If you feel overwhelmed and seem to get nothing much done, you’re not alone.
That’s because many of us go around in circles. We never attain take-off speed and are doomed to circle the airport endlessly. Or are we?
In this article, we will examine why top speed is so crucial and how to get to the point where you can fly on autopilot.
Here is the answer to the question. How do you get so much done in a day, and still manage to have time to “waste”?
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Imagine you're at an airport watching a Cessna take off.
It easily lifts off the ground at 102 km/h. An Airbus A330 needs to be between 278 and 333 km/h. The Concorde, on the other hand, requires a whopping 407 km/h.
If they don't reach these speeds, what happens?
You know the answer, don't you? The lift won't overcome the weight if the aircraft doesn't reach the prescribed speed. The plane stays on the ground and is doomed to circle on the runway forever.
No one wants to circle the runway forever.
As cheesy as it sounds, we all want to be on autopilot, soaring through the sky. Yet, the main problem isn't with flying but knowing the takeoff speed. Without a benchmark, we have no way of knowing how to move forward. And this brings us to a pertinent question I get from clients fairly regularly.
The question is: How do you get so much done in a day, and still manage to have time to “waste”?
If you know me well, you probably are aware that I paint a watercolour diary (now over 4500 paintings), take photos (well over 35,000 images), cook once or twice a day, host many very active Whatsapp groups, while conducting a live 12-week course, a membership site, weekly podcast and answering every e-mail personally. Oh, and there's French and Spanish to learn as well.
The main point missed in this array of skills is that I was circling the airport, too.
If I were to go back to 2003, I would barely write two articles a month. My camera was stored away safely, and I didn't own watercolours.
Any language learning was sporadic and not getting me anywhere in a hurry. The podcast was at least 10 years away. The membership site existed, but only just, and there weren't many e-mails to answer.
Yet, the only way to do various activities is to understand the takeoff speed.
And it's best to avoid trying to run a freakin' airport. Instead, work on the Cessna. Those 4500 watercolours started with me being in a hopeless situation. I could draw very well, because I'd been drawing almost nonstop since childhood.
However, if you looked at my work in watercolour, well, that was very childish. In effect, I was circling the runway. I did what most people would do: I went to a class. Wait, I went to three separate watercolour classes.
Luckily, one of the teachers gave me a benchmark.
“What can you do almost every day”? he asked me. I had some tiny (very tiny) watercolour books I'd bought a few years prior. I could try and rip off the wrapping and do a tiny (very tiny) sketch in watercolour. That was the benchmark because I was flying a Cessna.
When I started with the podcast, it was full-on Concorde. I circled the runway for two whole years. I complained about how hard it was to get just 20 minutes of audio online. It took a solid eight hours of my time, and then when I was done by Friday, I'd have to start all over on Monday. The Cessnas were getting off the ground, but the Concorde was a royal pain.
Yet, speed is the real answer to almost any problem.
If you can write an article in two days and get that speed down to a day, you officially have a day to waste. The same applies to a podcast, which was once an 8-hour headache, but now takes less than half that time.
Cooking doesn't really involve cooking and is mostly cutting. If you take ages to chop the veggies, you're burning your tyres on the ground and getting nowhere.
Does this advice sound a bit boring?
You've heard it many times before, haven't you? Keep at it, work at it, blah, blah, blah. No one tells you the takeoff speed, however. If you understand how long it takes to get something off the ground, look for teachers who help you achieve that speed.
Or you work your way through YouTube and get to that speed. Once you have that speed, you can do the same task in a fraction of the time and not get very tired.
You can now “waste more time” and easily go to the second or third task. In a week, you achieve more than most people achieve in months.
However, where do you start?
You don't want to start with a Concorde, that's for sure. What you need to do is get one Cessna off the ground. What's that Cessna? What's the takeoff speed?
If you were learning to take street photos, you might need three elements to get outstanding pictures. Hence, you'd need to know those three elements, and you're off the ground. If you're trying to assemble an e-book, you don't need to learn InDesign. You may need four or five elements, and your e-book is ready.
In a way, avoiding the Concorde is the way to go.
You get one Cessna off the ground, then work on the other. Soon you have a fleet of Cessnas flying and you're into watercolour, photography, writing, cooking, and wasting time.
At this point, you may want to play around with some Airbus or Concorde-level projects. But until then, it's a matter of getting to the correct speed.
Most Cessna projects need about 12 weeks at best.
You could know nothing about Photoshop, and in 3 months, you'd be quite the whiz kid. If you've never dipped your toes in AI, Perplexity, or Claude sounds alien, you're about 12 weeks away. There are a lot of Cessnas that are a breath away.
In 2003, I couldn't envision what I would do in 2013.
In 2013, I had no idea of what was possible in 2023.
Find yourself a Cessna project today. Or circle the runway forever. It's a choice.
One more question: how do you determine the elements needed to get you off the ground?
Oh, this is a good and challenging question to answer. It depends on the complexity level, or how complicated it is made out to be.
For instance, we used to teach how to draw perspective in the cartooning course. Just the method would take all week, and then it was so technical that we had a second week.
Was anyone good at the end of the second week?
Well, everyone was fed up with perspective and wanted to move on. Whether people got the idea or not, there was a high level of frustration. The course was revamped (and I'm fixing it again for this year), and now people can draw perspective in about 2 minutes.
When we ask how long it takes to get off the ground, the answer lies with the teacher, not the student. Most of us automatically assume that “we” have to be talented. That's not true. It's the teacher who needs to have a system.
That system should get you up and running, so the task appears easy, almost childish. If we use that benchmark of “the responsibility being with the teacher”, then most learning is rapid—a LOT of fun. In comparison, most of our knowledge is long, tedious and not a joy.
I know this is a long answer, but I wanted to give you a perspective on the problem of getting off the ground.
