Productivity

On a recent trip to the doctor, the receptionist asked me to take off my new, N95 mask and replace it with one of their surgical masks.

It was an odd request, since they were asking me to put on something objectively inferior to what I had brought with me. But creating standardized procedures always requires compromises.

I imagine the hospital administrators’ logic went something like this: If we allow everyone to wear whatever mask they bring with them, we’ll have a wide range of PPE in the office, some of which may not provide much protection at all.

So by requiring everyone to wear the same mask, we can ensure all patients have something good enough on their face, even if it means sacrificing the extra protection some people might bring with them.

This decision — between raising the floor to limit the worst consequences, in exchange for lowering the ceiling of best possible outcomes — shows up everywhere in our lives.

Most personal finance advice, for example, strongly encourages individuals to maintain a diversified portfolio. Over a long enough period of time, sticking your money in an index fund with low fees and forgetting about it will net you higher returns than trying to actively pick stocks.

But at what expense? You’re limiting your risk, but you’re also cutting yourself off from the outsized returns you’d get from putting all your money into what might be the next Google.

This is a tradeoff most people are willing to make: In exchange for security, you cap your overall potential returns.

At the core of bureaucracy is this tension: Every time we create a system, we’re eliminating many of the edge cases — both the ones that might ruin us, and those that might lead us to exceptional success.

Startups typically move quicker than established enterprises, because they have less to lose, and therefore can afford to take bigger risks.

Or consider the tradeoffs in manufacturing: If you’re in the string instrument business, you could build a factory of machines to create thousands of violins every month, but your product will be mediocre.

Because an industrial system can’t make trees sing the same way a skilled craftsman can.

French novelist Gustave Flaubert said, "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

This principle applies to workers of all disciplines, not just artists. In particular, chefs emphasize this in their training with the concept of mise en place.

Mise en place is a French term that refers to the practice of assembling and preparing all the individual ingredients you need to cook a meal ahead of time, so that you're not stuck searching for the herbs in the back of your fridge while your foods starts to overcook on the stove.

When you're done, you might have a prep counter to work from that looks something like this:

If you've ever woken up late and spent the morning scrambling to get to work, then felt a little frazzled for the rest of the day, you know what it feels like to ignore Flaubert's advice. Say nothing about being "violent and original" — order allows you to approach your work with a calm focus.

What does mise en place look like in your personal life? And what needs to happen on a daily and weekly basis to allow you to work and play from a place groundedness, not last minute panic?

If you're ever not sure what to do next, start with your answers to these questions.

Via Forte Labs

Unless you nerd out on the history of electricity, you probably haven't heard of Humphry Davy, the inventor of the lightbulb.

Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Edison didn't invent it, though he does deserve credit for creating the first one that was practical to mass produce.

In the early 19th century, Davy created a battery and connected rods of charcoal to it with a couple wires. And thus, the arc lamp was born. But it burned too brightly and didn't last long.

In the decades after Davy's discovery, other inventors experimented with a range of materials and vacuum chambers to create the conditions for long-lasting electric light.

Thanks to Davy, the core structure of a light bulb was clear: Connect two wires to a battery, and attach those to a filament. If that filament has a high enough resistance, it will heat up and emit light.

But until Edison figured out how to make a long-lasting filament out of carbon in 1878, electric light was mostly a novelty.

Viewed from far away, Edison's accomplishment appears to be an incredible leap forward, taking the world from gas lighting and thrusting it into the modern era of illumination.

But the reality is a little more humble: By the time Edison decided to tackle the problem, an affordable and long-lasting electric light was clearly within the realm of the adjacent possible. It was mostly just a matter of finding the right material to run a current through.

We don't know exactly how many materials Edison and his team experimented with, but they likely numbered in the thousands. Their achievement stemmed from a willingness to fail over and over again before finding the right material.

When a reporter asked Edison how it felt to fail so many times, it elicited Edison's famous response: "I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work."

This persistence is at the core of so much success. As Twitter user @TheStoicEmperor puts it, "Many seemingly complex achievements are simply the result of people getting the basics right with relentless consistency."

It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that an amazing accomplishment is the result of something extraordinary far out of reach of the rest of us.

But often, the extraordinary thing is simply heading in the right direction with relentless persistence.

Throughout history, people have used mechanical devices as a metaphor for the human body.

The lungs evoke mechanical pumps, which the Greek physician Galen picked up on when he suggested that they take in pneuma, the vital life force, and distribute it throughout the body.

