#9: Slow Productivity
#9: Slow Productivity
#productivity #therapy #work #life #growth
👋 Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Pursuit. We are all drowning in information but starving for wisdom. I spend over 10 hours each week learning about building great products and living a fulfilling life. Each week, I bring the highlights of these findings to save you time in your search for wisdom. So go ahead, try it, and subscribe now if you haven’t already.
This week’s discovery:
🐢 Slow Productivity: A Definition for Knowledge Workers #productivity
🌝 Getting Closer to the Truth - #therapy
❤️ The Importance of Doing What You Love - #work
👁️ 40 Useful Concepts You Should Know - #life
🪴 How to Build an Impactful Growth Team in 4 Steps #growth
⭐ A tool and music tracks…
🐢 Slow Productivity: A Definition for Knowledge Workers
Slow productivity is a concept that Cal Newport has been working on, a concept that aligns with our humanity and is centered around producing meaningful and valuable things in a sustainable and satisfying way. To achieve this, he suggests three principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. This approach to knowledge work realigns our efforts with the way we are wired, and can lead to producing things of great value. In a world where we are bombarded with emails and distractions, it's easy to forget the real value of craftsmanship and the time required to produce things of impact with our minds. The philosophical foundation of slow productivity lies in the human value that's extracted from doing things of value and meaning. As Aristotle once said, we have these brains that can sit and think and create things, and it's crucial to give things the time they require. By varying our intensity, not being overloaded, and spending more time applying hard-won skills, we can achieve a state of productivity that's meaningful and satisfying.
🎧 4-min
🌝 Getting Closer to the Truth
Don't always analyze and categorize your experiences as if you're a completed work waiting to be analyzed by experts. Instead, let yourself be shocked by your experiences and have intense moments with art or events in your life, as they can mold you into the person you're becoming. Sometimes, it takes feeling those intense moments to get you closer to the truth. Listen to the voices that have been marginalized. They can bring a fresh and much-needed perspective to public discourse. Don't be afraid to hear the voices that may seem a little unreasonable at first. As Ocean Vuong would say, "There is always light, if only we're brave enough to see it." So, be brave enough to see it, to hear the voices that have been silenced, and to feel the intense moments that can mold you into the person you're becoming.
🎧 3-min
❤️ The Importance of Doing What You Love
Paul Graham argues that doing what you love is not enough to achieve professional happiness. He suggests that, in order to be truly happy, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. However, he acknowledges that finding work you love is difficult and requires discipline. He advises against worrying about prestige and recommends doing what you like and letting prestige take care of itself. Ultimately, Graham believes that doing what you love should not be seen as a way to achieve success, but rather as a means to make some original contribution to the world and, in the process, not to starve. 🎧 5-min
👁️ 40 Useful Concepts You Should Know
We think people judge us by a single success or failure, but they don’t. If you mess up one meal no one thinks you're a bad chef, and if you have one great idea no one thinks you're a genius. People just aren't thinking about you that much.
Curiosity is the desire to fill gaps in knowledge. Thus, curiosity occurs not when you know nothing about something, but when you know a bit about it. So learn a little about as much as you can (like you're doing now!), and it will spur you to learn even more.
If a task would take less than two minutes, do it immediately. This is because adding the task to your mental to-do list, keeping it in your memory, and managing the anxiety of not having done it will take far more effort than just doing it now.
📖 8-min
🪴 How to Build an Impactful Growth Team in 4 Steps
Definition of a growth team:
At its core, a growth team hypothesizes, tests, and refines solutions to improve retention, monetization, and acquisition at a company. They use the scientific method to create a predictable, scalable, and competitively defensible strategy for how the company will grow. Growth teams exist to find new frontiers, their work is inherently ambiguous as they develop and test hypotheses about what drives growth.
📖 8-min
⭐ A tool and music tracks…
🛠️ SnoreLab: I started using this app last week after learning that snoring is one of the main symptoms of sleep apnea. The app measures your snoring score throughout the night and offers effective remedies to tackle sleep apnea.
🎧 You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, and Organic Electronic here:
Previously on Pursuit: