Many things people strive for are actually byproducts of what the real goal should be. But by focusing on the byproduct instead of the goal, the desired byproduct is ever elusive.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Happiness

The real goal is finding activities you’re passionate about and consistently engaging in them.

That definition skews towards work, but consider spending time with people you enjoy being around an ‘activity’ and it can encompass romance and family time.

Becoming “Networked”

Lots of people want a big network, full of powerful influential people, but if you focus on that is the end goal it’s probably not going to work out very well and you’ll come off as very insincere.

Having a large, powerful network is the byproduct where the end goal is helping other people, building relationships or trying to make an important vision happen that others can get behind.

Making Money

Making money is a byproduct of focusing on creating value.

If you focus on making money, you might end up making a lot if you’re very driven, but if that drive was applied toward how you could create the most value, you’d make a lot more money.

The one caveat with making money is that it only captures the economic spectrum of “value”, but a lot of people are working on how we can measure other kinds of currencies and make them more fungible so that in addition to financial capital we can measure things like social capital and emotional capital.

Confidence

I can’t become more confident by saying to myself, “C’mon Max, be more confident”.

Confidence is a byproduct of being really good at something, which is only obtainable through practice and repetition.

Though often people can practice and practice and not improve. That’s why people will tell you, “practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” While that’s directionally correct, a better answer is “practice in pursuit of perfection will allow you to increasingly approach perfection and achieve excellence”

Conclusion

The list goes on and on of things that many people try to achieve directly but are actually byproducts: Enlightenment, Love, Creativity, Status, Success, etc. etc.

It’s not wrong to want byproducts, but they are not things we can get, in the capacity we want, by focusing on achieving them directly. Byproducts are the rewards we get for living our lives the right way.

And by recognizing how byproducts break down into corresponding end goals it becomes clear there are no short cuts. When we care about other people, other people care about us. When we create value for others, we are rewarded financially. When we do amazing work, we gain respect. To live a rich life where we are happy, financially abundant, surrounded by amazing people and confident in our own abilities, requires cultivating curiosity, persistence, self-reflection, self-discipline, compassion, character, drive and many other esteemed traits.There is truth in the words that our external reality is a manifestation, or a byproduct, of our internal reality.

I encourage you to look at the things you want, and figure out what’s a byproduct and what’s the actual end goal that you should authentically commit to.

I don’t think that for most high level people crowdsourced work is the highest leverage way for them to give back.

Crowdsourcing is undervaluing the importance of focus and in the importance of thinking about something for a long time to do anything innovative. Advising, consulting and mentoring I think are higher leverage uses of spare time. Productive, engaged workers shouldn’t consider spare time, spare processor cycles. Most people do mindnumbing work the whole day so it’s okay to tap their spare time for spare brain cycles. But people who are really engaged in their work need these little respites to recharge. Anyone who understands that the currency of productivity is energy will intuitively make the decision to use spare time to recharge but the majority of people ascribe to the theory that time is the currency of productivity and will underestimate the negative impact of using their spare time to crowdsource worthy projects.

Of course, I’m only warning a small minority not to spend their energy crowdsourcing and by and large I think crowdsourcing combined with social networks will do tremendously positive things for society moving forward.

So many people have spare cycles. But that’s because most people don’t have engaging work. It’s true that if productive people feel like they are really doing good it could have energizing effects by satisfying their need for meaning but finding meaning in microtasks even if it’s for good cause would be like spiritual junk food. What if we had billionaires who instead of becoming philanthropists, just decided to do some microtasks and it satisfied that desire or need to give back. A lot of philanthropy, for better not worse, is motivated by the emotional benefit of giving for the benefactor, but what if they could derive benefit much easier from microtasks, without the same positive effect on society?

A few more notes on crowdsourcing:

What kinds of things can outsourced successfully?

Work that can be systematized and isn’t mission critical and it’s simple to train someone to do.

There’s so much untapped labor potential in the developing world.

Crowdsourcing removes the friction of matching supply and demand in the labor market. Elance and Odesk make that a lot easier, they reduce friction. Lower and lower barriers and more fluidity is huge.

