99% of Busy People Forget These Simple Things
It ends up causing them to plateau in life.
Busy is an illness.
Show me a busy person who can’t fit a 30-minute chat in their diary and I’ll show you a person who is heading straight for burnout and will leave a path of devastation behind them.
In case you think I was an immaculate productivity conception, I wasn’t. I know what these busy people get wrong because I was one of them. I wore sleep deprivation, tiredness, long hours and black, deathly bags under my eyes as a badge of honor.
The underneath of my eyes is still black and will never change, as a reminder for my overworked, busy years that ended every good romantic relationship I ever had.
Busy-ness stops you from thinking about your life. In the process, you can forget these simple things that eventually cause a plateau.
What are you really doing with your life?
Is this the dream?
Busy-ness puts us on an escalator to nowhere. You easily forget what the end goal is and what brings you joy. If you don’t ask yourself this question often you can effortlessly drift on into no man's land and forget about the big picture. Each day of life is a small step towards some definition of meaning.
I see executives all the time who sit in back-to-back meetings and make years feel like days. What’s the point of it all if you live out your days feeling lifeless, and drift from one activity to the next?
Quit the busyness and think deeply about where you’re really heading. If, like I was, you’re completely lost or heading in the opposite direction of where you want to go, it’s okay. Stop. Take a few days off. Write your thoughts down and think about what all of this means.
You don’t want to discover the meaning of your life on the last day you’re alive. That would be a giant waste.
Emotional intelligence is the real intelligence. Forget IQ.
I’ve met a lot of geniuses who can’t read a room full of people. They have a lot of knowledge stored in their hard drive of a head, but have no idea how or when to apply it. Emotional intelligence is the soft skills.
Soft skills get you places in life.
Knowing how to empathize, listen, and communicate helps you connect with other people, who create the opportunities that determine the different paths in life to be taken. If you lack opportunities, you lack the right people.
Soft skills attract the best people to you.
Soft skills get little respect but will make or break your career – Peggy Claus
Make hobbies a priority
A friend of mine is in his mid-forties and still looking for the right career. We’ve gone in circles for years. Whatever I say never seems to stick.
Last week he asked me if I play ping pong. Normally my answer is no. It so happens I got my partner two ping pong bats and a ball so we could play for free at the university down the road occasionally.
My friend explained to me that he recently rediscovered ping pong. With a beer gut and a lifelong smoker’s level of fitness, I had low expectations. He started playing one game. Then he played with friends. Now he’s joined a club. And yesterday he told me he’s a part of four different leagues now.
Ping pong has taken over his life.
He has no desire to go to the Olympics and be a ping pong legend. You might think his hobby doesn’t mean much. Here’s the thing:
He’s so excited to play ping pong that the energy for it bleeds into everything else he does. That’s what hobbies do. The same happened to me with writing. Writing made my banking career ten times better.
A hobby doesn’t have to make you money or serve a goal. A hobby can just be a way to increase your energy levels that you can redeploy into other things.
Oh, and a hobby is awesome networking in disguise too.
Read books for shits and giggles
Busy-ness sucks the imagination from your soul. Books turn your imagination up loud.
When I read non-fiction books, I discover potential paths in life. Our brain is so focused on what we know already that it blocks out all the endless options that haven’t entered our mind.
Many people waste their lives away consuming shallow content on Instagram and TikTok. A book is the opposite. A book is in-depth content that infiltrates your brain on every level. Words laid out across multiple chapters mean something different to your mind than a 15-second TikTok video of a dog licking its butt.
If you’re struggling for ideas, get lost in books when you get home from work.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one. ― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
Investing is how you buy back time
Busy-ness devalues time. Busy-ness causes you to prioritize working more, instead of working smarter.
Busy-ness is a prison. Time is real freedom.
You don’t need to work as much over time when you invest in financial assets. You don’t stop working, though, and put on a pair of flip flops and take your laptop to the beach like a warrior. Nope.
You simply let your investments take some of the load off. Investments do some of the money-making work for you, so time can be spent doing other things.
