Most of us would be happy to have accomplished in a lifetime what Donal Skehan had achieved by the age of 30. Years ago, as a young vocalist whose band had recorded a couple of number one hits in Ireland, he began to leverage his stardom to build a career focused on his first love: cooking. He started his own blog, Good Mood Food, in 2007; made guest appearances on culinary television shows; gave live cooking demonstrations; and finally launched his own weekly show, Kitchen Hero, in 2011.

By 2015, Donal had published five books, launched his own YouTube channel—which has since grown to more than 500,000 subscribers—and begun a new show for Food Network UK, Follow Donal, which began with a four‐part series chronicling Donal's explorations of the culture and food of Vietnam.

It was all going really, really well—until, in Vietnam, it suddenly wasn't. “I was doing my dream job of TV presenting,” Donal said, “and going to all these amazing places, doing these great things. We were having great success. But I'd come to a point of just absolute exhaustion. We were pretty much working all the time. I hadn't had a weekend off for about six months. It was just insane. I knew something had to give.”

If you've seen Donal on TV or the Internet, you know he's unusually telegenic—good‐natured, spirited and fun to watch. But he'd hit a wall. Weakened and bone weary, he came down with an infection that landed him in a Vietnamese hospital. “It was just a combination of a lack of sleep and not getting time off,” he said. “It took me about three weeks to get over it, because my immune system was down from working so hard. I had to take two rounds of antibiotics. Your body should be able to recover from something as simple as that fairly quickly.”

Donal and his production team had plenty of time to do what needed to be done in Vietnam. Time wasn't the problem. In Vietnam, they discovered something that surprised them all: Donal's seemingly boundless supply of energy had reached its limit.

Managing Energy, Not Time

In their best‐selling 2003 book, The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz presented a provocative argument: The concept of time management many self‐help and management gurus touted, they said, was outdated and useless. Managing energy, not time, was the key to high performance.

It makes sense: Time is a limited resource. It can't be managed. There will always be 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week.

As Donal discovered in Vietnam, energy is also a limited resource. But—as Donal discovered with the help of Potentialife's 10X leadership program—it can be managed. A 10X leader is able to boost positive energy by regulating its two determinants: depletion and restoration.

Donal's case would seem to lend credence to the traditional thinking about stress: It's the enemy of health and the cause of debilitating fatigue. And we don't mean to dismiss this idea out of hand. Studies by the American Psychological Association and the Center for Creative Leadership indicate that the majority of Americans—both employees and corporate leaders—perceive work as a significant source of stress.

Stress can cause accidents, mistakes, absenteeism, and turnover. The American Institute of Stress estimates that U.S. industry loses more than $300 billion annually to stress.¹ According to the United Kingdom's Health and Safety Executive, 45 percent of all sick days reported in the United Kingdom in 2015 and 2016 were due to stress.² Multiple studies have suggested stress is a major contributing factor to chronic disease, such as heart and liver disease.

Fatigue is also an expensive drain on the economy; a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reported that about 38 percent of American workers experienced fatigue—and that workers with fatigue cost employers more than $136 billion annually in lost productive time.³

So, yes: Stress and fatigue are big problems, for employees and organizations alike. But we suggest a more nuanced explanation for how this happens: Stress causes fatigue, and results in health problems and economic loss, when it's chronic and unrelieved. In other circumstances, stress can be exactly what a person needs.

You might have noticed this is an idea in direct contradiction with the second myth introduced in Chapter 3: People are happiest and most productive when they eliminate stress from their lives. But we've reached this conclusion based on a growing body of peer‐reviewed research. Evidence continues to mount in support of Hans Selye's concept of eustress—the idea that short bursts of stress can actually make you stronger, more capable and more resilient. In 2013, for example, a research team led by scientists from Stanford University and the University of California–Berkeley discovered that the brain stem cells of laboratory rats, when subjected to bursts of acute stress, proliferated into new nerve cells—and that upon maturation, these new cells improved mental performance. One of the study's coauthors, Dr. Daniela Kaufer of University of California–Berkeley, said in an interview: “You always think about stress as a really bad thing, but it's not. Some amounts of stress are good to push you just to the level of optimal alertness, behavioral and cognitive performance.”⁴

Although many studies have detailed how chronic stress, lasting weeks and months, can weaken the immune system, another Stanford research team, led by Firdaus Dhabhar, reported in 2012 that exposing laboratory rats to mild stress caused a massive mobilization of several types of immune cells into the bloodstream—boosting, rather than weakening, the body's immune response.⁵

