I. Teamwork: that shouldn't be too hard, eh?

Sooner or later, most people who want to make a difference in the world start thinking about how to have highly effective teams, teamwork, and collaboration.

On the surface, it seems like it should be simple and straightforward — if you and someone else both believe in the same cause, you're both competent at your individual roles, and you get along well between the two of you, you should be able to be an effective team.

Finding a third member of the team would just mean getting someone else who cares about the cause, is competent, and gets along with the two of you. And so on. Building teams should be easy and straightforward, no?

No.

If you've got a company, organization, or social group that wants to get a ton of work done in a short span while learning something cool, I'm happy to host some free or close-to-free(*) Work Cycles in North America in the next few weeks.

We regularly host events at Ultraworking, and of the most popular is Work Cycles. Work Cycles is a way to get an immense amount of stuff done in 4-5 hours.

A round of Cycles regularly leads to 20% to 400% increase in measurable performance, even for people who are already very effective. We've got literally hundreds of reports back like this,

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"The biggest thing I realized is that when I focused during Work Cycles, I can get a workday done in 3 hours... By getting the work done in disciplined cycles, that then frees me up to work on bigger things, as well as showing me where I was wasting time in the past." — Glennn Holman, Consultant; Dallas, Texas

“The more competent I become, the greater my willingness to push the boat way out, the tighter the hands grip the throat. No other game can train me for it. It’s a stupid activity, but name one that isn’t — to someone somewhere.”

— Mark Twight, Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber

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Airport

Seat 33A. Window seat.

I'm constantly on the lookout for words and phrases that map well to reality.

If you study history and if you study language, even just a little bit, you wind up realizing that for most of history, there was often a distinct lack of words and phrases crucial to understand reality.

I'm not just talking about technical terms — obviously we didn't know about "DNA" before its discovery and codification from 1869-1953.

No, it's easy to understand how scientific concepts were missing from our vocabulary before the relevant discoveries. Rather, what I'm on the lookout for are concepts that map well to human nature and how individuals and groups of people interact with each other — things which are real but which lack precise wording around them, thus making them harder to think about and talk about.

The modern usage of the word propaganda dates only to the late-1700s, and only truly hit its modern form of the word in the 1920s. Of course, there's likely been at least simple propaganda since the dawn of human civilization, but we didn't have a simple word for it.

From my journal. Status: quite speculative, but there's something here.

***

Hmm.

We could probably put a -5 to +5 scale of behavior together that was logarithmic about the enduring good/bad impact of various activities.

Something totally neutral — say, neutral leisure that’s not particularly recharging nor distracting — that might be 0.

Punk Rock

I started listening, just a bit, to punk rock lately.

It's okay. It's uneven. Some of it is, uhh, not very good. But some of it is good.

Punk rock is almost offensive on a mathematical level. I usually listen to techno or classical music, where everything is perfect. Punk music isn't like that. In the span of seconds, ostensibly the exact same guitar chords will have a sloppy erratic uneven quality to them. That's without getting into the lyrics, which are more often than not... also, umm, uneven.

It just sounds like some guys or girls getting drunk, maybe getting into a fistfight, and then jamming in a garage without caring about the musicalness of the music. Which of course, is precisely how a lot of it was made.

1. We're hiring at Ultraworking.

We're growing like crazy and delivering some amazing results to maybe the best customerbase ever, brilliant people across 25+ countries. We're hiring for our Tech team and Growth team. You can get an idea of what it's like to work at Ultraworking and apply here —

https://www.ultraworking.com/work

2. Next free Ultraworking event is scheduled for July.

We're doing Monthly Planning the last weekend of July, to set you to max out in August. There's 744 hours in August... maybe it'd make sense to spend 2-3 hours to set yourself up to maximize the month? You can register for free here —

Kai and I got sick of getting 10,000 "our privacy policy has changed" emails and didn't want to send you #10,001, so we decided to run a sale at Ultraworking instead —

https://www.ultraworking.com/gdpr

A round of free Work Cycles are scheduled for June. People always dig these, a good way to get a lot done —

https://www.ultraworking.com/events/1806-free-work-cycles