Throughout my life, I have outperformed those around me in most ways. I’ve had an unusual number of jobs and other activities, and the resounding consensus from my peers and supervisors has always been than I am the most productive person they’ve ever met, though the form of expression has varied, from “I don’t understand how you finished this already” to “how do you get so much done” to “knock it off—you are making us all look bad.”
That said, you might assume I’ve had some sort of challenge-free life or that I am particularly gifted. Though the space to prove it would take a biography, I promise you that both of these couldn’t be farther from the truth. As a child, I routinely felt as if I had to work much harder, longer, and smarter at things to perform at the same level as my peers. The lack of stability from moving eighteen times before I was eighteen years old meant that I was always catching up on something— and often many things—in some aspect of my life. The beauty of an early disadvantage is that if responded to with tenacity, it can motivate the establishment of a pattern of exerting extreme force into what one sets out to do in spite of great obstacles, acting like a giant flywheel, building momentum with each activity that carries into the next throughout one’s life. Somehow in the chaos of my childhood, the tenacity of tearfully learning how to write, tell time, learn basic math, and grow in fitness that seemed to come so easily to other kids transitioned into greater and greater momentum to continue applying outsized effort even after I caught up.
Time and again, I found myself promoted—to gifted and talented classes in school, to supervisory positions at work, to higher ranks in the military, and so on.
Consider the following examples in the domain of employment. I began working for my grandfather’s construction business picking up trash at eight years old for a brief stint over the summer. By the time I was 15, I was made supervisor of a man in his sixties on a construction crew. During the school year, I was working as a cart attendant at a grocery store, and quickly promoted to a shelf-stocker. Then I took a job as a restaurant cook, where I was training new hires within the first week as a restaurant cook. At 17, I was hired for an internship at an insurance company. Within two weeks, I finished the work my predecessor had accumulated over a year as an intern, and had to find another job because they had run out of more work to give me. I found a job at a computer store where my assignment was to clear an overflowing stockroom full of broken computers that needed to be walked through the long process to gain authorization for return to the the vendor. I had the room completely cleared in a matter of weeks, much to the shock of the owners, who promoted me to fixing computers because they had nothing else for me to do in my prior position.
This pattern continued through my undergraduate years and into the first jobs following. My assignment in my first programming job was to single-handedly build a piece of software that would not only replace but improve upon an established product built by a large company. In six months, my completed project was in production earning the hospital millions in new revenue per year. Within two job changes in three years, I found myself leading a small software company, where I had been promoted over the engineer that had hired me after successfully replacing the failed code produced by two engineers over two years in just two months after starting.
I returned to university where I completed MS and Ph.D. degrees in computer science within six years, graduating with more peerreviewed publications than anyone in our large, competitive graduate program all while having four children in diapers, fully remodeling a derelict starter home, writing two books, and serving as a company commander in the National Guard. At 30, I became the youngest hire on the computer science faculty I joined, in spite of delays in my timeline caused by several years of full-time work in industry, two years of missionary work in Chile, and ten years in the National Guard. I was promoted to Assistant Professor one year early, earning competitive rewards for research and receiving excellent reviews for teaching. I was awarded tenure, having outperformed my previously tenured peers in grants awarded and papers published in spite of founding and running a tech company, building a hobby farm, and writing another six books during that time, in addition to being a husband and father to five small children.
This is not a complete story, but it should help you believe that I know a thing or two about productivity. I have only been able to do what I have because I live the system I am going to show you in this book. It works, and my life is abundant proof of it.
The story of what I accomplished does not describe the challenges I worked against, which were much greater than I can take the space to describe. How did I do so much in so little time? How did I overcome what would overwhelm most people with stress, anxiety, and depression? How did I deal with the uncertainty and the sheer amount to do? Where did I find the motivation to continue through so many long projects? And why did I consider it all worth the cost? In this book, you’ll find the answers to all of these questions, but first we need to stop talking about me, and start talking about you.