Let’s play some Jeopardy. Alex, I’ll take “Dubious Definitions” for $400.
The answer:
Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Beyonce, and Elon Musk
I start tapping on my buzzer incessantly as Alex finishes his sentence. My name lights up and the floor is mine:
“When you think of successful, who comes to mind?”
In this imaginary game of Jeopardy, that $400 would be mine.
That’s because the four names from the answer all fit the standard definition of success. It’s typically someone who a) is proficient in a particular activity (e.g. sport, business, art), and b) has garnered recognition for this ability.
I struggle with this commonly accepted notion. We’re leaving out many deserving people and including others not truly worthy.
Derek Sivers, entrepreneur and author, also challenges this definition. “What if Richard Branson set out to live a quiet life, but like a compulsive gambler, he just can’t stop creating companies? Then that changes everything, and we can’t call him successful anymore.” (source)
Moreover, what if someone attained their success by acting like a total jerk along the way? Shouldn’t that also be factored into the equation?
With these thoughts in mind, I’ve developed a new model for defining success:
A person’s level of achievement, using their personal goals as the measuring stick
+
The way they did it, using your personal moral compass as the barometer
This feels like a more complete rubric to me. It takes into account Derek Sivers’ point regarding goal attainment and also accounts for how the person behaved.
Unfortunately, like most models, mine contains a fatal flaw. We never really know a person’s internal goals. That information is highly personal and rarely public knowledge — unless included in a memoir or if you happen to be best friends with the person.
I’m tempted to crumple this equation into a paper ball and channel my inner Michael Jordan by dunking it into the trash. But maybe it’s not totally worthless. Instead of using it to evaluate success in others, maybe we can use it to evaluate success in the most important and critical person of all — ourselves.
We beat ourselves up over being “successful” and doing everything perfectly. I think a cause of much of that criticality is due to an unobjective analysis of what we’ve accomplished. Let’s change that by adding some objectivity in how we judge ourselves, with a new formula for personal success:
My level of achievement, compared to my goals
+
How I did it
Using this model, we can look back over the past year, month, week, or day and ask ourselves: Have I been successful?
Now that sounds like a question for Final Jeopardy.
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Memory techniques to become superhuman! Productivity tools do more in less time! The ultimate workout to finally get in shape!
We’ve all seen these headlines before. Hell, I’ve even written some of them. The concept is simple enough — do this little thing and X will improve dramatically.
The trouble with these promises is that they’re asking you to build on an incomplete foundation. It’s like working on the roof of a new house before laying a single brick.
It’s ironic because there is a simple way to improve nearly every facet of our lives — and we already do it daily. The problem is that it’s misunderstood, unexciting, and time intensive (not the usual ingredients for an eye-catching headline). These perceived downsides prevent us from treating it like a true foundational aspect of our lives. So it’s pushed aside for activities with seemingly higher returns on investment.
That overlooked foundation is sleep, the most important contributor to our health, mental and physical performance, and overall well-being.
My eyes were opened to the far-reaching effects of sleep by Matthew Walker, pHD — neuroscience professor at UC Berkeley and sleep expert — during his epic interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast. His book, Why We Sleep, dives deeper into the powerful impact that sleep (or lack thereof) has on our lives.
I’ve summarized the power of sleep into three principles :
Sleep improves almost every facet of human performance
Conversely, not enough sleep will significantly hinder our capabilities
Virtually all of us need7-9 hours of sleep per night
Let’s explore each of these further.
💤 Principle 1: Sleep improves almost every facet of human performance
“Based on a rich, new scientific understanding of sleep, we no longer have to ask what sleep is good for. Instead, we are now forced to wonder whether there are any biological functions that do not benefit by a good night’s sleep. So far, the results of thousands of studies insist that no, there aren’t.”
Walker, Why We Sleep, page 8
This is the main thesis of Why We Sleep and it’s beautifully simple — sleep improves every function in the human body.
Such as memory:
“…following a night of sleep you regain access to memories that you could not retrieve before sleep. Like a computer hard drive where some files have become corrupted and inaccessible, sleep offers a recovery service at night….The “ah yes, now I remember” sensation that you may have experienced after a good night of sleep.”
Walker, Why We Sleep, 116
Or working on a difficult problem:
“Surprisingly, your brain can also work on a problem even while you are sleeping and are not aware of anything. But it does this only if you concentrate on trying to solve the problem before falling asleep. In the morning, as often as not, a fresh insight will pop to mind that can help you solve the problem. The intense effort before a vacation or falling asleep is important for priming your brain; otherwise it will work on some other problem.”
