“Either you run the day or the day runs you.” – Jim Rohn.
THE PRODUCTIVITY LOOP
It all starts with having a vision for where you would like to see yourself end up being in the future, imagining what each day of your life should look like. Then aspiring towards that. That vision can then be broken down into small manageable goals which you therefore plan your life around their accomplishment, by scheduling them in your dairy, taking one small step each day, each week, each month, all year, every year. Until your vision becomes reality.
Compromise is important as things will happen unexpectedly during your process. You might get injured and be out of action for a while. You might even start a family, then parenthood will occupy your main priorities for the next couple of years, even dictating changes to your plan from time to time. So have other plans to fall back on or into when the plan changes.
That way when you come back to the plan, due to the fact that it never went to plan, you find yourself with even more ideas and a sense of renewed energy from the delayed anticipation. So you always need to be planning and you always need to be acting towards those plans, no matter what moment the situation calls for you currently find yourself in. No matter what way you go, everything will bring you to where you ultimately one day want to end up being.
THE FIRST LAW OF PRODUCTIVITY: ELIMINATE DISTRACTIONS [THAT MEANS PEOPLE]
You get your best work done when others are not around, as when others are around you are not getting anything done. So the first law of productivity is to eliminate others from your mental space so that you can focus your attention in a state of pure and deep concentration.
Standing around and talking means you are not focused. And if you are not focused, then you are distracted. And if you are standing around and talking, not focused and distracted then you are exactly who this is not for as you have no chance of reaching your potential.
The path towards mastery at times may seem a lonely path. However the person on that path at no point experiences loneliness. They are only ever experiencing a higher-quality version of living which is deeply rich with intense optimal experiences in consciousness.
The way to be able to do that is to cultivate the ability of being able to drop out from the world and momentarily forget that it exists, focusing all of your attention on the present and this deliberate engagement with this inner quality of your life in a goal directed activity.
CREATE A 31-DAY TRACKER PLANNER PRODUCTIVITY SCHEDULE: COMMIT TO TRACKING AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE [HOW TO AVOID DISTRACTIONS EVERY DAY]
Never throw anything you ever read or write away. Whatever your first book was you bought, keep it. Whatever your first journal was you bought, keep it. Whatever your first notes were you took, keep them. Keep everything you have ever thought, read, written, drawn and logged. There will come times during the creative process whenever you may doubt yourself. And this will probably happen 1-2 times every day for the rest of your entire life.
So you may always stay stuck in a state of feeling unsure and have these doubts about it all or why you no longer need it. But you will need it. You definitely will need it. You must keep all of it. Especially that stuff you feel unsure about. You have to trust me. When the time is right, you will know what to do with it all. You won’t know when that will happen. But it will.
One sentence written in a 6-year old journal that you never even really used will all of a sudden just start coming to life out of nowhere and for no reason. Your mind will just say to you one day, where is that? And even though you haven’t thought of it in over half a decade, you’ll know what to do with it. So you just have to keep everything.
One of those thousands of notecards that never felt like there was anything you could do with it will not only come to life but even take on a life of its own. So you have to make sure you keep everything you ever read and write. Forever. And make that habit for the rest of your life. All these notes scattered everywhere gathered over years and years of learning and practice will be the making of your life’s future work. One day you will just be called back to something for no reason and without any prior warning, it will just decide to fall on you and you will be consumed with excitement over it. So never throw any of that away. It’s all of your progress. It’s also just interesting to see how much you have since changed and grown.
You won’t be able to do a lot of the things it’s asking you to do at the beginning as you are just in the process of learning therefore forming new habits, quitting bad ones and changing your character is a matter of training and doesn’t suddenly happen like flicking a switch. That’s why so many people fail to stick to their New Year’s resolutions. As if simply because a clock struck midnight after 2-weeks of bingeing is the way to radical change overnight. No. That’s not how it works. To become a different person, to work hard on being a better person, that is something that takes a lot of time, effort, discipline and a serious commitment.
So the goal you start out with is not always the goal you end up with. For example, this seems to have been a goal of mine 6-years ago. Although fast forward to now and being able to reflect back on its point it wasn’t so much about achieving mastery with a piece of software as much as the experience from doing so that arises in consciousness was.
Which we are now referring to as
FLOW STATE MASTERY
Not everyone wants to make electronic music. But almost everyone on the planet I’m sure would benefit enormously from achieving more flow in their life, as it helps you to improve in so many ways. So this was always about much more than that which may have been hidden under the surface and not always visible from the idea itself. It’s about achieving complexity in the mind and the continuing growth of the self and our experience in consciousness and experiencing deep levels of enjoyment inside difficult activities that provide their own intrinsic rewards that lead us to deep and sustained fulfilment, life purpose and life satisfaction.
Something it seems many in the world are now lacking, hence why so many seem to distract themselves by the never-ending stream of online media entertainment which seems to be taking place over many’s meaning and purpose now. Some people fail to achieve finding a point to their life. And so, they try to hide this by taking up activities such as scrolling. They spend their days in a fog of distraction watching others while they wallow into a vacuum.
