How to go from operator guy to idea guy.
There is a very painful transition that everyone eventually needs to make in their career & productivity journey.
At the beginning of your career, the only advantage you have is your work rate because you have no experience to draw on, and any natural talent is capped by your inexperience, so you just work hard to get ahead. You answer all the emails, take all the "would love to connect" calls, you send the invoices, write the copy, hire the contractors. All you.
But eventually that stage of your journey expires and you need to let it go. Maybe you have staff to delegate to now, maybe you've been given a promotion and need to be thinking more strategically at a high level. Previously your job was to work hard, but not so much any more.
Here's the problem; you've spent an entire career acclimatising yourself to getting stuff done. You've built a monster which sucks in difficult, tedious tasks and spits out completed efforts. You have created a link between being busy doing things you don't want to do, and success. The issue is that it's really hard to work out what you truly want and determine whether or not you're moving toward it, but it's easy to see the number of emails you sent or how many hours you spent on calls.
Ask yourself: is your job to press enter on emails? Or to actually move the mission forward? You are hooked on the dopamine of "I got stuff done today" because even if this wasn't a great use of your day, at least you don't feel useless, and you didn't have any time to consider that you might not be fully actualising your potential anyway.
Here's the thing - almost everyone's life goal is where "I just don't have to do anything I don't want to do" but what happens when you start to get there? So much of your self-worth is derived from overcoming hard things and pushing yourself through difficult tasks you don't want to do - so imagine that you DO reach your goal, where do you find satisfaction from now? This is why it's so difficult to let go of doing grunt work and being permanently busy, even when your precise goal was to get here.
Finally, why is it so hard to take pleasure in our successes? Well, largely because you are constantly peering over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming next. Even during the act of attaining a goal, you are already looking past it, getting ready to move the goal posts further away.
We are all chasing a sense of completion but we never actually allow ourselves to savour any tastes of completion that we get along the way. ~ h/t Joe Hudson & Brett Kistler for breaking my brain with these insights