Oakley, A Mind for Numbers, 5
You may have experienced this first hand while studying a language, learning a new skill, or deliberating a tough situation at work. Before bed we feel stuck and unable to chip away at the intricacies of the problem at hand. But by morning we’ve somehow magically made progress. As Walker explains, “Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection” (126).
💤 Principle 2: Conversely, not enough sleep will significantly hinder our capabilities
When we don’t get enough sleep, the benefits noted above are unrealized and our performance noticeably suffers. Unfortunately, human performance doesn’t simply plateau during a sleep shortage — it takes a serious nosedive.
“Obtain anything less than eight hours of sleep a night, and especially less than six hours a night, and the following happens: time to physical exhaustion drops by 10 to 30 percent, and aerobic output is significantly reduced. Add to this marked impairments in cardiovascular, metabolic, and respiratory capabilities that hamper an underslept body, including faster rates of lactic acid buildup, reductions in blood oxygen saturation, and converse increases in blood carbon dioxide…”
Walker, Why We Sleep, 129
The negative consequences of sleep loss might be most noticeable while behind the wheel of a car. It’s an environment that requires constant attention and the negative outcomes (crashes) are quantifiable.
“Operating on less than five hours of sleep, your risk of a car crash increases threefold. Get behind the wheel of a car when having slept just four hours or less the night before and you are 11.5 times more likely to be involved in a car accident. Staying awake for nineteen hours (e.g. waking up at 8 AM and driving home at 3 AM) causes cognitive impairment equal to being legally drunk.”
Walker, Why We Sleep, 138
To put this in perspective, “vehicular accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined” (Walker 5).
Think back to the last time you pulled an all-nighter. Maybe it was cramming before a college final or a push before a crucial work project. Mine was on a sleepless overnight flight with my giant legs crammed against the seat in front of me. Now think about how you felt the day after staying up all night. For me, dazed, groggy, and cranky are adjectives that come to mind. Even if it’s been several years since your last official all-nighter, the side effects are easily reproduced.
“Most worrying from a societal perspective were the individuals in the group who obtained six hours of sleep a night—something that may sound familiar to many of you. Ten days of six hours of sleep a night was all it took to become as impaired in performance as going without sleep for twenty-four hours straight.”
Walker, Why We Sleep, 136
💤 Principle 3: Virtually all of us need 7-9 hours of sleep per night.
We all know a self-proclaimed superhero who claims they’re able to “get by on just 5 or 6 hours a night”. The assertion, while boastful, feels plausible. We’re all unique and it only makes sense that some people need less sleep than others. Scientists have even discovered a gene that controls the ability to fully function on minimal sleep.
“We have, however, discovered a very rare collection of individuals who appear to be able to survive on six hours of sleep, and show minimal impairment—a sleepless elite, as it were. Give them hours and hours of sleep opportunity in the laboratory, with no alarms or wake-up calls, and still they naturally sleep this short amount and no more. Part of the explanation appears to lie in their genetics, specifically a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41.”
Walker, Why We Sleep, 145
Finally, some reassuring news! I thought so too, until Dr. Walker revealed the frequency of this gene.
“Having learned this, I imagine that some readers now believe that they are one of these individuals. That is very, very unlikely. The gene is remarkably rare, with but a soupçon [a very small quantity] of individuals in the world estimated to carry this anomaly. To impress this fact further, I quote one of my research colleagues, Dr. Thomas Roth at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who once said, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.”
Walker, Why We Sleep, 145
To make matters worse, we’re not very good at recognizing the issues that arise when we’re sleep deprived. Everything seems OK but, in actuality, our performance is seriously undermined.
“When participants were asked about their subjective sense of how impaired they were, they consistently underestimated their degree of performance disability. It was a miserable predictor of how bad their performance actually, objectively was. It is the equivalent of someone at a bar who has had far too many drinks picking up his car keys and confidently telling you, ‘I’m fine to drive home.'”
Walker, Why We Sleep, 137
How much sleep is actually “enough’? The rough answer: Between 7 – 9 hours per night. Outside of a formal sleep assessment, there’s a simple method to figure out if you need more sleep:
“If you didn’t set an alarm clock, would you sleep past that time? If so, you need more than you are giving yourself. “
Walker, Why We Sleep, 36
Anyone else ready for bed?
