Every Entrepreneur Needs to Hear This Quote

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. I want to give you just a little bit of Monday motivation here. This is a quote I came across last year. I thought it was one of the coolest quotes. It’s so damn true. And we can take it and apply it to two different aspects of our life, both of which are very impactful. The quote is from Vince Lombardi. He says, fatigue makes cowards of us all.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all. I love that idea. And he’s talking from the context of coaching football in the late stages of the game. You’re tired, you’re exhausted. You’re not as heroic. You’re not as pumped up and ready to run through a wall as you were in the first quarter. And now that you’re getting tired, this is where you start to doubt yourself. You start to concede a little bit and say, oh, maybe I don’t want this as badly as I want.

Maybe this doesn’t matter quite as much. Maybe I’m going to. We’ll try again next time. You start to beat yourself before you even reach the finish line. We’ve all been there. So there’s two aspects of this quote that I find very, very influential for how we can coordinate our own lives and how a coordinator are thinking. Number one is this. If fatigue makes cowards of us all, then we need to do everything in our power to make sure that we are rested, that we are energized, and that we are operating at the highest frequency possible.

That starts with sleep. So making sure that we get our sleep dialed in is easy way to ensure that we’re going through the day not tired. Right. I spent so much of my life kind of grinding around the clock, getting really bad sleep, staying up until one or 02:00 a.m. and then trying to wake up at like, early in the morning, but not really work. Next thing I know, I’m exhausted by 10:00 a.m. so I’m taking a nap at eleven. Like, that’s just not a good.

That’s not a good system for achieving the big things in life that you were here to achieve. Right? So here’s three simple ideas that you can take that will help improve your sleep, get you more consistent, so you’re starting the day with more energy. Number one, I use a sleep mask. I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s a higher roi, little accessory than that for improving the quality of my sleep. I think sleeping in pitch black very, very important. Humans are designed to sleep in the dark, right? We know this. But it’s very hard to control for light pollution coming in through your windows.
And even if you have blackout curtains and all these things still can be very difficult. So when I’m traveling or I’m at home, the very first thing that I put on is my sleep mask. Gets me dark, dark and I’m good to go. The next thing is to make sure that you set a consistent bedtime. More important than when you wake up is when you go to bed. Because when you go to bed is going to dictate when you wake up and how you feel when you wake up. And if you’re going to bed at irregular times every single day, you’re freaking with your circadian rhythm. You’re making it very hard for your body to get that good, good sleep.
If you go to bed every single night at the same time, your body is going to naturally start falling into the right rhythm. You’re going to get higher quality sleep. You’re going to go to sleep easier. You’re going to stay asleep longer. It’s going to be awesome. So set a bedtime rather than an alarm clock. Number three, stop drinking. Stop drinking alcohol.
Alcohol is screwing up your sleep. Even if you’re only having one drink and it’s many, many hours, like five, 6 hours before bedtime, it is still going to be messing with your rhythms. I’m not a big drinker. I don’t drink. I don’t think I’ve had a drink in over a year and a half now. I’m not telling you not to drink. Just if you want to be your highest and best self and you don’t want to be a tired coward in the middle of your day. Maybe cut out the drinking or at least cut it down.
It’ll have a significant impact on the quality of your sleep. Okay, so those are the three things that we can do to improve our sleep so that we are starting the day energized and ready to go. Here’s the second aspect of this quote that I want to apply to. I want you to try to apply to your life, which is fatigue makes cowards of us all. Therefore, we should fight the biggest, hardest, scariest dragon as soon as possible. We shouldn’t wait until later in the day to try and go and fight the dragon when we’re already tired from fighting all the little monsters, right? We need to wake up when we’re the most energized, when we have the most courage, and go fight that big dragon while we are in that state. It’s so easy to delay the fighting of the dragon and fight, and we just exhaust ourselves with the, the smaller monsters, and then we go try and fight the dragon at the end of the day. But we’re not in the right place.

We’re a coward now. We’re tired. As we push it, we just keep pushing it, pushing it, pushing it, pushing it. Stop fighting the tiny monsters that don’t matter. Go fight the big dragon first. And when I’m talking about dragon, this is just a metaphor for those big things in your life, those big activities, those hard tasks that will move you towards your goals, the things that you know you should be doing that will actually move the needle, but you, for whatever reason, you just keep pushing it off in favor of doing the easier things, like checking the emails, checking the social media, and doing those things instead of doing the hard work that you know. And I don’t know what that is for you, but you do that big dragon, fight it as soon as you can in the day, while you’re still courageous. It’s never gonna get any easier.

In fact, it’s just gonna get harder as you get more tired and more cowardly. So that’s how we can take this quote and we can apply it to two different aspects of our life as our sleep into our deep work routine. Do the hard thing first. Get good sleep. Everything else will fall into place. That’ll do it for me. You beautiful, beautiful entrepreneurs. I will see you in the next episode.

But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.