Pedaling Your Ideas

"Pedaling" Your Ideas

"If you want to know when I get the greatest mental energy and best ideas, they come when I mountain bike," says Bruce Jenner, Olympic gold medal winner and entrepreneur. "I go up into the mountains and ride for an hour or two. I'm huffing and puffing, my heart is beating at 160, I'm really working. At the same time, it's quiet and peaceful. The scenery is incredible. No phone calls, nobody's bugging me.

"That's when my mind starts going. I go over speeches in my head, I think about what's going on with my business, I come up with marketing ideas. My head is filled with ideas. I've been biking for so many years, I don't have to think about what I'm doing unless I hit some really rough terrain. The blood is pumping, the heart is working. I'm alive—and my mind is working.

"Even though I'm putting a lot of physical energy into biking, my mental energy is increasing. To me, having energy means being physically fit. If you're in good physical shape, you can handle a lot more intellectually and emotionally as well. But the physical comes first. All you have to do is lose your health, and all the other things you're doing in life become trivial."

Bruce Jenner may be an Olympic athlete, but he is no different than the rest of us when it comes to needing energy to stimulate his thinking and accomplish his goals. Energy determines how you move forward physically, mentally, and emotionally. It governs what you do and how you do it. Most of the time we take energy for granted. We think of it when we're running low on fuel, when we haven't taken proper care of ourselves and we feel we are not up to the tasks ahead.

We are all living organisms here on this planet. Life is too short and precious not to have our minds and bodies function at the optimal performance levels. We must be aware of what we eat, what we drink, who we're with, and how we think. We can harness our mental, physical and spiritual energy to keep us motivated and inspired, allow us to take more actions, and to make those actions more powerful and vibrant.

The most important weapon on Earth is the human soul on fire.

—Ferdinand Foch,
French marshal