The Art of Caring About Both

     In life you can have your cake and eat it too. This may not be the case for everything, but it is the case for some important things. You may have heard that multi-tasking is detrimental to your productivity, but to what extent? Have you also heard about the law of diminishing returns? It states that after compiling your efforts to a certain amount, there is a threshold that you pass where productivity begins to take a down-turn. Take for example the act of uploading a video while also making a blog post. Would you wait to upload the video and then post later after it is done? Or vis-versa, would it be better to write the post now and then upload the video later? This is a trick question. The answer is actually neither of these things. The correct answer is to upload the video WHILE you are making the post. In most situations, the upload will not hinder the blog and the blog will not hinder the post. This is a generic example but perhaps you may get the gist. Many things can in fact be done in tandem without directly interfering with productivity. It drives me nuts to hear that you should just focus on one thing and that's it for that time. If you can mastermind your way into big thinking and plan a schedule for yourself where things overlap effortlessly and you can get more done without burning out, then why not? Now let's take for example open heart surgery. Surely you would not want your surgeon making white hot memes with one hand while fixing your clogged artery with the other. This is a far fetched example, but it can translate into other areas of your life. Like everything in life there is a balance and perhaps even thresholds of productivity as stated earlier that you can reach and peak out at. Then, over-pushing results in your productivity dropping. The trick is to know when, where, and how to do it.
     
(This turns from a blog about the best ways to multi task to your time at Tesla)

When I was a younger man I often found my mind racing. I wanted to push the extents to which it could operate and take over the world in doing so. I saw the life around me in rural North Carolina to be slow. Tractors plowing fields and cicadas chirping on hot summer days. Not exactly "fast paced". The simple task one after another got to me, being young however I did not have much say so in the bigger picture of my life at the time. Fast forward to me when I was 18 and things begin to change. I drive my happy self all the way from North Carolina across the entirety of the United States to the destination of California. After living out of the car for a while and doing odds and end jobs here and there I got my lucky break. I swarmed Tesla with a tidal wave of applications and eventually they hired me. It was there that I got my very first taste of a fast moving lifestyle.
     At Tesla, things were like lightning. The schooling for the job they would place you in lined you right alongside world class engineers and scientists. You could walk out of one classroom of blue collar workers straight into a polished classroom of white collar, data entry and master-minded engineers working on things ranging from the newest material to make screws out of, all the way up to giant, shipping container sized batteries that would harness the power of the sun and store it in them in places like Australia. Surely more than one thing at a time was going on here. It simply could not be the case that all of these people and all of this intellect were brought here to this place just by following one foot after the other. There was some serious multi-tasking going on here, as well as doing ALL of the right things at the right time with another handy tool in their arsenal, time management.