I was awfully hungry after a long hike on Madeira’s mountain tracks. It was off-season, almost nothing was open, so we ended up in the empty restaurant of the only hotel around.
To be fair, they were nice and trying. But the only thing remotely vegetarian was a “soup” - and how wrong can you go with a soup. It came after an eternity, rolled in on a tray with silver domes that were lifted for us movie-like.
We got served a grey, murky soup that consisted of flour and sandy beans. After two spoons it was clear that I couldn’t eat it. But we carried on, said how happy we were. We felt bad while we ate it, we felt bad after we ate, also because we ate it.
About a year later I found myself in a French movie that was badly translated to German, the kind where the mismatch between voice and lip-sync is already irritating. The plot and acting were bad too. And although both my wife and I didn’t enjoy it one bit, we talked ourselves into seeing it through.
In both cases, nothing external forced my decision.
What decided was simply what ranked higher in that moment.
Upon reflecting on these episodes I realized that I was lacking a clear internal hierarchy of what is important to me and what is not.
And since that hierarchy wasn’t explicit, something else took over decisions.
Like classical sunk cost fallacy, normal people pleasing, and the quiet discomfort of breaking a situation once you are already in it.
Over the years it became more and more apparent to me how helpful it is to have a clear internal hierarchy. You can call these values or core beliefs, although it is not exactly the same.
What matters more is this: whether you have defined the hierarchy actively - or whether it is defining you.
This hierarchy helps you not only in decision making but especially in prioritizing. And this - along with the ability to focus - is one of the most underrated skills I know.
Everybody agrees that in order to produce or create something meaningful you have to focus. But that is only the second step. If you are not clear what to focus on, that focus goes to waste.
You don’t act on what matters most, you act on what you ranked highest.
And that is why people can be completely sincere about what matters to them - and still behave in ways that completely contradict it.
Priority by definition means that there is only **one thing** that is most important. It doesn’t allow for equal parallels. And that automatically creates a hierarchy of priorities.
Especially when building and living a multifaceted renaissance life it becomes crucial to be able to prioritize constantly to accommodate for the never changing, limited resources of time and attention.
Not because you lack options - but because you have too many.
Luckily not everything can be done everywhere at equal quality. I obviously can’t operate in a conference room. Or give keynote lectures in the OR—although that could work.
But thanks to the ever-connected, hyper-digital world we live in, many things can be done in many places under many circumstances.
This means if you know the order of what is important to you, you can adjust on the spot based on your current situation.
Obviously technical setup and preparation are paramount here.
For example, I always keep a current draft of a grant proposal, research paper or newsletter piece open in my cross-device-synced writing tool. Which means if I have an opening, I can hop in there and continue where I left off.
Most systems don’t fail because they are bad, they fail because they are built on the wrong hierarchies.
The system shouldn’t decide for you what you do, it only enables what is already ranked high enough to be picked.
Now this is by no means a manifesto for “multitasking” or frequent context switching. Multitasking per definition is not possible, because you can focus only on one thing at a time. Perceived multitasking is just rapid context switching, like a flickering light—and it drives you equally nuts.
The science is pretty solid showing that frequent context switching is inefficient and ineffective. So I am definitely advocating for deep work sessions and longer periods of uninterrupted time slots to create work that has quality and depth. It is the same in the OR. I do best when I am doing one surgery at a time, not when I am jumping between theaters.
That being said - not all work is heart surgery or Pulitzer-worthy literature.
For everything else, internal hierarchy and a reliable system that supports your prioritized areas are a godsend.
They don’t make decisions for you, they remove the need to renegotiate them every time.
They reduce the mental load of having to think through on the spot what to do, how to react, what to prioritize - so you can use your mental bandwidth to actually do things.
I regularly review that internal hierarchy of priorities. I draw it, map it, adjust it, delete it, scrap it, remix and rebuild it.
Because if you don’t define your hierarchy deliberately, it will default to something else - comfort, politeness, inertia - and quietly run your life for you.
So the question is not what matters to you.
It is what is currently winning - and whether you actually chose that.
To more in life
Nicco
The song to this episode:
