Say one morning you got up and thought to yourself;

“Hey, you know what, I feel like writing a book!”

So you’re committed, you jump out of bed, grab some breakfast and sit down in front of the computer. It takes long enough to figure out what to say, but once you finally start to feel like you’re getting into a rhythm, the smell of burning toast swiftly brings you back to reality.

A mouthful of carbon later, you’re just about to sit back down again the phone rings and you spend the next 2 hours catching up with some random cousin from Norway.

At long last, the call is over but now you’re hungry again. After ordering from the kebab house cos you totally can’t be arsed after the toaster incident, you promise yourself you’ll get it done… But it was a big lunch and all you really want now is to lie down and chill.

By the end of the day, you return to your desk but the blank page defeats you. You’re falling asleep now, and sorry to say, but this idea to write a book suddenly seems a lot less sexy than when it first hit you.

Shame.

Now you might be thinking, right I know where he’s going with this. Procrastination is bad, you need the discipline to achieve your goals, etc. No. I could go that route, but I won’t.

Truth be told, that’s just what a typical day is going to look like sometimes. Life is full of distractions. And you can’t always press mute like with your phone or when your partner’s being annoying- oh wait no they don’t come with that option yet sorry. Wishful thinking I guess.

Anyway, the point is these things take time. Writing a book takes time. Mastering a skill takes time. Unfortunately, time is a resource that is both precious and limited. precious because it’s limited usually.

For the majority of us, the best we can manage – as in, the absolute gold standard –  are bits and pieces stolen throughout the day. This can seem at odds with the sustained discipline everyone expeditiously assumes you need for writing a novel or non-fiction book; an exercise that is much more like a marathon than a sprint.

Also, it doesn’t help that almost all writers are perfectionists who would gladly spend longer wording a certain phrase, than an entire chapter.

Recently I listened to an episode of naval Ravikant’s podcast about the true nature of ‘work’. specifically, what does it actually mean to ‘work ‘hard’.

Naval is is an Indian-American entrepreneur venture capitalist and now after retiring as CEO of AngelList, sits and thinks about existence a lot. Whilst the tech community tends to steer clear of philosophy and existentialism (and vice versa) Mr Ravikant seems to combine the best of both worlds in his approach.

Despite his penchant for gadgetry, when it comes to deep thinking about abstract notions such as fulfilment or the good-life, Naval has embraced a very rich worldview indeed. He talks about people’s drastically varying definitions of hard work. In particular, he describes said work as a marathon of sprints.

I’ve got a short excerpt of his episode with Joe Rogan that sums this up pretty well.

“We’d like to view the world as linear, which is, “I’m gonna put in eight hours of work, I’m gonna get back eight hours of output,” right? Doesn’t work that way. Guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me. How much output is he getting? What you do, who you do it with, how you do it — way more important than how hard you work, right? Outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work that you put in.”

There you go. he said outputs are non-linear – they don’t depend on how hard you work but how well you work. You won’t get what you want by working hard – getting from point A to point B is all about working smart.

Coming back to the book idea, no one expects you to finish the manuscript all at once. It’s not a sprint they say, its a marathon. So that’s got me thinking lately about just how the sound of an analogy ‘marathon’ really is.

To be honest, the metaphor does fit well in some places – especially in writing. You have to spend time and energy practising to improve your skill and hone your body/mind before you are ready.

But there are also obvious problems such as it’s not really possible to write a novel in one go. Even productivity enthusiasts grind to a halt if they’re pushed too hard for an unrealistic deadline. Either that, or the book takes a trip to landfill…

So there’s where I believe the analogy falls short. you can run a marathon in one go. Sure, it’s a long, long go, but it’s still 1 go.

For the most part, Picking up something new depends on us finding spare moments in the day to bash out some reps. penny in the air. For example, writing is more like a marathon built up of a series of sprints. Boom, penny drops.

And once you recognise, that, you’re bound to start seeing it everywhere, in all sorts of different areas of life. In fact, not just areas of life, but life itself, may just be one big marathon of lots and lots of sprints.

Let’s take a random person -let’s call her Jane. Jane is very good at her job. She’s honest, likeable, hardworking. Best of all, she’s disciplined. The first to show up and the last to leave type of employee. Sounds like she’s got it all sorted

But here’s the ugly truth. Jane can show up like this diligently for decades and do exactly as she’s told, never step a toe out of line, but chances are she’ll still have little to show for it in the end. Like it or not, That is what our world has become. those who tell you to ‘stay in your lane’ are absolutely full of it.

In the 21st Century if Jane wants to achieve more than average – if she wants to amount to more than just another name on the payroll – she needs to take calculated risks. She ought to try new things, use leverage and branding to scale herself, Eat, sleep, be bold, repeat. Until eventually she makes a breakthrough.

And this all needs you to adopt the sprinters mindset, not the slow, steady grind we’ve come to accept as normal.

Here’s naval again to break it down a little further.

“As a modern knowledge worker athlete, an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete. Which means you train hard, then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassess. You get a feedback loop, then you train some more, then you sprint again, then you rest, then you reassess. This idea that you’re going to have linear output just by cranking out every day for the same amount of time — that’s machines, you know. Machines should be working nine to five. Humans are not meant to work nine to five.”

In all honesty, I was sceptical to try this out. People always told me that if you keep up a sprint too long, you’ll eventually burn out. Which is true. Hey, you can’t run a marathon flat out the whole time, so why the hell do you expect your work to be any different?

But here’s the trick: you’re not actually sprinting for too long at any one time. You stop and rest well before mental fog descends. then you recuperate, reassess, and begin again.

I tried it for myself last month. Usually, I’d have usually managed to write 3- 4 blog posts in that time. I ended up writing 12. Since then I’ve been convinced that a series of focussed sprints was way, way, way more effective than a long, leisurely spell of work.

The final benefit of this approach is that each sprint brings with it the opportunity for a nice psychological payday if you hit your word target or overcome a difficult problem.

Even just 1 print a day can give you the benefit of daily reward and begin – it could be the pivotal steps required for building any habit, no matter how elusive such a desire has proven to be thus far.

You may never want or need to conquer productivity mountain, but you’ll make it to base camp for sure. Taking some time to experiment with how best to use the limited time you have, is bound to pay dividends in the long run.

This works because there’s a psychological phenomenon out there known as akrasia – which is a human tendency to favour short-term rewards over long term ones. The very act of putting less importance on tasks offering delayed gratification is known as hyperbolic discounting.

Bottom line, in layman’s terms: us humans, we’re impatient. We’re always looking for the next hit, that next reward. the faster it reaches us, the better.

Social media is so addictive because it works in favour of akrasia. All these taps and pings snaps and shares act as little dopamine boosters – keeping us down the long and winding rabbit hole. Whole sentences are made redundant by a simple emoji.

We have that, we love that, and we want more. more of this instant gratification. Granted, tech companies have really profited from this, but the whole notion of working sprints is like using the short term rewards in our favour.

Of course, sprints aren’t a panacea. Despite what online course after online course might tell you, there’s not really such thing as a silver bullet when it comes to productivity. In some areas of our lives, especially that outside of work, we’ll still have to balance them with consistency.

It was Confucius who supposedly said, “It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.”If you think about it, going slow can also mean running full pelt then just lying still for a while

So work smart, not hard. Sprint and rest. Sprint and rest. Sprint and rest. not all the time though. But you can’t live life on cruise control. It’s all about existing, fast and slow.

Life is a Marathon of Sprints.