Why You Should Ignore Life Hacks And Productivity Hacks If You Are Unstructured And Undisciplined

I was a feral child.

My home life was chaotic. My American parents owned a car rental firm in the French Caribbean. The crises were constant -- accidents, flat tires, breakdowns. When my father drank he became monstrous. I spent a lot of time alone, in nature, at airports and resort car rental desks.

My childhood was a master class in self-reliance.

But benign neglect taught me many things -- how to commune with nature, how to enjoy being alone, and how to pull a thread of curiosity and teach myself from books.

To this day, I hate constraints.

I don’t like planning ahead, have little self-discipline, and even less internal structure. My life has zero optimization.

But the Twitterverse wants me housebroken.

My feed is filled with productivity and life hacks harangues. Sample schedules leave no time to pee, much less time for awe-filled moments like watching a wasp build a nest. I am being nagged about using checklists, tools, systems, and processes to continuously improve myself into waking up at dawn, not to watch the sunrise, but to work or worse, to work out. Fuck that.

Feral people of the world, unite!

You have nothing to lose but your feelings of inadequacy.

Here’s why:

Feral, unscheduled, and undisciplined me built a $2.5B asset management firm from scratch. By all conventional measures, I succeeded big time.

And I did it all “wrong”.

I followed my interests, did what was compelling in the moment, was true to myself, and flew my freak flag high.

If you are unstructured, creative, undisciplined, and inefficient AF, do what is fun and meaningful to you. And please learn to love your wild and unconventional self.

“Success” comes when you lean into your nature, not fight against it.

P.S. You also get to define what success looks like for you.

Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons