The top performers in the history of art, science, entrepreneurship, and leadership all swear by the power of Infinite Devotion

Over the last year, I’ve spent several hundred hours using the blockbuster process to research the concept I present in this article, which I will also expand on in a series. This research included collecting dozens of case studies, studying the academic research on motivation going back more than 100 years, and experimenting with how to incorporate the lessons into my own life while helping others do the same.

In many ways, it is the culmination of spending thousands of hours over the last 8 years studying and assimilating the lessons of the great scientists, innovators, entrepreneurs, creatives, and leaders of all time.

Like a picture slowly coming into focus, I feel that I’m finally able to express in words what I’ve been grasping at for years. Steve Jobs’ famous quote is apt:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
— Steve Jobs

It is my hope and dream that I can do all the research that I’ve found justice and weave it together into a series that can have a profound impact on the world.

Bottom line: This feels like the series I was meant to write. I hope you enjoy.

Isaac Asimov published 500+ books, making him one of the most prolific writers in the history of human civilization. Not only that, he was considered one of the “Big Three” sci-fi authors of his time.

Yet, he did not set goals, make deadlines, time block, or study habit design.

This should not happen according to conventional wisdom.

If you watch this interview, you would almost think he doesn’t really even have a system…

Every line of the interview is full of hidden meaning…

Interviewer: It seems like you’re in some sort of race.

Isaac Asimov: Well, I’m not. It seems so, but it isn’t so. Actually, what it amounts to is that I’m not happy except when I’m writing. It’s almost the only way I can think of to spend my time pleasantly. And so I’m naturally drawn to the typewriter at all times. The day is lost in which I don’t type.

Interviewer: Deadlines hold no terror for you?

Isaac Asimov: No, because I know that if I have an article to write, I can generally write it without trouble whenever I sit down.

Interviewer: It’s a book a month?

Isaac Asimov: For the last four and a half years, it has been a book a month. It’s not something that I’ve set for myself as a goal. I just worked it back and said, “My goodness. It’s a book a month!

At every step, the interviewer is asking the wrong question and Asimov corrects him. The interviewer’s assumptions, which represent conventional wisdom on achievement, can be summarized as this…

If you have a crazy output over a long period of time, it must be because you’re making it a goal and using hacks like deadlines to keep you on track.

Asimov seems to be operating in a different paradigm.

What’s going on here?

How does one of the most prolific creators not use basic time management techniques?

Is he just a quirky individual?

Or is there something deeper we can learn about the flaws in conventional wisdom on time management, habit design, and greatness overall?

The more deep dive articles that I’ve created of top entrepreneurs, executives, and creatives (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio, Thomas Edison, and Elon Musk) over the last 8 years, the more that I’ve seen that Asimov’s motivation system isn’t unique among top performers. Rather, it is the standard.

Not only that, the things we teach people about motivation, habits, and time management in school, research, and culture aren’t just different than what top performers actually do — they are diametrically opposed.

In other words, we need a new paradigm of greatness, creativity, and career happiness if we want to account for how world-class performers actually become successful.

This article will provide the contours of this new paradigm by exploring the “odd” beliefs of top performers like Isaac Asimov, Jerry Seinfeld, Barbara Cartland (700M+ books sold), Richard Feynman (Nobel laureate), Ray Bradbury, Einstein, and many others.

With that said, let’s jump into exhibit #2, an interview with one of the greatest comedians of all time, Jerry Seinfeld. It’s worth its weight in gold…

Exhibit #2: Jerry Seinfeld And 29-Year Old Comedian Speak Completely Different Language

In this clip from the Comedian documentary, we see a fascinating interaction between Seinfeld and an aspiring, 29-year-old comedian in the back of a comedy club. Here’s a core part of the back-and-forth:

Young comedian: I’m 29. I feel like I’ve sacrificed so much of my life. The last three years have been a blur.

Seinfeld [puzzled]: Do you have something else you would rather have been doing? You got other appointments or other places you gotta be?

Young comedian: Not necessarily, but I see all my friends are making a lot of money on Wall Street.

Seinfeld [scrunches his nose in confusion]: What?!?

Young Comedian: I’ve seen that my friends are moving up and I’m worried.

Jerry Seinfeld [shocked]: They’re moving up!?!? Are you out of your mind? This has nothing to do with your friends. This is a special thing. This has nothing to do with “making it” or…

Young comedian: Did you ever stop and compare your life and go, “Okay, I’m 29. My friends are all married, all having kids, they all have houses, they have some sort of sense of normality… What do you tell your parents? How do you deal with that?

Jerry Seinfeld [falling over laughing]: What do you tell your parents??!? Your parents???

At this point, Seinfeld can’t take it anymore. He plants his palm into his forehead with one hand and uses his other hand to sturdy himself.

After regaining his composure, Seinfeld tells a famous show biz story.

In this story, the legendary Glenn Miller orchestra is forced to land in a field on a stormy, snowy, winter night. As a result, they now have to walk to the gig through the cold, wet, slushy snow with all of their heavy instruments. As they walk, they come across a little cabin, and they look in a window.

There, they see a picturesque scene of a family enjoying each other’s company — a husband and wife along with their two kids, warmed by a fire, sit around a table as they laugh, smile, and eat.

The performers take in the scene as they stand around in their suits. They’re wet and shivering while holding their instruments. Then one guy turns to another and confusedly says the punchline:

“How do people live like that?”

Seinfeld then drives the point home…

“That’s what it’s about!”

This short vignette captures the essence of how Seinfeld views himself in contrast to how others do…

• From the outside, it looks like his life is hell. He’s doing things that others wouldn’t happily put themselves through. For example, the documentary is about Seinfeld struggling to rediscover his comedic voice in small clubs around the country after 10 years of not doing standup because of his TV show’s success. For the first few months, he’s just floundering.
• From the inside, he loves what he’s doing — warts and all. He would much rather live the life that makes him happy than live the life that makes someone else happy. He’d rather be uncomfortable pursuing his passion than comfortable doing something boring.

In other words, Seinfeld fundamentally challenges the young comedian’s paradigm of:

• Worrying about what other people think
• Comparing your progress to other people’s progress
• Doing things to make your parents or others happy (rather than yourself)
• Sacrificing now in order to “make it” in the future.

Rather, he’s talking about a completely different reality:

• He isn’t focused on each achievement. He’s focused on the process.
• He isn’t focused on the future. He’s focused on now.
• He isn’t focused on what other people think of him. He’s focused on what he thinks of himself and the love of his craft.

In other words, “making it” is simply getting to practice and improve at your craft now. Achieving conventional success is the cherry on top.

Although Seinfeld and Asimov come from different industries and different generations, they’re also similar in surprising ways. And they’re not alone.

For example, consider exhibit #3…

Exhibit #3: Puzzled Reporter Can’t Understand Why A 76-Year-Old Author With Hundreds Of Millions Of Books Sold Still Works So Hard

Barbara Cartland, one of the most famous writers you’ve never heard of, wrote 763 books that have sold over 700M+ copies. I particularly enjoyed a 1977 interview she conducted at age 75. At the time, she had only written a few hundred books, and the interviewer is puzzled by how hard she continues to work…

What really makes me wonder is why you keep on writing them, Barbara?

Cortland’s response puts the interviewer in her place and begins with, “Well darling…”

For the interviewer, it seems crazy for Cartland to be working so hard after achieving so much success and fame. For Cartland, it’s the opposite. Writing is the one thing she loves. It would be crazy to do other things that she doesn’t love.