You would be surprised to note how many people resemble their same self from a decade before. 10-years older in age but almost none the wiser in the mind. These are the same types who keep strict scorecards on other people, yet have not got a single record of their own. They never try to improve themselves. So they remain the same and stay as they always were, a decade gone by with almost nothing having changed or got better in their life.
We could say, what happened? The guy doesn’t know himself or seem to know what to do with himself. He can’t seem to be anybody without someone else in the room in order to make him feel he is somebody. We can only hope for these kinds they’ll one day eventually get around to starting this process. For if they don’t, they may just end up going all the way to their grave without even knowing who they were, having lived, yet only achieved a semblance of life. Anyone who keeps notes on other people more than themselves is a fool.
Passive leisure therefore attempts to fill in these gaps, or cracks in life, in order to try and fill the void during these moments when our attention has nowhere to be, and we don’t know how or even where to direct our attention when with it alone, slipping into distraction to try and suppress anxiety if we have no reason to be excited for or about anything else. Many are losing themselves to drugs or alcohol to escape this uncomfortable reality. But all that does is highlight and amplify how entirely lost you are. So this seems more important now than ever: knowing what to do with one’s life and knowing how to achieve happiness.
Which is what I think I was trying to say with “Mastery in Ableton Live”. But I’m not so sure the message was being communicated as best as it perhaps should have or could have been. So I therefore needed to shift away from that idea to make this experience more accessible and available to those who are not so interested in music production but are for achieving happiness. It wasn’t so much the idea of merely achieving Mastery in Ableton Live I was hoping to achieve but rather the attainment of the experience of mastery itself.
The initial idea for The School of Live it seems is more closer to The School of Life.
See what I mean about ideas. You have to have ideas in order to be able to start anything. But the idea you start out with is rarely what ends up being the finished product. But you wouldn’t have been able to get there without that initial idea you at least started out with.
GIVE YOURSELF 3-MONTHS TO REALIZE YOUR HABITS BEING DEVELOPED
It can take up to 90-days before starting a habit or quitting an old one finally forms. So it doesn’t matter if you get off to a bad start. It doesn’t matter if you fail. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t met half of them even for that month. What matters is the initial plan to accomplish establishing new habits and having a strong desire to make it happen. And depending on where you currently are in life, the thing you want and plan for yourself might be months away from you. But having that plan in place gives us the focused motivation and determination to keep steady and move one small step closer in its direction each day as best as we can until we can go full force with it. Slowly doing a little bit each day in even just one area is all that is necessary. But nothing will ever happen or change in your life unless you first start the process by writing it down. Or drawing it. Then even sharing it.
Research has shown that people who share their goals with other people actually increase their chance to achieve them. Because they don’t want to seem foolish wishful thinkers or procrastinators. So the act of sharing your goal increases your chances of its success as that further increases your motivation to do it as you don’t want to be that guy who sure does a lot of talking but doesn’t actually seem to be doing anything other than talking.
So step one is to be motivated and increase that by sharing it. Set it up as a game and turn it into a competition against yourself whereby you just have to beat yourself to improve and win this game. Then after, in the following months, all of this will start to act and work on you.
Your intuition may well be able to paint the direction in which you are to go long before you have even reached the ability of being ready to do so. Follow it anyway. While nothing about what you do may make sense to others, nor even to yourself at times, let that feeling guide you anyway. And trust that something seems to already know, even when you don’t.
One day, everything you ever do adds up, which is why you only have to do what many only know how to describe this as when they are also asked how but are not sure themselves.
How did you do that? The answer: I was just following the process.
FOLLOW THE PROCESS: MAKE CREATIVITY A DAILY PART OF YOUR LIFE
Someone said to me last night, it was a Saturday night, “are you doing your university work?” I said, no. I’m just working.
As if there would be no other reason to spend your saturday night with coffee and 10kg of books, notes and stationary in arms struggling to carry them for no other reason than the fact that it is saturday night and this is exactly why I’m having so much fun.
This process is the only thing you need to follow.
Trust it with your life. And while 10-years of working hard continuously non-stop and all in the background behind working too, might seem like a lot of effort or too much for some to tolerate, endure, or just far too much work. Yet that is precisely the point in why to do it.
*Note: this won’t work for anyone who has no plans for themselves or no idea what to do with themselves. However for the deadly serious student who is strongly committed, this will be like stepping on to a rollercoaster that will never end. It becomes most exciting when you take it seriously. Notice also it doesn’t mention anywhere to make more money or improve financially for productivity. People measure their productivity in different ways. Making more money always comes at the bottom of my priorities. Fun, flow and happiness, comes first.
THE YEARS ADD UP
Some of these pictures date back from a decade ago to my first notes taken, first books read, the start of the process and all the way through to now. But it all started with the first book.