My good friend and Conjunctured business partner, Dusty Reagan, just wrote a blog post that takes a pretty interesting (and realistic) perspective on productivity and achieving your life’s goals. Below is an excerpt and a link to his full post:

Yes my friends, it’s true. You’re gonna’ die. This is my #1 productivity tip. Don’t forget, that someday, maybe tomorrow, you’re gonna’ die. How does this help productivity? Remember all those things you’ve been planning on doing. You better do them… soon, because you’re gonna’ die. – Dusty Reagan, Life-hacking Productivity Tip #1: You’re gonna’ die

It’s a sobering, yet curiously motivational realization. Read his full blog post, complete with a video from William Shatner.

A little background first: I wrote this while I was backpacking in Australia during December 2008 and January 2009.  I had been traveling alone for the last 2-3 weeks of my trip and had been forced to acclimate myself to a foreign world and culture. Although Australia is far from atypical America, there are some significant differences inherent in Australian culture (and/or perhaps backpacker culture) that have significantly affected me. On January 13, 2009 on my flight back to America, I wrote a letter to reread someday when I need a bit of clarity . Here’s an exerpt:

I realize now that the person I was before is not the person I want to be anymore. I feel this way very strongly. I’m afraid that the excitement of day to day business life and exclusively being around others who feel the same way has distracted me from a superior alternative experiential life. So, whenever you feel like ‘hey, things aren’t so bad at all, this is fun…I’m enjoying things now that I’m back…I URGE YOU…’

Please. Read your travel notebook, mainly “things I’ve learned” and the “key tenets to experience life.” In the past– I have been too fast, too careless, too impersonal, too IGNORANT. Caught up in “the american way”. I want something different out of life. Something better.

7 Key Tenets to an Experiential Life

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKlU9GBn7cE

Every once in a while I reach a point where my mind is filled with so much stuff that I feel that I just can’t move. Stuck, like I’m walking around in quicksand, not really going anywhere. Out of all my techniques I’ve tried, the best one so far I’ve discovered is a twenty minute written meditation.  These are the steps I follow.

1. Open up my Google Doc “Notepad” file.  (I like Google Docs because it automatically saves the document and never crashes.) Note: it’s important that this document is a secure document that no one else will read except you. This gives you the freedom to truly unload.
2. Open up your favorite timer application. I use the free, Apimac Timer for Mac. And set it so that it counts down from 20 minutes. Make sure the alert is audible and that your sound is turned up enough that you can hear it.
3. Start the timer.
4. Close your eyes. (assuming you are a good typist). Bonus points if you’re in a public place as doing atypical things around strangers makes you a stronger person.
5. Start writing everything that’s floating around in your head no matter how seemingly weird and unrelated it is. Force yourself to keep writing, paying no attention to typos or grammar—go for stream of thought. You’ll probably reach points where you run out of things in your mind. It’s empty, already? Yeah, right. If you really have nothing to say, then write, “I don’t know what to say…” over and over again until your mind pops thoughts into your mind. And it will, trust me.  Eventually ideas will start flowing and things will come out. It might even surprise you what you uncover. Just go with it.
6. When the audible alert sounds, open your eyes and be amazed at how much gunk you’ve siphoned out of your mind. Can you really believe all that was up there? Note: if you’d like to keep going, then by all means, keep going. The longer the meditation, the better, but twenty minutes is the least amount of time I would recommend you do this for.
7. Feel a sense of cleanliness and emptiness that this exercise forces you to achieve.

Above is what I wrote out after my twenty minute meditation today. I reached a mental point towards the end similar to the mental experience I get from normal, quiet meditation. Sometimes after this exercise I feel a clear mind and that’s it. And at other times not only do I feel a clear mind, but I feel a sense of extreme clarity and am able to find meaningful, personal realizations in the last few sentences.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=21mpQQ9COD4

You dine, rather than consume.

It’s a one hour cup of soup and a glass of red wine at a local bistro. It’s not a four minute, thirty second frozen dinner and diet coke consumed at your laptop in less time than it took to heat up.

You sit in silence and listen to your breathing.

You don’t text message back and forth or look at your watch or be uncomfortable that you’re in public at lunch by yourself having a good time. You put your cell phone on mute (not vibrate) and turn it upside down.

You walk slow, with your head up, proud and purposeful, but with a curious nature about you.

You don’t walk fast, head down, shoulders hunched, thinking about your destination and the imposition the walk is causing you.

You think, “right now, my walking is the destination.”

You are proud of the small things you have accomplished today, instead of beating yourself up and feeling guilty for those you haven’t had a chance to get to yet.

You know that, not only will happiness find you, but that it is right here in this moment.

You try not to get too excited about the future because, not only is it almost always different than you imagine, but you realize that the present is where the actual experience exists.

You imagine a moment and a feeling the way you want it to be. You attach a firm picture in your mind to it, and then you let it go, comfortably knowing how the energies of the universe will shift and shape to allow it to come to fruition.

Relaxation is not being so serious.

Relaxation, most importantly, is not being so hard on yourself.

Life is too short to feel regretful. Life is too short to not enjoy the present. Life is too short to be afraid. And certainly, life is too short to be anxious, uptight, and in a hurry. Life is too important to forget this.

You look at people in the eyes and be with them because you realize they are not a distraction from your moment. They are the key piece to it all.

Does that correlation exist?  At this point, I’m not totally sure.  The inspiration for this post comes from that the fact that over the past several weeks I’ve been doing multiple sets of pushups daily on a regular basis, and because I’m not exactly the most muscular guy in the room, I’ve started to notice quite obvious physical improvement. I can tell it’s working because for one, I’m able to steadily increase the number of pushups I can do, so I know I’m getting stronger. And two, I’m seeing definition in my arms and chest that I haven’t seen since my sophomore year in college when I was going to the gym on a regular basis. And keep in mind, this is all just pushups (mainly because I actually enjoy doing pushups…I always have for some reason).  Probably about just 20/day for 2 weeks. Nothing intense.
So, this where it gets interesting…

Over the past week for just a random reason (to see if I could do it, or maybe it was because I set up Joe’s Goals) I started increasing the difficulty and variety of the exercises. Started doing crunches, squats, and even ran a mile for the hell of it one day (of which I haven’t done for years…I hate running because I think it’s boring).  Here’s the thing, though.  I noticed my business productivity and personal motivation go up a little bit. I’m very aware of my internal self, so when a small amount changes, I notice it big time.  And boy did I notice. The past few days have been incredibly productive, and the best thing is that because my motivation has increased I’m doing the tasks that I’ve been avoiding for a while now, without even thinking twice. I must admit I didn’t expect this at all.

Maybe this seems like old news to you. And in fact, I think I’ve read it before somewhere.  But when you experience it first hand, it’s a bit different.

The key is determining what it is about exercising that has increased my motivation. It could be a number of things:

1. increase in testosterone (i’ve already started to research natural ways to increase testosterone to further increase motivation if this is the culprit)
2. increase in muscle tone has increases my self-confidence and thus my motivation to live life to it’s fullest
3. the presence of the workout routine increases my work routine follow-through
4. something else I’m not thinking of…

I’m going to continue the experiment for a while longer. I wonder if there’s a plateau, or if motivation just continues to go up?  As a personal productivity obsessive and avid lifehacker, this is quite exciting to me! There’s an obvious correlation between personal motivation and business success. Now, the key is finding some way to hack into that extra supply of personal motivation.