Jargogled Impressions.

How do you approach everything you do, regardless of its excitement quotient or importance, with energy and with an involvement that is sincere and diligent? To work towards bringing the best in everything that you touch and work upon. If that means giving up on some things that you wanted to do but cannot focus on because of this, then so be it. The world wisdom that you keep receiving from the sources all around you makes you believe that knowing what you want is always the first step towards achieving it. Its common sense too but really knowing what you are after, rather than what you think you are after, is key to determining where your focus and your attention should be. When you feel like you have spread yourself so thin across different dimensions of living life, you end up not taking anything to a second or third level mastery. 

Achieving mastery in the things you do gets you to a stage where you transcend the act itself and can step back to really look at what you are doing in a different dimension. It’s like the concept of elder game – wherein, a player becomes so adept at navigating the concepts of the game boundaries that they tend to become elders who are playing the game for something other than to win or to survive. They are there to relish and to derive meaning from what they are doing. It’s like you transcend a level in the Maslow hierarchy above the physiological needs and the need to be safe and instead are focused more on self-actualization. Only this time, its with every act or game you play in this world.

We need to manage our energy, and by extension, manage our time. Time, by far, is the most precious resource we have and the way we use it isn’t all very sophisticated. Time has its properties including that it’s transient, its right here and then it isn’t, it’s too fluid or impatient to wait for anyone, its enveloped in this enigma that surrounds our past, the present, and the future. The amount of time we spend thinking about the past or the future makes our present increasingly become difficult to manage. 

It has become an imperative for everyone to better manage how they lead their lives in the world we live in today. Especially in the professional realm when as you become a manager, your control over your time becomes fluid. Reading Peter Drucker’s effective executive, the first step in becoming the manager is to understand where your time goes in the day to day operations of work and being conscious about how best you use your time. The idea of letting meetings and the small breaks in between drive the work that you do is preposterous and should never be entertained. Life is too short to let bullshit and inane meetings drive you away from doing the work or things that you really want to do and that you think can make an impact on this world. Letting these meaningless meetings drive your time away from you is probably the worst thing you can do to yourself.

They say that you should never be impatient with your life. But, cultivating a spirit of impatience with things that you find important is key as otherwise you would let others dictate how far or close you get to achieving your goals. Being conscious about the time that you invest in everything is important to driving away the senseless chatter that pervades these meetings sometimes. And preparing ahead so that you can either parallel process or provide your inputs that are impactful is key. For effective managers, focusing on the outcomes that you want to drive towards, instead of the effort behind it is key. This means being able to devote time and energy to things that matter to you and is important for you. This is an important mindset shift and one that if done properly, can be transformative. Most often, our focus tends to shift towards the effort and the tasks involved in getting from A to B and we end up forgetting or relegating to the back why we are doing something. This is dangerous and completely avoidable if you can understand the control you have in the meetings you are part of and can direct the focus towards things that lets you achieve the outcome without spending too onerous a time on things that don’t really matter.

I have been re-reading Getting Things Done by David Allen – the powerful tome on getting your stuff under control by being super anal about how you organize it and how you prioritize your efforts through a more workflow-based approach as opposed to things sitting in your head. At its core, GTD professes dumping the things that you have in your mind to the paper or to an application where you can track it constantly and free up the clutter in your brains to focus more on the creative aspects of everything that you do. It ties directly with my view that no matter what you do, you can always find something creative to focus on if only you could play the “infinite game” when you are doing them. Playing the infinite game means that you are choosing not to play a game that has a logical end but instead aiming to play something that can continue through your learnings and through your ability to constantly create something new around it. Playing the infinite game means that you transcend from playing the boundaries of a finite game and instead focus on things that matter. Infinite games focus on continuing the game, and therefore they are playing not just to win but to continue playing, much as how you are playing the game of life to continue to live and to continue to play it. There is a profound mindset shift when you think about applying the infinite game philosophy to the things that you do and choosing, choosing, to play the infinite game during an explosion of players needing to play the finite game around you. The choices you make in focusing on what to work on will really shift if you focus on being able to continue the game. Take my writing for example; currently, I approach writing as something that I am either going to win (become a published writer) or to lose (relegate myself to writing blogs that no one reads). Now if I shift this to thinking that writing itself is an infinite game, that the purpose that I write is to write alone and to enjoy the process, as opposed to the outcome, of writing; this makes the tasks and the un-finished efforts that I constantly berate myself on too tepid and insignificant. If, instead, I focused on trying to master the art of writing to continue to write and to learn. I am not aiming towards a certain desired end goal. There is no desired end goal other than to continue to use writing as a medium, a medium only, to express my thoughts and my opinions. That I get published or not becomes more of a side story as opposed to the main goal. Much in the same way that technology is only just a medium to achieving an end as opposed to the only goal, writing is more of a medium that you need to constantly nurture and develop.

Conditioning your mind to change the story you tell about yourself is the first step towards restraining the boundlessness that modern day life presents to busy and ambitious people. To bring a zest and energy in everything that you take on is only possible if you relentlessly prune the things that creep into your life and keep a laser focus on your core needs and values to sort and filter out the noise in your daily tasks. For that to happen, you need to know what it is you are after. Your goals and your destinations aren’t necessarily objective end-goals, but values and core principles that drives these milestones and destinations.