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Moataz Ahmed otherwise known as “motizzy” is a graphic designer, consultant and hand lettering artist.  He recently published Part 1 of his book titled, “Lazy Person’s Guide to Freedom” and we talked about his journey and book in this conversation.

The book was born out of years of taking action in his own life in his attempts to transform himself from a self-described “lazy person” to someone that was motivated and energized by many different projects.  

I found his guide a nice antidote to the “hustle-preneurship” advice we read so often.  It starts with a foundational framing of freedom as something that we choose rather than something where we give up our power to other people in exchange for stuff or money.  

We talk about:

• How we naturally started freelancing by helping people
• His embrace of the “gift mindset”
• How he improved his will-power and motivation
• How he thinks about freedom and justice
• How freedom should also be about speaking out for other people’s freedom
• Learning new languages and the benefit of cross-cultural insight for design work

You can learn more:

• Motizzy.com
• Lazy Person’s Guide To Freedom ($0+ Gift Pricing)
• His great design work on instagram

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Moataz Ahmed on Freedom, Creativity & His Journey To Overcome Laziness appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

My Short Summary

Alex Pang makes sense of the idea of “rest” through his own journey taking a sabbatical after leaving Academia and the corporate world. What he discovers is that we have lost connection with an ancient idea and broader conception of Leisure as one of a mix of contemplation and action. He explores how our modern work beliefs have crowded out rest – both the active kind (like exercise) and passive kind (contemplation) – in favor of the 40+ hour work week and being “productive.” An antidote to our empty work beliefs. Recommend.

Key Themes & Quotes

When our identity as a person becomes too wrapped up in being a worker we become lost

How taking an identity as a “worker” undermines your existence

If your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist.

The business world has been overtaken by a cult of “busyness” where we have lost the connection between “hard work” and “good work.” Americans are uniquely obsessed with work and have some of the worst problems with overwork in the world, dating back hundreds of years.

William James diagnosis on Americans

Consider William James’s diagnosis of overwork in his 1899 essay “Gospel of Relaxation.” He argued that Americans had become accustomed to overwork, to living with an “inner panting and expectancy” and bringing “breathlessness and tension” to work.
…
In 1899 William James noted that that many Americans had gotten “into a wretched trick” of overwork and overextension, which increased “the frequency and severity of our breakdowns.” An anonymous writer in Singapore’s Straits Times observed in 1913, “The tendency of the present age is to mental overwork and the exhaustion of the brain force.” Two years later, Bertie Charles Forbes noted that the modern industrialist “works harder than any of his workmen,” and the banker “gets early to his office and performs more work—and brainier work—than any other three men in his nerve-wrecking profession.” Such men had made America the envy of the world, he said, but they were “committing suicide by overwork.”

And the modern cult of busyness and “performing busyness”:

As a result, service workers and professionals are rewarded not just for performing work but also for “performing” busyness at work.

Today’s workplace respects overwork, even though it’s counterproductive, and treats four-hour days as “contemptibly slack,” even though they produce superior results.

On how companies are manipulating people based on our broken ideas of leisure to get people to stay in the office:

As sociologist William Davies argues, today’s workers are told that passion is their greatest asset and that they should do what they love (or at least love what they do); employers, meanwhile, have come to see happiness as a strategic resource that boosts employee productivity, decreases absenteeism and turnover, and increases customer satisfaction. In a few very privileged companies, where competition for talent is ferocious, this translates into free food, entertainment, on-site dry-cleaning, and other perks; elsewhere, it’s deployed as a kind of weaponized positive psychology, in which automated systems watch for signs of discontent, negative voice tone during customer phone calls, and indicators that happiness is at suboptimal levels. In environments like these, the ability to detach from a workplace that wants to commoditize your emotional life, and to cultivate a private life rather than succumb to easy alternatives that keep you in the office, is more valuable than ever.

Leisure once had a deeper meaning – it used to be an active engagement with life through contemplation or engagement in things that brought you alive. Our modern conception of it is as a passive pursuit and often merely in the aim of “recharging” for work.

The Roman and Greek conceptions of leisure and rest:

Of course, I can’t claim any special insight here. The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society, recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life. Today, we’ve lost touch with that wisdom, and our lives are poorer and less fulfilling as a result. It’s time we rediscovered the good that rest can do.

Referencing Josef Pieper and his discussion of work in Germany after World War II, he references Piepers idea of leisure that seemed to be lsot in the culture

Pieper described as not just a “result of spare time” but “an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm.”

