Why there is no such thing as ‘personal’ productivity

There is a concept in Buddhism known as ‘co-dependent arising,’ also referred to as ‘dependent origination.’ Though impossible to break down in a few pithy words, the idea is that nothing exists for itself, but the existence of one thing depends on the existence of everything else. The Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh explains it like this:

For a table to exist, we need wood, a carpenter, time, skillfulness, and many other causes. And each of these causes needs other causes to be. The wood needs the forest, the sunshine, the rain, and so on. The carpenter needs his parents, breakfast, fresh air, and so on. And each of those things, in turn, has to be brought about by other causes and conditions. If we continue to look in this way, we’ll see that nothing has been left out. Everything in the cosmos has come together to bring us this table. Looking deeply at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree, and the clouds, we can see the table.

Mainstream productivity culture, however, sees the world differently. For productivity hucksters, your success, usually defined by what you accomplish in life, depends wholly on you and you alone. Are you distracted? Are you focused? Are you living your life to the fullest? Then try doing X, Y, Z and success will follow. Nothing is impossible. You can make your wildest dreams of success come true.

The role of other people in your productivity, when it is mentioned at all, is usually either to ‘boost your social happiness’ or to take work off your hands in the form of delegation.

In the language of most productivity literature, success — even the unreal, 1000x success of the unicorn tech startup — happens in a kind of social vacuum.

But this negates the fact your ‘success,’ even defined along the crass, self-interested lines of productivity culture, is still socially determined. To be exceptional in your field by definition requires others to be mediocre. It also needs others to recognize you as extraordinary.

Similarly, to be wealthy beyond imagination requires millions of others to be much less well off, and requires millions to want to purchase your product.

On a smaller scale, higher productivity means being more efficient at achieving some end, which is almost always socially determined. Maybe you want to be better at your job, which involves impressing your boss, and making your CV more attractive to employers, on whom your financial security relies. The social is inescapable.

It is also rarely an obedient servant to your success, for reasons I pointed out last week. You might be the most productive person at your work, which doesn’t lead to recognition or higher wages but — surprise! — more work. Or you might be extremely productive in an industry that suddenly finds itself obsolete. Or your brilliant service to a company may be, as is often the case, rewarded by finding out your position has been made redundant.

Nor is your success an intrinsic moral good, despite some of the pablum that accompanies tech startup pitch decks. Surprisingly, that millions may suddenly demand your product does not necessarily mean your product is improving lives, something true for potato chips and smartphones, Twitter and Uber.

The idea that popular demand for a product is a vote of moral confidence in a company’s ‘mission’ is one of the more dangerous delusions of our age, and one that traces its roots, in my opinion, directly to a lot of the productivity bullshit Silicon Valley bros ingest every day.

Success, whether that means untold wealth, or winning the Booker Prize, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires a social whole with failed business people, unpublished authors, and perfectly ordinary people who are not visionaries, who are not leaders in their field, who are not surgeons or scientists, who don’t read 100 books a year or follow the tried and true advice of Charlie Munger. Before you denigrate these so-called ‘mediocre people’ in your latest productivity post on Medium, realize that your chimeric success would be impossible without them.