The Forgotten Art of Rest: How To Get Ahead Of Everyone By Doing Less

The idea of being average my whole life terrified me. The life I saw everyone living around me just seemed so average.

I quickly realised that wasn't the life I wanted to live. Instead, I have always wanted to do something great, to contribute to something larger than myself.

I thought, "If I am going to live an outstanding life, then I cannot do what everyone else does."

If I was going to get ahead of 99% of people, I would have to be willing to do what 99% of people are not.

I believed I had to work harder, put in more hours, make the sacrifices others wouldn't, and try even harder. Simply put,, I needed to outwork everyone else.

I couldn't put my finger on it, but there was something unsettling about this out-of-work approach. After 10 years of working hard at my goals, I finally know what it is. Work is only half of the equation.

So today, I am going to reveal what the other half is, how you are fucking it up, and at the end of the letter, you will see why the easiest way to get ahead of 99% of people is doing less, not more.

The 'outwork everyone' belief

Every underdog story has a training montage of someone overcoming challenges and obstacles by working harder. Aiming higher and working even harder than you were feels noble and charitable.

There is a truth in this.

No one has become successful without putting the work in.

You need to do the work. You will never hear me argue against that. But it is not only this.

How to get great

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, coined the concept of 10,000 hours, the amount of time you need to practice to become a master at anything. Measuring time is the easiest way to assess someone's effort and productivity.

We think that to get big results, we need to put big effort and big time in.

This is the common advice always given to any aspiring ambitious person: Just work harder.

But the theme I want you to remember is, if you do what everyone else does, you will become like everyone else.

If everyone says to work harder but doesn't have the life they want to live, it isn't clear that something is missing.

Since hard work is a requirement for success, the only people who come into our field view are people who worked hard. This results in a survivor bias. We come to believe that if we put the work in, we will come through the other side. Not true. What you don't see is all the rest of the people who worked their butts off and never made it.

Some of its luck. Some of its conditions. Some of its timing. But what we can be sure about is it is not hard work, discipline and consistency alone.

Consider Warren Buffett as an example. Everyone knows that Buffet is considered the richest investor of our time. But few people know that 90% of his wealth came from 10 investments.

All the hours he spent learning investment strategies, reading reports, and studying trends were for making 10 great decisions.

Want to know Buffet's best investment strategy? Time. 96% of his wealth came after his 65th birthday.

You find the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule in everything.

• On YouTube, 80% of a channel's views come from 20% of the videos.

• 80% of a company's sales come from 20% of their products.

• 80% of the mass of all the stars in the universe comes from 20% of the stars

These are not accurate numbers, but you get the idea.

Almost everything will amount to nothing. But when you get those few things right, for long enough, under the conditions and at the right time, you don't just win, you win big.

When Alex Hormozi talks about increasing his effort, he understands this. If he tenfold the amount of content he produces, he maximises the chance that one of them does really well.

When we look at the best shooters in basketball and the best hitters in baseball, who are they normally? The people with the most throws and swings.

This isn't just about doing the right thing; it's about doing the right thing to the best of your ability and maintaining the same intensity every week.

You have to stay in the game for long enough to give yourself as many attempts as possible.

Work is just one half of the equation, the other half is rest.

But not rest as you know it. The true outliers understand what real rest is.

As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang puts it in his book rest

Reframing Work and Rest

Charles Darwin wrote 19 books, including The Origin of Species, probably the most famous book in science, while working less than 3 hours per day.

Jordan Peterson commonly says he is only capable of intense intellectual work for 4 hours per day.

According to Rest, 4 hours per day pop up everywhere. It is probably why Tim Ferriss built his brand in around 4 hours.

I see this trend in my work. My writing and thinking performance peaks about 1 into the work session, and I can sustain that level of focus for another two before I start seeing a decline. Anything beyond this is a waste of time.

Think about it this way.

The best athletes do not train for the entire day. They might do two 2-hour sessions daily, five times a week. Each session is a deliberate, focused, and intentional practice.

The time in between is deliberate, focused and intentional rest.

Even if you are not a top athlete, you can achieve a top 1% physique within 12 months by training just 4 hours per week.

What you do for recovery in between sessions is as important as the session itself.

We run into problems when we see rest as the absence of work instead of as something with its own unique qualities.

Here is how I started to think about work and rest.

Dopamine, Serotonin and Cortisol

Work is optimised for dopamine Josh. Zoomed in, focused on the goal, distraction-free, and hopefully in the flow state for some of that time. This is a structured, routine time for productivity.

