[Music] if you are picking a brain and one listens to everything you try to do works according to plans sticks the schedules is obedient and calm and the second is a hellscape of chaos and obsession lacks all sense of structure organization just love staying up until 3am overthinking every night i mean you'd pick the first one right everything seems to be built for type 1 brains in a world full of success stories based on consistency atomic habits and self-disciplined routine it can seem impossible to succeed without just that and so for the longest time all i've wanted was a different brain one that would actually listen to me because as someone who has never been able to create any sense of long-term structure if you can relate to me at all here is how i think we can end up right where our consistent habit-forming friends are without ever needing to be consistent or create habits because even though on the outside i realize it looks as though i'm an organized person i run this youtube channel by myself i have a podcast and jobs and school but the thing is on the inside it's probably not what you think it is so let's just get straight into it i'm going to start my case against consistency and habit formation using my younger self as an example because i feel that she had a much better grasp on how to organize myself so i'm going to get a slight cringe pass here but when i was younger i was very good academically at the end of the year i would always have the best grades i would win olympiads i would get all types of reward for excellent academic achievement so you would presumably think that i was a very organized and well put together student and this is not the case on any given day of the year if you were to zoom in chances are i had forgotten what subjects i had that day i might have left my homework at home or had never done my homework because i'd forgotten to do it or sometimes very cheekily i just didn't want to do it and so i very often kind of fell behind during the year but this was completely normal to me i always recognized that sometimes i didn't feel like doing something so i fell behind and then i got interested in it so i caught up and then i got very interested in it so i went ahead and this fall behind catch up and go ahead schedule was very natural to me very often on the same day that i was behind on something that night i would study the next three months of that subject that we hadn't even done yet so i would go ahead everyone else i was just using my passion when i wanted to do things and one of the most important things i'd had to reteach myself as an adult is that falling behind is not quitting it's just a third of the story because i feel as though when i got older and i got used to seeing everyone being super consistent and having these habits as soon as i didn't do something for a while i thought that i had quit and that i'm just not as good as everyone else at this thing and it's not right for me when this is not the full story being a chaos and passion driven person falling behind is just a third of the story sometimes i don't do things but it's guaranteed that if i genuinely want to do them i will catch up and go ahead much later and this has been such an important thing for me to relearn i generally believe that consistency is not for everyone and those of us who cannot adapt it end up quitting so many things just because we think that we can't be consistent and therefore we cannot do it i know it's not the best thing in the world but sometimes i go to gym five times a week for a few months in a row and sometimes i won't go to the gym at all for five months but i know that this doesn't mean that i hate exercising because i'm going to want to do it again and i'm going to catch up on the progress that i missed out on during that time when i genuinely didn't feel like doing it just because i stopped does not mean that i have quit something forever douglas adams has a quote that i really relate to when he says that i love deadlines i love the wishing noise they make as they go by and this is so relatable for me any sort of artificial deadlines are just not serious enough for me to use and therefore even though that i know that there are some harsh deadlines in life for example when i was younger i had end of your exams now as an adult i need to hand projects in i have other things that i need to do for work but in between now and then i do not create any real deadlines anything that i put in my calendar is a suggestion it's not something that i need to do it's more like if i feel like it i might do this today but just because i skip it one two three four five six times in a row does that mean that i cannot catch up on this thing later or that i'm not good at this thing at all i only treat real deadlines like deadlines all the arbitrary ones are suggestions and i don't create any sort of self-hate or hatred for the thing that i'm doing around them now i'm very comfortable never being a consistent habit farming girl but always being a full-behind catch-up and go ahead girl because just like it used to do well for me academically when i was younger it honestly does really well for me in life right now because it's just the way i work and this leads me very comfortably onto what's perhaps a very controversial point which is screw one percent improvements i love james clear his book atomic habits is really really good but it genuinely has caused me a lot of damage because when i saw his one percent improvement graphs which is basically the thought that if you keep improving at something just one percent every single day by the end of the year you will be exponentially better at this thing which is really really true it's a hundred percent true so i looked at this graph and my heart just sank because i realized i could never do this i could never do something consistently for a year because the best way to get me to hate something or to quit something is to make a strict schedule for it if you tell me elizabeth you need to do this thing three times a week for the next two months there's no chance i'm just going to leave it and so i realized that it's never going to work because one percent improvements only work if you do things very consistently if you do things three times a month and you improve one percent every time you're getting absolutely nowhere and even worse if you do things twice a year and you improve only one percent at them that's no improvement you're going to stop doing these things because as frederick hesburgh in the harvard business review identified something that we probably all know intuitively of all forms of human motivation the most effective one is progress which basically means the better we get at something the more we want to do it and this one percent improvements only works if you're consistent and so i'm stuck in this conundrum where i have to be consistent in order to improve and so i can never improve or want to do everything and i'm always stuck with low level motivation for everything in my life this is where my method comes in basically what i've decided is to completely screw the one percent improvement and go for five percent 500 5000 improvements every single time and genuinely this is how i've learned my skills this is how i've learned to draw to paint to edit and everything so i'm going to explain how i do this specifically if you are also a chaotic passionate person hopefully this might work for you a few years ago i wanted to learn 3d animation because i saw people who create the video game characters and stuff and i thought oh my god this looks so cool i want to learn how to do it the way to quit this for me is to go okay so twice a week for the next six months i'm going to slowly learn how to 3d anime no no this would never work what i do instead is that i do nothing but i just passively kind of look at animations here and there so whenever i'm procrastinating or i have some free time i'll just go through my phone and i'll look at really good 3d animated work and what i'm doing here is that i'm passively priming my brain to get passionate about this thing and to fall in love with this thing and i'm not allowing myself to start the work because