Rest is a strategy, not a reward

Somewhere along the way, most ambitious people absorb a quiet belief: rest is what you get once everything is finished. The problem is that the work is never finished, so the rest never comes.

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High performers who last flip this. They treat rest as an input — the thing that makes good work possible — rather than a prize for surviving. They schedule it first, not last.

This isn’t about doing less. It’s about recognising that recovery is part of performance, the same way it is for any athlete. The goal isn’t to coast. It’s to be able to go hard, repeatedly, without breaking.