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Contents
Introduction
Welcome to the OptimalScience Wiki!
Imagine a world where every obstacle that you encounter has become an opportunity for the growth that you’ve always desired. Imagine a day where distraction, reluctance, and anxiety have been tamed by mindfulness and converted into adrenaline for peak performance. And imagine a future where every hour of your work has been deliberately crafted as a challenge that helps you enter into flow and grow in excellence. This growth transforms every task into an expression of service to those around you.
All of this is within reach. But unfortunately we are too often caught in a story of mere survival instead of heroic growth.
Rather than seeing work as the means by which we can grow into the best versions of ourselves, we too often fall victim to distraction, reluctance, and anxiety. Our days become exercises in distraction. We are pulled in a dozen different directions, frantically triaging a deluge of emails, texts, and meetings. At best, we’re simply “getting things done.” At worst, we dread walking into the office, opening our computers, or checking our phones. Each email becomes yet another overwhelming demand on our time. Each meeting becomes another test of our patience. Each task threatens to push us past our limit. At this point dread and reluctance give way to anxiety, and anxiety only accelerates the descent.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
What if we told you that there is nothing in our minds that isn’t shapeable? That our emotions are not set in stone, but actually the most malleable part of who we are? That our brain is the organ that is most easily transformed by behavior, and that you can carefully cultivate an approach to your thoughts and feelings that turns every moment of every working day into an opportunity to grow?
The central concept of OptimalWork is the Golden Hour, which combines the three skills of reframing, mindfulness, and challenge to help you prepare your mind for work. Practicing Golden Hours will help you first overcome the most common and disruptive obstacles to working at your best, then achieve excellence in your work, and finally grow according to your highest ideals and bring a spirit of service to everything you do.
We at OptimalWork have drawn on neuroscience, cognitive behavioral therapy, and virtue theory to give you the tools you need to achieve this growth in your work. We began our work over the past few years by teaching these practices to students at Harvard. After seeing that our approach transformed the working habits of even the best students at Harvard, we started a website, OptimalWork.com, to bring the method to a wider audience. Since then, we have expanded our coaching work to serve professionals from different fields and students around the world — and we began writing this book.
We hope this book will serve as a guide for anyone interested in cultivating a more deliberate approach to work. OptimalWork’s core concepts are universal and inexhaustible. They work for beginners and veterans alike, for those who have only started on the path to working at their best and those who have spent years proactively pursuing growth in their work. Wherever you are on your journey, you will walk away from this book with the knowledge and tools to achieve a profound transformation in the very way that you work.
