How Can I, as a Musician, Remain Flexible in My Sleep Schedule?

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I'm pretty good at getting everything kind of where I want to get it dialed in and I try to have it. So I wake up, I do everything and at night I'll go play a gig or have a rehearsal or sometimes music sessions. But a problem I'm having is sometimes I just. Because what Matthew Walker said about how midnight should be the middle of the night, I go to sleep pretty early and I wake up pretty early and I have gigs that will literally end at like 2 in the morning. And so sometimes I try to prep for that by having a nap at 8 or I or something like that, which you know, kind of is not great. But also if you're gonna stay up till two in the morning for like an obligation, I think it works out kind of well. But it throws me off for a while. And also sometimes I have an opportunity to play a morning gig which just throws off my work blocks or you know, that I have pretty consistently. But I guess I'm just dealing with this and I guess this is a problem a lot of people deal with in certain professions is how do you deal with these shifting schedules. And I know Kaunupur has mentioned career capital that if you get to a certain point then if I was, you know, a big time musician or whatever, if I have a lot of career capital, I could kind of negotiate well, oh, you can't bother me during these hours and stuff. I'm not quite there yet. And I've gotten to the point now where people will message me and they know I can't be like texted or called and answer you right away. And I've gotten, I think at least with my community, pretty good with musicians about building up like that trust. I'll get back to you. But you know, I'm busy and so I've, I've set up these kind of good guidelines, but the sleep is just the biggest one and there's a lot of things that get thrown off, but the sleep is, it'll throw me off for a couple days and it'll just kind of throw everything off. So any insights on that would be appreciated.

Yeah. Well, first of all, welcome again. Honored to have you as part of the program. And I just love the way you frame that and how advanced you already are, you know, and how much you already kind of crushing these things. So just to celebrate how you're approaching it is exactly how I would and will throughout the program, kind of counsel us to approach it. And then, you know, a few things come up for me and you. You hit on these, but just to make them explicit. You have an idiosyncratic, you know, style that you're going to need to figure out how you operationalize your ideal rhythms. And again, there's a lot of different professions that will have that. And you could decide, well, I'm just not performing, like gigs, and this is what I'm going to do. And I'm going to actually be. I'm not saying you should do this, but if you decided to be more of a studio artist and a performance, or maybe you write the music, I don't know what the actual permutation would be in your career, but in theory, you could decide that that was what you're going to do. Now, again, I'm not saying you should ever. We're at this stage, but you always want to know that's a possibility. If you wanted to do the hard work and pay the price, you could decide that you don't do this or that you do this. Now, again, I'm not saying you should do that, but we always want to have the agency to know that you could. If you decided that's what you wanted to do, because that's how you're going to give your gifts and greatest service to the world while still. While still paying the rent, then perfect. Now, if you decide that, no, no, I didn't even want that, I actually love performing. And the reality is that a lot of performances occur at night. I just spoke with the woman that founded Daybreaker, which is the opposite, which is you wake up early, you do meditation, then you have a party at 7 or 8am Right? And it's completely flipped, which is cool. But until the world gets flipped right side up, we'll just assume that as a performing artist, you're going to have later schedules on occasion. Then we get to have fun. So, again, we want to approach this with joy. Rub your hands together and recognize that arguably the most creative thing you're going to do isn't your art. It's creating a life through which you can express your art. And one of the things that I did, and I'm leaning down into my little stack of notes here, when I shifted from kind of teamwork orientation to more of back to the hermit philosopher mode, I printed out Two philosopher's notes, one on creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And I'm undermining and mastering it. I wrote it and I've read it a dozen times and I'm still reading it, being saying to myself, oh, that's exactly it. Like I just discovered it for the first time. You know, he makes a point here that I want to share and I'll just read from the note. He says, indeed, it could be said that the most obvious achievement of these people, the creative exemplars, is that they created their own lives. And how they achieve that is something worth knowing because it can be applied to our own lives. And then he says as well that after creative energy is awakened, it is necessary to protect it. We must erect barriers against distractions, dig channels so that energy can flow more freely, find ways to escape outside temptations and interruptions. Now you know that. So I'm reading that. For the benefit of those who are at a different phase of creating the deep work, time blocks, et cetera, your challenge now becomes perfect. If you have a performance once every X days or weeks or whatever it is, then we need to have a couple different masterpiece days. We got to have your typical crushing it mode where you do your early to bed and then you do your wake up early and you do your deep work, then you do whatever you do and then we need to have an asterisk on. Okay, cool. Then I've got my day that's going to have a performance at 9 or 10 or 11 or 12 or that's going to end at 2. Then we want to have fun having a masterpiece day for that day. And I'm stating the obvious, but we want to celebrate the fact that you're really close. Your nap on those days at that time is genius. Of course you should do that. And then we need to figure out the recovery day. So then you're up till 2, whereas you like to go to bed at 10 or whatever time, 11, 9, whatever time you usually like to go to bed. Perfect. Then what's the algorithm? Okay, I'm up till 2, then I shut down and I do this and I'm in bed from here to here. And I've got my blackout curtains, I've got my eye mask on, I've got my earplugs in, I've got my air purifier in my room. So it keeps it white noise quiet. All of which I have, by the way. Which got better, by the way, after wild coyotes were going nuts and kept me up and I realized, oh my God, Antifragile. I got to use that to my advantage now. I sleep better than ever. Perfect. So what's your late night performance routine and then what's your day afterwards? Because it isn't your deep work day, it's a recovery day. So that's the day that you do da da da da da da. I don't know what you do, but you got an extra nap, maybe you have two extra naps and you repay quickly your sleep debt. And then you go to bed perhaps at a slightly different time than normal, or perhaps you're just right back to your routine. I don't know, experiment with it. But you're right there. It's just continue to experiment, have fun with it, and then just have fun. I get goosebumps right now. Just taking it to the next level, embracing your reality and then using it to your advantage. And then final point, not only are you now at a point where your friends get it, but you're going to become an exemplar for them. So you're going to teach them. And again, whether you actually teach them or they just see you doing it, you're going to produce at such a higher level than you've ever produced, and you're going to do it with more equanimity and joy and calm confidence and energized tranquility. And they're going to perform at a higher level that they're going to come to you in 300 days if they don't already and if they don't sooner and say, what are you doing, dude? You know, you go, what are you talking about? I'm doing this, this, this and this. And rather than being the. That's how you earn career capital is you do the things that you know you could do, you earn that trust, and then you can start cashing that in for whatever ideal you see in your life. But awesome, awesome. Frame and question. Tell us your thoughts.

