Why Taking Life Less Seriously Could Be the Productivity Boost You Need

What's wrong with us?

[00:00:00]

Today I am asking what is the deal with work? We spend all of this time trying to find what we love to do, and then if we do find it, we call it work and we start hating it.

It's a curious conundrum where we can take something we enjoy and systematically remove all the joy from it until it becomes something we have to do for a living.

Sometimes it does feel like we are all members of this bizarre club, where the first rule is that if you are having too much fun, then you're definitely doing it wrong. These days we seem to have meetings about having better meetings. We've got apps to manage our apps.

We've got productivity systems to help us be more productive at creating productivity systems.

It does feel like something is going wrong. And then if we think about work life balance, it's as if work somehow is separate from life. Like, sorry, I just can't be alive right now. I am working. Like, no. When did we decide that a third of our day doesn't count as living? Right.

It doesn't make much sense, Why did we decide that everything [00:01:00] needs a label, a purpose, and preferably a LinkedIn update. Maybe we should be rethinking this whole thing.

So hello and welcome to the Growth Mindset Psychology podcast. With me, Sam Webster Harris, where today we are exploring how to possibly fall in love with what we do.

As you know, I like to explore the science of self-improvement and philosophy of what is a life well lived.

So definitely combining both today

after all, if we have this perfect rainbows and unicorns idea of a job, then we might fall incredibly short. But if we can play around with how we see the things that we do and nudge our perspective, then.

We might have a much better chance of enjoying our present moments.

Okay, so I think you've probably got an idea of what's coming up in the episode, and we are halfway through another year of hurtling around the sun,

which is why I thought it would be a good idea to think about how we can build some contentment into our lives . So stick with us.

I had like you to picture two different humans. Human A is a 4-year-old [00:02:00] building something with blocks, and for them time doesn't exist, lunch doesn't exist. There is just this moment, these blocks and endless possibilities. Towers are rising and falling. Some collapsing. Each collapse is exciting as the construction themselves.

Then we have human being. They are 40 years old and they are building a presentation time very much exists. There's a deadline in two hours. Their stomach is reminding them that lunch exists and instead of possibilities, there's just endless checklist of stakeholder requirements. Same species, very similar basic activity of building some things,

but the experience each individual are in completely opposite universes.

Now, this brings us to something psychologists call self-determination, theory, which is basically a fancy way of saying that humans need three things to thrive. Autonomy, which means being the boss of yourself. Competence, which is being good at stuff. And relatedness, which is connecting with other humans,

Children, playing with their Lego can have all [00:03:00] three, whereas an adult with their PowerPoint can find themself lacking a little bit.

What happens is we take things that could actually be inherently enjoyable, and systematically destroy them by creating external rewards for the thing instead of the joy of doing the thing itself. Mainly performance metrics and the wage. For example, if you like photography, that's great, but suddenly with a wedding schedule and 437 required shots and a mother-in-law with very specific ideas about lighting, then.

Something about it doesn't feel quite so good. And that's where the over justification effect comes in, which is just science speak for adding external rewards for something that you naturally enjoy will often make you enjoy it less.

So imagine that you're paid by your partner to give them a hug or to have a conversation with them. It would feel totally weird and not so much your choice or like you're in control of the things that you want to do. In fact, studies have even shown if you pay kids to do hobbies that they actually enjoyed like art, they will start to enjoy them less.

Actually have less motivation to do them.

The good news [00:04:00] is that there is a state that we can be in that switches off this problem, and that is when we get to enter the flow state, the magical place where time disappears and everything just clicks, like the building blocks for our toddler,

We can see pitch deck writers lose themselves completely in the zone, or even accountants can become deeply engrossed in their spreadsheets like it does happen.

So when we start putting these elements together and review it, we might ask, how do we end up with this mostly joy sapping idea of work?

Well, we can blame the industrial revolution in capitalism because that's what everyone does. After all, that's when we decided work and life should be separate.

