How do you get the results you want?
I was talking to a friend this morning about the tendency of people (mostly white men) to adopt productivity systems, and work through those every morning, starting with a visualization of their day, a session of high-intensity interval training, followed by an ice bath, followed by ten minutes of meditation, etc. And by adopting the actions of others who have been successful, they expect to get the same results.
It reminded me of what Richard Feynman called Cargo Cult Science:
“In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”
Yes, actions matter, especially building habits for success. But without an understanding of what led to a person’s success, it’s easy to focus on what’s visible, which is their actions, rather than what’s not, which is the specific circumstances, their specific experience, and, yes, the luck that contributed to their results.
Another common example is startup CEOs thinking that being a jerk will make them successful because Steve Jobs berated people, not realizing how much went into Steve Jobs being the right personality with the right perspective to take advantage of the opportunity at that time.
So what’s going to be your recipe of success that builds on your unique perspective and set of skills applied to today’s circumstances? Don’t copy what others did in other circumstances. Instead, experiment to figure out what works for you, and do more of that.
#cargocult #success #productivity