The Science of Productivity

hey friends welcome back to Deep dive the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs creators authors and other inspiring people and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love in this video we're looking back at previous episodes to take the best productivity advice from some of our previous guests so without further Ado here we are so many people when it comes to distraction they blame the things outside of us we blame the pains the dings the Rings all of the things in our outside environment that can lead us towards distraction now they those things can be a trigger for distraction those are called external triggers but we know from time studies that those external triggers only account for about 10% of our distractions so 10% of the time that you check your phone is it because of a pingding or ring but that's what we tend to blame what we don't remember what we don't think about is that 90% of our distractions 90% begin From Within These are called internal triggers what are internal triggers internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional stat that we seek to escape boredom loneliness fatigue uncertainty anxiety these are these uncomfortable Sensations that we look to escape many times with distraction so whether it's too much news too much booze too much football too much Facebook you are always going to get distracted from one thing or another unless you understand the root cause of the problem so if we just keep blaming the external triggers when they account for such a small share of the reason for our distractions we don't get to the real cause of the problem solid that's surpris ures me I would have thought that like the reason I get distracted by my phone is the fact that I get all these notifications but we're saying it's not actually because yeah because then I think when I'm on the couch or when I'm on the toilet it's not a notification I'm responding to it's something yeah that's right it's a feeling and so that's to me you know this whole question of distraction and and why don't we do what we say we're going to do right this ancient question that Plato asked as well I think is a fascinating question if we know what to do why don't we just do it right we all know what to do and today you know you could say okay well maybe in general ation passed our grandparents uh had a shortage of information if you wanted to know how to do something you had to go to the library or ask some expert today it's all here right Google it it'll tell you what to do and who doesn't basically know what to do we know if you want to get in shape you have to eat right and exercise if you want to have better relationships with your family you have to be fully present with them if you want to uh do well at your job you have to do the things that other people aren't willing to do right we we know this stuff you have to do the hard work we know but we don't do it and so to me that's a really interesting question so in order to understand why do we get distracted I think we have to go a layer deeper and ask why do we do anything and everything what's the nature of human motivation most people tell you that motivation is about carrots and sticks we've all heard this right turns out neurologically that's not true that neurologically the way the brain gets us to act is not through carrots and sticks per se but rather everything is about the desire to escape discomfort the way the reward system in the brain works is that the carrot is the stick right think about that that carrot is the stick meaning that even when we want to feel good pleasure desire craving hunger lusting for something the desire for pleasure is itself psychologically destabilizing so everything we do everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort so that means if everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort that must therefore mean that time management is pain management money management is pain management weight management is pain management and so that's why these internal triggers are so important if you don't Master these internal triggers they will become your master nice um how do we muster these intal yeah so this is the most important part I think a lot of people gloss over uh they look for the tips the tricks the life hacks right show me the app show me the secret solution give me the new Tropic that's going to fix this problem but at the end of the day if 90% of our distractions begin from within we have to figure out these strategies to master internal trigger so there's a dozen different tactics in my book IND distractible on how to do this and you have to experiment you have to see what works for you I'll tell you what works for me so a couple techniques that work really well that I I use literally every single day uh come from acceptance of commitment therapy I didn't make them up they've been around for decades one of them is called the 10minute rule the 10-minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction whatever that distraction might be whether you're on a diet and you're trying to resist that chocolate cake whether you're trying to quit smoking whether you're trying to not check your phone every 5 minutes when you're trying to be with your family or do a work project you can give into that distraction but not right now in 10 minutes and if 10 minutes is too long make it the five minute rule it doesn't really matter what you want to do is a couple things number one this shows you that you have agency that you can actually do what you say you're going to do you can resist anything for just five minutes so by showing to yourself hey you know what I I'm not controlled by these distractions I can wait a few