Optimize Your Personal Energy Instead of Your Time

Yesterday, I chatted with a long-time reader who started our conversation with a backhanded compliment I get recently, “Chris, I admire your persistence and optimism.” 

What they’re really thinking is:

“I’m amazed you keep at it in such good spirits despite being so unsuccessful for so long.”  

Does this bother me? Not one iota. Because it’s true. (If the objective truth bothers you, you’re not facing reality.)

It has been long. 

This week, I forwarded my friend one of my earlier posts and noticed I wrote it seven years ago. 

It has been unsuccessful.

Seven years of effort, and not only have I failed to build a name for myself worthy of getting invited to give a TED talk—not even TEDx!—but my audience is actually shrinking. 

So why haven’t I quit?

Because it has also been a good time. 

I’ve learned a lot, my life’s been awesome, and I’m proud of my internal progress. I have no doubt I’m in a better mood on a day-to-day basis than über-successful self-helpers, such as Tim Ferriss. 

This, I’ve realized, is the source of my patience and enthusiasm:

Prioritizing energy over time. 

Do Something Incredible That Is More Good Than Bad

Time may be priceless but it isn’t worth as much without energy.

If low on energy, 

• I’d have a hard time choosing to enjoy working out in the rain or wrangling my kids. 
• My creativity would crater. 
• Like a black hole of bleh, I’d suck energy from people who are unfortunate enough come into my orbit.

Turns out Tim Ferriss realized this recently, too: 

“The most precious nonrenewable resource, I used to say is time. I don’t think it’s time any longer. I think it’s energy. I think your energy fundamentally is the most important primary resource to guard.”

– Tim Ferriss on the Invest Like the Best podcast

Ferriss and I could have realized this sooner had we paid more attention to one of his podcast guests, Scott Adams. Before going off the deep end, he shared a lot of practical wisdom in his 2014 book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:

“Organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.”

Doing “something incredible that is more good than bad” sounds like my cup of tea, so I’ve been spending a lot of time—but not energy, because it’s fun—thinking about how to systematically optimize for personal energy. 

Seek More Pumps, Fewer Leaks 

The way I see it, three sources generate energy:

1. Doing things we enjoy. For instance, playing volleyball is a surefire pick-me-up, even on days I suck. Believe it or not, I similarly enjoy writing these words you’re reading. 
2. Doing things we’re proud of. I call these “anti-regrets,” actions from the past that leave a lasting benefit on your life. Cleaning your room, learning an instrument, or making a friend, for example.
3. Having things to look forward to. Think of your difference in energy between having an upcoming holiday to Cologne, Germany and having an upcoming colonoscopy.

Let’s call these energy generators “pumps.” 

On the energy-sucky side, “leaks” are things we dislike, regret, and dread. They drain energy.

Despite not having a degree in electrical engineering, I can deduce the strategy for optimizing energy: More pumps, fewer leaks. 

And the path to a virtuous cycle of energy is plugging yourself into activities that hit the “trifecta”:

• You enjoy doing them.
• You will be proud to have done them.
• You look forward to doing more.

Examples for me include throwing rocks on the beach, eating big salads, going for walks, adventuring with my boys, and exploring new places. Energy comes in, loops around, and keeps building on itself:

Fill your life with such trifecta-hitting activities, protect it from leaks, and patch up inevitable ones as they spring up, and you hum like a radioactive rod.

Simple, right? 

So why is it so rare?

Fix Your Calorimeter

“The happiest people have a knack for being honest about what does and does not energize them.”

– Todd Kashdan, What Happy People Do Differently 

This quote implies that energy is upstream of happiness—and all other feelings of well-being. So the question becomes: 

How do we get more honest about where our energy comes from? 

With a device for measuring your energy. A calorimeter.

Unfortunately, evolution didn’t do us many favors in this regard. Instead of being bestowed with Swiss-precision energy gauges—even me, and I’m a quarter Swiss!—we’re wired with:

• Glitchy sociometers. They trick us into feeling that getting five likes from bored paper pushers on LinkedIn is energy generative.
• Complacency circuit breakers. They tell us, “No Chris, attending that event is a bad idea. It will drain your energy. Better to rest up by reading your emails, watching TV, and drinking a beer.” 
• Laggy feedback loops. They deceive us with messages like, “Broccoli, feta, and pumpkin seeds? What the hell? We need more energy ASAP. Give us ice cream.”

How do we overcome these defects? 

The best way I’ve found to get a more honest read on what “pumps” and “leaks” energy is boring but effective: 

Keep track of what you do. 

I let my actions’ outcomes plink plonk through my brain’s broken, biased gauges. Then, at the end of the week, month, and year, I review: 

• What sucked my energy? 
• What gave me energy?

Then I try to do less of the former and more of the latter—especially the magical “trifecta” activities that I enjoyed, am glad to have done, and look forward to more of. 

Tap Into Your Nuclear Reactor

The more I’ve fine-tuned my calorimeter, the more I’ve come to accept something:

The Immutable Law of Personal Energy Alignment: The closer your actions align with your core wiring, the higher your energy. 

What do I mean by ‘wiring’?

A birds-nest-ian tangle of:

• Personality 
• Values
• Strengths
• Passions 

Go against these and you’ll need unsustainable willpower reserves to overcome the inevitable leaks, detritus, and dead ends. But get these wires running in parallel and you tap into intrinsic motivation, which, Dan Pink describes in his book, Drive, as “the motivational equivalent of clean energy: inexpensive, safe to use, and endlessly renewable.”

To tap into your own personal fusion reactor, you need to tune out external noise. Not care what others think. But that’s like trying not to think of a purple elephant when told not to. 

Instead, focus on engineering your pumps and leaks. That’ll lead you to your core. And that progress will leave you little time for others’ opinions.

I don’t think it’s selfish, either. While I’ve yet to prove it myself, the theory is that if you successfully avoid external influences and unleash your intrinsic powers, your energy will resonate contagiously.

Enthusiastically Engineer Energy

I’m lucky. I seem to have instinctively followed energy for most of my life, like a migrating bird. So life’s been pretty good.

But now that I’m conscious of prioritizing energy, I think I can engineer my life for even more of it—maybe so much so that it’ll successfully resonate with others. 

Then one day when I talk to you, instead of telling me, “I admire your persistence and enthusiasm,” you’ll say, “I’m inspired by your output.”

Thanks for reading.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris

PS – Energized to get started optimizing your energy? My top suggestion: Keep a daily log of what you do. Review at the end of the week, looking for pumps and leaks. Set a plan for fewer leaks and more pumps the next week. Keep tinkering. Here are more perks of logging your days and how my system evolved. For help, accountability, and energizing chats, consider joining the waitlist for Systematic Brilliance. 

PPS – For audiovisual reinforcement to implement these ideas to optimize for energy in your life, consider watching me talk about this here: