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Do You Have the Stamina for Career Success?
In the book Executive Stamina: How to Optimize Time, Energy and Productivity to Achieve Peak Performance, authors Marty and Joshua Seldman make the case that by “optimizing your effectiveness,” you can enjoy a “long, balanced and successful career.”
The book might also be called Get Your Act Together, Dude!
Marty, the father, is an executive coach and clinical psychologist, skills that must come in handy in many boardrooms. His son, Joshua, is an endurance athlete, champion cyclist, and trainer. Together they offer practical insights about mind, body and career management that break little if any new ground yet usefully survey a lot of recent thinking in a wide range of areas – down to yoga in the office and stretching exercises.
Take for example their observation that every day your body replaces 1 percent of its cells. “That means in three to four months you have an opportunity to regenerate most of your body’s building blocks. Are you going to strengthen them or allow them to get weaker?” That’s a perfectly good question and like most people I tend to get stronger in the summer and weaker in the winter when as a knowledge worker I’m even more sedentary. I lack a fitness plan.
The authors outline fitness plans – not just for health but also for time, stress and career management among other topics. “Simply put, if you don’t have a plan for your time, someone else will,” they observe, correctly. The Seldmans offer productivity suggestions including, interestingly, advice to “never say yes quickly. Few of us can judge accurately how long an assignment or project will take based on someone else’s description of it. Even after close scrutiny, we underestimate the time required to complete a task.”
Ultimately the best thing in the book is practical advice about how to stay physically fit and achieve peak performance while working a busy, executive career.
For more information about the Seldman’s strategies – I should have given myself more time! – check out Executive Stamina.org.
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