Weekly Wisdom #296 - What the greatest players of all time can teach us about productivity

Doing Less, Feel-Good Productivity, Patience, Learning More & Remote Work Lessons

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Happy Monday!

I finished reading Ali Abdaal's Feel-Good Productivity this week—my notes are below—and this passage about LeBron James stood out:

"Sports analysts have trawled through reams of on- and off-court data for LeBron and other NBA players, and spotted the same thing. Although he's a man who can sprint at the speed of a car coursing through the suburbs, LeBron is on average one of the slowest players in the NBA. In the 2018 season, his average speed during games was 3.85 miles per hour (more or less walking speed); he ranked in the bottom ten of all players who played for at least twenty minutes per game. During the regular season, he spent 74.4 per cent of the time on the court walking, a time unmatched by almost anyone else in the league."

It was weirdly reminiscent of the main takeaway from this article about Lionel Messi, another great in his sport:

"This season in the Champions League...Messi ran comfortably less than any other elite attackers, averaging just less than 5 miles per 90 minutes."

It's summarized well in this graphic:

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So what can we take away from these two greats?

First, what Abdaal's book concludes: "Do less, so that you can unlock more."

It's okay to rest. It's okay to not be going at full speed all the time. In fact, it's probably necessary to do our best work.

Second, it speaks to the mastery of their craft. They don't have to work as hard as everyone else because they're so much better at recognizing when they need to make their move.

It's thousands of hours going into making something look effortless and a reminder that as we move towards mastery, we should reach a point where things get easier.

If they aren't, it might be a sign that we're missing something, or not approaching it the right way.

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📚 Book Notes: Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You - Ali Abdaal - Over the years, I've read a lot about productivity. So much of the book wasn't a surprise to me, but it is useful to have it packaged so well.

The structure of the book provides lots of suggestions for experiments to run in your own life, which is helpful, and there was some new stuff for me to learn too.

It's also a nice counter to much of the "discipline/suffering" narrative around hard work and productivity.

It's an easy read, and I guarantee everyone will learn something.

📖 Short Term Impatient. Long Term Patient. - Jeff Morris Jr. - This has become somewhat of a mantra for me, and I think it's a good mindset for almost anything you're working towards in life.

Short term you want to consistently be figuring out the next action, and making it happen.

But you want to be working towards a long term goal, and comfortable continuing to pursue that goal for a long time.

Short term impatient. Long term patient.

🍿 The Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain into Learning More - Mark Rober - This 15-minute YouTube video was cited in Feel-Good Productivity, and it illustrates one of the biggest missed lessons from typical schooling: failure is necessary.

Failure doesn't have to be something negative, and in fact, it's a key part of a robust learning and advancement process. We should all be trying to get a little more comfortable with it.

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