Therefore, even though she’s 75, she…

• Writes several books per year
• Responds to several thousand fan letters per year
• Advocates for causes she believes in

With Cartland, we see the same pattern again that we saw in Asimov and Seinfeld — just at a different stage in life.

It’s clear that Cartland didn’t just put up with hard work for decades so she could eventually make it and then stop working. Rather, it was the other way around. She did hard work for so long because she loved it. And as a result, she became a better and better writer and created an incredible body of work. As a result, she became rich and famous.

For Cartland, the causality looked like this:

Devotion (pull) ➜ Hard work over decades ➜ Skill + Body Of Work ➜ Success

For the interviewer, the causality is reversed:

Goal ➜ Strategy ➜ Discipline (push) ➜ Focus ➜ Success ➜ Do what you actually love

Explained in more detail, in the conventional paradigm…

• To accomplish something big, we must set a big goal (ie — Sell X books).
• Then, we must create a strategy that turns that long-term goal into medium-term goals into short-term goals into today’s tasks.
• Then, we must use discipline to push ourselves to complete the tasks of the day every day whether we want to or not.
• Next, we must focus. In other words, when something happens that’s outside of our to-do list, we label it as a distraction and avoid it. Curiosity and play are distractions.
• As a result of doing this for a long time, we achieve success.
• As a result of achieving success, we can stop doing the stuff we don’t want to (the work) and start doing the stuff we want to (the play).

In other words, Cartland is playing an “infinite game” propelled by devotion while the conventional paradigm plays a finite game propelled by discipline.

In the finite game, we work hard on stuff we may not like in order to have money and freedom in the future to actually do the stuff we love.

In the infinite game, we find what we love early on, and our goal is to keep lovingly playing it regardless of the outcomes and our life stage.

Exhibit #4 challenges the prestige dimension of the conventional paradigm…

Exhibit #4: Why A Nobel Laureate Physicist Hates The Nobel Prize

Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman is known for his ebullience. This clip is the only one I’m aware of where he’s frustrated. The frustration is triggered by a simple question…

Interviewer: Was it worth the Nobel prize?

Feynman gives a few minute response:

I don’t know anything about the Nobel prize. I don’t understand what it’s all about. Or what’s worth what. And if the people in the Swedish academy decide that X, Y, or Z wins a Nobel prize, then so be it.

I don’t have anything to do with the Nobel Prize. It’s a pain in the [you know what]. I don’t like honors…

I don’t need anything else… I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish academy decides that someone is noble enough to win a prize.

What could possibly make a Nobel Laureate dislike the Nobel prize so much?

Feynman explains his antipathy:

I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out. The kick in the discovery. The observation. Other people using it. Those are the real things.

The honors are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honors. It bothers me.

Honors is epaulettes [ornamental shoulder pieces]. Honors is uniforms… I can’t stand it. It hurts me.

Once again, we see the same pattern that we saw in Asimov, Seinfeld, and Cartland. Feynman isn’t doing research in order to win awards or to belong to an exclusive group. Rather, he’s driven internally by his desire to follow his curiosity in order to figure things out. And, he’s driven by the purpose of discovering things that are useful for others.

The reward is the process and the impact. It’s not in the recognition. To summarize his viewpoint on honors, Feynman does not mince his words…

The whole thing was rotten, because the purpose was mostly to decide who could have this honor.

Implications: Cultures often fetishize arbitrary endpoints (fame, wealth, recognition) rather than the fullness of the process that got them there and the impact it had.

As this “achievement” porn becomes endemic in schools, workplaces, and culture more broadly, toxicity takes hold…

• The education system’s focus on grades, test scores, and getting into a good college saps the innate curiosity of billions of people every generation.
• The academic research system’s focus on citations and a hierarchy system based on titles leads aspiring scientists to aim for progressing their careers rather than being moved by wonder and the joy of figuring things out.
• The work sector’s focus on short-term goals, promotions, and retirement rather than intrinsic motivation often leaves employees with jobs that pay the bills, but leave them unfulfilled.

So far we’ve seen how infinite devotion is just as important at several stages of the mastery process — amateur, expert, and master. It’s also key for beginners who are just getting started.

Passions often aren’t profitable or prestigious for years. Thus, unless someone is willing to be “impractical” or under-estimated for years, they will not even start. Or if they do, they’ll likely give up in months.

To persist through this early “no money, no respect” period, we must have a strong internal drive. It’s tautological, because without external rewards, the only thing left to drive us is internal.

Ray Bradbury is a case in point for what it really takes to go from zero to one…

Exhibit #5: Sci-Fi Writer Ray Bradbury Made Almost Nothing For Years

One of the most famous sci-fi writers of all time, Ray Bradbury, was once asked how much money he made in the beginning of his career.

This was his response…

Year 1 — $0

Year 2 — $0

Year 3 — $10

Year 4 — $40

Year 5 — $80

Year 6 — $200

Year 7 — $800

Year 8 — $1,200

Year 9 — $2,000

Year 10 — $4,000

Year 11 — $8,000

$8,000 dollars back then is the equivalent of $100,000 today.

This means it took Bradbury 10 years after setting out to become a professional writer to actually become one and make a middle-class $50,000 salary.

While these numbers may sound brutal, they reflect reality. At least the typical reality for almost anyone capitalizing on a skill whether it be a creator, an innovator, an artist, or an entrepreneur.

Bottom line: Cultivating infinite devotion is the prerequisite for becoming great in any field. The external rewards typically take so long to appear that the people who ultimately persist to success are the ones who cultivate their internal motivation to the point where the external rewards are just the cherry on top, not the core goal.

From the outside, these individuals appear crazy in their early years. From the inside, they are on fire.

While Asimov, Seinfeld, Cartland, Feynman, and Bradbury may seem odd, they only appear so because our culture is odd. Today’s culture goes against what we now know actually motivates people and makes them the most happy at work.

Collectively, they are examples of what it looks and feels like when our innate potential is released. They demonstrate Infinite Devotion, a universal property of iconic greatness throughout time and across fields. In fact, there is no case of lifelong iconic success that I’m aware of which isn’t smothered with Infinite Devotion’s fingerprints…

Asimov, Seinfeld, Cartland, Feynman, and Bradbury are not alone

Rather than just being exceptions to the conventional paradigm, they are the norm in the Infinite Devotion paradigm, which I will explain later in this article.

Over the past year, I’ve spent 100+ hours collecting diverse case studies to illustrate this paradigm.

The diversity of these examples is important because they reveal that there isn’t just one way it happens. Rather, the message here is a few-fold:

• Anyone from any economic class can develop it
• It’s never too late to start
• It can work in different fields (science, art, entertainment, business, innovation) and domains of life (sports, hobbies)
• It works throughout history
• And, it can work for different personality types

Each story is curated to paint a different lesson. The story either adds an extra level of nuance or even challenges the fundamental premises of Infinite Devotion.

Again and again, the same pattern appears: Top performers have an Infinite Devotion for their craft that is misunderstood and labeled crazy by the outside world.

#1: Charlie Munger (self-made billionaire) said he’d learn Braille if he ever lost sight in his other eye

Legendary investor and Warren Buffett’s long-time business partner, Charlie Munger, is a lifelong reading fanatic. Throughout his entire career, he has spent the majority of his time on his passion for reading in order to think better, which then helps him invest better. To illustrate the extent of this devotion, after Munger lost an eye earlier in life due to cataract surgery, he was later told by doctors that he was at serious risk of losing the eyesight in his remaining eye. His response to his friends? “It’s time for me to learn braille.”

Munger is still actively investing at 99 years old, once again showing that Infinite Devotion is powerful way to stay productive and healthy as we age.

