Why CEOs wake up before you

Two excellent articles have had me thinking recently. The first one is the Schumpeter column in The Economist: Here comes SuperBoss. The article argues that this is an era where the elite have to live by the code of “effortful superiority”. Not only do a lot of successful people, especially corporate CEOs in The Economist’s telling, wake up really early, many of them also start their day with furious exercise. Several of them also indulge in extreme sports – including climbing mountains, skydiving, scuba diving, racing cars, running marathons, triathlons or going for Ironman Challenge and the like.

This is now also being augmented by wearable technology for organizations to track their executives’ vitals, and by popping James Bond-esque pills to increase concentration and reduce sleep requirements (presumably for some Bond-style bonding which such reduced sleeping hours must allow).

The Economist ends with a note of caution and a call to end “all this hyperactivity, before it gets out of hand.”

I have also heard it said that such frenetic CEO activity is due to a need for them to demonstrate hard work in an environment where their personal efforts are almost entirely irrelevant to the organization’s performance. No one can grudge a man (or woman) the multi-million salary and several millions of bonus and stocks (not to mention the golden parachutes if all that hard work fails due to other people’s shortcomings or acts of a jealous God) if he/she wakes up at 4:00 am and attends analyst calls while running triathlons!

The second article is about William James’s take on “Psychology of the Second Wind”. James explained the phenomenon as follows:

We usually stop in a task as soon as we encounter a certain level of fatigue. However, if we press onwards (because of deadlines, urgency, or sheer bull-headedness) then a surprising thing can happen: the fatigue passes away and we are fresher, and we can go on exerting. That is, we tap a level of "new energy". 

"In exceptional cases, " James says, "we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own — sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points. ”

In addition, there are three very interesting points that James posits: One, that we all have stored-up levels of energy that are ordinarily not called upon, but can be; two, that we don’t call upon such reserves because we fear ‘burnout’ and so stop at the early signs of fatigue setting in; and finally that the repair from fatigue takes broadly the same time irrespective of exertion (and therefore superhuman CEOs don't need twice the sleep of those working five levels below).

William James then goes on to suggest that we can all get to a new normal of a more energized state by a process of some “inner” and “outer” training: “...some outer and some inner, some muscular, some emotional, some moral, some spiritual..." He then muses, "How to keep it at an appreciable maximum? How not to let the level lapse? That is the great problem.”

Now, behavioural science research is telling us that self-control or willpower is a finite resource. If you forego a cheese burger (esp. if this involved effort to resist the temptation), chances are you will find it more difficult to resist the dessert. If you resit that urge too, you are almost certain to have one extra cigarette or that additional cookie later.

This also applies to decision making. Our cognitive faculty is a finite resource. The more decisions we have had to take, the more difficult the next decision is going to be – the less focused, the less analytical, and the less open-minded we will be. President Obama’s wardrobe (blue or grey suits and white shirts only) and breakfast (the same every day) is a case in point. He would rather save his decision making energies for slightly more important stuff than “what should I wear to work today?”

I wonder if William James’s “human energising” idea could also be similar – may be it is a common pool, the same muscle so to say, wherein if we effortfully train ourselves to increase our capabilities in one area, we could increase our chances (and inclination) to increase it in other areas? In other words, may be those who push themselves to get out in the morning for exercise are also able to push themselves to persist at that difficult problem at work?

Perhaps it is one way to bend our free-range minds to our will. If you train yourself to turn one difficult chore into a daily habit, you may also maximise your chances of training yourself to keep up at another difficult challenge.

If this is plausible then it may explain (contrary to The Economist’s conclusions) that successful people build superhuman habits in order to maximise their chances of achieving their second wind every day in ever more areas.

That may well be why effortful superiority is contagious: How else can you compete with the Energiser bunny except by becoming more like it?