1.9 – Recap

This blog is structured by weekly topics. Every Thursday, the week’s topic is summarized with clear and actionable implementation steps. You can find all these summary posts in this category.

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Recap: Sustainability through Life Efficiency

Wow, after 272 posts, we’ve made it to the final recap of the first season of Supermorning! 

This final week delved into the deeper meaning behind this blog, particularly with respect to life efficiency as an incredibly attractive pathway to a sustainable society. 

The checklist

  • A new measure of human progress.
    • GDP growth has long been synonymous with human progress.
    • It remains relevant in developing regions, but the time has come to move on to a new measure: happy life years. 
    • Through a little bit of math, this shift of focus reveals life efficiency as a critical lever for achieving a sustainable society. 
  • Transforming society through life efficiency.
    • Unlike other sustainability solutions, life efficiency does not need to deploy lots of new capital. 
    • It just needs a mindset shift. And if this shift goes viral, sustainability can grow surprisingly quickly. 
    • Those who build life efficiency now will benefit greatly when this shift crosses its tipping point. 
  • How evolved are you?
    • These benefits lie far beyond our primitive drive towards instant pleasure and away from instant pain. 
    • Individual success requires evolution to longer-term thinking. But there is a higher level: a global mindset where the impact on society strongly influences our individual actions. 
    • Such a mindset is perfect for building a truly efficient life. 

The most amazing thing about the material covered over the past year is this: You can do your bit to save the world by vastly improving your own life. 

Sustainability is not something that requires great sacrifice and self-deprivation. It’s a guiding light towards a happier, healthier, wealthier, and more productive life. 

If you have taken any steps towards greater life efficiency this year, I thank you from the bottom of my heart! One day, the world will too. 

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Recap: Your Ecological Footprint

This week’s posts were about understanding where our ecological footprints come from. To get started, I strongly encourage everyone to take this quick and simple test to see where you stand. 

The checklist

  1. Food
    • Animal products are the major source of ecological destruction and a plant-dominated diet is highly recommended. 
    • Other influential factors include the amount of food you buy, the distance your food needs to travel to you, the amount of packaging it needs, and its impact on your health. 
  2. Home
    • The size and type of your home is the main factor, with smaller apartments being much greener than large homes.
    • In most countries, heating and cooling offer the greatest potential for cutting your home footprint.
  3.  Transportation
    • The daily commute from a large home in the suburbs has a very large footprint, particularly if done in a big SUV or truck with only one or two occupants. Your air travel footprint also quickly adds up.
    • Public transport (particularly trains) is better, while virtual mobility and walking/cycling are by far the best options. 
  4. Stuff
    • Our high stuff turnover rate resulting from planned and perceived obsolescence creates great ecological damage. 
    • Solutions include, in order of usefulness, embracing creativity, simplifying life, and committing to always purchasing high quality. 

The ecological footprint of individuals is a central moral issue in our society. The reason for this is that those suffering the most are not those causing the damage. And the main factor determining whether you are causing the damage or experiencing it is the lottery of birth. 

Do the only morally correct thing. Shrink your ecological footprint. 

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Recap: Saving the World

Sustainability is the core motivation behind this blog. Over a decade ago, I started playing with a simple idea: a sustainable life can also be a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive one. 

Today, I consider this idea to be 100% proven. Indeed, we can all save the world by building better lives.  

This week’s posts explained this big claim in a bit more detail.

The checklist

  • Why you should care about the environment. 
    • Nature delivers twice as much value to our lives as all human activity combined. 
    • Our continued destruction of nature threatens to cut off or even reverse these free services, making our lives deeply uncomfortable. 
  • Save the world by looking after yourself. 
    • Food production is the single largest impact on our environment. It’s also one of the core ways in which we destroy our own health. 
    • Displacing the typical excessive meat-rich diet with a moderate plant-rich diet is a great way to help yourself and your planet. 
  • Save the world by building wealth.
    • Consumption can only directly address basic human needs like food, shelter, and security. 
    • Satisfying higher human needs like love, esteem, and self-actualization is much better achieved by saving and investing than by spending. 
  •  Save the world by embracing your creativity.
    • A creative life automatically crowds out consumerism and offers a direct route to esteem and self-actualization. 
    • Both consumption and creation tend to develop self-strengthening feedback loops.

So, there you have it. A sustainable life is not some painful sacrifice we must make to save the planet. It’s a proven pathway to happiness, health, wealth, and self-actualization. 

