One of my employees, Patrick, was leaving work around lunchtime with his coat on and his bag over his back and I asked if he was going home? “No,” he said, “I’m just going out to lunch to read my book.”

I replied: “Must be a big book!”

He laughed and pressed me on a related issue that made me ponder whether great success rests on 24/7 focus. My observation is that lots of very successful people are nearly maniacal when it comes to the main game in their life.

 So, whatever you might be trying to achieve as your most important pursuit, be it looking for a promotion, building a business, being a sports or entertainment star or say being a great mum or dad, the question is: do you have to be full-on and totally into be a great success? Or can you mix it with chilling out which actually enhances your likelihood of being a great success?

Liz Huber, who calls herself a “mindset and productivity coach” writing for www.medium.com gave us her “10 Rules of the Ultra-Successful to Master your Focus & Achieve your Goals”

My colleague Patrick got me thinking about this when he said he’d listened to an interview I did with a well-known fund manager, who said he’d seen an employee going to work on public transport reading a book! And it wasn’t a markets or money-related book!

When the young employee got to work, he was quizzed on what he knew about what had happened on Wall Street and what it was likely to do to stocks here. The poor guy had to admit he was clueless about the subject as he’d been reading his book. The guy lost his job!

The fund manager in question is very successful and was clearly a believer in being 100% focused on the job at hand. He didn’t want part-timers who might be able to do a good job but full-on full-timers who want to win and win big time.

This led Patrick to ask what I thought about him enjoying himself, maybe lost in a book such as Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?

It was a good question but I didn’t have an answer for him so I thought about it. And this is why I’m writing this piece right now.

As he’s a budding financial adviser, my first preference in the books I’d like Patrick to read would be say Ray Dalio’s Principles: Life and Work or Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor or even my book — Join The Rich Club, though I think he’s already done that. Well, I hope he has!

But is that right thinking? So I thought I’d test it out.

Liz Huber’s 10 rules to be a success don’t go long on the “you gotta chill out” option, so what does she see as critical in turning say a good personal winning story into a great one?

The core of her assessment on what makes you succeed exceptionally is the f-word for focus. “Focus is the key to success in the 21st Century,” she insists. This is how she makes her argument and it’s compelling logic:

• “You can probably agree that in order to be successful, you should know what success looks like for you and set the goals you want to achieve accordingly.”
• “In order to achieve these goals, you need to identify and work on the projects that have the most impact on achieving your goals.”
• “But in modern times, working on important projects is difficult because we’re constantly distracted by other things like email, notifications and meetings.”
• “And if we’re distracted, it can take us up to 25 minutes to fully focus on our previous task again.”
• “Consequently, we end up being extremely busy all the time but don’t actually get anything important done.”
• “Ultimately, we end up stressed but unsuccessful.”

Here are her 10 Rules

1. Plan your week according to your TOP 3 goals.
2. Know your WHY, which helps keep your focus.
3. Time-Block like you mean it — schedule the important stuff and don’t compromise on it.
4. Learn to say “NO”.
5. Start the day with intention and ask yourself: “If I could only do ONE thing today to make progress on my goals, what would it be?”
6. Design your Deep Work Zone and don’t get distracted from it.
7. Keep distractions out by being objective about what lures you away from the crucial task and design systems to KO them.
8. Use the Pomodoro Technique to learn how to focus on one thing. This is a time management system that encourages people to work with the time they have—rather than against it. Using this method, you break your work day into 25-minute chunks separated by five-minute breaks. These intervals are referred to as pomodoros. (See these apps: Focus Keeper and Focus Booster.)
9. Take care of your body to make sure your productivity doesn’t suffer. A “sleep deprived body is a great recipe for killing your productivity as it leads to impaired memory, increased levels of stress hormones and a significant decrease in your mental ability to focus,” Huber explains.
10. Increase your mental focus through mindfulness, which says Huber knows all work and no relaxation makes Jack and Jill underachievers.

This is her big takeaway and I think she’s so right: “There is a true cost of being unfocused. If you want to be ultra-successful, you really need to get clear on what you want and focus your time, energy and attention on it.”

That said, only two out of the 10 rules were about a better life versus being a better worker, which I think is a key takeaway as well.

So how important is the role of chilling out, exercising and getting into mindfulness, meditation and say good eating?

Writing on the flywithfitness.com website, Ching Chew made a strong case in his “Why we need to chill — the importance of some rest and relax time for your health.”

And this isn’t just touchy feely stuff — there is  science in chilling out.

“It is important to get a little rest and relax time to activate our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS),” Chew explains. “PNS stimulates digestion and restoration functions in our body.

“I quite often refer to it as the green zone; the zone that allows us to relax and experience amazing overall health benefits, including better sleep and improved gut health.”

When we are under stress — fighting or flighting — he says we’re in the red zone

He is on a unity ticket with the Dalai Lama, who argues that a “calm mind brings self-confidence, so that is very important for good health.”

On the other hand, the long-term effects of living in the red zone can eventually lead to various health issues such as high blood pressure and irritable bowel syndrome.

Here’s Chew’s rules for effective chilling out:

1. Trust yourself and stop trying to please others. Take the pressure off yourself.
2. Breather deeply and engage with meditation.
3. Sleep 7-9 hours. If that’s hard, look at your caffeine intake and electric devices in your room.
4. Improve your digestion via smaller meals at night, chew your foods 50 times before swallowing, avoid processed foods and have a glass of warm water with lemon juice or a glass of apple cider vinegar in the morning half an hour before you begin your meal.
5. Take breaks and pamper yourself.
6. Learn to say no (there’s that one again!).
7. Schedule you time which is non-negotiable.
8. Have a morning ritual like going for a swim.
9. Schedule three one-hour blocks for returning calls rather than doing lots of stuff on the fly.
10. Exercise gratitude, which Chew says will deliver calm into your life.

What these rules are mirroring are the rules or systems that explain success. Focused people with enormous drive and efficient systems create businesses such as McDonald’s.

Ray Kroc, who turned McDonald’s into one of the greatest business success stories ever, could see it and created the systems-dependent operation that could be reproduced the world over. The McDonald brothers, who created a great small business, couldn’t see it and maybe were distracted by other things in their life.

The old business tyros like Kroc were often 24/7 focused on business. Those who never ascend such tall mountains of success invariably weren’t as committed. However, many of these great business builders had terrible family experiences because they couldn’t pull off the double play of business and family success.

The lesson has to be that if you want untold business success in concert with a lasting, successful family experience, you must have a business plan built on focus and the best of inputs, that’s complimented by a professionally conceived plan to ensure that you chill out with those you love.

If you’re a true professional with your business goals and leave your family objectives to chance, then your success rate with your loved ones will be like a lot of small businesses that perform OK but are not truly great. And many of them fail!

So what would my considered answer to Patrick? Keep reading your book and come back charged and focused and ready to perform. I want high-performing but chilled out human beings on my team!

I’ve often advised those aspiring to succeed in business to remember this great piece of advice I once was given by a random, wise guy I met at a conference. He said: “Peter, work out what you want. Figure out the price. Pay the price!”

If you want the double play of business and family success, the advice from Liz Huber and Ching Chew combined would be a great start.