Win at Work and Succeed in Life

Key Takeaways:

• Work is only one of many ways to orient your life, and you can define what winning at work and succeeding at life looks like for you;
• Constraints foster productivity, creativity, and freedom, and you can constrain your workday;
• Work-life balance is not a myth, and you can schedule what truly matters to you and those people most important to you;
• There’s incredible power in nonachievement, and you can maintain nonwork activities that delight and rejuvenate you; and
• Rest is the foundation of meaningful, productive work, and you can begin each day with a good night’s sleep.

1. Work is only one of the many ways to orient your life:

• Many of us fall for Hustle Fallacy: We think if we just crank a little harder, we can push past all the pressure. The demands keep mounting, and we try running faster still. We hope to catch up—maybe even get ahead—if we just work smarter and master personal productivity. But no matter what we do, the obligations outpace our hustle.
• Opposite of Hustle Fallacy is Ambition Brake: Stress and crazy hours no longer crush our health or personal life, but unfulfilled professional dreams and ambitions could just as well crush our souls.
• What is Cult Of Overwork:
  - work provides the primary orientation for life;
  - constraints stifle productivity
  - work-life balance is a myth;
  - a person should always be busy; and
  - rest wastes time that could otherwise go to work.
• Technology was supposed to free us from overwork, not saddle us with more. They predicted automation would provide us gobs of free time. In 1930, for instance, economist John Maynard Keynes said we’d only need to work fifteen hours a week. “Three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us,” he said.
• Keynes's prediction holds true for manual labor but not true for knowledge workers, executives, managers, creatives, and other professionals.

• Work is only one of life's many domains:

• The three non-negotiables:
  
  
  
• DEFINE YOUR OWN DOUBLE WIN:
  - You have a choice. You can either live on purpose, according to the plan you’ve set. Or you can live by accident, reacting to the demands of others. The first approach is proactive; the second is reactive.
  - The process begins by admitting we’re not Superman. We don’t have a cape. We can’t face insurmountable odds and accomplish everything that comes our way. Since it’s impossible to do everything, we can’t make doing everything our definition of success. It’s important for us to stop and clarify the kind of success we’re after.
  - When you define the win at work, consider these questions:
    
  • What’s my unique contribution?
  • What are the things that only I can do?
  • Which of my activities drive the biggest results?
  • Where do my skills and abilities best match my passions and interests?
  • Where do I want to be in my career three years from now?

  
  - When you define the win at home, consider these starter questions:
  
  

  • How do I want to be remembered by the people who matter the most to me?
  • What steps can I take to ensure proper self-care and good health?
  • In what ways can I invest in my marriage to help it thrive?
  • Where can I invest my time to make the people I love feel loved by me?
    
    

2. Constrain Your Workday:

• Start and stop of the workday are essential
• We need to give time to Non-achievement and rest apart from the achievement.
• Try to strike a good balance.
• Warren Buffett says, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.
• Work and life operate as a symbiotic whole. Work gives you confidence, joy, and financial provision to bring home, and investing in your health, hobbies, and home life nurtures a clear mind and rested body to bring to work.
• Constraint enable:
  - FOCUS
  - CREATIVITY 
  - PRODUCTIVITY
  - FREEDOM
• Thinking, If I just work a little bit harder right now, we’ll get the payoff, the rest, the family time, the me time—whatever—later. But as we all discover sooner or later, there’s really no end to working. It’s easy to live in denial, thinking the extra hours will be temporary. But in the blink of an eye, three, five, and ten years slip by, and we’re still overworking while our life spins off another direction.
  The solution? Create hard edges around your workday, workweek, and weekend. You probably know Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Well, here’s Hyatt’s Corollary: “Work contracts to the time permitted.”

3. Schedule what truly matters:

• Plan an Ideal Week:
  Must include Non-negotiables
  - self-care
  - Relational priorities
  - Professional results
  We can also look at the ten life domains.
• Preview the coming week:
  - Balance is much easier to manage when we rule out surprises
  - Previewing the work week with your partner at home and colleague or manager at the office
• Schedule the specifics when you can:
  - Nature abhors a vacuum. So does work
  - So, plan your weekends as well.

4. Power Of Nonachievement:

      Hobbies and their benefits on the brain:

• Exercise improves long-term memory, decreases the risk of dementia
• Reading increases left temporal cortex brain connectivity
• Learning a new language slows brain aging, improves later life cognition
• Playing video games improves spatial navigation, strategic planning, motor performance
• Playing a musical instrument enhances cognitive skills, verbal fluency, academic achievement

       Albert Einstein played violin, an instrument he taught himself. He sometimes played with Max Planck, who, when he wasn’t busy developing quantum theory, enjoyed playing the piano.

       The most productive thing you can do is to be unproductive from time to time. Your body and mind will be better rested. You’ll have more energy and better ideas. And you’ll probably enjoy life more as well.

        Nonachievement doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing nothing at all. In all the cases we’ve seen, breakthrough ideas were a byproduct of being in a context where achievement wasn’t the driving force, where the mind was given free rein to wander, imagine, innovate, and dream. This is what we mean when we say there’s power in nonachievement.

       The problem with overworking is that we marginalize or utterly miss these periods of profitable pause, where we can put other parts of our minds and bodies to use, and thereby benefit from use of our whole person, instead of the aspect most focused on work.

       History, business case studies, and magazine profiles are replete with stories of innovations, solutions, products, even whole companies, born out of periods of nonachievement. And a surprising number of our Michael Hyatt & Co. clients have likewise experienced breakthrough innovations, solutions to complex problems, or complete career changes leading to a happier, healthier life once their ideas had a chance to percolate during a period of nonachievement.

       Strong connections exist between mind wandering and creative thinking, lateral problem solving, and generating unique ideas. “By encouraging our minds to wander, leisure activities pull us out of our present reality, which in turn can improve our ability to generate novel ideas or ways of thinking,” he says. “When we let our minds drift away from work, we return to our tasks capable of tackling them in more inventive creative ways

5. Rest:

“The rest time precedes the work time,” says Leithart. “And that gives us a clue for how we should think about sabbath and rest within our own lives. We’re not simply working toward rest.” It’s not that we work so we can earn time off, time to sleep. We work because we have slept because we are rested. “We’re working out of a sense of rest,” he says. “It keeps us from being frantic, it keeps us from workaholism because our work is done not scrambling so that we can get to the holiday. It’s done out of a rest that’s already achieved