Stanford psychologist Alia J. Crum studies the ways in which people's mind‐sets—the ways they perceive, organize, and interpret information—can alter their objective reality. One area of focus for her has been stress. Crum and her coauthors, in introducing “Rethinking Stress,” a study published in 2013, wrote of their intention “to question whether this focus on the destructiveness of stress—this ‘stress about stress’—is a mindset that, paradoxically, may be contributing to its negative impact. Our research suggests that improving one's response to stress may be a matter of shifting one's mindset.”⁶

These findings have been borne out in the anecdotal research Loehr and Schwartz performed more than a decade ago, when they studied several highly successful athletes and generalized their findings to the broader population: “In the living laboratory of sports,” they wrote, “we learned that the real enemy of high performance is not stress, which, paradoxical as it may seem, is actually the stimulus for growth. Rather, the problem is the absence of disciplined intermittent recovery. Chronic stress without recovery depletes energy reserves, leads to burnout and breakdown, and ultimately undermines performance.”⁷

On Depletion and Recovery: The Energy Creation Zone

The idea that acute stress can be beneficial may be disorienting to those who are used to thinking of stress as bad. But understanding the difference between the effects of acute and chronic stress is potentially liberating. It becomes obvious that stress shouldn't be the focus of someone who wants to be happy, healthy, and more productive: The focus should be on the amount of energy one is able to apply to life and work.

When we talk about depleting and restoring energy, we use the simple analogy of working out in the gym—stressing your heart, muscles, and lungs, making them tired, makes them stronger. But if you work out too hard, or for too long, and don't allow yourself enough time to rest, you can become burned out—or even injured. The problem isn't the stress—it's the insufficient recovery from stress.

In the 1960s, Derek Clayton was one of the top long‐distance runners in the world, but he had difficulty making the Australian national teams at the 5,000‐ and 10,000‐meter level. He began to train for these races by running marathons—26.2‐mile races—and, when he found his times in the marathon were stellar, he began to compete in marathons.

Clayton was famous for training harder than any other long‐distance runner; he typically ran between 140 and 170 miles a week, sometimes more than 200 miles, each mile in under 6 minutes. He was a good marathoner, but not among the best; his personal best was 6 minutes short of the world record. Australian coaches attributed it to his build—he was over 6 feet tall and fairly muscular for a runner; he often looked huge next to his competitors.

Because of the intensity of his training, Clayton often injured himself, as he did in 1967 while training for the Fukuoka Marathon in Japan. He was unable to run for an entire month, and by the time he was ready to train again, the race was only a week away. He decided to simply take it easy for the week and use Fukuoka as a practice run for his next race.

To everyone's amazement, including his own, Clayton shattered the world record of 2 hours and 12 minutes at Fukuoka. He'd become the first person ever to run a marathon in under 2:10.

Two years later, in 1969, a similar thing happened: He got hurt before the Antwerp Marathon, sat out for a while, trained lightly when he resumed, and then decided to use the marathon as a practice run—and broke his own world record by more than a minute. The record lasted another 12 years.

Interestingly, Clayton didn't seem to learn much from these two races. He continued with the same training schedule, and he was often injured—and often seriously enough to need surgery. In his career he had four operations on his Achilles tendons, two on his knees, and one on his heel. He ended up retiring at the relatively young age of 32. “Unfortunately, I didn't heed my injuries, I challenged them,” he wrote in his memoir, Running to the Top, published in 1980. “Now I would show an injury the respect it deserves. I would rest it, exercise it, and if need be, stop running until it healed. Such an attitude during my competitive years might have kept me off the operating table a few times.”⁸

But even as he acknowledged the role his training had in his injuries, Clayton didn't appear to understand how his world records happened—that more training didn't always translate into faster times. He broke world records because after intense cycles of training, his body rested and became stronger and more durable.

Fortunately most of the running world had been paying attention—including the trainer Angus used to help him through his running regimen after his weekly routine had begun to feel like a chore. Angus had been running the equivalent of a 10K race, a few times a week, for years. The routine had helped him to feel fit and energized. But he was beginning to feel drained.

The trainer suggested that Angus vary his pace with intervals of walking, jogging, and sprinting—and Angus discovered that not only was he more fit, but he was also covering the 10 kilometers faster than ever and feeling invigorated, rather than exhausted, at the end. He'd learned to alternate periods of stress—sprinting—with periods of recovery—walking or jogging.