Yeah, I really think you're probably right. It's just I need to have multiple masterpiece days. I sort of have ideas like, of a protocol. Like I sort of already have it, which is kind of dumb. I don't just think of it on a day basis because like, let's say, for instance, I have a gear problem. Like my gear breaks and I think my guitar just doesn't work out. I'm a guitarist and I make beats and producing and stuff. But so if I already have like a technical issue, my laptop breaks or something, I literally have a protocol in Place like, all right, I'm gonna go do this, I'm gonna go do that. But let me still not let this day go to waste. So I should just have. I've kind of been thinking, how can I salvage this 2pm or 2am performance and still make it as close as possible to my other masterpiece days? But maybe that's just been the wrong approach. I've been trying to salvage that and force this other way into which it's different. It is. So I think that is almost obvious, but I should definitely approach it like that. And I want to quickly add, though, that that has happened a little bit with people noticing me. And also people, my friends know your name because I'll sometimes say, well, Brian Johnson would say this and Brian Johnson would say that. So literally, my friends sometimes like teasing me. They'll be like, well, what would Brian Johnson say?

Juan.

They know who you are, kind of.

Dude, that's so good. I'm looking for your last name here. Juan Espino, Right? They're going to be saying that, dude. They're going to be saying, what would Juan Espino say? You know, you're the domain expert and just your embodiment of that. And being that radiant exemplar is so exciting for me and again, honored to be part of your life and by extension, your friends lives and yeah, dude, that's it. And to highlight one more theme here that we'll talk about in our work together, the psychological attribute that you just articulated is flexibility. Flexibility is a hallmark of healthy people. So inflexible people tend not to be functioning very well. Right. And chaotic people don't either. So Dan Siegel, one of my favorite teachers and friends, et cetera, Harvard psychiatrist, he says, think of it like a river. So a healthy human being is flexible. They're like a river. And the river flows with two banks. On one side they have structure and on the other side they have spontaneity. Right? So a river flows between structure and in spontaneity. Now, you can err in one of two ways. You can flood structure into rigidity, where you can't change anything in your life. I tend to go there. I am such a programmatically, protocol driven guy. Ask my wife that. I can get rigid and that's when I get psychologically suboptimal. Some people flood the other side. Some people like spontaneity. They don't like structured awe, and they flood into chaos. I don't want to have to count my stats. I don't want to have to Think about this or that. Go to bed at the same time every day. That's crazy. My creativity can never flourish. Perfect. So we just want to know who we are and know where we tend to fall and then embrace the whole process. So then you've got that tightrope walker, which is a metaphor we use a lot, who is never actually perfectly balanced. So the other thing that gets in the way of our joy is thinking we're ever going to get there. You'll hear me say this a lot. You will never get there. There is no there there. There's only this moment to respond to that which is arising. So a great jazz musician has structure, but they also have that beautiful spontaneity and the flexibility. We want to approach our lives like that and know that balance is dynamic. You're constantly a little bit too much this way, then a little bit too much that way, and you're spiraling up with each little distinction. In those bad days when things don't go the way you want, we want to squeeze all the data we can out of them. What did I do differently here? And again, I get goosebumps that I can do just slightly better. Maybe something I'll do a little more of or a little bit less of. Perfect. Then we get excited. Then every time we fall short of our standards, we don't beat ourselves up, we get excited and we get a little bit better, A little bit better, a little better. But the main thing there was flexibility. And this is what you already have implicitly, that I want to celebrate and then have fun cultivating, because that's exactly how we're going to be able to approach it. And then you're going to change again. So in a year or two or three or whatever it is, everything's going to change. Maybe you're a producer at that point. You got this and you got that. And maybe you'll be the one coaching up and coming artists or doing whatever, and you're going to get them on your schedule. You're not going to be in the studio at midnight or one or two. You're going to be the one that's teaching them how to eat and move and sleep so they can connect to their diamonds. They can give their best more consistently or not. But it's really exciting to get clarity on that. And then ultimately, what do you want and then what do you need to do? That targeted thinking is how we come back all the time. Thrilled for you, dude. Love your energy and share some music with us too. If you're open to it. I'd love to celebrate you and your craft and again, excited to connect over the next 300 days and God willing, well beyond it.

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