#2: Warren Buffett ruthlessly eliminated anything he didn’t love from his life. As a result, he spent 80% of his career reading and thinking

Similar to his business partner, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett knows what he loves and has ruthlessly removed everything else as I illustrated in Warren Buffett: “Really Successful People Say No To Almost Everything”. Whereas almost all CEOs of major companies spend a lot of their time traveling and hopping from meeting to meeting, Buffett travels surprisingly little and his days are almost completely free of meetings and devoted to learning. When describing his lifestyle, he says, “No CEO has it better; I truly do feel like tap dancing to work every day.” This is why Warren Buffett’s #1 advice for others is to:

Find your passion. I was very, very lucky to find it when I was seven or eight years old… You’re lucky in life when you find it. And you can’t guarantee you’ll find it in your first job out. But I always tell college students that come out (to Omaha), ‘Take the job you would take if you were independently wealthy. You’re going to do well at it.’

Interestingly, despite being in a profession that is all about money, he has lived in the same house for almost his entire adult life. More so, listening to Buffett’s interviews, it’s clear that his life was never about making the most money to buy things so he could have a certain lifestyle. It was about practicing his craft with Infinite Devotion.

Similar to Cartland and Munger, Buffett is still incredibly active and productive into his 90s. He is now the oldest CEO of a Fortune 500 company ever.

#3: Isaac Newton worked an 18 hours a day, 7 days a week work schedule for his whole career

Isaac Newton is regarded as one of the top scientists of all time. He made breakthroughs in optics and invented Calculus by his mid-20s.​ Then, he invented the Newtonian paradigm for physics, which much of the modern world is built on.

When describing Newton’s energy, one of his biographers said he had:

… an almost voluptuous intellectual energy, one amounting to mania. Newton’s day-to-day life was disorderly; he slept when sleep overpowered him. He read continually, he meditated without pause, often for days on end. He was often too distracted to eat.
— David Berlinski (Newton biographer)

When asked how he made his remarkable discoveries, Newton replied:

I keep the subject constantly before me and wait until the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.
 — Isaac Newton

Understanding how he was misunderstood by others, he once said:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
 — Isaac Newton

#4: Mr. Rogers didn’t care about the numbers

Mr. Rogers was on the air for 33 years and 870+ episodes, in one of the longest-airing shows in television history.

To create the show, he combined several passions/skills:

• Desire to support children
• Understanding of child development
• Religion
• Puppeteering
• Musical instruments

In a fascinating clip when Charlie Rose talks about reaching a large audience, Rogers quickly clarifies that this isn’t and was never one of his goals.

Charlie Rose: How many kids do you think are out there that in 30 years you have influenced or made a difference with and made them feel something special?

Mr Rogers: I don’t care how many, even if it’s just one. We get so wrapped up in numbers in our society. And the most important thing is that we’re able to be one-to-one (like you and I) with each other in the moment.

In another clip, Charlie Rose talks about the world leaders he gets to interview. Rogers immediately responds that what feeds his soul is not fancy people, but individual children…

In this clip, like the other clips throughout the article, you can sense authenticity, sincerity, and focus on what gives their soul nourishment — even if it’s not prestigious.

#5: Bill Gates worked 56 hours per week on his passions in high school

Bill Gates grew up at a fascinating point in history:

• After the advent of computers.
• Before the advent of personal computers.

That means, to get access to a mainframe computer while in high school, he and his friends had to go to the University of Washington. Consider the following passage from Outliers:

Gates and his friends began hanging around the computer center at the University of Washington. Before long, they latched onto an outfit called ISI (Information Sciences Inc.), which agreed to let them have free computer time in exchange for working on a piece of software that could be used to automate company payrolls. In one seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time on the ISI mainframe, which averages out to eight hours a day, seven days a week.

Let that sink in. At the age of 16, Gates was traveling to a college and spending 56 hours per week on computers while also going to school full-time in a period of life when most kids are just hanging out with friends, relaxing, or doing athletics. He put everything into his passion.

Describing this period in his life, he says…

It was my obsession. I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.

I found out Paul [Allen] had found a computer that was free at the University of Washington. They had these machines in the medical center and the physics department. They were on a 24-hour schedule, but with this big slack period, so that between three and six in the morning they never scheduled anything. I’d leave at night, after my bedtime.
— Bill Gates

No wonder why years later, Gates’ mother said,

We always wondered why it was so hard for him to get up in the morning.

Through this story, we can see how Gates’ early Infinite Devotion combined with timing helped make him a world expert in what turned out to be one of the highest potential fields in history.

#6: Steve Jobs believed that great work requires great passion

Throughout Steve Jobs’ career, he emphasized the power of Infinite Devotion over and over…

“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”

“The journey is the reward.“

“You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.“

“The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking, don’t settle.“

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

The two videos below of Jobs at different ages drive home the sentiments in the quotes even further:

I think most people that are able to make a sustained contribution over time, rather than just a peak, are very internally driven. You have to be, because in the ebb and tide of people’s opinions and of fads, there are going to be times when you are criticized and criticism is very difficult. And so when you’re criticized, you learn to pull back a little and listen to your own drummer. And to some extent, that isolates you from the praise.

— Steve Jobs

People say, “You have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing.” And it’s totally true. And the reason is, because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you’re gonna give up. And that’s what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being “successful” in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes it’s the ones that are successful loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that that didn’t love it, quit, because they’re sane, right? Who would wanna put up with this stuff if you don’t love it? So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly. And if you don’t love it, you’re gonna fail. So you gotta love it. You gotta have passion. And I think that’s the high order bit.
— Steve Jobs

#7: Oprah Winfrey swore by the power of Infinite Devotion though out her entire career

In this 1986 60 Minutes interview, 32-year-old Oprah Winfrey is on the cusp of making it.

Two years prior she had taken over as the host of a local talk show. Audiences loved her.

Now, she was about to have her biggest test yet. Her show had been syndicated nationally. It was make or break.

What I particularly resonate with in this interview is Oprah’s Infinite Devotion.

The following quote stands out in particular…

I think that the path to our spiritual evolvement is the greatest journey we all take. I think that’s part of the reason why I am as successful as I have been. Because the success wasn’t the goal. The process was. I wanted to do good work. I wanted to do well in my life.
— Oprah

#8: Elon Musk, The Hardest Working Person In The World, Is Primarily Motivated By Curiosity

Have you ever wondered how Elon Musk musters the energy to run multiple huge, complex, and stressful companies simultaneously?

In the following video clip, a confounded interviewer tries to understand. He asks…

Generally speaking, everything you do is for humanity… Why? Why are you working? Why do you care about politics? Why do you care about multi-planetary species? Consciousness?

In other words, Musk is rich and famous. He has accomplished more as an entrepreneur than almost anyone in history. He’s stated that these work sprints are grueling. So why the ‘F’ is he working 100+ hour weeks and taking on new and impossible challenges (ie — buying Twitter) that are guaranteed to add work and stress?

We get some clues in Musk’s answer…

Notice that he quickly veers the conversation toward existential philosophy. It does not veer toward tactical time management approaches that are now delivered as the panacea of hard work. It does not veer into personal achievements he’s hoping to make.

In another interview, he gives an answer to the same question in more concise terms…

Interviewer: What drives you on a day-to-day basis to do what you do?

Elon Musk: I really want to make sure that there is a good future for humanity. And that we’re on a path to understanding the nature of the universe. The meaning of life. Why are we here? How did we get here?

And in order to understand the nature of the universe and all these fundamental questions, we must expand the scope and scale of consciousness. Certainly it must not diminish or go out or we certainly won’t understand this. So I would say I’m motivated by curiosity more than anything.

