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#BigBoomerBites #TruesdellWealthChannel #SleepHealth #ChronotypeMatters #LionChronotype #FiveFiftyFive #CognitiveHealth #AmericanIndependence
Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This IOC conversation does not involve securities.
Truesdell Wealth, Inc.
A Registered Investment Advisor
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481
352-612-1000 or
212-433-2525
Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder
J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
Founder
Rough Show Notes
OCTOBER 1, 1986
The Day I Stopped Letting Other People Run My Clock
I came upon this naturally.
Nobody taught me how to sleep. Nobody handed me a schedule. I just paid attention to my body, and over the years I learned what worked. Then I built a life around it.
For most of my life, people have told me my schedule is abnormal. They’ve told me I should adjust. They’ve suggested I’d be better off if I just slept like everyone else and ran my day like everyone else. I’ve tried. Every time I’ve tried to fit somebody else’s idea of normal, I’ve gotten worse — slower, sicker, less sharp, less productive. Every time I’ve gone back to what works for me, I’ve come back stronger.
Let me tell you where I learned that lesson the hard way.
In the 1970s and 1980s, I worked in law enforcement. Shift work. Rotating hours. Some weeks I was on days, some weeks I was on nights, some weeks I was on something in between. The schedule was set by the department, not by my body, and my body let me know it. Shift work was a killer. The men I worked with who stayed in it for thirty years didn’t all make it to retirement, and the ones who did weren’t always in the kind of shape a man hopes to be in when he finally hangs it up.
So on October 1, 1986, I declared my independence.
That’s the day I went out on my own. That’s the day I stopped letting somebody else’s schedule run my body. And I have a saying I’ve lived by ever since.
I do what I like. I am good and profitable. And what I can control .
I do what I like. I am good and profitable. And I can’t be controlled.
I’ll say it twice because it’s worth hearing twice.
The 1990s tested that decision. There was a stretch in there where I let the work creep back into the late hours, and the early dinners turned into late dinners, and the schedule started to drift. It almost killed me. I am not exaggerating. My health went sideways in a way that got my full attention. So I put my foot down. I went back to what my body had been telling me all along, and I have felt fantastic ever since.
Here is what that schedule looks like.
I don’t like to eat after five o’clock in the afternoon. By that time my body is already winding down, and food just sits there. I take an hour or two after dinner to relax — read, sit quietly, let the day come off the shoulders. When it gets dark, I get tired. When I get tired, I go to bed. Most nights that’s somewhere between eight and nine. I fall asleep fast. I sleep like a log. Once in a while I’ll get up to use the restroom, but I’m right back down. And then between three and four o’clock in the morning — most days right around three-thirty — I am wide awake, refreshed, eyes open, and ready.
That is when I do my best work.
From the time I wake up until somewhere around nine or ten in the morning, I have the sharpest, clearest, most productive window of my day. The phone isn’t ringing. The email isn’t pouring in. The world hasn’t woken up yet, and so the world isn’t asking anything of me. I get more done in those quiet hours than most people get done in eight hours at a desk. By the time everyone else is sitting down with their first cup of coffee, my best work is already on the page.
After about ten in the morning, the interruptions start, the administrative tasks pile up, and the day shifts into reaction mode. By four or five in the afternoon, I am toast. And I am fine with that, because by four or five in the afternoon, I have already done what mattered.
For a long time I thought I was the only one who lived this way. I now know I am not.
The researchers who study sleep have spent the last twenty or thirty years figuring out that human beings are not all on the same internal clock. They’ve identified what they call chronotypes — genetic patterns that determine when your body naturally wants to sleep, wake, eat, focus, and rest. They’ve named these patterns after animals to make them easy to remember.
About half of the population are bears. Bears run on a roughly nine-to-five schedule. They wake when their alarm tells them to, they peak around midday, and they go to bed around eleven. The whole modern world has been built around the bear, because the bear is the average. If you’re a bear, the way the world is set up actually fits the way your body works.
About one in five people are wolves. Wolves are night owls. They are the artists, the writers, the late-night creatives, the people who do their best thinking at midnight and resent every alarm clock that has ever been invented. The world is hard on wolves, because the world starts at eight in the morning whether the wolf is ready or not.
