182 | THE INTELLIGENCE TRAP: WHY SMART PEOPLE STRUGGLE WITH PRODUCTIVITY [2]

THIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY JAMES MCCREADIE & DEBBIE MAY

In last week’s episode, I talked about why intelligence so often works against productivity. That episode, and this one, are inspired by Isaiah Hankel’s book The Science of Intelligent Achievement, which looks at why intelligent, capable people struggle to convert thinking into consistent execution. Hankel calls this pattern the intelligence trap.

For anyone who didn’t hear Part One, please go back and check it out first but for those that have here’s a recap - I focused on three things.

First, that mental energy is finite. Once it’s depleted, intelligence, experience, and effort stop converting into action.

Second, that when that energy drops, intelligence often turns to busyness. Tidying, organising, clearing decks. Work that feels responsible, but avoids the thing that actually matters.

And third, that fragmentation destroys high-value thinking. When attention is constantly broken, quality collapses, even though effort stays high.

That episode was diagnostic. It was about naming the problem and removing self-blame.

Today is about direction.

Because once you understand why things are stalling, the next question is obvious.

What do you do about it?

In Part One, I identified that intelligence isn’t the problem - Unmanaged intelligence is.

So, in this episode, I present three new principles that help direct intelligence properly.

These are not mindset tricks. They are structural.

PRINCIPLE FOUR - MOTIVATION IS OVERRATED, SYSTEMS MATTER

There’s a belief that if something matters enough, you’ll feel like doing it. That motivation will arrive. That insight, passion, or a sense of urgency will carry you through resistance.

But now, having laid it out like that, you may already be thinking the same thing I am.

It usually doesn’t.

One of the most common traps intelligent people fall into is overestimating motivation.

But motivation fluctuates. Energy dips. Stress interferes. Life happens. And when motivation is treated as the engine, work - even the idea of doing it - becomes hit and miss.

This is why intelligent people often restart instead of carry on. They wait to feel ready. They wait for clarity. They wait for the right moment.

And nothing moves.

What actually carries work forward is structure.

A system is not a big plan. It’s not a mood. It’s not a vision board.

It’s the repeatable set of steps that makes the work happen even when you don’t feel like it.

And this is where intelligence can get in its own way again. Because smart people love designing the perfect system. They can spend hours refining it. Optimising it. Stress-testing it. And none of that counts if the system doesn’t produce output on a bad day.

I’ve had it with this season - I spent an awful long time trying to set up the perfect GPT to help me structure episodes, but I’ll give you a wee insight into the future episode on Ai - I’d have got more done quicker, if I hadn’t wasted about a day and a half trying to make it work - which , in the end it only partially did. It hasn’t achieved what a real system should do.

A real system should be simple enough to run when you’re tired. Clear enough to run when you’re distracted and small enough to run when life is getting on top of you.

This is also where intelligent people confuse readiness with avoidance. They wait for a feeling, instead of relying on a clearly defined next step, they can execute regardless of mood.

Systems don’t care how you feel. They don’t require inspiration. They create default behaviour. And that’s what makes them powerful.

So, when I say directing intelligence, I mean this. Stop asking yourself, Do I feel like doing the work today? Start asking, What does my system say I do next?

Stephen King is a good example of this in practice. He doesn’t wait to feel ready, inspired, or in the right mood. He writes because it’s time to write. Same place. Same routine. The system removes the daily decision, and because the decision is gone, the work happens. Inspiration, if it shows up at all, turns up after the work has already started, not before.

I’ve found it with this season too – I came in tired yesterday and looked at about 6 episode ideas couldn’t decide what to do 1^st and effectively faffed about rather than writing shows. Today I knew that was an issue so I worked out in detail 15 ideas up to a point, went to a coffee shop and dealt with some emails, and then when I came in despite a couple of jobs interfering with my headspace - forcing me to respond and write a risk assessment and make a call - I went straight into this and last weeks episodes.

Because progress is built from what you repeat, not what you intend.

Directing intelligence here means building systems that make progress boring, repeatable, and less dependent on mood.

PRINCIPLE FIVE – ATTENTION IS THE REAL BOTTLENECK

I’ve an episode next season - Yes I’m working that far ahead now - about bottlenecks but there this is specific to the intelligence trap - We talk about time constantly in productivity conversations and about finding more hours in the day.

• But time is rarely the real constraint.

• Attention is. Mental energy is.

You can block out hours in your calendar and still get nothing meaningful done if your attention is fragmented. And intelligent people are especially vulnerable here, because they notice everything.

• Every notification.

• Every open loop.

• Every unresolved problem.

• Every flippin’ notification sound that goes off as I write this episode.

I’ve had to put volume up on it as I’m expecting a call – and its aggravating!

Nothing fully leaves the mind. It just queues up in the background.

And once our attention is split, it’s extremely difficult to recover. Context switching is expensive. Re-entry into the task at hand – especially creative tasks - takes time. And deep thinking does not survive constant interruption. Even short breaks in attention carry a cost, because the mind has to rebuild context again and again.

And this reframes productivity completely.

You stay busy, but you make poorer decisions and struggle to move anything forward.

This is why long days don’t necessarily produce good work. Attention gets spent on reacting rather than directing. Responding rather than deciding. Managing noise rather than focusing on creating better work.

And intelligence doesn’t protect you from this. In many cases, it makes it worse. The more you can see, the more there is to notice.

Directing intelligence here means learning to protect your attention deliberately.

It means deciding what does not get access to your thinking, as much as deciding what does.

It’s choosing not to open email first thing in the morning, because you know it will hijack your headspace for the next hour and instead scheduling time for that which is separate from your larger creative task time.

It’s turning off notifications while you’re trying to think, because every interruption forces you to rebuild context again.

It’s not starting a task you can’t finish properly, because half-done work leaves mental residue that follows you into the next thing. I’ll talk about parking it forward in a later episode by the way - which is a good way of dealing with this issue -

• It’s closing tabs you’re not using.

• Writing things down instead of holding them in your head.

• Creating conditions where your mind isn’t constantly being pulled in six directions at once.

Because without defended attention, intelligence never gets the uninterrupted space it needs to do its job.

You react instead of choosing. You stay busy, but nothing substantial moves forward.

Defending attention isn’t about discipline or heroics. It’s about reducing the number of things competing for your thinking so the work that matters actually has room to happen.

PRINCIPLE SIX – ENVIRONMENT BEATS WILLPOWER

We like to believe that if we just think clearly enough, decide firmly enough, or commit strongly enough, we’ll overcome whatever is in our way. That clarity plus effort should be enough, but in reality, behaviour is shaped far more by our surroundings than intention.

Physical spaces. Digital tools. Defaults. Notifications. Layouts.

And the People we surround ourselves with! - look to episode 179 to hear more about that.

These things steer our behaviour long before willpower ever gets involved.

Trying to think your way out of a hostile environment rarely works. Redesigning the environment does. When the conditions are working against you, every task requires effort just to begin. And that effort gets misread as a personal failure, when its likely just friction from the world about you.

Willpower is not a strategy. It’s a short-term override. It might get you through a day, or a deadline, but it doesn’t hold under repetition. The moment energy dips, stress rises, or attention is pulled elsewhere, willpower collapses and old patterns return.

This is why intelligent people often exhaust themselves trying to be disciplined instead of making the work easier to do. They rely on self-control in environments that constantly demand it, and then blame themselves when it runs out.

Directing intelligence means changing the conditions you work under, instead of trying to push harder inside the same situation.

It means removing friction where you can, rather than relying on willpower to overcome it. Reducing unnecessary choices. Fewer decisions. Fewer things fighting for your attention.

Steve Jobs understood this well. He famously wore the same outfit every day. Not as a branding exercise, but to remove unnecessary decisions. One less thing to think about. One less drain on attention and mental energy before the real work even began.

The point isn’t the clothes. It’s the principle. He reduced friction wherever he could so his thinking was reserved for the work that actually mattered. Fewer trivial choices meant more capacity for meaningful ones.

That’s what directing intelligence looks like in practice. Not trying harder, but designing your day so you don’t have to fight yourself just to get started.

It means making the right action the default, not something you have to talk yourself into. When the path of least resistance points in the right direction, progress stops feeling like a daily battle.

And crucially, it means stopping the habit of blaming yourself for struggling inside systems that were never designed to support sustained, focused work in the first place. Most of the time, the problem isn’t you. It’s the environment you’re trying to work in.

So, let’s pull all this together. Across these two episodes, I’ve talked about six things.

First, that your mental energy is finite. Once it’s depleted, intelligence, experience, and effort stop converting into action. It’s fundamentally vital that you do whatever you can to protect that mental energy.

Second, when energy drops, intelligence often turns to busyness. Work that feels responsible, but avoids the stuff that actually matters.

Third, that fragmentation destroys high-value thinking. When attention is constantly broken, quality collapses even though effort stays high.

Fourth, that motivation is unreliable. Systems, not mood or intention, are what actually carry work forward.

Fifth, that attention is the real bottleneck. Not time. Not effort. And once attention is fragmented, decision-making and progress suffer.

And finally, that environment matters more than willpower. Changing the conditions you work under is often far more effective than trying harder inside the same setup.

That’s where I’ll leave it but if you want to know more please do check out Isaiah Hankel’s awesome book The Science of Intelligent Achievement

…and here’s your call to action for this week.

Pick one area of your work where intelligence keeps circling but nothing moves.

Don’t add more effort.

Change the structure. Identify what works for you and what doesn’t and write them down.

Then:

• Adjust your system.

• Reduce the attention drain.

• Alter your environment

Small changes here will make a big difference over time.

Before I wrap up, allow me to thank you for giving me your time and attention today. I don’t take that lightly. I know I say it all the time, but I do know how crowded and noisy things are, and I appreciate you choosing to spend this time with me.

In next week’s show, FIVE LESSONS ABOUT LIFE AND TRUST WE CAN LEARN FROM THE TRAITORS, I use the tv show The Traitors as a pressure test for human behaviour. When politeness is removed, patterns become obvious and who controls information, how bad beliefs get locked in, and why emotional control decides who we trust are

important considerations for productivity. Once you see these patterns clearly, you stop wasting energy expecting people or systems to behave differently - and that alone frees up focus. If you’ve been carrying too much in your head, and it’s been burning up your mental energy, that episode will definitely help.

I’ll end today with these words from Vincent van Gogh, who apparently said… Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

Now, take control of your own destiny. Keep on shootin’ and join me next time on FILM PRO PRODUCTIVITY!

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REFERENCES

• The Science of Intelligent Achievement – Isaiah Hankel

• Deep Work – Cal Newport

• The intelligence trap

• Finite mental energy

• Busyness as avoidance

• Attention fragmentation