Stop optimizing. Start reshaping reality.
Why productivity advice misses the point entirely
I spend over 250 hours per year reviewing my life.
Daily journaling, weekly check ins, quarterly audits, one big annual review retreat, and more. Most people would call this insane. I call it the foundation of everything good in my life.
These reviews 10xed my performance at work, pulled me out of multiple divorce-bound relationships, helped me drop 40 pounds of fat, and raised my baseline happiness three years in a row. Through my transformation, there’s one lesson I’ve learned over and over.
Improving your life is a skill. And the ultimate manifestation of that skill is the ability to reshape reality.
Although my systems help me write to do lists and get things done, their real value is helping me question and renegotiate the hidden assumptions that limit my life.
In our lives, we are as gods. My goal is to help you get good at it.
What are we even doing here? Isn’t this a newsletter about how to make friends or how to throw a cool party?
Of course it is! But you can’t be a good friend if you’re miserable or drowning in work so deeply you can barely feed yourself. Stage 1 of The Friendship Pipeline is all about solving your own internal (and external) blockers to be a person who can show up for others in an authentic way. It’s a lot easier to invite people into your life if you have your shit together.
I want to walk you through how I run my life and the philosophies and theories that underpin it. This will be the first in a multi-part series. There will be frameworks. There will be insane Connorisms. Don’t worry though, I won’t ask you to track every ounce of liquid you drink in a year. My hope is for this exploration to be one part manifesto, one part systematization guide, and one part practical tactical tips to steal for your own routine.
While this series may appear more engineer than friendship, these are the lessons I’ve learned in the trenches of building — and rebuilding — my life. They won’t work for everyone, but I hope they’re helpful for you.
Flourishing Hierarchies in Everything
To achieve abundant friendships, you need to overcome both your emotional and operational blockers. Today, we’re going to talk about Life Operations.
Operations are the systems and strategies you use to navigate through your day to day life. Everything from how you do the dishes to how you manage your relationships with friends and family. Operations are both conscious and subconscious, both chore and treats.
We’re all familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy. From basic physiological needs all the way to self-actualization. Maslow’s is one of what I like to call Flourishing Hierarchies, and they appear everywhere I seem to look. These hierarchies define an ordered progression of distress to control to prosperity.
When it comes to Operations, of course there’s a hierarchy.
Crucially, your operational capacity isn’t just about time management or willpower. It’s downstream of your mental state. All of your accumulated stressors, both low and high level, conspire to keep you at the lower levels. Even small things like unwashed dishes or a cluttered desk take a mental tax. The physical chaos in your environment creates mental chaos, and mental chaos makes it nearly impossible to operate at higher levels.
Without further ado, here are the levels:
Basic subsistence: Survive, but go no further.
Example: Feed myself. Barely get out of bed. Accomplish nothing. Live meagerly.
At this level, you’re operating in pure survival mode with no mental space for anything beyond immediate needs.
Fake functionality: Go through the motions, but make no progress.
Example: Show up at work, but get nothing done.
You can maintain appearances but lack the clarity to actually advance anything.
Single Focus: Get one thing done in your life. Make progress in one area, while the rest of your life degrades or at best holds steady.
Example: Do a great job at work, but your house is in shambles and your relationships all need maintenance or repair
You have enough mental bandwidth for one priority, but not enough to juggle multiple areas simultaneously.
Multiple Priorities: Select and engage fully with a small number of priorities.
Example: Be a great parent, put together an amazing home, and maintain a few strong friendships. Your ultra marathon dreams, meanwhile, go on the back burner. Thrive.
You’ve achieved the mental clarity to consciously choose and advance several areas while accepting trade-offs.
The Operational Flourishing Hierarchy has two important takeaways.
First, its pinnacle isn’t perfection. No matter how organized and productive you are, you will still only be able to juggle 2-3 simultaneous priorities. I haven’t met anyone who can handle significantly more than that. That doesn’t mean you can’t have more than three hobbies or that having a family, caring about your career, and looking after your health is all you can manage. You can still maintain other areas of your life in maintenance mode, but only three can be consistently moving forward.
Second, there’s no shortcut to the top. You can’t skip levels because each tier requires progressively higher mental clarity. You can’t compartmentalize your divorce, burned down house, stock portfolio crash, and death of all your loved ones in a tragic trapeze incident all at the same time and expect to check every box on your todo list day after day. The ability to do stuff comes from having a clear mind and a clear heart.
To reach your potential, in relationships and in life, you need to achieve the highest level of operational flourishing. But what’s the framework? How can you move yourself up the ladder?
The Dao of Operations
There’s an endless supply of productivity gurus on the internet. All you need to do is buy this Notion template or organize your notes with this file hierarchy or alternate working and resting with this exact ratio.
What all of these philosophies have in common is they are designed to help you optimize the work you have in front of you. They help you tackle or strategically ignore your problems. You get better at playing the game of life.
Operations is about changing the rules.
Two years ago at my all-time high in bodyweight, I made the decision to change from a calorie-restricted eat-whatever-you-want routine to a macro-balanced high protein diet. Despite a decade of prolific home cooking experience, I STRUGGLED to feed myself.
My weekly grocery trips were a nightmare. After archiving my entire mental recipe library (no recipe that isn’t specifically “high protein” is high protein), I had no idea what I could eat. I’d spend literal hours battling my Sunday Scaries trying to put together a coherent menu for the week. Food stress can be particularly insidious. When you need to eat every 4-6 hours, there’s no respite, no days off.
Of course, that stress bled into the rest of my life. My work on my startup suffered, and outside of work, I accomplished little outside of walking extra steps and showing up at my new gym. After my usual pattern of buying cookbooks and obsessively watching food Youtubers failed to deliver the relief I was looking for, I knew I needed to find another way out of this problem.
At first, I looked for a coach or dietician to guide me, but eventually, I came across Austin Meal Prep, a company that sends out precooked, macro-balanced meals every Sunday. You have to understand, this was a heretical idea to me. When I cook, I make almost every component from scratch. I don’t take shortcuts, and I take quality super seriously. This was a STEP, but I was desperate.
Within two weeks, the most stressful problem in my life entirely disappeared. After I opened myself up to the possibility of not taste-maxing every single meal I consume, my relationship with food returned to a healthy state. I still cooked (for my parties) and ate out at restaurants twice a week. With my new routine in place, I started to build more muscle and the fat began to fall off. Now, I was free to turn my attention to my next project, one that proved to be even more daunting: dating.
The way to climb the operational hierarchy is to manage your finite attention. To realize that you can’t build that side project because you’re too tired and hungry after work. To acknowledge your limitations in energy and willpower. The way to win is not by becoming a robot who no longer has human needs or to pretend that stress doesn’t affect you. The trick is to make your limitations irrelevant. To reshape reality.
It’s recognizing when you’re trying to win an unwinnable game, then finding a way to not play that game at all.
Reshaping reality isn’t about changing the cosmological constant or changing others into who you want them to be. Instead, it’s renegotiating and redefining your relationship to the world around you.
I have a lot more to say on this topic, and in the next few issues, I’ll go into more details on my theoretical and tactical tips for moving up the operational hierarchy and developing what I like to call a Mind like Fire. Till then, enjoy the breaking of summer heat and the first turn of the foliage. I hope this issue finds you with a PSL or apple cider donut in hand.
Your friend,
Connor
"Priorities are like arms: anyone who claims to have more than two is crazy or lying" and yet, almost anyone (with two arms) can learn to juggle three balls, and yet, juggling more than 3 is really really really really hard