Things like keeping your peas and carrots from touching each other on a plate. But despite this clear segregation, it is funny how technology is blurring the lines even more. We have smartphones making sure that we never really leave work when we go home while simultaneously they give us endless ways to procrastinate when we are at work.

In fact, this wonderful technology that's supposed to make everything easier means you can disappoint people at the speed of light. You can get [00:05:00] emails about urgent meetings whilst you are asleep, which apparently is progress.

Now it's worth remembering. This whole system is something that we made up, and it's a story that we tell ourselves in our own heads. So we can make up something new, ideally something better, something that maybe doesn't require us to unlearn everything that made us happy when we were kids.

NinjaSwoosh

Modern Metaphors for Work

So you've probably noticed so far that one issue with work is that we've been falling outta touch with our roots. As I've been investigating our Stone Age ancestry, lately with my new podcast, I thought I'd draw a few parallels between modern jobs and practice in ancient times, just to create some different perspectives to help us change the frame that we look at things with as we go forwards.

In fact, I think we can look at a lot of modern work as essentially different art forms in disguise. So I'll just give you some silly examples that came up for me. For example, being a coder, while that is basically saying complex things in elegant ways, just like poetry, when you add more rules and constraints to it, the more creative people can get, kind of like giving a tiny canvas to paint a [00:06:00] masterpiece,

then we could think about UX designers. We generally think of them as making pretty buttons for things, but they're actually choreographing an intricate dance between humans and machines, so every tap, swipe and scroll is part of an invisible ballet that they're creating and science behind this is actually pretty cool.

Our brains have these things called mirror neurons that fire both when we perform action. And when we watch someone else do it, or if we imagine them doing it, which means that when a UX designer creates a smooth interaction, they are literally dancing in their mind

onwards. We have content creators, which could even be anyone posting on social media, and when we do that, we are just telling stories. The modern day version of our campfire huddles, except the campfire is a ring light and cave paintings are like tiktoks. Regardless. We're still talking about journeys, transformation, heroes, warnings.

We just put all these human stories under the arc of influences.

So what about project managers? You could imagine [00:07:00] them like gardeners. No amount of shouting at a plant can make it grow faster. But creating the right conditions and keeping the path clear of setbacks can give the best chances, and I'm sure we all like a good manager that kindly sprinkles us with extra resources regularly.

And finally, here's a fun one with the concept of remote work. It's a bit like improv theater where one moment you are a serious professional in a client meeting whilst at the same time you're trying to stop your cat from gracefully showing everyone his butt. And you're hoping your toddler isn't microwaving his action figures,

, of course these are some silly examples, but I think it's nice to just more widely at the world around us and the jobs that we do and see how they probably speak to some. Ancient need within this to try and make sense of the world and share our understanding with others and when we step back and appreciate that it doesn't sound so taxing to me, it feels a bit more like you are tapped into a greater human purpose.

Because I think it can be very easy to lose a sense of purpose when you feel so disconnected from what the rest of the world is doing.

With the [00:08:00] increasing complexity of the types of jobs that we have.

Psychology of Doom feelings

However, let's now talk more about where our psychology starts to add in some doom to the potential magic that we might be able to start seeing.

Well, firstly, we have the classic imposter syndrome where you're doing your job, everything's fine. Suddenly your brain goes, Hey, you know what would be fun?

Let's convince ourselves that we are completely fake and dunno what we're doing. I mean, who needs actual problems when your brain can just make them up for you. In fact, the research says that 82% of people sometimes feel this way, like 82%, and that means that almost everyone you know is walking around thinking that they're falling everyone else.

And we are all in this giant game of professional pretend to know what we're doing.

Another classic problem is analysis paralysis.

Having so many options that you end up choosing none of them. Your brain, which originally evolved to decide between fight and flight, is now trying to decide between 37 different project management tools if your phone should have a bigger battery or a better camera, [00:09:00] while simultaneously wondering if you should have been a dolphin trainer instead of a management consultant,

well, here's what's happening in your brain. Working memory can only handle about seven things at once, and when you try to analyze 20 different options, your cognitive load just goes through the roof and your brain basically goes, no, I can't do this. Let's just scroll through social media instead because I'm sure I'll get rewarded for doing that.

