Shift your primary focus from merely asking ‘How can I be more productive?’ to ‘How can I accomplish more meaningful work?’ This reframes your effort towards achieving impact rather than just increasing output.
Aim for work-life harmony by intermixing responsibilities where possible, rather than striving for strict daily balance. Use a regret-avoidant framework to prioritize what’s truly important, willingly sacrificing other pursuits to ensure those priorities are met.
When seeking work-life balance, aim to achieve it over a longer period, such as a week or a month, instead of striving for daily equilibrium. This approach allows for flexibility, accommodating days that are heavily focused on work or family.
Increase your chances of discovering truly great ideas by prioritizing the generation of a high quantity of ideas over initial quality. Tolerate numerous dead ends and false starts as a necessary part of the creative process.
When choosing problems to work on, filter them by assessing their potential impact on people’s lives, especially at work. Pursue ideas that are both personally interesting and have a significant potential to make a difference.
To maximize the value of your giving, identify the overlap between what your organization needs most and your most distinctive skills. Focus your generous efforts primarily within this intersection.
If you identify as a giver, be discerning and avoid being overly generous with takers. This strategy helps prevent exploitation and protects your energy and resources.
When composing a team, actively weed out takers and aim for a mix of givers and matchers. Matchers, with their strong belief in fairness, provide a crucial safeguard against takers, complementing givers’ trusting nature.
When facing current hardships, practice mental time travel by remembering past difficulties you have overcome. This boosts self-efficacy, provides confidence, and can resurface forgotten strategies for resilience.
To combat adaptation and fully appreciate accomplishments, imagine how excited your past self (e.g., five years ago) would be about your current success. Take responsibility for experiencing that same level of excitement in the present.
Cultivate the skill to zoom in for detailed analysis and zoom out for a broader view, or at least toggle between these perspectives. This systems thinking approach helps solve problems effectively without creating new issues in other areas.
Always let data guide your narratives, beginning with questions rather than preconceived stories. Actively seek out data that might contradict your viewpoint to avoid confirmation bias and ensure a more robust understanding.
When evaluating research or ideas, shift your thinking from ‘Does X cause Y?’ to ‘When does X cause Y?’. This encourages a deeper understanding of the specific conditions and contexts under which an effect holds true.
Refrain from comparing yourself to others you don’t know well, especially online, because you are only exposed to their curated best work. This practice helps prevent the development of unrealistic expectations and a distorted view of consistent greatness.
When high expectations lead to dissatisfaction, channel that energy into actively fixing problems you perceive as broken, rather than merely complaining about them.
To foster creativity in children, reduce the number of household rules, as excessive rules can inadvertently suppress a child’s natural imaginative and original thinking.
When establishing rules, articulate them in terms of the core values they uphold, rather than presenting them as arbitrary commands. This helps people understand the ‘why’ behind the rule.
Offer children choices that involve taking responsibility, such as managing their own bedtime. Reward responsible choices with privileges, and temporarily remove those privileges if the responsibility is not fulfilled.
During family discussions, such as dinner, ask children what they did for someone else that week instead of focusing solely on school accomplishments. This practice reinforces the values of generosity and kindness.
When children express interest in a topic, provide them with a book and challenge them to learn about it, then teach it to you. This approach encourages deeper learning and engagement.
Carry an idea journal to capture thoughts, transcribe handwritten notes weekly into a digital document, and review them monthly. Prioritize ideas that appear multiple times, as this suggests genuine interest or significance for further exploration.
Juggle different roles by cycling between intense engagement (e.g., teaching) and periods of exploration (research, writing, speaking) to generate new questions and ideas that feed back into your work.
When trying to find the core insight of your own work, especially in familiar areas, write a longer summary first. The most concise and impactful ‘aha’ moment often reveals itself towards the end of this extended explanation.
If you are a giver, cultivate strong time management skills, as this will transform your helpfulness from a potential detriment to a positive contributor to your performance and productivity.
To cultivate a culture of giving, organizations should actively remove disincentives for generous behavior, ensuring it is valued and does not negatively impact career advancement.
Organizations should reward individuals who not only drive their own success but also actively elevate the success of others, such as through supporting contributions to team projects. This strategy helps identify and promote genuine givers while deterring takers.
Organizations should create mechanisms that empower employees to form their own communities of practice around shared learning interests, rather than solely relying on expert databases. This bottom-up approach fosters collective capability and knowledge sharing.
Managers should empower employees to pursue ‘secret missions’ by identifying passions not yet present in the organization and creating initiatives around them, requiring interest from at least one other person. This fosters innovation and engagement.
Actively seek contradictions or gaps between existing research and real-world observations (classroom, organizations, speaking). If data is missing and you have something important to say, initiate a research project to explore it.
When investigating any effect, explicitly outline its boundary conditions and potential moderators that could reverse it. Systematically investigate these conditions to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.
Adopt a writing strategy that involves working in intensive bursts, rather than prolonged, continuous effort, to maximize output and focus.
Having children can lead to increased work efficiency by forcing you to get work done during specific windows (e.g., when kids are at school/asleep) and encouraging you to choose to do less, but do it better.