Your "biological clock" suggests something unwavering, ticking away inside of you. But a single bright light can throw off your circadian rhythm. And if you fly to a different time zone, your body can take days to catch up, unlike a regular clock, which can simply be reset.

More recently, computers have served as a metaphor for the brain. Computers cannot create consciousness, though. They never get tired and aren't capable of empathy.

These models serve as a way of simplifying the biological processes happening inside us. But if you're doing a job that a computer or robot cannot, then you are more than the sum of your mechanical parts.

We do our best work when we approach it with this holistic appreciation for ourselves. Some days are more or less productive than others, because you are an organic being. Full of life and emotion and intelligence and compassion.

How glorious is that?

I'll never forget the feedback I received on a paper from one of my professors:

"Beautifully written as always, John, but lacking in substance."

She was correct, of course — I hadn't started reading the source material for my essay until the night before the paper itself was due.

With so little time to reflect on the material, I didn't have much to say. Sometimes last minute panic can spur you to heroic action in a short amount of time. But there's no shortcut to letting your ideas marinate.

When you give yourself time to set your work aside and return to it later, you can examine it with a fresh mind.

Only then can you craft something of true substance.

Ditch digging is pretty repetitive. It's the kind of work that requires you to just put in the time. Maybe you can dig a little faster, but there aren't really any hacks around pushing your shovel into the dirt and moving another scoop.

Knowledge work is different, but on the surface, it looks similar: You can only answer those customer service emails so quickly.

This is where hustle culture comes from. Work harder, put in more hours, and the rewards will soon pile up.

But what happens if you can solve the issue that led to all those customer service emails in the first place? Or create a portal that lets customers address common issues on their own?

Suddenly, you've got the same results in a fraction of the time.

If you spend your entire day digging ditches as fast as possible, you'll never have time to invent the backhoe.

You can’t make yourself fall asleep by trying harder to doze off. In fact, the opposite is more likely to happen.

You’ll have greater success getting your room as dark as possible, investing in a comfortable mattress, and establishing a wind down ritual to prepare yourself mentally for sleep.

This approach to creating the conditions for your desired outcome is universally applicable.

If you’re hosting a party, for example, and want your guests to have the time of their lives, you can’t simply instruct them to have fun.

But you can ensure that anticipation is high and then exceed expectations with delicious food and drink, a great playlist, and maybe some additional surprises thrown in.

By changing our environment to nudge us in the right direction, success becomes much more likely.

If you're having trouble concentrating on something, you can try to focus harder. But you might find it easier to change your environment so that there are fewer distractions.

If your floors are often muddy, you can clean them more often. Or you can simply take your shoes off at the door whenever you get home.

And if someone can't hear you, you could yell louder. But if you move closer, they might be able to hear you without you having to increase your effort.

Our instinct when we run into difficulty is often to simply push harder. But if we work instead to remove the friction in our path, we can accomplish our goals without increasing our effort.

Competitive swimmers understand this principle. The swimmer who wins the race isn't necessarily the one who moved their arms the fastest. It's the person who swam the most efficiently.

This is approach to life isn't just easier. It's also the most sustainable in the long run.

See also: Stop Pedaling

Scientist Stuart Kauffman coined the term "adjacent possible" to describe the limited range of changes available to something in its existing state.

The idea was popularized by author Steven Johnson in his book Where Good Ideas Come From. Johnson recently named his newsletter after it and writes:

In any system that is evolving over time—whether it’s a biological system or a cultural one—at any given point in that evolution, there are a finite set of ways that the system can be changed, and a much larger set of changes that can’t be made.

Single celled organisms had to evolve to become multicellular before something like a fish or chimp could exist.

The internet was science fiction until the computers that needed to be networked were invented.

And if you have dreams of running a marathon in under four hours someday, you'll need a lot of experience at shorter distances first before that becomes feasible.

The adjacent possible goes hand in hand with Gall's Law, which states that any complex system evolved from a simpler one. This is one of the reasons why the US failed in Afghanistan, for example. A government, and the economy it supports, is too complex a system to be implemented top-down. It has to incrementally grow from something simpler.

So if you're trying to scale an organization, embark on personal development, or invent something new, remember that trying to skip over the adjacent possible is setting yourself up for failure.

Like a pyramid of cards, if you're lacking one of the interdependencies at a lower level, the whole system will crumble to the ground.