Crowdsourcing and the media is really exciting. Social news is the future

Game dynamics are important, so that people have a self-interest and can stroke ego and do well at the same time.

We have a billion more people coming into the labor market and due to unemployment many they turn to illegal enterprises. Train them to create their own companies, social entrepreneurship instead of relying on finite number of jobs in current job market. Plenty of good ideas worth working on.

Mechanical Turk — It has become more mainstream due to recent obsession with lean startups.

If edufire wants to test a new feature they use mechanical turk to have people to test out a page and run through features and say what works and what doesn’t. And all the permutations get tested because you have 1000 people testing it.

People love the creativity involved in critiquing edufire’s page because they get to think, and say things like, “wouldn’t it be cool if you used this tagline.”

How big is the market for crowdsourcing? There is a limit to how much knowledge can be broken into tiny bits and still be useful. Almost all innovation is dependent on synergistic design thinking. But certainly the crowdsourced market isn’t even close to being saturated.

Mechanical turk has 51,000 tasks.

ODesk has done 87 Million . 200,000 people

Elance 211 Million — 200,000 people

Crowdsourced, outsourced, opensourced often get conflated.

74% of U.S. citizens don’t volunteer.

If you have american volunteers do stuff for free because it’s embedded in social games that takes work away from refugees who could get paid to do crowdsourced work.

Most personal development is crap. I’ve heard 95% of the industry is crap. I think that is a good number. But it’s such a big pie that the other 5% is huge and there are a lot of valuable ideas out there. Even within the 5% you can easily waste your time, if you read it without attempting to implement anything. You just feel productive instead of actually being productive. Which is actually probably worse than not having read something on productivity at all, because then you mistakenly feel you are making progress on that aspect of life.

I think it’s important to always have a few things you’re working on implementing. If you have bitten off reasonable chunks then prioritize within the 5% of quality advice.

It’s also very important to regularly reflect. I spent a lot of time doing that while I was in Hawaii this last week with my family. And I used a book a friend gave me, LifeManual by Peter Thomas, as a jumping off point. I identified my values and the things that are most important to me and made a plan to invest energy proportionally into the things I value most.

Another thing I adopted to try to sustain progress once I’m back in the swing of everyday things is to have regular rituals. I’ve tried those a few times the last few years but I haven’t been able to make rituals a habit. The problem was that it took too much will power, and we get a very limited amount of will power everyday. So to make it stick, I automated it, eliminating the need for will power.

My ritual involves a PBWorks wiki page that prompts me to do a variety of things each morning: list the top 3 things I want to accomplish today, reflect on the previous day, visualize what I want the day to be like, read my personal mission statement, and a personal commercial to pump me up. It opens automatically every morning with iCal and applescript. I also decided I should put in an evening ritual that is similar but with different prompts.

And every Sunday I automatically pull up a page that lists my goals for each of my values. I  reflect on the progress I made each week. Sunday is a good time to do reflection and I’m going to try to make it a habit of focusing on personal development projects predominantly on Sundays.

I just started most of these habits during my vacation in Hawaii so we’ll see how it goes.

By far I think the highest leveraged productivity book I’ve come across is the Power of Full Engagement.

It says the key to high performance is managing energy not time. I fully agree. There are four areas of energy that must be grown, strengthened and maintained independently: Physical, Emotional, Mental, Spiritual. I read the book a few years ago for understanding. Now I’m going back through it for implementation.

Productivity is of huge interest to me right now because I think it’s one the most important skills to learn while young because it’s basically setting the strength of the engine for the rest of my life. Of course I can do it later in life, but I won’t be going as fast in the meantime. And I’ll have more ingrained habits that are difficult to change, in addition to my time being less flexible.

I’m building the capacity to go really fast. Once I’m ready to get on the freeway I will fly.

Max: If your goal is to optimize productivity, does taking a few hours out on a Saturday night advance that goal? I tend to think yes, if you use the paradigm of energy management rather than time management. I’ve heard there are scientific articles support this and discuss the social lives of the some of the world’s most productive people. Regardless of what the evidence supports, over-optimization has to be considered as well.

