When we started I Grow Younger, I thought that productivity would be a central topic and being in “flow” while searching for your peak performance – one of our central concepts.
However it turned out that productivity is not central for a happy and successful life. And not even happiness is central for anything. They are both a byproduct. Your driving forces don’t come from productivity. When you already have the important things in life, you end up also being productive and happy.
People with more flows than boxes are always productive and happy, so happiness in a strange way guarantees productivity without causing it – it’s more of a correlation. If you’re thinking about counterexamples right now, if you’re thinking of the Buddhist monk in an orange robe meditating and happy but not looking productive right now, you need to keep reading because your idea of productivity is dead wrong. It’s not your fault – you copied the wrong perspective from the people around you. Almost everyone in modern society gives themselves the wrong answer to four key questions:
1. Is productivity mostly about “producing”?
Every meaningful non-physical work process has creative stages and implementation, “production” stages.
If you lack the creative stages, you’re in a bot role and your job will likely be replaced over time by AI (I’m not kidding at all). Structured jobs like accountants and lawyers are at the highest risk of taking a big hit. So you better start developing your creative, intuitive sides right now.
If you lack the implementation, “production” stages, your work will also likely be replaced over time by AI (again I’m not kidding). AI can create anything now – text (which includes ideas), images, videos – in such quantity and at such a low cost, that even if it has to create 500 ideas and 1000 images, there will be at least one decent enough, on par or better than your human take. Not to speak that AI prompting will only get better as we get used to this insane new power.
So are we all going to be replaced? No!
It’s in the combination of creating and implementing, in the dance back and forth between the two that AI is still vastly outperformed by humans. And a smart human using AI will probably always be better than just AI left on its own.
Unless you’re a top 0.1% creative artist, you have to be in the mix up. It’s no longer a choice. It is what it is.
Remember, just like in the bear joke, you don’t have to outperform AI. You just need to be better than other humans. If everyone has this philosophy and raises their productivity, we may be able to transition our economy so no one is left behind. Alternatively doom thinking and sheep mode will lead to a social disaster since:
- The current form of capitalism
- AI development as we see it
- A no-one-being-left-behind policy
are impossible all at the same time since the jobs would just decrease and not be fully replaced in the short term, leading to massive economic downward spirals.
Once we realize we need the creative stages and it’s not a matter of personal taste anymore, we can define productivity to include creativity. The future of humanity, increasingly full of AI and robots, will demand this definition.
However, here we hit another language problem, just like many others in I Grow Younger. “Production” Productivity and creativity are extremely different in just about any regard. They are absolutely incomparable. It’s a like comparing a swarm of mosquitos that flap their wings 500 times a second, with a volcano that erupts once every 10 years (but may also not erupt at all) and ask which one creates more wind. It just doesn’t work like that.
In order for something to include something else, they somehow need to occupy the same structural space. Saying productivity includes creativity is like saying that mosquitoes and volcanoes are alike because they both move air.
The paradox is people somehow realizing that creativity is part of productivity in general, yet the word productivity also being used in the “production” sense which has as much to do with creativity as mosquitos have to do with volcanoes.
This creates immense confusion when trying to develop an intuition about this topic.
In such cases it’s helpful to clear some fog by exploring how the incompatible duo of “Production” Productivity and Creativity even works.
Production is a left brain structure. It requires a process, definitions (boxes), often logic or planning. It’s the only time in life we actually need to create mental “boxes”.
Creativity is a (mostly) right brain “flow”. It cannot be manufactured, only stimulated by giving it space and time to form and thrive.
As we already learned, boxes and flows are like fire and ice and very much like to destroy each other in the short term – reflecting the struggle for dominance between the left and right hemisphere of our brain. In many people the logical, “boxy” left brain is so dominant that they never have major ideas – creativity is there, yet mothballed and nothing gets to the conscious part of the brain.
