Hello, Lovely Human,

Sometimes we just get tired. Have you been recently?

Some of us think it has to do with age, or how many reps we are doing of something. I have an entirely different take on this.

It has to do with the energy within and through you at this moment on your journey.

Energy within is normally tied to passion. It is the thing you would do at 11pm for free, and did, for years, before anyone paid you for it.

Energy around a gift given to you to serve others is purpose. That one does not come from you. It moves through you, and you can feel the difference, because purpose can carry you through a week that passion alone could not.

Then there is a third kind, and it is the one nobody writes about.

Some of us must have the energy to make a living and keep a roof over our head, and I get that tired. It is the tired of showing up on a Tuesday for work that takes your hours and gives nothing back to the energy within or through you. No passion to refill you. No purpose to carry you. Just the mortgage, the school fees, and your word that you would be there.

And those of us lucky enough to be energy powered by passion and purpose , we also get tired. Passion burns hot and it burns out. Purpose asks more of you than any boss ever did. The difference is that our tired comes with a reason attached. We can name what emptied us. That is a privilege, and most of us forget it is one.

So I want to say this plainly this week.

Being a responsible adult and earning a living tired, with no passion or purpose, is the hardest job in this world. So be tired. It’s a privilege like aging I would say.

Harder than founding a company on something that lights you on fire . Harder than the board seat. Harder than any title I have held. Every one of those came with an energy source attached. Yours does not.

If that is you right now, you are not failing. You are carrying. And carrying without fuel is its own kind of strength, the quiet kind that never gets a LinkedIn post.

Just get a good night's sleep, and tomorrow is a new day my tired friend.

Why is the GLEAC community like no other? Quiet Capital. It's everything that never shows up on a balance sheet. Who trusts you. What you know. Who picks up when you call. Here's one of many examples of what it looked like inside our community this week .

Religious Focus this month: Stoicism

Every month we pick one religion or way of living. It allows us to open our minds and be mindful of how we and others live better, healthier, joyful and meaningful lives.

Last week we sat with premeditatio malorum, the Stoic habit of rehearsing misfortune before it arrives, and Nikos the Athens DJ who kept a wedding dancing through a power cut. This week, a different Stoic skill: what to do with a thought that arrives when you have nothing left.

Beatriz Nunes is forty eight and has been a nurse for twenty six years, the last nine of them as charge nurse on a night medical ward at a public hospital in Porto. She has a rule that the younger nurses think is a superstition.

She does not resign at 7am.

Not that she has never wanted to. The rule exists because of how often she has wanted to. Night shift on a medical ward is twelve hours of other people's worst days. By six in the morning, after a death at two and a fall at four and a daughter who screamed at her in the corridor because nobody had called, Beatriz can feel a sentence forming. It is always the same sentence. I am done with this.

She used to believe the sentence. For years she thought the thing that arrived at 6am was the truth, finally, with the politeness worn off.

Then a doctor she respected, an old internist who had read everything, caught her in the staff kitchen one morning with the sentence halfway out of her mouth, and said something she has never forgotten.

"Beatriz. You are not having a thought. You are having a night."

He was quoting, loosely, Epictetus, the Stoic who had been a slave. When an impression arrives, Epictetus taught, do not let it carry you off. Say to it: wait a moment, let me see who you are, and where you come from. The Stoics called these impressions phantasiai, and the whole discipline was in the pause between the impression and your agreement with it. The feeling is not up to you. The assent is.

So now Beatriz has the rule. The 6am sentence gets written in the back of her notebook, dated, and nothing else. She hands over the ward at seven, takes the number 500 bus along the river, sleeps until two, eats, and only then opens the notebook.

In nine years she has written the sentence forty one times. Awake, fed and rested, she has agreed with it zero times.

What she has found instead, in the daylight version of the note, is usually something smaller and more useful. A rota that needs changing. A junior nurse who needs to be told, kindly, that she is good. A daughter in a corridor who needed one phone call three hours earlier than she got it.

Marcus Aurelius, an emperor who commanded armies on the Danube while chronically ill and chronically short of sleep, opened the fifth book of his private notebook with a scene every night nurse recognises. At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work, as a human being. He wrote it because he struggled with it. Seneca, in his essay on tranquillity, went further than Marcus and said the quiet part out loud: the mind must be given rest, and it will rise keener after resting. Rest was not a break from the Stoic's work. It was part of the method.

What the old doctor gave Beatriz was not resilience, and not positive thinking. It was a filing system. Tired thoughts go in the back of the book. Rested thoughts get to decide.

Guiding question:

Which sentence do you keep hearing at your own 6am, and have you ever once read it back rested?

Three steps. Before you decide anything.

1. Name it before you diagnose it.
The next time you catch yourself thinking "I'm done," "they don't rate me," or "this isn't working," ask one question first: when did I last sleep properly? If the honest answer is "not recently," you are having a night, not a thought.

2. Write it in the back of the book.
Give the tired sentence a page, a date, and nothing else. No email, no resignation, no "we need to talk." Then do Beatriz's test: read it back after a full night's sleep and a meal, and see if you still agree.

3. Schedule rest like it's a client.
Pick one evening this week and put it in the calendar as unmovable. Seneca said the mind rises keener after resting. Treat that as a performance strategy, not a reward you have to earn.

Forty one times she wanted to quit. Zero times once she'd slept.