Elizabeth Filips was a previous med-school student, artist, now Youtuber and a great many other things. A full modern renaissance girl.
She has a unique way of looking at the world and it was her achievements + talent & intelligence that made me super curious about this book on how she gets things done.
Though there’s no scientific evidence to back up her idea (it’s all just anecdotal), and though I disagreed with some points, overall it was a great short read (47 pages, I almost highlighted and took notes on the whole thing so it took me 2.5 hours to read).
The entire book resonated with me and for the most part, it’s exactly how I function but thought wrong to function, so the book kind of made me feel like I have permission to lean into it fully now. Wonder what I can accomplish when I’m not working against myself. I wonder what you can accomplish too if you did the same. Worth the read. Is the price exorbitant? Yes, hell yes. I hope that she can decrease it at some point in the future so it’s more accessible to others. But if you can splurge a bit, then great, this is a great guilty pleasure read that might end up actually making a difference for you. For now, my summary & thoughts below. Cheers🥂 and good luck!
major takeaways
- Skip over the things that aren’t meaningful to you and get to what sets your soul on fire. Working on things project based, even if it’s scary, even if you’re bad at it, will get you where you want to go because you want it so bad.
- Motivation is fickle and unreliable BUT is necessary to achieve flow state. Working in flow state is more efficient, produces more in-depth & profoundly important and exceptional work, and makes for a happier and more fulfilling life.
- Working with routines and schedules and setting up habits can make things a slog because you’re working against the grain by always working when you have to and not when you want to. This is what leads to burn out, because you’re just going through the motions and only working on things based on what you think you have to do, when you think you have to do it.
- Only work with routines & schedules for external work (i.e., work for school, clients, employers), but allow yourself freedom to manage your personal projects as and when you see fit. Even when working with external work, if you have the freedom to manage your workload and still hit the deadline, you don’t have to work in habits and routines. Optimize around how you work best in order to hit flow state.
- What if you work best in random, frenzied 15 hour work days when you obsessively focus on one task until completion? Wouldn’t that lead to burn out? Not if you’re also the type that does not like consistently working on one thing. If you worked 15 hour work days 7 days a row for a month, that might be an issue (unless, of course, you’re having fun while you’re doing it…then that’s not really work and you’re good). But if you’re someone who likes variety, it’s more efficient to do the ‘short’ 15 hour obsessive bursts to get through a project. Less time spent in set up, and you’re working at a faster rate. Better than if you had broken that project down into 2 hour increments throughout the month and simply slogged through it because you weren’t in the mood to actually work on it. You’re more likely to go slower then.
- This is all under the assumption you’ll actually be motivated to work. If motivation is fickle, how do you influence or control it? By priming. Elizabeth offers her own strategies, but my favorite is just exposing myself to the task every once in a while. Either set a timer for 15 minutes and just tell yourself to work on it for that long only or I look up videos of other people doing it or expounding tips on it. If you still experience resistance to starting, clear your schedule and tell yourself you can relax and do whatever you want but you’ll need to just do this one thing. Or you can write down all the steps to getting it done and then knock off each as you go (that gives me a high for some reason). Or you can think of how much better your life will be if you finish it. Or what the ideal end product would be. Basically you’re just exposing yourself to the task, dreaming of the ideal end result, writing out the steps to uncomplicate it (also one way of exposing yourself to the actual process of doing it), and exposing yourself to others that have done it or is in the process of doing it or the tips for getting it done.
- Learn the basics of something you want to do and start, you can add to your knowledge later. If you don’t want to and just keep working with the basics that’s fine too. You can create a lot of interesting complicated work with just basic techniques. If others say there’s a more efficient way of doing it than just using the basics, Elizabeth says you can ignore it. Main point is to actually do the thing. I work differently for this though. For anything I do, I learn through projects and yes I start with the basics and learn as I go. But I don’t stick to just the basics. In each of my processes, I do allocate time to learn more complicated items so I can level up my skills and eventually do more. But that’s because I’m naturally motivated to do that. If that’s not how you operate, then do what works for you. If that my way didn’t work for me, I wouldn’t do it.
- Some things you just have to do the bare minimum and move on. If you’re experiencing resistance to starting a task, keep stripping away at all things you think you have to do until you get to the smallest, most basic level of it that you’re willing to do.
- For the things you can’t go hard on from time to time and achieve great success in because it requires consistent work, you can gamify it. For example learning is best done a little at at time. I like testing myself, makes it fun when I see progress like that.
