How To radically Increase Productivity: Asking The right Questions
Occasionally we experience key moments in life that change everything around us: forgiving somebody, leaving home, or becoming a parent. However, there are also key moments, that have tremendously more leverage. If the sun runs out of hydrogen in about 6.5 billion years, it will expand critically and swallow Mercury, Venus and Earth. Subsequently it will shrink to a white dwarf and all other planets will be thrown out to the vast universe. Today we’ll discover positive keymoments, which can have a white dwarf leverage to your productivity.
When shit hits the fan
Have you ever felt like having a talent to propell yourself into a negative downspiral when things don’t go as planned? The bus departs in front of your eyes, the lady from the tax department is unfriendly, or when you run late because you stepped into dogpoo? Very quickly one pitfall after another follows and before we can look around, we’re up to our neck in it. When we perfectionize our ability of jumping headover into downspirals, we do so the moment we wake up. Does this mean these people are unluckier than others? Certainly not. But where’s the lever here, that shit seemingly hits the fan for some people more often than for others?
Don't Think about the pink elephant
You surely know the little mindgame where somebody says to not think about a pink Elephant. Right when the sentence is finished, exactly this notorious elephant jumps through my head as if I saw peanut butter on the kitchens table. And this is the power of knowing how our brain works.
Asking the right Questions
To me, asking the right questions is an art to learn, a craft to hone down every day. Since we are hardwired to ensure survival, the default of questions that pop up in our head after an event is rather ineffectively random. Our brain is still stuck in stoneage, which probably will not change in the near future. And this is the reason why somebody growing up in Japan asks by default the same ineffective question as somebody who grows up in the middle of Africa.
-> Why can’t I be like …
-> Why don’t I have …
-> Will I ever …
Translate it from whatever language you want. The software is the same all over the world and the only thing that can rewrite it, is you and your environment. This makes me come the magic spell:
How to profoundly perfectionize Questioning
You see this goldsmith who makes the finest jewlery in town? Did he become so by using the same techniques from the beginning? Certainly not. He tried out different angles, materials, tools and became better day by day. It’s the same strategy with becoming a master in questioning: Practice. There is literally no secret, except of becoming conscious about the pandora’s box in our head. Therefore I’d like to get you acqainted to a set of questions for various situations in life and you simply decide for yourself what’s useful and what is not.
Aiming for the 1%
Here’s the deal: You don’t have to move mountains. As James Clear stated: all you have to do is to become better 1% day by day. At the end of the year you are 37 times better, than at the beginning of the year. The key ingredient is consistency. Question everything you and others ask you. Be sceptical about its quality and dare to speak out loud the questions your heart is longing for.
All the best – Kevin