And we have reason to take Musk at his word. At first, when Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, would hear Musk talk about his philosophies, he was skeptical.

But, then he heard it in meeting after meeting for hundreds of meetings. And, he saw it reflected in action after action. Eventually, he came to trust Musk’s sincerity.

To be fair, Isaacson also points out other motivations like drama and power that he thinks motivate Musk as well. Either way, the point stands. Infinite Devotion is an absolutely necessary ingredient of iconic success and impact over decades.

And the list goes on and on…

The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.

— Louis Pasteur (Chemist)

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

— Friedrich Hegel (Philosopher)

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

— Albert Einstein

I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think [this] is an eminently important difference.

— Darwin

Animals were my passion from even before I could speak. — Jane Goodall

Collectively, all of these examples point to the universal power of Infinite Devotion. (Though there are certainly nuances, and I will confront these in future articles).

Interestingly, many of these individuals didn’t succeed because of the education system or work culture. Rather, they succeeded despite them. Many of them either flailed through school or didn’t complete it. This shines a light on an important point…

When the successful people in a society succeed despite the system rather than because of it, we should rethink the fundamentals of that system.

The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working

When kids ask why they need to get good grades rather than follow their curiosity, they are told that it’s important in order to get into a good college.

When college students ask why they need to get good grades, they’re told that they need to do so in order to get a good job.

This idea has even impacted sports. As students get to high school, the context of sports becomes more and more about winning and using the sport to get into a good college rather than building a long-term Infinite Devotion toward health. Malcolm Gladwell captures this phenomenon in the following clip:

This is the relevant quote from the clip:

Imagine that I make you the athletic head at one of these local high schools, and you stand up in front of the entire school on your first day in the job. What is the speech you give? You’re going to say, I am here to create in you teenagers a set of habits around physical exercise that will stay with you for the rest of your life. Right? I’m going to use my job as athletic director to teach you how to live a healthy life. That’s your goal.

You’re not going to say, I’m going to try and win as many California state titles over the next five years as I possibly can. Right? You’re not going to give that.

And the tragedy is that everybody else who gets that job says, I’m here to win as many California titles as I can over the next five years…

And we are suffering as a country, as a society, as a result. Look around you. 1% of the population in middle age is practicing healthy habits. Why is that? Because no one bothered to teach them at the moment when those habits need to be taught. Right?

Next, employees look for good reviews in order to get promotions.

They get promotions so that they can retire and then actually do what they love.

But the brutal reality at the end of these many decades of sacrifice is, on average, 49 hours of TV per week mixed with loneliness, boredom, and lack of meaning.

This paradigm is broken.

The end of the rainbow doesn’t fulfill its basic promise.

And, we can do better.

Not only that, we need to rethink the tools of our productivity paradigm. Modern productivity over-focuses on tactics like habit design, time management, goal setting and prizes pushing through the pain whether you like something or not. The people who feel Infinite Devotion deeply automatically improve, stay consistent, and persist through hardship naturally as a result of their obsessive curiosity and passion. We are humans, not machines. And Infinite Devotion is our soul. Productivity hacks are helpful, but they are secondary.

Asimov, Seinfeld, Cartland, Feynman, Bradbury, Oprah, Musk, and many others like them paint the contours of a new paradigm.

We may not choose to work as many hours as these individuals do or be as career focused, but we can still use their lessons learned in our own life to live a more curious, playful, impactful, and meaningful life.

With that said, I’d like to officially introduce…

The Infinite Devotion Paradigm: The Hidden Pattern Behind Greatness

In each of the exchanges above, we see a different perspective of the Infinite Devotion paradigm similar to this picture of blind scientists touching different parts of an elephant and coming to a different conclusion on what they’re touching…

In this section, we tie all of the different perspectives together. At its heart, below is what separates the conventional paradigm from Infinite Devotion.

In other articles I will go deeper on each point, but for now, that’s the big picture breakdown.

I call this paradigm Infinite Devotion because when you whittle everything else away, you are left with two things:

#1: Infinite motivation

Infinite devotion is such a deep alignment with our motivation systems that the duration and intensity of our energy shoot through the roof.

The duration is infinite because it continues to propel us at each stage in the mastery journey.

When most others would “justifiably” stop, people propelled by infinite devotion keep pushing forward…

• Beginner Plateau. A lot of people want to learn a skill, but it’s so uncomfortable to do so. There’s not a lot of external reward at first, because they’re not very good yet. So, a lot of people who want to start, never do.
• OK Plateau. We’re at the OK Plateau when we get good enough to do our job, and there isn’t a pressure to keep improving. For example, imagine you’re in a new job. At first, there’s a really quick learning curve. You’re not good enough, but then over time you get good enough. It gets easier. You’re not at risk of losing your job. You’re not making a fool of yourself. At this point, the skill typically plateaus.
• Greatness Plateau. We reach the next level when, rather than settling for being okay, we keep on improving. After years and decades of improvement, these individuals become top performers in their field. In sports, they might win an Olympic medal. In science, they might win a prestigious award. In business, they might create a breakthrough innovation that makes them wealthy. They’ve made it in conventional terms. So they don’t have the same “chip on their shoulder” to prove themselves. As a result, many plateau.
• Iconic Plateau. At this stage, many of the external rewards become negative as the icon becomes criticized, lied about, and gossiped about in the media. They can’t go out in public without being mobbed. Yet, they keep going and keep improving. They can’t help themselves, because they’re propeled by something deeper.

Bottom line: At each stage, Infinite Devotion propels them forward to greater and greater heights.

#2: Devotion rather than discipline

Devotion is a way of working that organically pulls us rather than something we need to force through discipline, grit, shame, and external rewards/punishments.

Every time I have used discipline as my primary motivator, I have ultimately burned out.

For example, as an early-stage entrepreneur, I really procrastinated on doing sales calls. To get myself to overcome procrastination, I found ways to add accountability and force myself to do it. Results started pouring in, which was great.

But, then something surprising happened. Despite getting rewarded for my actions, my motivation actually decreased rather than increased. Eventually, I would starting procrastinating again and spend my time on where I was internally drawn even it wasn’t making any money. I wondered what was wrong with me.

After going through this many times, I realized that there was a cycle I kept going through when I used discipline as my main motivator:

At first I thought I was alone, but over time, I’ve learned that this pattern is very common. In fact, when it comes to exercise and diets, this seesaw pattern is the norm.

“Research shows that the average dieter regains 107 percent of the weight he or she takes off.”
— Robert Kegan (Harvard Researcher)

In 2014, after 10 years of using hardcore accountability, I decided to try something different after another burnout—devotion.

For the first time as an adult, I allowed myself to pursue my curiosity in an unbridled fashion. I gave myself permission to write about whatever I wanted to write about, and then I built a business structure that made this possible financially.

I haven’t burned out since, and I truly feel like a kid in the candy store every day that I’m researching and writing. Furthermore, I’ve earned significantly more in take home pay than I did during the previous years.

In the end, rather than burning out due to discipline or pursuing curiosities in every direction but making no progress, I naturally progressed by doubling down on my strongest curiosities, interests, and passions.

Conclusion

The idea of Infinite Devotion is profound when you consider its implications.

First, as I shared earlier, if you take Infinite Devotion seriously, we would need to redesign our whole education, work, and research paradigm to match what naturally motivates us.

