Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal

How strongly I recommend this book: 4 / 10

Date read: December 27, 2023

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Summary

Ali’s entire premise is based on feeling good about doing the work. Instead of hard-core disciplined approach, try finding ways to make the work more fun. He lays out a lot of research around how we do our best work when we’re less stressed. However, I’m not sure how much I agree with this premise. I’ve come across research that calls out that dopamine stacking can cause less and less enjoyment with the task at hand. I’ll get back to this topic when I’ve done more reading in this area.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

Introduction

• Positive emotions are the fuel that drives the engine of human flourishing.

• Positive emotions are bound up with a set of four hormones: endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin, which are often labelled as the ‘feel-good hormones’. All of them allow us to accomplish more.
  • Endorphins are often released during physical activity, stress or pain and bring about feelings of happiness and diminished discomfort – and elevated levels usually correlate with increased energy and motivation.
  • Serotonin is connected to mood regulation, sleep, appetite and overall feelings of wellbeing; it underpins our sense of contentment and gives us the energy to tackle tasks efficiently.
  • Dopamine, or the ‘reward’ hormone, is linked with motivation and pleasure and its release provides a satisfaction that allows us to focus for longer.
  • Oxytocin, known as the ‘love’ hormone, is associated with social bonding, trust and relationship-building, which enhances our capacity to connect with others, boosts our mood and, in turn, impacts our productivity.

• The participants who watched the positive-emotion films took significantly less time to return to their baseline state in terms of heart rate and blood pressure. And those who watched the sadness-evoking film took the longest time to return to baseline. This is the ‘undoing hypothesis’: that positive emotions can ‘undo’ the effects of stress and other negative emotions. If stress is the problem, then feeling good might just be the solution.

• Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.

Part 1: Energise

• Feynman was not alone. To my knowledge, at least six Nobel Prize winners attribute their success to play.
  • James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA in the 1950s, described the generative process they used to come up with the structure as ‘constructing a set of molecular models and beginning to play’.
  • Alexander Fleming, the scientist who discovered the antibiotic penicillin, once described his job as ‘playing with microbes’.
  • Donna Strickland, the 2018 Nobel laureate in Physics, described her career as ‘getting to play with high-intensity lasers’.
  • Konstantin Novoselov, who shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for helping discover graphene, put it most simply: ‘If you try to win the Nobel, you won’t,’ he reflected. ‘The way we were working really was quite playful.’

• Those who had more adventurous experiences – those who took themselves off to a wider and more random assortment of places, whether taking a new route to work or trying a different coffee shop rather than sticking to their regular one – felt happier, more excited and more relaxed. Their conclusion: an adventurous life holds the key to unlocking positive emotions.

• Think of a task that you don’t want to do right now, and ask what would it look like if it were fun?

• Children are more likely to play when they’re in a comfortable, non-threatening environment. And studies of adults in the workplace have found that the feeling of relaxation promotes playful behaviours, as well as promoting creativity and wellbeing.

• No failure is ever just a failure. It’s an invitation to try something new.

• ‘In frivolity there is a lightness which can rise. But in seriousness is a gravity that falls, like a stone.’ This, he said, was true of people who understood Zen. He summarised it thus: ‘There is a difference between being serious and being sincere.’

• There’s an element of fun in every task, even if it isn’t always obvious. Try asking yourself what this would look like if it were fun, and then build your projects around the answer.

• When the going got tough, those who believed they could do it – regardless of their ability – were the ones who actually could. And, crucially, the students who were primed to be more confident ended up enjoying the exercise a lot more too. This study was exploring a simple question. How does our level of self-confidence affect our performance? The answer to this question – along with those of many such studies before and since – is simple: a great deal. Feeling confident about our ability to complete a task makes us feel good when we’re doing it, and helps us do it better.

• The next time you’re not feeling good enough to take a chance, simply ask yourself, ‘What would it look like if I were really confident at this? What would it look like if I approached this task feeling confident that I could do it?’

• Seneca said, Qui docet discit – ‘He who teaches learns’.

• Intrinsic motivation is something that can be built up. As early as the 1980s, they were demonstrating that intrinsic motivation can be enhanced by a handful of forces, chief among them our sense of ‘autonomy’. In layperson’s terms, that’s a sense of ownership. And it’s our final contributor to the sense of power that energises us and our work. Deci and Ryan argued that when people feel they have power over their own actions, they’re much more likely to be intrinsically motivated to engage in them. That’s why the Soma cube experiment found that monetary rewards reduce people’s motivation. They don’t feel like they fully ‘own’ the task – but that they’re undertaking it for some external reward. Their sense of control declines, and so does their sense of motivation.

• Simply switching their mindset from ‘have to’ to ‘choose to’ they boosted their sense of control, power and, in turn, what they were capable of.

