About an hour and twenty minutes into Chris Sacca’s appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast, Sacca describes the profound shift that occurred in his life when he moved from San Francisco to Truckee, near Lake Tahoe.

The whole podcast is worth listening to, but the essence of that move was that it allowed him to shift from playing defence to playing offense.

He stopped being only nominally present in the meetings he felt he had to, and instead started pursuing only the relationships he saw as valuable.

Offense = “the action of attacking”

Defence = “resistance against attack”

All things being equal, adult life mostly trends towards defence.

Defence of a job. Defence of a mortgage. Defence of a car loan and a credit card.

Defence of your time.

All these requests for your time and energy, far too many for a single 24 hour day, bombard you like a quiver of arrows.

Some nights, you feel really good, because you allotted your best 4 hours, or 6 hours, or 8 hours, to filling your time with the finest of the arrows that were propelled in.

But there’s always more arrows coming tomorrow, and too many you let through today.

There’s some ideal, all-offense life — no debt, the minimum viable amount of possessions — and each day arriving, clean and anew, unburdened by expectation, or calendar invites to 14-digit conference lines, or vulturous requests via LinkedIn InMail to “pick your brain”.

All-offense is probably an unrealistic expectation of life. More likely is a life where the scale tips to offense, and you defend just enough to get by.

But at the core of all this, is choice.

On defence, you are reacting.

On offense, you get to choose the next move.

Go look at your calendar for the next week.

How many chunks of blocked-out time did you choose to put there? How many would you still accept if your only purpose was to be the best version of you?

How many contribute to you growing, pushing, striving, learning?

In your inbox, your boardroom, your coffee shop, your browser, your Twitter and Facebook — how many times are you scrolling, just reacting?

And how many times are you choosing?

How many times are you acting with purpose?

Offense to defence is not a switch so much as an ebbing tide.

As the tide runs out, the change begins.

Time to move. Time to transition from offense to defence.

Time to choose.