So “Production” Productivity and Creativity will be in a constant fight for territory within you. And that’s actually great! As we already established that we need both, if the fight was temporary, then the winner would take all the space forever. But since it’s constant, there is always a chance for a comeback. However, if the underdog (usually the right brain/creativity) cannot make the comeback for more than a day, something is wrong, the balance is off. The sad part is that for many people it’s not a day, it’s months or even years since their last bright idea. The good part is this is completely reversible. Remember, even if you feel down and out on idea creation, your creative part is intact – not damaged, just mothballed!
If we’re off-balance how do we stimulate creativity? Like every right brain “flow” it’s not directly manufacturable, but if we remove enough boxes we open the space for it and improve the chances – just be careful not to immediately fill the space with other boxes as the overstimulated dopamine system of the brain will urge you to do! Removing brain fragmenting distractions like phone notifications, social media scrolling and TikTok and similar short video feeds is the best possible start.
Remember that any grind-supporting structures like schedules etc. are boxes and will not only not help your creativity but will usually suppress it. The only exception is the creation of empty time slots in your schedule – boxes with no other boxes inside can create the space for flows!
Once that we’re aware of the delicate dance between the extremely different “Production” Productivity and Creativity in the short term, let’s zoom out in time and return to the mosquito vs volcano analogy.
Mosquitos and volcanoes both move air but while a swarm of mosquitos cannot really change the world no matter how fast they flap their wings, volcanoes can and very much have changed it. And in the long term so have great ideas whose time has come.
The structure of the current world makes great ideas relatively more important than great execution overall because:
- Ideas scale; we are now ~8 billion people, meaning that each world-changing idea has impact on a huge number of human beings.
- Production is now outsourced to machines in most agriculture and manufacturing, meaning our basic “box” needs are covered anyway as long as we have money.
- Money is best earned in the long-term by scaling a business or being a valued worker, both of which require skills in demand – mostly creative ones.
- Execution is easier to predictably outsource than great idea generation.
- Great ideas are inherently more effective as they require little to no resources to come up with. It’s the implementation that is resource-heavy. This is why some consultants are so highly paid – their job is structurally effective (even if they suggest mostly bullshit).
- As many people have their creativity mothballed and just take part in the execution process, your ideas become more valuable in the free market of skill supply and demand.
The only problem about truly great ideas is that their generation is completely unpredictable. It doesn’t fit any plan or “box” pattern, if fact as we already saw, any pressure or structure will be counterproductive.
There is only one way to invite them into existence. Open time and space for them. Let them surface. Let go. Plant some seeds. And be patient.
Here are some structures you need to get rid of in order to open this time and space:
2. Is productivity defined by performance?
Performance is now. Ideas are forever. If you see productivity as defined by performance, you automatically suppress creativity, which is a slow, chaotic and immeasurable flow over long periods of time.
3. Is it possible to measure productivity?
I’m sure you’ve heard of if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. This applies only to boxes, as flows such as love, motivation and meaning cannot be measured anyway. As the more important part of productivity is the immeasurable creative component, measuring its reversely correlated “production” counterpart is extremely misleading and counterproductive. Do you think Einstein was measuring his productivity while he was writing four (!) legendary papers, each revolutionizing science in a separate way, all in one year (1905)!? Dude was too busy changing our perception of science and the Universe, I’m sure it didn’t even cross his mind to track progress on a calendar and give his days productivity scores. I kid you not, one of the main reasons you are not Einstein-level-productive is precisely because you are doing things Einstein never would even think off. Such as tracking productivity.
4. Is it possible to improve productivity by planning more?
Well, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it with more boxes. Only with less. Most people in Western society need way less planning in life, not more.
However, if you don’t aim for “production” productivity, plan less, don’t measure outcomes and don’t measure performance… is it even productivity as we have come to understand it?
If even one volcano eruption in a lifetime potentially contributes to the world more than a lifetime of mosquito wing flapping… and at the same time any time you flap your tiny wings you are less likely to have the precious volcano in the near future…
Is is possible that flapping your wings has negative effectivity in the big picture!? Is this why the Buddhist monk chooses to do nothing!?
Is incremental progress actually slowly bringing us down, rather than up? Can’t be!