• Eno would reflect on the importance of that unique musical community in launching his career. He noticed that all the most innovative and ground-breaking musicians of his time were not working in isolation; they were part of a larger scene of artists, producers and fans who were all pushing each other to explore new sounds and ideas. Eno had discovered the genius of the collective scene. Or, as he called it, scenius.

• This seemingly small act – borrowing a book – had a significant effect on Franklin’s opponent and on Franklin himself. The man was so surprised by the gesture that he began to see Franklin in a new light. He couldn’t reconcile the fact that he had helped someone he disagreed with. As a result, the man’s attitude towards Franklin began to change for the better. This concept is today known as the ‘Benjamin Franklin effect’. It suggests that when we ask someone for help, it’s likely to make them think better of us.

• A Swedish proverb says: ‘A shared joy is a double joy; a shared sorrow is a half sorrow.’ When one person shares good news with another, both people are happy. And when one person shares something sad with another, the act of sharing takes some of the sadness away.

Part 2: Unblock

• When negative feelings like confusion, fear and inertia stand in our way, we put things off. This leads to even more bad feelings, and in turn even more procrastination. It’s a negative loop of low mood and stagnation.

• We get procrastination wrong. All too often, we approach procrastination by treating the symptoms rather than the underlying causes. And all too often, those causes relate to our mood: when we feel bad, we achieve less. So the unblock method is about establishing what’s really blocking your good mood – and finding a way to eliminate it.
  • The first emotional barrier is the simplest: uncertainty. The solution? To gain clarity about what you’re actually doing. That involves asking ‘why?’ and then using this to figure out your ‘how’.
  • Next, ask ‘what?’. That means an alternative approach to goal-setting. Forget SMART goals. What you need are goals that feel NICE (near-term, input-based, controllable and energising).
  • Last, ask ‘when?’. If you don’t know when you’re going to do something, chances are you won’t do it. One solution is to use implementation intentions – where your common daily habits become triggers for the things you intend to work on: for example, if I brush my teeth, then I’ll stretch my hamstring.

• Psychologist Howard Becker suggested that the labels society places on us profoundly affect the way we behave. At the time, Becker was focused on labels in the context of criminality: he found that people who are labelled as ‘criminal’ after a first crime are much more likely to engage in criminal behaviour again.

• Inspired by Beyoncé, Adele created her own alter ego, Sasha Carter, an amalgamation of Sasha Fierce and the legendary country singer June Carter. Sasha Carter was everything Adele aspired to be on stage: fearless, unapologetically bold, and radiating confidence. By stepping into the persona of Sasha Carter, she was able to distance herself psychologically from her fears and become the confident and powerful performer she had always dreamed of being.

• Our fears are often blown out of proportion. Ask yourself these questions to prevent yourself from catastrophising:
  • Will this matter in 10 minutes?
  • Will this matter in 10 weeks?
  • Will this matter in 10 years?
• Pychyl told me that whenever he finds himself procrastinating from anything, he simply asks himself, ‘What’s the next action step?’ For instance, when he knows he’s procrastinating from doing yoga, his next action step is to roll out his yoga mat and stand on it. That’s it.

Part 3: Sustain

• ‘People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on,’ he said. ‘But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are… Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.’ Jobs’ message was clear: no was just as important as yes. ‘I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done,’

• The people who seem to get the most done are often those who’ve turned doing nothing for large chunks of time into a fine art.

• How can we maximise the potential of these creative hobbies? The trick is to ensure that they remain just that: distinct from your work, with no clear end point and no stress. To this end, it can be helpful to make sure that your hobby has clear boundaries.
  • Establish specific times for your creative activity, and distinguish it from your work and daily responsibilities.
  • Try dedicating a particular room or space to your hobby, turning off work notifications during your creative time, or setting a regular schedule for when you’ll engage in your chosen activity.

• He found that the patients whose windows faced the greenery were healing on average a whole day faster, requiring significantly less pain medication and experiencing fewer complications than their counterparts staring at the wall.

• Participants felt more relaxed during park walks than street walks. And they felt more revitalised during park walks when alone – perhaps because this let them soak up the natural world better – but more revitalised during street walks when with a friend – probably because of the effect of people on our energy levels.

• After the earthquake, employees reported valuing intrinsic goals more than extrinsic ones. What’s more, the greater the sense of mortality threat they had experienced, the larger the shift towards intrinsic goals.

• We’ve got three for Health (Body, Mind and Soul); three for Work (Mission, Money, Growth) and three for Relationships (Family, Romance, Friends). Next, you rate how aligned you feel in each area of your life. Ask yourself: ‘To what extent do I feel like my current actions are aligned with my personal values?’

• The ‘12-month celebration’. This is my favourite method to convert dreams into actions. The idea is simple. Imagine it’s twelve months from now and you’re having dinner with your best friend. You’re celebrating how much progress you’ve made in the areas of life that are important to you over the last year.