Scott H Young

Do your goals consume a lot of your mental and creative resources? Career and business goals often take a lot of our time and energy. If you have set these goals properly, chances are you have a lot of passion and enthusiasm for successfully achieving them. If you have a lot of control over the hours you can put into your goals, it can be easy to go a little overboard and invest most of your time and energy. Why take a break when you love what you do, right?

Bodybuilders know the importance of recovery time for building muscle mass. Weight lifting doesn’t actually build muscle mass. Lifting weights or other anaerobic activity stimulates the muscle fibers to grow. In other words, your muscles build after the weight lifting, not during it. Authors of the Body Sculpting Bible, Hugo Rivera and James Villepigue, point out that after an hour strenuous exercise the body reverts to a catabolic state which impedes muscular development. The importance of recovery is also known by athletes in many other fields. They understand that recovery and rejuvenation is critical to maintaining and improving their performance.

Just because you love what you do doesn’t mean you too aren’t susceptible to burnout, fatigue and imbalances in your life. Working constantly without rest also cuts off your creative powers which can save you far more energy and time than you could otherwise. Taking time to recover, reassess, plan and think can critically improve your performance. Recovery time is a smart investment that can improve your productivity and restore balance in your life.

Take a Day Off

I take a day off every week. During this time I don’t allow myself to do any work on my major projects, for which most of my business related goals are directed. I consider this an incredibly valuable investment, because the day off gives me time to refocus my energies and attention. Most of my creative insights have come during this recovery period and I can often save an entire week of work from an idea that comes from it.

What you consider work is up to you. Sundays are my days off, yet I am blogging here today. I don’t consider blogging to be work because I don’t have any goals that I ensure I reach with the posts I write or the traffic levels I produce. Because goal setting is the skill of allocating focus and my focus is currently on my major projects, so I don’t consider blogging to be work. If you have a lot of goals for your blog, then you might consider it work. It is all a matter of perspective.

Don’t define something as being work or not based on how much you like to do it. I love working on my project and blogging. I define my project as work simply because it consumes a fair bit of my time and I have goals that monitor its progress. If you like your job, that’s great, but it doesn’t mean you don’t need recovery time. If you hate your job you shouldn’t be working there, not just taking more vacations. Donald Trump once said, “You should love your job so much that you never want to take a vacation.” I think it should say, “You should love your job so much that you have to remind yourself to take a vacation.” Loving what you doesn’t mean you don’t need recovery time.

Once you’ve decided what you classify as work, take an entire day off from it per week. If your job makes this impossible, try taking a half day or even six hours. Any recovery period is better than nothing, but I recommend an entire day. This investment in time can yield incredible benefits increasing your productivity for the week while simultaneously allowing you to relax and enjoy life.

Time for Review

Your recovery period is the ideal time to do your weekly review. Because you have no commitment towards work, you can invest a lot more time into doing a longer and more probing weekly review. Spending at least an hour or two on your weekly review is crucial if you want to find solutions to the problems your facing.

During this period you can also review your progress on your goals for the past week. Were you productive the entire time? What obstacles and problems did you encounter? What things did you do right that you should remember for the future? By asking yourself these questions and others, you can learn a lot more from your experience in the past week. If you understand why you had low points of productivity or the mistakes you made in handling your problems you can improve upon those things in the future.

This period of time can also be used for seeing whether you are meeting up with the progress you need for your goal. Are you on track? If you aren’t on track, how can you get back on schedule? The barrage of daily events can often blind us to the big picture. Constant phone calls, interruptions or replying to e-mails can fool us into thinking we are being productive. A reassessment can allow you to see the big picture so you don’t lose sight of it during your week.

Once you have reviewed your past week you can begin planning your next. This period can give you a chance to modify and adjust your plan so it is still valid. Chances are your plan needs adjustment in the face of new ideas and opportunities. By giving you some time to rethink it, your plan can still be a valuable tool to help you decide what to do next. Without spending this time your plan is sitting useless in a binder collecting dust.