Yet, it kind of is… It’s just an extreme form of letting go to admit it. If you haven’t had any decent creative ideas in years, does this mean years of your life were intellectually wasted? This sounds bitter and triggering. But just like any such realization about our past, there is a much better perspective – The best is yet to come!
If whatever you have achieved in life was mostly done using not only half of your brain but by far the less evolved and less powerful left half… imagine what you can do with your full biological ability unlocked! It’s just insane to think about it.
It took me about 15 years to transition from a productive to a creative mindset. To stop measuring success in every other way and leaving just one intellectual metric in my life – How many truly world-changing ideas do I generate per year?
I started with about one idea a year eight years ago. At the moment of writing it’s about seven per year for the last two years and you can find some of them in the website of our parent organization (also founded by me) – Impact Mindset.
This shows that creativity is built by flows and other invisible building blocks but as you have some constructive power over opening up space for these building blocks, you can influence it. The volcano will erupt if the magma moves around and the crust is thin. So live dynamically, talk to smart and creative people, connect, engage, share… just move in different directions all the time like magma searching for the opening. If the crust does not yield in this spot, don’t try it again unless you, the magma, are already way different than before.
In I Grow Younger we always say not experience but diverse experience since one person can have more data points for their intuition in a year than someone with a very repetitive life in five years. So especially for young people a good direction of advice is to try as many different small things as possible and don’t feel compelled to finish anything that no longer feels like a challenge. Unfinished projects are a loss in The Game of Life (as we lose resources like money and status) but wins in The Game of Self as we prioritize the invisible – intuition, creativity, curiosity, meaning and not caring of other people’s opinion. These precious flows give us internally more than the experience of minor finishing touches on a project whose success or failure are already pre-destined at this point.
An important addition to the above, may sound radical but… f*ck this popular narrative of celebrating small wins! There is no stupider way to abandon your flows and Hunter mode just when you got the momentum. You don’t have many battles in life, you have one and it’s an infinite game, it’s never won or lost so there’s nothing to celebrate – you’re fabricating a structure detached from reality and a total coping mechanism. Feeling good and joyful and having fun are great flows. A targeted celebration is turning the joy into a box and in a way, destroying to best part of it. That’s an instant no from me! You can celebrate the whole miracle of life 24/7 if you want – that’s healthy! You can have a dinner out with friends every night if you like it – that’s also healthy. I can assure you from all the self-help authors I’m the least anti-fun! But celebrating losing five pounds or anything specific is just coping and gets in the way of joy, sustainable progress and seeing the big picture.
Remove the boxes from your life to thin the crust. It’s no coincidence that people have great ideas while in the shower but rarely while they watch TikTok.
Of course it’s not that easy. People need to stay in touch with reality and in most cases need and have a job. Most jobs are mundane and in some following protocol at least most of the time is truly important – no one wishes for a highly innovative TSA agent with creative fantasies in the BDSM realm. How do we open space then?
In the Boxes vs Flows chapter we explored many practical ways to get rid of boxes and create space for flows. But there is one critical thing we omitted since it’s more intellectual and better fits here. It’s simply the value of empty intellectual space, stillness (of the mind, body may be moving or walking around). This is not boredom which is craving stimulation. It’s just the absence of thinking. Mental peace.
Just like sadness can be a healthy processing state on an emotional level, stillness is a very healthy processing state on an intellectual level. In both states the brain turns off its tireless conscious prediction engine functionality, resulting in boxes fading away and space for flows being formed. At the same time the full brain power is available to facilitate the processing and the very limited brain intellectual output bandwidth (a measly 10-15 bytes/sec in spoken language) is free in the case the processing all of a sudden results in some amazing idea.
Stillness can happen at any moment you are not stimulated. After you wake up in bed (this is when most of my ideas surface). In nature. In public transportation. While waiting for someone to show up for a meet-up or date. Yes… many of the times and places most people use their phones are great, yet wasted by phone use opportunities for stillness.
