 Today, I'm going to be teaching you one simple secret to success, and this is something that I pretty much never hear anybody talk about. And one thing that has definitely helped me in my 16 years of business and 16 years of personal involvement. When I first started my own business, I was 19 years old. It's about to turn 20, and I'm 36 now. And when I was younger, I will tell you that I was go, go, go, go, go, go, go. I need to build. I need to build. I need to go. I need to work. I need to work. I need to work my ass off. Nothing else matters. You know, I know that what I would, I'll give you an idea, when I turned 21, I started and had moved to a different territory to open up a franchise with this company. I was 21 years old, lived in Florida, and was finally of the drinking age. And I was like, you know what? Instead of going and partying on the beach with my friends and all of the girls that come down from up north, I'm going to go ahead and start my own business. I was that obsessed with growing a business and becoming successful that I was like, this is the one thing that I'm going to do. Everything else will come later on in life. And I thought to be successful, I had to be go, go, go at all times. I thought I had to be working at all times. And from, you know, 21 to about 25, I worked about 110 hours a week. I was either, I was 7 a.m. to about 9 to 11 p.m. every single day, seven days a week. No days off, no vacations, 7 a.m. to 9 to 11 p.m. depending on the day, every single day. A lot of my times, I would get into my office before the sun rose, I would leave my office after the sun went down. And I thought that's what I had to do. I thought because society is so much go, go, go work your ass off, you have to struggle to be successful, hustle culture, hustle culture. I thought that is actually what I had to do to succeed in that there were no other ways. And just so you know, I've coached thousands of business owners at this point. Almost everybody thinks the exact same thing. There's this thing in our society that we think to be successful. We have to kind of struggle and it has to suck and we have to get on the edge of burnout. And I thought that's what I was supposed to do and I did burn myself out. I ran my business into the ground. My business was super successful for a few years. And then I was just working, working, working so much that I subconsciously ran it into the ground, blew it up. And now that I've been doing this for 16 years, I'm 36 now, I feel like I have a lot more experience and knowledge and wisdom under my belt of how to run a successful business, how to grow, how to do everything. And one massive secret to success that I never hear anybody talk about in hustle culture and hustle and go, bro, go, all of that stuff is rest. It's not the sexiest thing and it's funny because if you were to talk to me seven years ago, 10 years ago, I'd be like, rest, no, that is not a secret to success. There is no way that rest helps with success at all. There was a point in time in my life where I remember thinking to myself that I did not deserve a break. I did not deserve rest because I wasn't where I wanted to be yet, which is interesting because I don't know if you're like me, but I tend to be an overachiever. And the closer I get to my goal, the further that I push it out, which means that I would never actually be, quote, unquote, where I'm supposed to be or where I want to be. And so one of the things that I never hear people talk about is rest, is taking a break, is not working. One of the tips of success is to not work. Now I do want to say on the other side, there is also a part of you that when you are working, you need to be working your ass off. But then when you're not working, you need to be not working at all. So it's very black and white. It's not like business flows into your off time and off time flows into your business. But taking a break, not working, being alone with your thoughts, and I'm going to teach you how to do this. And it could be a day, it could be a moment, it could be multiple days, whatever it is. But you have to, for as on as you're going to be, if you're running a business or if you're a parent or whatever it is that you're doing, for as on as you're going to be, you need to have moments of completely off. I mean, if we take business out of it, we just go to being a parent. There's a lot of parents that work, work, work, work, work as a parent and that they're a parent, they're a parent, they're a parent and they don't get any break from their children. And then it's just like a collapse. And it's like, you know, they start resenting their children sometimes. And they're like, I need a break from my fricking kids versus like, how can we be fully on at some points and fully off at some points? And how can we build our life to be that way? And these can, once again, I'll tell you about it in this episode. These can be moments of off. It doesn't have to be an entire day off. So, you know, being alone with your thoughts, simply existing with nothing that you have to do. And this is really, really hard for a lot of people because most people are, you know, have basically trained themselves, myself included to be go, go, go, go, go. And they struggle to be alone with their thoughts. And interestingly enough to actually give you an idea of how hard it is for some people to be with their thoughts. There was a study that was done not long ago and they asked people, you can either be alone with your thoughts for 15 minutes or you can be down with this experiment. You just have to give yourself a quick electric shock and they had a button in front of them and they could sit there for 15 minutes or they give themselves a quick electric shock. Nothing that would kill them, but