Welcome to “The Looking Glass”, a weekly newsletter journey of personal growth into mindset, meaning and mastery in work.
#37 – 06 Jan 2023
Hello friend,
Thanks again for being here
I share an insight, a question, and a quote for reflection, then an actionable learning you can implement.
Contents:
- 💡 Using the science of timing for peak performance
- ❔ Your mental chest of drawers and the E.T. method
- 💬 On authentically building rapport
- 📣 A mighty annual review to unlock potential
💡 Using the science of timing for peak performance
Are you a lark (morning person) or an owl (evening person)?
I consider myself a night owl, as I have always found I work better later in the day and enjoy a creative surge later in the evening. But I struggle to get going and be productive early in the morning.
I always feel guilty for being slack in the morning.
But this becomes anxiety around this time of the year as everyone shares their ‘New Year, New Me’ plans, which usually include some version of early morning habits.
I was triggered this new year by a few things, and I started connecting some dots:
1) Mark Manson’s ‘5 Lessons I Learned in 2022’ post:
“Waking up early is legit. The hype is real.”
2) Jim Rohn’s audio quote:
“How come you’re up so early?”
“Say, if you were headed where I’m headed, you’d be up early too. If you were gonna meet who I’m gonna meet, you’d be up early.”
3) Dan Koe’s YouTube video, ‘The 4-Hour Workday (Focused Work Changed My Life)’:
“Wake up before distractions.
There seems to be two main perspectives when it comes to the hustle-and-grind culture and waking up early.
Some people are very pro waking up early, at 4 or 5 am.
And some people are very pro ‘I get up whenever I want, and then I start working, and then it gets done’.
And you can do whichever you want.
Try it out.
But unless you try waking up early, I wouldn’t talk smack about it or just write it off entirely.
The hours of 5-7 in the morning are sacred.
There is nothing that can distract you. It’s very peaceful.”
“The more distractions you give the chance to penetrate your awareness, the more likely you will be to go into a downward spiral of procrastination.
This is my most effective productivity advice:
Wake up 1-2 hours earlier.
Even if you’re a night owl (leverage your sleepy open focused brain for creative work, rather than technical work).”
4) I remembered the Quentin Tarantino interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where Quentin explained his writing process.
Before that, he described himself as “an amateur, mad little writer” who would work late into the night, at home or in restaurants.
He would drink coffee and work all night long, then go to bed in the morning.
But around the time he wrote the movie Inglorious Basterds, he changed his process to start in the morning and finish in the evening, like a typical workday.
In essence, he was becoming more professional.
And this process turned out to be more creative, enjoyable, and successful.
5) Dan pink and the science of good timing:
We face a constant barrage of distractions
As I have gotten further into this solopreneur thing and juggling the demands of having a baby at home, I find the days just get away from me. The inevitable distractions and emergencies arise. So I am warming to the idea that those sacred early morning hours are the solution.
Now, I am very anti the productivity-bro / productivity porn movement of hustlers getting after it at 4 am. It just doesn’t appeal to me. But I am starting to see the merits of making good use of the morning.
Depending on where you land on the morning person vs evening person scale, you may be thinking:
“Night owl, yeah right, toughen up mate, morning is where it’s at”
Or
“Those crazy morning larks know nothing about the good life.”
But wait.
It turns out there is some legitimacy to being one or the other or something in between.
And it makes sense to plan your day accordingly.
From Dan Pink’s book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing:
Thomas Edison was a night owl who enabled other night owls. “He was more likely to be found hard at it in his laboratory at midnight than at midday,” one early biographer wrote.
Human beings don’t all experience a day in precisely the same way. Each of us has a “chronotype”—a personal pattern of circadian rhythms that influences our physiology and psychology.
The Edisons among us are late chronotypes. They wake long after sunrise, detest mornings, and don’t begin peaking until late afternoon or early evening. Others of us are early chronotypes. They rise easily and feel energised during the day but wear out by evening. Some of us are owls; others of us are larks.
It’s a nice simple distinction between the two, but Pink cautions us that, in reality, it is more nuanced.
The “third bird”
Pink unveils this nuance through the concept of a “third bird”, somewhere between the lark and the owl. And in reality, this is where many of us fall.
