Michael Hyatt
speaker
169 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Feb 2025
Michael Hyatt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's weird and it's counterintuitive, but as it turns out, if you're less stressed, if you're more healthy, you make better decisions. And a lot of times people think that they just got to grind and grind and grind. And there's been a lot of research around this. And I write a lot about this in my book, Free to Focus.
But there's been a lot of study about working beyond 55 hours and how the productivity goes south fast once you get past about 55 hours. And yet people always think they're the exception. You know, they think, well, I can work for 100 hours. I can work for 120 hours a week. And the truth is you can't. for a short amount of time.
But what the research shows is you start really losing momentum and your health begins to deteriorate and your relationships deteriorate. And so those people don't perform well at work. Now, I didn't put all that together initially. I just knew that I was making better decisions. I was less stressed. I was calmer. I led better. You know how it is when you're tired and everybody becomes more stupid?
That's what it was. So yeah, you know, rest is a huge thing. Getting adequate rest. And play is everything.
That's right.
You know, one book I read back in those days early on in the early 2000s was a book called The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Lohr. He was a sports performance coach and he took those lessons and applied them to the corporate world. And he basically, the metaphor was you're a corporate athlete. Well, what do athletes know about high performance? Well, they know that rest is the foundation.
You know, the world's greatest players in any sport rest like nine hours a night because they realize how important that is for performance. They have a pregame ritual that sets them up for success. And you know, you always think of athletes that are partying on game night. No, not the good ones.
The good ones are to bed early, they're taking care of their nutrition, they're taking care of their stress levels through meditation or whatever, but they take care of the instrument of their self so that they can perform at the highest levels. And for whatever reason, we don't understand this in the corporate world. And so we grind people.
And Dr. Stephen Covey talked about the need to sharpen the saw. We just have people out there who continue to change the metaphor a little bit to an ax that are basically trying to cut wood with a dull ax. Everything takes longer. Everything is rougher. Everything's a mess. And so, you know, a well-rested person can accomplish in half the time what an exhausted person can do.
Yeah, and being a CEO is really challenging, as you know, particularly when I was running the company in 2005, became the CEO. We were still publicly held. We took the company private two years later. That was its own education. But, you know, I'm trying to do all of this like a baby CEO, just learning the ropes. And I've got all these challenges.
A few years later, we would face the Great Recession. And we were fighting for our lives and all of that and trying to keep my boundaries in place and all of that. One of the most helpful pieces of advice that I got, though, is on the day I became the CEO of the company, I got a call from John Maxwell. I mentioned him before. And he's a good friend.
And he said, look, first of all, congratulations. But he said, you've heard that it's lonely at the top. And I said, yep. And I just figured that goes with the territory. And he said, I want you to understand something. And he said, I want you to listen to me. He's very direct that way. He said, that's a choice.
Well, that kind of rocked my world because basically he was saying that I didn't have to be lonely at the top. And in the next couple of weeks, I reached out to two other public company CEOs in Nashville and one at Tractor Supply and the other one at a parking company. It was also public. And we started to get it together once a quarter.
And the whole premise of it is we had lunch and then we spent the afternoon together. We had a different topic every time. And it was a place where we could be ourselves and really share vulnerably the challenges we were facing that we couldn't share with the board and we couldn't share with our team. And that was my first experience.
I didn't have the language for this at that time, but that was my first experience of a mastermind. I think that part of success has to be a team sport. Get a coach if you want to perform at the highest level. Join a mastermind. You need the accountability. You need a safe space where you can just let it all out. And I think that was critical for me.
You know, I can remember I was in New York City. We were in the office of Wells Fargo because they were an investor in the private equity company that had acquired us. And so we were meeting with them, but all the meetings were canceled that day. Everybody knew, like, this is a big storm. And I was sitting there in the basement of Wells Fargo. All my meetings had been canceled.
And I was looking at this painting they had on a wall that was this ship that was going through this incredible storm. And I thought, wow, this, I think, is prophetic for what we're about to go through. Of course, none of us had any idea. And so we're sitting there not knowing what we're about to enter. And at first, you know, it's kind of like, is it us or is it the environment?
And I can remember the chairman of my board was very upset at one point because our sales were slipping. In fact, they fell 20% in one year that first year, which is catastrophic for a company of that size. We had to make some cuts, had to lay off a lot of people, all that stuff, which was very, very painful. But we had no idea what was coming.
And the chairman of my board was of the mindset initially that it was us. And we'd had this seven-year run prior to them acquiring us where it was just up and to the right. Shareholder value was growing. Everything was increasing, revenues, profit. And so I remember telling him one time, I said, look,
The same idiots that are trying to run the company now were the same idiots that for seven years had this crazy run. I think it's something other than us. I mean, certainly we're making mistakes and there's things we could do better, but something's happening systemically in the environment. And, you know, that didn't leave us an excuse.
Showing 61–80 of 169 · page 4 of 9
← Previous
Next →