FASTer - Issue #13

June 04, 2021

We have spoken about ideas, concepts, methods, businesses & things to do, invest time in or explore. This edition we will look at things slightly differently and talk about skills, success hacks and the power of procrastination as a tool for growth and doing the extra ordinary. As humans we like to have clean simple explanations, the most popular being; if you are being productive and putting in a lot of effort, going all in, having no weekends , just doing doing doing you will win in the end. Nothing could be farther from the truth. When you leave no room for the mind to "idle" you are at the receiving end of some one else's outsourcing vs your own co-creating. Learn to create value for your self, give your mind breaks, when you procrastinate you day dream, you look at the non obvious. Let's explore those and other constructs in this issue.

Outcomes

We all secretly wish to achieve our goals in vain, we want things but are we ready to accept the change that is required to get to the desired outcome? We all want to be the person who has reached their instagram #vacationgoal #summerbeachbodygoal #relationshipgoal or #wealthgoal. We continue to mislead our selves to believe we are almost there but just not quite. This is the almost-achieved syndrome.

If you have friends who say "I will invest in the self-development online program I’ve always wanted to take.” It is always when I “get some thing X,” then I will “do Y.” Your response should be the same as mine to say “Why don’t you do that now? Why is some thing else standing in your way?” This is actually not Procrastination this is the other side of it. This believing you don't have time or resources. That is very different from Procrastinating. This is mis classification of either your in-ability to do some thing or not having the courage to committing to things.

Truth be told, if you really wanted it, couldn’t you find a way to get it now? Yes, in fact this is the mindset we want to adopt. What is happening here that we are getting lost in the grind, the mundane and we are conditioning our selves to believe "falsehoods" around what is important and why.

Society demands & expects us to prioritise and make lists and deliver to KPIs. Whilst in certain phases in ones life that may be a necessary evil, it kills creativity and the freedom to do and dream. What we need is freedom and more times than not, procrastination helps with that. To address this you must first try to differentiate between these items. There are enough obsessive, rational people in the world, let your self be a dreamer instead.

One New Thing(at-least for me)

So there is some science behind all this(procrastination as a tool). It was new to me when I read the works John Perry( a philosopher at Stanford who published a book about it Admittedly, it’s not a long book (92 pages), and then heard him talk about his ideas below. I recommend you not putting off watching this video:)

Researchers have independently identified the phenomenon of positive procrastination, although there’s some disagreement on what to call it. “Structured procrastination” is the preferred term of John Perry. Procrastination is not the same as wasting time or being lazy. But we are conditioned to believe so. The psychological principle is this: "anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”He also says "Lots of tasks disappear when you wait, so make sure a task is very necessary before you commit your self to it".

An interesting concept that came out of his book was the concept of "task triage",when somebody gives you a task to do, you force your self to do a task, not easy for you to do as a procrastinator, so you do a task list/mental model, "what is the chance this goes away", "the difference a good or great job on my part does to the outcome of this task", if the answer is "not-much impact", you lower the bar so you do a basic mental model of what you will achieve and you have already done the function of triage.

Watch the video for a more impactful insights. The best trick is to play ones projects off against each other, procrastinating on one by working on another. Structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, because one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. One needs to be able to recognise and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines while making oneself feel that these tasks are important and urgent.

The other-side of this paradigm and must view is this Ted Talk by Tim Urban on the mind of a master procrastinator.

Boring stuff that scales (that you must do)

A life calendar...How often do you think about your life? That’s the question, Tim Urban proposed on a blog post, titled “Your Life in Weeks” circa 2014. It was a defining moment for me and perhaps many others. What dream are we really chasing? It also gave me a profound sense around what procrastination actually meant if you viewed your life in weeks and how it could be a super power.

Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But since 2014 when this chart came about it helped to emphasise that it’s most certainly finite.

The goal of his post was not contrarian. Any thing but. It helps us understand that every king and peasant, hero and villain, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every corrupt politician, every supreme leader, saint and sinner all lived their lives within the confines of a life calendar. Profound when you get it.

Tim teaches us that we can either live our life by enjoying the present, (hoping not to succumb to instant gratification monkey) or work at the expense of our present selves to improve our future selves.

Sometimes we find ourselves neither feeling happy nor working towards building a brighter future. We can find ourselves living day by day feeling depressed, frustrated or upset; whether its due to having the wrong career, relationship, self-discipline or some other debilitating condition, dont over index on that.

Instead break free, give your self time to think, to dream, to analyse to figure things out. If every perfect thing you are doing is encapsulated in a box, what about the imperfections? Think it through. Do the perfect things really matter, when looked at objectively?

Do it for at-least two weeks. I am not proposing you give up life as you know it, just saying don't be too hard on your self and also plot a few weeks and come back to it to see if you can co-relate some thing and make better decisions.

By simply labelling each week with a colour, it will force to think back on the events of the week and to ask yourself certain questions like:

  1. What went really well this week? What did I do that worked?

  2. What got in the way? What didn’t work?

  3. How might I approach things differently in the future?

We all have highs and all have days were we wish we didn't exist. The key to decreasing the bad weeks and increasing the good weeks is by reflecting on what made them so. You may be pleasantly surprised. Heres a blank weekly chart for you to print, colour code and follow through. So here are some ideas on how to break it down or colour code it.

