We talked a lot about exercise to spend time on, time you spend on work, thinking about time, but I want to move to prana because it's not always about time. So maybe let's jump in here. - So, I mean, you know, prana, the definition of prana is like this extraordinary energy.

This is like, almost think of like a tank of energy that all of us have, but we don't always know how to access that. And one of the reasons for that is because when we think about investing in a project or investing in an idea, the thing that we are so conditioned to think about is like time, right?

How much time am I going to give something? And ultimately, what tends to matter most when we look at sort of great projects that have come alive across all of these different industries wasn't really time, but it was heart. How much heart did you really give that? That's why you see, you know, movies like "The Clockwork Orange" that were like written in a few days, right?

"The Great Gatsby," all these great works, they were written in a fraction of the amount of time that you might think because all of a sudden there was this creative burst of inspiration and they were to sit down and just like really, really bang it out. And that's just kind of proof that like what we're really trying to optimize here for is heart and not time, right?

And so it's much better to be fully, like full hearted with your dharma than it is to be fully scheduled. And, you know, the example that like is very similar, I know like you've had like people talk about meditation on this show. You know, I went and spent time at like, you know, a monastery and what I was kind of surprised by, I guess, you know, I'm surprised now to have been surprised, but at the time, like I kind of expected that these monks were like sitting around and meditating all day.

And the truth is they weren't, right? They were meditating for three or four hours a day, but the rest of that time was spent like working the land, doing all the stuff that they needed to do, doing the duties that they needed in order to make the place actually function, right?

But their life was dedicated to meditation. And the point being that just because you're dedicating your life to something, just 'cause you care about it, doesn't necessarily mean you're spending every waking hour doing that thing. What is more important is that you're finding ways to really bring your best prana, your best energy and your best heart to those moments.

So, you know, for me, like, you know, writing for a half hour every morning is way, way better and produces much stronger long-term results than if I was actually spending two hours in the afternoon writing. It's just literally the degradation of my brain. And it's the degradation of my creative horsepower.

I mean, I can sit down and I can write, but it's not gonna end up being any of the pearls that ultimately make it into the book. Like 99% of what I write ends up in a trash bin, right? And so what I'm looking for is like these little pearls in this, you know, in this piles of horse shit that I write each day.

And it turns out that like the little pearls are much more likely to appear in that half hour morning session than a two hour writing block in the afternoon, right? I know that about myself. And so for me, my dharma is to write and to tell stories, but it's not like I spend all day, every day, like doing that.

I mean, I've got kids, I've got other work that pays the bills. You know, there's a lot of other things going on, but I have to make sure to have this commitment. The second thing about that then is like, how do we then like condition ourselves so that we have the right energy at the right moment, right?

And for me, this was sort of a big breakthrough, which is that like, I've always sort of looked at rest and recovery as something that you did in long periods, right? So I would take myself to a breaking point. I would take myself to the red. And then I would say, I need a vacation, right?

And my wife and I, we would plan this. We'd be like, hey, like, we have this one week vacation scheduled. And I would literally look at three months between now and then, and I'd kill myself, right? But the problem with that is I would literally return back from vacation with less gas in the tank than before that three month period even started, right?

And the science kind of bears this out. I mean, most people actually return from vacation and say they're more stressed one week after they return than one week before they left, right? Point being, like, vacations are like wonderful, can be a wonderful thing. They're great for reconnecting with family, and seeing new places, and spending time with friends.

But they're actually not as effective an instrument for dealing with burnout than we may assume. What tends to work much, much better is when you can actually have frequent focused recoveries throughout the day, every single day. In fact, like, average high performers, whether it be in business, or be in music, or be in sports, they're taking somewhere around eight breaks every single day, right?

About one an hour throughout a work day, which, like, I know sounds extraordinary. But when I started to put this into practice, I used what I call the 55-5 model, which is like for every 55 minutes of work, I'm taking five minutes of focused recovery, right? And that five minutes can be doing anything, like literally anything.

It can be sipping out a cup of coffee, it can be doing pushups, it can be taking a walk to the mailbox and back, like, doing whatever it is you're doing, but you're not multitasking it. You don't have your phone with you when you're doing it, and you're, like, getting some quasi-rest and quasi sort of work done at the same time.

Those five minutes are deliberately non-productive. You're focused on rest. And people have a very hard time with this. I know I did. And the reason for that is because what we feel like we're doing-- again, we're in a time-based model-- is that we're shrinking the amount of time, productive time, we have in our day, right?

We already feel squeezed as is. If you're shrinking five minutes from every hour and you're working, let's say, nine hours a day, you're shrinking your schedule by 45 minutes, which is significant, right? We could use that 45 minutes. But if you give this a shot, what I can almost promise you, based on experience from myself and from watching others put this into practice, is that five minutes is going to make the other 55 minutes far more productive, far more effective, far more imaginative.

