Good Life Project - Maker, Manager and the 2% Challenge

Episode Date: August 27, 2015

What if you spent more time making?We tend to spend our work lives dancing between two modes: maker mode and manager mode.The idea first came to me through a friend, Brad Feld. Maker mode is where we are immersed in the process of creation, innovation, problem-solving, artistry. It's a powerfully generative state that often creates the giant leaps forward, the big ideas and awakenings that propel us.Manager mode is all the administrative, process-driven stuff you need to do to breathe life into the genius that emerges from maker mode. It's a necessary adjunct and, for some, it's also the place where they become most alive and aligned.Problem is, they often have trouble happening at the same time. One pulls you almost violently from the other and you end ping-ponging between the two and never really make much progress on each.What if you took a different approach? What if you created designated, longer-term windows for each. Then took it even farther and, when in maker mode, focused only on the 2% of making that yielded the most stunning outcomes?That's what we're talking about in today's short and sweet GLP Riff. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week's Good Life Project is entitled, Pick Your 2% and Put Everything Against It. So what if you blew up your schedule and rebuilt it around your ability to birth genius? What if you started with a blank white schedule then added in four to five hours a day in fluid bursts where you dropped into uninterrupted, hyper-focused maker mode? What if then, and only then, you added back in a smattering of, quote, manager mode items, like meetings and calls and conversation and other administria, but only what could fit into a designated two- to three-hour window every day? And what if you kept this schedule for a week or a month or a season? What if you kept this schedule for life? How might this change not only what you're capable of

creating, but the way you engage with the people you adore and your ability to build or rebuild a vital, healthy body, mind, spirit, and life? What might the net impact of this be, not just on you, but on the world around you? What if as legendary Boulder, Colorado venture capitalist and tech stars co-founder and author Brad Feld, as he offers, what if you picked the 2% where you could make a massive difference and you put everything you've got into it and then let everything else go? And interestingly, in the summers, Brad pretty much does just that. Moving to a mountain house in Keystone with his wife and a few golden retrievers, he abandons his insanely packed schedule,

mountains of meetings, constant calls, 16 to 18 hour days, and spends months away from the world, writing, creating, running, connecting, refueling. When he does this, what unfolds is pretty extraordinary and he shares it often. Many surprises and awakenings, both about the true impact his regular schedule was having on him and what that pace was doing to his ability to pick his 2% and put everything he had against it to make the greatest difference. In fact, if you want to go into that more deeply, and I've actually recorded a conversation there. We have an earlier podcast with Brad.

You can just search for it on the site or on iTunes. You'll find that conversation and it's a really powerful exploration of how Brad makes very deliberate choices in the name of living an extraordinary life. One that's not always easy and one that doesn't always work well. But I think you might really enjoy that conversation. But the idea here is, what if we go way beyond just living day to day and really dive into this experiment of saying, okay, there's maker mode where I'm creating. I'm doing the thing where I'm just here. I feel like I'm just, I'm pure generative state. I'm creating things that matter to me and potentially to others. And you explore specific structures and strategies that allow you to craft an extraordinary existence, career, relationship,

physical and mental health, and life while exalting your relationship with those who matter. What if you actually took some time and zoomed the lens out, set everything back to zero and said, if I rebuilt my day now, what if I took the 2% that lights me up more than everything else? And I rebuilt everything that I was doing so that I could just drop into maker mode and jettison almost everything else and make that thing matter. What might my life look like? And then try it on for size.

Something to think about as we start to explore, okay, moving into the second half of the year here, moving maybe out of summer and into more deliberate intentional action mode as we sort of wrap into the fall, what do I want to do with the rest of this year? Maker mode, manager mode, and what's my 2% where if I could just pick that and put everything against it, my world and maybe the world would change. As always, I hope you enjoyed this week's Good Life Project riff.

I'm Jonathan Field, signing off for Good Life Project. Thank you.