minutes I will do that thing but a little bit later in 10 minutes the other thing that I think is super important that lot of people forget is that they think that the right path to stop a behavior is abstinence and for some behaviors that can be the case right if you can remove external triggers from your environment so for example if people are trying to uh stop a substance abuse if you can remove those triggers from your environment sure abstinence might be able to work for you but how do you remove the triggers for technology right it's it's all it's all over the place right we we need our devices in order to stay connected to work to family to loved one that is part of the modern experience food same way you can't just stop eating food you need food to survive so in those cases strict abstinence telling yourself no can backfire it's called psychological reactant psychological reactant says that when you are told what to do when your agency is threatened the natural human response is to Rebel so when your mom told you oh it's raining outside put on a cat and you said don't tell me what to do or your boss tries to micromanage you that feeling of being controlled that's reactants now the crazy thing is that the human brain will elicit reactants even when we are telling ourselves what to do so when you tell yourself don't check Tik Tok don't watch YouTube you are literally making yourself want it more so instead to disarm Psychological reactants a much better approach is to say hey I can do whatever I want I'm a grown human being I can I can make my own choices I choose to delay this by 10 minutes I will do that thing in 10 minutes now what's the next step when you do that you want to explore that internal trigger with curiosity rather than contempt a lot of people they beat themselves up so when people uh think about distraction we find that they fall into two buckets two categories we have what we call the blamers and then we have What's called the shamers the blamers they blame things outside themselves they blame technology they blame the news they blame the modern world they blame all this stuff outside of them those are the blamers and that's feudal because you're not going to change that stuff right people have always been distracted by things happening outside them so that's not that's not an effective strategy the other category is what we call the shamers they take it on the inside that's what I used to do oh there must be something wrong with me uh if I was a real writer I wouldn't have this urge to constantly get distracted maybe I'm my brain is broken somehow I would shame myself into thinking there was something broken about me and of course shame is a very uncomfortable internal trigger so what do we do in response to shame we're more likely to look for distraction to escape the shame that we're feeling so we don't want to be a blamer we don't want to be a shamer we want to be what's called a claimer a claimer claims responsibility not for how they feel so this is this was a big one for me turns out we don't control our urges we don't control our urges people try and control their urges you cannot control your urges think about the urge to sneeze when you feel the urge to sneeze it's too late you already felt the urge all you can do is to decide what you will do in response to that urge right hence we can claim responsibility responsibility comes from how you will respond to that urge so what do you do when you feel the urge to sneeze do you sneeze all over everyone and get them sick no you you take out a handkerchief and you cover your face right that's the responsible thing to do and the same goes for our urges around getting distracted right it's not about claiming and blame it's not about shaming and blaming it's about claiming responsibility for having a plan for what we will do when we feel that discomfort so the 10-minute rule allows us to say okay I will give into that distraction in 10 minutes now what do you do for those 10 minutes what I do is I do I use this technique called surfing the urge surfing the urge acknowledges that these emotions are like waves they Crest and then they subside but that's not how it feels in the moment in the moment when you feel bored or anxious or uncertain or lonely you feel like you're always going to experience that emotion but that's not true right that if you acknowledge that in a short very short period of time that emotion will crest and subside you can ride it like like a surfer on a surfboard until it's gone and so what I do uh you know I write every single day uh and writing never gets easier like there's no such thing as a writing habit by the way you know people try and make everything into a habit these days and by definition that that you can't right a habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought how exactly do you write with little or no conscious thought right I I don't know how to do that right how how do you an exercise habit that's a misnomer because habit requires little or no conscious thought if you're trying to break your PR that requires effort that requires thought uh so so you can't just you know habit it away you have to put effort towards these things these are the things that people tend to get distracted from so while I'm writing oftentimes when I'm about to say oh let me just check email real quick or let me just Google something right what I'm doing is I'm trying to create an excuse for me to to get away from that internal trigger of of is this writing going to be any good and uh uh is it's kind of boring and I'm not sure where it's going to go and is anybody going to read this all this down uncertainty what I do what I do is I I take a pause I set a timer for 10 minutes I put my phone