Rest is a Responsibility

In 1954, Roger Bannister was one of many athletes trying to break the elusive four-minute mile barrier. At the time, breaking this barrier was thought to be a pure test of endurance—a question of who could tolerate the most pain and suffering.

Except the relentless grind wasn't paying off. As Bannister noted, “We were stuck. The training had ceased to do us any good.”

Instead of searching for marginal gains, over-optimizing his schedule, or hunting for a new training technique, he did the unthinkable for an elite athlete: he stopped. He completely walked away from training and went hiking in the mountains of Scotland with his running partner.

He wasn’t burnt out, and he wasn’t injured. To Bannister, rest wasn’t a reward for hard work—rest was a tool. Rest was a form of discipline, not a lack of it. It was the missing key to his entire training regimen. Very soon after taking that intentional break, he stepped onto the track and broke the four-minute mile.

For too many of us, rest is merely a reaction to burnout or exhaustion. And when we only rest because our bodies have forced us to a halt, it usually results in "bad rest". Our rest consists of binge-eating, numbing out on Netflix, alcohol, or doom-scrolling.

Bannister’s rest looked entirely different. He was climbing mountains. He was connecting deeply with a friend, moving his body, spending time in nature, and changing his environment.

The responsibility of rest is not to simply stop working; it is to be just as intentional with how you rest as you are with how you work.

Rest should be systematic and proactive. It needs to be built into your life daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. It cannot just be the one week off a year or a fleeting summer break. As leaders, we must actively design leisure into our lives.

The challenge is that we are constantly chasing more. We build our lives around our work, rather than building our work around our lives. We tell ourselves we need to work well now so that we can someday live well later.

We have it completely backward. We need to live well now so that we can work well.

Don't just use this season to carve out a temporary break. Start building intentional rest directly into your daily routine.

Rest isn’t a reward. Rest is a responsibility.

—J.P. Nerbun

P.S. *My new book, The Culture Captain, is available now on Amazon. It isn’t just a blueprint for sports teams—it is a guide for any leader who wants to perform at the highest level without losing themselves in the process.