The Science of Peak Performance: Why Heart Trumps Time
00:00:00.000 | We talked a lot about exercise to spend time on,
00:00:02.960 | time you spend on work, thinking about time,
00:00:06.160 | but I want to move to prana
00:00:08.440 | because it's not always about time.
00:00:10.680 | So maybe let's jump in here.
00:00:12.240 | - So, I mean, you know, prana,
00:00:13.880 | the definition of prana is like this extraordinary energy.
00:00:17.680 | This is like, almost think of like a tank of energy
00:00:19.980 | that all of us have,
00:00:21.160 | but we don't always know how to access that.
00:00:24.760 | And one of the reasons for that is because
00:00:28.360 | when we think about investing in a project
00:00:30.680 | or investing in an idea,
00:00:33.120 | the thing that we are so conditioned to think about
00:00:35.860 | is like time, right?
00:00:37.200 | How much time am I going to give something?
00:00:39.980 | And ultimately, what tends to matter most
00:00:44.320 | when we look at sort of great projects that have come alive
00:00:47.520 | across all of these different industries
00:00:49.240 | wasn't really time, but it was heart.
00:00:52.060 | How much heart did you really give that?
00:00:54.120 | That's why you see, you know,
00:00:55.340 | movies like "The Clockwork Orange"
00:00:56.960 | that were like written in a few days, right?
00:00:59.360 | "The Great Gatsby," all these great works,
00:01:01.800 | they were written in a fraction of the amount of time
00:01:04.160 | that you might think because all of a sudden
00:01:05.960 | there was this creative burst of inspiration
00:01:08.080 | and they were to sit down
00:01:09.240 | and just like really, really bang it out.
00:01:11.400 | And that's just kind of proof
00:01:12.680 | that like what we're really trying to optimize here for
00:01:15.400 | is heart and not time, right?
00:01:18.080 | And so it's much better to be fully,
00:01:20.780 | like full hearted with your dharma
00:01:23.280 | than it is to be fully scheduled.
00:01:25.040 | And, you know, the example that like is very similar,
00:01:27.000 | I know like you've had like people talk about meditation
00:01:29.280 | on this show.
00:01:30.260 | You know, I went and spent time at like, you know,
00:01:32.200 | a monastery and what I was kind of surprised by,
00:01:34.880 | I guess, you know, I'm surprised now to have been surprised,
00:01:38.080 | but at the time, like I kind of expected
00:01:39.720 | that these monks were like sitting around
00:01:41.360 | and meditating all day.
00:01:42.480 | And the truth is they weren't, right?
00:01:45.120 | They were meditating for three or four hours a day,
00:01:48.420 | but the rest of that time was spent like working the land,
00:01:51.720 | doing all the stuff that they needed to do,
00:01:53.460 | doing the duties that they needed
00:01:55.040 | in order to make the place actually function, right?
00:01:57.720 | But their life was dedicated to meditation.
00:02:00.720 | And the point being that just because you're dedicating
00:02:02.800 | your life to something, just 'cause you care about it,
00:02:05.100 | doesn't necessarily mean you're spending every waking hour
00:02:07.840 | doing that thing.
00:02:08.920 | What is more important is that you're finding ways
00:02:11.720 | to really bring your best prana,
00:02:13.920 | your best energy and your best heart to those moments.
00:02:16.840 | So, you know, for me, like, you know,
00:02:19.200 | writing for a half hour every morning is way, way better
00:02:24.140 | and produces much stronger long-term results
00:02:27.100 | than if I was actually spending two hours
00:02:29.180 | in the afternoon writing.
00:02:30.700 | It's just literally the degradation of my brain.
00:02:33.380 | And it's the degradation of my creative horsepower.
00:02:36.020 | I mean, I can sit down and I can write,
00:02:38.400 | but it's not gonna end up being any of the pearls
00:02:42.140 | that ultimately make it into the book.
00:02:43.700 | Like 99% of what I write ends up in a trash bin, right?
00:02:47.500 | And so what I'm looking for is like these little pearls
00:02:52.200 | in this, you know, in this piles of horse shit
00:02:55.000 | that I write each day.
00:02:55.960 | And it turns out that like the little pearls
00:02:58.660 | are much more likely to appear
00:03:00.320 | in that half hour morning session
00:03:02.200 | than a two hour writing block in the afternoon, right?