Second, I wonder if it is a major contributing factor to why our society’s productivity growth rate has plateaued since around 1970 — the exact point where you’d expect it to skyrocket because of Internet-connected computers. Perhaps, in the shift from blue collar work to white collar work and in the shift from routine work to nonroutine work, we need to overhaul our motivation systems. What the research tells us about motivation is that external sticks and carrots are great at motivating us to do simple work faster, but it’s terrible at getting us to do creative and complex work better. I go deeper into the productivity paradox in We’re in a productivity crisis, according to 52 years of data. Things could get really bad.

Third, as we move into a world where AI automates exponentially more jobs, a universal basic income will not solve all of society’s problems. We humans need to do work that is meaningful to us in order to thrive psychologically, and Infinite Devotion is the essential quality we need to cultivate. The future of our society may depend on tapping into this innate and universal drive. As novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky once said, “Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.”

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So Passionate You Never Stop Improving: The Secret Behind the Success Of Asimov, Jobs, Seinfeld… was originally published in Accelerated Intelligence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Author’s Note: This article was written over 60 hours with love and care using the blockbuster mental model. If you like my writing style, and you want to create high-quality viral content using the blockbuster approach, you’ll love my Blockbuster Blueprint newsletter, which delivers three in-depth articles every week.

“The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing.”
— Peter Drucker

I spent over 500 hours researching and writing this article. Those 500 hours were spent reading through dozens of books/studies in 10+ fields (history, economics, technology, philosophy of science, manufacturing, management, sociology, investing, innovation). I spent so much time because the topic was both much more interesting and complicated than I originally thought. And, as is the case with all of my writing on Medium, I use the blockbuster philosophy. This means I don't click publish unless I think it is one of the best articles that has been written on the topic.

As a result of going through the research process, I will never think about productivity in the same way. What I learned blew my mind over and over, and I hope it does the same for you as the reader.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The “Great Boom” was supposed to last.

From 1870–1970, there was an incredible 50x increase in the productivity of the average manual worker. Let me break that down so it really lands for you like it did for me:

• 50x Increase: Imagine getting 50 hours of work done in one hour. Or imagine doing the work of 5o people by yourself.
• On Average: We’re not just talking about a 50x increase for the most ambitious, smartest manual workers. We’re talking about all manual workers.

To put the profundity in context, the “Great Boom” is one of the most amazing and under-appreciated events in economic history. The chart below captures its magnitude and uniqueness:

To more deeply appreciate this shift, consider the following:

• This is a unique event in all of history. “Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened… Then — just a couple of hundred years ago — people started getting richer. And richer and richer still,” states Economist Steven Landsburg.
• Before it happened, the average American lived on about a dollar a day (in today’s dollars). “Before 1750, almost nowhere in the world were living standards something that we would call anything but miserable and poor,”according to economic historian Joel Mokyr. Economist Steven Landsburg adds, “Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level.”
• Before it happened, day-to-day life was brutal. “In 1870, farm and urban working-class family members [in the United States] bathed in a large tub in the kitchen, often the only heated room in the home, after carrying cold water in pails from the outside and warming it over the open-hearth fireplace,” according to economic historian Robert Gordon.

Bottom line: The people alive between 1870–1970 experienced unprecedented change. Now, imagine being an adult in 1970. Think about how you’d see the world…

Looking Back From 1970, You See A Wondrous Productivity And Lifestyle Boom

Below are a few examples of the changes and their implications. Of particular note are:

• The shortening of the workweek from 68 hours to 40 hours.
• The removal of child labor
• Wondrous technologies in the most important parts of life
• 100x increase in worker safety

#1: Shortening of the workweek from 68 hours to 40 hours

This means parents could be home with their children more, spend more time with friends, and spend more time on their mental and physical health.

#2: Removal of child labor

Many children started work at 4 years old and worked 12-hour days doing intricate work that benefitted from having small hands or dangerous work that required working in small places adults couldn’t reach. Around the same time that children were removed from factories, they were put in schools. As a result of this shift and an explosion of free public education, illiteracy went down 20x while school enrollment doubled. As a result, the seeds were planted for an educated workforce and society.

#3: Wondrous technologies in the most important parts of life

We see inventions like cars, elevators, automobiles, plumbing, heating/cooling, penicillin, and electricity. Collectively, these make life more safe, mobile, comfortable, and urban.

#4: 100x increase in worker safety

Worker safety means things like protection from accidents, disease, pollution, fires, etc. along with protections in the case of injury. As an example of the extreme shift that happened, 19th century US Steel workers had a one in seven chance of being killed before 50 and a one in three chance of being disabled, according to economic historian Brad Delong.

In addition, people started receiving benefits like health care, paid vacations, social security, and disability protection. This gave people a new level of safety knowing that they would be taken care of rather than their life being destroyed forever if something went wrong.

With these huge gains, it was no wonder that…

Looking Forward From 1970 You Could Envision Utopia

Given the massive change between 1870–1970, looking forward from 1970, you could confidently see the potential for another 50x boom because of the computer revolution and digital knowledge work.

The promise was that what machines were for our bodies, computers would be for our brains… except on steroids. Furthermore, rather than sending products/services around the world on planes and ships, we could send bits across the world instantly at zero cost.

The shift to digital knowledge work made it possible to imagine a knowledge work revolution that could eclipse the manual worker productivity revolution:

• 30-Hour work weeks with work being voluntary for many
• Freedom over what, when, where, how, and with whom you work
• Passion-fueled work that is creative and curiosity-filled
• Meaningful work that connects us to other humans and purpose
• Amazing technologies like living forever, all-powerful artificial intelligence, flying cars, etc

For example, in 1970, MIT AI pioneer Marvin Minsky predicted in Life Magazine that:

“In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”

Not only that, in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported and the Senate passed a 30-hour work week bill. Though, it ultimately fell through. In 1956, Richard Nixon predicted a 32-hour workweek in the “not too distant future.”

In other words, if you were prone to optimism and living in 1970, you could imagine a work utopia in the 21st century.

But something odd happened…

Bizarrely, In 1970, Lots Of Things Started Going Downhill

“The simple claim that in modernity ‘everything goes faster and faster’… is transparently false.”
 — Sociologist Hartmut Rosa in Social Acceleration

At the exact point you’d expect things to go from good to great, bad things started happening.

For starters, the productivity growth rate decreased significantly (known as the productivity paradox):

This phenomenon happened worldwide — not just in the United States. The following chart of GDP per hour (output per hour) growth captures the global phenomenon more precisely…

At the same time that productivity overall was increasing (even if the growth rate dropped), most of the productivity gains went to the top earners while the middle class stagnated. This is known as the Great Decoupling…

This stagnation is a big deal. When you stop believing that your kids will have a better life than you, you stop believing in the “American dream.” And according to a 2022 survey of 1,300+ people in 19 countries, 70% of survey respondents believe their children would be worse off financially — a significant increase compared to previous years.

Other examples of stagnation include:

• The price of energy is stagnant rather than decreasing.
• Transportation isn’t moving faster than decades ago (ie, cars & planes).
• Biotech innovation is ⅓ the rate compared to 20 years ago.
• Healthcare and education costs are increasing significantly without a commensurate increase in results.
• The average lifespan in developed countries is stalling.
• Agricultural innovation has decreased significantly for the first time in nearly a century.
• Large construction projects are more expensive and take much longer.
• And much more.

These before-and-after pictures of the physical world further capture what hasn’t changed in ways that words can’t:

In fact, the list of things going haywire in the early 1970s until now is so large and odd that there is an entire research-based, well-known site devoted to it called WTF Happened In 1971?.

To summarize: We have this unprecedented 50x rise in manual work productivity between 1870 and 1970. Then, at the exact time you’d expect things to have another 50x boost because of the computer revolution, things start slowing down.