The lesson from this story translates not only to the workplace but also to life at home; many people talk about maintaining their work–life balance, as though work is the thing that causes stress and life is the part of the day in which you recover from stress. But for most people, both can be a cause of stress—as well as an opportunity for recovery.

Research by Loehr, Schwartz, and others shows that successful people who are also healthy and energetic punctuate their intense periods of productivity with periods of recovery, both at work and outside of work. These people are operating in what we call the Energy Creation Zone (ECZ): They focus on balancing depletion and recovery to generate more energy, rather than on trying to manage their time. This applies to both home and work.

In her important book Restore Yourself, Edy Greenblatt points out that most people see work and life as two opposites that need to be balanced. Instead, she suggests, we should look at an additional continuum between depletion and restoration. In this way an activity, whether at home or at work, can be either depleting or restoring. To lead a healthy and happy life, finding the right balance between depletion and restoration is no less important than finding some form of work‐life balance.

There will always be times when we're stressed by deadlines or at risk of exhaustion from overwork. But if we shift our thinking toward restoration, the small changes can accumulate to make a huge difference in our levels of well‐being and success.

The 10X leader, in addition to working from his or her strengths and passions, is also full of energy and vitality—and this energy doesn't come from some inexhaustible inner dynamo. It's a resource—physical, mental, and spiritual—managed by attentive, disciplined people who've learned to practice a bit of self‐awareness.

In the ECZ: Lessons from the Blue Zones

National Geographic magazine has been around since 1888, and among the more than 1,400 issues published since then, the third‐best‐selling issue circulated in November 2005, when writer/explorer Dan Buettner wrote the cover story, “The Secrets of Living Longer,” profiling a handful of communities, located in different parts of the world, where an unusual number of people lived to be 100 years or older. In 2008, with input from some of the world's leading experts on aging, he published his book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest.

In his book, Buettner describes four such places—though he's since discovered a few more Blue Zones—where lifespans are longer and people tend to live full, happy lives to the end. On the island of Okinawa, Japan, for example, the locals are three times more likely to reach the age of 100 than Americans, and are five times less likely to develop heart disease. The Italian island of Sardinia has the world's largest documented percentage of people who have lived past the century mark—in one village, Buettner's team found seven centenarians out of a population of 2,500, a rate 14 times greater than in the United States. On Costa Rica's tiny Nicoya Peninsula—in a part of the world not known for long life expectancy—a 60‐year‐old man is twice as likely to reach the age of 90 than his counterparts among many of the world's richest nations.

The fourth Blue Zone surprised many people: The town of Loma Linda, in San Bernardino County, California, where people live an average of eight to 10 years longer than other Americans. Despite the environmental hazards they share with other people in Greater Los Angeles, the people of Loma Linda have far lower rates of cancer and other chronic diseases.

Why do people in the Blue Zones live longer and have fewer health problems?

The most obvious thing these communities have in common is that they are relatively small and follow traditional lifestyles—Loma Linda is a community with a high concentration of Seventh‐Day Adventists, a religious sect with a distinct set of cultural practices—and they often marry within the group. It would be easy to argue, then, that the secret is genetic—except that scientists have studied Blue Zone community members who left to live elsewhere, and concluded that genes are only about 25 percent accountable for how long we live. The rest is determined by our lifestyle—where and how we choose to live.

So Buettner's team studied the residents of Blue Zones, and he found several more things they had in common:

• A Healthy Diet. This one is no surprise. A healthy diet is a known contributor to good health and longevity. People in the Blue Zones eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, very little meat (Seventh‐Day Adventists are strict vegetarians who don't smoke or drink alcohol), a variety of nuts, and whole grains. Along with Sardinia's mountain villagers, people on the Greek island of Icaria—another Blue Zone since discovered by Buettner's team—eat what's widely known as a Mediterranean diet, rich in olive oil, whole grains, fruit, and a little fish. Icarians drink raw goat milk and red wine teeming with antioxidants. Their rate of cardiovascular disease is half that of Americans, and dementia is virtually unknown among them.

  At the same time, these people aren't extreme in their beliefs. Most eat meat or fish, but moderately, and they avoid—or more accurately, most don't have access to—highly processed foods. In Okinawa, locals remind themselves to eat until they're 80 percent full—which helps them avoid the extremes of too much or too little. Research has established that overeating, especially of processed foods, is an energy depleter that can leave you fatigued.

