Why You Need to Shut Up and Decompress

I'm writing this from Maui.

Phone’s off. Notifications silenced. The only sound is the ocean, rolling in and out.

Most founders hear vacation and immediately think lazy. Like if you're not grinding 24/7, you're falling behind.

But here's the truth…

If you don’t find time to decompress, you’re not a high performer, You're a bottleneck waiting to break.

In the LeBron Longevity System, I talked about how he spends millions on recovery. 

He doesn’t do it cause it’s fancy, he does it because it’s a competitive advantage. 

He knows that the game isn’t won by the person who sprints the fastest for one quarter, it’s won by the person who can still dominate in the fourth.  

As an entrepreneur, your brain is your greatest asset. But when you're constantly plugged in, reacting to every DM, every email, every urgent fire, you’re running on empty.

And eventually, you're going to crash.

When you truly disconnect, not just "Do Not Disturb" for an hour, but actually step away with no phone and no laptop, two things happen:

First, you get strategic clarity.

You stop staring at the ground and start looking at the horizon. You finally see the big-picture pivots you've been too buried to notice.

All those decisions you've been putting off, The ones that felt too big or too risky to make while you're in execution mode, They suddenly become obvious.

And it's not because you magically got smarter. It's because you gave your brain space to think instead of just react.

Second, you get a creative surge.

Innovation doesn't happen in the middle of a Slack thread or while you're answering your 47th DM of the day.

It happens in the white space. When your brain isn't being hijacked by notifications every three minutes.

When you give yourself room to breathe, your brain gives you your next big idea. The product pivot. The content angle. The partnership opportunity you didn't see before.

But you can't access any of that if you never unplug.

Most people don't know how to decompress. They take a weekend off but still check their phone every 20 minutes. They go on vacation but bring their laptop just in case.

That's just working from a different location.

Here's how to do it right.

The Digital Hard-Stop

Turn your phone off. Not on DND. Not on airplane mode. Off.

If your business can't survive 48 hours without you, you don't have a business. You have a job you can't quit.

I know that sounds harsh. But it's true.

And the crazy part is when you actually do this, you realize the world doesn't end. Your business doesn't collapse. Most of the urgent stuff people were hitting you up about wasn't actually urgent at all.

The Audit of Absence

While you're disconnected, pay attention to what you don't miss.

What tasks didn't come to mind once, what meetings could have been an email, What fires put themselves out without you.

Those are the low-leverage tasks you need to automate, delegate, or delete the second you get back.

This is one of the most valuable exercises you can do as a founder. You can't see what's stealing your time when you're drowning in it. You need distance to get perspective.

Family and Solo Priority

High-leverage work isn't just about business.

Reconnecting with your family, or just reconnecting with yourself is the recovery work that fuels your next 90-day sprint.

LeBron doesn't just train harder. He recovers smarter. He sleeps 12 hours a day during the season. He prioritizes his body and his mind because he knows that's what lets him stay at the top for 22 years.

You need to do the same thing.

Spending real time with your family without your phone in your hand isn't a distraction from building. It's what keeps you sharp enough to keep building at a high level.

I already know what some of you are thinking.

"I can't just disappear for 48 hours. My clients need me. My team needs me. Things will fall apart."

If that's true, you have a bigger problem than burnout. You have a dependency problem.

You've built a business where everything runs through you. Where you're the bottleneck for every decision, every approval, every fire that needs putting out.

That's not sustainable. And deep down, you already know that.

The reason you resist stepping away isn't because your business will fail without you. It's because stepping away forces you to confront the fact that you haven't built the systems that let it run without you.

And that's uncomfortable… But it's also fixable.

The first step is proving to yourself that the world doesn't end when you unplug. Once you see that, you can start building the systems that make unplugging easier every time.

This week, I want you to schedule a 24-hour blackout.

No phone. No laptop. Just you and the people who matter.

Pick a day, tell your team, set up an auto-responder, and disappear.

If you're scared to do it, that's exactly why you need to do it.

The goal isn't to prove you can survive without working. The goal is to prove your business can survive without you.

And when you come back, you'll be sharper, clearer, and more focused than you've been in months.

If you want to build something that lasts… not just a business that burns you out in three years, you need to build recovery into your system.

Not as a reward, but as a requirement for staying sharp.

Stop overthinking. Start recovering. Shut up and execute.