down and I say okay I close my eyes and I just surf that urge and so for me a useful technique another one that I talk about in the book is to have a personal Mantra and so you can create your own Mantra I'll share with you my Mantra so in those 10 minutes I have a choice to make I can either get back to the task at hand and whenever I'm ready to get back to the task at hand get right back to the writing or I can surf that urge by just taking a few seconds to repeat my Mantra my Mantra sounds like this I close my eyes and I say this is what it feels like to get better this is what it feels like to get better that's just my my personal Mantra you can create your own to me that reminds my reminds me that it's supposed to be difficult right if it was easy everyone would do it that's part of the struggle that's part of a craft is is is pushing through that discomfort and what I find nine times out of 10 is that before those 10 minutes are up I'm right back at that task in hand and what what happen over time is that the 10-minute rule becomes the 12-minute rule becomes the 15minute rule becomes the 20-minute Rule and now you're proving to yourself that you actually do have control you do have agency over these distractions traction time boxing what is that sure okay so let's talk about uh let's start a little bit beginning with what is distraction right so this is important to understand what does that word even mean um and and and I I'm I mean I I think this it relates to productivity but I I don't know if it's exactly productivity because I'm trying to help people get the things out of their way right so much of of behavior changes about what you should do and I think maybe we should focus more on the things that get in our way from doing the things we know we should do so let's start with what is distraction so the best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not what's the opposite of distraction so most people if you say what's the opposite of distraction they'll tell you it's Focus but that's not true the opposite of distraction is not focus if you look at the origin of the word the opposite of distraction is traction right it makes sense when you look at them next to each other traction and distraction they're opposites they both come the from the same Latin root trahar which means to pull and they both end in the same six-letter word act n that spells action reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us it is an action that we ourselves take so traction by definition is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do things that move you Clos to your values help you become the kind of person you want to become those are acts of traction distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you said you were going to do away from your values away from become becoming the kind of person you want to become so this is this is super important uh it's not just semantics because the difference between traction and distraction is one word and that one word is intent so as Dorothy Parker said the time you plan to waste is not wasted time so there's nothing wrong with scheduling time for video games that is traction if that's what you said you were going to do in advance conversely and more dangerously is when people don't even realize they're distracted so my workday routine used to look like this I would say okay I'm not going to procrastinate I've got that big project I have to finish nothing's going to get in my way here I go I'm going to get started but first let me check some email right let me just scroll that slack Channel real quick let me just do this uh easy task on my to-do list right that those are productive things I'm I'm doing work rated tasks I'm being productive right but if it's not what you said you were going to do in advance it's just as much of a distraction as you know plain Candy Crush or something so it is all about what you said you were going to do in advance that's attraction and distraction so how do you put this into practice you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from so if you have big open whites space in your calendar what the hell did you get distracted from you can't tell me everything is a distraction unless you plan your time so unlike a to-do list which is just a register of things you want to have done when you time box and I didn't make up this technique it's been around for a long time it's called setting an implementation intention it's the most widely studied technique that far too too few people use it's basically saying here's what I'm going to do and when I'm going to do it now the difference is that the metric of success what I added in my book uh which is is unlike a to-do list which is about checking cute little boxes it's about finishing things that's a terrible metric because you don't control the output right you don't control the output how how long is something going to take you when you're doing a YouTube video sometimes it takes you a few hours sometimes it can take you dozens of hours narrowly you don't always know what you do know is the what's your input it's time and attention and so when you budget those things your time and attention the new metric isn't did I finish the new metric is did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction whether that's being with my family whether that's playing video games whether that's working on a big project did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction because that is the only way to have a feedback loop so the reason that it takes people on average three times longer to finish a task than they predict is because they have no way of knowing how long things take so when you have a time box calendar you say okay I'm