• Regular Physical Activity. Almost without exception, residents of the Blue Zones are physically active. The Seventh‐Day Adventists of Loma Linda, who view the body as a temple, usually schedule regular exercise—often at the campus fitness center at Loma Linda University, which is open to the community. In the more rural Blue Zones, villagers walk daily to work, to do errands, or to visit friends; they often work in the garden or perform a range of similar activities that require the expenditure of energy.
• Lots of Rest. Residents of the Blue Zones sleep the 8 to 10 hours experts say is optimal for revitalizing our brains and bodies. In the rural villages of Icaria and Nicoya, people take time out of the day to nap or to relax and connect with friends.⁹

We've all been there: the deadline, the unexpected changes or additional requirements, the all‐nighter. It happens now and then. Sometimes the only answer to a problem is to keep working until it's solved.

If it seems to happen all the time, though, it's probably a sign that time and energy—both limited resources, and only one of them renewable—are being wasted. Researchers Drew Dawson and Kathryn Reid established nearly 20 years ago that workers who were moderately fatigued were either as impaired, or more impaired, than those who were legally drunk.¹⁰

Dr. Charles Czeisler, a professor at Harvard Medical School, has said the evidence base for the hazards of sleep deprivation is now as clearly established as was the case against tobacco 50 years ago. Sleep deprivation increases your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, metabolic syndrome,¹¹ mental illness,¹² and some cancers.¹³ It has a direct impact on your ability to perform both mentally and physically.¹⁴ A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2014 found that long‐term sleep loss was associated with permanent brain damage in rats.¹⁵

Czeisler describes sleep as the third pillar of health, along with exercise and eating well. These three pillars are energy restorers—and lifespan extenders—for people in the Blue Zones, and evidence is mounting that they make a critical difference in the workplace. A 2012 study led by Brigham Young University health science professor Ray Merrill found that employees with unhealthy behaviors—particularly poor diets—were causing substantially higher levels of lost workplace productivity, a conclusion supported by several other studies in the past decade, both in the United States and abroad.

To Donal Skehan, this was one of the most disconcerting things about the period in which he got so busy that he lost touch with all he'd once loved about his work. On screen, he would passionately walk viewers through the preparation of one beautiful, satisfying dish after another. “But as a cook,” he said, “I wasn't eating really good food. It was ridiculous. We were eating petrol station sandwiches, and other stuff you should just stay away from, because of time constraints.”

Merrill's study also found that employees who had difficulty exercising during the day were 96 percent more likely to have increased productivity loss¹⁶—which, while an astonishing number, makes sense given what we're learning about the link between exercise and physical and mental energy. In his book Spark, Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey details the ways in which physical exercise builds the “cellular machinery” of the brain. Studies of the brain—both brain imaging and cognitive studies—have repeatedly shown the direct benefits of exercise on the brain. According to Ratey, who calls exercise “Miracle‐Gro for the brain”: “First it optimizes your mindset to improve alertness, attention and motivation; second it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another which is the cellular basis for logging in new information; and third it spurs the development of new cells from stem cells in the hippocampus.”¹⁷

Sleep research, likewise, is backing up an assertion made decades ago by the great Winston Churchill, who was an avid napper. “Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day,” he once said. “That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one—well, at least one and a half, I'm sure. When the war started, I had to sleep during the day because that was the only way I could cope with my responsibilities.”¹⁸

Researchers have since established that a short nap—as brief as 15 to 20 minutes—can revitalize us, improve our mood, and boost cognitive functioning; it's like starting fresh halfway through the day.

Buettner's Blue Zone research isn't remarkable for the basics of what it points out: It's not an earth‐shattering revelation that eating well, exercising and getting enough rest are good for us. What's eye‐opening about the body of research is just how big a difference these changes—even small changes—in diet, exercise and sleep can make, both for individuals and organizations. To benefit from this knowledge, you don't need to completely overhaul your life—as Buettner points out in his book: “You don't have to do it all…know that whatever you choose, chances are you'll be adding months or years to your life.”¹⁹ As the people of the Blue Zones illustrate, you'll also be adding life to your years—living better, as well as longer.

The Replenishing Role of Positive Emotions

Social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has spent her career documenting the value of positive emotions. “Through experiences of positive emotions,” she wrote, “people transform themselves, becoming more creative, knowledgeable, resilient, socially integrated, and healthy individuals.”²⁰ Additional research, including studies by University of California–Los Angeles physician Steve Cole, have established the link between happiness and health: Our immune system is stronger when we're happy and weaker when we're upset or depressed. Happy people live longer and better.

