Hi friends,

The 10,000 hours rule is unscientific and thoroughly disproven. Man, I wish I had known that 10,000 hours earlier!

At age 14, determined to be the world’s greatest organist, I bought in to Malcom Gladwell’s pop psychology. I would wake up and practice scales from 5am to 7am. Then put in another 4 hours in the afternoon.

6 hours a day, 7 days a week.

On top of everything else in my life, I was in “work” mode for about 11 hours a day, without fail. I did that from age 14 to my mid twenties.

Now, if you’re just a smidge more insightful than I was, you know the end of the story: massive, massive burnout!

I created substantial physical and mental health problems for myself by trying to get to 10,000 hours as fast as I could to achieve my dreams.

Knowing what I know now about learning, I could have achieved everything I did as an organist in 5,000 hours! Maybe less. Plenty of other musicians have.

I pushed myself into depression, burnout, and a whole host of health issues. All to achieve a dream. That’s the power of an idea...even when it’s the wrong idea.

I’ve got a pretty different idea now, though.

📢 Time off is equally important to time on.

Time off, now, is most definitely not “recharging” time. Recharging means the purpose of that time is just to charge another part of life.

I shifted to viewing my time off as vital.

Time away from work is life itself.

Time off is at least as important as time on.

You’ve probably heard a version of that message before. I certainly had. But you can’t think your way into transforming yourself.

🗝 Just because you know something has little bearing on whether or not you become something.

I experimented with dozens of ways to get out of the overwork-burnout-recharge cycle. Most of them didn’t work for me. But I eventually arrived at a short list, that I still do every single day.

So, after many years of failure, here they are, the practices that helped me to permanently change my behavior around burnout and time off:

• 🗓️ Time blocking. Cal Newport taught me this and I can’t recommend it enough. Basically, it’s an extremely simple system you can learn in 2 minutes to creating intentional, distraction-free blocks during your day. I time block my on. And I time block my off.
• 🗣 Shut down ritual. I learned this from Jason Selk. At the end of my work day, I verbally state “Shutdown complete.” The ritual has had a massive impact on my ability to “honor the off.” It takes me 5 seconds, and has changed my life in a way I never would have predicted.
• 🧠 3 Mental Mantras:
  ⇒ “How’s that working for you?” I ask myself this question all day long, to check in on myself from a non-emotional observer perspective. It helps me to change my behavior, without the emotional ups-and-downs that come from judgmental self talk.
  ​⇒ “Every minute spent worrying about something, and not solving it, is a dumb way to spend my time.” Harsh, and true. When has worrying ever helped me? I either must sit down and actively solve a problem, or I won't think about it. I have to remind myself of this a comically high number of times a day! But it works.
  ​⇒ “Honor the off.” No thoughts or energy go to anything, except what I’m doing for fun and enjoyment during my time off!

I could list the dozens of things I tried that didn't work, but you'd need to settle in for a long read. :)

Have a wonderful week!

Edward

P.S. Go have some fun!

​

♥️ My Favorite Idea this Week

• 🤩 Mimetic Desire. “This assumption ... is what the French social scientist René Girard calls The Romantic Lie. The Lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some kind of secret desire chamber in my heart.”

​

👨‍💻 My New Blog Posts

• ​Connect the Dots
  Learning to sing is learning Javascript is learning to speak French. Because this is how our brains work: pattern recognition + relationships = learning.
• ​There are an infinite number of ways to be wrong, and extremely few ways to be correct
  The list of what doesn’t work is infinite and the list of what does is really quite short.

​

✍️ Quote of the Week

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

​One of the greatest movies of all time 🏴‍☠

‍