The big implication: Ultimately, the productivity paradox points to a gaping hole in our general understanding of one of humanity’s greatest achievements — The Great Boom between 1870–1970. And, it’s more important than ever that we fill that hole now if we want it to dramatically improve everyone’s lifestyle and well-being in the future. Because, if we don’t, things could go from not good to plain bad…

The Productivity Paradox May Be The Most Important Societal Problem We Face

“The only way to raise living standards over the long term is to raise productivity.” — Ray Dalio

The Productivity Paradox is not an idle curiosity.

It’s life-changing and relevant for all of us. It impacts our lifestyles, careers, government, society, and economy at fundamental levels. Even if we don’t realize it, the effects of the productivity paradox already touch our lives in many ways…

For example, if societal and individual productivity growth continues to plateau or decline, it could mean war, generational lifestyle stagnation, our currency going to zero over time, the rise of communism, environmental catastrophe, and stalling of innovation.

Unfortunately, these aren’t wild predictions. They are extrapolations of what’s already happening now and backed up by history. This is not the first productivity paradox ever, so we don’t have to completely guess what the implications might be.

Let me expand on each potential future to let the severity sink in…

• War. Less productivity means a smaller pie for everyone to split. Escalating tension between the haves and have nots could devolve into conflicts (civil war, coup, etc). Famous investor and student of history Ray Dalio summarizes the situation: “When wealth and values gaps are large and there is an economic downturn, it is likely that there will be a lot of conflict about how to divide the pie.”
• Currency That Goes To Zero. Government debt will continue to skyrocket (less productivity creates less tax revenue). And if history is a teacher, governments will print more and more money to pay off that debt, which will cause more and more inflation, which devalues the currency. In a surprisingly extreme prediction, one of the world’s most successful and oldest (nearly 100 years old) investors Charlie Munger predicts (40 seconds into this video) that the US currency will go to zero in the next 100 years and shares many historical precedents of where extreme inflation led to the demise of democracies.
• Rise Of Communism. In difficult times, there is a backlash against capitalism and democracy and a rise in socialism. In a fascinating clip on the Lex Fridman podcast, Harvard-trained economist Richard Wolff shares the surprising stat that there was a huge rise of the Communist party. In other words, the more growth stalls, the more people there are calling for revolution, not just reform. In fact, one of the great management researchers of all time Peter Drucker argues that the prosperity from the manual work productivity revolution was the reason that the United States did not become Communist during the Great Depression.
• Environmental Catastrophe. The way we use resources to create energy is already unsustainable. Pollution will eventually destroy our world if we don’t learn how to create more energy and goods with dramatically fewer resources.

None of these futures are guaranteed to happen. But they are serious scenarios discussed by many of the smartest people in the world, and that alone is concerning.

Bottom line: This state of affairs is not sustainable. The consequences are predictable based on history. And those consequences have been already playing out and could get much worse.

There comes a point at which one has to declare a state of urgency, if not emergency. And that moment is now.

The productivity growth rate is a fundamental input that impacts lots of other things we care deeply about.

The productivity paradox is arguably the most important puzzle that will determine the future of our society and our careers. We are on a purgatory between hell and heaven. Hell of escalating conflict and stagnation. Heaven of a work utopia.

Given the importance of productivity, you would expect a few things to happen:

• It would be the headline of every major newspaper.
• World leaders would be constantly talking about it.
• Knowledge workers and companies would go all out increasing productivity.

Yet, not only is productivity growth rate not talked about, there is a huge backlash against it…

Inside The Productivity Backlash

At first, I thought the idea of a backlash against productivity was ridiculous. I wondered, how can someone be against the idea of getting more of what they want with less cost? But, as I read books and articles that I actually disagreed with at first, I became aware of the compelling points I could not ignore. I realized that I had only been looking at productivity through my own lens rather than empathizing with other people’s lived experience.

Below is a summary of the core reasons there is a backlash against productivity:

• More productivity doesn’t mean less work for employees. Workers feel pressured to work harder even as they become more efficient.
• Workers aren’t receiving the gains from their increased productivity. The gains in productivity are not redistributed to workers in a way they feel is fair.
• Hustle culture isn’t appealing. Many people aren’t excited about making every work moment more productive and filling every free moment with more work.
• As tasks are systematized, they can become boring and mechanical. Extreme specialization may be more efficient, but it can lead to simple repetitive work that is boring. Many associate productivity with being overly structured or mechanical. For example, one person I talked to for this article said that one of his bosses once said to him, “When you walk in the door, I only want everything below your neck.”
• Many are jaded by failed productivity experiments. Many productivity experiments fail and even make things worse or more frustrating (ie — lifeless call center agents reading empty scripts).
• Increased overall productivity has directly hurt certain groups. Rapid changes in society because of productivity growth inevitably disadvantage people who live in certain regions, who work in specific industries and professions, or who come from certain cultures. For example, outsourcing America’s manufacturing turned many company towns into ghost towns that now suffer from brain drain, falling property prices, poverty, and addiction.

While there are many signs of productivity backlash, below are some of the most apparent examples.

For one, there is now a whole genre of anti-productivity bestsellers…

For example, in Four Thousand Weeks, author Oliver Burkeman argues:

The modern discipline known as time management — like its hipper cousin, productivity — is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays.

We can also see the tension between pro-productivity and anti-productivity culture in these two opposing memes about the same incredibly destabilizing event of Covid:

For many, productivity culture is a tool that the ruling class uses in the context of capitalism to get as much work out of workers as possible.

For example, How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, which was read over six million times, makes the case that capitalism is the root cause:

Until or in lieu of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, how can we hope to lessen or prevent — instead of just temporarily stanch — burnout? Change might come from legislation, or collective action, or continued feminist advocacy, but it’s folly to imagine it will come from companies themselves. Our capacity to burn out and keep working is our greatest value.

The late anthropologist David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs, which also started out as an article with millions of views puts the blame on the ruling class:

​​The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. (Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.) And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Finally, this viral tweet below from former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich encapsulates a growing sentiment against wealth. It implies that wealth cannot be achieved by entrepreneurs and innovators who start from nothing and who become more innovative by innovating amazing products and services that customers love:

As I spent more time considering all of this backlash, I felt like I was shifting between two realities. Sometimes I felt like people were unfairly judging productivity. Other times, I wondered, “Wow! Maybe there are enough things wrong about productivity that there is a deeper structural issue culturally or economically that I’ve been too biased to see.” (More on how I ultimately synthesized everything later in the article)

Bottom line: It is now cool to publicly be against getting more of what you value with fewer and fewer resources. For many, productivity has become a bad word from bad people (wealthy people) from a bad system (capitalism).

Not only are we having a backlash against productivity, but the productivity paradox is also almost completely hidden from day-to-day conversation or news…

We Think Productivity Is Skyrocketing At The Same Time It’s Stalling

I was born in 1981. I got my first computer when I was 10 years old — a black & white Mac — in 1991. Growing up, I was always told a narrative of being lucky to be alive during a time of incredible progress. I devoured sci-fi like kids eat candy.

The fundamental tentpole that the progress narrative rested upon was Moore’s Law, which had been true for decades and held the promise to continue for many decades more:

Moore’s Law is the pattern that approximately every 18 months, the price/performance of transistor chips doubles. Given that transistor chips are a core input of the digital world, we can see things getting better every year.

Not once in my first 35 years did I hear that overall productivity might actually be slowing down.

And apparently the same is true for many others. In the process of writing this article, I talked to several tech-savvy, well-informed friends and none of them knew about the slowing productivity growth rate. They thought change was faster than ever.