something that definitely still hurt. 30% of women decided to shock themselves and 60% of men decided to shock themselves. Just let that sink in for a second. Think about that. People have so much trouble being alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes that 30% of women chose to shock themselves and 60% of men chose electric shock. Let that thing, just let that sink into your bones. How crazy is that? People have a problem being off, turning off. And the world goes through seasons, right? So if you think about it, we have, we have spring, we have summer, we have fall, we have winter. Humans also go through seasons. Your day can be all four seasons in one. You know, it's not, if I, if we look outside, I love to look, look at nature for inspiration because we come from nature. We are nature. There's no difference between us because I live in a house doesn't mean I'm not, you know, nature like a tree is. We come from that. If you look at nature and I like to look at nature where we have, you know, in Austin, we have all four seasons that we go through here. Some places we don't have all four seasons we go through, but majority of the world has four seasons, right? It is not spring forever. It is not constantly grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow all of the time. And conversely, it's also not winter forever. It's not, you know, leaves dying, leaves dying, leaves dying, leaves dying forever. It's not spring forever. It's not winter forever. It is winter for a little while, the trees, the plants, all of those, they have to lose their leaves. They have to contract in order to expand and grow in the spring. So in order to grow, there is necessary. There's, you know, expand in order to expand and grow. There is necessary contraction. The trees need to let go of their leaves. They need to contract for a little while. And then when spring comes, they grow and they actually get bigger and, you know, expansive, more expansive than they were before. So everything expands and contracts, expands and contracts. Humans think, a lot of us overachievers think we can always be expanding. You don't need to always be expanding. That doesn't make sense. It doesn't apply and fit in with the laws of nature. So what is expansion look, I'm sorry, what does contraction look like? It looks like rest. And rest can be a lot of different things. You know, when I say rest, I don't mean that you have to take a month off of work. You can if you want to, if that's up to you and you feel like you need it. That's why some people go on sabbaticals. But rest can be a quick 10 minute meditation in the middle of the day. That's it. Expand, expand, expand all day. All right, let me take some time to contract for 10 minutes. And meditating is not sitting there and stopping your thoughts and thinking that you just disappear. Meditating is sitting and just observing your thoughts. So instead of going, going, going, going, and going, oh man, you know what, I need a break. And you sit on your phone for 10 minutes. That's not a break. There's a whole lot of studies of the reason why, you know, that's actually worse for you. I don't need to get into it, but it's based off of your eye movement, the focus that you have, the adrenaline, the cortisol, the acetylcholine that's released into your brain. When you look at something that's on a small screen because your eyes have to converge. But really what it is is when you have a break, it needs to be a break. Your brain is on, on, on, on, on. And then it needs a little bit of rest. Rest can also be, you know what? It's 6pm. I'm going to turn off my phone. I'm done with work and work cannot come back into my life until I start tomorrow. And not allowing, allowing it to be black and white and not gray in there. Okay. I'm on. I'm off. Don't try to contact me when I'm off unless the business is on fire, unless something's on fire. Hit the subscribe button so that you can see some more and get notified the next time I post. Rest can be turning off at 6pm to enjoy your life. Rest can also be planning a weekend trip with the family. And in that time, don't fucking email me if you want to say that to people, right? Like that's okay to be able to do that. But then some people do this. This is what's interesting. Some people immediately, and some people listening are thinking this right now. But if I slow down, aren't I going to be less motivated? Like, I won't get to where I want to be if I slow down. And for that, I say, think of this for a second. Let's say I want to wake up and go for a run in the morning. Let's say you want to wake up and go for a run in the morning. If you wake up and you had a really, really good night of sleep, would it be easier for you to go for a run, a long intense run, early in the morning if you had a great night of sleep, or a shitty night of sleep? Answer is obvious, isn't it? The answer is a really great night of sleep. Why? Because you are rested. You are off. You are able to recover. Now when you're in and you're deciding to go for it, you can be fully on. So some of you won't allow yourself to rest and you're wondering why you don't have full bandwidth, full brain power, full energy to do what you want to do. One of the reasons why is because you're not taking any time off. You're not allowing your brain to take a step to the side and be like, okay, this is what I'm going to do for a little while. I had to stop myself. It's not taking a step back, right? It's not taking a step back because taking a step back makes it feel like, oh, I'm going backwards and now there's something wrong with it. It's like pulling an arrow back. To shoot an arrow, what do you have to do? It cannot go forward. It is impossible for an arrow to go forward unless it is pulled back