Productivity and progress are the result of exercising consistent pressure in one direction over time.
TRANSCRIPT
Please note: this transcript is auto-generated so forgive any (or many) errors 😲 – click the timestamps to play that section directly in the audio.
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I’m going to continue talking today about productivity, and today I want to talk about not being distracted and about the dangers of being distracted and living a life of distraction. I mean, it is really honestly, I think the biggest danger of the generation that we live in now is that our time just pours out in all directions because of the various distractions that come our way every single day. And I like our pocket. We carry distraction around in our pocket quite literally nowadays.
00:00:43.650]
And oftentimes what you find is people are so, so addicted and so used to always having something kind of bombarding their attention that they never have any space to live to think if someone’s standing in a line in the supermarket, they’ll have their phone out and they’ll be scrolling. If there’s a moment to breathe at any point during the day, there’s going to be it’s going to be filled with something. And as soon as we begin to enter that world, what happens is there’s a constant pull for us to jump from our point of focus and fascinate over something else and say, you know, the most expensive currency in today’s society, particularly in countries, Western countries like ours, is our attention.
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That’s really what people are paying for. That’s what advertisers are paying for. And that’s what these different platforms are craving and looking to possess. Is your attention in the highest bidder? You know, has has a barrage of offers behind whatever their attention grabber is. But at the outset, they’re looking to hook your attention and then once they’ve got it, they’re looking to keep it. But there’s that there’s this amazing verse in the book of Ecclesiastes that says the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the filled with hearing Ecclesiastes one, verse eight.
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The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor is the Earth filled with hearing. I can promise you it does not matter how many how many things you look at on your wall. It does not matter how many images you imbibe of. It doesn’t matter how many songs or sermons you listen to. It doesn’t matter. You know, your eyes and your ears are always going to crave the next thing. And I think that that is very much a picture of how we can run our lives.
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You know, we can where our attention can run from one distraction to the next until our attention and our energy is so exhausted that we’re no longer left with the capacity to pour into our own projects. And so learning to place great value on where you place your attention think is something that you really want to develop and something that you really will need to strengthen. And so then instead of being consumed by what everyone else is saying, doing or selling.
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Yeah, your energies can be rightly directed into what you are producing yourself, and I really believe that productivity, if we can if we can harness and take back hold of our attention, then productivity becomes really very much more possible and productivity and process. I often say to people the result of exercising consistent pressure in one direction over time, productivity and progress are the result of exercising. Consistent pressure in one direction over time now exercising, you know, we all know that exercise is not something we necessarily like, but it’s true.
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Nevertheless, we must exercise our will, our skill and our courage to create. It actually takes some reps to get into the process and get into the habit of exercising yourself to be a producer rather than a consumer. And I like, you know, overnight success is really generally is preceded by many, many days of learning. It does take work to win. There is exercise and there is effort involved in being a creative and actually being a productive person in whatever sphere you’re involved in.
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And so just be sure that your efforts are not spilling in every direction. I exercise your best reserves to create things of value rather than pouring all of that attention and energy and thought and into kind of endless streams that where you just scroll and just pour all of your attention down the drain. So exercising consistent pressure, consistent daily habits and established disciplines are going to have a far greater impact on your ultimate success than short spasms of activity in a short amount is assured, disciplined.
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A daily habit is going to make a great deal more difference than like one or two days a month where you enter the zone and and like, say, I’m in the inspired flow. I much prefer to just do the work. And then you can still enjoy those times of inspired flow and the like. Hallelujah, Hallelujah chorus moments. But in the meantime, just do the work consistent, be consistent with it. And you know, and I say exercise consistent pressure because you do have to push through.
00:06:53.320]
You know, we don’t always I don’t always want to stand up here and do this. I would say that that’s probably true of today, I’ve been doing a lot of recording for some courses that I’m teaching, and quite honestly, I’ve been I’ve been talking to the screen for for a number of hours now. You know, I don’t necessarily feel like still standing in front of the camera again and doing this, but I’ve made a daily discipline of going live.