An increase in positive emotions is a key determinant of the amount of energy we bring to our work. Answering the following questions is therefore important: How can you maximize your positive emotional energy? What is it that tends to deplete that energy? What restores it in a way that would allow you to thrive like residents of the Blue Zones?

Buettner's team recognizes several commonalities among Blue Zone residents that can't be tied directly to the machinery of the human body. The long‐lived residents also had strong social supports to help them maintain high emotional and spiritual energy: They tended to belong to an organized religious congregation, lived their lives around a strong family core, and were tied to a network of close friends. They also lived with a strong sense of purpose for their life and work.

The emotional benefits of these circumstances—and the unhappiness that can result from their absence—are hard to overstate. Clearly, as we know from the Blue Zones, other research, as well as our own lives, relationships are a major source of positive emotions. However, not all of our interpersonal relationships are restorative. Our positive emotions are probably at their peak when we're spending time with people who bring us up rather than down, with whom we enjoy healthy rather than toxic relationships.

Often, our depleters and restorers are seemingly small events that, cumulatively, color our lives. One of Tal's big depleters is being late to an appointment, or being anxious because he's almost late. Rather than try to manage his time with maximum efficiency, scheduling everything like clockwork and arriving at the last possible minute, Tal has decided to reduce this negativity by arriving early. He makes sure he has something to do—he's a Type A personality, after all, who's not going to just sit there—by bringing a book with him. It's a small adjustment that makes a big difference in his level of happiness.

Of course, it's impossible to eliminate unpleasant emotions—and certainly, these emotions are sometimes necessary, given the circumstances. As Lyubomirsky and her colleagues point out, with remarkable understatement: “In some situations, positive affect is not the most functional response.” Unpleasant emotions, while inevitable, may have less of a depleting effect on our energy if we're able to express them to a trusted other—a therapist, family member, or colleague.²¹

Research by social psychologists James Pennebaker and Laura King has demonstrated that even those who don't particularly feel up to sharing unpleasant emotions with a group can relieve some anxiety by writing about them privately.

Conversely, one of the best ways to enhance positive emotions and restore energy is to write about positive experiences. It's an approach that mirrors the work of psychologists Hadassah Littman‐Ovadia and Dina Nir, who asked study participants to write down three things, every night, they looked forward to the following day. Those who did were less pessimistic, felt more energized, and experienced fewer unpleasant emotions.

Expressions of gratitude can be particularly restorative if they're shared with someone else. A letter of gratitude, or an expression of appreciation to another, contributes in a big way to happiness, and the future of the relationship, whether it's personal or professional.

Studies by Emmons and McCullough demonstrated that writing down things for which we are grateful each night before going to bed leads to higher levels of happiness and optimism, as well as to better performance and improved health. Such gratitude is an important element of success in the workplace, where the only list we regularly consult is the to‐do list. But Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School professor, has shown that employees who remind themselves of the progress they've made during the day, whether completing a report or calling a potential client, are happier, more productive, and more creative. How many of us take time at the end of a day to appreciate our own accomplishments, or the many things we've accomplished over a whole week? Appreciating what we've done is not only gratifying, but it also leads to better performance.

Managing Team Energy: Setting the Tone, Setting the Pace

As we've worked with organizations of all kinds around the world, we've seen this principle—that pleasant or unpleasant emotions either fuel or deplete one's emotional energy—transfer almost indistinguishably to groups. Every organization or team we've worked with has a distinct emotional tone, and while it's often difficult, in the limited time we spend with these people, to determine how that tone is set, the responsibility for setting it ultimately belongs to leadership.

Frederickson and others have laid the groundwork for us, proving that people who feel positive emotions are more motivated, more creative, and harder working. They're better learners, more adaptable to the pace of change in today's world. They're healthier, and they miss work less often. They have better cohesion with their coworkers and are more committed to the organization as a whole.

So how do we set the tone that leads to such results? Unfortunately, we've seen a lot of examples of how not to do it. A few years ago, Angus was working with a large communications company that had just expanded by acquiring another company, which was in the midst of launching a new service line. The managing director of the acquired company and his team had been working on the launch for years, and it was a big deal to them; there were posters and flags and video screens announcing the new service all over the warehouse.

