There is something that always bothered me about the advice of productivity gurus. It has taken me a while to figure out what it is. I think a big part of it is that I was never particularly impressed with their examples.
A common example, especially when someone is writing a productivity book, would be examples of authors. The first problem with this is that I’m not particularly interested in writing a book (although maybe someday I will be). More over, the specific act of writing a book is not necessarily difficult or impressive.
It is definitely a lot of work to write a book. (Or was, before generative AI took off.) And I’m sure that if you actually want anyone to read your book, it is even more work. And if you actually want to make the book successful enough to make any money, it is even more work. But the example of the author who just writes for some specified period of time or some specified number of pages every single day really didn’t resonate with me.
Maybe the other piece of it is that the majority of the people giving advice on productivity themselves aren’t doing anything or achieving anything that I find particularly impressive or applicable to my own life. Especially where their profession now is simply writing books about methods for how to be more efficient at writing books. Again, I’m sure that is valuable for a lot of aspiring authors, but it never really stuck with me.
For me, I have always been more interested in the advice of operators and doers. For example, I am much more curious about Warren Buffett’s advice on investing because he is actively investing and has built up his expertise on the topic through doing it (well) for decades. His advice might get him a little bit of publicity, but it really isn’t his business model to be giving advice. His business model is to be a smart investor.
On the other hand, you have people like Jim Cramer, whose primary job is giving investment advice every single day on TV. That’s what he gets paid to do. And yes, he also had a hedge fund at one point. I won’t pretend to know anything about it, but I don’t think it was particularly successful. Regardless, his profession is giving advice about investing, not investing.
I tend to be more interested in productivity tips from people who are focused on doing and achieving things, not just talking about it. The hard-won learnings of an operator are richer and more rooted in reality.
I can do nothing for you but work on myself…you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!