Crack the Code: How This Rare Mindset Revolutionizes your Productivity Game

And the ground breaking research that supports it

You’re ambitious, smart, hard working. You are what I call (instead of a knowledge worker) a technical-creative professional.

More about the technical-creative concept here

You feel like you’re putting in the effort yet you feel like something is off, something is missing from your career trajectory. You want to make a bigger impact sooner, you want to earn a great salary, get more flexibility in your career. It’s just not happening as soon as you’d like.

To fully reach your career potential, you need to develop your Deep Work and productivity practices. This is what I focus on teaching others how to train for.

For you high achievers, there is a special body of research which serves as a trusted advisor as you walk your productivity and Deep Work journey.

It shines a light on what intentional, high quality professional work should look like.

Fair warning-many people do not understand, appreciate, or even accept the ideas we are going to dust off from this classic research, but ignore them and do the work you were born to do.

To win in todays career you need to work, and to think differently.

The Research

Professional productivity wisdom was turned upside down in the early 1980’s by two ambitious psychologists at the University of Chicago and a couple of beepers.

They devised a method called Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to randomly solicit people’s feelings and activities, with a high degree of precision, in real time, to capture ground breaking research insights about how people go about living.

One of the scientists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheek-sent-me-high-ee), went on to coin the beloved concept “Flow”, and pen a deeply meaningful book to expand on this idea in great detail.

High performers already know that accessing a flow state, while engaged with their work, amplifies creativity and productivity which leads to more achievement. It makes work fun, fluid, even effortless. It’s one of the key indicators that your productivity is vibrant and driving you towards your dreams.

Let’s dig a little deeper and understand what I feel is the hidden, and powerful mechanism that unleashes abundant flow state in your work.

First, let’s start with a few of the key research outcomes from the ESM. Within this amazing research the research team uncovered five powerful insights:

• People are typically happiest at work
• Doing work is more enjoyable than having free time
• Work provides structure, and feedback loops, like a game, which makes life more novel and fun
• People like when they are challenged and pushed to accomplish difficult tasks
• The more flow experiences a person has, the more fulfilling their life tends to be

How can this be? Our minds despise psychic entropy. The disorder, confusion, and chaos that can ignite a mind. We crave order and structure more than we think. On the surface free time feels heavenly and restful, but it often comes at a hefty mental price.

Work, especially work that lines up well with the individuals natural traits, leads to order, a remedy to the default randomness of the mind.

Of course the common wisdom is that people hate working, people hate jobs, and retirement is the ultimate blissful end game.

The Rare Mindset

What I’ve taken away from this research is this. Your embrace of process and the present moment is more fulfilling than the outcomes. Flow translates into process and this is where life is most enjoyed and fully expressed.

This process oriented mindset is something you should adopt. Many people don’t grasp this that doing can be better than attaining, and that it can be inherently rewarding in the pursuit of a goal. It fly’s in the face of modern consumer culture where, through endless marketing, we are conditioned from a young age to think getting things leads to happiness.

It’s why we tend to overconsume and underproduce.

But the Flow research sheds light on a different, more enticing path than the passive consumer who dreads task: that fulfillment in fact comes from doing the good work itself in heightened performance flow states.

Embrace the work and the processes of your chosen profession with patience. Tap into flow state more frequently (which I will help you with). You’ll work deep naturally by installing this mindset, and you will inevitably see breakthroughs.

This is how you execute.