Productivity Is For Robots Heres How To Stay Human.
Transcriber: Roni Cavalcante
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I was lying in bed
on a Saturday night back in 2018,
and this was during a time
that I was in a deep hole
of mental and emotional burnout.
I was overworked and overwhelmed,
and as I was lying there
haunted by my never ending to do list,
it suddenly occurred to me that …
it didn’t really matter
what I did or didn’t do
because I remained driven
by an insidious feeling
that I was just never doing enough.
I turned on “Saturday Night Live,”
and the comedian John Mulaney was hosting,
and let me just say
I did not expect a stand up on SNL
to shake me with a life-changing epiphany.
But here we are.
In his opening monologue, he said,
“Everything moves too fast now.
The world is run by computers.
The world is run by robots.
And sometimes they ask us if we’re robots,
just because we’re trying to log in
and look at our own stuff.
You spend a lot of time
telling robots you’re not a robot.
Think about that for a second.”
(Laughter)
It was at that moment
I finally understood.
I realized that for every step technology
takes toward becoming more human,
we take a step to meet it halfway.
Speed, efficiency, optimization -
these aren’t just the traits
we expect from our devices.
These have become the qualities
that we demand from ourselves.
We want the life hacks, the smart pills -
anything to squeeze out
that last drip of focus.
Technology was supposed to set us free,
and yet many of us have
chosen to imitate it.
Each day we get online
clicking photos of stop signs and bicycles
just to confirm “I’m not a robot.”
And yet each day, so many of us get online
and compete in this never ending
game of robotic productivity.
Now, I don’t believe
that the problem is our ambition.
The problem is that in this blind march
toward getting things done,
we’ve lost sight
of the things worth doing.
I know it isn’t like this for everyone.
We all know those people who accomplish
more than anyone else,
yet they never seem stressed
or overwhelmed.
I know: I hate those people too.
(Laughter)
But I used to watch them from afar
and wonder, “How do they do it?
What do they know that I don’t know.
What is it that I’m missing?”
And what I discovered after a few years
of research and lots of trial and error
is that what these seemingly
superhumans have figured out
is that you don’t need
to be superhuman at all.
And yet hidden in the same traits
that separate us from technology,
is our human nature.
Now, it’s important to mention
that there was a time when society
needed humans to be machines.
The industrial revolution rewarded
those who could work harder,
faster, and longer than others,
but that’s no longer the world we live in.
And I believe that one of the reasons
many of us are burnt-out and disconnected
is we’re still trapped
in this old world definition of what
it means to be productive and useful.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote:
“Never confuse movement with action,”
which updated for the new,
post-industrial world would be:
“Never confuse movement with meaning.”
As humans, we need meaning in the work
that we do to feel truly satisfied,
but the problem with searching
for meaning through endless productivity
is that we already have robots
that can work 168 hours a week.
We already have machines that can
weigh the odds and see the probabilities.
What the new world really needs
is for more humans to get back to that
which separates us from technology.
Creativity: the round trip ticket
to elsewhere and back again.
Must be human to ride.
Only humans can escape reality
through a secret hatch in the mind
to leave with real world problems
and return with other world solutions.
Technology will never
replace human creativity
because codes and algorithms
are built on what’s expected to happen.
Creativity is the unexpected.
As humans, we have the power
of curiosity, imagination, and empathy.
We have the capacity for courage.
The greatest gift you and I
will ever share with the world
won’t be born out of robotic thinking
or aimless productivity;
it’ll be born out of our
true human nature.
So we all have these traits inside of us.
The question becomes:
How do we put them to use?
How do we cut the fat on movement
to make way for more meaning?
I spent two years
researching different ways
to change my relationship
with work and productivity,
and today I want to share three strategies
that have had the biggest
impact on my life:
The first strategy is what I like to call
“never empty the well,”
I want to go back to Ernest Hemingway
for some more wisdom.
In his memoir on life in Paris,
Hemingway wrote:
“I had learned already to never
empty the well of my writing,
but to always stop when there was still
something in the deep part of the well
and to let it refill at night
from the springs that fed it”
Now, if you’re like me,
you learned a long time ago
that the greatest sin of high performance
is to leave anything on the table.
We celebrate those
who can burn the midnight oil
and leave it all on the field,
so it’s no surprise that when we persevere
past an empty energy tank
that we feel as though
we’re somehow winning the game.
The problem is that when
we walk away from our work
drained, dazed and confused,
our subconscious is keeping score.
The bad form that we finish our day with
gets internalized in our minds and bodies,
and that feeling of trying
to draw water from an empty well
becomes forever attached
to the work that we do.
So these all night work sessions
and heroic stretches of output,
they might produce results,
but the brain drain that you feel
when you walk away will follow you home
and hit you right back
to your desk the next day.
And that’s what Hemingway understood.
He knew that anyone could learn
to outlast the others,
any robot or machine
can work around the clock.