A smaller group are dolphins — light sleepers, anxious by nature, often very intelligent, often struggling to fall asleep at all.
And then there are lions.
Lions are rare. Somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of the population — the smallest of the productivity-driven chronotypes. Lions have melatonin that starts early in the evening, cortisol that comes online before the sun does, and a peak work window that runs from before dawn to mid-morning. Lions go to bed early. Lions wake early. Lions get their best work done while most of the world is still asleep.
That is me. That has always been me. And it turns out it is also Tim Cook at Apple, who is up before four every morning. It is Bob Iger at Disney, up around four-fifteen. It was Indra Nooyi when she ran PepsiCo, up at four. It is Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan. It was Howard Schultz at Starbucks. It was Andrew Carnegie a hundred and fifty years ago. It was Benjamin Franklin a hundred years before him. It is most of the senior military officers I have ever known, most of the farmers and ranchers I have ever known, and most of the small business owners I have ever known who actually built something with their own two hands.
There is a reason this pattern shows up so often at the top.
The early hours are the only hours nobody can interrupt. A lion gets two, three, four hours of uninterrupted deep work before the rest of the world wakes up. By the time the phone starts ringing, the lion has already done the day’s most important thinking. Everything after that is reaction, and reaction is fine, because the work that mattered is already done.
Now I want to talk directly to those of you in the five-fifty-five group.
Five-fifty-five means you are within five years of retirement, or you are fifty-five years of age or older, or you are already retired. That is a large part of the audience I speak to, and it is the part of the audience that needs to hear this next piece most clearly.
Sleep is not optional. Sleep is not a luxury. Sleep is not a thing you catch up on later.
The deepest stages of sleep are when the brain does its housekeeping. Researchers have identified a system inside the brain that activates only during deep sleep — a kind of internal cleaning crew that flushes out the proteins that, left to accumulate over years and decades, wrap themselves around nerve endings and become the disease none of us want to name out loud. When you protect your sleep, you give tha...
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By Paul Grant Truesdell, JD., AIF, CLU, ChFC#BigBoomerBites #TruesdellWealthChannel #SleepHealth #ChronotypeMatters #LionChronotype #FiveFiftyFive #CognitiveHealth #AmericanIndependence
Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This IOC conversation does not involve securities.
Truesdell Wealth, Inc.
A Registered Investment Advisor
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481
352-612-1000 or
212-433-2525
Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder
J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
Founder
Rough Show Notes
OCTOBER 1, 1986
The Day I Stopped Letting Other People Run My Clock
I came upon this naturally.
Nobody taught me how to sleep. Nobody handed me a schedule. I just paid attention to my body, and over the years I learned what worked. Then I built a life around it.
For most of my life, people have told me my schedule is abnormal. They’ve told me I should adjust. They’ve suggested I’d be better off if I just slept like everyone else and ran my day like everyone else. I’ve tried. Every time I’ve tried to fit somebody else’s idea of normal, I’ve gotten worse — slower, sicker, less sharp, less productive. Every time I’ve gone back to what works for me, I’ve come back stronger.
Let me tell you where I learned that lesson the hard way.
In the 1970s and 1980s, I worked in law enforcement. Shift work. Rotating hours. Some weeks I was on days, some weeks I was on nights, some weeks I was on something in between. The schedule was set by the department, not by my body, and my body let me know it. Shift work was a killer. The men I worked with who stayed in it for thirty years didn’t all make it to retirement, and the ones who did weren’t always in the kind of shape a man hopes to be in when he finally hangs it up.
So on October 1, 1986, I declared my independence.
That’s the day I went out on my own. That’s the day I stopped letting somebody else’s schedule run my body. And I have a saying I’ve lived by ever since.
I do what I like. I am good and profitable. And what I can control .
I do what I like. I am good and profitable. And I can’t be controlled.
I’ll say it twice because it’s worth hearing twice.
The 1990s tested that decision. There was a stretch in there where I let the work creep back into the late hours, and the early dinners turned into late dinners, and the schedule started to drift. It almost killed me. I am not exaggerating. My health went sideways in a way that got my full attention. So I put my foot down. I went back to what my body had been telling me all along, and I have felt fantastic ever since.
