I have read hundreds and hundreds of self-help/productivity books. The ones that promise to make you smarter/faster/better and have dazzling white teeth. They're okay. Lots of stuff you can extract and apply to your own life if you work at it, but oftentimes seem to be written by dudes with zero complications in their lives, like, idk, families.
I was excited to receive a galley of this book, so I dug right into it. Then, I stalled out at pg 52 for *over a month*. That's where Gilkey says "Look, if it takes you 5 years to accomplish anything really significant, minus your current age from 85, then divide by 5. That's how many significant projects you can accomplish."
Dear reader, this triggered a midlife crisis.
I'm 33, and have already notice that my rate of 'accomplishment' is slowing down. I'm used to achieving things every year or two. But now that I'm not just dabbling, now that I've found the place I want to be and I'm digging deep to accomplish it, things are slow going. Oh, they're satisfying. That's why I'm here. But it was one of those surreal photozooms in a weird movie that transports you all the way to the end of the road, and, suddenly, faced with that inevitability, I panicked. "That's it!? That's all I get?"
Luckily I have a lot of accomplished friends, so I shared the quote and my feelings about it. The younger ones were on my side. We were all in either the bargaining stage, or denial. 'Well, I'll just get really good at this, and do more" or "I don't believe it. Nothing is stopping me from doing more than one big project at at time."
(The thing is, I've followed Gilkey's work for at least a decade now. The man organized supplies and convoys in the military. He groks the constraints of complexity, throughput, and sequencing the way only a person with several hundred people's lives on the line can do. If he says five years of focused effort, give or take, is what it takes, I swallow my bile and agree.)
Interestingly, the older people I showed this to were very chill about it. Some of them weren't much older than me, but they said things like "Only 7 things? That seems very doable." For them, the hard limits made a well-defined scope and allowed them to relax into the challenge. And them doing so, gave me the template to do the same.
After that long dark night of the soul, I devoured the rest of the book. Gilkey straddles the line between the high-level vision that is necessary to motivate most people and balances it with piles of tactical advice to keep them from getting bogged down when the rubber meets the road.
I still need practice with switching planning "horizons" in order to correctly plot out my time. The cheat sheets he includes, showing how different words *imply* a particular timeline. His advice about deciding what projects and what *parts* of projects it's acceptable to have just 'mediocre success' was insanely helpful to me-- I might be a little Type A in that regard, but everything can't be equally important.
Probably the most challenging (but ultimately most effective) advice will be to recruit your "success pack." It's one thing to say "I'm going for this" to myself, but to others? The problem with Charlie Gilkey is that he's so **reasonable**. You know you have no good reason not to do these things, but you don't want to do them just because it would make you show up brighter than you think you're ready for.
Like most things, reading this book won't make you actually do anything if you aren't prepared to make changes. But Gilkey does a good job of presenting even the most challenging suggestions as reasonable and not-that-hard.
Anyway, five stars for making me actually think and maybe even grow as a person. But that's just me thrashing :)
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