Tyler: I tend to think that optimizing all of your time is destined to lead to burnout and to injure your ability to lead a full life — but I tend to agree that a social life provides a good chance to recharge and recenter, especially when you use that time to discuss the things you’re thinking about. Getting the informed opinions of a peer group can help you challenge assumptions and learn through serendipity.

Max:  I agree optimizing can have insidious effects on enjoyment of life if it leads to over optimization. But I think enjoying life can increase your productivity.  I strive to enjoy as much of what I’m doing on a day to day basis as possible. I understand life is a process and I’m happy as long as I’m moving in the right direction even though there is always room for improvement. This positive outlook helps productivity because an upbeat person gets more done than a depressed person. By focusing on optimization while being able to recognize what too much looks like I think you can increase your further your goals and increase your happiness.

The way I look at optimizing is that’s important to put forth effort to increase productivity yet have tempered expectations. Optimization becomes over optimization when you can’t focus on the present moment and when you become disappointed with yourself for not accomplishing more.

Striking the balance between optimization and over optimization seems to be an important topic for up and coming ambitious generation. I invite you to share your thoughts on how to increase productivity in a sane, healthy way? I’d like to dig deeper into this topic.

How you think and what you think about are largely determined by the thoughts you put in your mind. Every time you read you’re filling you mind with the worldview and ideas of the author. Copying their insights about the world onto your internal map.

But I urge you to be careful because not all programming is good programming. Pay close attention to what you’re reading. The mind doesn’t care how it’s programmed. It will readily accept a hateful, self-destructive worldview just as easily as an accurate and fulfilling worldview. If you have inaccurate beliefs eventually they will catch up to you and affect your ability to operate effectively in the world. 

Every time you read you’re incrementally brainwashing yourself. Either by painting over old areas or creating new ones. I try to brainwash myself to think like people who I consider brilliant and insightful. I want my thoughts to be flavors of ideas from people I respect. Note, that even some of the most brilliant people ever to exist were full of flaws. So I just want to understand and internalize their gems of insight. Ultimately, internalizing their thoughts gives me a high quality field of concepts I can use to interpret and reconcile my experiences with the world. Insightful ideas are usually the result of making connections across subject areas, synthesizing previously disconnected ideas. 

How Does The Concept of Programming Affect What I Read?

Before you dive into reading somebody’s writing ask yourself if you really want to understand their worldview. Ask yourself, “will their worldview give me better insight into how the world works?” And furthermore, “will their worldview give me richer insight than the worldview of this other author I could read?” You cannot make the decision if a book is worth reading in a vacuum. You need to compare it to the alternatives. If you believe in optimizing in attempt to create the best possible life like I do, then you will constantly strive to read the books that will have the biggest influence on you. 

But how do you find the most influential thing to read while swimming in more information than could possibly be read in a lifetime? As Clay Shirky notes here, this is not a new problem. There has been more information than a person could read in their lifetime since the library of Alexandria. But now, due in large part to the internet, the information superhighway, the abundance of information is much more in your face. A lifetime worth of information passes directly in front of our eyes everyday. In order to navigate this crowded world we need better filters. I’ll talk more about the filters I use, which are relatively primitive and subjective. Fortunately better tools are being created as we speak.

What Do I Want From a Book?

Two things come to mind. I want knowledge that can help me create changes in my behavior that will improve my life. Or I want new stimulating ideas that give me insight into new dimensions of the world. Those two are actually closely related. Stimulating ideas either add or force me to to reconsider aspects of my working theory of the world. And since my working theory of the world must be accurate enough to produce positive effects in the real world, both of the things I want in a book, behavioral change or interesting ideas, reinforce the underlying motivation of living a more effective life. 

Ideas, insights and information are very interesting concepts to me. Below are some follow up topics I’m thinking of writing about:

What I Mean by a Working Theory of the World, Looking For Highly Processed Information, Striving For Intelligence Instead of Being Satisfied with Smarts,, Using Horizontal Scanning to Inform Book Reading, Articles Vs. Books, Reconciling the Self-Help Industry, The Reading-Writing-Discussing Feedback Loop, and How to Increase Retention of Ideas.