What great leaders know about themselves that most others don’t

What level of intensity can you sustain without crashing? It’s time to learn your Ideal RPE: Rate of Perceived Exertion.

Matt Hunter • July 15, 2025

Capitalism doesn’t care about your well-being.

I’ll say that one more time: Capitalism doesn’t care about your well-being.

If you don’t protect yourself, the modern world will grind you down and burn you out. It’s nothing personal; that’s just the way the system was designed. Its goal is to maximize output and profits, not to make you feel good. Unless you protect yourself, you will experience chronic stress, and it will take a toll on your mind, body, and performance over time.

In my years as an entrepreneur and executive coach, I’ve seen countless friends, colleagues, and clients hit the point of burnout. They work at a level of intensity they can’t sustain, and eventually, the body says, ‘no more.’ Their system fully breaks down to the point of non-functioning. It can take months or years to recover, and often, they struggle to bounce back fully.

While I understand and have sympathy for this struggle, it’s also important to be honest in acknowledging that succeeding at the highest levels means being smart enough to know how to avoid this fate. Part of the skill of sustaining high performance is learning how far you can push yourself without crossing the line to burnout.

Great leaders and high performers understand their ideal Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE)—the level of intensity they can sustain without crashing. They are wise and creative enough to know when to surge forward and when to rest and recharge their batteries. They’re intentional and strategic about how they spend their energy, not just for their own health and longevity, but to create sustainable performance across the span of their career, and for the good of their organization as a whole.

This is a critical skill for leaders that requires both self-awareness and strategy, and starts with advocating for what you need. You need to figure out your personal resource stack: meditation, therapy, training, naps, time with friends, cutting alcohol, maybe all of the above. What helps you to recover quickly and stay sharp? The goal of these practices isn’t to be comfortable; it’s to stay focused, strong, and available to execute for long periods.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint

Accomplishing your mission is a marathon, not a sprint. Just like a helicopter can’t run at max effort indefinitely without breaking down, neither can you. The truth is that at the highest levels of business leadership, there’s no such thing as work-life balance. Excellence over time has less to do with balance and more to do with endurance. They don’t let ambition run them into the ground, but they also don’t focus too much on their own comfort. Instead of trying to create balance, they ask a better question: What do I need to keep performing at a high level of intensity year after year?

This is where your personal resource stack comes in.

For Kobe Bryant, it was napping several times throughout the day so that he could train harder for longer. Winston Churchill worked from bed in the mornings and took afternoon naps so he could work 15-hour days without exhaustion. Elite leaders don’t just grind—they train, recover, and return stronger. They are playing a long game, ensuring they have the energy to go the distance.

As Kobe described this ethos: “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to be the best. I train with the thought that if someone else is doing a workout at 3 in the morning, then I should be doing it at 2. I don’t need too many hours of sleep. I can go off of three to four hours. If I’m working out in the morning, I’ll get up early. I’ll go train, I’ll go shoot, I’ll go to practice, then I’ll come back home, I’ll take a nap for about an hour, then I’ll get back up and do my second session.”

Of course, there are some leaders who sprint the whole marathon, but only a handful of genetically gifted people can actually do that. The rest of us have to resource ourselves like we’re critical to our company’s success. Understand what you need to cover your basics: sleep, nutrition, exercise, social time, limits on alcohol consumption, and recovery time. Everyone has different needs in these categories, and you’ve gotta take the time to understand what works for you. If you get this wrong, you pay the price. Understanding your ideal RPE means knowing your limits, because if you push too hard, you are almost guaranteed to burn out, become miserable, or develop an illness.

Let’s talk about sleep for a minute. Popular opinion and scientific evidence suggest that we need 7-8 hours of sleep to be at our best. But everyone is different, and many leaders can (somehow) get by on four hours a night. Be honest with yourself if you’re not actually one of these people. Experiment with how you lead on seven hours vs. four hours of sleep. If you lead better on seven hours, budget more time for sleep. Sleep is 100% tied to your mojo, your reactiveness, your recovery, your ability to focus, and your ability to inspire people. If you’re getting less than seven hours of sleep and you’re slipping in any of these areas, you need to get more sleep. One of my coaching clients was sleeping three hours a night. He was also incredibly reactive, bursting with anger if he didn’t like what he heard, and had a hard time trusting people. For him, it was best to get more sleep. I had to sell him on the fact that getting more sleep was one of the best things he could do for the company, having a direct impact on the culture and the performance of the organization.

Hopefully, I don’t have to sell you on the importance of taking care of yourself enough that you don’t crash and burn. But again, it’s a skill, and it means taking the time to learn your own RPE and develop your personal resource stack so that you can sustain that RPE.

This is something you need to prioritize, or it’s not going to happen.

Given that your company and capitalism don’t care about your well-being, you must respond in kind with a similar level of ruthlessness toward giving yourself what you need. For leaders, it’s a battle, often fought on their own schedule. You must do whatever it takes to resource yourself. Lie. Subvert. Schedule fake meetings. This is war. Don’t play nice here. It will screw you.

Make it your job to figure out what you need. You must figure out what actually moves the needle for you, whether it’s breathwork, quarterly psychedelic therapy, or massages and sauna sessions. For others, it’s a therapist, time with friends, watching movies, and taking naps. Just make sure you actually figure out a resourcing stack that works for you rather than whatever kind of self-care you’ve been sold.

Then, make sure you prioritize giving yourself what you need to go the distance and be your best day in and day out.

If you don’t get this right, the system will break you. If you do, you’ll amaze yourself and others with your capacity to endure.