I was listening to a webinar by author Benjamin Hardy this week and he made an interesting point. All the growth and creativity happens when you rest.
If you are trying to build muscle, you work hard at lifting weights but the muscles get bigger during the recovery period.
The same can be said about coming up with new ideas at work or in your business. So many entrepreneurs say their best concepts arrived in the shower or while on a run or during a vacation. Not during the wild day to day ride.
The problem is many of us have created a life where there is no time for recovery. No time for rest. No time to unplug. And without that recovery, we cannot grow.
How can we embrace the 80/20 rule in our lives where 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort? What things can we say no to and replace with activities that fill our cup? How can we recover from ourselves?
It could be getting up an hour before your alarm normally goes off to meditate, stretch, do yoga or go for a walk. It could be carving out time at lunch or before bed to read something unrelated to work or write in a gratitude journal or create a vision board.
When our mind is at rest we can think big things. We can connect the dots. And imagination is everything.
As theoretical physicist Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
How can we turn off the world for a time and let our imagination reign? What might we discover while we recover?