You Can’t Optimize Your Way to Perspective (with Tiago Forte)
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40:43
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Tiago Forte and I both started out teaching people how to get more done. This conversation is about what each of us found when that stopped being the real question.
Tiago's new book, Life in Perspective, is built around the annual life review. We use it as a way into proportion, grace, and why the present is the hardest stretch of time to look at, along with what happens when the systems we build begin to undermine themselves.
Six Discussion Points
Attention can't be treated as one commodity, which is why the shift from attention to perspective is about quality rather than quantity.
Perspective is closer to space than to time, and losing it shows up as lost proportion, a matter of angle rather than character, which a range can track better than a pie chart.
Optimizing tends to double down on itself, and a reflective practice can serve as the built-in safety mechanism that catches us when it goes too far.
Without grace, a review of your year becomes a report of failures rather than a story.
The present is the hardest stage to look at because there's less outside data and future-oriented people are practiced at leaving it.
The smallest thing worth writing down during the year is what resonates, because the seeds of what matters rarely make sense at first.
Productiveness: my book on productivity as an activity versus productiveness as a state, which comes up in the conversation.
I came away from this one thinking less about reviewing a year and more about how we look at our lives at all. If you've built systems that work and still feel the pull to build another one, this conversation is for you. Listen, and if something resonates, write it down. That turned out to be the smallest practice we landed on.
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Episode 682