The Recipe for More Joy is to Invest More Yourself
Advice on staying energized at work and my latest side project
Hello there,
The New Year has arrived and my family already traveled to New York to celebrate my grandma’s 100th birthday. We should all be so lucky to live such a full and wonderful life!
The trip with a toddler zapped my energy and I’m still recovering, but we had some terrific highlights:
Bagels — want to feel safer in NYC? Buy some lox (hah!)
Museum of Natural History — the (temporarily cancelled) brontosaurus did exist
Seeing a Broadway show starring my uncle Jay (check out Purlie Victorious!)
Thanks for all the positive feedback on my book list - let me know if you have a few favorites I should check out. Still building my stack for 2024...
This week I’ve got advice on finding more joy in your work, a new type of mask for your next plane right, and my latest project using AI.
The Empathy Strategy for Business Growth
Ali Abdaal was suffering from burnout a few months into his first full-time role as a doctor. He arrived home each night more and more tired, but he wasn’t willing to just lose all his energy to work.
He decided to try an experiment that went against his instinct to do the bare minimum at work. Ali Abdaal began finding ways to enrich his days even though they required more effort; chatting with patients a little bit longer; making tea for the nurses; and playing the Lord of the Rings soundtrack in the staff room.
And after a few days, he found his energy turn around. The more he put into enjoying his shifts the more he got out.
Here’s the big lesson he shares — instead of figuring out to give the least effort possible when you dislike your work, more often you benefit from putting more effort in, finding ways to make it all more fun, which produces ten times more energy.
This reminds me of the idea from Katherine Morgan Schafler:
Productivity isn’t about having enough time.
It’s about having enough energy.
Back in my 20s, I worked as a design engineering consultant and one project involved excruciatingly tedious work moving files into a new database for weeks.
The client needed the task completed but I couldn’t stand watching this uploading scroll wheel for 60 seconds at a time before clicking another button. I found myself watching YouTube videos in the middle of my office because my willpower was zapped.
The solution for me sounds ridiculous, but it worked. I decided to engage my brain further by making the task harder. Facing my monitor away from me, I arranged a mirror on my desk so I viewed my screen backward.
For two weeks I struggled to move my mouse in the opposite direction from what I was seeing. And it worked!
I had a little smirk on as I fought to read the mirrored text and navigate the software and eventually, I completed the arduous mini-project. I marveled that my bosses even let me do this, but it got me through it.
Three more ideas from Ali’s book Feel Good Productivity:
1) Reframing failure to find success
Mark Rober ran an experiment during coding challenges where some of the participants were told, “You have failed. You’ve lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again.”
And that group made fewer attempts to solve the puzzle.
“Success isn’t own to how often you fail. It’s about how you frame your failures.”
The challenge to you is to imagine approaching things as experiments with as much to learn from failure as success.
2) The effectiveness of taking more breaks
Studies show that the most productive employees are the ones who take lots of breaks.
In a test where participants first did a mentally taxing exercise, like standing on one foot or counting down from 2000 by sevens, they gave groups different lengths of time to rest (1 min, 3 min, 10 min).
When challenged to squeeze a sensor with their non-dominant hand, the participants with the longest break to rest performed best.
The lesson for me is to take longer breaks (and make sure they are restorative either by walking under trees or talking with a friend)
3) Leave room for play and exploration
Each day Ali first preps his to-do list, but then he asks himself, “What’s today’s side quest going to be?”
When he shifts from an intense focus on the most obvious task to the potential alternative attitudes he creates space for curiosity, exploration, and playfulness.
It connects to a wonderful quote from Walter Isaacson after writing biographies of history’s most impressive minds:
“Being curious about everything not only makes you more creative. It enriches your life.”
Worthy & Remarkable
An Ex-Airbus VP creates Skyted - a Silent Mask that allows you to make private calls in public spaces, raising $100k on Kickstarter - and I think the name needs some work…
Pete Whittaker from Wide Boyz challenges ChatGPT to set a crack-climbing boulder problem and the result is very amusing
Ride to Ski is a 36-minute film about three women bikepacking with skis through the Italian Dolomites - sign me up!
One Thing from Me
Along the lines of side quests and exploring your curiosity, I’ve got a project to share!
With generous help from my friend Wyatt, we built a tool that generates compelling images to go along with your post or content to help engage a reader’s curiosity.
I can only run it locally, but here’s a rough demo video I made in the wee hours of the morning (with some background family sounds).
Also if you have an OpenAI account, you can try out my now public Climbing Chatbot. Pretty wild that they announced an entire GPT store of custom chat tools.
A few helpful reminders from the project:
Learn from experts - we paid to take this class
Projects are more fun with collaborators - thanks Wyatt!
Invest the time - to learn something new you need to show up, which for me was a few early, early sessions
Here’s to another full year of learning and exploring!
Experimentally,
Jono