One of the questions I hear most often is

The Mirror
One of the questions I hear most often is, ‘Where do you get your energy from’.
2004-03-08 0:00

Sometimes I tell people it is zapped from a spaceship circling Earth, which will one day take me back to my own planet, orbiting the star Electra in the Pleiades cluster.

If I say this with a straight face, and I open my eyes very wide, people believe me… or, at least, they don’t ask any more questions.

The truth is much more mundane. I get my energy from doing lots of things. I pack my day with activity – even if I have to rise at 4am to get to a TV studio, I make time for a brief work-out in my gym, and I grab all the morning newspapers to read in the car (it’s OK, I don’t do the driving).
I learned long ago that the most exhausting thing is to do nothing, when there are things to be done. It’s much harder to avoid a task than to simply plunge in and get it done. A job that’s hanging over you is leaching your energy every second of the day.

Even something as dull as washing the dishes is a drain on your resources if you put it off. The actual business of filling a bowl with hot, soapy water, dunking the crockery and applying the dishcloth is child’s play – what wears us out, when we try to be lazy, is the weight of a job that’s waiting for us.

A pile of dirty plates is like a constant nagging refrain in the sub-conscious mind: ‘You haven’t done me yet,’ it whispers. ‘You’re going to have to face me sometime. I’m still here. You can’t ignore me forever.’

Do a job and it’s over. It’s in the past. But put a job off and it lasts forever. If you want you