So you might ask why are we like this? Why can't we just make a decision? Well, our school system spends years training us to seek the correct answer. In a world where so many things don't really have one.

And sadly, we don't learn much at all about practical decision making.

We get taught that the worst thing to do is to make a mistake, and we build all of our grading systems around regurgitating correct knowledge, and it's a huge installation of fixed mindset thinking, where we want perfect grades with zero mistakes. And we would rather memorize perfect answers than think about how things work and experiment.

Like instead, of course, we should be excited [00:10:00] about trial and error and any opportunity to take a journey of discovery.

But that's not what we've been trained to do then finally, we have a big, giant culture trap. Not onlyof the business that we're in, but also the comparison game of social media where everyone else's life is probably better than yours. Let's say you're in an apartment eating all Chinese food, watching someone post about their life changing smoothie bowl experience, like life changing. Why they, They're eating breakfast and yet somehow that goes into a brain that their life is better than ours, like. There's a big issue with a thing called Social Comparison Theory where we take our worst moments and compare them against the highlight reel on social media of someone else's best moments. So we essentially always feel like we are behind in doing badly.

An interesting example here from chimps is that when two chimps in opposite cages to each other, we're both given plates of cucumber. They'll both eat their meal, no complaints, and be happy with it. But if you give one chimp in one cage, banana, and the other one cucumber, the poor chimp with a cucumber will [00:11:00] cry.

He'll throw his cucumber at you and he'll get depressed and it's like the worst thing ever has happened. Now that's essentially what you do every time you go into social media.

You are watching everybody be showered with gold plated bananas whilst artificially turning everything about the experience of your own life into a soggy cucumber, but it's completely unreal. It's just a lie in your brain that has nothing to do with how good or bad your life really is. It's just the way you're framing it in your head.

And that's a really important thing I want you to remember,

now, the good news is that we can reframe these three main lessons that I've spoken about. So instead of panicking about feeling like we're a fraud at work, we can focus on the fact that we just.

Learning and no one knows what they're doing in life anyway.

Instead of trying to make perfect choices, we can realize that with a growth mindset, we should just be gathering data, optimizing for just making decisions faster and trying different things and really accept that there probably is no such thing as a perfect decision and just get on with experiencing our life. And then finally, instead of feeling like the world around you is [00:12:00] full of happy, perfect people who are better than you.

Well, a great start is to delete social media, but another option is to remind yourself that those people are on their own individual path, and it probably isn't even real in the first place.

And now we are ready to look further into some mindset shifts we can start making coming up after the break.

Mindset Shifts

Now some of what I'm about to say might sound a bit lame or silly, but I promise you it can honestly change how you experience every day. There is a huge experiential difference between saying, I have to do something and I get to do something.

So, instead of saying, I have to attend this meeting. You can say, I get to connect with another human being through space and time using invisible electronic wizardry,

and in your brain. This changes its pathways from a doom spiral to an opportunity and genuinely it can rewire your thoughts towards positivity.

It's crazy how so many of our feelings aren't actually based at all on reality so much as our [00:13:00] perception of it, just the same as with those chimps.

So it is worth remembering that ultimately the only people who really have to do things are prisoners. You get to choose what job you do. You choose how you make money, you choose if you go to the gym or eat healthy. It's all a choice, and if you think of it as a chore, it's just a really unfulfilling choice that you're making.

Now, another mindset shift that we can look for is

how we think about our outcomes. If we can stop obsessing about the end result, like it's the last biscuit in the tin, we can remember it's actually about enjoying the journey. When you're dancing, you don't think, oh, only 47 steps until I'm done.

You're just dancing.

So my challenge for you here is can you culture some of those same vibes at the work you do and get into the groove of it instead of seeing your email inbox as a monster that keeps spawning mini monsters? Can you think of it as a zen garden? Each email is another pebble to mindly place or toss out the window.

I'm sure you know that research shows our attention span works best in 20 [00:14:00] minute chunks anyway, and. That's not an overwhelming inbox. That's four Zen Garden sessions for your day. Okay. Yes. I know that may sound silly. I did give you a warning, hey, what is the worst that can happen? Honestly, when we strip away the gray mist of mundanity in our routines and look at the world that we live in with eyes wide open, we are surrounded by magic. You can access the entire archive of human knowledge.

We get to dance with our user interfaces, and you get to call people on the other side of the world. It is really crazy.

NinjaSwoosh

Technology Breaks

As we've learned, of course, like technology can become too much and when it does become too much, you can have a detox from it I would really, really recommend it. ' 'cause the real issue with technology is that when we start using it unconsciously every day.

It starts to bring all these negative things into our lives, and instead of being fully aware of it, we just complain mildly about the effects later of how we have no attention span and that everything is a bit beige, but it's not. It's just how we see it.

But the problem isn't the world being boring? It's just how we see the [00:15:00] world.

In the same way that you would never eat the same food every day, or we even get bored if you have to spend every single second of the day with the exact same person day in, day out.

Because your brain needs variety.

So one thing you might be missing in your life is a better way of refreshing your experiences and unplugging from technology so you can keep a healthier mindset towards your approach with it.

Now, I'm sure you may well have already tried to create some space from technology before Come at within enthusiastic, Ooh, I can change. My relationship with my phone will be different from now on this time I'll stick to my screen limits. Meanwhile, your phone is there sending you notifications, like a clingy X.

Like, Hey, you have, you checked me? Hey, come back. Come back please. I miss you. Check Bitcoin. You really need to check Bitcoin and hey, it's a problem, don't worry. But what you might find is if you don't use your phone for a whole weekend, you won't die.

So I would like you to remember that brains really do need a break from technology. Like plants need water. if you want some tips, you can try [00:16:00] staring at trees instead, which is scientifically proven to help or play with a dog. Have conversations with real people and. Basically just do anything literally that doesn't involve a screen.

And if that sounds impossible to you in the modern day, well remember that in Israel on the Sabbath. No one uses a phone for the entire day and the entire country still works and has a good economy regardless of what you think about it. Otherwise, politically speaking, I'm just giving an example of how they don't use technology one day a week.

And I'm certainly not making any kind of political comments.

Because in fact, what we need to do is start looking at other ways of making some of our mindset shifts and better habits stick.

Mindset shifts and habits

Now, when it comes to habits, I know everyone talks about them like they're these mysterious things. Like, Ooh, it takes 21 days to form a habit. I mean, who came up with that exactly. Was there a meeting? Did all the bad habits get together and agree? Okay, 21 days, that's our deadline.

In fact, ultimately when it comes to habits, it's just a question of the fact that your brain is lazy and does the things it reckons it will get rewarded [00:17:00] for. So if you do it lots and it works, it builds its reward pathways, but you can also bribe it with some efficient environmental design.

And again, environment design is a topic that also gets over complicated by people with their rules online. I'm sure you've heard of people give examples, like, put your gym clothes on the night before, set 17 alarms, write affirmations on your mirror, et cetera.

Well, you know what works? Just making the thing that you want to do easier than the thing that you don't want to do. That's it. That's environment design. Lock your snacks in a safe and give control of the password to someone else if you really want to, or just don't have snacks in your house. And that might also be easier if you wanna exercise, set a date with a friend or a coach to go do some exercise.

You wanna stop watching TV earlier, you can buy a plug to turn your TV off at 10:00 PM You can cancel your Netflix subscription.

Essentially what you have to do is proactively think of the decisions upfront that you want to do

so that your lazy self in the moment will still follow the good habit. that's really about it we can take those lessons into our [00:18:00] work to start making the habit of making work fun. this might sound surprising to you, but the best way to make work more fun is to start having fun at work. I'm sure you might have a serious job or whatever, but I've had serious teachers and fun teachers.

