Want to get ahead in business? Take a nap.
That advice comes straight from the multi-millionaire media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington, who freely admits to taking regular naps in her office in New York, without even bothering to close the blinds.
“I used to close the curtains but not anymore. I want to advertise it,” Arianna said, during a raucous speech to launch Emma Isaac’s Business Chicks in Beverly Hills, California, today.
“I was a dinner a few months ago with a man who bragged to me that he had only gotten four hours sleep the night before. I thought to myself if you’d gotten five, this dinner would have been more interesting,” Arianna added, to laughter.
“There is an idea that burn-out is the only way to achieve success. This is simply untrue. We have people dying on their treadmills, on their private planes, because they are doing life on the assumption that burnout is the only way to achieve.”
Before an audience of Australian and American business women, Arianna revealed that she is currently working on a new book about sleep, due out in April. She is passionate about resting, recuperating, especially after collapsing from burn-out in 2007 (she broke her cheek bone on the way down to the floor.)
“I am immersed in the science,” she said, “and the vast majority of people require eight hours sleep and if you don’t get it, it affects your ability to be creative and productive.”
“If you work in corporate America you are aware that people who work 24/7 are congratulated. But modern science demonstrates that working 24/7 is the cognitive equivalent of coming to work drunk.
“The world of work was designed by men, and it’s up to (women) to redesign it. It’s not working for men. It’s not working for women. Remember you’re not paid for your stamina, but your judgment, your creativity, and sleep deprivation is the killer of all that.”
Arianna recalled coming to ‘in a pool of my own blood on my office floor, having to ask myself is this what success looks like?’
Many of the offices of her media company, The Huffington Post, now have ‘nap rooms’ so, if somebody is tired in the middle of the afternoon “we don’t want them to have a fifth coffee or a third cinnamon bun, but a nap.”
She said that creative ideas tend to come to people only during moments of quiet contemplation, “which is why we are most creative in the shower. And as soon as the waterproof smart phone arrives, that will be the end of that.
“I read recently that 20 per cent of (young people) now use smart phones during sex. I don’t quite now how. I obviously have not read the smart phone instructions closely, although I suppose if you have an Apple watch, it’s going to be easier to use it during sex. And that is why I will not get one.
“Most people are chronically tired. This is the new normal. They don’t remember what it was like to be energized.”
Besides urging everyone to get their full eight hours, Arianna urged the women in the pink-splashed room to investigate what might come of heartbreak and disappointment. Back when Arianna was in her 20s, she was living in London, and madly in love with a man would not marry her. She finally left him, and “when I looked back, I think that everything good that happened to me happened because a man wouldn’t marry me. So remember that.”
The speech was delivered in Arianna’s now famous accent. She was born in Athens, Greece, and says that just before she got divorced, her ex—husband’s “last gift for my birthday was a dialect coach, who followed me around for two weeks to give me notes on my accent.”
“It was quite a passive-aggressive gift,” she added, wryly
“By the end of the this two weeks, I was completely paralysed. I could either be a normal, functioning human being or speak proper English – and I chose the first.”
Some time later, she met Henry Kissinger, who told her not to worry about it, saying: “In American public life, you can never underestimate the advance of compete and utter incomprehensibility.”
Arianna told The Weekly she was looking forward to the launch of the Australian office of Huffington Post, which will launch in August. It’s a partnership with Fairfax media.
Business Chicks is a community of female entrepreneurs and employees, led by Australian Emma Isaacs. It’s not yet 10 years old but now has a footprint in three continents. Emma, who is founder and CEO, has four children under 10, and seemingly bottomless reserves of energy.
She, too, gets her sleep.
Arianna Huffington with the founder of Business Chicks, Emma Isaacs.