i'm just doing this thing slowly and slowly and slowly and at some points i'll reach a tipping point while i go straight i need to learn this right now because i can't wait to learn this so then i'll just sit down and honestly i had never done any work before in my life i sat down and i sat for maybe 10 to 15 hours on my laptop and i taught myself from nothing to be basically quite good at learning to animate and then on the second day i created this and i'll show it on screen on the third day i was really good i created this so in three days i learned something that admittedly i could have pieced myself and done for a very long time if i was different i just can't do things that way so i went for like 10 000 improvements basically in the space of three days which otherwise i would have never been able to achieve because if i would have tried to get to one percent improvement i would have quit very very early on so this is how i learn skills without creating habits i prime myself for extreme passion and then i get to do them and also another huge benefit of this is that you get to learn things so much faster and with so much more focus because as much as i envy and i'm so jealous of consistent and organized people because they can do so many things the one thing that i think i'm a lot better at is deep work i don't understand why people struggle with deep work i'm always falling into deep work and i think it's because they pace themselves too much and they create these short schedules or i'm only going to do this for 40 minutes a day if you sit into it if you get in the proper mood to want to do something properly you can get extreme levels of focus and therefore crazy results and because for my personal projects and things that i want to work on i only work in a deep work state i can get so much more done and learn a lot faster and therefore i'm leveraging huge amounts of passion huge amounts of focus the best kind of state of mind for learning to get extreme results really really fast without one percent improvements so yeah this is how i hack my brain into learning things now i'm pretty sure a lot of you might be thinking this really doesn't work for everything and you would be 100 right i think the toughest pill for me to swallow especially as a competitive person is the realization that there are certain things in life that i will just never be good at i know this is hard to say for me but it's it's just true i will never be good at memorizing facts because you need to repeat things again and again in order to remember them consistently it's not for me i love exercise but i will never be a bodybuilder because it takes ridiculous amounts of food restriction and exercise for a long amount of time to get somewhere and i can absolutely never do that but this doesn't mean that i can't learn some things or that i can't enjoy exercise so i think that in my life i do not optimize for consistency i optimize for passion because even though there are some things that i'm always going to be really bad at there are some things that i'm always very very good at i can get inhumane amounts of work done in a short burst of time i can learn huge amounts of information in short periods of time and also i have a very creative bigger picture mind because i touch things intensively and then i leave them for a very long time so when i come back to them i can see things differently so i am very good at bigger picture thinking so if you're also kind of a chaotically passionate person you might be the same as me and we're better at these things than we are at strict scheduled routines so when it comes to both personal projects and as much as i can in my professional life and things i have less control over i tend to optimize for being a passionate person because that's where i can shine there's this very interesting study that showed that 50 of the amount of work done in a company is done by the top 10 of workers and also the best performer is a hundred times more productive than the lowest performer in the company and this doesn't mean that we should all aim to be the most productive person but basically what that means is that these people who are at the top are probably having a lot more fun and also just in their natural element so i think recognizing my strengths recognizing the things that i'm good at and optimizing for those as much as i can leads to better results in my life and also just letting go of the things that are just too painful and impossible for me to do because trust me i've tried and it does not work as a slight caveat here of course i do not mean that i lead my life just based on my feelings and passions and some level of strictness and rigorousness and routine is absolutely necessary to function in the world especially with meetings and jobs so i can do these things i'm just not the best at them and so even though there's these strict schedules when it comes to the work that i need to do on my own which realistically is a huge amount of work on any job i'm a lot less strict and a lot less rigorous and a lot more passion driven my next very important point is having adult and not childish and bratty conversations with myself because very often i can be a childish brat in my mind and what i mean by this is that if i have something to do and i don't do it i can be very annoying if you asked a child why they didn't do a task and they told you i'm just a lazy person and i didn't do it you wouldn't accept that answer would you you'd probably go okay honey you that might be true but what did you do instead and why did you feel that you wanted to do that more what would have made this task more interesting for you when do you think you might want to do it and most importantly why do you think you need to do this in the first place i think it's so underrated exploring why we need to do things because you're not an idiot you can't just tell yourself to do something and then you're going to do it i think it's very important to explore why we make choices in the first place when we can and when we don't have a trace and we have to do things anyway kind of exploring why this is important and why things function this way might make it much more likely for us to actually go through with the task so when it comes to conversations with myself i cut myself off when i go i'm just a procrastinator oh i'm so lazy oh i just didn't want to do it and rather go a level deeper and say what needs was i trying to fulfill because it's unlikely that i have a need to browse instagram and much more likely have a need to rest or have a need to have fun or have a need to connect with people and i can see how i can fulfill these needs more productively in other ways or i can see how i can turn the task that i have to do and don't want to do into something that might increase the likelihood of me kind of fulfilling these needs for connection and enjoyment and rest and everything else so more adult conversations with ourselves i think are much more important in order to kind of work with the chaos in our mind on the topic of priming my brain to get passionate to learn things what i'm currently trying to get ready to learn is to be better at animation specifically for youtube videos and i'm using philip demiko's class on this on nebula which are very kindly sponsoring this video it's quite embarrassing that i didn't know this as a nebula user but there are now full-on classes on nebula where you can genuinely have professional creators teach you things which is completely crazy if you're currently already a nebular user it's just a five dollar upgrade but the classes are absolutely insane production venue and i'm lowkey getting tempted to create one of my own if you have any ideas by the way for a class for me to make please let me know because um yeah they look super super cool if you want to upgrade any of your skills there are some classes from some of my favorite youtubers on there already so there'll be a link in my description if you wanted to check that out but otherwise if you made it so far here is to endless organized chaos i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be honest yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye