The most powerful, creative, productive people on the planet do not operate in a linear way. They operate in a cyclical way. The most powerful high-impact leaders on the planet do not do the same things every day. They understand that there is a natural creative order to a life richly lived, and they live their life in a series of intuitive seasons. There are times to be in the world where you’re up at 5AM, running The 20/20/20 Formula, scheduled every minute, bringing on your fire, being uber-productive. What I call the high-excellence cycles. And then if you develop intimacy and fluency with your natural creative self, there are going to be times where you naturally feel it’s a time to pull back from the world. And this is when you rest more, you start to read more, you allow ideas to incubate, and you live life. Haruki Murakami, the great Japanese novelist, said “It’s when you’re not writing the book and when you’re living life is when you’re writing your next book.” Those times when you’re traveling and having fun with your family and taking long nature walks and being really contemplative, that time in the creative wilderness is causing you to get your next-level ideas, your next-level philosophy, your next-level of vision that you then bring back into the world.So just remember this method of seeing your life as a series of seasons and knowing when to be out in the world, and then that time to pull back and be in the wilderness. It’s a profound way to live. It’s very disruptive. A lot of us feel guilty if we’re not producing 24/7. There’s a lot of messaging in the world right now, “You need to be like a machine, scheduled, productive, running your rituals and routines 24/7.”What I’ve realized more than ever before, run your life in a series of seasons, high-excellence cycles, deep refueling cycles. You come back stronger than ever before.
