What gives you energy?

A recurring personal tag Kyle applies across his reading to passages about what energizes versus drains a person — covering both the people and the kind of work worth choosing. From Gordon B. Hinckley — Go Forward With Faith, he flags Henry B. Eyring’s account of Hinckley: “When I’m with him, I’m wiser… he brings down the power of heaven into my life,” paired with Kyle’s own takeaway — “don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire” (linked to Charlie Munger). From Becoming, he tags Michelle Obama’s counsel to surround yourself with people who don’t weigh you down: “good relationships feel good… they don’t hurt,” and to choose friends and partners by that test.

In How To Take Smart Notes, the same tag marks Ahrens’s distinction between exergonic and endergonic work: some work constantly drains energy and only moves if you keep adding more, while a good workflow “gains momentum, pulling us along and sometimes even energizing us.” Ahrens ties this to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and a “virtuous circle” where positive experience motivates the next task — versus a “vicious circle of failure.” Across all three, the tag is a lens for designing a life and a working process around what generates energy rather than depletes it.

Where this appears

• Gordon B. Hinckley — Go Forward With Faith — Eyring on how Hinckley made others wiser; Kyle’s note to only work for people you respect and admire.
• Becoming — Michelle Obama’s counsel to keep relationships that “feel good” and don’t weigh you down.
• How To Take Smart Notes — the exergonic/endergonic distinction and the energizing “virtuous circle” of a good workflow, tied to Flow.