The Productive Man Starter Kit

The Productive Man Starter Kit

You are worth more than you know. It may not feel that way, but there exists, in the future, a better version of your current self.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. To change your life all you need is a plan.

A man without a plan is nothing at all. He’s just a barnacle in life, filter feeding off of whatever drifts by. Consuming and not producing, existing and not living, seeing but never observing.

All men may be created equal but not all men are created the same. To each their own but their own should be that of purpose. Here is a quick checklist to help reorient your thoughts and get back to a more meaningful life.

You see, but you do not observe.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Think

When was the last time you just sat and thought about something. Really picked it apart. Game theoried out some possibilities. Dug into what you really felt about something. Politics, nature, relationships, religion. It’s amazing how long that has been for some people. Even I, your humble writer, has gone weeks without truly…thinking.

The post-modern Man is assaulted with a constant stream of distractions to divert your attention and help you to NOT think. Why? Because your attention is valuable. It’s so valuable that billion dollar corporations pour millions of working hours into fine tuning their apps and games to wring every last bit of attention out of you as possible.

Why not take that valuable asset and invest it in yourself. Sit down and think about something. Anything. You’ll be amazed at what you come up with.

Learn

A recent report has shown that the IQ of Americans has lowered over the past 13 years. This is by design. The elites want a malleable and compliant consumer class to keep them in power. A dearth of education, especially education that empowers men, continues to plague the western world. Feminism has destroyed the upward trajectory of Millenial, GenZ and Gen Alpha men.

So to regain your purpose you must learn. And you must obtain knowledge asymmetrically. What do I mean by that? I mean you should learn about a subject from multiple sources and multiple mediums. Podcasters, youtubers, Ted Talkers, TikTokers, writers and teachers all approach the same subject from different angles and in varying levels of depth. Don’t get locked in on Podcasts as your main source of information. If you do that, you aren’t liable to have a well rounded understanding of a subject. I could write a whole post about this subject but for the sake of brevity I’ll leave you with this axiom:

Information you get off of the internet is a rough simulacra of actual knowledge that is stored inside of the pages of books.

Plan

You’ve done your part thinking and learning and something has changed inside of you. You know you need to DO something. Something HAS to change. You can’t see it yet, but the impulse builds inside of you and tells you it’s time for action. You have the what and the where but now you need the how. Now it’s time to make a plan. Without a vision, the people perish says Proverbs 29:18 and without a plan you will waste the most precious resource on the planet; your time. Make a plan following the time tested SMART method.

Simple
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-Bound

By far the most important part of goal making is simplicity and timeliness. If the goal is too complex with no due-date then it’ll never get done.

It’s crucial to remember that planning should only take a fraction of the time you’ve spent thinking and learning. If you spend too much time planning you won’t act. Planning is important but it can’t be the only thing you do.

"Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success."

Pablo Picasso

Do

Thinking, learning and planning MUST be followed by execution otherwise you’ve been wasting your time. The Doing part can be hard for some, and that comes in part because an object at rest wants to stay at rest. You must overcome thermodynamics to follow through on your best laid plans. That’s why the plan is so important; if you have made the first steps too difficult, you will never start.

And let’s be clear: watching more youtube videos or reading blogs about the thing you want to do isn’t doing, that’s research. Doing is making progress towards a goal. It is action. It is getting that EIN for your small business, it is taking an hour to set up Quickbooks, it is going to the hardware store and purchasing what you need to start, it is making the call or writing the email to the person you want to do business with.

Those are actions. Actions build momentum. Research does not build momentum. Most of your research should be done once the planning stage is completed. Check in here or there but don’t get sucked into endless Twitter Spaces or Podcasts when you should be out there making momentum happen. Once you have built momentum you will find that creating a new future for yourself is a lot easier than you thought. All you had to do was stop and think for a bit.

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