#2 – Persistence, Better Sleep, and the Hawthorne Effect

Purpose

“To live, is to suffer. To survive, well, that’s to find meaning in the suffering.” DMX

You might not think of rapper DMX as being one of the greatest philosophers, but if you listen to his lyrics, you might be surprised at what you take away.

One of the inevitable truths about life is that whatever path you are on, you will face hardships. The problem with most people is that, as soon as adversity appears, they quit their pursuit in favour of something else easier and less challenging.

If you want to be successful, you have to be Persistent. That means sticking with your course of action, even if it is tough, until you are successful.

Victor Frankl said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” and if he had been a rapper and made it to my gym playlist, I might have led with his quote. But I think it makes a nice compliment to the line from DMX’s Slippin’ track.

The question you need to answer for yourself today is do you have a big enough reason to keep going when times get tough? 

Energy

If we want to have energy to push ourselves during our waking hours, we need to make sure we are resting and recovering overnight as effectively as possible.

One of the simplest ways to get better sleep is to use a GABA supplement.

GABA (Gamma-AminoButyric Acid) is an amino acid produced naturally in the brain and helps reduce the activity of neurons in the brain and central nervous system. Research shows it helps decrease the amount of time it takes to fall asleep and may even increase overall sleep time.

I have always been pretty good at falling asleep, but when I use GABA, I still notice the difference. I’ll take it about an hour before I want to fall asleep and try to remember to set two alarms for the following morning as I know I am going to still be deep asleep when 5 am comes and I have to go to the gym.

You can easily find cheap GABA tablets on Amazon (like these ones) so try popping some GABA before bed and see what impact it has on your sleep and recovery.

Productivity

What gets measured gets done!

This is the principle behind the Hawthorne Effect, a psychological effect that causes people to improve performance when they know someone is observing their behaviour.

We can use this to our advantage by picking a performance metric we want to improve, and then actively tracking those numbers.

Authors, track your word count. Salespeople, track your outbound messages. Fitness enthusiasts, track your reps and weights. Manager, track your employee satisfaction scores. Engineers, track your defect rates. Book lovers, track your Audible listening stats.

If you want to improve your productivity, tie it to a specific metric and use the Hawthorne Effect to your advantage. And by the way, I made you a little reminder video here to help you remember this tip.

I hope these idea have given you something to think about and reminded you of what is most important to focus on for the rest of the week.

Until next time…