Too busy to read?

The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. It is our most precious resource. The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become. The more we blame others or external circumstances, the more negative and compromised our energy is likely to be.

As I write this paragraph, my wife and our good friends are wondering why I'm selfishly lagging behind and not meeting them for an afternoon of sitting in the sun. I'll get there soon. And when I do, I'll feel energized and satisfied and be far more fun to be around. No one will think worse of me in the long run for being thirty minutes behind for a full day of fun that they have already started. But everyone will appreciate that I'm in a better mood when I show up. That's the trade-off. Like capitalism, some forms of selfishness are enlightened.

recommend that you always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower. When you're in one of those low-energy states, do those things. Casual reading (magazines, articles, catalogs, Web surfing), contact data that needs to be inputted, file purging, backing up your computer, even just watering your plants and filling your stapler--these are some of the myriad things that you need or want to deal with sometime anyway.

So while writing takes me away from my friends and family for a bit, it makes me a better person when I'm with them. I'm happier and more satisfied with my life. The energy metric helps make my choices easier.

The entire brain weighs three pounds (1.4 kg) and so is only a small percentage of an adult's total body weight, typically 2%. But it consumes 20% of all the energy the body uses. Why? The perhaps oversimplified answer is that time is energy.

PRINCIPLE 2: Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.

Bring high energy. People with high energy are more persuasive. We're all drawn to energy.