During my research for this article, I stumbled across several Random Yet Interesting Sleep Facts:
💤 Our bodies adjust slowly to jet lag. “For every day you are in a different time zone, your suprachiasmatic nucleus (the region of the brain responsible for regulating our circadian rhythm) can only readjust by about one hour,” notes Walker (25). This means it takes about three days to truly adjust after a cross-country flight between NYC and LA, since there’s a three hour time difference between the two cities.
💤 Unihemispheric sleep “is sleep where one half of the brain rests while the other half remains alert.” It’s found in certain species of birds, dolphins, and whales and allows these animals to rest while in areas of high risk or migratory flights. This also allows some birds to literally sleep with “one eye open” — with a closed eye opposite the brain hemisphere that’s asleep and an open eye opposite the hemisphere that’s awake.
💤 There are theories under investigation that hypothesize humans also exhibit a “very mild version of unihemispheric sleep”. This could explain why we sleep so poorly in the first night in a new place (e.g. a hotel, the guest room at your Aunt’s house). “One half of the brain sleeps a little lighter than the other, as if it’s standing guard with just a tad more vigilance due to the potentially less safe context that the conscious brain has registered while awake” (Walker 66). Wild!
💤 Avoid the mid afternoon time slot, usually between 2 – 4 pm, for critical work meetings. To blame is our post-prandial alertness dip, which is a state of drowsiness due to the 1 – 2 punch of post-meal digestion and our bodies’ natural rhythm yearning for a siesta (Walker 69).
💤 The “power nap” was founded by scientists but named by marketers. In a 1990 NASA sponsored study, researchers discovered pilots on long-haul flights suffered from degraded performance due to lack of sleep. They recommended in-flight “prophylactic naps” to combat the loss in alertness. However, the FAA “believed the term ‘prophylactic’ was ripe for many a snide joke among pilots” and instead suggested “power napping” because it sounded better (Walker 144).
Corporate Board of Directors: a group of people elected by shareholders to represent their interests. Not responsible for day-to-day decision making, the board provides high-level guidance for the ultimate success of the company. Usually found at public & private companies, and nonprofits. (sources)
But why should a board of directors be limited to billion-dollar public companies or highly funded startups? What if we took the concept of a corporate board and applied it to our individual lives? What if everyone had their own Personal Board of Directors?
Personal Board of Directors: a core team of trusted people an individual can turn to for assistance with career and personal growth.
Everyone should have their own Personal Board of Directors — and it’s easier than you think to make it happen. There won’t be a formal induction ceremony, quarterly meetings, or compensation. Heck, the members don’t even have to know they’re on your board. But there is incredible value in crafting a team to assist in your development.
A Personal Board of Directors can help:
Give advice – In its purest form, they help you navigate difficult situations. People to call, text, or email when you’re stuck on something. They can also facilitate a retro meeting to help put rejections in perspective.
Keep you on track – It’s good to have someone hold you accountable for reaching (and setting) goals.
Call you on your bullshit – Sometimes brutal honesty is needed to get back on track.
Introduce you to others – Just like a corporate board, your Personal Board may have a strong network and can introduce you to the right people at the right time.
My board of directors is comprised of a couple family members, an industry expert I met at an event, my prior manager, and multiple friends. They’ve most recently helped me refine a proposal for a potential client and bounce around ideas on future business trends.
How to create your own Personal Board of Directors
No need to look far because you have ideal candidates within your existing network. Contemplate each person’s strengths, skills, and background for a well-rounded team.
Some people to consider:
Prior coworkers
Family
Friends
People you’ve met at conferences and events
Your LinkedIn connections
People you’ve recently asked for feedback
There’s flexibility in how to communicate with your Personal Board of Directors. One option is to simply not alert every member of your board that they’re actually on your board. Depending on your relationship, it can be challenging to discuss (and about half of my board is in this stealth mode).
However, there’s tremendous value in being more open. It benefits you because they can be on the lookout for different ways to assist — or knock you back on track. It helps them because you’re recognizing their advice, guidance, and experience. More importantly, it creates a level of trust because you’re expressing a desire for growth and including them on that journey.
If you think someone would appreciate the transparency, you can say something like, “Hey Julie, I really appreciate your guidance and consider you a member of my Personal Board of Directors”. That will spark a deeper discussion where you can explain the concept and why you cherish their collaboration.
Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your board. Start today. Your future self will thank you.
