Enter the cult of extreme productivity | Mark Adams | TEDxHSG

Thanks guys, I'm really hungover and I have a hundred slides, so this probably won't work in approx. I have been told that in 18 minutes a red dot will appear on my forehead and there will be a shot and my body will fall at this stage and that would be the end in the meantime let's try to learn a few things. I've noticed from chatting to people today that there are some really interesting people in this, like families, there are people here who support each other. Others of you told me yesterday at dinner that there is a real community for everyone, you know everyone at St.

Gallen University, so I want you to look at the people you know in this room and send them a psychic message of gratitude for all the support and all the things they have done to help you be the best. version of yourself, thank you, this is good and then as you do it, I want you to realize that according to global statistics, you are looking at the people most likely to murder you and the reason I say this is a trap, right? I know those pep talks and they're because you read on LinkedIn about

productivity

and all that stuff.

This is the satanic inversion of all that. Okay, so please forgive me for what's to come. Basically, I've done a TED talk before and they banned it. they weren't allowed to show it they didn't post it on the internet they said the ideas in it were dangerous so let me introduce you to the most dangerous group in the world this is the most dangerous TED talk in the world apparently okay so let's see what we can do with it, so my brother and I yeah, sorry about the hair, and my brother and I will always have been complete losers and basically the only thing my dad ever told us was that he's Scottish, so it sounds a bit. like Shrek you say guys even when he loved us we just felt cold you know it doesn't feel like you love us with him that's why he was like yeah guys remember a joke it's only a joke if both people think it's fun and honest.

I'm 30 now and I still fundamentally disagree with that. I think it's a lot funnier if one person thinks it's funny and the other doesn't, so all my brother and I would do is play practical jokes on each other. constantly, so this is all we had, the only skill we had was this and we lived in situations like this in college while unleashing. You know this feeling and why it is in a certain phase of our lives. We think it's really awesome to collect it. a cone and take it home I don't understand it and it's very strange, yeah, it really resonated well, so you know, we lived in hell, basically, right, this was our house, we lived in absolute hell, we were complete losers in all the possible senses.

The way our procrastination meters were through the roof, we didn't do any training sites either, you're resonating with all of these things and the interesting thing is that now my job, as you just heard, is that I have to teach innovation, so it's an incredible situation. I don't know how this happened, basically this complete loser is now the guy who's supposed to come and tell you no and I've worked with the biggest celebrities in the world, the biggest CEOs in the world and I've basically realized that innovation is It's kind of nonsense unless it's about changing and the interesting thing is that if I can change, anyone on this planet can change, okay, so my current job is basically to go and meet with leaders, you know. , I have met with some of them.

You know, like I said, some of the biggest CEOs and the biggest celebrities in the world, governments and politicians, and I basically walk in and they say, can you please change this person who just doesn't want to change? But what's interesting and this is the most serious point is that the technology, as Lulu was saying a little bit earlier, is growing at such a rate because of Moore's law and other incredibly, you know,

extreme

ly additional thermal reactions to the way As the world is changing, our human adaptability, our capacity for change is not able to keep up, so that's why I think the information that I'm about to give you is actually very powerful and important because, literally, in This point in history we can't keep up with the pace of change and it's going to get faster and faster and faster now, obviously this is worrying for you, you know mr.

Burns and the CEOs of the world, but much more importantly it is worrying for every company on the planet and for every human being on the planet, you are probably training yourself to do things that may not exist in 15 years. I do a job now. You know, my career advisor didn't. There was no such thing as being the chief innovation officer anyway, so it's an incredible time, but what we have to think about is how do we update our human operating systems so that the rate of change is not so high. it's going to get ahead of us and leave us in a really bad situation, so the common way to do this and since it's almost January is like this, you know, right, everyone says, oh yeah, that thing and you sit around the first of January you like this year it will be different you get rid of the cone right no I don't need it anymore I'm getting over that and you write down all these goals and all these things that you want to achieve the right thing and then they tell you that willpower will get you there and then you say my name is willpower for three days you are willpower and you're walking and whatever you're supposed to do you did it and what you're not supposed to do you don't do it and suddenly You say oh, I'm going to read some books and then you'll understand what kind of literature about success there is on LinkedIn and five

productivity

tricks from Elon Musk and you say, yeah, amazing, that's amazing, I'm totally killing life, and then you get into this hacker mentality and everyone knows you read Silicon Valley stuff, you start eating food they grow on the moon and anyway.