Here is what that schedule looks like.
I don’t like to eat after five o’clock in the afternoon. By that time my body is already winding down, and food just sits there. I take an hour or two after dinner to relax — read, sit quietly, let the day come off the shoulders. When it gets dark, I get tired. When I get tired, I go to bed. Most nights that’s somewhere between eight and nine. I fall asleep fast. I sleep like a log. Once in a while I’ll get up to use the restroom, but I’m right back down. And then between three and four o’clock in the morning — most days right around three-thirty — I am wide awake, refreshed, eyes open, and ready.
That is when I do my best work.
From the time I wake up until somewhere around nine or ten in the morning, I have the sharpest, clearest, most productive window of my day. The phone isn’t ringing. The email isn’t pouring in. The world hasn’t woken up yet, and so the world isn’t asking anything of me. I get more done in those quiet hours than most people get done in eight hours at a desk. By the time everyone else is sitting down with their first cup of coffee, my best work is already on the page.
After about ten in the morning, the interruptions start, the administrative tasks pile up, and the day shifts into reaction mode. By four or five in the afternoon, I am toast. And I am fine with that, because by four or five in the afternoon, I have already done what mattered.
For a long time I thought I was the only one who lived this way. I now know I am not.
The researchers who study sleep have spent the last twenty or thirty years figuring out that human beings are not all on the same internal clock. They’ve identified what they call chronotypes — genetic patterns that determine when your body naturally wants to sleep, wake, eat, focus, and rest. They’ve named these patterns after animals to make them easy to remember.
About half of the population are bears. Bears run on a roughly nine-to-five schedule. They wake when their alarm tells them to, they peak around midday, and they go to bed around eleven. The whole modern world has been built around the bear, because the bear is the average. If you’re a bear, the way the world is set up actually fits the way your body works.
About one in five people are wolves. Wolves are night owls. They are the artists, the writers, the late-night creatives, the people who do their best thinking at midnight and resent every alarm clock that has ever been invented. The world is hard on wolves, because the world starts at eight in the morning whether the wolf is ready or not.
A smaller group are dolphins — light sleepers, anxious by nature, often very intelligent, often struggling to fall asleep at all.
And then there are lions.
Lions are rare. Somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of the population — the smallest of the productivity-driven chronotypes. Lions have melatonin that starts early in the evening, cortisol that comes online before the sun does, and a peak work window that runs from before dawn to mid-morning. Lions go to bed early. Lions wake early. Lions get their best work done while most of the world is still asleep.
That is me. That has always been me. And it turns out it is also Tim Cook at Apple, who is up before four every morning. It is Bob Iger at Disney, up around four-fifteen. It was Indra Nooyi when she ran PepsiCo, up at four. It is Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan. It was Howard Schultz at Starbucks. It was Andrew Carnegie a hundred and fifty years ago. It was Benjamin Franklin a hundred years before him. It is most of the senior military officers I have ever known, most of the farmers and ranchers I have ever known, and most of the small business owners I have ever known who actually built something with their own two hands.
There is a reason this pattern shows up so often at the top.
The early hours are the only hours nobody can interrupt. A lion gets two, three, four hours of uninterrupted deep work before the rest of the world wakes up. By the time the phone starts ringing, the lion has already done the day’s most important thinking. Everything after that is reaction, and reaction is fine, because the work that mattered is already done.
Now I want to talk directly to those of you in the five-fifty-five group.
Five-fifty-five means you are within five years of retirement, or you are fifty-five years of age or older, or you are already retired. That is a large part of the audience I speak to, and it is the part of the audience that needs to hear this next piece most clearly.
Sleep is not optional. Sleep is not a luxury. Sleep is not a thing you catch up on later.
The deepest stages of sleep are when the brain does its housekeeping. Researchers have identified a system inside the brain that activates only during deep sleep — a kind of internal cleaning crew that flushes out the proteins that, left to accumulate over years and decades, wrap themselves around nerve endings and become the disease none of us want to name out loud. When you protect your sleep, you give tha...