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I’ve made a daily disciplining of recording and encouraging podcast. I’ve made a daily discipline of writing a blog post every day. Those are my basics that like that. That’s my staple. And so there there’s always going to be various pressures that want to kind of have you back off, give up, press pause, make an excuse, blame someone or something for your inactivity or lack of production. It’s always there and it’s there for us all. But as I say, in exercising consistently, you build a much greater muscle and it becomes a lot more it becomes a great deal easier to to do the discipline days so you can enjoy the daylight days.
00:08:16.200]
But those disciplined days are just as important, just as powerful. And just as I really ultimately kind of build the the grit that will take you to the finish line in one direction, exercise consistent pressure in one direction. You know, it doesn’t really need to be highlighted that if we expand our energy and our attention and and in all sorts of different directions, that the old kind of proverb of spinning too many plates in and if we’re spinning too many plates, ultimately one at least is going to fall.
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It’s the same for our attention and our energy. You know, you only have a certain amount of there’s only there is a finite capacity that you have. Now, you can optimise on that and you can multiply that through working smart, working with outsourcing, working with team partnering and various other productivity hacks, if you want to call it that, and different ways of working. Absolutely. You can produce far more than your own personal capacity. But even so, if you’re in if you are in the process of producing personally, even if that producing is boils down to managing other people’s energy, OK, there still is a capacity there that you have to manage.
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And so trying to do too many things sometimes will lead to like your energy just bleeding in all directions and no one project really moving forward to fulfilment. And so I do encourage you to really focus in on just one or two things rather than trying to do 10. I listened recently to some interesting training that spoke about the motivation curve. And, you know, we generally begin a project or a new venture with a high level of uninformed optimism. You know, it feels fabulous.
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We’re excited and we’re hopeful. But then comes the decline into the valley of informed pessimism. We we we we find out that, man, this wasn’t as easy, as cheap or as quick as I expected it. It’s actually work. And maybe the results sometimes in the short term, disappointing because we’re learning. Because we’re growing. Yeah. And sometimes in this place of informed pessimism where we realise, oh, wow, this wasn’t what I thought it would be, we can sometimes turn back and we can look back up to that that where we began and we can want to just like quit and make our way back up to that place of uninformed optimism and run in another direction.
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Grab another opportunity. Instead of staying with the one that we started with, instead of sticking with what we know we are supposed to be doing and like like going through the pain of growth, going through the pain of discipline, going through the pain of learning. But if we do that, instead of jumping to another offer or another promise or some other shiny object, if we will venture beyond that and get through that sometimes what could be described as disillusion?
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Yeah, we can begin to make our way up the other side of that valley into a place of informed optimism. And this is an optimism that’s tempered by experience. It’s not just kind of the rosy, rosy glasses or what is it, rosy spectacles. You know, we actually understand, okay, this is this is what it takes to complete. This is what it will take to maintain, you know, we’ve maybe made whatever necessary course corrections were needed.
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We’ve overcome some of the challenges that the task or the project posed for us. We’ve worked our way through those with and rolled help where necessary, maybe learn some new skills, leaned in to prayer. And here on the other side of the valley, we can be we can really begin to build something remarkable. And so exercising consistent pressure in one direction over time and energy and time are the chief ingredients that are required for us to successfully produce the kind of things that we want to produce.
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Time is required, whether it’s yours or someone else that you hire, and every impactful project or publication will require more time than you generally kind of expect at the outset to know if you’re like me. But I’m hugely optimistic about what I can produce in in a short period of time. I think I’m going to produce like a book a week or a course every week or some some remarkable thing every month. But but like life happens and you know, but I say taking time, you know, you need time to think.
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You need time to implement. You need time to outsource. Time to assess. Time to improve. Time to maintain it. Everything takes time. And so we need to come into our kind of with that mindset, you know, when we’re talking about producing, when we’re talking about building a legacy, when we’re talking about like completing on our creative ideas and creative projects, we need to understand that time will be required at all sorts of stages and all sorts of levels.
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And that’s why it’s like really very, very key and very important for us to value how we spend our time and make sure that our time is spent well and poured into projects. That is significant both to us and to the people that we’re seeking to serve and that we don’t fall into this distraction trap, pouring years and years of our life into black holes of endless distraction and a really learn to direct your days with purposeful intention. Well, thanks for listening, hopefully.
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It’s been an encouragement to you today, if you want to connect any further, you can do so through my website at Davidlee.martin.com. Have a great day.