As Stillness is in conflict with Hunter mode, and Speed/Scale to an extent, we need to clarify:
- Doing nothing and thinking about nothing is great. We have evolved to do much needed mental processing in such a state. It’s a flow. But if thinking and especially overthinking/rumination creep in, it becomes a box, good turns to bad in a complete 180.
- Doing everything at maximum speed with Hunter mode hormones in the body is also great! Even boxy work can merge into flow if you’re super fast moving.
- The above can happen on a PC but rarely on a phone. PCs and laptops are built for productivity. Phones are built for distraction and addiction. And your brain associates each of them in exactly this way. The mere sight of the phone is distracting and killing your flows. So doing just about anything on the phone (rare flow exceptions are talking, listening to music/podcasts or messaging a loved one) is a boxy experience that is not productive even if it’s work or education related. While I have huge respect for the insanely innovative Luis von Ahn and the team at Duolingo, your streak system is so boxy that it’s not a retention strategy for your users. It’s a diagnose for each and every one of them. Learning French is not worth sacrificing your chances for flows at the same moment, even if they are small.
We have one of those typical I Grow Younger “infinity spectrums” where extremes are good and the middle is bad:
- Slowing your brain input and output speed to near zero is great – you win in flows and intuitive processing;
- Working at insane speed is also great as it helps you body get into hunter mode and doing beats (over)thinking;
- The mid-ground of getting some work done on the phone at half speed & small screen with no proper mouse/keyboard is a shitty choice at just about any given moment. Don’t waste your flows like that;
How are motivation and creativity related?
First of all… what is motivation? It’s surely a driving force but, how does it work?
This is a very confusing word that encompasses many meanings. Let’s try to clarify.
First and foremost all of your motivation happens due to dopamine. Scientists did an astonishing experiment with a rat, placing food a few inches from it behind a small barrier or (in a different setting) requiring to pull a lever to get the food but also blocking dopamine in its brain with an inhibitor. The rat would starve to death because without dopamine it’s unable to make any effort towards the food, even if the effort is both tiny and obvious, one that any normal rat would do in an instant even when not particularly hungry. Crazy!
I know many of you think “reward” when you hear the word “dopamine” but that’s kind of an old school understanding. The more accurate one is dopamine = motivation.
The brain has two neural pathways for extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Dopamine is central to both but in every other regard they are very different.
Extrinsic motivation is anything about avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Basically all your biological cravings, all the reward chasing in Hunter mode and all the defensive, fear-induced behavior in Sheep mode all come from extrinsic motivation.
Think about it this way:
- Extrinsic motivation was what made people chase deer in the Stone age even when there were sabretooth tigers around.
- Extrinsic motivation could made them gather everything they own (probably not much to be fair) and move 200 miles on foot to find a place with more deer and less tigers.
- Extrinsic motivation could made them fight another tribe to the death.
- Extrinsic motivation could made males fight about who’s the alpha.
- Extrinsic motivation was involved in anything about food, safety, procreation and tribe survival.
But…
- Intrinsic motivation made kids play around.
- Intrinsic motivation made people tell stories around the fire.
- Intrinsic motivation made people draw paintings on the walls of the cave.
If you don’t know why you do it, but you do it, and it’s not some biological craving but some joyful flow experience… it comes from Intrinsic Motivation. Animals also have it – puppies and kittens also play joyfully.
How do we increase our Intrinsic Motivation?
Intrinsic motivation is simply the sum of your Core Flows (Self-Love, Unconditional love, Meaning, Responsibility and Growth – all of which require some degrees of Freedom – which while not directly a Flow behaves like one).
Here is what each Core Flow does when it becomes a part of you:
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Self-love (destroys the barriers within, you see yourself and your life experience as one whole)
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Unconditional love and compassion for others (destroys the barriers between you and other people)
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Meaning (destroys all other barriers in the world, seeing it as a whole)
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Responsibility (destroys all barriers between our values and taking action on them)
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Growth/Scale (destroys all barriers that slow us down on our mission to contribute to the world – eg. the false belief that we’re not made for greatness)
Those generate secondary ones such as curiosity, playfulness, joy, love for nature and other wonderful flow mixes.
