In the middle of the conversation I decided to clarify something that not many people know. I don’t sleep much. Four or five hours a night, then I start working. When I moved back to Brazil (2017), I woke at four in the morning, or a bit earlier, to work for EHD. At midday I took a nap with my son, and the afternoon was for my kids. Two years ago, I was waking up at one or two in the morning and worked until five in the afternoon (maybe a bit more). DISCLAIMER: I still wake up early because one of my companies is in the UK and I live in Canada, and because I’m used to this routine. But I don’t work as many hours a day as I did a couple of years ago. Still, if needed, I do work a lot 😉 So when my guest started talking about rest, and about the tracker he had worn every day for more than a year, I said it out loud. I was afraid of wearing one of those. I did not want a device telling me to sleep more, because I work differently. If I slept in at the weekend, I felt terrible for the rest of the day. I told him he could bash me, or use me as an example for other leaders, and I said it with a laugh. The hours were never the point Most of us measure the thing we can see. Hours in the chair. Messages sent. Calls booked. The calendar packed from edge to edge. It is visible, it is honest effort, and it feels like proof. The trouble is what the number can hide. If you need twelve hours to get the result, the twelve hours are not the achievement. They may be the size of the gap between what you can do and what you are asking of yourself. Effort is easy to increase. Skill is not. He put it in one line, about his years selling solar door to door: “If I have to knock that long, it’s because I don’t have enough skill to yield better results from a smaller amount of input.” Keep that line next to my four or five hours. What I said about my own I described my hours as a schedule with a reason behind it: my work and my kids. Then I added what I notice when I am not fully rested. There is backlash in the people around me. I said it in one sentence, on the record, and carried on talking about wearables. I run teams. The rule I give them is to come to me with a problem, three solutions and the one they prefer, because I am not there to solve their problem, I am there to give my opinion on the choice they are making. That rule only works if my opinion is worth acting on. An opinion from a tired founder costs more, because somebody acts on it. Later in the same conversation I told him that a founder who will not let go of control burns the midnight oil forever. I said it to a man who had just heard how little I sleep. My four or five hours came back later in his answer, too. I did not wear a tracker (and I still don’t), so nothing was measuring any of it. I took quick naps, ten minutes at a time, and I thought that kept me rested enough to decide. I told him short nights and quick naps suit me better than a long lie in. The people around me were the only measurement I had, and I had already told him what they showed. Owners love to say the business cannot run without them. Very few of us ask what kind of version of us it is running on. Go and hear it from Austin Austin Willman spent more than three years knocking doors and building sales teams in Arizona and California, then moved into the agency world. He hosts hosted E-Coffee with Experts and works with founders at the point where growth starts to threaten culture and control. He walked me through the document his team fills in every Friday, and I told him I might borrow some of it. Near the end he told me about one night that changed his life, and the question he came back with: “It’s not who am I, it’s when am I Austin.” I am not going to explain it. He does. The episode is on YouTube. Watch it to see where he took the conversation after I offered myself up as the example. Cheers Gledsley Get full access to Learn, Apply, Repeat at www.learnapplyrepeat.com/subscribe
