Self-Improvement, Psychology and Mindset

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Have you ever spent years studying the wrong major, climbing the ladder at the wrong company, chasing the wrong career?

Have you spent years living in the wrong city? Wrong relationship? Wrong lifestyle?

It’s hard to discern what *we think we want* from what we really want.

Society teaches us what we’re “supposed” to want. And we follow along.

The result is keeping up with the Joneses. It’s the hedonic treadmill. It’s lifestyle inflation. And it causes conflict, both within ourselves and with others.

Today’s guest, Luke Burgis, discusses mimetic desire — how our “wants” are imitative — and how we can find our deeper truths.

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Four thousand weeks.

That’s how long we live if we’re lucky enough to celebrate our 80th birthday.

Crazy, isn’t it?

We rarely think of our lifespan in terms of weeks. When we do, it seems painfully short. And that’s the point that Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, wants to drive home.

Oliver, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking and Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done,  is a self-professed time management geek.

But after reading scores of books, he concluded that most time management tactics result in an illusion of productivity. They don’t get to the root of why we feel the need to be time wizards. They don’t tell us how to overcome FOMO. They don’t mention the importance of relaxation or play.

Instead, most advice furthers the false narrative that we can do it all and have it all. This narrative leads us to endlessly spin our wheels. Just one more task, just one more project…only to have five more take its place by the end of the week.

If this sounds familiar (and exhausting), then Oliver has a different perspective to offer.

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What did you learn from 2020? 

That question carries a lot of weight, doesn’t it? 

Collectively, all of us experienced an unprecedented year. In March 2020, the world changed overnight. 

Working from home became the norm. The market shot up and down and up again. Bitcoin skyrocketed. Housing prices held at unfathomable highs. We saw a global reckoning around social justice. 

Needless to say, our internal and external worlds experienced rapid shifts. We may still feel ungrounded.

And now we’re dealing with the aftermath, asking questions such as, “What do I really want out of life? How can I form a plan when there’s still so much uncertainty?”

The answer: become nimble. Embrace flexibility. 

At least, that’s the conclusion Brad Barrett and Jonathan Mendonsa reach during this interview.

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Do you tend to see things as they are?

Or do you tend to see what you want to see?

To cut to the chase: how important is it to seek truth and honesty? Especially if it means the possibility of compromising your existing beliefs and ideas about the world?

If you’re unsure, or if these questions have you thinking, “Whoa, I need more caffeine before going down a philosophical rabbit hole…”, today’s episode has you covered. (Just grab your beverage of choice beforehand.)

Julia Galef, author of The Scout Mindset and host of the long-running Rationally Speaking podcast, explains the difference between the soldier mindset (see what you want to see) and the scout mindset (seeing things as they are).

She explains why we often default to the soldier mindset of defending ideas we desperately want to believe, and reviews several thought exercises that we can use to instead train our brains to scout for the truth.

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Does work/life balance sound like a mythical wonderland that only a select few ever achieve?

Do you make it a goal to enter this mythical wonderland each year, only to end up completely disappointed a month or two later?

Or have you completely written off this mythical land to double-down on work in hopes that you’ll achieve financial independence sooner?

Neither of these has to be the reality you settle for.

Work and life can coexist together. Without enormous trade-offs.

But you need to ruthlessly prioritize both areas of your life to make it happen.

“Yeah, okay. Please indulge me. Tell me how I can achieve this so-called work/life balance.” 

We’ll leave that to our guests, best-selling author Michael Hyatt, and his daughter and CEO of Michael Hyatt & Co, Megan Miller Hyatt.

They both practice what they preach in their new book, Win at Work & Succeed at Life, and they’re here to share concrete examples and actionable steps you can take today to make work/life balance achievable.

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Do you ever feel like there’s a voice inside your head that insists on repeating all of your fears, insecurities, or mistakes?

Does this voice craft invisible scripts that then govern your life in the most limiting way ever?

Are you just sick of this voice having a home inside your head?

You’re not alone.

Today’s guest, bestselling author, Jon Acuff, found himself suffering the same fate. It wasn’t until he silenced this voice and replaced it with a kinder, gentler one that he began to wonder if this was common.

He commissioned a study to find out, and the results were clear: 99.5 percent of 10,000 people said they were overthinkers.

[smart_track_player url="https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/paulaandjaymoney/AA303.mp3" title="A World Without Email, with Cal Newport" artist="Paula Pant" social="true" social_twitter="true" social_facebook="true" social_gplus="true" social_linkedin="true" social_stumble="true" social_pinterest="true" social_email="true" ]

Wouldn’t it be nice if our inbox magically managed itself?

Let’s go a step further.

What if we could live in a world without email?

Email overload takes a real toll on us – on our workflow, and on our brains. A study conducted by RescueTime found that most workers can’t go six minutes without checking email. That, combined with how inefficient we become when switching tasks, creates a gigantic loss of productivity during our workday.

Joke’s on you! I don’t use email. I use Slack instead. Ha!

Slack isn’t any better than email. Any platform that allows for endless back-and-forth communication will cause your productivity to plummet. How are you supposed to get any work done outside of Slack or email if you’re busy checking in every six minutes? Those constant notifications can keep you engaged with unstructured conversation to the point where the day ends and you’ve had no time to get actual work done.

Hmm, those days do suck. But how else am I supposed to communicate with my teammates when something needs to be done?

There are plenty of alternatives that don’t involve back-and-forth messaging. Cal Newport, third-time guest of the show, joins us to talk about these alternatives. His new book, A World Without Email, explores the pitfalls of the “hyperactive hive mind workflow” and the structures and systems workplaces have adopted to cut down on noise and increase productivity.

Cal gives us a brief history lesson on how email came to dominate the workplace, explains the inefficiencies and limitations with email, and tells us which mindset shifts to make in how we manage our time, energy, and attention at work.