Learning MacGyver's tricks does not make you MacGyver

Merlin Mann is writing a new book and he's been posting some videos discussing his ideas. What he came up with in a recent video is a roundhouse kick of solid advice for anyone who's into productivity and self-help reading. Here's his 43 Folders post with the supporting info.

After watching this video, I've intentionally relegated most of my Twitter & RSS subscriptions to a category called "nachos" that is not loaded by default. That will make sense after watching. A couple warnings, 1) it's really long and 2) the opener is juvenile and crude with a couple profanities later, so I'd recommend skipping to 2:00.

He attacks from so many good angles, but the main thesis is that too many people are fooling themselves into believing they are building competence by reading advice blogs, when their real need is to just decide who they are and do something to become a real expert. I took an inexact transcript of some of the important takeaways:

There are a lot of people in the world, in a lot of different professions, but particularly on the Internet... there are a lot of people who don't start making money until you briefly forget who you are.

Procrastination and anxiety about work and the stuff we know we need to do comes from a lack of confidence about one of three things:

We temporarily forget who we are and who we want to be and who we want to be
What we should be paying attention to
What our options are and what we can do about it

The downside of tacitly asking the world to tell you who you are is that there are a lot of things, people, Internet properties, and businesses that thrive on finding people who don't know who they are and then telling them over and over and over again who they could be, what they could pay attention to, and what they could do about it as a result.

Some people make a living by repeatedly getting you to not do your work.

Don't imagine that you're building expertise if what you're really doing is just kind of unwinding. Ask yourself, What are you going to do with that? How is that helping you figure out who you are today, what you need to pay attention to, and what you might do about it? How will you know when you're done and when the question is satisfactorily answered?

No system, no diagram is going to save you. It's heroin. You're going to have to figure out who you are.

Making Work Flow