The key to staying human
is to walk away before you’re cooked.
It takes a cool Hemingway-like
confidence to tell the muses:
“We’ve worked enough today. I’m sure
I’ll see you around tomorrow.”
The second strategy I’d like to share
today is called “find your wabi-sabi,”
and for this, we need Miles Davis,
the man whose name
is forever attached to jazz music.
Again and again,
Miles Davis and his trumpet reinvented
what jazz music was and what it could be,
yet despite his years
of dedication and study,
he struggled to ever
master his instrument.
His tone was cracked and restrained,
often out of tune with what
was happening around him.
He constantly missed notes,
and his dexterity was considered feeble.
Miles also played with a shyness
that lacked the traditional bravado
of his heroes and peers.
But over time,
it was these mechanical limitations
that became his greatest asset.
Unable to wail in the high end,
he was forced to play with vulnerability.
His soft tones gave him
little to hide behind,
and those missed notes -
they created emptiness and tension.
His playing created drama,
and it was his imperfections that resulted
in a style that was his and his alone.
It was his imperfections
that forever changed jazz music.
The Japanese call it wabi-sabi:
the beauty found in the imperfect,
impermanent, and incomplete.
It’s our wabi-sabi that points us
towards the things that only we can do
in the way that only we can do them.
And more important to our success
than doing the good,
the great, or the perfect
is pursuing the personal quirks
and tics that make us unique.
Now of course, when it comes
to discovering what makes us special,
we’re often the last to know,
but the good news is that no one
has to work extra hard at becoming unique.
You’re already you.
You already have your own
unique set of fingerprints.
The key, like so much of life,
is becoming aware.
So to turn your wabi-sabi into a compass,
you just have to start with one question:
“How am I different?
Not better, just different.”
Because it’s once you answer that question
that you become free to ask,
“How can I be different and better?”
And if you struggle to answer either
of those questions right now, don’t worry.
Like Miles Davis himself once said:
“Man, sometimes it takes a long time
to sound like yourself”
So now that we’re avoiding perfection
and walking away from our work
before we’re drained,
what are we going to do
with some of that extra time?
Well, we’re going to waste it.
The third and final strategy I’d like
to share today is to “waste more time.”
Now, it was when I
was in my deepest pit of burnout,
and I was behaving
more like a stressed-out cyborg
than a living, breathing human
is that I hated this idea of wasting time.
And in order to avoid the guilt
that came with doing nothing,
I constantly looked for ways to stay busy.
By show of hands, how many people
here have ever had to turn down
an exciting invitation or opportunity
because they were just too damn busy?
All right, lots of hands.
I see people without their hands up
squirming in their seats a little bit.
It’s OK.
You know, when I look back on this time,
I realize now that much of my busyness
was really just frantic movement
in a collared shirt.
Busyness was the safety rail
that I put around my comfort zone.
It was a disguise that I wore
to look at myself in the mirror
after a long week of emotional avoidance.
I discovered that it
was a lot easier for me to say,
“I’m too busy”
rather than “I’m scared,
and I don’t know where to start.”
And don’t worry, this isn’t a call
to just banish busy work altogether,
but we need to accept that busy work
often gets in the way of meaningful work,
and the bigger problem
is that too much busy work
actually prevents our brain
from knowing what the meaningful work is.
This is why I believe that we all need
more unfocused, unscheduled idle time.
Idleness breeds insight because clarity
is a result of mental digestion.
I’ll say that again:
Idleness breeds insight because clarity
is a result of mental digestion.
Living in a perpetual state of busy,
however, limits that digestion.
No one’s going to have their best ideas
when they’re locked and loaded
on task execution
day after day or week after week.
And the mind that is never left
to meander or to waste time
is a mind headed for burnout.
So my challenge to you all today, then,
is to embrace those lazy afternoons
where the agenda can be blank,
where your mind is free to run off leash
through unscheduled and unfocused time,
and then please, for the love
of true productivity,
go do the things you’ve always
wanted to do if you weren’t so damn busy.
We’re living in a time where the old-world
skills are becoming obsolete,
and the future no longer belongs
to those who can outwork the others.
It belongs to those who are the most
creative, empathetic, and courageous.
It belongs to those who can stay human.
And it’s by realigning ourselves
with what it means to be human
that we can reclaim meaning
in the work that we do.
Because when productivity
is aligned with meaning,
it doesn’t lead to more
burnout and overwhelm -
it leads to more joy,
pride, and connection.
It leads to a greater excitement for life.
And it’s by sharpening
the skills of human nature
that we can create lives
we don’t need to take a vacation from.
And we can rediscover
the things worth doing.
Because when technology does finally steal
away that last chore or mindless task,
when robotic arms descend to cook
our meals, drive our cars and do our jobs,
will you remember
just what to do with ourselves?
It’s time to leave the hustle
and grind to the machines.
It’s time to confirm once and for all,
“I am not a robot.”
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)