Think of yourself as a professional athlete. Your sport is using your brain in specific ways to achieve goals at work—executing day-to-day tasks, making decisions, creating plans, developing novel solutions, and solving problems.
If you want to excel in your job, consider the best ways to manage your body—because your brain is part of it—to perform these tasks effectively. Like an athlete, this includes eating the right foods, getting proper rest and recovery, sleeping enough, and ensuring adequate nutrients.
Doing all of these things consistently is challenging. I personally struggle with recovery.
Top-level athletes all work hard. But once they reach an elite level, improvement doesn’t come from working harder or longer. Similarly, as a professional, you need to build the skill of working hard early in your career. However, once you reach your performance threshold, you’ll experience diminishing returns from simply pushing harder. At that point, your growth depends on developing other differentiators—your ability to work effectively with others, lead, motivate, and generate creative or novel solutions. None of these can be achieved by just putting in more hours.