You can tell I was drinking last night and then life comes along and it just explodes because everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face and then we realize you know this is my plot. I read them all. From those books I did everything but eat the moon's food because that doesn't even exist and honestly it doesn't work well, it's time to take a breath and accept, but it's another trap in this whole billion dollar successful literary industry. Overall I have to say that 95% of TED talks, all about hacking, changing and trying to alter yourself from the inside, don't work, okay, I'm sorry to bear this news and you can see why Ted hasn't decided to publish previous TED talks . you know why it's a function of time in the movie interstellar there's a great line where you notice that the old man the old scientist has asked you do you know who your enemy is essentially what you're afraid of me says I'm afraid of time this is going to have a little conceptual, but we constantly think that this person who is going to do all these things that the five productivity tricks that we read on LinkedIn say to do is to get this person that we will be tomorrow, but tomorrow is this place.

This fictional earth where 99% of all human productivity happens, but when it actually arrives it's just now again and we're the same person, so this version of ourselves we set up as if we were going to be this person. I'm going to go to the gym I'm going to stop collecting cones I'm going to do what's right but when that time comes it's for now and we're the same person so we think with this guy but we're like this guy, and what's really interesting is that we've been told you know this is the information age. We've been told that more information can solve this problem, so we read more and we think I'm going to download more audiobooks and then I have friends who listen to audiobooks at three times the speed so that they can consume more information, so that they can learn more and be able change, but that doesn't create a change, since someone just said, yeah, it's a guy, dad, anyway, so we're really in this and I fundamentally think it's a trap and I think it's a very profitable trap for a lot of people, so they tell us that if you consume more information, if you read that other book that I'm going to make you read, then you stop doing it, oh yeah, well, if you read the other one the long tail long I don't know you you have to read this one well and I'm not saying don't read I mean I've never done any number of reading that hurt me but whatever but the point is that it's a fundamental situation where we have to accept that we don't need any more information that I've learned from teaching celebrities, CEOs , governments, even politicians know how to change and how to move with technology, they don't need it.

Let me come and tell them more things, they know what they have to do, just like you all know what you have to do to pass the exams and all the things you have to do to be the people you are, the question is. Will you do them? So at a certain point you're going to have to confess that it's you against you and I'm not sure that the version of you that you think you want to be and the version of you that acts in the way that you're not so happy with, I'm not sure that you can honestly say that those two are the same continuous self over time, it's more like, I think we might be modeling this wrong and I think that economics, the economic paradigm, has given us this type of Homo economicus, since you know, transient preference, everything he does, they call him, he's basically the same person now, since we'll be on at 2 in the morning, you'll see him at 2 in the morning at the after party.

I will do that. not be the same person, so I'm going to be totally honest with you. I went through a period where I felt very, very, very affected by this. I was reading everything there was to read. I was really getting into all this stuff and it wasn't working for me, it was my procrastination, it was through the roof, like I said, and I really honestly started selling streams. I thought I knew I could and I knew what I had to do, but I just wasn't doing any of it. and instead of doing that, I was reading more and I actually started to get to the point where I was suffering from incredible anxiety and panic attacks and I was sitting there and it was basically because I was literally chronically building this up. expectation of who I was supposed to be or what I was supposed to do and never meeting that expectation and I hope this is therapy because I think we never talk about this, we are told that we are always supposed to feel like we are.

We're moving forward and the stupid thing we said to ourselves was, yeah, you know, it's not really going well, but I think we're creating this anxiety and the moment that really changed for me was my Nana, you can see in the middle here and you can see to my brother, me and my family running, this is my family so you can see where I really come from and my Nana was diagnosed with cancer and I will never forget this, my mother. I'm a Nana, we had a talk and Nana said she would love when she was in the hospital to have a little tape back in the day of music, so you know she couldn't use iTunes to do this stuff, so my brother and I said that we would do it.

Make this tape and we'll send it to your hospital bed and my mom called me because there were a couple of tensions at Nana's house. I really want to listen to that tape. It's going to be great, can you, can you, can you, but hurry up because you know she's. No good and we said yes, we went out another night, we got Conan Doyle home and we went crazy and we did other things and we kept putting things off, we kept the rude name, we kept putting it off, we kept putting it off, remember Nana sent it by phone, I loved that tape.

