I am a child of Africa. And for those of you have been in close proximity to lions in the bush, understand the power of the lion, the King of the jungle. They are so powerful and majestic and literally can eat you in a second or rip you apart. One wrong move. Or just being that close to them and when they roar, your breastbone literally vibrates. It is an insane experience.
Work like a lion, not like a cow.
I took this line from Naval Ravikant. Two animals with two work patterns. A cow grazes steadily all day, every day, at a constant low intensity. A lion rests most of the time, watches, waits and then when a target appears, it sprints in one violent burst, kills, eats, and goes back to resting.
Lions actually rest for 20 hours a day! 20 hours of sleeping, napping, resting, being with their family.
His argument is that knowledge work is lion work, but we have organized it like cow work. The 9-to-5 is a factory-floor inheritance: a schedule built for jobs where output scaled linearly with hours logged. Creative and strategic work does not behave that way. The value comes in concentrated bursts of insight and execution, so pretending to be productive for a fixed eight hours mostly produces the pretense.
Practical claims :
Work in sprints when you're inspired, and go hard. Inspiration is perishable and act on it the day you have it.
Rest properly in between. The rest is not slack, it's the mechanism. A lion that never rests can't sprint. Half-working all day means you're never fully on and never fully recovered.
Judge yourself on output, not hours. The hours metric is the cow's metric.
Wait for the right target
Most of a lion's day is spent not hunting. Selectivity about what you chase is doing work, even when it looks like idleness. And hunts actually are not fast at all.
When a lioness hunts, she is just hanging out, but no one can see her.
And when she has her eye on the prey, all she is doing is just staring at a huge pack…. zebras, gazelles on the other side. She is just staring at the animals. And she is waiting for when to strike.
She is not going to strike from afar. She is going to get really, really close and not let the animals know that she is there and making her way. Every 30 minutes or so, she would get up, find a point to move into another spot. So she is slowly getting to the prize. So much patience.
And then the best part which is also leading into business: she is not striking to go catch just any gazelle or zebra. She has already picked out the animal that she wants. She is not just taking a shot. She is focused and extremely precise on the one she wants. She has her eye on the prize, the single focus.
Our lioness is that in business, we have to pick, we have to focus. It is not a one size fits all. It is not, I am going to try this and then move that. I think rather that the successful hunt comes with precision and with focus.
The Lion King actually rests, and still own the jungle.
Let’s learn from the animal kingdom, to truly rule the kingdom of our business and live the beautiful life we want.
With love, Christina
Know a woman in agriculture, or any woman growing where she has been planted, who would connect with this message?
Forward this to her. She may be exactly who herloom is for.
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