But what is your chronotype?
Knowing your chronotype is essential to becoming a high performer.
By understanding how you work best, you can structure your day accordingly and reach new levels of mastery.
Here’s an easy way to determine your chronotype, as developed by German, Till Roenneberg:
Please think about your behaviour during “free days”—days when you’re not required to awaken at a specific time. Now answer these three questions:
1. What time do you usually go to sleep?
2. What time do you usually wake up?
3. What is the middle of those two times—that is, what is your midpoint of sleep? (For instance, if you typically fall asleep around 11:30 pm and wake up at 7:30 am, your midpoint is 3:30 am).
Dan Pink
So what does the result mean?
If your mid-point is between:
- 12 am and 3:30 am, you’re probably a lark
- 3:30 am and 5:30 am, you’re probably a third bird
- 5:30 am and 12 pm, you’re probably an owl
Now, I’ve just gotten back from holiday (“free days” as per above), and I was averaging going to bed at midnight and getting up around 8 am, a mid-point of 4 am.
This lands me in the “third bird” category (so I am not such a night owl, after all!).
Where do you land?
Daily cycles
Pink states that we all experience that day in three stages – a peak, a trough and a rebound.
And about three-quarters of us (larks and third birds) experience it in that order. But about one in four people, those whose genes or age make them night owls, experience the day in something closer to the reverse order—recovery, trough, peak.
Dan Pink
So what do to with this info?
Once you understand your type, consider the work you need to do, and select the appropriate time to do it.
For example:
As a “third bird”, which peaks in the morning, I should be doing my heads-down, focused analytical work here. It would be the best time to smash through difficult work without distractions and make those tough, strategic decisions.
But my creative and insight tasks are probably best suited for the late afternoon / early evening. This could be tasks like outlining my weekly newsletter.
The trough stage is when our mood is low. This is the best time to do that “boring” admin work, e.g. responding to emails or completing expense reports. We shouldn’t be wasting our peak performance stages on these routine tasks.
Consider your chronotype and plan your day accordingly to unlock peak performance.
If you are a boss at work, here’s a final insight:
Understand the individual types of your team members. Allow them to work accordingly to their preferred style so that they can produce their best work. Most of the typical 9-5 doesn’t work as well for owls.
❔ Your mental chest of drawers and the E.T. method
I love reading fiction at night to unwind before bed.
It calms my mind.
One of my go-to favourites is the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. He blends unique storytelling of everyday life with surrealism and plenty of insightful wisdom.
While on holiday, I love hunting down a local bookstore to browse the shelves. And I try to buy a special book to remember the trip.
A non-fiction work from Murakami captured my eye, Novelist as a Vocation. From the back of the book – “A charmingly idiosyncratic look at writing, creativity and the authors own novels”.
Now, I have no plans to start writing novels. Still, there is a great deal we can learn from Murakami, a true master of his craft, who has paved his own way, creating his unique style, and building a successful body of work over the long run.
There are so many insights to be gained by studying the masters and applying their insights to creating our own life’s work, whatever field that is.
Back to the holiday
I set up a comfortable chair by the sea and scanned the book’s contents.
A chapter instantly caught my attention, ‘So What Should I Write About?’.
I knew this would have some sage advice that I could apply to my newsletter writing, so I started there.
How do you decide what to write about?
I’m sure you’ve been stuck here before.
Even if you are not a ‘writer’.
My wife always asks me what her Instagram captions should be.
I struggled to come up with adequate text for my neighbourly Christmas cards.
We all battle with getting started.
But we especially struggle with our most important work, our creative work.
I have mentioned before how I believe a key to good writing is good notetaking. You compile a trusty backlog of ideas with potential and store them for later use.
Murakami uses the metaphor of a mental chest of drawers. Here we have lots of knowledge stored away, which we can draw on when the time is right for our creative writing process.
Your mental chest of drawers is a great asset when you set to work on a novel.
If you have stockpiled your chest with a rich variety of unrelated details, however, you will be amazed to see how naturally they pop up when the need arises, full of life and ready to be fit into the narrative.
Murakami
Do you have a mental chest of drawers?
If not, now is the time to start.
Whatever work you are doing, at some point, you’ll need good ideas.
