Here are a few parts from this episode that I wanted to share. The whole thing is great so find some time to listen to it if you’re interested in organizational change, finding strengths, and increasing effectiveness through the lens of attention management (instead of time management).
Tim Ferriss skews toward learning and building meaningful relationships.
Adam Grant: That’s so compelling because what it says to me is you decided that learning and relationship building are the two leading indicators of success.
But also they’re worthy ends in and of themselves. And so even if they don’t drive success, you’re still going to be glad you invested in something that sort of formed a meaningful connection or taught you something.
That is such a clever work around the problem of: do I know whether I’m accomplishing anything?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I wish I had come to that conclusion sooner, quite frankly. Because if you approach things with that lens, at least in my experience so far, eventually you’re gonna win. As measured or determined by the outside world, if that makes sense, right.
It’s like you can continue to acquire skills and deep relationships with people you care for who are also incredibly good at what they do— you will… Success cannot be kept from you indefinitely.
Adam Grant points out that this was part of how he looked at deciding to start a podcast when the spaces was already crowded:
Adam Grant: It’s something… It resonates a lot with me because I got into the podcast world much later than you did and felt like, you know, it was by that point, pretty crowded.
There are a lot of interesting people having interesting conversations. So I was pretty hesitant about it at first and then eventually said, okay, my biggest problem is I’ve spent the past five years getting invited into some of the most interesting organizations on earth and telling them things I already know mostly.
And I’m not learning anymore.
So even if the podcast completely fails, I am going to pick the people in the places that I want to learn from. And then I’m going to come away with new insights on the back end that in some format I will share.
It was extremely valuable. I mean, it gave me all kinds of ideas for articles and books and for research projects I wanted to take on. And, it would’ve been great even if we didn’t do a season two and beyond. And I think that… I think you’re right. I think there, there are ways to structure new projects so that even if they don’t achieve conventional success, you still gain more than you invested in them.
This all reminded me of a couple other things:
- Naval Ravikant’s How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky — Naval stresses the need to think long term. Ten years not 10 days. Relationships and learning will compound. If you can learn to create media and learn to create with code and you can create a lot of leverage.
- Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game — This is a book about long term thinking at both the individual and organizational level. “Nothing and no one can perform at 100 percent forever. If we cannot be honest with one another and rely on one another for help during the challenging parts of the journey, we won’t get very far.”