You Keep Dismissing It. It’s Actually the Accelerant.
Everything is changing. Rapidly, relentlessly, and in ways that are genuinely hard to keep up with. We are living in exponential times, and incremental responses simply cannot keep pace. I think most leaders feel this in their bones right now, even if they haven’t named it yet.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: in the middle of all this exponential change, one thing hasn’t changed at all. Our biology.
Your brain still needs sleep to consolidate learning and generate creative thought. Your nervous system still needs recovery to regulate and reset. Your body still requires rest in order to perform. This has always been true. What’s different now is the stakes. There wasn’t nearly as much riding on your brain capacity ten years ago as there is today. The demands of the Transformation Economy aren’t just requiring more of you physically, they’re requiring a fundamentally different kind of thinking. Creative synthesis. Rapid adaptation. Complex problem solving. And none of that is available to you when you’re running on empty.
I used to be able to push through my task list on sheer force of will. I could muscle through and still get results. But my work didn’t require the level of creative thinking and adaptation that it does today. Yours probably didn’t either. That era is over.
So while the world is asking us to evolve exponentially, we are still treating rest and recovery like optional luxuries. We still wear exhaustion like a badge. We still quietly believe that working more hours signals more value. And I want to say clearly: that is broken programming, and it is costing us.
Seven hours of sleep — minimum, every night — is not a wellness trend. It is the fuel that makes everything else possible. The creativity, the clarity, the quality of your decisions, the way you show up for your team. I think about it like this: most of us worked incredibly hard to get our kids to sleep through the night. We swapped tips with other exhausted parents, we read, we tried every method. Work that hard for yourself. Create the environment, the routine, the boundaries that allow you to actually rest. You deserve it, and your business needs it.
And while we’re on the subject of reclaiming capacity, I have to say something about meetings. I’ve heard it from leaders more times than I can count: I can’t get my actual work done because I’m in back-to-back meetings all day, so I start doing it after hours. I understand why it happens. But it is not sustainable, and it is not OK.
This goes back to what I wrote about last week: asking the right questions and being willing to let go. The meeting structure that made sense a year or two ago may not make sense today. You may have new people, new goals, a fundamentally different set of priorities. And yet the calendar looks the same. I’ll say something bold here: I am almost certain you could cut your meetings IN HALF and achieve more. Free up two to three hours a day. Give people back the space to actually think, create, and do the work you hired them to do.
The leaders who will thrive in what’s ahead aren’t going to be the ones who outworked everyone else. They’re going to be the ones who figured out how to operate at their peak, and who created the conditions for their people to do the same.
Exponential times require exponential thinking. And exponential thinking requires a brain that has actually been allowed to rest.
Start there.
Slow Down to Speed Up
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