Simon Alexander Ong — Success Is Hard Until You Fix Your Energy Like This

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📚 Read the first chapter of my book Energize for free here: https://simonalexanderong.kit.com/chapterone

In this video, I share how mastering your energy will help you not only succeed, but thrive over the long-term. And make sure to stay with me until the end, because the last one I want to share with you is the simplest one and it’s the shift that makes everything else possible.

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Key Insights

What if I told you that the reason success is hard has nothing to do with how many hours you work, how talented you are, or how much you know, and [music] everything to do with how you master your energy. Because to master your life, you must master your days. To master your days, you must master your time. And to master your time, you must master your energy. The problem is that most of us are treating energy as if it’s infinite when it’s the most finite resource we carry into every single day. I wrote about this in my best-selling book Energize, which you can read the first chapter of for free if you comment book in the comments below. [music] I was working hard and giving everything I had, but I was exhausted and burnt out. I kept telling myself the answer was to push through harder. It wasn’t. In fact, it never is. Energy is a resource, and like every resource, >> [music] >> how you manage it determines what you are able to build with it. It is like a multiplier on everything you bring [music] into your work and life. The same task, the same hour of effort, and the same conversation [music] done from a full tank versus an empty one produces results that are worlds apart. That [music] is what this video is about. I will share three powerful shifts to help you master your energy so that you are able to not only succeed, [music] but thrive over the long term. And make sure to stay with me until the end because the last one I want to share with you is the simplest one, and [music] it is the shift that makes everything else possible. Number one, work and rest are partners of the same team. In the 1950s, sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman, the same man who discovered REM sleep, made a second discovery that never received the same attention. He found that the brain doesn’t just cycle through states at night, it cycles through them during the day, too. Every 90 to 120 minutes, our minds naturally shift from a state of high alertness and focused capacity down into a quieter, lower gear state that calls for rest. He called this the ultradian rhythm. The brain is designed to pulse in waves to focus and then restore, to push and then recover. But notice what most of us do instead. We hit the afternoon dip, that moment around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon when the thinking goes foggy and the motivation drops and we reach for more coffee and other external stimulants to push through and keep going. What we’ve actually done is ignore what our bodies are trying to tell us. The highest performers I studied understand how their energy fluctuates during the day and then they build their schedules around that insight instead of always fighting it. Anders Ericsson, the researcher behind the famous 10,000 hours idea, studied elite violinists and discovered something fascinating. The best players in the world did not just practice more than the good ones, they also rested more deliberately and on purpose as a fixed part of their days and weeks. They slept around 8 and 1/2 hours a night and napped in the afternoons. They did not treat recovery as a break from the work, they treated it as part of the work. In sport, this is obvious. No serious coach would schedule back-to-back training without rest built in. Muscles do not grow during the workout, they grow during the recovery. Push without rest and you do not get stronger, you simply break down. Even in Formula 1 racing, pit stops have to be taken because even the fastest car can’t run forever. After a few laps, the tires are exhausted, so the driver enters a pit stop. With fresh tires on the car, then leaves ready for the next lap. We know this for the body, but we act like it doesn’t also apply to the mind. We need deliberate breaks to maintain performance and avoid mental exhaustion. Deliberate rest beats continual effort. Thomas Edison fished for an hour every day beside a lake near his lab. He never caught a single fish and when someone asked why, he simply said, “Because I didn

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