If you think about it, any bag is a sleeping bag if you have narcolepsy. And you’re in a bag.
I can nap with the best of them. I’m a total uncle that way – every time I visit my niece and nephew, I pass out on their couch.
Not my most productive side, and this is made all the more evident in The Third Door, the book I’m currently reading. It’s the first-person story of a college student who went on a mission to interview some of the most successful people in the world and discover their secrets.
Here’s a passage I love:
Qi Lu grew up in a rural village outside of Shanghai China, with no running water or electricity. The village was so poor that people suffered deformities from malnutrition. At age 27, Qi was making the most money he’d ever earned – seven dollars a month. Fast forward twenty years, he’s president of online services at Microsoft.
How did he do it? In college at Fudan University in Shanghai, he had a realization that changed his life.
He began thinking about time. Particularly, the amount of time he felt he wasted in bed. He was sleeping eight hours a night, but then he realized that one thing in life doesn’t change: whether you’re a rice farmer or the president of the United States, you only get twenty-four hours in a day.
He read about notable people who’d reengineered their sleep patterns, and set out to create his own system. First, he cut out one hour of sleep, then another. And another. At one point, he was down to a single hour a night. He forced himself awake with ice-cold showers, but he wasn’t able to sustain it. Eventually, he found that the least sleep he could optimally function on was four hours a night.
I saw it less as a quirky experiment and more as a means of survival. Think about it. With so many brilliant college students in China, how else could Qi have found an edge to break through? If you cut 8 hours of sleep down to 4, then multiply the time saved by days, that equals, 1,460 extra hours – or 2 additional months of productivity per year.
