#48: It's Easier to Be Busy

#UnreasonableHospitality #FindingYourGame #RemovingBarriers #ProductivityMatters

Dec 08, 2023

👋 Welcome to this week's Pursuit. My name is Amir, and each week I go over 10 hours of content in pursuit of living a meaningful, fulfilling and balanced life. I'm grateful to share my findings with you and hope I can have a tiny impact on your life. Subscribe now if you haven't already!

This week’s discovery:

🍲 Unreasonable Hospitality at Eleven Madison Park
🎰 What Game Are You Playing?
🌬️ Removing Barriers to Clarity
🏃🏼It's Easier to Be Busy
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
🎵 Music I'm Listening To

🍲 Unreasonable Hospitality at Eleven Madison Park

Eleven Madison Park is a 3-Michelin star and one of the best restaurants in the world. One of the final episodes of the show The Bear is inspired by this story:

The hot dog story is another iconic moment in the evolution of unreasonable hospitality. It happened during a busier than normal lunch service when Will (ex-co-owner) overheard a table of four foodies discussing all the amazing meals they had in New York. One woman mentioned that they had never tried a hot dog from a street cart. Inspired by this, Will went outside to a hot dog cart, grabbed a hot dog, and brought it back to the kitchen. After convincing the chef to serve it in their high-end restaurant, the hot dog was cut into four pieces and served with ketchup, mustard, sour crowd, and relish. Before the final savory course, he brought over the hot dog to the table and explained that they wanted to make sure the guests didn't go home with any culinary regrets. The guests were thrilled by this unexpected gesture and it became an example of going above and beyond to create a unique and memorable experience for customers.

🎧 Listen - 6min

🎰 What Game Are You Playing?

The lesson many of us eventually learn is that the game we’ve spent years playing turns out not to be the right one for us. It’s like discovering all your life you’ve been trying to win at competitive Street Fighter when what you really love is Final Fantasy. And the problem with most advice you get is that someone will say: Oh, to get to the next level, you just need to mash the ‘jump’ button twice as quickly as you can and press Y. And their advice might be absolutely spot-on if you’re playing Mario. But are you? So how do you find the game that’s right for you? Ask others what they’re playing to know the options: What drives you? Try out a bunch of different games. Think about yourself at 80 — what will you be proud that you played? Avoid comparisons. Ask yourself: can I show up for my family, friends and community in accordance with my values? Can I learn and better myself every single day? Can I create at the peak of what I am capable of? What game are you playing?

📖 Read - 7min

🌬️ Removing Barriers to Clarity

The tactic of subtraction goes against the grain of the so-called mind-set revolution, in which it seems everyone is adding this or that quality to their mental approach. The growth mind-set. The abundance mind-set. The gratitude mind-set. But in this genre of self-optimization, if it can be called that, we are adding more and more duct tape to something that isn’t broken — our mind — until it is so covered we lose sight of the beautifully designed machine underneath it all and it thus becomes, in fact, broken. The key is removing barriers to clarity, not adding them in hopes of reaching our goals. Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

📖 Read - 4min

🏃🏼It's Easier to Be Busy

The key to productivity is doing more of what matters and less of what doesn’t. When you concentrate your mental and physical energy in one direction, you have the most impact. All the time you spend on the least important things comes at the expense of the most important things. Asking the question (… does this matter?) is easier than answering it honestly. Admitting you’re doing something that doesn’t matter means you’ve been wasting your time. It’s much easier to keep doing what we’ve been doing and tell ourselves that if we just had one more productivity hack, we’d make more progress. Being busy and being productive are not the same thing. Running around in circles is busy. Going toward your destination is productive. It’s easy to be busy. It’s hard to be productive.

📖 Read - 2min

As a kid, my dad got me a toy where I could assemble machines using bolts, nuts, and metal pieces. I was obsessed with building cool cars and following the instructions. Recently, for my birthday, I bought a metal puzzle of a mechanical octopus with 2400 pieces. It quickly became my way of disconnecting from technology and focusing on the physical world. Each night, I spend 30 minutes making progress on creating this octopus. The leg you see in the photo took me 3 hours to assemble. It's become my favorite pastime, a reminder to embrace simplicity and create something real.

🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On

Most of life is a series of choices, subconscious or conscious. Something deep, primal, in you is rewarded by the choices you make. Fully recognizing and owning those choices is the journey.