Mencius believed that moral capacity isn't stored — it has to be continuously renewed through use, or it quietly degrades. He called this the 'sprouts' model: ethical sensibility exists in you the way a seedling exists in soil, requiring active cultivation or it simply withers back into ground. The parallel for productivity is uncomfortable: the ability to do genuinely hard cognitive work isn't a reservoir you draw from, it's a living tissue that responds to whether you actually exercise it. What most productivity systems do is optimize the logistics around deep work without ever requiring the deep work itself — a kind of elaborate trellis with nothing growing on it. The corrective Mencius implies is structural, not motivational: your system must regularly demand output that could fail, not just output that gets processed. Difficulty isn't inefficiency in the system; it's the mechanism by which the capacity stays alive.

Look at your calendar for the past two weeks: how many of your completed tasks could have been done by a version of you from three years ago?

Drawing from Confucian Philosophy (Mencian) — Mencius (孟子)