You're going to be far more collaborative. Like, all the things that we associate with success, you will have more of that in the next 55 minutes than you did if you were just waiting to the end of the day to finally unload and burn yourself out. Because it's just clearly not working.

As I read this and as you talk about it, I think about how Google has this speedy meetings feature, where you can say, set these meetings to 25 minutes for-- like, a 30-minute meeting is now by default 25, and an hour meeting is by default 50. But it takes the ability to turn the meeting off at 50, because so often, it's like, oh, I know no one on this call scheduled the next 10 minutes, so we could just run over.

And then I was thinking about, I remember when I had a Zoom account that was free. And it's like, oh, there's that timer. And it's like, this meeting is going to run out, and we are going to turn it off. And I've been in meetings like that. So if anyone out there knows of a way that I could hack Google Calendar and Google Meet to just actually shut the meeting down at 50 minutes to force everyone to end, I would love to see that feature in action, because I find it hard-- I can schedule the 5- or 10-minute break, but it's really hard to actually take it.

Yeah, it's funny, because I'm on all these different platforms now for virtual stuff, and you are too. And I notice on Microsoft Teams, when they set the meeting for a certain length, they will actually say, five minutes left in the meeting. And then they'll have a countdown timer. Now, I don't think it actually shuts off at that time.

But the fact that there is actually a bit of a countdown timer, I do find to be somewhat helpful. It's like, hey, this is the meeting you called. These are the people whose schedule you're dealing with. Everybody is assuming this one thing. Let's put a little bit of a countdown timer in the last five minutes.

I find that to be somewhat helpful. But I agree with you, man. I was the kind of guy who, if I had two extra minutes in between meetings, I would go to my to-do list, and I would grab, oh, what can I knock out? What can I knock out quickly?

And there'd be a little bit of an energetic hit that I would get from that. But the problem was that throughout the day, like clockwork, I would end up slumping. At the end of the day, I was far less energized than I was at the beginning of the day.

And that hurt because there were some times where there was key meetings, key moments that were in the afternoons. I remember when I was raising money, even, and I was out there pitching investors. Yeah, some meetings were in the morning when I was fresh. But there were a lot of meetings that were in the afternoon.

So I know that, looking back, I would perform with far less quality. I would be far less compelling in those afternoon meetings than I was in the morning. And part of the reason for that is because that morning, I was spent grinding. And then I would walk straight into that meeting, and I would take all the baggage from that grind.

I would take no time to reset myself. Maybe if you look at people who I think are-- if you strap for time, who do this very well, and they don't have five minutes, I think one of the most important things you can do is to provide some type of transition for yourself in between two big moments.

And again, if you only have 30 seconds, even if you have 10 seconds, it is deliberately saying I'm going to be non-productive for a period of time. And the difference between 0 and 10 seconds, whether it's closing your eyes and taking a breath or literally getting up and stretching, doing something, will be game-changing if you're having these transitions throughout.

And it's different for everyone. For me, the afternoon meetings and the afternoon pitches were actually really great because I didn't have anything to worry about. If I go into a meeting at 8, I'm all these things. What came in overnight? What emails do I have to respond to? But by the afternoon, I've been able to catch up on all the other stuff.

So I think it really depends on a per-person basis. Sometimes my wife asks, why were you up till 2 in the morning last night? And because we both have to get up-- we have kids. We got to get up at 6 to 7. The kids are up. We're up.

And I was like, well, I just had this bout of energy. And I felt like I could get done in two hours what I would normally take 10 hours to do. And so I can-- now, the hard part is forcing yourself to use that time you've saved to actually recover.

But sometimes when I find this prana, I'm just-- I'm like, let's capture it when it's there. And sometimes it surprises me. That's a really good point, man. We can't always count on prana. It's tough to predict when your prana is going to be really high. There are patterns, for sure.

For me, I remember when I was at the office day in and day out, I would try to work out in the middle of the day. We had a newborn at home. The mornings were very tough. And when I went home, I wanted to spend time with the family.

So I'd try to work out at around 12 o'clock. And then I would end up scheduling meetings at 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock. But what I found is that after I finished working out, I felt really good. I felt really creative and awesome. And I was like, all right, well, why am I scheduling a mundane meeting at 1 o'clock, in that case?

I should be scheduling a block of time, like at least a half hour, where I can get back from the gym, and I can go to my desk, and I actually can write down a few things that are really important. I can spend some time doing some deep work.

And when I did that, that changed things as well. And it's a great point. Figure out where the pockets of your day are, where you tend to have your highest prana. But then also, sometimes it'll just happen spontaneously. And when it does, try to give yourself enough flex where you can capture it.

Yep, I definitely do that a lot.