We’re approaching the end of Robin Sharma‘s newest book, The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning, Elevate Your Life. We should end our Dadly Daily Declaration series of insights from this book within the next two weeks. In the meantime, we continue our Dadly Daily Declaration series with insights drawn from this must-read.
Our declarations for this week center on The Twin Cycles of Elite Performance. Below is a graphic explaining this twin cycle and its focus on protecting your 5 assets of genius.
Here are some gems from today’s reading:
- There is value in alternating time in the world pursuing success at the highest level with time in the wilderness recovering—a symmetry needed to ensure a strong harmony between winning at work and richness in life. Massive productivity in society without an abundant heart, an authentic sense of joyfulness and enduring inner peace is no different from the game a hamster plays on a running wheel. It thinks it’s moving, yet it remains in a cage.
- Exceedingly excellent creative production without calibrated human asset protection leads to a noticeable performance reduction. Becoming legendary in your industry is all about sustainability. You must ensure you show up at world–class not just for a month or even for an entire year. The real sport of the captains of commerce, the great masters of the arts, the visionaries of the sciences, the heroes of the humanities and the giants of athletics is preserving your A-game over a lifetime.
- This principle is called supercompensation. Just as a muscle tears when you stress it to the edge of its capacity and then actually grows during the pause of recovery, your five assets of genius surge when you actively push them past their usual limits and then allow for a period of regeneration.
- A little-known key to terrific success over the long term lies in a simple word: oscillation. The secret behind undefeatability is work-rest ratios. Your growth happens when you’re resting.
- In fact, this productivity rule is one of the most central yet paradoxical truths. The mainstream thinking tells us that to get more done, we must put in more hours. To achieve more, we need to do more. But solid research now confirms that that kind of linear approach—‘work harder to produce better’—is seriously flawed. It isn’t sustainable. It just leads to burnout. Exhaustion. Loss of inspiration and the reduction of your private fire to lead the field—and enhance our world. That old-school way of operating also causes a visceral depletion of the very human resources which, if applied intelligently, will make you the master of your marketplace.
That leads us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
Longevity is a key to legendary. This is a main key to your rise to iconic. You really must learn how to balance working intensely and brilliantly with deep rest and recovery so you can remain fresh and strong over a long career. As you do this, you won’t blow out your gifts by hyperextending them, in the same way that some pro athletes blow out their knees—preventing them from ever playing again. The geniuses all know and apply this remarkably important principle.
