This course is going to have a lot of general guidelines to help you be more productive. But one thing that wildly productive people do is they look at any general guideline and they sort of try it on for size and they see does this work for me? And if it doesn't, they throw it away. I need you to do that as well. As a general rule, I don't advise people to drink three bottles of wine a day or two fifths of booze a day. But there have been some wildly productive people who do that.

Winston Churchill drank tremendous amounts of alcohol on a daily basis, and was one of the most protective people in the world. Forget all of his political accomplishments, just the sheer number of books and articles he wrote, would have made him one of the most wildly productive people of his day or any day, and he lived till he was 90. The journalist Christopher Hitchens drank incredible amounts of liquor. President Grant as a general Ennis president was known for drinking tremendous amounts of alcohol. Am I advocating that you drink a lot of alcohol? No, I'm not.

But I give these examples to you to make you realize that you've got to try and test all of these techniques to see if they work for you. And you've got to figure out what's best for you when you have something that works. When you have a way of shipping a lot of product, whether it is software, books, cabinets that you make whatever it is you do, whatever it is you create, if you are creating a great deal of those things, and you do it from 2am to 6am, and everyone else thinks you're crazy because you sleep all day. You may have to ignore what other people say and do what works for you. Now this is different than just saying I do whatever I want whenever I want, and you're 39 years old, living at home, in your parents basement, you've never had a job.

That's not what I'm advocating. You've got to figure out what rules apply to you what general systems can apply and where you need to break them. That's what this course is about. It's a journey to help you do that.