Inc., Kadavy

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.

I had discovered that making progress on my first book wasn’t so much about having the time to write. It was about being in the right state of mind to do the work at hand. I had discovered that today’s productivity isn’t so much about time management as it is about mind management.

Most people’s idea of productivity is to be able to produce a lot of something. To do a lot. Follow a series of steps, and you’re done. Do it over and over again.

But, more and more, if it can be completed in a series of steps, there’s no point in doing it. AI and automation are poised to eliminate forty to fifty percent of jobs within the next decade or two. It’s the jobs in which people follow a series of steps that are the most at-risk. AI expert Kai-Fu Lee says it’s the “optimization-based” jobs that will be taken over first. Jobs such as loan underwriters, customer service representatives, even radiologists. Jobs that involve what Lee calls “narrow tasks,” such as finding the ideal rate for an insurance premium, maximizing a tax refund, or diagnosing an illness. Tasks involving optimizing data will be the first to go.

Which jobs are safe from the reach of AI? According to Lee, it’s the jobs that require creativity

These days, the mental work that matters isn’t about following a series of steps. It’s about finding your way to a novel and useful solution.

Your edge as a human is not in doing something quickly.

Your edge as a human is in thinking the thoughts behind the doing.

“Earn with your mind, not your time.”

many of us approach productivity today as if it’s the speed of production, not the quality of our thinking, that matters.

“Scientific management,” aka “Taylorism,” was born.