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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job summary
Dale Carnegie
Increase your understanding of human nature to live more fully
27 mins
What is How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job about?
How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job (1955) provides guidance about getting more out of your day-to-day life, by generating more energy into your workday and improving your personal relationships. It sheds a light on how human nature influences the way we behave, so you can improve your interpersonal skills and deepen your self-understanding.
Table of Contents
How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job
summarized in 8 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 8
It’s not work that makes you tired, it’s your emotions.
Take a moment to think about how you feel at the end of a grueling workday. Do your muscles ache? Does your head pound? Have you completely run out of energy?
Now reflect on what you’ve been doing all day. Is your job physically demanding, or do you spend most of your time sitting at a desk?
If your job doesn’t involve hard labor, it’s easy to put work exhaustion down to mental fatigue. After all, your brain is doing some serious thinking for at least 40 hours a week. It may surprise you then to learn that your brain can work just as effectively after 12 hours as it can when you sit down at your desk with your first cup of coffee. So, why do you feel tired all the time?
The influential psychiatrist Dr. A.A. Brill believed that emotional factors are the primary cause of fatigue for desk workers. Anxiety and feeling unappreciated make you produce nervous tension. And that tension is what wears you out.
Think about what happens to you physically when you feel stressed at work. You might scowl, strain your eyes, and hunch your shoulders. But these actions don’t improve your performance. Instead, they squander your precious energy reserves, which is why you feel so tired at the end of the day.
Luckily, there’s an antidote – relaxation. Being tense is a habit – a bad one – but you can choose to make relaxation a habit instead, even one you practice at work.
Effective relaxation begins with the eyes. Our eyes require a significant amount of our body’s nervous energy. That’s why they can feel strained even if you have 20/20 vision.
Get into the habit of closing your eyes several times a day, and spend a full minute silently telling all the muscles that control your eyes to let go. Slowly, your muscles will start to obey and the tension will fall away. Once your eyes are relaxed, you can shift your focus to another part of your body, like your jaw or your shoulders. Picture your body as a floppy sock. Author Dale Carnegie even kept an old maroon sock on his desk to remind himself to relax.
Being tired doesn’t mean you’ve worked well, it means you’ve worked inefficiently. At the end of each day, evaluate your tiredness and identify whether it was work that wore you out, or how you worked that did. In the next blink, we’ll look more closely at where all this fatigue is coming from, and how to combat it.
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Who should read How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job?
- The chronically weary
- Managers who want to become more effective leaders
- Students of human nature
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