Both high energy and low energy are related to mental stamina. When your mental stamina “stamina bar” is full, you have high energy; otherwise, you have low energy. In yesterday’s article, I shared the importance of “protecting your mental stamina,” explaining why mental stamina is also a form of productive resource, and how people unknowingly waste their own mental stamina without realizing it.

Today, let’s talk about the specific things you can do to achieve the low-impact mindset mentioned yesterday: “you can’t hear it, you can’t see it, you don’t care, and you don’t calculate.”

Let’s use the simplest example: “refusing small matters with low value” and “refusing a favor.” When many people face these situations—or requests like them—they always get stuck in repeated inner struggles. Either they can’t refuse, end up receiving the favor but wasting time; or they refuse, yet feel uneasy inside, always thinking that in the future they’ll be abandoned and have fewer allies.

Why does this happen? On the surface, it seems to be a matter of personality—for example, lack of security—but in fact it’s because you don’t have much valuable work going on, or the valuable things you’re doing aren’t frequent enough. Whether you refuse or not comes down to the trade-off of gains and losses. If you’re idle anyway, then refusing creates a strong sense of insecurity. You feel guilty—as in, “I’m not accumulating merits or saving up ‘chips’ for the future.” Because you rejected someone, they might reject you next time you need help.

But if you’re busy doing something where the gains and losses are in the millions or even tens of millions, and someone asks you to do something for free, or to show up and attend an event that doesn’t really help you—what would you do? You’d simply refuse. Is this related to personality? No. It’s a matter of gains and losses. When you choose to be an “easygoing, agreeable person,” it’s often not because you have a great personality—it’s because your current value determines that you’re only “worthy” of being an easygoing, agreeable person.

Once you understand this, you should see it clearly: refusal is something you naturally do after you’ve been busy with high-value matters.

Likewise, when a person constantly weighs and decides over trivial matters—reconsidering again and again, comparing and comparing, unable to truly “not care” and “not calculate”—the underlying reason is also that there isn’t much high-value output. It’s very simple: when you’re frantically digging in front of a gold mine, how could you care why a bottle of farmer’s spring water costs you 5 yuan instead of 3 yuan? When you’re idle and there’s no output, your attention naturally dissipates. That’s what people mean by “idle anyway.” Since there’s no output at the moment, saving 1 yuan is still saving; so you keep comparing and calculating, over and over.

But the problem is: you don’t realize that these things also drain your mental stamina. So once your whole day is filled with these matters, you won’t think about doing anything high-value anymore—because you’re already very tired. Not physical tiredness—rather, decision fatigue, and mental fatigue.

Is this just pure laziness? Not entirely.

Then can everyone find high-value things to do? If they can’t, what should they do?

Here’s a concept you need to pay special attention to: in “high value,” “high” is a relative term. If you’re begging, then picking up trash is a high-value thing; if you’re picking up trash, then carrying trays is a high-value thing. You must have something you can try that has more value than what you’re currently doing. The key is that you need to carve out time to try it.

But what if some people already have their whole day packed—what then? That doesn’t exist. People will automatically squeeze out lower-efficiency tasks based on the priority level of what they’re doing.

For example, you feel that certain things must be done right now, because you aren’t doing anything with higher-efficiency output. Once you insert new tasks, and their output accidentally “overflows,” the so-called original must-do tasks will automatically get pushed out. Where is there any truly “must-do”? It’s just that you haven’t inserted higher-output things to push them out.

Time works like this: it’s not that you wait until you “have time” to add new tasks. Instead, regardless of whether you have time or not, you must keep inserting new tasks so that the new task competes with the old one. In the end, it decides on its own which gets pushed out.

Why do it this way? Because you don’t truly have “extra time” in any real sense. The moment you free up even a little time, you’ll immediately fill it with other things—for example, you had an important job before, but now you’re unemployed. Do you have time then? Only temporarily. Before long, you’ll fill that time with other things that are actually “less important” but that you also think are important in the moment. So if you wait until you “have time,” “get free,” and then insert something to try, you’ll never reach that moment.

Therefore, just keep inserting tasks into your thread. Your brain is very smart: as it keeps working, it will automatically drop the less efficient tasks, making you “not care,” “not calculate,” “not see,” and “not hear.” And the goal is achieved.

You’ll find that although you do many productive things in a day, your energy is still strong—more you do, the more energetic you become; the more energetic you become, the more you want to keep doing it.

Why? Because you have a yardstick for the value of your unit time. Even if you drain the mental “stamina bar,” as long as you get the feedback you want, you won’t feel tired. #GUSD年化升至3.8%