Rest is optimised for serotonin, Josh. We will return to this soon because optimising for serotonin is actually harder than it seems. There is a big enemy in the way.

Cortisol Josh.

Cortisol Josh is the one is fears and stresses. I spent too many years of my life as cortisol Josh.

Feeling guility when I was "resting" because i could be working. Feeling guilty when I was working because I felt like there was so much I was missing out on.

Again, if you want to live an extraordinary life, you cannot do what everyone else does.

I have to accept that what is fun for me is not fun for most other people. If they think I am boring, then so be it.

I digress.

When I examine my own habits, I realise that my resting patterns are usually optimised for cortisol, not serotonin.

There is a simple reason.

When I come home, I am tired from a long work day. My default prescription is high-stimulant technology. Phone, social media, YouTube videos

We got to rest so wrong

I used to think rest was doing nothing, almost wasting time. I also had the misconception that work and rest were exclusive, while they were influenced by each other.

When most of us think of rest, we think of sitting on the couch watching TV. Or lying in our beds scrolling on videos. We don't consider rest to be a hard physical activity or doing a hobby that you love.

Because while we are doing things that help us take the mind off the mind, the subconscious is still processing what we were working on in the background.

The best insights often come during periods of downtime after periods of focused and intensive work

The first time in became really aware of this was when I was at university.

I was working on this thermodynamic assignment, and there was a problem I just couldn't solve. I spent hours scribbling on paper and scrunching them up when they didn't work. After being completely frustrated, I put it away and didn't look at it for a couple of days. Then out of nowhere while I packing boxes at my retail job, the answer came to me.

In that instance, my job was to rest from that assignment.

Werner Heisenberg came up with the idea of the uncertainty principle while strolling through a Fallen Park. This was a breakthrough after months of struggling with mathematical equations.

Even during rest, your mind is still plugging away at it in the background. This type of thinking is what the best performers are optimising for.

They see rest as optimising for the serotonin version of themselves. Not the coritsol version of themsleves.

Watching content that grabs your attention is often an attempt to stimulate your amygdala, the region of your brain responsible for perceiving and processing fear. 

When you are in an alert state that you didn't choose, you become stressed and anxious. Your body responds by producing cortisol and increasing inflammation.

Most of the activities you do to rest feed the cortisol version of yourself, the one that fears and is reactive. This is not restful and impedes your recovery.

The best performers, however, engage in activities that help them achieve a state of flow. These activities are challenging, meaningful, and chosen.

Flow can be a state of doing when you are zoomed in, hyper-focused on the task, and making progress toward the goal. Dopamine Josh comes out when I write for 2 hours in the morning.

But flow can also be a state of being. That is serotonin, Josh. He is completely immersed in the activity just for the simple enjoyment of doing it—not for the external outputs but simply for the love of doing it.

It can be hard. It can be difficult. It needs to be, actually. That is the condition for the flow state

Imagine a grandmaster at chess plays a complete novice. There is no challenge for the grand master, and he gets bored. The novice, on the other hand, faces an insurmountable challenge, and he is anxious and overwhelmed. In this game, neither the grandmaster nor the novice is having fun.

The optimal experience is in between, at or close to the edge of what you can do. It pulls your attention in. It demands focus. It takes the mind of the mind.

We need to destroy the idea that rest needs to be passive. It doesn't. As I learnt from the book flow, people report feeling lethargic, unmotivated, and dissatisfied when they rest passively.

But if they rest actively by engaging in activities that get them into flow, they feel productive, fulfilled, and satisfied. They have positive feelings about themselves and the world.

So, active rest is when you are focused on something you choose, not distracted by something you didn't choose.

Let's be clear: rest isn't just about strenuous activity. While that is a part of it, there is also a time and place for chilling, lying back, and putting your feet up.

The key objective of rest is to optimise for serotonin Josh. How you get into that state of being is up to you.

The best performers do everything with intention. They understand that work and rest are complementary, so they design their days accordingly.

Deliberate rest as an average person

What does designing a life for deliberate rest actually look like? In the book Rest, Alex mentions some key factors to consider: recovery, daily habits, exercise, play, and long breaks from work.

Recovery

I spend a lot of time in the gym, probably 8 - 10 hours per week. I train hard. Most sets pushed me to the edge of my ability. Both my muscular system and nervous system get fatigued.

After most particularly intense sessions, I am cooked. When I get home, I'm not much good for anything except lying down.

