A subject or subjects that I have written about many times in the last 2000 or so Blogs.
Particularly relevant to where we are at the moment, when many of us and particularly those in generation X (like me) habitually bemoaned the fact that we had not enough time (and usually openly or not) enough money.
The game has changed and the circumstances have reversed for many people, or at least for those who are the most privileged in society.
The middle class who were on the Hamster wheel, running as hard as they could to pay for all their direct debits, holidays, car, clothes and their consumption are now staring the reality in the face that they will have more time and less money.
For the privileged few, they will have plenty of money and more time and for the very top of the pinnacle in the right industries, they will have more money and less time.
The masses though, the majority of people in the over-bloated middle classes will have time to consider themselves and wonder what to do next with less income coming in.
If your income hasn’t slowed yet, then you may be in the second group, the ‘turbo' recession group, who will get hit second stage when we start to recover normal operations.
So, what will you do with the time that you have, baring in mind that you will have less money to spend within that time?
Two options as far as I can see it and certainly from within my little bubble of Dentistry:
1)Consume more information (either quality or otherwise)Looking at where we are in the educational side of things, there is now an extraordinary explosion of free to air educational content. It’s not hard to see why that is the case as many people involved in education (and probably me) are narcissistic a**eholes who need the attention and need to be loved, but that doesn’t mean you have to sign up for that when you find you have more time and you’re trying to learn.
If you are feeling the urge to produce more content, it’s also worth remembering this. Best not to start a gigantic project of digital information production if you can’t keep your promise when you go back to your normal job.
There is a famous story in Michael Gerber’s book, where he goes to the new Barber shop and is offered a free coffee and is very impressed, the next time he turns up at the Barber shop he isn’t offered a coffee and is disappointed.
Unless you’ve decided to use this time as a long term plan to engage with people digitally for the foreseeable future, it’s not a good idea to do it in the short term as it’s liable just to damage you and damage your relationships with other people.
For the rest of us who are looking for quality information and improvement, the best thing to do is to target the time that you have available over the length of time that you realistically think this will be available.
Let’s assume that this was going to continue for a further eight weeks of lock down.
It would be possible to divide it up into forty working days and try to do one thing to improve yourself per day (and perhaps produce one piece of content of high quality, if that’s your game too) to do that and to have eighty exceptional interactions in that time, would catapult you forwards extraordinarily further than you had been in the past.
To try to achieve more than that in a short space of time will reduce the quality that you receive or give, and just add to the noise that the rest of us are trying to cut through.
Very unlikely in this digital madness that we find ourselves in, that you’ll be able to monetise any of that also, and worth remembering that if that is your goal.
Remember that the chances of you becoming the next YouTube sensation, particularly in the current circumstances, are quite unlikely.
One thing that my friend Carl and I did, was took our little circuit training exercises that we were doing twice a week onto Facetime and increased them to four mornings a week because we had the space.
We’ve now got towards the end of week three of four times a week, only to find that we were worn out and creaking (we are old, and I am the oldest) and we were entering into over training fatigue.
That’s also worth a consideration too.
Zoom was new and exciting three weeks ago, once you’ve done eight or ten a week it starts to wear a little bit thin.
As always is the case going forwards, personal interaction and the ability to foster personal interaction will be the most successful way to win the long game.
If you’re learning isn’t fostering personal interaction, or your production of content isn’t doing that too, then you’re living in the short term and it will wear out pretty fast as soon as the bubble bursts.
Blog Post Number - 2335