In my view, spreading this simple message is the single most promising pathway to a sustainable and just society. 

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Recap: Professional Relationships

Interdisciplinary collaboration moves our increasingly complex world forward. And, unsurprisingly, taking part in this progress requires you to be an excellent collaborator. 

Becoming highly “collaboratable” was our mission over the past week. 

The checklist

  1. Establish “win-win more” relationships.
    • When gathering collaborators for your initiative, try to ensure that they get more from the deal than you. 
    • This strategy can bring massive compounding gains over the span of a career. 
  2. Ensure that you collaborate effectively. 
    • Be open to feedback – both the constructive and destructive kinds. 
    • Make sure your communication is crystal clear. Misunderstandings happen all too easily. 
  3. Take pride in being the dumbest person in the room. 
    • Learn from experts by offering to do all the work in return for their guidance. 
    • Get a mentor team, either by reading works from best-selling non-fiction authors or by getting real-life mentors. 
  4. Find your networking style.
    • If you’re a natural networker, you could make a career out of bringing the right people together. 
    • If not, rather build close relationships with one or two natural networkers and focus more on online networking. 

It’s not unusual to spend most of your relationship time with professional instead of personal contacts. Make the best of this time and, together, you can make the world a better place 🙂

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Recap: The Art of Bucket Filling

Relationships happen one interaction at a time. If the vast majority of those interactions are positive, the relationship will blossom. If too many are negative, it will wither and die. 

This week’s posts revolved around a simple concept to help maximize the positivity. 

The checklist

  • How full is your bucket?
    • Each of us has an emotional bucket and dipper. If our buckets are filled, we feel great. If they’re emptied, less so. 
    • Our mission is simply to add at least a few drops to the other person’s bucket in every interaction. 
    • And the best thing is that filling another bucket also fills our own. 
  • 9 great ways to fill a bucket.
    • Smile, add humor, complement, praise, give, express gratitude, listen, show interest, and validate. 
    • Consistently deploying these bucket-fillers needs plenty of practice. 
  • 7 great ways to empty a bucket. 
    • Sulk, scream, belittle, neglect, forget, gossip and destructively criticize. 
    • Mostly, we know all too well when we’re emptying buckets. Stop. 
  • The art of constructive criticism. 
    • Constructive criticism is essential for personal and professional growth. Learning how to give and take it is a crucial life skill. 
    • Get the timing right, don’t get personal, communicate your intent to help, and know when to stop. 

The simplicity of the bucket philosophy makes it quite easy to keep in your awareness as you go through your daily interactions. This awareness is all that’s needed. 

Give it a try, one interaction at a time. 

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Recap: Productive Environment

And so we come to the end of another Supermorning chapter: Productivity. 

Over the past week, we looked at four ways to tie together insights from this chapter into an environment that makes inspirational levels of productivity fully automatic.

Let’s check out the summary. 

The checklist

  1. The perfect working environment.
    • Remove all friction from the process of adding value. Your work space should be perfect. 
    • Line up a wide range of creative relaxation mechanisms to keep your mind fresh and healthy. 
  2. Digital mastery.
    • Install RescueTime to protect yourself against the horde of digital distractions out there. 
    • Intelligently add and remove friction to make good digital actions natural and bad ones tedious. 
  3. Efficient collaboration.
    • Use email sparingly, turn off those distracting notifications, and keep your inbox clean.
    • Block off focused work in your calendar and employ reminders to achieve 100% reliability. 
  4. Proactive workload shaping.
    • Master the “art of no” to maintain a manageable workload of agreeable tasks. 
    • Always be on the hunt for meaningful work containing complexity, autonomy and a link between effort and reward. 

Sustainable productivity is essential for fulfillment and self-esteem in the individual and for progress in society. Mastering this art is a win for you and all those around you. 

Give it a go! I think you’ll like it 🙂

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Recap: Time Management

Time…

Our one truly non-renewable resource. 

The way we apply this precious commodity shapes our entire experience of life. Squander it, and life quickly becomes empty and meaningless. Invest it, and life can blossom beautifully. 

This week studied the investment of time into four categories of productive and creative endeavors. 

