Today we're going to talk about what is our most precious personal resource. Many people are going to believe that time is our most precious resource. If I went out on the street and pulled 100 people on the street and said, "Hey, what's our most precious resource?" I'll bet 98 out of 100 would probably say time. Why is that? Well, I think there's a good reason. Society, and quite honestly, the people that sell you things about time management certainly are going to tell you the time is the most precious resource. It seems to make sense. The idea that we can get it back once it's gone, we can't get it back. There is some argument to say if we have enough money and then we can buy time. That I think holds true in some sense. But basically, this is a resource that once it's gone, we can't get it back. It makes sense to say, time is our most precious resource, but is it? This lesson is a paradigm shifting lesson in the fact that for a long time I was in that boat too, I believed that time was the most precious resource. But I want to pose maybe a little different look to this today and say, is it really? Recently, Mark Jordan from Corpus Christi set the Guinness Book World Record for most pull-ups in 24 hours, 4,321 pull ups. That just blows my mind. I love the fact that he's the same age as me, 54 years young, doing this. Nice job, Mark. Here's the thing. Let me, illustrate this point. What is the most precious resource, time or something else? As we look at Mark Jordan here, I don't know Mark personally, but if I were to ask Mark, "Mark how many pull ups can you do in one minute?" I would venture to guess probably, I don't know, something high number 20, maybe 30 in a minute. I can imagine he could he could kind of bang those out pretty quick. But if he could do that for 20 or 30 pull ups per minute for 24 hours, it'd be a heck of a lot more than 4,321 pull ups. The idea is we have 1440 minutes in 24 hours. For this record, Mark did a roughly three pull-ups per minute, much less than 20 or 30 per hour that he could probably do when his energy was at a high level. As we look at this record that I hope brings this point home, it's not time that was the limiting factor for how many pull ups Mark could do, it was energy. That is the paradigm shift right here is, time is not the most important thing, energy is. I say, number 1 on the list is energy. I'm going to stick with that argument, and I'm not the only one that has that has argument. But 1a is time. I'm not here to say the time is not important, but I think energy trumps time in the example that I just showed. If we can start to look at this as our energy is the limiting factor, not time. That changes a lot of things. As human beings, we are built for sprints, not marathons. Many people say, hey, this whole idea of putting your head down and working hard for eight hours at a time is absolutely not in line with the way our neural biology works. Our brains are not designed to sit down for eight hours, five days a week, and do good quality work. Let's start with that. You're much better off, you're going to function at a higher level if you can start to look at using your energy in sprints, not marathons. People will advance the argument that it's sprints within a marathon. Life is a marathon. I can buy that. Then within that is a series of sprints. But we are built and this is going to shock some people, we're only built to do about anywhere from three to four hours of good quality work in a day. Isn't that crazy? Where we got the eight-hour workday is a little bit mind-boggling to me or why we stick with it. That might be more mind boggling. But here's the idea, you and me, we should be looking at using our energy right. Looking at it is a series of sprints. What does that mean? I'm talking about work hard for X amount of time. Use things like the Pomodoro effect if you're not familiar with that google search. But roughly it's short bursts of really focused work, followed by a break, then another one, and then a break and then another one. We start to see this sign wave of doing these sprints. You're going to work, again at a much higher level, if you can get into that mode of using sprints. Some people call these brain breaks. Take a brain break. If you're a knowledge worker and you're using this a lot to do your job, you really need to take some time away, stretch, walk, move around, get away from your computer. Many things that you can do to give the brain just a minute to rest. This is what I like to say. Let's say I gave you a one-pound weight. I said, I want you to take this one pound weight and I want you to curl it. As many times you can't forever and ever and will go for maybe an eight-hour day. That's a one-pound way, not much there, but go ahead and try to do that for eight hours while stopping. I'm going to tell you right now, I've never done it, but I can tell you there's no way I'm going to make it to eight hours, nor will almost everybody that's watching this video. Again, we need to look at that as if I did a one-pound weight and maybe I did some curls for 10 minutes and then I took a break and then I did it for 10 minutes more and then I took a break. I would probably do a lot more than if I did it continuously. You can think of that metaphor, that story there as a way to give your brain a break, let it rest. You're going to get much more out of it. Think about working in sprints, not marathons. The other thing that ties into this is this notion of stress plus rest equals growth. It's a great little simple equation. I believe it came from Brad [inaudible]. But don't hold me to that. But stress plus rest equals growth. If we look at this equation doing some simple algebra, if we remove stress or we remove rest, we don't get growth. Here's the thing, our brains like growth. It likes improvement. It likes to not be stagnant and so feed the brain what it wants, and that is growth, that is improvement, that is learning. Again, without that stress and that rest, both ingredients are necessary for that growth. But here's the part that goes back to my previous statement is notice we need both, that stress is going to be that peak. Then we're going to get rest and then we're going to get stress, and then we're going to need rest. Much like the sprints that I just talked about. That's how we're going to work best. Consider that as you develop your day. Start to look at stress as a growth engine. I might add rest as well. Without those two components, we will not get the growth that we're looking for. Another thing that comes up in my world of endurance sports and maybe you're familiar with this is something called periodization. The idea behind periodization is, for example, if I'm training for a Ironman triathlon, I will have a progression of Week 1, Week 2, Week 3. A lot of times this is the way it works for this world. Week 1 is a certain level. Week 2 I step it up a notch. Week 3, I step it up a notch again, and then I take a recovery week. Step it up, step it up, step it up, recover. Step it up, step it up, step it up, recover. Again, we see the stress plus rest equals growth. The idea behind this is we can't always be in a high level all the time. Manage that energy. We really truly want to get the best growth that we can. We can do things like that. If you buy into this idea that energy is the most important thing, even more important than time. I would say, take care of yourself just like you would a corporate athlete. Hydrate, get good nutrition, make sure you're getting good sleep. Try to sleep for seven to eight hours a night. Mix in some power naps, and those power naps should not be any more than about 15 to 20 minutes. Don't be afraid to take naps. To say that's weak is ridiculous. Many elite performers take naps. Make sure you get outside, get some fresh air, go for walks, go for hikes, take those brain breaks. All of these little tricks will help you manage your energy better and get more out of your day to be quite honest. At the end of the day, remember that if you can get three to four quality hours of work, call that a win, it's not eight hours. I know that your boss is not going to like hearing that, but that's the truth of the matter. That's coming from science, not my opinion. There you go. Energy, not time is the most limiting factor for how much we get done and at what level. In the next video, we're going to talk about why timing matters. I'll see you there.