This gap between the narrative and the actual productivity stats was hard to reconcile at first.

On the one hand, I’d read articles about how AI is changing everything. Then, I’d read an academic study about how productivity growth from AI was invisible in statistics.

It all begged questions that sounded like zen koans — riddles one needs to be enlightened for in order to understand:

• How can things be slowing down when change is speeding up?
• If technology is the root cause of progress, how can technology accelerate at the same time productivity growth is slowing down?

To begin to understand these questions, we must first swallow a difficult truth articulated by PayPal co-founder and investor Peter Thiel:

“The first step is to understand where we are. We’ve spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and we think that it’s an enchanted forest. If we’re to find a way out of this desert and into the future, the first step is to see that we’ve been in a desert.”

— Peter Thiel

Technologist J. Storrs Hall, author of Where Is My Flying Car?, provides important context for why productivity paradox might be invisible — the people who are closest to the technology industry have the most trouble not seeing change:

I was somewhat shielded from the overall trend by virtue of being in computer science, which did in fact grow and increase in its capabilities at the rate the science fiction writers and futurists expected. So it took a while for me to come to the realization that there were a lot of technologies out there that were more like space than computers.

Next, we need to have a deeper understanding of the difference between productivity, productivity growth rate and technological change:

• Productivity. Workers creating goods and services with less labor and resources. It is the ratio of output over input.
• Technological Innovation. While innovations can improve technology, not all technological innovations increase the productivity of knowledge workers. For example, the smartphone is one of the major technological innovations in human history. At the same time, it has a negligible effect on the productivity of most knowledge workers.
• Productivity Growth Rate. Productivity growth rate is a function of how much productivity increases for a certain number of people over a period of time. Therefore, you can have a big technology that increases productivity, but if it only impacts a small group of people or happens over a really long period of time, it may have less of an impact on the productivity growth rate than one might expect.

With these distinctions, we are now poised to understand the most well articulated explainer for why we aren’t seeing a productivity growth rate increase from the computer and Internet revolutions. In his 784-page book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, economic historian Robert Gordon makes the case that:

• The productivity impact of the shift to Internet-connected computers is much smaller than we think. In fact, We’ve already experienced most of the benefits from it (primarily between 1994–2004).
• The technologies (electricity, combustion engine) that came in the 20th century are much more impactful on our productivity than the computer revolution.
• There were other unique events that boosted productivity, which can only happen once such as women entering the workforce and a large percent of the population receiving formal education.
• The impact of the computer revolution is primarily on information, communication, and entertainment while the 20th century revolutions were much more broad and had a bigger impact on our living standards.
• “The equipment used in office work and the productivity of office employees closely resembles that of a decade ago.” In other words, people are primarily using computers to type up documents, browse the web, edit spreadsheets, send emails, create code, make designs, etc. The hardware and software we need for these activities already exists and is improving incrementally.
• Some incredible technologies can also negatively hurt productivity (at least for awhile). With regards to smartphones, Gordon points out, “Smartphones are used in the office for personal activities.” In other words, smartphones don’t help most knowledge workers be more productive. In fact, they may actually decrease production via tempting distractions we can hide from our employer.
• Finally, Gordon argues that many of the most hyped technologies (AI, self-driving cars, 3D printing, robotics, etc.) won’t impact productivity as much as we think or they will happen over a long enough period of time where we won’t see a big leap in productivity growth rate.

My initial emotional response to Gordon’s work started with incredulity. When I first saw the title, The Rise And Fall Of American Growth, it almost felt like clickbait to me. Given the narrative of constant progress backed up by the dizzying array of new things, the idea that productivity growth rate was slowing seemed silly.

But, as I understood what productivity growth rate actually measured, and I read his thoughts more closely as well as others in the stagnation school, I started to see this school as more and more compelling. Some others that influenced me include:

• Investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in his talk, We wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters
• Jan Vijg, author of The American Technological Challenge: Stagnation and Decline in the 21st Century
• Researcher Hartmut Rosa, author of Social Acceleration: A New Theory Of Modernity
• J Storrs Hall, author of Where Is My Flying Car?
• Tyler Cowen, author of The Great Stagnation
• Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and researcher Michael Nielsen, authors of Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck.
• And hundreds of economists writing about the productivity paradox.

For example, I started questioning the idea that we’re on the cusp of huge leaps in artificial intelligence any day despite all of the headlines that we are.

For example, I learned about the first step fallacy from AI pioneer and researcher Melanie Mitchell on the Jim Rutt podcast. In the podcast, Mitchell summarizes her academic paper, Why AI Is Harder Than We Think. Being in the AI field for 40+ years and seeing so many optimistic predictions of AI prove wrong, she wrote the paper as an attempt to understand and explain why. To write the paper, she collected several fallacies that hurt people’s ability to make accurate predictions of the future in AI, and the first one is relevant for any technology. It’s called First Step Fallacy:

If you’ve made what you call the first step towards solving a complicated problem, you’re not necessarily on the path to solving that problem because the path might not be continuous. So I stated this as narrow AI is on a continuum with general AI. That’s the fallacy.

….What Stuart Dreyfus, who was an engineer said, “It’s like assuming that the first monkey who climbed a tree was on the path to going to the moon because the monkey had gotten high in the tree.”

Interestingly, Yann LeCun, one of the most highly-regarded AI researchers in the world applies the same point to Large Language Models (LLMs), the approach that ChatGPT is built on:

Yann LeCun on Twitter: "On the highway towards Human-Level AI, Large Language Model is an off-ramp. / Twitter"

On the highway towards Human-Level AI, Large Language Model is an off-ramp.

In other words, we see AI doing amazing things (AI being the world chess champion / winning Jeopardy) and then we extrapolate all the way to AGI taking over the world in a few years.

Mitchell also talks about the difficulty of understanding how hard problems are in advance of solving them:

“Well, I guess like all of these fallacies, the problem is that we have so little insight into our own intelligence that we don’t know what things are … the things that are easy for us are so invisible to us. We don’t know how hard they are for machines. That’s part of the problem is that we don’t understand our own intelligence well enough to make predictions about how complex machine intelligence is going to be.”

A metaphor for this challenge is thinking about solving technologies as climbing a mountain. When you’re ascending a mountain, all you can see is the peak of the mountain you’re climbing. It feels like if you can just get to the top of it, the problem will be solved. But, the reality is that when you finally get to the peak of the mountain, with your better view, you’ll notice that there is another mountain in the distance for you to scale still. And so you can see how it is impossible to predict how many steps it will take to solve complicated problems where you’re not sure of what’s required to solve the problem.

As a result of persistently under-estimating problems, we think the future will come sooner. We’re smart enough to see and believe that building artificial general intelligence, upgrading the human genome, creating new forms of life, eradicating disease, or living forever are all possible. And we assume that we can do it soon.

In addition, I’ve noticed Paradigm Blindness. We think the current paradigm and rate will go on forever and apply to everything. We often can’t see the limits of the current paradigm until we sufficiently explore it. And, we can’t be sure what the next one will be.

We can see a lot of evidence for these fallacies. For example, in 1965, Nobel laureate and early AI pioneer Herbert Simon predicted that: “Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” Since then, there have been many waves of AI euphoria and wild predictions. As recently as the end of 2016, Elon Musk predicted that Tesla would have full self-driving by 2017. It’s now 2023, and there isn’t clarity on when it will actually happen.

AI breakthroughs are followed by narratives about how AI is imminent and about to change everything. The reality is that the advance does have a major impact, but its impact is spread over many years or decades thus impacting the productivity growth rate less than we might expect.

