The speaker contrasts exhilarating work, which leaves you breathless with excitement like a great snowboarding run, with enervating work that drains your energy. The key is recognizing which tasks fall into each category and eliminating or delegating the draining ones so you can focus on what feels rewarding.
Is your work exhilarating or enervating? To be exhilarating means to remove breath, quite literally. But I think we all associate with the idea that we're pretty excited, right? We're out of breath because, man, that was awesome. And like me at the end of a good snowboarding run, that is the kind of feeling I want you to have about your work. Whether it be consulting work you're doing, the building you're doing, whatever it is, I want you to feel like, man, that was effort and it took a lot, but I am so happy with with both the result but also the experience of having done it. Contrast that being enervating. Enervating is when you are drained. Strictly speaking, these two words can mean the same thing, but I think we all know that to be enervated means that you are tired, means that you wanna go take a nap, means that you want to lie down, you want to stop doing things. And that's because the activity, instead of filling you with excitement, has drained you. And you're gonna find there's lots of work that will happen like that, and you need to identify what that work is and ask how you can get that off your plate. I want you to be exhilarated, not annoyed.