Time for Creativity

You can’t get a view of the big picture when you are using a magnifying glass. Goals act like a magnifying glass, allowing us to focus down on the immediate actions and move towards their successful completion. A side effect, however, is that in focusing down on our goals we can lose sight of the big picture and meaning to those actions. It is during this time when we get to the top of a ladder only to discover it was leaning against the wrong building.

Your recovery phase will likely be the time you are most creative. During the week almost all of your mental faculties are directed towards handling day to day tasks. When you are no longer focusing on the minutia of your work your mind seems to expand and notice a lot of opportunities and solutions that were invisible previously. Some of the ideas I gathered during this period saved me months of work and others have saved my projects from running into a dead-end. Without this recovery period I would have been unable to notice them.

This creativity often doesn’t come from analyzing your work. By getting your mind completely away from your work, your subconscious seems to go into overtime. When you arrive back at your project ideas and insights often appear out of nowhere. When you return to your house after a long trip everything seems familiar, but also bizarre in some indescribable way. This happens when we return to work after our recovery period. You begin to notice things that you hadn’t before and you seem to have a first impression all over again. These priceless creative moments easily make up for the day off in themselves.

Time for Balance

Working all the time on one or two goals is likely to lead to burnout. Giving yourself a recovery period can allow you to enjoy yourself, add some variety to your life and make you feel better about going to the work ahead. Don’t waste this time. Plan out spending it on activities you truly enjoy. Don’t squander it on watching boring television shows or on activities you don’t truly enjoy. I think this benefit of recover periods is clear to all of us. Having balance in our lives is critical if we want to have continued progress. An obsessive focus on only one area of life will collapse eventually.

If you normally spread time on your goals over all seven days, I’d suggest squeezing them into six. Working hard with time to relax more at the end is superior to an entire week where you are neither working nor relaxing. By guaranteeing yourself one day off even in extreme conditions you can ensure that your work doesn’t consume other areas of your life.

Recovery periods are essential for maintaining creativity and productivity with any demanding goal. These periods will allow you to learn more from your past and plan a better future. This period also grants creative insights that you might not see. Finally, a recovery period can allow you to increase the quality of your leisure time, stress and fatigue. Recovery is an investment whether you can only afford a few hours or an entire day. Use it wisely and reap the rewards.

It is easy to become overwhelmed with personal development. With so many areas we need to work on, where do we start? Being hit with so many ideas on how we can improve our lives can make your head spin. I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard a personal development author or speaker claim that it was this one specific idea that was critical to success. Some say that persistence makes the difference. For others, it is the ability to dream big, discipline yourself or stretch yourself. Still I have heard others claim that skills and tools like NLP, goal-setting or GTD is the critical idea which opens the gateway to supreme enlightenment and power. With all this surrounding us, where are we even supposed to start?

The first key is to understand that there is no universal “big idea” that will transform everyone’s life. Some of these ideas will create a transformation for a few people and do little for others. This doesn’t mean the ideas are faulty, just that with such varied backgrounds, what ideas or messages personally speak to us will differ. Some ideas will really resonate with you and give you a new perspective while others will not do anything at all.

The truth is, most of us will never have an epiphany moment where our lives completely change in an instant. While such moments are definitely possible, they are the minority. I never had an epiphany that caused me to develop such a passion for personal development and I doubt most people have. There was no solitary idea that changed my life. It was the continuous work and integration of thousands of small ideas that made the difference. Sorry, but I can’t give you the single “big idea”. The big idea doesn’t exist for most of us, so don’t expect it to hit you in the face.

I hesitate to say personal development is not about innovation. Innovation is an important part of personal development because it is often necessary to break through to a higher level. However, I want to stress that the majority of personal development is based on optimization not innovation. Incremental and continuous improvements, not massive and rapid changes, will ultimately determine the quality of our lives.

