Celeste Headlee is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. Her TEDx talk has over 26 million views. Her books include Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving and Speaking of Race: Why Everyone Needs to Talk About Race--And How To Do It.  Celeste is a 25-year veteran of public broadcasting. She was a host on NPR and she has also been on PBS and PRI. And during this time in her career she really started researching and figuring out how to have better conversations and how to interview well, that’s when she realized most people are not good at informal conversations--especially difficult ones on topics such as race and politics.  She gave a TED Talk on that topic and it went viral so she wrote a book on the same theme titled, We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter. The TED Talk really changed her life and led her down the career path she is on today. Why we struggle to truly rest There is a quote from Bertand Russell that Celeste included in her book, Do Nothing and it is such a great quote. “It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of twenty four. In so far as this is true in the modern world it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for lightheartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” So many of us, myself included, have a hard time taking time away from work, resting, and not thinking about what else we have to get done. Celeste says for the longest time she felt the same way too. The to-do list in her head was never complete and she would justify working until 10 o’clock at night so that she could “get ahead”. But the problem was she never got ahead, the list kept getting longer and never emptied. So what was the point of working so late? We tend to think that people going back through history have always worked hard, and they did, but they also knew how to have balance. Something that we struggle with. Celeste says this all changed with the Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution people worked half the year, or maybe less. Even the lowest ranking people had time off. They spent a week celebrating a wedding. After the harvest was done, they took a week or more to reward themselves for the hard work they accomplished with a festival. People, even serfs, had some land, they made their own tools, they were capable of taking care of themselves. During the Industrial Revolution people moved to the cities to work in the factories and for the first time in history time equaled money. That is when the obsession with efficiency and productivity started. And this is something we still focus on today---it’s all about the hustle culture--the more you work supposedly the more successful you are.  But the truth is people who work around 50 hours a week only make between 6-9% more than someone working 40 hours or less. So there really isn’t a huge financial gain to working excessively.  Celeste shares that actually people who take all of their vacation time every year are more likely to get promoted and have a higher salary than those who don’t take their vacation time. So, as she states, long hours are literally counterproductive.  When you work more hours you are more apt to make mistakes, you're much more likely to be irritable and tired, and it often leads to an unhealthy lifestyle that leads to heart attacks, strokes, etc… --------------------------- There are 6 trends that are transforming leadership forever do you know what they are and are you ready for them? Download the PDF to learn what these 6 trends are and what you should be doing about each one of them. These are crucial for your leadership and career deve