going to work on this task for 1 hour 30 minutes 15 minutes doesn't matter and I'm going to do nothing but now you have a feedback loop now you can say okay well I need to make this slide presentation and it's going to be 30 slides long and I did about three slides that means I need a total of 10 time boxes to finish the entire presentation you can start being a better estimator of how long things take as opposed to someone who use a to-do list you say okay I'm gonna I'm going to finish that task today here I go I'm going to get started for 5 minutes they work on it and they say oh you know what uh let me get a cup of coffee real quick and oh Janice is at the water cooler and oh you know what I need to do this other thing and wait what was I working on again so this is why time boxing eats too list for breakfast it's a much much better technique because it allows you to understand For the First Time what is traction anything that's actually in your calendar and everything else is a distraction what other productivity techniques have helped you in your marriage in my marriage what else ask for a friend um so I I talk okay this is kind of personal but uh you asked so let's talk about our sex life why not um so we found a few years ago again been married for married for 23 years now and uh a few years ago we found that our sex life was really suffering and the reason it was suffering was not for a lack of of not loving each other or lack of intimacy it was that every night we were going to bed later and later and we were just exhausted and part of that was that every night I would go to bed and I was caressing my iPhone and she was fondling her iPad and we weren't being intimate yeah and so it wasn't until I started writing indistractable I decided to take on this Challenge and one of the best things we did was that I went to the hardware store and I bought us this outlet timer and this outlet timer will turn on or off anything you plug into it at a set time of day or night so in my household till this very day every night at 1 p.m. our internet router shut off so uh we probably don't even need it anymore because we've been doing it for so long but what that means is that everybody knows no internet past 10 p.m. my daughter knows that my wife knows that I certainly know that so as opposed to uh checking email to the we hours or scrolling social media or watching YouTube videos or whatever hey gotta wrap everything up because 10 p.m. the internet's going to shut off and so that that that's called a an effort packed now it's called an effort pack because it takes a bit of effort it puts some friction in between you and the distraction now could I still get on the internet of course I could I could use my cell phone I could unplug the internet and then you know take out this timer and replug it in but that takes work that takes effort it it proposes this minute of mindfulness when I say wait a minute do I really need to stay online here or is it time to go to bed and maybe be intimate with my wife when you sit down and start a task sometimes it can be very hard to begin and something like procrastination for example where you can't take action that's caused by load opening levels and when you start a task so let's say cleaning your your home because that's an annoying task that we all have to do it's not like super pleasurable especially at the beginning you start the task and you also put it off for ages because you can't be bothered then eventually you start the task and at the beginning it's like so much effort you maybe have some music playing on in the background you think oh I can't bother to do this but I need to do it a good example is something like cleaning a bathroom because that's a particularly annoying task in our home what you'll find is the first five minutes pretty annoying and gradually you begin to what's called gain momentum effectively after 10 minutes you might start getting more and more into it and then what can happen is the opposite can occur rather than thing you can't bother to do this you actually get more into it than you even expected to and that's because you're effectively entering cleaning Flow State flow state is when our brain gets hyperfocused on something it takes an average a human brain about 15 minutes to enter Flow State brilliant psychologist called gold discover this whole Flow State and dopamine connection and effectively the beginning of the task very very challenging as you engage the effort the brain starts to realize oh this human is in the pursuit of some kind of goal they need the dopam vesal to help they need the dop vesical to help and it's why whenever you sit down for T cleaning your home completing a specific annoying work project going into the gym it's so important to understand the first 15 minutes are always going to be the hardest because at that point you're sitting at Baseline dopamine you might even be sitting below it because if you've just scroll Tik Tok for 10 minutes before you're actually now in a dopamine deficit State and you've got to climb to this High dopamine in order to get into a highly motivated driven experience so beginning hard battle through 15 minutes that's where flow state begins sick um what are the enemies of this dopamine system in our modern world you can imagine that with a graph anything that requires effort like hunting or building shelter would take a long time for the dopamine to be experienced within the brain so you can quickly access it you suddenly have to engage like two hours of effort dopamine would slowly increase with the brain you get this really pleasurable rewarding experience and that would motivate us to do that action again in the future anything in the modern world that has developed