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December 31, 2017 - January 1, 2018
to bed hours before his
however, is that reading this book will help you nurture your nature so that you can maximize your potential in a healthy and sustainable way.
Nearly every artist has struggled with creative burnout at some point in their career.
We’ll show you how strengthening your ability to solve complex cognitive problems is similar to strengthening your ability to lift weights
If we’ve done our job well, by the time you finish reading this book, you’ll thoroughly understand:
Stress + rest = growth.
Ah...the secret lies in the variables. Overtraining syndrome is a beeotch.
How you treat yourself in between workouts is where you make gains and acquire the strength to attack the next one.”
She’s even called her workouts the easy part. What sets her apart, the magic that has allowed her to run so fast and so far for the past 25 years, is how she recovers: the 10 to 12 hours of sleep she gets each night; her meticulous approach to diet; her weekly massage and stretching sessions.
Stress demands rest, and rest supports stress.
Csikszentmihalyi documented a common process across almost all great intellectual and creative performers, regardless of their field:
Participants who were forced to flex their mental muscle—be it to resist temptation, solve a hard puzzle, or make tough decisions—performed worse on a subsequent task that also required mental energy as compared to participants in a control group who had an easy first task, like eating fresh cookies.
The good news is that just like the body, by stressing and allowing the mind to recover it also becomes stronger.
Scientists have discovered that the more we resist temptation, think deeply, or focus intensely, the better we become at doing so.
As he laid out in his wonderful book, The Art of Learning, it’s how he cultivated that talent and his competitive drive—how he nurtured his nature—that propelled him to the top of seemingly disparate domains.
Over time, humans and rats alike seemed to adapt to each unique stressor, building up increased resistance. Certain stressors could even produce desirable effects, strengthening the specific part of the body that was under duress.
Growth comes at the point of resistance; we learn by pushing ourselves to the outer reaches of our abilities.
Skills come from struggle.
The most effective tutoring systems, on the other hand, all shared one thing: They delayed instruction until students reached the point of failure.
•Fail productively: Only seek out support after you’ve allowed yourself to struggle.
A little doubt and uncertainty is actually a good thing: It signals that a growth opportunity has emerged.
regularly seek out just-manageable challenges: activities that take you out of your comfort zone and force you to push at the point of resistance for growth.
What really differentiates deliberate practice is deep concentration.
•Define a purpose and concrete objectives for each working session.
•Identify what interrupts your deep focus. Common intruders, many of which are enabled by smartphones,
Great performers, Ericsson found, generally work in chunks of 60 to 90 minutes separated by short breaks.
It’s becoming clear that cultivating a growth mindset and a challenge response to stress is highly beneficial.
“reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement” is often advantageous.
simply telling yourself “I am excited” shifts your demeanor from what they call a threat mindset (stressed out and apprehensive) to an opportunity mindset (revved up and ready to go).
Ernest Hemingway said that as difficult as his blocks of writing were, it was “the wait until the next day,” when he forced himself to rest, that was hardest to get through.
Stephen King, “For me, not working is the real work.”
•Challenge yourself to view stress productively, and even to welcome it.
When you meditate, you are strengthening your mindful muscle. It’s a simple practice:
Rest isn’t lazily slothing around; it’s an active process in which physical and psychological growth occurs.
To reap the benefits of stress, you need to rest.
We learned that we do our best work in cycles of intense effort followed by short breaks.
Browsing social media, for example, isn’t nearly as effective as taking a walk.
•The best way to figure out the right amount of sleep for you is to spend 10 to 14 days going to sleep when you are tired and waking up without an alarm clock. Take the average sleep time. That’s what you need.
That's just genius.
Deena Kastor (“My workouts are the easy part”).
the growth equation: stress + rest = growth. It’s a simple yet profound guide to structuring your days, weeks, and years.
“Consistency was another way to tamp down terror.”
there is no one universal best routine. It’s up to you to determine the ideal state of body and mind for the demands of your event, and to figure out the best way to put yourself in, or very close to, that
I think the same way I deal with writer’s block is the same way I deal with going to [running] practice and warming up for a race. I have these tools and these warmups that I can use to always be able to “show up.”
In his book The Evolving Self, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, writes that being intentional about our surroundings is essential to eliciting our best performance.
•Create “a place of your own” in which you do your most important work.
minimize distractions and eliminate activities that are extraneous to his work.
“I block off between 60 and 90 minutes every day to read outside of my domain,” he told us. “This helps me generate new ideas.”
“In order to be a maximalist,” he says, “you have to be a minimalist.”
What this does mean, however, is that you should identify and strive to cut out all the superficial things in your life.
You should be fully intentional with how you spend your most precious resource of all: time.
Great performers choose where to focus their energy, and they protect it from everything else that could encroach upon it.
