LSW#32 🧘🏼‍♀️"Un-guru-ing" Ourselves

Doing what works for us, not them

We are inundated with gurus and experts dishing advice on how to live a perfect life. The last thing you want to do is beat yourself up after reading an AI generated “life-hack” from these pseudo-experts.

Even when implementing advice coming from solid research, there are still limitations and caveats that don’t get as much airtime. On that note, “backed by science” is now officially recommended in marketing courses to increase clicks.

Yes, there are proven best practices, but all models suffer from abstraction, and are sterile — they are removed from the nuances of our unique situations. When gurus pontificate, they leave out key assumptions, nuances, and complexities of applying their model to our own special mess.

👉The key is to recognize that this is NOT our flaw, but rather a flaw of the MODEL.

I see this pattern all too often in clients who read a leadership classic (insert your genre) and have cognitive dissonance when they go back to the “real world” of work. The mistake is trying to follow the advice verbatim, instead of the upstream principles behind them.

Consider my own experience at following some of these prescriptions:

• Meditation: I fall asleep when trying to meditate, but I’m in a meditative mode during running, swimming, and writing.

• Journals: Gratitude journalling just doesn’t work for me. The process breaks down the moment I want something out of it. What works is spontaneously noticing and writing.

• Reading: I don’t finish most books, but go through close to a 100/year. I just read the parts that interest me and move on. The filtering criteria is curiosity and interest rather than someone’s recommendation, or because someone said I had to. As Haruki Murakami said, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

• Organization/Discipline: I’m disorganized and undisciplined in many things, but equally so in a few important ones. My systems are built to make up for that lack of discipline. Daily planning doesn’t work for me. Weekly/quarterly plans work better.

• Networking: I’m an introvert, but I connect through meaningful 1-on-1 conversations.

• Time management: Blocking time doesn’t work for me. But I have activities/quotas that I hit every day. It’s my form of time-blocking.

• Productivity: Pomodoro doesn’t work for me. My work revolves around energy & emerging momentum. But I have consistent daily practices that make them more likely.

• Exercise: My activities vary inconsistently between running, swimming, and weights. But I’m consistent on getting minimums in during the week, month & year.

Going by even the most lenient guru, I’m failing by their standards. But I’ve built a system that works for me, and that meets minimum standards based on what I value.

Takeaways

(1) Do what works for you. We don’t have to follow every prescription down to the tee. Most productive folks don’t. If you had to follow every guru’s dictum (morning routines, evening routines, blah-blah-blah) we might not have any time left to do “real work” that mere mortals have to do daily. Most ideas have upstream first principles, which you can implement in your own unique way.

(2) Don’t try to optimize ALL areas. You simply can’t. But we can prioritize, and decide what to optimize, and which ones to take it easy. It’s essentially choosing to suck at most areas, or maintaining bare minimums, albeit proactively. I try to rotate this every quarter.

(3) Everything’s wrong, until proven right. Take all advice with a grain of salt until proven right in your own experience and practice.

(4) Avoiding over-optimization. When starting a new practice the natural tendency is to try and get everything right. But in doing so, we often stop doing it, thus losing on 100% of the benefits. Proactively lowering our standards ensures we stay in the game. Over time, this naturally trends up.

(5) Ignore everything I just said.

Study the best ideas, pick what appeals to you, stick to what works, and design your own system. Then you can write a book yourself, become a guru, and pontificate.

Further reading

Couple of articles that build on some of the ideas that might be useful:

How wisdom evolves

Karl Weick’s framework of going from naive simplicity to confused complexity to profound simplicity helps explain some of the underlying dynamics when trying to accelerate “the implementation of wisdom”. I tried to capture it graphically below. Click the picture to go to the main article.

Smart goals gone stupid

The “wall of frustration” is another dynamic that trips many of us — not sticking with something long enough before it goes from effortful to enjoyable. We intuitively understand this — what makes it harder is not knowing the timeframe of breaking through. I explain this, and other goals-related challenges, in The Stupidity of My Smart Goals.

That does it for this edition. Have a great rest of the week!

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