I'm literally in this hospital room alone all the time. Know? I really appreciate that tape. Yes, for sure we will definitely do it tomorrow. You absolutely know what is going to happen one day. Mom called and said Nana left. No no. worrying about the tape and that was the last straw, my brother and I just went, this is it, we've put off getting on with it for 95% of our lives, we've sucked, we both suffer from crippling anxiety and now the only person we absolutely loved that we owed something - we didn't do it because we were caught up in the moment and it was going to be this future me that was going to do it but it never came so this mixtape really changed things and we really broke each other in the medium and said don't write anymore and we basically found through research this global sub

cult

ure of people that this was actually back in the days of the dark web and you could get there pretty easily and do all kinds of things and all kinds of things. ways that's enough now and I will Send me to am and we realized that from Silicon Valley to Shanghai there are people with a system that is nothing like the system we talked about just a minute ago and this system is called blocking and I want give them this.

This is a dangerous idea, okay, this is the dangerous part. Blocking is one of those things where if you want to go down the rabbit hole, you can go all the way down, so if not, you cover your ears. I don't listen to it anymore Lock-in takes seriously the idea that we are not the same person over time and basically says that the person you are at moment a is a fundamentally different person than what you might be atthat moment due to your preferences. and the way you're set up and basically that, like I said, you know you have a critical self, a self knows that you have to make that tape for your Nana and knows that you have to do that work, knows that you have You have to do your talk TED tomorrow and not go out the night before like I did and have experience and want to live in the now and the future. me, this critical self who knows what he needs to do and it's about considering time and this myopic experience that he wants to maximize at the present moment and they, like I said, are not friends, this is a very famous footballer, George, better, you can see him having his He experienced himself on the left side here and his critical self was the one who paid, so you have this moment where you have something that is what we call in law a distributive question of justice over time, well, that basically means that it is maximized a lot. at one point you take completely from futures and the person you take from is yourself in the future, so smoking, drinking, all these things essentially take from someone, but that someone is someone you don't have any relationship with yet, but en So this becomes really metaphysical and it was really interesting when George Best died, he, you know, literally wrote this saying don't do this, so we started researching this and digging really deep into this and there's actually this thing.

In demonology, in Judaism, this demon is called still lord and the still lord basically takes you away from the self that you could be in this, this, more, this much lower self that actually destroys your life, so actually we started drinking. This idea is actually very serious and if you look at it, personal decisions are now the leading cause of death and you have this situation where, whatever it is, there was this distributive problem of justice that we have to deal with, it is causing so much anguish. pain and now with the economy changing so quickly, if we can't find a way to get better, we are in deep, deep, deep trouble, so that's what I thought, now is the time to bring this idea to light and it has sense because we are animals looking for food, we literally maximize the moment because of our evolutionary psychology and, as you know, the classic example of this is Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they were expelled from paradise for an apple. I mean, maybe there's a metaphor that I don't have, but you know there's an Apple, right, and look, it looks like they fell, mom, dad, I'll go on, but what you end up with is that it's this moment, wait, we're looking for food, We take what we can eat, drink and be happy because tomorrow we may die, so we are constantly maximizing the present moment. So how do you escape this demonic trap? You have to find a way to lock yourself into your critical self that knows what time it is.

You will require it and you will lock yourself in, so when that werewolf starts coming out you can't let it control you and Ulysses is the classic example of this, so Odysseus knew the sirens were going to call him and he tied himself up. to the mast and told his men to completely ignore everything he said and this is game theory so the game is all about mutual assured destruction it's all about changing the payoff matrix so you have to do it really expensive, really painful and hugely important if you don't do what you know you should do then these things don't work these things do work and we build the world on contracts we build the commercial world we live in on contracts I can contract with you on I'm sorry about this, but I can contract with you about anything almost right and we accept that there are sanctions and punishments and the enforceability of that contract consequences if I don't do what I'm supposed to do, but there's no such thing with promises. what do you do to yourself so we start saying what if we support each other what if my brother makes a promise and I enforce it because promises without the sword are nothing more than words and this is the type of Apocalypse Now if You have to make your friend fear so you have to be so afraid of not making it that the courts when he arrived in South America burned all the ships so there was no turning back for the men he made his friend fear Now there are ways to exclude yourself stay away from the casinos so you literally can't get in and what will happen is this other version of yourself will try to fight back, it will be like an exorcism, right, but it will eventually end with this if you accept the fact that it's more.

Scarier to fail than to succeed you will achieve crazy things and this was me at Buckingham Palace collecting an award this is my brother don't go to Harvard and we only achieved this through this and I just want to say if we can achieve anything and update the human operating system so fast. I think there's something in this for everyone and I hope we can use this, be a little more specific about it and integrate it into a system and actually try to get up to speed as far as technology goes. We update. Thank you so much guys.

Greetings.