first. And the further that you pulled the arrow back and then let go, the further it's going to fly forward. So sometimes the better you reset, the farther you'll fly forward. There is not a step back. It is just pulling the arrow back is all that it is, which means have a cutoff time for work. Have a cutoff time for your business and turn it off completely. I have a business and we have 20 employees, but there's a lot of times where like if you text me at nine o'clock and want to talk about business, I'm probably not going to receive a response from you. But when I turn my phone on, which is after my morning routine in the morning, then I could talk about business because it's now time to talk about business. Now I will tell you this and I promise you this, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, what I'm saying would have seemed ridiculous and foreign and alien to me. But I was also a lot poorer, a lot broker and a lot less happy than I am now. So trust me when I tell you this, you have to be on when you're on and you have to be off when you're off and when you're off be completely off. So, you know, if you notice yourself and start to really become aware of yourself is the important part. When you notice yourself not a hundred percent, let's say it's one o'clock and you're like, man, I'm just not, I'm not a hundred percent today. I'm not, I'm not mentally, I was doing great this morning and now I just feel like I'm pretty tired. Okay. Assess the situation for a second. Have you been go, go, go, go all day full expansion mode? Maybe you need to take a quick break. Take 10 minutes. Close your eyes. Listen to a 10 minute audio if you want to. Or you can just go outside and just don't take your phone with you. But go ahead and look out at the horizon. Look out at some trees. Allow yourself to just kind of mindlessly wander for a little while. And you might sit there and be like, why the hell would I want to do that? Well, there is science behind how well this actually works for you. So let me go ahead and bring it in. Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about this, but he calls it non sleep deep rest, non sleep deep rest, which is where you allow yourself to just basically chill. There is nothing that you do. You're not talking to anybody. You're not journaling. You're not reading. You're not looking at your phone. You're just simply existing in the world for 10 minutes or so. This is why this is important. When you fall asleep, there's a part of your brain that's, you know, there's many parts of brain that help with this. But there's a part of your brain called a hippocampus that replays the day to file all of your stuff into your brain. It's the easiest way to think about it. And what it'll do is it'll replay your memories from the day and what you did. 30 to 60 times faster over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, because, you know, repetition is the mother of all skills. So it'll actually replay it over and over and over again 30 to 60 times faster than it actually happened during the day so that you can take all of those memories and you can store them and file them away. Your brain wants to be able to take that and file it away. Here's what's really cool. If you do a quick meditation or you go for a walk or you just stare outside in the distance and you just allow yourself just to simply exist and your mind just to wonder, your hippocampus will do the exact same thing that it does during sleep but instead of doing it 30 to 60 times as fast, it does it 10 times the speed. So what's cool about it is if you give yourself a full-on just break away from everything, it actually helps you take everything that she did earlier in the day and start to process it, file it away. And when it's filed away, guess what happens? It leaves more mental energy to start working on other things and so you can sit there and I would have been like a break is crazy 10, 15 years ago but now scientists are starting to come out and say, hey, a break is actually like pulling the arrow back so that therefore when you're done with the break midday you let go of it, you fly forward. So it could be a 10 minute break in midday. It could be multiple 10 minute breaks. It could be turning your phone off at 6pm. It could be taking a three-day weekend with your family once a quarter. It could be, you know, going on a week-long vacation and being completely disconnected. Whatever it is, you have to understand that one of the biggest parts of success is being able to go, go, go, go, go, go, go. But that is unsustainable forever because for all of the expansion that you have, there needs to be moments of contraction as well. And so you have to think to yourself how can I build in moments of contraction to be able that when I am go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, I can take a break for a minute and then rest and then go back into it and be able to go, go, go, go, go. You cannot be an expansion forever. There needs to be moments of contraction. It could be moments. It could be hours. It could be days. Whatever it is for you, you just have to start thinking to yourself, am I an expansion? Am I a contraction? Do I feel like I need to contract a little bit? Have I been expansion too much? And you start to assess the situation, figure out what works for you, and over time you will realize that allowing yourself to rest is one of the most important things that you can do for your growth. The same way that you can't work out all day long, one of the most important parts of working out and growing muscles is the sleep and the rest so that your body can grow and they can actually start to heal itself. The same thing works for your brain, except for now you're just working on your mental muscle.