Maybe you are writing content, attracting clients, designing a new project, leading and managing a team, redesigning your kitchen, exploring photography or coming up with riffs on the guitar.
You’ll need to connect the dots between your collected ideas and express them in creative output.
That’s what I am doing here.
The E.T. Method
Murakami explains how we dip into that mental chest of drawers during the writing process and use pieces of the material we have stored.
He then references a scene from “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial”, a popular 1980’s movie by Steven Spielberg:
E.T. assembles a transmitting device from the junk he pulls out of the garage. There’s an umbrella, a floor lamp, pots and pans, a record player – it’s been a long time since I saw the movie, so I can’t recall everything, but he manages to throw all those household items together in such a way that the contraption works well enough to communicate with his home planet thousands of light years away.
Remember that scene?
I was born in the ’80s, so I fondly remember that movie.
Murakami continues:
I got a big kick out of that scene when I saw it in the movie theatre, but it strikes me now that putting together a good novel is much the same thing.
The key component is not the quality of the materials – what’s needed is magic.
If that magic is present, the most basic daily matters and the plainest language can be turned into a device of surprising sophistication.”
Interesting.
It’s not the quality of what you have that matters, but the magic in how you put it together!
Just like E.T. managed to do.
This insight gives those who are new to developing their craft hope.
First and foremost, though, is what is packed in your garage.
Magic can’t work if your garage is empty.
You’ve got to stash away a lot of junk to use if and when E.T. comes calling!
Murakami
I love the E.T. garage metaphor for our creative minds and the work that calls us.
You have nothing to write about
One of the problems we face in today’s modern society is that life is generally pretty good.
(I know there are many exceptions! But that’s beyond our scope here.)
And a problem with a generally good life is that we may not find much to write about at first glance.
It all feels relatively standard.
No big rollicking adventure like E.T. travelling across the galaxy.
Maybe you feel called to write, but no topics come to mind.
You don’t have any significant challenges you feel are worthy of exploring.
This is where the “E.T. Method” becomes your solution.
“Their only recourse is to throw open their garage doors, drag out whatever they have stored away to that point – even if it looks like no more than a pile of useless junk – and slave away until the magic takes hold.”
Murakami
Make do with what you have.
Try your best.
Keep at it until the magic arises, and you will be on your way to success.
That’s what I have done here today in writing this newsletter.
Throughout the week, I collected notes in my “mental chest of drawers”. When the time came, I started writing and combining the things aligned with my newsletter theme until “magic” emerged in the document.
Murakami also calls this “practicing magic”. The connecting of dots from your garage is like linking with distant planets.
So when you have nothing to write about (or whatever your medium of work is), return to the E.T. Method.
Explore your mental garage and connect bits and pieces.
Magic will emerge from these seemingly useless and unrelated bits of information.
Are you storing ideas in your mental chest of drawers, whatever that looks like for you, so that you can create the magic?
💬 A quote to ponder
– On authentically building rapport
“The other way of building rapport is to learn to embrace and leverage your own unique personality and quirks.”
Corey Wilks
📣 What happened this week
A mighty annual review to unlock potential
Rich Litvin is a leader and coach who inspires me to improve my craft and serve people more powerfully.
During the week, he kindly shared his annual review process.
If you are serious about a big year ahead, I recommend undertaking this annual review.
Find a quiet space, sit with the questions, and journal your responses.
I base my Annual Review around 6 concepts: success, energy, fear, growth, confidence and excitement.
THE ANNUAL REVIEW
1. SUCCESS: What are you proud of this year? (It’s not bragging if you’ve done it and bragging is a lost art).
2. ENERGY: What energised you and what drained you this year? (Your next level of success is held back by the people, places and habits that are draining you of energy).
3. FEAR: What scared you this year? (Fear is often a mask for desire. Did you let it hold you back, or did you move ahead anyway?)
4. GROWTH: How did you grow this year?
5. CONFIDENCE: What are you most confident about in this current moment?
6. EXCITEMENT: What are you excited for in the year ahead?
Rich Litvin
Take it seriously.
I’m sure you will uncover some gold to help you succeed in the coming year.
💭 Thanks for reading!
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Cheers!