This idea of leisure – one of “inward calm” was slowly eroded and then looked at skeptically and ow dramatic this shifted our culture:

Anything created through contemplation (or religious revelation, or intuition) was, by definition, less impressive and trustworthy.
…
These philosophical arguments might seem arcane, but the assumptions that knowledge is produced rather than discovered or revealed, that the amount of work that goes into an idea determines its importance, and that the creation of ideas can be organized and institutionalized, all guide our thinking about work today. When we treat workaholics as heroes, we express a belief that labor rather than contemplation is the wellspring of great ideas and that the success of individuals and companies is a measure of their long hours.

Pieper shares the idea of the ratio and the intellectus, which is that ideas can be formulated through work (ratio) or intellectus (spiritual means):

Devoting yourself only to the first (to ratio, in other words) and neglecting the second (intellectus) might make you more productive in the short run but will make your work less profound in the long run.

Another example from history, he cites Sun Tzu

Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “It is the unemotional, reserved, calm, detached warrior who wins, not the hothead seeking vengeance and not the ambitious seeker of fortune.” In The Book of Five Rings, written around 1645, Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi advised, “Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm.”

Breaks can be vitally important, but a vacation within the context of full-time work probably will only give you 3-4 weeks of relief

At this rate you’d need to take a week vacation every month to really “recharge”

Psychologists have since discovered that a similar effect holds for even relaxing vacations: the benefits don’t last very long. When they measure mood, energy levels, engagement, and happiness levels among workers before and immediately after a vacation, then weeks or months later, psychologists find that the emotional boost that a vacation provides lasts about three or four weeks. After that, your happiness and job satisfaction levels return to their prevacation levels: it’s “lots of fun, quickly gone,” as one article puts it. (And for perfectionists and workaholics, the fade-out effects happen even faster.)

Looking back in history, you find many prolific creators did not work as the people we glorify today. There is a consistent convergence around 4-hours of deep work. Our modern work culture has lost connection to good work because we orient around a 40-hour work week instead of looking at the worth of the output.

Here is how Darwin spent his day”

After his morning walk and breakfast, Darwin was in his study by eight and worked a steady hour and a half.

At nine thirty he would read the morning mail and write letters. Downe was far away enough from London to discourage casual visitors, yet close enough to allow the morning mail to reach correspondents and colleagues in the city in just a few hours.

At ten thirty, Darwin returned to more serious work, sometimes moving to his aviary, greenhouse, or one of several other buildings where he conducted his experiments.

By noon, he would declare, “I’ve done a good day’s work,” and set out on a long walk on the Sandwalk, a path he had laid out not long after buying Down House. (Part of the Sandwalk ran through land leased to Darwin by the Lubbock family.) When he returned after an hour or more, Darwin had lunch and answered more letters.

At three he would retire for a nap; an hour later he would arise, take another walk around the Sandwalk, then return to his study until five thirty, when he would join his wife, Emma, and their family for dinner. On this schedule he wrote nineteen books, including technical volumes on climbing plants, barnacles, and other subjects; the controversial Descent of Man; and The Origin of Species, probably the single most famous book in the history of science, and a book that still affects the way we think about nature and ourselves.

Anyone who reviews his schedule cannot help but notice the creator’s paradox.

Henri Poincaré

Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours. He did his hardest thinking between 10 a.m. and noon, and again between five and seven in the afternoon. The nineteenth century’s most towering mathematical genius worked just enough to get his mind around a problem—about four hours a day.

A study of scientists in the 1950s:

A survey of scientists’ working lives conducted in the early 1950s yielded results in a similar range. Illinois Institute of Technology psychology professors Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr surveyed their colleagues about their work habits and schedules, then graphed the number of hours faculty spent in the office against the number of articles they produced. You might expect that the result would be a straight line showing that the more hours scientists worked, the more articles they published. But it wasn’t.
…
The data revealed an M-shaped curve. The curve rose steeply at first and peaked at between ten to twenty hours per week. The curve then turned downward. Scientists who spent twenty-five hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five. Scientists working thirty-five hours a week were half as productive as their twenty-hours-a-week colleagues.

It looked something like this:

Companies and people find tremendous value in taking extended leave – sabbaticals – and they are probably underutilized in modern society – both for individuals and within companies

He is a big fan of sabbaticals, having discovered the idea for his first book during his own sabbatical. Here is an example from Korea he mentions:

Organizations can also benefit from sabbaticals, as the experience of Samsung Electronics shows. In 1990, when it was still struggling to expand outside Korea, Samsung started an overseas sabbatical program for its most promising executives. Every year, two hundred people attended a three-month boot camp heavy on language immersion, meditation, and education in local customs; they then headed off for six months to one of eighty countries, where they learned the local culture, made friends, and essentially played amateur anthropologist; they then spent another six months working on a business-related project of their own design. Within a decade, the experiences of these graduates were contributing to Samsung’s dizzying rise as a global brand. Today, graduates of the sabbatical program are among the company’s most senior executives, both in Seoul and around the world.

