Productivity vs. Magic: Which Do You Choose?

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume today that there are only two paths in life and you have to choose one of them. One path is productivity, with your goal being to be as efficient as possible; the other path is magic, with your goal being to discover and master universal forces we do not yet understand or even acknowledge with any degree of specificity.

Just to be clear, I am not using the word magic to describe card tricks or pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Instead, think about: heightened sensory perception, feelings of unity or interconnectedness, transcendence of time and space, intense visions and insights, or intuitive understandings that seem to go beyond our usual cognitive capacities.

Which do you choose? Magic or productivity?

This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know which you personally would choose.

5, 10 or 20 year ago, I would have chosen productivity. Most people I know seem as though they choose productivity without ever even consciously recognizing they are doing that.

And yet, most of the people we seem to most respect and admire choose magic.

The melody for Yesterday, one of the most famous and successful songs ever, came to Paul McCartney in a dream. “I woke up with a lovely tune in my head,” he recounted in the 1998 biography?Many Years From Now. “I thought: That’s great, I wonder what that is? There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot but because I’d dreamed it I couldn’t believe I’d written it.”

In Safi Bahcall's brilliant book, Loonshots, he argues that large organizations tend to reject radical, novel, or non-conforming ideas in favor of safe bets. Yet history shows that these loonshots often bring about breakthrough innovations. Safi suggests that organizations should separate the "artists" who work on radical new ideas from the "soldiers" who work on regular operations.

My own guess would be that the artists would choose magic and the soldiers would choose productivity. Do you agree?

Ryan Reynolds, the "part-time actor and business owner", presents an interesting and perhaps contradictory example of the relative powers of productivity vs. magic. I doubt any of his 2.4 million LinkedIn followers tune in to his hilarious commercials or Deadpool movies for productivity tips. Still, he stands out among actors for his business acumen. Which option do you guess he would choose?

None of this, however, explains why I'm asking you today to make this choice.

I'm looking to start a series of small, intimate conversations (think five or ten people at a time) among highly successful people who choose magic.

Why?

Because I want to understand better how intuition, eureka moments, transcendent experiences, premonitions and leaps in human development occur. As Dr. Lisa Miller—author of The Awakened Brain—once told me, "We are hardwired to be able to see into what I might call the consciousness field or the implicit order; we are hardwired to be able to see into the transcendent reality."

She then took this statement one giant step further. "Capacity is at the level of consciousness: a loving, guiding consciousness level. I say God. Some people say Universe or Allah or whatever word they use. That connection into the loving guiding consciousness is our birthright. We're born with this, and when we engage in that form of dialogue, you know, asking a question, 'Do I go left or right?' we can receive the answer in the form of a gut instinct, a mystical experience or a certain knowing. That is a dialogue. It’s a dialogue with with life, with spirit, with God."

If you give me the choice between receiving wisdom directly from Source or getting really good at organizing my accounts receivable, I'm going every time with Source... or, as I'm calling it today, magic.

Unfortunately, most LinkedIn accounts do not include a field that allows you to self-identify as a Productivity vs. a Magic individual. Today, I'm offering you an opportunity to correct that oversight.

For those of you who choose magic, please don't be surprised if one day soon I invite you to a deep conversation with a few other insightful and expansive humans.

For those of who choose productivity, I'm genuinely curious whether you've also encountered magical moments in your life that you can't explain with logic alone.

To learn more about me and find links to many of my other writings, please stop by my web site.