I ran across this post today from Lifehacker. Apart from the utterly fantastic thought of getting productivity secrets from Jerry Seinfeld backstage at a comedy club, the post is sheer gold for the “paradigm factor.”

What’s the paradigm factor? It’s my way of looking at procedures and methods that can be applied to a variety of contexts. In this post, the method is described by Seinfeld to the author, a young budding comic seeking advice on greatness from one who’s already “made it”:

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself – even when you don’t feel like it.  He then revealed a unique calendar system he was using pressure himself to write. Here’s how it worked. He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent  wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

This is productivity gold.

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