This is one of the most difficult posts I’ve ever written. I have been writing it and rewriting it for days. I can’t seem to finish it. I’m still not sure I should have posted it. But in the spirit of vulnerability and authenticity, here we go.

If you are like me, you find great satisfaction and value in your work. That’s a good thing. That’s the way it’s suppose to be.

But as much as I enjoy being productive and getting things done, there is a reality I am coming to grips with: My worth as a person has nothing to do with the amount or quality of stuff I can accomplish. I am not defined by what I do. And doing more will never make me more content.

This might sound arrogant and I don’t mean for it to, but when it comes to my job, I think I’m a pretty productive guy. I’ve worked tirelessly to figure out ways to get a lot done in a short amount of time with very few resources. For instance, in the first quarter of 2013 we shipped 45 finished videos. The “we” in that sentence is me and a few freelancers that almost add up to one full-time person. That’s more than the company I used to worked for produced with an entire staff of full-time employees. To say I run a high-performance scrappy little outfit would be an understatement.

That should be something to celebrate. But here’s the unfortunate truth: I’m a workaholic. Productivity is my drug of choice.

When the afterglow of a job well done fades too quickly, I’m out looking for my next fix.

The harder I push, the faster we move, the bigger the invoices get.

But when will it be enough? That’s the crux of this post.

We have been indoctrinated to believe that progress will eventually lead us to some ideal state. It will not.

We learn this from a culture obsessed with success. Some go so far as to say finding your life’s work is worth losing your marriage and your sanity for. There are thousands of books, blogs, websites, and consultants dedicated to helping you get more done. Brands tap into it too. With that next cup of Starbucks, you’ll be able to send twice as many emails in half the time. And that Pinterest project will make you look like Supermom to all your friends.

Just push a little harder. Do a little bit more. Find a hack to make you slightly more productive than the rest. These things are not inherently evil, but our over-worked, over-caffeinated, over-achieving culture glorifies them ad nauseam. And yet, at the same time, we’re inundated with more ways to stay distracted than we’ve ever had. Interesting.

Think I’m being too dramatic? Have you looked around lately? Probably not. You’ve been staring down at your phone checking “important” emails and Facebook all day. Why? Because you get a tiny thrill each time that little red notification appears. You do. I do.

When was the last time you went more than an hour without checking your phone? When was the last time you spent more than an hour working on one big idea, something meaningful?

I started writing this post at an empty bar, with pen and paper, iPhone off at 3:30 on a Monday afternoon. Normally I would be writing on my iPad in a coffee shop, sipping something with too much caffeine, watching people come in and leave, flipping back and forth between Facebook, email, Twitter, and Instagram, and expecting something substantive to flow effortlessly forth. Sound familiar?

Please hear me, I’m not necessarily recommending the bar as an ideal place to do meaningful work. It’s just that for me, writing at the bar punctuates a shift I want to make. It’s a shift away from forcing progress, away from the status quo, and away from my addiction to technology. Don’t worry Pour Jon’s, it’s not a shift away from coffee.

It is a shift toward finding contentment in the moment, and as I wrote about in my last post, allowing my natural rhythm to lead me into productive zones.

Yesterday I needed to get out of the office for a walk and find a quiet place to think and write. So that’s what I did. And I made progress on something much more important than emails and projects.

I made progress on my wellbeing.

There are a thousand more “productive” things I could have done. And in a corporate job, I would have pushed through the day and probably just sent a few more emails that would be forgotten as soon as they were received.

I’m not saying we should give up or stop trying. I’m not saying we shouldn’t work really hard at things we love. Not at all.

What I’m saying is that when those things start to define us, we’re walking a dangerous line. We each have a primal longing to be accepted, celebrated, and validated for the value we bring. Our Maker gave us a desire to be productive and creative. But that’s not our sole reason for existing. I think it’s easy to forget that because for a lot of us, work consumes most of our waking hours.

