A short YouTube talk by Brian Johnson summarizing Kevin Cruz’s final time-management secret: energy — not time — is the fundamental currency of high performance. Johnson emphasizes scheduling positive rituals to build and renew energy (citing Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr), explains energy enables sustained productivity and engagement, and connects this idea to his own Heroic practices and app design.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. Today we're going to wrap up our quick tour through Kevin Cruz's 15 secrets. Successful people know about time management. And we're going to talk about secret number 15. Although it's the final secret Kevin shares, it is by far the most important. So pay attention. Kevin asks us, and I quote, would you like to know the real secret to completing 12 hours of work in just an eight hour day or would you? Then he tells us, you can't get more time, only more energy. That was in all caps, by the way, and that's a very big idea. Kevin continues by saying, what if the ultimate time management secret isn't about time at all? You can't manage time no matter what you do. You will have the same 24 hours tomorrow that you had today. When people talk about time management, what they really want is to get more stuff done with less stress. And the real secret behind this is that you need to maximize your energy. And finally he tells us, I saved this secret for the end because I didn't think you'd even read it or care about it if I put it up front. But it's the most important secret of all. Energy. That, my dear heroic friend, is the secret to time management and to everything else you want to optimize in your life. Which is why our soul force equation begins with your energy. Then we focus it on what's important now. And know this, there's only one possible way we can more consistently show up in our work and in our love with heroic levels of productivity and connectivity. And that's by getting ourselves heroically energized. As we've discussed. See our notes on seven habits in our Heroic Coach Mastery series module on energy, etc. Renewing ourselves and sharpening our saws was Stephen Covey's seventh habit of highly effective people. I say let's move that up to the first position and create a chainsaw. Kevin leans heavily on Tony Schwartz and Jim Lore's wisdom from their great book the Power of Full Engagement to make his point in this final and most important secret. Those guys tell us energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. And they say energy is simply the capacity to do work. Our most fundamental need as human beings is to spend and recover energy. And then the next logical question is, how do we develop our energy? Well, they tell us all great performers rely on positive rituals to manage their energy and regulate their behavior. And the more exacting the challenge and the greater the pressure, the more rigorous our rituals need to be. And they say creating positive rituals is the most most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement. And the more scheduled and systematic these rituals become, the more renewal they provided. And that, my dear hero, is precisely why I hit 101 heroic targets every single day and why we architected the app the way we did. It's time to activate our soul force, get our energy focused on what's important now. Not once in a while or when we feel like it, but consistently, all day, every day, especially today.