The shift is subtle. I’ve found I don’t work less. I just work on different projects and think less about what money (if any) I will earn.
Investing money helps switch off the factory worker brain we were given at birth by the industrial age that says work, work, work so you can earn money.
Earning money distracts you from living life.
Exercise is free endorphins that will change your life
I’m a skinny prick as my mate likes to say. You can see the bones of my rib cage. The pandemic has made me into a flimsy version of the character Gumby (see below).
Forget the Baywatch bod, baby. Exercise isn’t about muscle.
Busy people forget the true power of exercise. It’s endorphins. When you exercise you feel good. All these happiness juices flow through your body and change how you look at the day. I can’t wait to rejoin the gym once I get my jab in the arm. I miss the feeling of the endorphin release that doesn’t come from gentle exercise like walking.
Exercise hard so you can get endorphins that unlock another level of life.
Life isn’t a competition
When I meet a douchebag who wants to turn everything at work into a competition, I run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.
Life isn’t a competition. Nobody cares who came first. Nobody cares how much money you’ve accumulated. Nobody cares how big your company’s genitalia is. Nobody cares what car you drive.
Once you ditch the sportsmanship life, you start to see people differently. You start to see them for who they are, and there’s a great deal of beauty in that.
Competitive nature says there has to be a loser. Humanity makes us born losers because we all die at the end of life’s game.
Make love not war
There are little Tasmanian devils running around the place ripping everything to shreds. They blow up. They swear at strangers. They make everything about them. They mock people and think it's funny. They love being a critic when their own life is a complete joke (worse than Mr Bean’s pretend career).
I used to be a devil. I’d leave comments at the bottom of Youtube videos and tell people all sorts of nasty stuff to make myself feel better and hope my potbelly would disappear all by itself. I learned my potbelly was a lifetime of stored up negative emotions I didn’t have the guts to release. It took me years to realize the following:
Be kind to every person you meet.
Genuinely care about other people. Don’t let busyness cause you to get tangled up in yourself. When a devil spews venom all over your freshly ironed chequered shirt, don’t repeat the bad behavior. Show them love. Wish them well.
Give them a gift they would never expect in a million years. Take every harsh act they dish out in your direction and turn it into a kind act.
Sleep is an accelerator for growth
Busyness can force you to sacrifice sleep. If you’re grumpy and angry, take a 20-minute nap. You’ll wake up a new person.
Working harder and filling up every slot in your calendar doesn’t bring you the success you crave. But trading some of that busyness for sleep will make you far more productive.
If you sleep 7 hours then make it 8. If you sleep 8 hours then make it 8 and a half. Or, simply add an afternoon nap to lower the stress and increase the joy.
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
― Ernest Hemingway
Make sense of the busy-ness through writing
I’m a huge advocate of writing and sharing my thoughts on social media. All day you’re taking in information and learning new insights. To store them solely in your head is a waste.
Take what happens to you and turn it into short written posts. Publish that content on Twitter, LinkedIn, Bitclout, Medium, or Substack.
If you can playback what you’ve experienced through writing, you can reach a higher level of awareness that will accelerate your progress in life.
Family time is the best time
Happiness is only real when shared― Jon Krakauer
Busy people accidentally spend a lot of time away from their families.
They fall for the dream of a job promotion or the lie of a huge bonus. They trade time for money. They trade time for meetings. They trade time to have coffee with strangers.
The huge opportunity is right in front of them: their family. Family time helps you escape the death spiral of being overly productive. Family acts as a reminder for why you’re working in the first place. If you forget about family for long enough, then eventually you’ll wake up and they won’t be there anymore.
This happened to a leader I used to work for. She got multiple big promotions in a three-year period. Then one day her husband simply disappeared. To this day she has no idea why. To those who are close to her, we know exactly why. Two words: too busy.
The simple things in life like family are far better than the distractions capitalism sells us that are broken dreams.
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I'm in that rat wheel at the moment! Breaking through seems too far away right now and as you say, it's not healthy! Let's do some meditation 🧘♀️
Great content, as usual.