And it’s not that I love working more than other things in my life. I really don’t. I love my wife exponentially more than I love my work. But it’s easy to get out of balance because of the ratio of time and the pressure we feel from ourselves and the societal expectation to achieve.

To keep myself in check, it’s important for me to think about holding my work loosely. To remind myself that it is only one aspect of my life, not even the most important aspect. And to force myself to stop long enough to realize what I’m obsessing about.

Not to get all new age on you, but meditation is one thing that helps keep me centered. Even five minutes of stillness is enough to clear my head for most of the day. Try it once. Sit still, breathe deeply, and try not to think about anything for five minutes. It feels like an eternity. Yet, five minutes is less than one half of one percent of your day. You start to realize how incredibly noisy, busy, and frantic our world is. And you realize how empowering a clear mind can be.

Just don’t confuse being productive with producing meaningful work. There’s a big difference.

How’s that for a disjointed pile of words on a screen?

To put a nice bow on it, I leave you with some words from Macklemore, one of the great philosophers of our day:

And I had to find out who I really was
Who I really wasn’t
So sick of who I was becoming
Yeah, tired of running
Time to look at the man in the mirror until I can learn to love him

Make the money, don’t let the money make you
Change the game, don’t let the game change you
I’ll forever remain faithful
All my people stay true

Here is the latest episode in a series called LeaderSkilz that I help produce (and act in) for The Soderquist Center.

In this episode, the boss plays favorites by lightening the load for his flag football teammate at the expense of someone else. The lesson: Great leaders don’t favor their friends over others in the organization.

Special thanks to Walmart for sponsoring this episode!

We’ve produced 18 episodes so far. I still chuckle at the original pilot:

©2012 The Soderquist Center

Steven Spielberg sitting on the mechanical shark from Jaws (Louis Goldman/AMPAS)

Jaws is one of my favorite films. It scared the living daylights out of me as a kid. The music, that little boat that crumbles to pieces, Captain Quint. Epic.

Jaws was also the first film to surge past the $100-million box-office mark.

Yet for a movie about a shark, you really don’t see the shark that much. Director Steven Spielberg didn’t intend for it to be that way.

During the making of the film, the crew couldn’t get the mechanical shark to work. It was wrought with technical problems and never worked the way Spielberg wanted it to.

This was a huge disappointment to the young Spielberg. After all, how the heck can you make a movie about a shark without a shark?

They had to figure out how to tell the story without their main character.

To hide the mechanical shark, Spielberg and company took the approach of “what you don’’t see is scarier than what you do see”. This approach made all the difference. And as they say, the rest is history.

Today I heard Andy Murray talk about how constraints lead to breakthroughs in creativity. The Jaws example is a powerful testament to this idea. The constraint was not obvious or intentional at first. Had the shark worked, the film may very well have flopped. Yet because of this challenging constraint, they figured out a way to tell the story in a much richer way.

When we think about being “creative,” we often think of half-day brainstorming sessions where there are no bad ideas and every idea under the sun is up for consideration. The counterintuitive truth here is that the most creative ideas come as a result of having constraints, not from an absence of them.

So the next time you’re trying to solve a problem, try putting a constraint around it. Maybe it’s a time constraint: “I must come up with a solution in the next 30 minutes.” Or a people constraint: “We’re going to solve this with only two people.” Or maybe it’s a resource constraint: “Using only the tools we currently have, we’re going to figure out a creative solution.”

“Where resources are plentiful (i.e. no constraints), you will find very little creativity. Where resources are scarce (i.e. many constraints), you will find an abundance of creativity.” – Andy Murray

A wise person once told me that it is always good to have a bias for action.

When we are presented with an opportunity, a challenge or a decision, it is almost always better to lean toward doing something rather than sitting around thinking about it or analyzing it to death.

This also applies to plain ‘ol everyday life (although a life full of action is anything but plain). Do something constructive with your time. Teach people, help people, build stuff, design stuff. We were created to create.

People sometimes ask how I can be so productive. I think it has a lot to do with my bias for action. I try to keep this mantra top of mind.

