A joyful life carries a higher cost than a normal one. Normal people are miserable. They ignore opportunities for improvement, assuming that the future will be at least as good as the present without adopting the improvements that would make it so. Unsurprisingly, their lives cascade into greater overwhelm as challenges unexpected by them predictably occur. Surprises require surplus. If you want to be better than normal, you will have to do more and better than normal people do.
The pursuit of a joyful life requires more time, energy, and rational selection than normal people have. An excellent life requires more than just enough for yourself—more time, more skills, more wisdom, more money, more space, and more stability. And not just for you. The greatest joy comes from helping others, so what you’ll need is more than what you alone need. If you want to save a drowning person, you’ll need to be able to swim well, not just tread water, as it is much more difficult to swim for two than it is to swim for one. Happiness requires surplus, and surplus requires hyper-productivity.
It is convenient to pretend that hyper-productive people have a magical stockpile of surplus time, energy, talent, or will. They don’t. They use the same exact resources normal people have; they just use them in ways that generate much better outcomes.
Hyper-productive people do not base their decisions to improve on whether they need to, but rather whether they ought to. They do the best they can, not the worst they can get away with. They weigh whether the benefit outweighs the cost, and do what is worthwhile.
The life plan framework gives you a way to move towards hyperproductivity by combining faster execution, more effective selection of tasks, and better decision making to compound productivity gains to a point where you will not believe how much you are getting done. The dramatic gains in productivity will be even more shocking when you realize how little you needed to change to obtain them.