the ability to get that level of dopamine increase but immediately is effectively what's hijacking it because the brain is always seeking for homeostasis that balance experience if you suddenly get super high Tik Tok Spike of dopamine you then put the Tik Tok down and you're suddenly like I feel like you're apathetic you can't take action towards anything and it's because your brain is just so confused by the unnatural Spike that it crashes out effectively and the way to identify if something is unnatural dopamine it's just how quickly does it give you pleasure a simple comparison would be reading a book versus scrolling on Instagram when you open a book and start reading a book it's not like wow this is so enjoyable I love reading this it might be for some but I think for the majority it's like okay I got to get into this and your brain begins to put in more and more effort as you read the lines and the pages and you try and get into it gradually after 10 or 15 minutes when you kind of ENT that flow State type experience with reading it does become a very pleasurable experience because the dopamine has been slowly add and increased in a natural way when you open Instagram immediately you feel good you get some notifications you get likes comments a message from a girl you're getting loads of stimulation off all the videos whatever it might be and then the dopamine spikes extremely high and then as a result we going so naturally hide the brain seeks for that balance and crashes it out and so many of us are struggling to take action towards our dreams because we're just constantly crashing the system that's responsible for getting us towards them so what I'm hearing is that really the pursuit of pleasurable things that involve a level of feeling as if you've earned it mhm is important here like you're not just getting the free pleasure from just doing the thing I wonder if sort of I enjoy playing video games on like very hard difficulty playing Horizon forbidden West at the moment and there's like you know people would look at me and be like we you spent the last three hours on the same boss fight like why not just tune down the difficulty level but there's something about doing the hard thing that feels way more rewarding than just like I don't know killing the boss on story mode or on easy mode or whatever I think similarly I used to go these Wilderness medicine trips at University where it was like um we we'd we'd spend the whole day hiking and then we'd do like medical scenarios of like this person's like broken their leg and you got to splint it and stuff and then at the end of the day we would all have a lovely big dinner in the cottage and play some board games and there was something about the fact that we had to do a whole day of hiking to feel as if we've earned that that really made it way more rewarding compared to if we had just sort of randomly started playing board games is that this sort of idea of like feeling as if you've earned the thing 100% that is exactly it and if you had just immediately woken up in the boing and done the board game it wouldn't be as nearly as pleasurable and you just have to imagine surviving was so hard for 300,000 years like if you actually think about suddenly being put out in a forest and you've got to suddenly survive out there it would be insanely difficult so the brain has to be so deeply programmed to seek for effort that's exactly how it's designed to operate if you look at that gaming example when you're playing Horizon did you call it when you're playing Horizon the fact that you have the desire to put it on to the hardest level is probably why you're actually in the position you're in in your life right now in terms of your career and your business because you've actually chosen the harder path in life and it means your brain because you've consistently chosen the harder path when you're at University making your YouTube videos whilst also studying all of these things the fact you chose the harder path mean means your brain has had to work harder throughout your life and therefore your brain will have a greater capacity to generate dopamine than the average brain so then you're going to be a more motivated individual you can imagine if you're two hunter gatherers and one had an easy time at surviving because it was like warm and there was an abundance of food around and then you had one that was trying to survive in the cold with no food this one is going to have to work way harder so they're going to need more motivation so suddenly they're going to have to require so much more dopamine in order to survive and if you start pursuing the lane of effort in your life more regularly generate more dopamine Your Capacity to pursue effort in all Lanes whether that's being more attentive with your partner eating healthier food being more disciplined in your home working towards your goals whatever it might be becomes actually easier and easier cuz you've got a ton of the chemical sick just a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get back to the show so if you are making money online or saving up and wondering how to grow it you might want to check out trading 212 who are very kindly sponsoring this episode trading 212 is an amazing app that I've been using for the last several years now that makes investing in stocks and shares and funds simple and commission free one of my favorite features that they've got is the pies and autoinvest features now these tools make it easy to create a diversified portfolio that helps you automate your investing with this feature 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which is free money so you might as well claim it and of course a quick disclaimer this episode is sponsored by