Creativity is just another one of these secondary flows.
Intrinsic motivation is simply the brain pathway that facilitates the above (mostly right brain) circuits and engages dopamine to turn our fluid, undefinable wishes into action.
One of the most fascinating neuroscientific discoveries is that due to both pathways sharing the dopamine in the system, having extrinsic motivation will deplete all of the dopamine from the other circuit and make intrinsic motivation impossible for you! Damn!
So how do you create the uncreatable, how to spawn intrinsic motivation? You don’t need to do anything special. If you construct your life in support of your Core Flows and reduce as much boxes as possible you also fix all problems with dopamine depletion and extrinsic motivation getting in the way. One solution to everything, isn’t that nice and… rare?
This is why your productivity requires zero effort. This is why pressure is counterproductive and self-discipline is a sham concept that leads nowhere. This is why measuring and structuring your life is counterproductive – because it breaks the only pathway, that really, really matters. The only one that creates volcanoes. The Flow based one.
Productivity is Creativity + Execution. Only Execution also requires Creativity. And improving over time also requires Creativity. And time is long. And Intuition building over the long time is needed for both Creativity and Execution. But Intuition needs data points. Which come from Diverse Experience. Which comes from Chaos and Creativity, not repetitive Execution…
Once you close all the loops above and also acknowledge that Execution is boxy and often hinders Creativity while it can also be outsourced to other humans, software, robots and increasingly AI… you see where this is going.
I know this verdict will make a lot of you very uncomfortable since you don’t feel creative enough. But I have to say it because this is the modern reality. Productivity is almost entirely Creativity. If you’re not creative, you’re not productive. But wait! There are some major good news.
The discomfort you may be feeling right now is one of the core components of being creative! (This video explains it with real life stories better than I ever can).
And also most other people are not super creative either! It’s all normal. You’re not broken, the fucked up education system and a lot of cultural bullshit have suppressed your creativity by stimulating mostly the non-creative parts of your brain. But you still got it in you! Nothing is lost, trust me! Your best creative ideas are yet to come. But you need to accept reality about how this works and remove the boxes in the way even though it might seem scary.
Let’s not lie to ourselves any more.
If your productivity cannot become creativity due to a total lack of Game of Life freedom (eg. stupid boss refuses to listen for the 17th time and tells you to keep tunneling), you need another place to work and another boss. Right now. Every day of delay is damage on all fronts.
In all other cases… productivity is creativity. If creativity doesn’t happen, don’t resort to pressure. Lay the seeds for it until it does and believe ideas will come intuitively out of the blue. It’s the only way they ever do!
A truly great idea, if you don’t ruin it with boxes later, will steamroll whatever is in your way. At the same time a truly great idea reduces the boxes in your life as it opens the gates for intrinsic motivation and shuts the ones for extrinsic motivation. It’s an explosion that carries its own intuitive oxygen and selectively burns out everything harmful in your life. All your fears, inadequacy feelings, avoidance and excuses melt in fire when the mighty volcano erupts. And it doesn’t matter that much if the idea doesn’t work out. The boxes holding you back have been hit by a volcano! They will never be as strong again. You’ll have the space for more flows and more creativity – and the next volcano will arrive sooner.
Don’t be afraid of the chaotic, uncertain, invisible nature of creativity. It’s how evolution made it to be so it saves on brain resources while feeling magical. It is a win-win because it works this way.
Welcome the mother of all positive changes. Create. Share the joy of creation with friends so we can break the twisted narrative we live in. If they question your progress because it’s immeasurable, use the moment to change a life. Tell them about mosquitoes and volcanoes and ask them to name the one really successful historic figure they admire the most. Then find a biography and explore their life path together so you can point to the obvious volcanoes. Then watch your friend’s face as they see their perception of productivity crumbling down along with parts of their identity. And give them a big hug and all the compassion that this tough moment requires.
There is no other way. In order to make space, first you need to let go. The joy, fulfillment and meaning that await you on the other side are more than worth it.