To summarize: Increasing our productivity growth rate is more complex than it seems at first. Now, you understand that complexity at a deeper level, you’ll be less trusting about article headlines proclaiming that a new technology is about to change everything as we know it overnight.

Unfortunately, rather than talking about productivity growth rate, it’s not even on the agenda. Rather than mobilization, there is backlash.

So where do we go from here?

To answer this question, let’s take stock of what has been covered in this article so far…

The Productivity Paradox Is The New Silent Spring

• We have a Great Boom between 1870–1970 (depending on where you stop measuring).
• At the exact point you think the productivity growth rate would skyrocket because of the computer revolution, it slows down. This is known as the Productivity Paradox.
• This slowdown has had a huge negative impact on society and has eroded the “American Dream.”
• If we don’t do something about the slowdown, things could get much worse: war, extreme inflation, communism, etc.
• Despite the importance of the Great Boom and Productivity Paradox, there’s a huge backlash against productivity, and the slowdown isn’t even talked about.

In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote the Silent Spring, which, for the first time, brought mass attention to the increasing effects humans were having on the environment. Her book served as a wake-up call that something needed to be done before it was too late. In the 2020s, we need a silent spring for productivity.

Given the backlash against productivity, many people have come to the conclusion that productivity is bad.

But, when you think through the implications, we don’t actually want less productivity as a society. We want more…

• We want energy to be more efficient in order to reduce climate change.
• We want more powerful and smaller supercomputers in our pockets for the same price.
• We want less waste filling up landfills.
• We want the things we buy to cost less while also getting better and faster.

On a personal level, whatever our goal is (meaning, happiness, aliveness, money, impact, connection), we want to get to it faster and easier with all else being equal. For example, given the choice of taking a 15 minute trip somewhere or taking a 4 hour detour, we will always choose the faster approach. Even if our goal is to maximize relaxation, we will take the most efficient path for that, which might be taking the longer, but more scenic route.

Things like bloat, burnout, dehumanization, and inequality aren’t the ultimate result of productivity. They are they result of other failures:

• They are the result of failed productivity experiments.
• They are the result of not redistributing the gains of productivity properly.
• They are the result of approaching productivity myopically rather than holistically.
• They are the result of productivity myths.

But, here’s what’s important to understand…

Failed experiments don’t mean productivity is bad and we should stop experimenting.

The myths about productivity shouldn’t define it.

To improve is fundamentally human.

We have drastically improved manual work productivity in the past using a proven framework, and we can re-use the same framework for knowledge work now.

Before we can redistribute productivity gains, we need to have productivity gains.

At the end of the day, productivity is a scapegoat, and it shouldn’t be. Rather than blaming productivity, we should be celebrating it. Rather than doing less experimentation, we should do more.

Anti-productivity backlash is an accurate acknowledgement of symptoms, but an inaccurate understanding of root causes.

Ultimately, what we really want is a new kind of productivity. We want a kind of productivity that is actually more productive, more inclusive, leaves us time for an uninterrupted personal life, and ultimately feels better — more purpose, more fulfillment, more aliveness, and less hurry.

So the question that arises now is, so what? What can we actually do about this productivity crisis on an individual level?

First, this is societal problem, and there are certainly many solutions that need to be considered at that level. But, I won’t write about it here because:

• This article is already 6,000 words, and I don’t want to make it 10,000. 🙂
• I don’t like writing articles where there isn’t a tangible action that readers can do to make a difference in their world.
• Solving complex societal problems is outside my circle of competence.

Fortunately, there is something we can all do at an individual level to make a big difference in our own productivity, which can then inspire others…

What You Can Do Now: Be Deliberate About Your Own Personal Productivity Growth

Productivity growth doesn’t just happen on its own.

In today’s work world, the implicit focus of most work is execution:

• Identify what work needs to be done
• Get it done
• In a given time frame
• At a certain quality
• With no defects

Execution is about doing the same thing over and over in the right way in the right-time frame and getting the right result. It’s about doing a lot of things right.

There is one problem with execution though. We don’t automatically become more productive just by doing the same thing over and over. Rather, once we become good enough, our performance typically plateaus. In academic circles, this is known as the OK Plateau. For example, think about typing and driving. You do these everyday without thinking about it, but don’t improve at them automatically.

To improve at execution, we need a whole different mindset that is counterintuitive. More specifically, we need an improvement mindset. The improvement mindset is counterintuitive because it’s an inherently inefficient process in the short-term that leads to massive productivity gains in the long-term.

With the improvement mindset, we focus on…

• Trying productivity experiments that may or may not work
• Learning more about best practices that will take a long time to pay off
• Discovering and trying out new tools
• Creating new habits that don’t exist

What’s important to understand is that the execution and improvement mindset are both important, but they’re also completely different. And, progress on them is measured in opposite ways.

For example, someone in the execution paradigm does the right thing over and over. They could get fired if they don’t produce enough or make a mistake. In the improvement paradigm, most of what one does doesn’t pay off. And when it does, it might only do so over years. But, the one thing that does payoff, may pay back all the mistakes and give a 1,000% return.

For example, it might take 50 hours to improve at one execution task by 10% (or 10 minutes per day). But, if you do that task everyday, you will save thousands of hours over your career because of the increased productivity.

The table below highlights many of the differences between the execution mindset and improvement mindset:

In my experience, the one big thing you can do first to develop an improvement mindset is to set aside five hours a week to deliberate learning, reflection, and experimentation. I call this the 5-Hour Rule, and many of the world’s top entrepreneurs, leaders, and innovators follow it religiously throughout their entire career no matter how busy they are. For example:

• Warren Buffett has spent 80% of his time ever since he was a child just reading and thinking.
• While President Obama was in the White House, he still set aside an hour for reading daily.
• Even as he was starting Microsoft, Bill Gates would still read an hour per day even though he got him at midnight on most nights. In addition, throughout his entire career, Gates spent an entire week just reading every year.

Unfortunately, setting aside time to deliberately improve one’s work is hard on multiple levels:

• Most people aren’t paid for learning
• It often takes away from execution time
• It requires a whole new, opposing mindset
• It requires a different way of measuring progress
• It’s almost never urgent
• It can be hard to do alone

As a result, many people procrastinate on deliberately improving their productivity.

For example, I first fell in love with learning when I was 16 years old. I re-invested everything back into books. However, as I got older, I realized I was procrastinating on learning certain topics that were critical, but that were hard for me. I also noticed that I wasn’t as deliberate about applying what I learned to my life. About 15 years ago, I created a whole accountability and support network so my friends and I could help each other learn and grow together. Over that time, I’ve literally done thousands of these calls.

More recently, I decided to make the structure public…

Resource For Deliberate Improvement

From April 3–April 28, I’m doing a month-long improvement challenge called Month To Master. During the month you:

• Select one micro-topic to learn (in a sea of information overwhelm).
• Build a curriculum to help you rapidly learn the micro-topic.
• Share what you learn each day on a co-learning call, in order to deepen your learning, connect with others learning the same thing, and build your audience.
• Reflect on how you could improve your learning process.
• Publicly share what you learn on social media so you can build a following and demonstrate your expertise.

You can learn more and sign up now >>

This article was written with love and care using the blockbuster mental model. If you’re interested in creating your own blockbuster article, I have a year-long, in-depth training program that I personally lead. To learn more, fill out this application form.

If there’s a link to an Amazon book, it’s an affiliate link, which means I get a small amount of compensation when you buy the book. This compensation does not influence the specific books I recommend, as I only recommend books that I read and love.

We’re in a productivity crisis, according to 52 years of data. Things could get really bad. was originally published in Accelerated Intelligence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.