Get Everything Done

Mark:

<<I think I've already at some time in the past answered a similar point, maybe from you. I think we were talking about Bill Gates. I said that I don't want to know what his [insanely simple] system is now - I want to know what his system was when he wasn't rich and famous, and which he used to become rich and famous.

The reason is that people like Bill Gates are surrounded by flunkies whose job is to make life insanely simple for the boss.>>

You have mentioned this a number of times throughout my time on this forum and long before I was ever an active member. I think the sentiment makes sense, but I've always had the impression that you think we *don't* know what things were like for these people before they were highly successful, whereas I think a lot of research has been done and study conducted to uncover what they do. I don't think it's very much of a mystery at this point, or at least, not as much of a mystery as some people seem to make it out to be.

At the very start, we have the IQ research, which has helped to identify the value of leveraging fluid intelligence early and often to build rich crystalized intelligence. The degree to which you improve your ability to efficiently build crystalized intelligence has strong and powerful effects on future success over a wide range of fields. Put in layman's terms, you have to learn how to learn and then learn all the time, as much as you can, constantly. Building large and rich internal knowledge frameworks makes a huge difference, so things like memorization and integration skills are really powerful from an early age.

Then we have the research into personality. The big five research has demonstrated a strong correlation between trait conscientiousness and various forms of measurable success. In other words, cultivating and training your innate ability and tendency towards meeting your obligations, being reliable, and being willing to endure discomfort in the aim of something long term of value. It's subtrait industriousness seems quite important, which is tied with the ability to take action on a thing even if it isn't innately rewarding as an activity. Evidence suggests that you *can* train this skill.

Digging into the more flexible and less fixed stuff, you have the success research that people like Robert Mauer have pointed out, which are highly correlated with personality, but which are also a little orthogonal in some dimensions. Here, we have long term success sustained over time, which I think meets the criteria. This research shows the value of a few skills: 1) the ability to be aware of and accepting of fear and the tendency to reach out to others for support, either emotional or technical, rather than hiding way; 2) The ability to embrace and cultivate positive responses to rejection; 3) recognize personal needs for attention; 4) The ability to separate goal-fixation from the desired state, and the ability to cultivate a desired state in the midst of pursuing a goal, rather than assuming that you will achieve that state by achieving that goal.

Then we can see the historical habits of many people long before they became wildly successful. Burchard's HP6 (Clarity, Necessity, Energy, Productivity, Influence, and Courage) seems to be a pretty good way of reasoning about many of those habits. In particular, in the productivity space, we see that most of the people who are continuously successful spend the majority of their time (and, importantly, *spent* the majority of their time before they were successful) consistently producing the key products that were the main sources that would drive future success. As many, many people point out, they all had some way of investing and protecting significant portions of their daily life to ensure that they spent time on, as Burchard puts it, Prolific Quality Output. You can see this across any range of work, and not just in creatives, though it's easiest to see it in creatives. Newport has pointed this out as well as James Clear, Brian Tracey, and many others. Whatever time they have available, they spend the majority of it towards the key quality outputs that have the highest leverage.

An important anti-feature here is that very often such people *didn't* keep all the plates spinning. That is, they often didn't worry about other things in their lives that might not be in order. Things like having a perfectly clean house or making sure all their email was handled or making sure that they didn't miss the next great opportunity or capturing every new idea. None of this seems to have mattered as much.

Mason Curry's collection of famous people demonstrates how different various people's routines and habits are, while all still tending towards a common thread of consistent PQO via some sort of protected or focused time. But you can also find this in examples like the Brandon Sanderson's advice and Cal Newport's take on it:

https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/02/25/brandon-sandersons-advice-for-doing-hard-things/

And then you have people like Warren Buffett who famously had amazingly simple schedules with *lots* of time for learning, reading, research, and thinking. Buffett has famously talked about how much patience matters and being able to have discernment. And what's more, that culture seems to have spread out to the rest of his company to some degree.

Or you have George Marshall, whose early bad experiences with burnout and overwork (Necessity and Energy in Burchard's model), helped to give him the perspective that enabled him to focus on PQO in his work during the War. Except he wasn't writing a book, he was focused on making high quality decisions by learning as much as he could and keeping his space clear to make good decisions. But notice that he crafted that environment, and he did so in opposition to those around him. But he got that by having already experienced what not to do. This is essentially just the same as many other people applied in a different area.

Brandon Sanderson has a good example of his early writing. He tells a story of how he took a night job that required zero thinking because that was what gave him the best space for his writing. This was before he was the ultra-famous writer he is today. And he gave programming as an example of one of the worst jobs for an aspiring writer to have because of the mental overlap. But his solution wasn't to try to become more productive by managing his time better between programming and writing, it was to recognize the incompatibility, and cut one of them out of his life entirely.

Or Neil Gaiman's story about how one of his books got started, where he just wasn't able to find any time to work on it, so he instead kept a book at his nightstand and wrote a few lines every night. As he said, "If you do that every night, eventually, slowly, you write a book."

I think all of these are important examples because they demonstrate that exact mindset that people have had *before* they were wildly successful that they used to get wildly successful. The whole point is that these simple systems they use now *are* the systems that they used to get there. And in most of these cases, the system is a simple set of diagnostic questions that results in a specific set of habits and routines that they then use to succeed:

1. What is the things I need to produce that will progress me forward?
2. How can I ensure that I spend consistent time doing that thing, and how can I increase that time up to my maximum effective amount in a sustainable way?
3. What do I need to do to ensure that I do #2?

And I think that's really the point. Most of these successful people have wildly varying *other* stuff in their lives, but what remains consistent across all of them is that they all identified good answers to those questions and followed through on them. They may or may not have been on top of their email or had a good sleep schedule, but they all made sure that they had PQO. And when you get down to it, that results in really simple systems.

I guess, all that to say that if we look at someone like Gates or the like, it's a bit of a mischaracterization to say that they have a simple life because they have a bunch of flunkies making sure that is the case. Instead, it's more like their own choice to simplify is what brought about the flunkies, such as they are. Or put another way, I think we already do know what their ultra-simple systems are. In many cases, we've been told directly what their lives were like and how they conducted themselves before they were successful. We *know* how they got successful. What they do now isn't really a deviation from that, it's just what happens when it gets applied correctly and well and in combination with all the other individual goals, dreams, and environment that goes into it. That is, the attitude, approach, and system came first, the flunkies came later. Such people are effective with or without the flunkies, but they know how to leverage the value of group effort to get more out of their skills. And that's something that is available to everyone.