I said yes to everything for years. Board positions, speaking engagements, networking events, consulting calls, race invitations. If someone asked and I could physically fit it in my calendar, I did it. 

After all, that's what driven people do, right? We show up. We deliver. We don't leave opportunities on the table.

Then I noticed something…unfortunate. My best work wasn't happening in all those meetings I'd squeezed in. It was happening in the margins I'd accidentally left open: the early morning hours before anyone else was awake and the rare Saturday afternoon when nothing was scheduled. 

The quality of my thinking, my leadership, even my training—all of it suffered when my calendar looked like a game of Tetris with no gaps.

The word "no" might be the most important tool in your arsenal as a leader, parent, or athlete. But for high achievers, it's also the hardest one to use.

The alarm goes off at 5 AM, and it looks like midnight. I can see my breath in the bedroom. My running shoes are waiting by the door where I left them the night before, but the bed is warm with the weight of winter blankets. Wife snoozing beside me. No race on the calendar. No training plan to follow. Nobody’s expecting me to show up.

I don’t really have to get up and run. Right?

This is December in Memphis, and these mornings tell me everything I need to know about discipline.

I’ve made some of my worst business decisions at 9 PM on a Thursday after a day packed with meetings, fires to put out, and noise from my personal life. I think we’ve all been there, regardless of our position. 

The problem isn’t necessarily that we’re making decisions when we’re tired. That’s unavoidable when you’re in a leadership role in a business. The problem is that we don’t adjust our decision-making framework to account for our depleted state.

I was talking with one of my colleagues last week who was beating himself up over a deal that fell apart. He kept replaying every decision, looking for the fatal mistake, convinced this one failure might define, maybe even sink, his career.

I recognized that spiral immediately. I've been there more times than I can count.

With Thanksgiving around the corner, I've been thinking about failure differently. Because, really, gratitude isn't just about celebrating what went right. It's about recognizing that some of your most important growth came from the moments when everything went sideways.