“The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing.”
— Peter Drucker

“The only way to raise living standards over the long term is to raise productivity.” — Ray Dalio

if societal and individual productivity growth continues to plateau or decline, it could mean war, generational lifestyle stagnation, our currency going to zero over time, the rise of communism, environmental catastrophe, and stalling of innovation.

The productivity paradox is arguably the most important puzzle that will determine the future of our society and our careers.

More productivity doesn’t mean less work for employees. Workers feel pressured to work harder even as they become more efficient.

Workers aren’t receiving the gains from their increased productivity. The gains in productivity are not redistributed to workers in a way they feel is fair.

For many, productivity culture is a tool that the ruling class uses in the context of capitalism to get as much work out of workers as possible.

“The first step is to understand where we are. We’ve spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and we think that it’s an enchanted forest. If we’re to find a way out of this desert and into the future, the first step is to see that we’ve been in a desert.”

— Peter Thiel

The productivity impact of the shift to Internet-connected computers is much smaller than we think. In fact, We’ve already experienced most of the benefits from it (primarily between 1994–2004).

The technologies (electricity, combustion engine) that came in the 20th century are much more impactful on our productivity than the computer revolution.

The impact of the computer revolution is primarily on information, communication, and entertainment while the 20th century revolutions were much more broad and had a bigger impact on our living standards.

“Well, I guess like all of these fallacies, the problem is that we have so little insight into our own intelligence that we don’t know what things are … the things that are easy for us are so invisible to us. We don’t know how hard they are for machines. That’s part of the problem is that we don’t understand our own intelligence well enough to make predictions about how complex machine intelligence is going to be.”

AI breakthroughs are followed by narratives about how AI is imminent and about to change everything. The reality is that the advance does have a major impact, but its impact is spread over many years or decades thus impacting the productivity growth rate less than we might expect.

On a personal level, whatever our goal is (meaning, happiness, aliveness, money, impact, connection), we want to get to it faster and easier with all else being equal.

Ultimately, what we really want is a new kind of productivity. We want a kind of productivity that is actually more productive, more inclusive, leaves us time for an uninterrupted personal life, and ultimately feels better — more purpose, more fulfillment, more aliveness, and less hurry.

We don’t automatically become more productive just by doing the same thing over and over. Rather, once we become good enough, our performance typically plateaus. In academic circles, this is known as the OK Plateau.

the one big thing you can do first to develop an improvement mindset is to set aside five hours a week to deliberate learning, reflection, and experimentation.

Warren Buffett has spent 80% of his time ever since he was a child just reading and thinking.