Most people who run things are far better at working than they are at resting. They can build a schedule, chase a number, manage a difficult customer, sit through a hard conversation — and then, handed a free Saturday, they have no idea what to do with it. So they fill it with noise. Ask about the Garrett O’Rourke Miami Beach routine and the answer is deliberately unglamorous: water, walking, dogs, a little travel, and a phone left in another room more often than most people would guess.
Decompressing isn’t a reward for finishing the work. In my experience, it’s part of the work. The quality of your thinking on Tuesday afternoon has a lot to do with what you did on Sunday morning.
What years of operating teaches you about burnout
Sales organizations and call centers run on energy. That’s not a motivational line, it’s an operational fact. When you own and operate a call center, you watch the same pattern repeat: the people who have something steady outside of work hold their numbers over months and years. The people who have nothing outside of work produce a spectacular few weeks and then fall off a cliff.
Over the years I’ve seen more talent lost to exhaustion than to lack of ability. Someone good at the job gets promoted, starts taking every call, answers messages at eleven at night, skips the gym, skips the meal, skips the day off — and six months later they’re short with customers, short with teammates, and can’t figure out why the job suddenly feels impossible. Nothing changed except their reserves.
When you’re responsible for a team, you also learn that you set the tone whether you mean to or not. If the person running the operation is visibly fried, everyone recalibrates around that. If they’re calm, that spreads too. So recovery stopped being a personal indulgence for me and started being a management responsibility.
Why most attempts at decompressing don’t work
Here’s the honest problem: a lot of what people call relaxing is just distraction. Scrolling isn’t rest. A loud dinner where you’re still talking about work isn’t rest. A weekend trip packed so tightly that you need a day to recover from it isn’t rest either.
Real decompression usually has two ingredients. First, your hands or your feet are busy and your mind is allowed to wander. Second, there’s no scoreboard. The moment an activity gets a metric attached to it, it becomes another performance review. That’s fine sometimes, but it isn’t recovery.
The other reason it fails is that people treat rest as something spontaneous. Business taught me that anything important gets scheduled, and anything that isn’t scheduled gets eaten by whatever’s loudest. If time off only happens when the calendar happens to be empty, it never happens.
The plain habits that actually hold up
Walking near the water, early
South Florida gives you a straightforward advantage: you can be outside almost every morning of the year. Long walks along the water before the day starts have done more for my thinking than any productivity system I’ve tried. Nothing gets solved on purpose. But the problem you were gnawing on at 10 p.m. tends to look smaller and more obvious at 7 a.m. with the ocean on one side of you.
The key part is that it’s boring and repeatable. Same route, no music some days, no agenda. Consistency matters far more than intensity — that’s true of sales pipelines, and it’s true of whatever you do to stay level.
Time with animals
Animal welfare is something I care about, and time around animals is one of the more reliable ways I know to get out of my own head. A dog does not care about your quarter. It has no interest in your strategy. It needs a walk, water, and attention, and giving it those things puts you back in the present tense immediately.
There’s a useful lesson buried in there for anyone who manages people, too. Animals respond to patience, consistency and tone — not volume. Most teams are the same way.
Travel with room in it
Travel is my favorite way to reset, but only when it’s built loosely. The version that works has one or two anchors a day and a lot of unstructured space around them. Walk a neighborhood with no destination. Eat where the line is made up of locals. Sit somewhere for an hour and just watch how a city works.
I pay attention to that last part more than I probably should. You learn a surprising amount about operations by watching a market, a cafe or a busy transit station in another country. Who greets you. How fast the line moves. Whether the staff look like they understand the system they’re working inside. Good execution looks the same everywhere, and so does bad execution.
Coming back to Miami Beach after time away also does something worth noting: it makes the familiar visible again. You notice things about your own city, your own business, your own habits that you’d stopped seeing.
Reading that has nothing to do with the day job
As an investor, I read plenty of dry material, and that’s work, not relaxation. Separate from that, I try to read things with no possible application. History, cities, architecture, how places were built and why. It scratches the same curiosity itch without putting me back on the clock.
Patience is a skill that transfers, incidentally. Sitting with a long book is closer to holding a position through a rough stretch than most people realize. Nothing about that is investment advice for anyone else — it’s a personal perspective on temperament, not a recommendation for your portfolio.
Food, cooked or found locally
South Florida is a genuinely great place to eat because so many cultures are represented within a few miles. Trying a small family-run place in a neighborhood you don’t usually visit costs almost nothing and resets your week better than an elaborate evening out. Cooking does the same thing at home — it’s a task with a clear beginning and end, and you can’t do it while checking email.
A few things I’d tell any operator
- Schedule it like a meeting. If the walk or the day off isn’t on the calendar, it isn’t real.
- Pick activities with no score. Rest that gets measured turns into another job.
- Leave the phone behind for one hour. Not the whole weekend. One hour, daily, is more sustainable and does more.
- Let your team see you do it. Permission travels downhill.
- Stop equating exhaustion with commitment. They aren’t the same thing and never were.
The broader principle
Running a business teaches you that almost nothing good comes from a single burst of effort. Results come from doing the right things repeatedly, for a long time, without blowing yourself up along the way. That applies to sales processes, to real estate, to public markets, and to the person doing all of it.
So the habits are ordinary on purpose. A walk by the water. A dog that needs attention. A trip with empty afternoons in it. A meal somewhere new. None of it is impressive and all of it compounds. If the goal is to still be sharp, curious and steady twenty years from now, the unglamorous routine is the one worth protecting.
Photo by 𝕡𝕒𝕨𝕤 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕤 on Unsplash