The checklist

  1. Planning time.
  2. Execution time.
    • Make sure you have the five E’s well covered: Effectiveness, Engagement, Environment, Efficiency and Energy. 
    • High efficiency needs sharp focus, the right tools and expertise, an ordered workplan, and great information organization. 
  3. Communication time.
    • Here, we switch from E’s to P’s: Purpose, Preparation, Presentation, Positivity and Participation.
    • Patiently practicing these P’s is pertinent to proper communication of a professional persuasion. 
  4. Recharge time.
    • Never push beyond breaking point to a highly unproductive (and unhealthy) crash. 
    • Find your ideal recharge rhythm. It may well be something different from the societal norm. 

Any awesome creation needs a healthy mix of these four ingredients. Is there one or two you tend to neglect? 

Your time is precious. Spend it well. 

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Recap: Effective Planning

Planning for enhanced productivity doesn’t exactly sound like a bundle of fun.

But it can be…

Letting your mind run free in several attractive futures can be really exciting and inspirational. And when that plan slowly starts coming together … wow! … awesome feeling 🙂

Let’s see where that feeling comes from.

The checklist

  • Smart work.
    • Proper prior planning is the difference between the hard daily grind and smart inspiring progress.
    • Planning should happen in on three distinct timescales: days, months and years. 
  • Daily planning.
    • Everyone should have a daily to-do list. 
    • Google Tasks offers the three key features of a good to-do list: user-friendly, always accessible, recurring tasks. 
  • Monthly planning.
    • Monthly planning is about coordination with others, coherence over time, and getting interesting ideas out of your head.
    • A Gantt chart in Google Sheets next to Google Tasks is just the right tool for the job. 
  • Long-term planning.
    • This plan keeps you pointed in the right direction year in and year out. 
    • Over a couple of decades, such consistent progress can take your life to awesome places 🙂 

Planning enlightens, entertains, and elevates your perspective. It also informs, inspires, and improves your performance.  

Plan consistently, plan smartly, and plan patiently. 

Your future self will be forever grateful. 

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Recap: Finding Meaning in Work

This week’s posts laid the groundwork for the productivity chapter of Supermorning. We discussed how essential meaning and purpose are for sustaining high levels of productivity. 

Let’s take a look.

The checklist

  1. Why do you work? There are two main pathways:
    • You work to earn money to build a good life.
    • You work towards an inspiring purpose doing something you would happily do for free. 
  2. Debt, work and consumption.
    • The first option typically gets people stuck in a vicious cycle between high consumption and stressful work.
    • Getting out of this cycle is challenging and should be done as early in life as possible. 
  3. Liberty, purpose and obsession. 
    • The alternative is a virtuous cycle between liberty, purpose and high life efficiency. 
    • This cycle easily leads to obsession, which could become unhealthy if left unchecked. 
  4. Life is long enough to do special things.
    • A truly worthwhile purpose is a multi-decade project.
    • Over such a time frame, the power of compounding can produce stunning results. 

In short, productivity becomes a whole lot easier if you’re inspired by what you do. Liberty and purpose are the keys to such inspiration. 

So, get yourself into the virtuous cycle with a multi-decade awe-inspiring purpose and see what happens 🙂 

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Recap: Future Technology Revolutions

It’s fun to imagine the cool technology revolutions that could shape the future of planet Earth. If we manage to interact responsibly with these technologies, the future looks very bright indeed 🙂  

Let’s wrap up the four future revolutions we can look forward to. 

The checklist

  1. Enhanced humans.
    • Genetic engineering and digital/mechanical augmentation can greatly enhance human health, longevity and performance. 
    • A lot of work is ongoing in this area, so those who look after their health and wealth could get to experience these benefits in their lifetimes. 
  2. Artificial intelligence.
    • Learning to communicate with machines could turn out to be a very valuable future skill. 
    • Jobs that involve a high degree of complexity, creativity or emotional intelligence should be safe in the coming era of automation. 
  3. Advanced telecommunications.
    • Although physical teleportation is probably impossible, virtual teleportation is something we can look forward to.
    • Virtual reality technology could totally change the way we meet and travel over coming decades. 
  4. Shared universal mind. 
    • Efficient access to the complete shared knowledge and experience of humanity can greatly enhance individual lives. 
    • With increasingly automated data collection, the creation of such a shared universal mind is becoming a real possibility. 

No one knows how quickly these technological revolutions will play out. But all of them are possible and highly attractive, ensuring that they will eventually happen. 

The best we can do is to shape our lives with an eye on the future and enthusiastically adapt when the time comes. 

Despite the uncertainty and everything that is wrong with the world, the future really looks incredibly interesting!

In fact, one of the primary reasons I’m determined to look after myself as best I can is so that I can see how this all unfolds 🙂

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