trading 212 but I am not a financial adviser and this is not Financial advice when investing your capital is of course at risk and you might get back less than you invest past performance does not guarantee future results and terms and fees apply and you'll find all the details in the video description and on the trading 212 website cool so thanks trading 212 for sponsoring this episode and let's get back to it when I spend time in the US I'm always just like surprised by how much conviction people have for saying stuff even if I know they actually don't know what they're talking about in that specific context like if someone's if I'm if I'm at like a conference or something and someone's out and talk to talking to me about YouTube and I've I've seen their Channel and I I know they've got like 300 subscribers and they've been doing it for like a month and the way they speak about about like content creation and like growing on social media with such conviction I'm like wow I didn't more that confidence in my life most of us 99% of us are way too far on the wrong scale yeah in terms of conviction like pretty much all of us and then there's a select few who could do with with dialing it down a little bit but I think we're also afraid of being that select few that we dance around the very very much not enough conviction area cuz was so afraid of going a little bit too far and uh I would love to see everyone just wake up go to the office the day and go too far just for one day see what it does you know yeah it's a good experiment almost yeah um in my team as well like occasionally I get I'll get a message from someone being like Oh hey you know sorry about that thing that I said I think I might have gone too far I'm like what did did not even vaguely register me because to them they were like oh my God I it was too direct with that that thing that I said and I'm just thinking it it was it was just totally normal like it was so normal to the point I didn't even notice the thing but they all in their heads thinking like a I I said it too directly yeah cuz the line is here right and they like they're usually here and they went here and they oh my gosh that's way further than I usually go the line line is here you can you can always do what you just said you send a message afterwards if you really think you've gone too far sorry I went too far you'll be forgiven yeah it's I've rarely heard stories of someone because conviction is not an energy that is anger or aggression or it's not a negative energy it might have negative connotations if you're afraid of it but it's not like it's not something that you are aiming at someone else like you must believe it's just it's just more belief in what you're saying more energy and more certainty in your in your in your beliefs yeah I think lots of people myself included will be interested in almost the beginning of the story so why you landed on working on productivity and how how that sort of came about for you because that's been sort of fasination for you through the YouTube thing and how did it all begin yeah so I've been I've been obsessed with productivity for quite a while um I found that when I was at when I was at University going through medical school and trying to build my first business on the side I realized that I had to find ways to become more productive and ways to work harder and work smarter and learn how to study efficiently and stuff so that I could have the time to do the things that I wanted to do but then and so that worked throughout University but then when I started working full-time as a doctor um that was like a step up in terms of like oh you know I didn't think I had free time at University now I really don't have free time cuz like at University even even in medical school going into the hospital is kind of optional you wake up in the morning and you're like I don't know I feel like going in today um or yeah I'll go in for a few hours I'll leave at lunch time and then do my own like selfstudy when you have a job that you know that's just that's unfeasible like you have to up and so all of a sudden like 10 to 12 hours of every single day were just being blocked up by work and I was trying to grow the YouTube channel on the side and I had a lot of periods of where I felt pretty overwhelmed and pretty stressed by the demands of work plus the demands of the YouTube channel and so that was when I was like okay I need to change my approach to productivity that's where this idea of sort of feeling good like positive emotions and stuff landed cuz I didn't really want to be in a position where every day felt like a grind cuz I was in that mode for a while I was like okay what if being productive and like doing the things I wanted to do didn't have to come at the expense of my like physical and mental health what if I actually could feel good while also being productive and then I went on this whole like research rabbit hole and found that actually feeling good is one of the keys to productivity and actually the more positive emotion we feel in our work the more productive we become but also the more energy we have to give to the other important things in our life and so to me feel good productivity became this sort of like holistic philosophy that I you know I I I use every day when like whenever I'm doing something and it feels bad or I feel blocked or I feel like kind of the the negative emotions getting in the way I I sort of remind myself that okay no there are ways to make any situation feel better and the way ways to experience the positive emotion and everything and it just means that I can float through life well float through life I it means I can go through life feeling better about the work that I'm doing while also being