"Change works better when it's focused around a foundational activity."

A lot of successful musical artists agree on the fact that the best way to make good music is to focus on making the music you would like to listen to. I guess I look at it the same way with this course. This course is the course I wish I had I ran into when I started my journey of self-improvement and productivity, over a year and a half ago.

The course that would have taught me you don’t have to read and listen to everything the “Hustle Gurus” have to say to you, about picking yourself up, working 12-hour days, sleeping 4 hours per night, and hitting the gym at 5 am. The course that would have taught me self-improvement and productivity are not end-goals, they’re not even a succession of targets to hit. They’re simply the most natural and logical way towards living the life you want and doing what you love.

Maybe you procrastinate not because you're lazy but because you don't know where to start. Maybe you've started dozens of projects and never finished one, not because you're disorganized but because you're creative. Maybe you believe in a more subtle, informative approach to online courses. This course is not here to teach you how to do things, but to show you what worked for me, and to inspire you.

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Self-Improvement & Productivity
You shouldn’t want to "improve yourself" because something is wrong with you, but because you want to know and understand yourself better. There is a big misconception that self-improvement is all about productivity, crushing targets, and being better than everyone else. It’s often associated with those productivity gurus who want you to buy their book and come to their conferences so that they can tell you how to live your life and beat the competition. The same thing goes for productivity. You shouldn’t aim for productivity just for the sake of being productive. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. In this course section, I explain to you what realizing this meant for me, and how I started to set up systems for myself.

The Wheel of Life
The wheel of life is used as an assessment tool, where you rate yourself in each of the sections of a circle meant to represent the different areas of your life. At the end of the exercise, you end up with a shape that represents how balanced your life is around the different areas. I use the wheel of life for my personal resolutions and overall planning of the year, every December. My wheel of life template is based on an existing one, but I changed the section names and structure a little bit, to match my needs more, and in this course section I show you how I use it.

The One Thing & Eat That Frog
The One Thing & Eat That Frog are both popular books that changed my approach to self-improvement and productivity in general. The former is about identifying the number one most important task to focus on for you to make progress. The latter is about tackling this one thing (your frog) as soon as possible in your day because you're increasingly likely to postpone it as time goes on. In this course section, we go over those 2 main concepts, and how I used the learnings from the books to optimize my workflow and prioritize my tasks better.

The Best Productivity Tools
When it comes to productivity tools, a lot of people make the mistake to put form before function. Essentially, they focus on details like customization, they try out all the features even the ones they don't need... This gets in the way of actually getting the work done. In this course section, I'm going to bombard you with a ton of tools I have gathered from many people I've interviewed over the past 2 years (75 interviews in total). The goal is obviously not to have you go and try to implement them all in your life. The goal is only to inspire you. As with everything when it comes to productivity advice: try things out and find what works for you, get rid of the rest. Don't make things more complex by using a tool just because your favorite productivity guy uses it.

Journaling
In my interview series called 75 People Who Do, 60% of people I asked about journaling, journal on the regular. Either physically or digitally, daily, weekly, monthly, at a specific time, or at any time… The practice of journaling was a big component of their answers about productivity. I consider journaling to be a keystone habit, a term coined by Charles Duhigg in his bestseller book The Power of Habit. Duhigg defines a Keystone habit as “small changes or habits that people introduce into their routines that unintentionally carry over into other aspects of their lives.” It’s essentially something positive that is going to ripple through your life and create more positive change. In this course section, we go over my 3-journal system for keeping track of my work/life, and why I think journaling is a keystone habit.

The 6-Month Rule
The 6-month rule is very simple: pick something up, stick to it for 6 months, consider it as a job, and don't expect anything out of it. After 6 months, you will have made substantial progress on that one thing you picked, and it will be time to assess whether or not you feel like you can commit to this thing for even longer, because it will be required if you want to become successful. In my case, I picked up blogging and showed up every day for 6 months straight. Then I kept going for one more year, and one more after that. Today I'm still here, and in this section, I tell you how the 6-month rule changed my life.

The Problem with Goals
When it comes to productivity, a lot of it goes through setting goals for yourself, and these come with a lot of important caveats. Goals are great, but they can also be really discouraging. The very reason most people don’t follow their goals is that they don’t really think they can reach them. Goals don’t move, they’re standing still on the horizon of possibilities, and the only way to get to them is to start walking the distance and getting to work. But there are always bad days with wind, rain, storms, and only a few people keep walking on those days. If you do work hard enough to get to your goal, you realize there’s a whole new horizon waiting for you, with yet another goal standing still, shining in the distance. It’s like it never stops, this endless road of goal after goal if you're motivated enough to even move forward. In this course section, we look at remedies and a healthier approach to fix the "goal issue".

The One Thing All Overachievers Have in Common
Ever since I started blogging, I’ve interviewed over 75 medium authors on the subject of productivity. One crucial thing this project has taught me is that there’s no one-size-fits-all plan. Everyone has their own techniques, tools, and routines. Because everyone works differently, you can’t say that there’s a clear blueprint to success. Across all the interviews, I can always find patterns and trends, but never a general truth. Yet there is one thing all these people have in common, something that ties them all together. It is an indisputable truth, a fact so obvious I almost can't believe it took me more than 75 interviews to realize it.

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Who am I?

Hey, I'm Joseph Mavericks! Learning to live with a purpose and improve myself has changed my life, and I publish content online about the journey. In August of 2019, I took one of the biggest decisions in my life: commit to blogging for at least 6 months, and see where it would take me. Up until then, I had tried dozens of different projects, without ever sticking with one long enough to see any kind of progress. This time around, I decided to treat blogging like a job, to be extremely consistent, and to not drop it at the first obstacle on the road. This course is both the story of my journey and a breakdown of the learnings I gathered along the way.

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Other useful links

My 50 People Who Do Interview guide - josephmavericks.com/50people

My blog - medium.com/@josephmavericks