As a busy lawyer, your time and attention are your most valuable assets that you must jealously and vigilantly guard. If you want to be great, minimize distractions as much as possible. Top performers, throughout history and across domains, have worked hard to minimize distractions in order to focus on their most important work.

J.J. Watt is a defensive end for the NFL’s Houston Texans, and is one of the league’s top players. He’s so good that he’s typically part of the conversation when analysts debate the greatest defensive players of all time. Watt’s 2014 season was particularly noteworthy. Despite frequently being double-teamed by offensive players trying to block him, he racked up 20.5 quarterback sacks, which ranks in the top 10 in the league for most sacks in a season (he also had 20.5 sacks in 2012). He even scored five touchdowns in 2014, which is a level of production that most running backs and wide receivers would be happy with. Beyond his remarkable on-field success, Watt had even more to celebrate in 2014. At the beginning of the season he signed a $100 million contract with the Texans, which was at the time a record deal for a defensive player.

I’m working on a new book (launching in April!) that is meant to address some of the common challenges that young lawyers face when getting started in their careers and prescribes a formula for success. To create the formula, I spoke to scores of successful senior lawyers at firms across the country to get their opinions on what it takes to build a successful legal career. One of the most surprising results from my research was the number of attorneys who placed high importance on the need for young lawyers to cultivate outside interests.

This surprised me at first, but after giving it more thought it makes perfect sense. The practice of law can be all consuming if you let it. I know this from my own experience.

Early in my career I worked a lot (even by busy lawyer standards), thought about work all the time, and checked my Blackberry (yes, I’m that old) incessentantly. The blinking red light on my Blackberry indicating a new message in my inbox was my personal Pavlov’s bell.

Winston Churchill once said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” There’s no doubt that Churchill left an indelible mark on history. While we think of Churchill for his wartime leadership, his experience holds many lessons related to personal branding for lawyers as well.

Churchill was on the outside looking in when it came to the political power structure in Great Britain in the 1930s. Mired in intra-party squabbles with former political allies, Churchill was left out when a new government was formed in 1931. By mid-decade, as he was entering his 60s, Churchill was widely perceived to be all washed up, exiled to the political wilderness. Churchill biographer Robert Rhodes James, writes: “By the end of 1933 Churchill was widely regarded as a failed politician, in whom no real trust could be reasonably placed; by June 1935, these opinions had been fortified further.”

But as we now know, Churchill was not done; far from it, in fact. By 1939 he was appointed to a cabinet position within the government, and in 1940 he became prime minister. It was an amazing turnaround from political outsider to the heights of power.

So how did Churchill engineer this amazing feat?

Lawyers work hard. It’s what they do.

The good news is that hard work can be deeply satisfying. It feels good to do a job well done. Accomplishment gives us meaning. Hopefully this resonates, because it’s a feeling you’ve experienced before. But it’s not just me making this assertion about the connection between hard work and happiness – academic research backs it up.

In the early 1980s, well known psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted a series of studies meant to understand the psychological impact of common behaviors we engage in every day. One of the major insights of his work was to show that depth generates meaning. He found that people are actually happier doing deep work than they are relaxing. Based on his findings he concluded: “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.” Csikszentmihalyi popularized the term “flow state” that is used to describe the effortless feeling experienced by high achievers – from authors to athletes – operating at peak performance during periods of hard work.

It’s called “hard” work for a reason. Any time you’re trying to learn a new skill, or attempting to build something worthwhile, it’s hard. Most of us start enjoying something only after we get good at it. And it takes practice and hard work to get good. Take playing the guitar, for example. Practicing guitar is painful (physically and emotionally) and frustrating for several months until enough work has been put in to build up calluses and learn the basics. Once someone earns their calluses and their skills improve, however, guitar starts to become fun and satisfying. Resilience is built up during the painful periods of any worthy endeavor, and serves as a bridge to the other side. If you want to do something that’s satisfying, most times you have to do it when it’s not.

When I read a book, I’ll remember the broad strokes of the story or, in the case of non-fiction, the main thrust of the message. But it’s rare that I’ll remember the details of a minor character, or the intricacies of a professional development sequence.

Every so often, however, I’ll come across a book passage that makes me sit up straighter in my chair, grab my highlighter, and “dog ear” the page. It’s a message so powerful that it stays with me long after I’ve finished the book. It’s profound and remarkable when it happens. And it only seems to occur when the circumstances are right: which is when a powerful message reaches you at a time in your life when you’re ready to receive it.

This is not a post about legal marketing or attorney business development in the purest sense. It’s more a message about how to draw inspiration, grow, and prosper as people and professionals from the world around us. I, for one, find that it’s often how you spend your time outside of work that dictates how successful you become at work. And there are few more beneficial activities than reading great books.

I’m going to keep this short, because I want to you to be able to get back to what really matters – your work – as quickly as possible after consuming this concise, important message: Lawyers should use social media as little as possible, and the time they do spend on social networks should be very purposeful and intentional.

Here’s why:

First, social media platforms are engineered to be addictive. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and other social media platforms grow and get paid based on how many people use their platforms and for how long. These companies compete in what’s called the “attention economy” and, as Seth Godin (who famously eschews most social media) explains, we are the products these companies sell. They round up our attention, and sell it to advertisers. Accordingly, it’s not surprising that social media platforms are engineered to be as addictive as possible. And it’s working. Facebook’s head of marketing recently discussed in a speech that the average millennial checks his or her phone 157 times daily. That’s insane, because…

This is a message to young law firm associates:

Your law firm cares about your personal and professional growth. But make no mistake, the law is a business – often a cutthroat one. Your firm has made a big investment in you in terms of salary, benefits, training and overhead. It expects a return on that investment. As a young lawyer, it’s important to understand how your firm perceives your value, and to a great extent it comes down to dollars and cents.

Law firms rely on leverage, which means having lots of associates in place to work and bill. Young associates should understand they are typically less valuable (in terms of dollars and cents) to their firms than their mid-level and senior associate colleagues. It’s a fact of life in today’s economic environment that clients are less willing to (as they see it) subsidize the on-the-job training of young lawyers by paying for unproductive time. This means that as a young lawyer you must be productive and effective – and not just busy – to stand out.

How many times have you read a book or blog post, listened to a keynote or podcast, and been inspired to take on the world? You know the feeling. The writer or speaker drops a bunch of knowledge bombs which open your mind to new possibilities. You can barely wait to get back to the office and start implementing everything you’ve learned.

So you sit down at your desk, pull out your legal pad and create a cascading flowchart full of goals, with a corresponding laundry list of to-do items. You’re pumped. You’re ready. Time to go big. This time it will be different.

But then it’s not. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you never even get started. The legal pad that you were so excited about sits undisturbed on the corner of your desk. Pretty soon it gets filed away with all the others. You go back to doing things the same way you always have.

Sound familiar. Feel familiar? It does to me. At least it used to.

There’s a great deal that the legal industry can learn from the technology industry. A good starting point is Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup, which is filled ideas that are just as valuable (perhaps more valuable) for large, institutional law firms as they are for fast-growing tech startups.

Another great source of ideas and inspiration is the unstoppable force that is Jeff Bezos and his Amazon empire. Bezos has many powerful mantras for his business, but this is one of my favorites: It’s always “Day 1” at Amazon.

What he means is that Amazon will never stop being a startup. It’s a message Bezos drilled down on in a recent letter to shareholders (written from a building he works in named “Day 1”), in which he wrote:

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”