He cites the example of Stefan Sagmeister who gave a TED talk about he takes a year off from work every seven years.

“EVERYONE WHOSE JOB description includes ‘thinking’ or coming up with ideas will benefit from” taking a sabbatical, Stefan Sagmeister says. His

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Rest By Alex Pang: Summary & Key Quotes appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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Pang’s Own Journey To Understanding Rest

I first stumbled upon Alex Pang when my cousin suggested I read his book Rest, which was published in 2016. The book argues that we are ignoring Rest – a key component of a life well lived and more practically (at least in the short-term) a vital component to getting more done while working less.

I’ve also written about Pang’s own experience with a sabbatical and how he discovered a renewed sense of energy for engaging with the world.

As I’ve talked with people that have taken leaves from work – planned or unplanned – I find a similar pattern. I find that people discover or even re-discover hobbies, interests or projects that they are drawn to. Some people write books, some people decide to volunteer.

During Alex’s three-month sabbatical, he had a moment that made it seem like everything he thought about his work was wrong:

It was about a month into it that I had this realization that I was getting incredible amounts of stuff done, I was reading huge numbers of books, I was having all these ideas, great conversations, producing lots of stuff but I didn’t have this sense of being constantly time-pressured and always being half a project behind in my entire life that was just part of normal existence in silicon valley. It was at this point that I realized I had made a significant transition, a mental shift, but also a shift in how I experienced time. It started me thinking about the relationship between work and leisure and rest and creative work.

I asked him if there was a single moment in which all of this came to him.

I had been reading Virginia Woolf’s book A Room Of One’s Own that makes the argument that for in order for women to be creative, but really for anyone to be creative, they needed a certain kind of space and independence that had long been denied to women…That got me thinking about all these issues and their interconnection.

The connection between rest and leisure is something that has bubbled up in the modern consciousness. I’ve written about how we mistake a vacation for leisure, Andrew Taggart writes about how Leisure was once seen as the supreme aim of life and Pang writes about losing touch with the essence of the idea in Rest (my own book notes here).

Of course, I can’t claim any special insight here. The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society, recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life. Today, we’ve lost touch with that wisdom, and our lives are poorer and less fulfilling as a result. It’s time we rediscovered the good that rest can do.

Working Less = Doing More?

In his book Rest, he quotes an example of Academics from the 1950s:

A survey of scientists’ working lives conducted in the early 1950s yielded results in a similar range. Illinois Institute of Technology psychology professors Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr surveyed their colleagues about their work habits and schedules, then graphed the number of hours faculty spent in the office against the number of articles they produced. You might expect that the result would be a straight line showing that the more hours scientists worked, the more articles they published. But it wasn’t. The data revealed an M-shaped curve. The curve rose steeply at first and peaked at between ten to twenty hours per week. The curve then turned downward. Scientists who spent twenty-five hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five. Scientists working thirty-five hours a week were half as productive as their twenty-hours-a-week colleagues.

The surprising chart of results looked like this:

What he found over and over again was a theme of people that do great creative work for about four hours per day:

Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours. He did his hardest thinking between 10 a.m. and noon, and again between five and seven in the afternoon. The nineteenth century’s most towering mathematical genius worked just enough to get his mind around a problem—about four hours a day.

But this does not mean they work 4 hours a day and then just lounge around for the rest of the day. Pang has found that people are very deliberate about their rest.

They often have hobbies that are almost as absorbing as their work – sometimes being time-consuming or physically challenging.

Can the 4-day workweek be a bait & switch for doing better work and finding more rest?

As Alex says in our conversation, overwork has become the norm, even a “badge of honor” in the Western world for knowledge work:

Overwork is now seen as a badge of honor rather than a symptom of a problem and this is a relatively new things. Its so common now, its easy to see it as a natural and inevitable thing. However, its actually very new. If you’re a knowledge work, you naturally work harder than others is really a reversal of practice in the past.

His book Rest led him to find companies that were experimenting with the 4-day workweek and finding that much of what Alex has written about in Rest is coming true – that they are able to do the same or more in less time. This is something I talked about with Tash Walker, who moved her company to a 4-day week in 2019 and found many of the benefits that Pang predicted.