00:03:04.680 | I know that about myself.
00:03:05.800 | And so for me, my dharma is to write and to tell stories,
00:03:09.480 | but it's not like I spend all day, every day,
00:03:11.240 | like doing that.
00:03:12.240 | I mean, I've got kids, I've got other work
00:03:15.520 | that pays the bills.
00:03:16.820 | You know, there's a lot of other things going on,
00:03:19.280 | but I have to make sure to have this commitment.
00:03:21.720 | The second thing about that then is like,
00:03:24.480 | how do we then like condition ourselves
00:03:27.980 | so that we have the right energy at the right moment, right?
00:03:31.400 | And for me, this was sort of a big breakthrough,
00:03:33.680 | which is that like, I've always sort of looked at rest
00:03:36.680 | and recovery as something that you did in long periods,
00:03:40.000 | right?
00:03:40.840 | So I would take myself to a breaking point.
00:03:44.380 | I would take myself to the red.
00:03:46.400 | And then I would say, I need a vacation, right?
00:03:48.880 | And my wife and I, we would plan this.
00:03:50.500 | We'd be like, hey, like, we have this one week vacation
00:03:53.440 | scheduled.
00:03:54.240 | And I would literally look at three months
00:03:56.000 | between now and then, and I'd kill myself, right?
00:03:59.080 | But the problem with that is I would literally
00:04:02.040 | return back from vacation with less gas in the tank
00:04:05.320 | than before that three month period even started, right?
00:04:08.120 | And the science kind of bears this out.
00:04:10.200 | I mean, most people actually return from vacation
00:04:12.640 | and say they're more stressed one week after they return
00:04:16.280 | than one week before they left, right?
00:04:18.600 | Point being, like, vacations are like wonderful,
00:04:20.840 | can be a wonderful thing.
00:04:22.200 | They're great for reconnecting with family,
00:04:24.080 | and seeing new places, and spending time with friends.
00:04:26.600 | But they're actually not as effective an instrument
00:04:31.080 | for dealing with burnout than we may assume.
00:04:34.360 | What tends to work much, much better
00:04:36.480 | is when you can actually have frequent focused recoveries
00:04:39.840 | throughout the day, every single day.
00:04:41.520 | In fact, like, average high performers,
00:04:44.200 | whether it be in business, or be in music, or be in sports,
00:04:47.840 | they're taking somewhere around eight breaks
00:04:51.080 | every single day, right?
00:04:53.040 | About one an hour throughout a work day, which, like, I
00:04:56.680 | know sounds extraordinary.
00:04:58.400 | But when I started to put this into practice,
00:05:01.400 | I used what I call the 55-5 model, which
00:05:04.320 | is like for every 55 minutes of work,
00:05:06.560 | I'm taking five minutes of focused recovery, right?
00:05:09.960 | And that five minutes can be doing anything,
00:05:11.960 | like literally anything.
00:05:13.120 | It can be sipping out a cup of coffee, it can be doing pushups,
00:05:15.920 | it can be taking a walk to the mailbox and back,
00:05:17.960 | like, doing whatever it is you're doing,
00:05:19.620 | but you're not multitasking it.
00:05:21.000 | You don't have your phone with you when you're doing it,
00:05:23.340 | and you're, like, getting some quasi-rest
00:05:26.040 | and quasi sort of work done at the same time.
00:05:28.320 | Those five minutes are deliberately non-productive.
00:05:30.800 | You're focused on rest.
00:05:32.480 | And people have a very hard time with this.
00:05:35.040 | I know I did.
00:05:35.960 | And the reason for that is because what
00:05:38.240 | we feel like we're doing--
00:05:39.640 | again, we're in a time-based model--
00:05:41.640 | is that we're shrinking the amount of time,
00:05:44.760 | productive time, we have in our day, right?
00:05:46.520 | We already feel squeezed as is.
00:05:48.560 | If you're shrinking five minutes from every hour
00:05:50.880 | and you're working, let's say, nine hours a day,
00:05:53.320 | you're shrinking your schedule by 45 minutes,
00:05:55.640 | which is significant, right?
00:05:57.180 | We could use that 45 minutes.
00:05:59.000 | But if you give this a shot, what I can almost promise you,
00:06:02.720 | based on experience from myself and from watching others
00:06:05.440 | put this into practice, is that five minutes
00:06:07.720 | is going to make the other 55 minutes far more productive,
00:06:11.440 | far more effective, far more imaginative.
00:06:13.360 | You're going to be far more collaborative.
00:06:15.080 | Like, all the things that we associate with success,
00:06:17.680 | you will have more of that in the next 55 minutes
00:06:20.920 | than you did if you were just waiting to the end of the day
00:06:24.480 | to finally unload and burn yourself out.
00:06:28.640 | Because it's just clearly not working.
00:06:30.760 | As I read this and as you talk about it,
00:06:32.600 | I think about how Google has this speedy meetings feature,
00:06:35.520 | where you can say, set these meetings to 25 minutes for--
00:06:38.360 | like, a 30-minute meeting is now by default 25,
00:06:40.600 | and an hour meeting is by default 50.
00:06:43.240 | But it takes the ability to turn the meeting off at 50,
00:06:47.240 | because so often, it's like, oh, I
00:06:48.960 | know no one on this call scheduled the next 10 minutes,
00:06:51.480 | so we could just run over.
00:06:52.580 | And then I was thinking about, I remember
00:06:54.280 | when I had a Zoom account that was free.
00:06:56.520 | And it's like, oh, there's that timer.
00:06:58.120 | And it's like, this meeting is going to run out,
00:06:59.920 | and we are going to turn it off.
00:07:01.360 | And I've been in meetings like that.
00:07:03.080 | So if anyone out there knows of a way
00:07:04.720 | that I could hack Google Calendar and Google Meet
00:07:07.520 | to just actually shut the meeting down at 50 minutes
00:07:10.540 | to force everyone to end, I would
00:07:12.520 | love to see that feature in action, because I find it hard--
00:07:17.280 | I can schedule the 5- or 10-minute break,
00:07:19.240 | but it's really hard to actually take it.
00:07:22.120 | Yeah, it's funny, because I'm on all these different platforms
00:07:25.280 | now for virtual stuff, and you are too.
00:07:28.000 | And I notice on Microsoft Teams, when
00:07:30.640 | they set the meeting for a certain length,
00:07:32.480 | they will actually say, five minutes left in the meeting.
00:07:34.880 | And then they'll have a countdown timer.
00:07:36.180 | Now, I don't think it actually shuts off at that time.
00:07:38.840 | But the fact that there is actually
00:07:40.080 | a bit of a countdown timer, I do find to be somewhat helpful.
00:07:43.740 | It's like, hey, this is the meeting you called.
00:07:47.100 | These are the people whose schedule you're dealing with.
00:07:50.000 | Everybody is assuming this one thing.
00:07:51.900 | Let's put a little bit of a countdown
00:07:53.440 | timer in the last five minutes.
00:07:54.940 | I find that to be somewhat helpful.
00:07:56.900 | But I agree with you, man.
00:07:58.940 | I was the kind of guy who, if I had two extra minutes
00:08:01.540 | in between meetings, I would go to my to-do list,
00:08:03.900 | and I would grab, oh, what can I knock out?
00:08:06.620 | What can I knock out quickly?
00:08:08.380 | And there'd be a little bit of an energetic hit
00:08:10.740 | that I would get from that.
00:08:11.940 | But the problem was that throughout the day,
00:08:14.380 | like clockwork, I would end up slumping.
00:08:17.300 | At the end of the day, I was far less energized
00:08:20.060 | than I was at the beginning of the day.
00:08:22.420 | And that hurt because there were some times
00:08:24.980 | where there was key meetings, key moments that
00:08:27.380 | were in the afternoons.
00:08:28.660 | I remember when I was raising money, even,
00:08:31.660 | and I was out there pitching investors.
00:08:33.660 | Yeah, some meetings were in the morning when I was fresh.
00:08:35.500 | But there were a lot of meetings that were in the afternoon.
00:08:38.000 | So I know that, looking back, I would perform with far less
00:08:44.300 | quality.
00:08:44.820 | I would be far less compelling in those afternoon meetings
00:08:47.220 | than I was in the morning.
00:08:48.380 | And part of the reason for that is because that morning,
00:08:50.660 | I was spent grinding.
00:08:52.020 | And then I would walk straight into that meeting,
00:08:54.060 | and I would take all the baggage from that grind.
00:08:56.100 | I would take no time to reset myself.
00:08:58.340 | Maybe if you look at people who I think are--
00:09:00.820 | if you strap for time, who do this very well,
00:09:04.060 | and they don't have five minutes,
00:09:05.900 | I think one of the most important things you can do
00:09:07.980 | is to provide some type of transition for yourself
00:09:10.860 | in between two big moments.
00:09:13.380 | And again, if you only have 30 seconds,
00:09:15.300 | even if you have 10 seconds, it is deliberately
00:09:18.700 | saying I'm going to be non-productive for a period
00:09:21.300 | of time.
00:09:21.900 | And the difference between 0 and 10 seconds,
00:09:24.340 | whether it's closing your eyes and taking a breath
00:09:26.620 | or literally getting up and stretching, doing something,
00:09:29.740 | will be game-changing if you're having
00:09:32.820 | these transitions throughout.
00:09:34.700 | And it's different for everyone.
00:09:36.040 | For me, the afternoon meetings and the afternoon pitches
00:09:38.700 | were actually really great because I didn't have anything
00:09:41.980 | to worry about.
00:09:42.700 | If I go into a meeting at 8, I'm all these things.
00:09:45.820 | What came in overnight?
00:09:47.060 | What emails do I have to respond to?
00:09:48.980 | But by the afternoon, I've been able to catch up
00:09:51.040 | on all the other stuff.
00:09:52.040 | So I think it really depends on a per-person basis.
00:09:55.300 | Sometimes my wife asks, why were you up till 2 in the morning
00:09:58.860 | last night?
00:09:59.460 | And because we both have to get up-- we have kids.
00:10:01.540 | We got to get up at 6 to 7.
00:10:04.100 | The kids are up.
00:10:04.740 | We're up.
00:10:05.500 | And I was like, well, I just had this bout of energy.
00:10:08.260 | And I felt like I could get done in two hours what I would
00:10:12.220 | normally take 10 hours to do.
00:10:14.380 | And so I can--
00:10:15.460 | now, the hard part is forcing yourself
00:10:17.500 | to use that time you've saved to actually recover.
00:10:20.980 | But sometimes when I find this prana, I'm just--
00:10:24.180 | I'm like, let's capture it when it's there.
00:10:26.940 | And sometimes it surprises me.
00:10:30.140 | That's a really good point, man.
00:10:31.500 | We can't always count on prana.
00:10:33.940 | It's tough to predict when your prana is
00:10:36.580 | going to be really high.
00:10:38.540 | There are patterns, for sure.
00:10:40.420 | For me, I remember when I was at the office day in and day out,
00:10:45.580 | I would try to work out in the middle of the day.
00:10:48.220 | We had a newborn at home.
00:10:49.820 | The mornings were very tough.
00:10:51.100 | And when I went home, I wanted to spend time with the family.
00:10:53.560 | So I'd try to work out at around 12 o'clock.
00:10:56.380 | And then I would end up scheduling meetings
00:10:59.260 | at 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock.
00:11:02.180 | But what I found is that after I finished working out,
00:11:05.020 | I felt really good.
00:11:06.540 | I felt really creative and awesome.
00:11:08.580 | And I was like, all right, well, why
00:11:10.260 | am I scheduling a mundane meeting at 1 o'clock,
00:11:14.460 | in that case?
00:11:15.420 | I should be scheduling a block of time,
00:11:17.180 | like at least a half hour, where I can get back from the gym,
00:11:19.980 | and I can go to my desk, and I actually
00:11:21.580 | can write down a few things that are really important.
00:11:24.140 | I can spend some time doing some deep work.
00:11:27.300 | And when I did that, that changed things as well.
00:11:30.060 | And it's a great point.
00:11:31.460 | Figure out where the pockets of your day
00:11:33.540 | are, where you tend to have your highest prana.
00:11:36.900 | But then also, sometimes it'll just happen spontaneously.
00:11:40.020 | And when it does, try to give yourself enough flex
00:11:42.580 | where you can capture it.
00:11:43.940 | Yep, I definitely do that a lot.