- Don’t discount motivation, figure out how to control & use it. Don’t just keep doing things just because you have to do it. Instead, think of ways to make motivation work for you. Dissect why you’re not motivated to do something that you have to do and think up ways to get yourself motivated to do it so that when you get around to actually doing it, it’s faster and more fun for you to do. You can turn anything in life into something fun. If something is a grind, pretend like you’re a character in a game, going through that motion to level up your skill. Or maybe earn points that you can use to get something else you want.
Fav Quotes
When you see me working like a mad woman, it’s because I don’t feel like I’m working: I feel like I’m having fun. I’m in pure flow, 10h feels like 20 minutes to me. Make me do a task I hate for 20 minutes and It’ll feel like 10h, so I’ll avoid doing it and do anything else in the world instead. But it’s not just about the feeling. When I’m doing work I don’t want to do, it doesn’t only feel like it takes longer. It genuinely does take longer…I need to read the same sentence 5 times. My mind flies and I need to look back at what I’m doing. I’m slow and stupid…What is the point of doing work in that state? (pg. 37)
Give me 5 hours to axe down a tree, and I’ll spend the first 4 sharpening my mind…Priming is always fun. It’s just browsing fun stuff, thinking about my feelings, it’s almost like procrastination. (it’s only fully procrastination if you’re not doing it properly, otherwise it’s axe-sharpening) (pg. 38)
There are two things I take issue with: the fact that habits are necessary and helpful for everyone, and secondly, that motivation is unnecessary and unreliable for exceptional work. Because the reality is, if you’re at all a chaotically passionate person, following this advice is a death sentence. Not only does it drain your soul of its desire to live, but to speak in the ‘results and success’ language: in the long term it leads to mediocre, miserable performance. (pg. 4)
If you were the best person in the world at this skill, what cool things would you be able to do? (pg. 45)
Examples
Of how I operate in ‘organised’ chaos:
Reading
I do think it’s worthwhile to read books to the very end. Only because there are several books in the past that I initially detested until I reached the end and they ended up being my all-time favorites. Although there were still some I forced myself to finish that were actually horrible, the ones that I forced myself to finish that ended up making a lasting impact made reading books to the end worthwhile effort for me.
So how do I make it through? I tend to read multiple books at a time. But for the slog books, I might just allot 15 minutes to it and then move on to something I actually want to read. Once I land on something I like or a book I was previously slogging through starts picking up, I start obsessively reading it until it’s done. It becomes my main priority, my all-consuming task. That’s how I can go really deep and get the most out of it in the least amount of time & effort (because when you’re in flow, it’s effortless).
Projects
If I want to learn something, I work in projects. I think of what I want to accomplish (usually, initially it’s something basic) and I start right away and learn the basics to get to what I want. I learn things as I need to learn them to get to the end product. If it’s too time-intensive or complicated for me, I lower the bar and do whatever I can or find a quick workaround until I find a better time to learn a better technique for it.
I also switch between projects based on whatever I’m in the mood for that day.
work
Weirdly enough, I work as I’m supposed to because I know I allow myself to work however I want in my personal life.
Blog/Youtube
I have multiple blogs and work on each one as the mood strikes. But I do have a weekly deadline to get something out for at least one of them. I might not always meet it, but it pushes me to at least dedicate some time to any one of them at any time.
Writing Fiction
Same thing as above. Work on whatever I want to that moment of, make big visible progress, then set it aside. Doesn’t lead to lots of finished work, but because it’s a hobby, not a big deal for me.
Doesn’t Seem Like the Above Method Produces a Lot of Results?
This is true. LOL Progress is slow going on personal projects initially because I work based off mood. Yes it’s faster when you’re in the moment of, but if you don’t finish things off, you don’t see results.
It is improving in terms of blogging, mainly because my process/systems are getting better for doing it. And that’s just natural progress. Same for writing.
But what about for when results matter? For work I find that having deadlines help. And tasks at work are smaller & less complicated in nature.
Applying that to personal projects have helped improve progress. Breaking things down, systemizing it. Having templates. Minimizing the scope of the work. Adding deadlines. Only focusing on things I can control.
But all that couldn’t have happened if at first there wasn’t passion to get started and it wasn’t fun to actually keep going.
So just start & find ways to keep it fun, you’ll start seeing improvements and achieve results eventually.
Have you ever looked at how you work? Do habits and routines make you feel dragged down? Are you close to burning out? Maybe try doing things a different way than you’re used to for a while and see how that works for you. Can’t hurt, might even end up helping.
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