  • Yellow = Brilliant week-life is at 100%

  • Green = Good week, all things considered could be be better

  • Orange = Trips-personal time, prioritised over others

  • Brown = Low week, stressful, under achieved on productivity

  • Red = Terrible Week- no other way to skin it

If you need a real push..Theres a chrome mortality extension that will do that job:).

You heard(read) it here first ..

Productivity hacks are over rated. I am sure you aren't surprised I say that. It's becoming productivity porn, articles, clippings, tweets, insta posts. Trust me when I say "trust your instinct and your self on what works best for you."

No one whose putting out these curated hacks is a billionaire, well at-least not the vast majority. They are content writers going with a theme, scanning for trends and capitalising on your emotional needs to force you down this rabbit hole called productivity. Its all about filter bubbles, if you care to explore more heres a detailed blog post I wrote about the phenomenon some time back.

I say, better to relax and find your pace than to go crazy following a ten step guide. I have a simple question for you. Do you follow a similar guide to "talk on the phone?" or "order food online?" why would you then allow somebody to have the power over you and your decisions to drive you to believe that they have a hack and you must try it. You are getting conditioned in your desire to be at some "super human" level of output that perceptively others are at. It's ok to not wake up at 5 am and do yoga and respond to email. Id rather you woke up at 10 by the beach and went for a walk instead. Not every one needs to be a yogi or an email don. Make your own choices, choose your own freedoms. Put an other way and clearly stolen from the web on my rounds of feeding my brain junk food aka my hours of procrastination. This resonated with me

Don’t sell shit you don’t want to buy.

Don’t work for people you don’t want to become.

Simple but not simplistic. Scale your outcomes(happiness, pleasure, good life etc) not your complexity in its pursuit, by following some one else's guidelines.

What you should be reading

It fits in so perfectly for this weeks theme. My good friend Paul wrote a book. It's one of the most profound books Ive read in years. No one describes the book better than him. Let me humour you, see the image below. Pauls not on twitter..But it's time we get him there. The first time I met him, I realised that if humility and accomplishment were mixed in equal parts he would be the output. Meeting him, learning from him is a seismic event. So trust me, when I tell you, as an entrepreneur reading his book will be no less. It is the best $25 you will invest this year guaranteed. This ought to be a paid post but it isn't. The book is actually that good. You can follow his profound advice on linked in.

Monetise your time (at work-by reading this)

Ok so I do not want you getting any crazy ideas, but I read an incredibly engaging reddit post that I think should be made mandatory reading for every one. Trust me there are enough nuggets of wisdom + comedic relief, more than I could ever provide, so I procrastinated and am sharing that content vs building my own. But this is more to demonstrate what people do when they aren't doing what they are supposed to be doing. This is also for you as startups, employers, companies, friends, bosses, colleagues to think about. Do you want to be on the receiving end of this??

Made in Pakistan(potentially grown in Pakistan)

According to the research study, the global Moringa Products Market was estimated at USD 5,000 Million in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 8,400 Million by 2026. The global Moringa Products Market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% from 2020 to 2027.

Dr Shahzad Ahmad Basra, who teaches at the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad says that Moringa, a tropical plant, has gained popularity as a new superfood because of its highly nutritious profile including its anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and other protective properties.

Due to its medicinal properties, the demand for the tropical plant has increased worldwide. With all our dollarized imports, we need to be looking at quick wins and figure out ways to process + export this product. Currently, India is exporting about $3 billion worth of moringa related products. Instead of us going down head first into textiles only, diversification is the name of the game. Agri-tech has more potential than most insta warriors and government twitterati can understand.

Heres some research on the product and its export potential albeit from an African perspective but the underlying theme remains the same.

As I went down this Rabbit hole of procrastinating on the interwebs I came across:

Anwar F., Ashraf M., Bhanger MI., 2005, “Interprovenance Variation in the Composition ofMoringa oleifera Oilseeds from Pakistan”, Journal of American Oil Chemists Society, 82: pp. 45-51

Anwar F., Bhanger MI., 2003, “Analytical Characterization of Moringa oleifera Seed Oil Grown in Temperate Regions of Pakistan”, J Agric Food Chemistry, 51: pp. 6558–6563

Incase you are interested in getting in touch with the Author to have a go at this, this is their listed contact info online. Be respectful and mindful of their time if you do. Telephone +92-21-8142894-98, ext. 18; fax +92-21-8141847; e-mail [email protected]

One Last thing..

Nothing ever happens until someone sells somebody something, that thing might be an idea or a product or something else. But it’s what makes the world go round. So learn how to sell. Be it your vision. Your dreams, hopes, aspirations, targets or view point. Till you become an expert at selling you wont become an expert at much else. The end.

Bonus..

The Reasons People Are Superstitious About the # 13

Happy 13th Edition to all the readers. Your feedback/comments/trolling all helps make this better. Thought I'd include a fun fact about why the number 13 is considered un-lucky.

The number 13--first record of it being a superstition was in the late 17th century, and the first incarnation of unlucky 13 was '13 at a table.' If you sit 13 people at a table, one will die within a year. If you are really interested in origin story, I suggest you read this fascinating transcript of an interview at NPR. Podcast also available at the same link.

Note** From Edition 14, we will be switching platforms- most likely, so for all the readers who are reading this on the web vs subscribing via email, please register. It will just make it easier to keep you updated. From Aug 2021, this will be a Paid Newsletter. The good news is all those who are signed up prior to that point will have this free for as long as its published. Even better news is that the first 500 people who had signed up, will also get all the premium content and reports we will publish starting Jan 2022. Still work in progress,will keep every one posted.