pretty pretty effective at the work and and and it's interesting I guess because you have both types of experience so you know when you were working as a doctor in hospital where when you're dealing with people who are really unwell or really highly stressful situations it must be really hard to find the pleasure in that kind of work in comparison to you know a YouTube life and and where you can kind of choose your hours a bit more or do things that you're interested in so were there quite different challenges yeah so this is the thing so when I first started started working I found it very like stressful and sort of these high high stress situations and most of the doctors around me also had that approach where it was like there was this sense of like uh kind of tension and stress in the air but not everyone was like that and I had a few seniors who I really looked up to who were just like they were really good doctors but they were they were also happy they were like had a smile on their face they would crack jokes and it kind of help me realize that actually there is another way like approaching work as if it was it was really stressful was actually a choice that I was making and so I did also make a concerted effort in my day job to enjoy the day-to-day a little bit more and kind of modeling the doctors that I'd seen who would have Smiles on their face and stuff started it sounds weird but approaching it with more lightness and ease almost as if I was playing a game kind of um and it's not playing a game in the sense of you know people's lives are at stake but there was a line from gry's Anatomy that I I often thought about which is when uh Derek Shepard the neurosurgeon when he starts his operation he says he puts a music on and he says to it and he says to his team it's a beautiful day to save lives let's have some fun and obviously you know that's a fictional fictional drama but there's something about that that even when you're doing neurosurgery even when it's just like like life and death is in the balance it can still be a beautiful day to save lives you can still have fun along the way and so much of that I found is a choice that we make ourselves rather than a rather than a thing that's foed upon us by the environment yeah and I guess with any job however difficult or kind of emotionally taxing is there's always something to be grateful for or something to find in it that we feel thankful for or find even the slightest pleasure in I guess yeah I think I think gratitude is a is a really major part of this um the other one is you know this is the first chapter of the book is the idea of approach approaching work in the spirit of play where yes even even when the thing is really stressful you can still choose to approach it in the spirit of play and you know there's so many stories of Nobel Prize winners who found you know the key to their productivity and the key to their creativity was kind of treating it with a little less seriousness yeah and heaviness that we tend to approach work with even when it's heavy and serious like working in medicine or being a therapist and things just choosing to approach it with a little bit more lightness and ease yeah so I tried to kind of I I tried to do that when I was in the day job and especially now running this business and having a team and stuff again a lot of people I a lot of business I knows a lot of business owners I know are pretty stressed because of the demands of running a business and managing payroll and having all these people dependent on you but at the same time it's it's a bit of a game approaching it in the spirit of play yeah yeah that the the idea that that Joy is the most kind of important factor when it comes to being productive is that at the core of this whole thing so it's a sort of that's where you start yeah sort of um so the the scientific basis for this is a theory called the broaden and build Theory um so there's this researcher in the early 2000 called Barbara Frederickson who kind of coined this Theory to basically explain the fact that when we experience positive emotions it boosts our performance in almost everything it boosts our creativity and it lowers our stress and you know her Theory very Loosely is like if you imagine back in caveman days because we're still operating with caveman brains back in the caveman days if if life is good if you're feeling positive emotions it means that you're not in danger of being eaten by a lion the group is surviving life is good and so you're more open to exploring and you go out to your environment and you forage the new stuff and you see you see if you can make some new alliances whereas when you experience a negative emotion like fear or stress or anxiety it's like uhoh my life's in danger a lion could be around the corner and you your entire being contracts and you go tunnel vision for survival and when you're in that survival mode it's a very high stress State because the body is literally kind of trying to survive whereas when you're in that kind of broaden state it's like broad it broadens your repertoire of things that you can do and it builds like resources like alliances and like Crea ity and things like that um and so that was like a thing that I came across in my research um where I felt that that was really the key and so if we can experience positive emotions joy in our work it just has all of these benefits it generates more energy for us and often for a lot of us time isn't necessarily the limiting factor energy is the limiting factor but you know when you when you experience joy and positivity in your work you end up with Boundless Energy and you as a side effect you become more productive in your work but then outside of work you also have way