I need time to allow my muscles, connective tissues and nervous system to recover.

Intellectual work is similar but with a very important difference.

After a particularly intense work session, my brain feels cooked—at least my conscious brain. However, my subconscious brain is still churning away in the background, working on the task.

Sedating yourself with cheap dopamine from scrolling on your phone does not promote recovery because it is not relaxing, you have no control over the experience, and there is nothing meaningful to master. It is very good at taking the mind of the mind. Exactly why you use it as a sedative. It numbs you from the life you are living.

Hunt for the activities that satisfy these qualities and make them daily habits.

If you feel like lying on the couch and doing nothing, try to actually do nothing for a little while. You will notice the boredom seeping in, and if you don't allow yourself cheap entertainment, you will cure your boredom in some other way.

Daily habits

If you really want to get ahead of 99% of people in life and work, you have to build a lifestyle that optimises for the dopamine and serotonin version of yourselves.

That really comes down to the habits you do on a daily basis.

Many top performers use the first hours of the day to do their highiest leverage tasks. The tasks that generate the highest amount of results.

I recommend experimenting with projects outside of your job, especially if you are not very engaged at work.

Dan Koe has a great saying: "You only need one hour a day to build the life you want to live. A lot can happen in 365 hours."

He also says, "If you can spend 8 hours a day working on someone else's dream, then you owe it to yourself to work one of yours for one".

I am getting in the habit of writing for at least an hour first thing in the morning before I have to go to my job.

But what your morning looks like is up to you.

Tim Ferris likes to start the morning slowly. For the first hour, he doesn't want to be rushed into doing anything, and then he can begin his first work block.

Let's be real, though; having a job that doesn't have a 4-hour work philosophy complicates this. You simply have less control over your time when you work for someone else compared to working for yourself.

Making time in the morning to do work can be difficult. But you are a different person in the morning than you are in the afternoon.

The vibe in the morning is productive and motivated.

It is a common experience to get to the end of the work day feeling completely depleted and reach for the local anesthesia — your phone.

The moments are the exact moments we need to optimise for rest by doing things that re-energise us.

• What habits do you have or can experiment with to promote mental rest and recovery?

For me, it's a gym session on training days or a walk or some other low intensity activity on non-training days after work.

I have noticed that if I don't include some free time to release entropy, in my hours, I become fatigued and rundown. This generally means free time from dinner to bedtime, which I aim to be at 10 pm

I'm trying really hard to maintain this schedule, but it doesn't also happen this way.

Last night I was up to 12:30 am editing a video, sometimes work just needs to be done. Other times I get sucked into a story of a show and go to bed later than I should.

We need to be better at placing constraints around work and pleasure.

Most people use the weekends to sleep in, take it easy, and rest from work in pleasurable ways. I don't.

I like my weekends being the opportunity to live out my ideal day. Experiments and try different workflows and routines. This is what my current ideal day looks like for work and recovery.

• 7 am start of the most important tasks

• 11 am gym session

• 1 pm lunch

• 2 pm reading, researching ideas

• 3 pm walk or low intensity hobby

• 6 pm dinner

• 7 pm free time

• 10 pm sleep

Let's not forget that the goal is to achieve the lifestyle we want, one that promotes the optimal experience.

Play

Unfortunately, as we age, responsibilities pile up, our time is absorbed by others, and we play less.

When there is less opportunity to play, we are most likely to compensate for play with destructive behaviours.

I think this is one of the reasons we have vices. We seek out instant pleasure to make our lives more interesting in the moment. But we know the calories are empty, and there is no nourishment.

Play is very different.

Play gets you into the optimal experience. Cortisol is gone, and you are full serotonin during play.

Play is doing hobbies that are challenging, mentally absorbing, and personally meaningful.

Play detaches you from work, allows you to pursue mastery, relaxes your mind, and gives you full control over the experience. It is one of the best forms of recovery that most people are missing.

I want to make much more time for play because it is noticeable when it is lacking. When it is not present, I feel run down, fatigued, and bored. That's when the vices come in.

If you don't go to bed tired and satisfied with how the day went and do not wake up excited for the day ahead, you need projects that demand you to be at your best, and that means recovering well.

Let dopamine you focus on the work that actually matters and achieve the life you want. Let serotonin you enjoy the life you have created and find rest. That is how you get ahead of 99% of people by doing less.

That's all for this idea. Appreciate you. Enjoy the rest of your day,

Josh