The CEO of the acquiring company decided that the day of the launch announcement was a good time for a visit. After the managing director made the announcement, the CEO stood up and told the assembled crowd, in a really nasty tone of voice: “You will absolutely not launch this on such a large scale. I don't care what you've announced. I'm cutting this back.” He threw a small coin on the floor. “Instead of this,” he said, gesturing to the posters and pennants and video screens all around him, “the launch is going to look like this.” Then he pointed to the coin on the floor.

For Angus, it was a rare chance to witness an unmitigated failure of leadership: The CEO had publicly humiliated the managing director, and in less than a minute, had transformed the exuberance of more than 400 people into toxic anger.

The merger, unsurprisingly, did not go well.

In the 1990s, a group of Italian researchers discovered that individual neurons in the frontal and parietal cortexes of macaque monkeys fired both when the monkeys grabbed an object and when the monkeys watched another primate grab the same object. It seems a simple discovery—but another neurologist, V. S. Ramachandran, has since called these neurons, known as mirror neurons, “the neurons that shaped civilization.”²²

Follow‐on studies have shown that mirror neurons exist in humans, too, and that they're not limited to the motor cortex. They also mirror the emotions and sensations of the people with whom we're interacting.²³ Mirror neurons help explain the phenomenon of emotional contagion—the way pleasant or unpleasant emotions tend to spread like a virus among group members. We're automatically and unconsciously tuning in to the actions and emotions of others. We don't have to think about what others are doing or feeling. We just know.

This is a powerful bit of knowledge for a leader, because followers mirror the emotions and actions of a leader more strongly than they do other group members. Fostering the positivity you want mirrored in a team can be tricky, however, as you probably also want team members to mirror a firm grounding in reality. Fostering positivity doesn't mean living in denial, operating on blind faith, or ignoring problems—it means you and your team members will be able to see, and work together to pursue, a good outcome to a difficult situation. As Tony Schwartz puts it: “Here's the paradox: The more you're able to move your attention to what makes you feel good, the more capacity you'll have to manage whatever was making you feel bad in the first place.”²⁴ When you do that, the positive impact will be felt throughout your department or organization.

This was a hard‐won lesson for Donal Skehan—who, despite a career doing what he loved, ended up anxious, exhausted, and sick. After his stint in the Vietnamese hospital, he went through the 10X leadership program to spend some time reflecting on the things about his work that brought him joy. As a television personality, he's often seen as a handsome but solitary on‐screen face, but in reality he's a business owner, the leader of a production team that travels around the world with him. Together, he realized, they had fallen into the rut of chasing one job after another, which drained the work of any enjoyment.

“Certainly one thing that I picked up from the program was the importance of celebrating our successes,” he said,

because everything was just rolling on to the next thing. We might have done an amazing nationwide tour of 25 venues, and then we were on to the next thing, rather than saying: “Hang on a second. We've just done 25 nights on tour. And people turned up for us. Let's celebrate that. That's amazing.” And then team morale was boosted, because we were actually saying: “This is brilliant. We've done this. Now what are we going to do?”

The phenomenon of “rolling on to the next thing” raises an important point about managing the energy of a team. Loehr and Schwartz, to illustrate their point about energy management, compare long‐distance runners—“gaunt, sallow, slightly sunken and emotionally flat”—to sprinters—“powerful, bursting with energy and eager to push themselves to their limits.”

We—and particularly Angus, a pretty good long‐distance runner himself and, as you'll soon see, not at all emotionally flat—think this analogy might be a bit underbaked. But we agree with the point Loehr and Schwartz are making about the advantage sprinters, so to speak, have in the workplace: “No matter how intense the demand they face, the finish line is clearly visible 100 or 200 meters down the track. We, too, must learn to live our own lives as a series of sprints—fully engaging for periods of time, and then fully disengaging and seeking renewal before jumping back into the fray to face whatever challenges confront us.”²⁵

The research proves several things: People are more likely to work well together when they take care of their bodies, minds, and souls—following periods of intense, demanding activity with intervals of rest and recovery. They generate positive emotional energy both by reflecting on their own attitudes, bringing positive energy forth from within, and by modeling these attitudes for the people around them.

The 10X leader also understands that time is a fixed resource, a dead weight; by itself, it does nothing but drag you across the calendar. The 10X leader focuses on the energy that allows his or her team to perform to its potential during the time they have—on providing their bodies and minds the fuel and refreshment they need to flourish.