Do you have a bias for action?

Don’t be fooled into thinking social media is the answer to your marketing problems.

Social media is a communication tool. That’s it.

Communication is nothing new. People have been communicating since the beginning of time. Only now instead of drawing pictures on rock walls, we type words into Twitter or Facebook.

Remarkable stuff is what matters.

If you don’t make or provide great stuff, no one will care about you. It doesn’t matter how much or how often you tweet, facebook, or spam, if you don’t have something remarkable to point people to, you are wasting your time.

I had coffee with a friend the other day who is a brilliant strategist and marketer. He’s doing a lot of social media consulting these days. He said that if a client wants to get into social media and they don’t have a truly remarkable product, the conversation about social media ends there. It’s futile. Social media doesn’t matter because no one is going to talk about your product or service if it’s not truly REmarkable (worthy of making a remark about).

So just make great stuff, or as Nick Campbell would say, “Make Cool Shit“

I recently discovered the blog of a business leader I respect very much.

I was excited. His blog has great content and great insight. It felt very authentic. It felt authentic until I clicked on the huge protruding “LEGAL” button at the top.

Come to find out, the site was “created” by this leader but it is “maintained” by the company. The legal notice goes on and on…and on about how you can and cannot use the site.

I’m not accusing this person of misleading his readers or anything like that. The point I’m making is that authenticity is critical. If you want me to believe that it’s really your thoughts I’m reading on your blog, don’t slap a huge corporate legal notice at the top. At the very least, tuck in down at the bottom.

This one is about keeping things simple. Much harder than making things complicated. Enjoy.

I have a friend whose husband works for the famous Little Debbie snack cakes. He used to work on the factory floor diagnosing and repairing equipment. He loved it. He was so good at it that they promoted him to Management.

My friend was saying that she knows how good her husband’s day has been by how much flour is on his clothes when he gets home. If his clothes are clean, she knows he’s mostly been doing administrative work in his office all day. If he’s covered in flour, she knows he’s been on the floor doing what he really loves.

If you are someone who loves designing, creating, or fixing things, I think it’s really important to keep doing those things even if you’ve worked your way in a “better” position.

For me, it’s making great videos. Sometimes I can use those videos in my marketing efforts. Sometimes I can’t.

What is it for you? Are you happier when you come home “covered in flour?”

Lately I’ve been thinking about where social media is leading us. Some people think we are going to end up with a society full of crazy narcissists. I think that’s already happened.

It’s really not even worth arguing whether social media is good or bad. It’s just a communication medium enabled by technology. And technology is amoral, it’s neither good or bad. It’s what we do with it that makes it good or bad.

I think social media is leading us to a world with absolutely no barrier in communication from one person to another. Throughout history, this barrier has always existed. Be it proximity, time, technology, whatever. The buffer between you and another person has always been there. Until now.

We are rapidly nearing a day when it is absolutely conceivable for two or more people to be inseparably linked via technology. The most imminent reality of this is live streaming video delivered via smartphones. It’s already happening.

This is an amazing time in history. We are on the cusp of a monumental shift in the way we communicate that will forever change the course of human interaction.

Pages from Leonardo da Vinci's journal

Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein…

All of us know these names and the work associated with them.

But what if these great thinkers (among others) hadn’t documented their ideas? What would we know of them? Especially considering that the extent of their influence came long after they were dead and gone.

These ideators were not isolated. Certainly there were plenty of other contemporary great minds with ideas just as groundbreaking. The difference is that the ones we know about documented their ideas in a form that could be shared. They did this during times when it was much harder to document and share ideas than it is today. It took years (hundreds for some) for their work to circulate and gain recognition.

We live in a time of unprecedented access to information and ideas. The communication platforms we use everyday give us opportunities the great minds of history never had access to. Yet they took painstaking time and extreme care to document and share their ideas. And that has made all the difference.

Are you being intentional about sharing your ideas with the world? Nothing is stopping you.

P.S. If Da Vinci were alive today, do you think he would tweet?