This idea doesn’t get a lot of press. Most authors focus on the innovation aspect because it is the most glamorous. We love hearing about the breakthroughs and overnight successes, even when they don’t even exist. Many people talk about Wal-Mart as being an overnight success, despite the fact that they had decades of slow optimization to get to that point. From the outside it looks like a revolution, from the inside it looks like steady, incremental improvement.

The big idea is a myth. Starting personal development doesn’t have to start with a lightbulb going off in your head, a cry of, “Eureka!” or a chorus of angels singing as we have reached the coveted epiphany that changes our whole life. Without this epiphany, how can we start on the path to improving our lives?

Focus on the Now

It is easy to lose hope and faith when we see how far we are from where we want to be. The chasm between those two places may seem too vast for us to cross. We also wonder whether reaching that new plateau will really give us the happiness and satisfaction we desire. Maybe that new status will just come with more problems, leaving us worse off than when we started.

Focusing on position in life is dangerous. Putting all your emphasis on tomorrow is a really suboptimal way to live. You can’t enjoy what you have, and when you do reach your goals there is very little sense of lasting fulfillment. Like a dying man in the desert you chase your goals only to realize they were a mirage, then continue to chase the next illusion before you, never tasting the water you seek. The solution isn’t to give up and stop trying to improve. When we do that we have already died inside. The solution is to completely change our perspective of life entirely.

I wrote about this problem in detail in my in-depth essay about balancing today with tomorrow. If you are having trouble balancing the notion of enjoying life to the fullest and improving for the future I suggest you give it a read.

Develop a Taste For Self-Improvement

Associating incredible fun, enjoyment and satisfaction from personal development is the key to continuing with it. We will ultimately do things we enjoy and have a passion for and avoid things we associate with pain and suffering. This is human nature. I draw immense enjoyment from self-improvement. I am excited and enthusiastic about improving and making changes.

Don’t start personal development with the promise that you are going to be disciplined and trudge through your problems. While discipline and a bit of temporary struggle is going to be a factor of personal development, you don’t want your impression of self-improvement to be associated with that. It will leave a bad taste in your mouth and swear you off taking action further.

Creative solutions can often remove a lot of the drudgery and sacrifice people normally associate with personal development. While I believe that a bit of pain is unavoidable, that pain can often be reduced by finding a better solution. I listen to music when I write, work or exercise. Having some music in the background improves my productivity and makes the whole act more enjoyable. Going on a diet doesn’t have to be painful. Find some new foods that fit within your diet to make it more fun. When I first started my vegetarian diet I thought I was going to be forced to eat bland foods, but now I am eating many delicious foods that I had never even considered beforehand.

I treat life like a game. Sure there are challenges and periods of frustration, but they only add to the experience. Like an sculptor chiseling out a fantastic work of art or a programmer creating the perfect algorithm, I enjoy the act of improvement. I don’t bemoan my weaknesses but see them as exciting opportunities for growth. Some people will read this blog and get the impression that I am a very stern and serious person, when the opposite is more accurate. I am definitely not a type-A personality. Maximal enjoyment and maximal improvement are not mutually exclusive.

Start Small

Start with the smallest step possible and reward yourself heavily for it. As soon as you start taking even a little action towards your own improvement, give yourself an obscenely significant reward for it. As long as the reward isn’t counteracting your growth, rewarding your little improvements will encourage you to make more of them. Plan to give yourself a big reward not just when you’ve been on your diet for a month or a year, but a day or even a single meal!

Don’t worry about the one big idea that will change everything, and instead work on continually trying out and adopting new small ideas. These ideas compound on each other until you have an incredible amount of improvement. Improvement doesn’t go up incrementally, it goes up exponentially! Each improvement you make will expand the improvement potential for the future. Exercising gives you energy that can be invested into improving your business which can give you more money to buy better exercise equipment.

Read through archives of this blog. If an idea jumps out at you as being useful, try applying it in your own life. Remember to enjoy the process. Learn to enjoy your own improvement and it will be harder for you not to grow. Don’t wait for an epiphany to get started. Start today.