Maker, Manager and the 2% Challenge
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2015
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if you spent more time making?
We tend to spend our work lives dancing between two modes: maker mode and manager mode.
The idea first came to me through a friend, Brad Feld. Maker mode is where we are immersed in the process of creation, innovation, problem-solving, artistry. It's a powerfully generative state that often creates the giant leaps forward, the big ideas and awakenings that propel us.
Manager mode is all the administrative, process-driven stuff you need to do to breathe life into the genius that emerges from maker mode. It's a necessary adjunct and, for some, it's also the place where they become most alive and aligned.
Problem is, they often have trouble happening at the same time. One pulls you almost violently from the other and you end ping-ponging between the two and never really make much progress on each.
What if you took a different approach? What if you created designated, longer-term windows for each. Then took it even farther and, when in maker mode, focused only on the 2% of making that yielded the most stunning outcomes?
That's what we're talking about in today's short and sweet GLP Riff.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week's Good Life Project is entitled, Pick Your 2% and Put Everything Against It. |
| 0:08.7 | So what if you blew up your schedule and rebuilt it around your ability to birth genius? |
| 0:14.3 | What if you started with a blank white schedule then added in 4 to 5 hours a day in fluid |
| 0:19.0 | burst where you dropped into uninterrupted hyper-focused make-or-mode? |
| 0:25.4 | Instead of then and only then you added back in a smattering of, quote, manager-mode items |
| 0:31.7 | like meetings and calls and conversation and other administrative, but only what could |
| 0:37.6 | fit into a designated 2-3 hour window every day. |
| 0:42.2 | And what if you kept the schedule for a week or a month or a season? |
| 0:46.6 | What if you kept the schedule for life? |
| 0:49.7 | How might this change not only what you're capable of creating, but the way you |
| 0:55.1 | engage with the people you adore and your ability to build or rebuild a vital, healthy, |
| 1:03.0 | body, mind, spirit, and life? |
| 1:06.0 | What might the net impact of this be? |
| 1:09.1 | Not just on you, but on the world around you? |
| 1:13.8 | What if as legendary Boulder Colorado, venture capitalist and tech-starch co-founder and author |
| 1:19.9 | what Brad felt as he offers what if you picked the 2% where you could make a massive difference |
| 1:27.8 | and you put everything you've got into it and then let everything else go? |
| 1:33.0 | And interestingly in the summers Brad pretty much does just that. |
| 1:38.6 | Moving to a mountain house in Keystone with his wife and a few golden retrievers, he |
| 1:43.4 | bandends his insanely packed schedule, mountains of beatings constant calls 16 to 18 hour |
| 1:49.2 | days and spends months away from the world, writing, creating, running, connecting, refueling. |
| 1:56.7 | When he does this what unfolds is pretty extraordinary and he shares it often. |
... |
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