There are boring policemen and there are ones that are still fun to work with. Even presidents that have lots of serious stuff to do can make jokes and enjoy themselves.

The special thing about emotions is that they are contagious. So if you can bring positive emotions into your work, you can really infect your culture . Now I know of course, that there are some workplaces that are just so bad and bigger than you that it's better to just escape. But often you can be the person to infect others with positivity if you choose to. And I'm not suggesting that you go from being a serious business person to a cartwheel champion overnight,

but you can honestly sit here right now and be like, you know what? I'm going to be the officer of fun at work. And. Then start thinking about what you would do to make your work more fun. You could organize some games each morning, or you could start a favorite part of the day competition.

Maybe [00:19:00] give the plants Lee names or make our spreadsheets more colorful. really doesn't matter what you do. It just matters that you start with small shifts that slowly morph the whole direction of your day-to-day life into something slightly more enjoyable, and that's really all you need to do.

Conclusions

Okay. Before, it sounds like it's all too easy, I will gladly accept some of this episode might have felt silly or fantastical, but I would like to remind you that you only do have one life and perhaps you should ask yourself what is stopping you from thinking bigger or more open-minded about how you approach it?

Do you want to be the person in a coffee shop

wrestling with your laptop to send an email like you're fighting some angry octopus? Or would you rather be like the kid playing with his Lego every day? Like that's the basic question, and you just have to start working out how to go in the direction you want. I can't confess to knowing the specifics of your circumstances. And the very easy thing for you to do is to just come up with some excuses because you know you are special for whatever set of reasons you can't make any improvements to your [00:20:00] life. And you know, woe is you, everything is terrible.

The truth is that work and play don't have to be complete enemies. Your brain doesn't care what you want to call something. It only cares about how you approach it.

When you think about the word play, when you think about it as something is stupid, that's not helpful for you, and I would forget that association play is literally how we are wired to learn, grow and thrive. And it's really how you get the best outta yourself

yes, we've been trained to think that we have to be serious to get results, but all along the best results can come from not being too serious at all.

So as you're looking at your plans for your next days, weeks, and months. Remember to think about how you can transform what you have to do into what you get to do, and see how you can reframe your attitude, which will change your neural pathways and will change your internal sense of joy.

And if you're up for it and you're choosing to play along with me, try and think of one thing that you have to do tomorrow, just one. And think about how instead you could find a way to play with it, [00:21:00] instead of having to do it.

' cause honestly, the secret to life isn't so much about working harder as it is playing better.

Sign off

All righty. I hope something in the episode today gave you an idea to make your days a little bit brighter as you go through them.

' cause after all, a 1% difference could be a huge effect on your life when you have thousands and thousands of days left, hopefully.

And if you think I did help, and if you might enjoy working with me as a coach, perhaps while I'm giving away two, three months of coaching to a prize winner in a competition that you can play, it's pretty simple. You just have to subscribe to my new podcast, how to Change the World about the History of Innovation, and send me an email sharing a screenshot.

And bonus points if you can give it a rating.

That's about it.

Otherwise, as always, the listeners can book a short call with me on Wednesdays 'cause I like to get to know people.

And if you can share the episode with someone or leave a review, that is the best way to support the podcast. And on that, don't put off your happiness in life until some [00:22:00] future goal

when every day of your life is lived one day at a time until it is over. So the more of those days that you can enjoy the better, rather than using your time hypothetically to bank some future happiness that you might never even experience. As they positively say, get busy living or get busy dying.

Thank you so much for listening. Go you. Your consistency to reach the end of an episode is legendary, my hero. If you have any ideas or feedback for the show, I'm always interested to hear from you. You're the best studies show. We need time for information to sink in, so I'm going to give you a five second pause, silence to reflect on one idea from the show before you jump back into your busy life.

Ready and go.