Imagine that your partner broke up with you. Since then, you’ve been lying in bed, feeling depressed and lethargic. Obviously, you won’t get a lot of stuff done and people definitely won’t enjoy being around you no matter how hard you try.

No productivity system or advice like “look people in the eyes” will change that.

Then one day your ex calls you up, saying they never should’ve left you and they want to come over. All of the sudden you’ll feel like you can take on the world.

In that state you will effortlessly plow through your todo list and be incredibly charismatic.

This is what most personal development advice gets wrong. Surface-level tactics will never work in the long term.

Looking people in the eye or remembering their names are definitely all actions done by people with great social skills. Similarly, highly productive people usually use some system that looks a bit like Getting-Things-Done.

But for them these tactics are all effortless outward manifestations of something far deeper: their state of mind.

If you’re in the right state of mind, you’ll effortlessly get stuff done and social interactions are effortless.

Hence it’s futile to tell people to mimic outward manifestations. What really matters is getting into the right state of mind.