Why You Can't Become Productive

Summary

You've done it all: watch 1000s of hours of YouTube content on productivity, you've installed Notion as a Life Operating System, you time batch your tasks, you use the Pomodoro Technique, and you firmly believe that TO-DO lists should help you achieve your goals, yet you still waste most of your days. Let me tell you, this is not your fault. This video will discuss why.

Transcript

You've done it all watch 1000s of hours of YouTube content on productivity, you've installed notion as a live operating system, you timed out your tasks, you use the Pomodoro Technique, and you firmly believe that to list should help you achieve your goals, yet you still waste most of your days. Let me tell you, this is not your fault. Welcome back.

[INTRO] Hey, I'm León Castillo, CEO & Founder of Selfmastered, a high performance training company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their solid bottleneck, their own performance, which transformed the unproductive, overwhelming focus entrepreneurs into laser focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

So in this, we didn't want to prove you why you have been looking at productivity in the wrong way, say you are the product of hundreds of 1000s of years of evolution that have shaped you, according to our environment, that it is no longer here.

And this is why you keep failing at habit formation when you keep failing at productivity, because you are ignoring a fundamental truth about yourself that holds the key to your success and growth. And this is the fact that you are a complex system. And unless you embrace this paradigm, you're going to keep failing and habit formation and productivity and what is a complex system, you may be thinking Well, glad you asked a complex system is a system that is composed of smaller components that interact between each other.

So the interaction between these components affects the whole and drive the system's behavior. And you are a complex system that is sub composed of a myriad of subsystem, like the nervous system, the digestive system, the cardiovascular system that interact between each other, and you need to optimize each subsystem in accordance to the goal that you are pursuing for the system as a whole. So if you are trying to become more productive and drive effective behavior, you need to take into account the sheer complexity of you, which is why we teach the people who work with about the concept of the system of view and how to actually drive yourself as you wish.

Now, in order to really drive this point home, we need to discuss about the two paradigms of science.

One is the holistic product and the other one is the reductionist paradigm. And the problem you've probably been schooled in is the reductionist paradigm that states that the whole is the sum of the parts. So what you see is what you get. And this may be true for the simplest forms of science, let's say from the prototypical Newtonian physics, in which force multiply is the mass multiplied by the acceleration, so you can understand what are the key interrelation between the components of the equation and you get essentially the result, you can also work for the molecules when a molecule is simple enough, then you can subdivide it into the atoms that compose it and understand that the behavior of the molecule will be the function of the interaction between the items.

But if the system is complex enough, if it's sub composed of a lot of components and subsystems, it becomes impossible to understand what is the behavior if you do not analyze the interaction between the different parts. So a complex system will be the human body in mind, a complex system can be a society can be a company, it can be the world at large, in order to really understand what drives the behavior of a complex system, you need not only to look to the whole but also to the parts. In other words, in the reductionist paradigm, the whole equals the sum of the parts, but in the holiest paradigm, the whole is more than just the sum of the parts.

And you may be thinking, why should I care about this? If I clicked on a video about productivity, well, you should care because if you keep failing a productivity and habit formation is because you are not doing what you should be doing. You are not optimizing your whole self to drive that desired behavior. And you know, inherently that this is true, no amount of notion templates is going to offset the fact that you may be going through a divorce and therefore your emotional standpoint is not the best to be productive.

If you do not sleep, how do you spec to actually get a few hours of focus? If you drunk yourself to death the night before, it's just no way that you are going to be able to achieve your goals the next day? This simple truths are essentially what proves my point that since you are a complex system, everything has to be architected and designed for the goal that you are pursuing. In this case, being productive. Just harnessing the power of one mental model of doing dopamine fasting or again, installing a new productivity app is not going to give you the results you want. You need to look deeper and be much more ambitious.

Now before we get into how to solve this What you should be focusing on in order to be productive virtual life, subscribe and hit the bell not only because this we allow other people to actually find this video, and it could be helpful for them, but also because we're running promotions for our subscribers, and you will only get notified if you subscribe through the bell. So don't miss out on that.

So how do you solve this? How do you actually become productive? How do you drive effective behavior? Well, there's 1000 things that you could be learning but after a few years doing this, we have boiling down to eight core skills, which is essentially what we teach our clients but I'm gonna tell you which skills are these so you can learn them on your own. If you're so willing, you're going to take 100 hours but it's probably doable. If you want a short version, you know where to find us. So the first thing you need to do is self awareness and self awareness is conquered through systems thinking Systems Thinking is related to this Hollis paradigm and will help you understand yourself and the universe is a collection of systems that can be tweaked and modified and designed for perfection for giving you the results you want. So when you understand yourself from a holistic perspective, your self awareness goes up and you're able to identify what is the problem that you should be working on next, which leads me to skill number two, goal setting and systems design. Once you know what's wrong, you need to design a goal and systems that allow you to solve what's wrong, right.

So goal setting is skill number two, skill number three is execution. How can you execute How can you make happen what you design? Well, by being very good at execution skill number four is about cybernetics or data driven performance optimization is understanding if you're progressing or you're regressing is extracting data from your performance is understanding how to make sure you're actually driving progress, because it is very easy to fool oneself.

Then another crucial skill is identity update or motivation, essentially, because habit formation and motivation derived from the identity that we assume for ourselves and be able to recreate ourselves often is a surefire way to giving ourselves the tool we need to do what we want to do then goes focus on flow, how to get into flow, because getting into flow and doing deep work is a skill that you can learn, but you will not be able to pull it off if you're working on the wrong things, which is why self awareness is so important, or you do not have the correct execution protocols, right? Focus is important, but it comes after you know, what is it that you're going towards, and then finally, energy management.

So it's very important for you to understand that you are a biological entity that needs to be optimized based on your own circadian rhythms. Remember that environment that you evolved into that is no longer here? Well, you need to adapt what you have right now your current body of mind to the environment you currently inhabit. And that's a skill you can learn to and finally, emotional management is What is crucial is especially important highest echelons of business. Because if you lose the your temper, if you do a bad decisions, you're going to undo a lot of progress. So emotional management is the last skill.

So it's self awareness. It's goal setting and systems design execution protocols, data driven performance optimization, also called cybernetics, motivation and identity update, focus on flow, energy management and emotional management. If you learn these eight skills, you will be able to become more productive, because you will be hitting all the right nails to optimize the complex system of view in the direction that you want. I know nobody has ever told you this, but it is true nonetheless.

And I highly invite you to look into the science of habit formation and why it is so hard to achieve what we want and most time is because we are taking an incomplete approach or partial view on the problem. So really, this is why we do performance. And we don't do productivity because it is much harder than just installing a notion template or using a productivity tool.

You need to look very deep into who you are. What do you want, why do you want it and what are the goals and systems that you create to achieve what you want? I hope this was useful. Please let me know in the comments if this is the first time did you hear about this holism and reduction paradigm and really I want to see if this is something that might interest you for future videos.