A System That Can Help You Achieve Anything You Want

Mar 7

Mastery is the continuous pursuit of high-quality performance in a specific domain—an endless process in constant flux. It's not an end state but a journey, and declaring yourself a master is self-deceptive and may halt your growth. Here is an interesting and in-depth essay about Jerry Seinfeld and the pursuit of mastery.

When we think of mastery, traditional disciplines involving physical labor—like martial arts and craftsmanship—often come to mind first. These disciplines share a common feature: they incorporate ritualistic practices and higher-level philosophies that balance chaos and order. This balance follows a natural cycle: create (introducing chaos), allow the creation to take form, then organize and refine before beginning anew.

This balance of chaos and order seems largely absent from discussions about knowledge work—the mental labor of transforming ideas into value for others. However, knowledge work can be approached like any traditional craft, with the same dedication to mastery and excellence in both process and results.

Knowledge work, especially in technology-related jobs, changes rapidly. We constantly adapt to new technologies as they emerge like donkeys following the carrot. This has happened and continues to happen. It takes a few influential people to start the movement, and everyone follows, as is often the case in phenomena involving humans, so similar to ants and yet so different at the same time.

To give examples, a manager is a knowledge worker; so is an executive assistant, an accountant, a creative director, and a salesperson. These people use conceptual artifacts to generate value and outputs. They turn abstract ideas and concepts into specific desired outcomes. A person working at a factory making shoelaces is not a knowledge worker because the job involves repetitive physical labor and the output is tangible and made of raw materials.

One of the main challenges in knowledge work is to define value. For the shoelace maker, value can be defined clearly by the number of shoelaces produced per period. There are clear processes and timed procedures in place to measure output. In knowledge work, there is no such thing as clear value/output. Because of the abstract nature of knowledge work, success is difficult to define and it has a significant subjective component to it.

So far, as argued by Cal Newport, we have been using visible activity as a proxy for productivity/value in knowledge work, similar to how we measure physical labor. Yet, this doesn’t seem to work well in the long term—making many people overly preoccupied and it is not clear whether activity is directly correlated with the quality of output in knowledge work.

Pseudo productivity

The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.

This is why successful leadership in knowledge work means clearly defining goals and narrowing down the focus on one priority at a time fully until it’s done. This is the theory of capital allocation. Since knowledge work is founded on thoughts, and thoughts have no boundaries and can only be shared via language and partially through action, there needs to be clear guidelines as to what you do right now. Not what you will do or what you did, but what you do now.

If you attempt to set multiple priorities at a time—perhaps because you’ve never thought about this in-depth, or because you score high in agreeableness and fear upsetting other people by prioritizing, which involves declining options—then you spread your energy through multiple activities, which increases significantly the likelihood of making mistakes, failing, or haphazardly keeping up the activities with mediocrity at best while feeling miserable. Maybe that’s not the case for you. You can experience it for yourself and draw conclusions. This is merely a proposition. Ultimately, you know what to do and you are the driver of the canoe that is your life.

Cal Newport argues that knowledge work can be measured by the impact of your work in the long run. Read Slow Productivity and A World Without Email for all the details. To do impactful work, you may do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality (in a way akin to unreasonable hospitality, not perfectionism). Be able to say “no” and carry on doing the thing for a long time with intention and sustained effort. Results will take care of themselves as long as you keep focus and attention where it needs to be. Implement processes to manage work and work sequentially on one initiative at a time.

This concept ties well with Habits, as proposed by James Clear, for example. The degree of your success is determined by what you do consistently. You start simple and you continue with humility and conviction while maintaining a sharp focused attention on the big picture and changing trajectory as required.

Now the question is, how do you implement these ideas/principles in daily life? How do you keep this as the foundation of your actions on a random Tuesday morning in mid-February? First, you can expose yourself to these ideas and other high-level concepts that may allow you to gain perspective and detach your nose from the dirty canvas that is daily life with its hectic energy. Second, you may create systems that are based on these principles, hence becoming part of your environment and raising the bar for your standards and for the way you operate daily. At low points, you fall back to the level of your systems.

Following this train of thought, here is a proposition for a system that will help you raise the bar:

Know the overall direction of your life. You may undertake the Future Authoring Program for this purpose because it’s a very detailed exercise that guides you through writing in detail about your future.
Establish a project management system. This can be in Notion like I show in the video, or any other tool of your choice. You will improve the system over time, sometimes adding to it, and sometimes removing unnecessary elements from it.
Daily, establish the Focus of the day — the specific Project(s) and/or Task(s) you are going to focus on that day. See Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks—Time Management for Mortals for details about mindsets and strategies for narrowing down the focus.
Schedule the Focus of the day on the calendar.
Execute
Once per week, perform a weekly review and lightly plan for the upcoming week. See this Weekly Review template I created to get inspiration.

A pyramid with multiple layers symbolizing the process explained in this essay - from defining the life direction to daily planning and execution — Start from the bottom of the pyramid and make your way up.

That is it — one way to get your life together and row forward in the direction you wish to follow instead of powerlessly getting transported by the current. You are the driver of the canoe that is life, and you are the river stream. There is no rehearsal of the game. You may execute following the system with consistency and gentle awareness.

Tinker with it sometimes as needed when a revelation manifests within you telling you that there are specific improvements you can make to the system that could benefit your workflow and enjoyment of using it daily. Do not try to cut corners or else you end up with a cornerless canvas which eventually flattens out until it’s a straight narrow line and there is no space left to walk over it. You can anyways always begin again.