when he'd reach over into his neighbor's yard and pick berries right off the tree. He can feel his mouth starting to pucker up and the tartness as his taste buds recall the flavor of his favorite gooseberries. Gooseberries.

"Hey boss," he yells across the aisle to the produce manager, "when are we going to get some gooseberries in here?" "Gooseberries? What's that?" "You know! Gooseberries. Little, round, sour..." It's hard to describe gooseberries to someone who hasn't tasted them before.

A week later, Rafael is at the farmer's market when he sees Sarah who runs a little farm stand. Incredibly, there at the front of her stand, are little boxes of gooseberries. Not pumpkin-shaped like he remembers, but smooth and round. He picks up one and tastes it. He has to close his eyes and savor it as he remembers the joy of eating so many gooseberries all those summers ago. He buys some and takes them home to enjoy.

The next day, he shows off the berries at work. "Hey boss, try one." "Hey boss, when are we going to get some gooseberries in here?" The other employees tease him and after a while he gets known around the store as "that gooseberry kid."

Meanwhile, up at the corporate offices that run the grocery store, executives have started to think about how to bring locally sourced products into their stores. After analyzing numbers and charts and thick stacks of documents, they eventually direct store managers to carry local produce. At Rafael's store, the store manager is reviewing a list of products she's been sent.