He is launching a new book in 2020 and sharing more stories about the 4-day week – sign up to get a notification when the book is on sale below.

Connect With Alex

You can find Alex on Twitter, Instagram (with his dogs), or on his blog Deliberate Rest

Support Boundless & Alex

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Alex Pang on Working Less, Rest, Leisure & The 4-Day Workweek appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

 The agreement also identifies the worker’s rest periods as well as the technical and organizational measures necessary to ensure that the worker is disconnected from the technological equipment.

While technology does seem to be driving our desire to limit work taking over our lives, I believe there is a deeper tradition of the embrace of a certain type of “leisure” that makes these types of laws a natural fit for Europe. de Toqueville was commenting on the split between the US and Europe in the 19th Century:

In the United States a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit or to public business. He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living. It is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work that so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find some scattered remains of aristocratic society, among whom idleness is still held in honor.

TL;DR: Americans like to be busy.

A Successful Four-Day Work Week Experiment

America no longer corners the market on busyness. Most cities across the glove are filled with workers who always feel like there is more to do. Yet in places like London, where there is a deeper connection to a certain concept of leisure, they are quicker to limit the amount of work as a solution.

The Mix London recently announced the results of its successful experiment to implement a four day workweek highlighting increased well-being, revenues, profit and client retention and lower levels of absenteeism. The report they created is deep and insightful and goes far beyond the usual surface level culture nonsense that most companies publish.

The report takes a step back and looks at the history of work. It is worth reading in full, but one of the most powerful quotes offered was from Brennan Jacoby, a philosopher who focuses on the workplace:

“Work exists to produce income, the purpose of which is to enable leisure, but leisure exists for its own sake”

Compared to summer Fridays and “flexible work,” which leave the door open to staying longer if your work is important and which, more importantly, always favors the most reward-driven workers, the four-day week sets a constraint which only allows work on Friday under extreme circumstances.

Constraints Unlock Creativity & Reinvention

Basecamp is another company that has experimented with setting constraints on the work-week. Their CEO is famous for saying “40 hours is enough” – which shouldn’t be shocking, but is. In the summer 32 is enough – they work a four-day week from May to the end of August. One of their former employees, Kris Kniles wrote about the experience:

Summer Hours are one of my favorite practices at Basecamp — but not just because they are an extra day off each week. Keeping Summer Hours hones our prioritization skills and breathes fresh energy into our work.

He goes on to share why this is the case:

The key is in the constraint..Removing a day each week forces you to prioritize the work that really matters, and let the rest go. It’s not about working faster, but learning to work smarter. It’s about honing your prioritization, scope hammering and judo skills.

While The Mix has decided to fully enact a four-day workweek, companies like Basecamp are finding value in a seasonal answer.

The key to these programs is like Kris says in the constraint – setting a hard cap helps you focus on what not to do. In our information age, we rarely stop to ask what we should stop doing. Meanwhile executives are coming up with new ways to visually present the strategy in PowerPoint creations, creating hundreds of new reports and analyses that need to be completed by the masses of employees.

Constraints give power back to the people doing the workers.

First, they get the power to prioritize the things happening in their lives. They can take space to contemplate what matters to them rather than merely resting for more work. Second, when the managers responsible for helping to implement the program realize they will need to eliminate work, not add it, they will need to engage front-line workers and ask them “what should we stop doing?”

Should every company implement a four-day workweek? Of course not. But companies like Basecamp and The Mix show that it is possible and that the downsides are likely not as linear as we might expect. Companies should, however, look for ways to ask some fundamental questions:

• What work should we stop doing?
• What is it all for anyway?
• What energy might our people bring to work if we gave them more time and space to engage with the world and live their lives in a way they desire?

If you still need a “business case” you are still stuck in the 1960’s. While we still operate in a world in which humans are treated as resources, they are merely that – humans. If you help them engage with the world better, by setting constraints and limiting the nonsense from work that creeps into their lives, you’ll likely build a better company and enable people to live lives they are proud of.

Further suggestions: If you enjoyed this article you’ll enjoy my conversation with Alex Pang on his books Rest and Shorter, the latter which explores the potential of the four-day week. Additionally, you’ll enjoy my reflections on Keynes essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” as well as my thoughts on Bertrand Russell’s thoughts on “In Praise of Idleness.” Finally, Tash Walker shares how her company implemented the four day week at her company in London.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post The Four-Day Workweek Is Not About Working Less appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.