more energy to give to the other important things in your life yeah and it's interesting because you there's um uh sort of Lit Literature around that idea but in young children so sort of that you know if you have a a young toddler for example and they they are in a kind of threat mode and they'll feel anxious and they'll go to their mother to feel safe and then once they you know they get that reassurance and they feel safe or they receive a positive emotion or experience a positive emotion from an interaction with that mother they'll then go out and take more risks and and dive into whatever the situation is and play with other children all they needed was to feel safe and to have a sort of positive emotion and then they're ready to go out again and and exper so does it sort of help with risk-taking and trying new things or creativity is all kind of Linked UP absolutely no I think that's a great that's a great example with the with the kids I wish I thought to put that in the book cuz that's that's like absolutely perfect we'll do some edit to the book um no it's yeah there's just so much evidence so there there was a the first study that really tested this I think it was from from like the 1980s there's this thing called uh I think it's called the matchbox puzzle oh so what's to that effect where you give you know they get people in a in a lab and they give them like a matchbox and a candle and like some like thumb tacks those things that you yeah pins put stuff in the wall and you know the challenge is find a way to get the candle to light the candle but without any any wax dripping onto the floor or something to that effect and this is like a classic test of creativity because people who are more creative in that moment will discover the solution where people who are less creative won't and they found that if you prime people with positive emotions like giving them a m teaser or something just before they do the thing they're like way more likely to solve the puzzle through creativity amazing and so it was that study that was in I think in the 1980s that sort of helped spawn this wave of research into how even for adults positive emotions do make us more creative and increasingly in the world that we live in where most people watching or listening to this are probably knowledge workers or students of some sort productivity is actually more about being creative and thinking broader than it is about just like efficiently cranking out more and more widgets so I can eat chocolate all the way through when writing absolutely yeah going to help me with our creativity absolutely yeah more the more we feel good the more productive we are that's a great piece of research um how about the sort of you know the industry so far because I feel like you know I've followed your work for a long time and as someone who sort of steered away from the more like sort of hustle culture productivity where you're just you know you just get up at 5:00 and you just you know don't go to sleep or you you know you grind and grind and grind because that's what we do and it's all for you know this thing called success your content from the very beginning was different that wasn't it so it was it was always this way that you always had that sort of recognition of life is is a bit more than that just succeeding for succeeding sake we need to look a bit deeper into that so what's your take on the kind of the hustle culture and the sort of productivity industry generally yeah that's a great question so I think I sometimes when people come across my YouTube channel and they don't watch the videos they'll kind of badge me as like a toxic productivity kind of guy because it's like oh they'll see videos and how to manage your time and how to be more effective and stuff and to me that's always been like like to me productivity is about using using our time intentionally effectively and sustainably like working towards the things that truly matter to us and part of the reason like we we almost never use the word success in the book because I don't really like the word the word success because for a lot of people success is tied up in kind of traditional Prestige or what other people will think yeah and the experiences that I had working as a doctor like from the first year of medical school onwards anytime I'd meet a doctor and would get on with them I would ask them hey you know how much are you enjoying your job like if you won the lottery would you still keep doing it and stuff and so often there were these these like really high Achievers who had gone through high school and medical school and everything and gotten to this success who sort of felt like uh I kind of like I wish I'd had more of a life I had all these Hobbies when I was younger and then I let them all go because work got in the way and so I think success without recognizing the fact that the journey is ultimately what matters tends to be pretty Hollow for most people um and so from fairly early on I was always in the mindset of like okay the journey is actually more important than the destination yes when your book hits the best seller list as yours does you feel like that flash of like yeah but if the process of getting there was like a grind and didn't feel good and you didn't take care of your physical and mental health and maintain your relationships along the way a lot of people say that like the success is not worth the pain if it means your life becomes out of balance yeah so I'm I've always been about just trying to trying to make sure life stays in Balance trying to enjoy the journey as well as aim towards some sort of destination all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye-bye

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