by Ryan Holiday
There’s nothing wrong with having a large family—the throne did need heirs—but it never seemed to have occurred to the couple that they had any say in the matter. “Man is a beast of burden,” Albert wrote to his brother, “and he is only happy if he has to drag his burden and if he has little free will. My experience teaches me every day to understand the truth of this more and more.” As a result, his and Victoria’s existence was hardly one of privilege or relaxation or freedom. It was instead an endless cycle of obligation after obligation, done at a breakneck pace that the two of them inflicted on themselves.
It is a testament to their affection for each other that their marriage survived. Victoria was at least aware of the deleterious effects all this work had on Albert. She wrote of the consequences of his “over-love of business” on their relationship, and she also noticed that his health was flagging. His racing mind kept him awake at night, his stomach cramped, and his skin drooped.
Instead of listening to these warning signs, he soldiered on for years, working harder and harder, forcing his body to comply. And then, suddenly, in 1861, it quit on him. His strength failed. He drifted into incoherency, and at 10:50 p.m. on December 14, Albert took his three final breaths and died. The cause? Crohn’s disease, exacerbated by extreme stress. He had literally worked his guts out.
Modern medicine has hardly saved us from these tragedies. In Japan they have a word, karōshi, which translates to death from overwork. In Korean it’s gwarosa.
Is that what you want to be? A workhorse that draws its load until it collapses and dies, still shod and in the harness? Is that what you were put on this planet for?
Remember, the main cause of injury for elite athletes is not tripping and falling. It’s not collisions. It’s overuse. Pitchers and quarterbacks throw out their arms. Basketball players blow out their knees. Others just get tired of the grinding hours and the pressure. Michael Phelps prematurely ended his swimming career due to burnout—despite all the gold medals, he never wanted to get in a pool again. It’s hard to blame him either; he’d put everything, including his own sanity and health, second to shaving seconds off his times.
Meanwhile, Eliud Kipchoge, possibly the greatest distance runner ever to live, actively works to make sure he is not overworking. In training, he deliberately does not give his full effort, saving that instead for the few times per year when he races. He prefers instead to train at 80 percent of his capacity—on occasion to 90 percent—to maintain and preserve his longevity (and sanity) as an athlete. When Michael Phelps came back to swimming after his breakdown in 2012, it was possible because he was willing to reimagine his approach to training and to approach it with more balance.
Pacing is something athletes are often forced to come to terms with as they age, while young athletes needlessly burn themselves out because they think they have a bottomless well of energy. Yes, there is purity and meaning in giving your best to whatever you do—but life is much more of a marathon than it is a sprint. In a way, this is the distinction between confidence and ego. Can you trust yourself and your abilities enough to keep something in reserve? Can you protect the stillness and the inner peace necessary to win the longer race of life?
It was a malicious lie that the Nazis hung over the gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit macht frei—“Work will set you free.”*
No. No. No.
The Russian proverb had it better: Work just makes you bent over.
Man is not a beast of burden. Yes, we have important duties—to our country, to our coworkers, to provide for our families. Many of us have talents and gifts that are so extraordinary that we owe it to ourselves and the world to express and fulfill them. But we’re not going to be able to do that if we’re not taking care of ourselves, or if we have stretched ourselves to the breaking point.
The moral of the American tall tale about the rail worker John Henry is often lost on people. He challenges the steam-powered drilling machine, and through sheer strength and inhuman will, he beats it. It’s great. Inspiring. Except he dies at the end! Of exhaustion! “In real life,” George Orwell observed, “it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.”
Work will not set you free. It will kill you if you’re not careful.
Prince Albert’s children would have gladly traded a less exciting Great Exhibition to have Albert for a little longer, and so too would Queen Victoria and the British people.
The email you think you need so desperately to respond to can wait. Your screenplay does not need to be hurried, and you can even take a break between it and the next one. The only person truly requiring you to spend the night at the office is yourself. It’s okay to say no. It’s okay to opt out of that phone call or that last-minute trip.
Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? It’s a vicious cycle: We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes. We end up pushing good people away (and losing relationships) because we’re wound so tight and have so little patience.
The bull in Robert Earl Keen’s “Front Porch Song” whose “work is never done”? Do you want to be the artist who loses their joy for the process, who has strip-mined their soul in such a way that there is nothing left to draw upon? Burn out or fade away—that was the question in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. How is that even a dilemma?
It’s human being, not human doing, for a reason.
Moderation. Being present. Knowing your limits.
This is the key. The body that each of us has was a gift. Don’t work it to death. Don’t burn it out.
Protect the gift.
GO TO SLEEP
There is a time for many words and there is a time for sleep.
—HOMER, THE ODYSSEY
American Apparel was a billion-dollar company that failed for many reasons. It borrowed too much money. It had a toxic workplace culture. It was besieged by lawsuits. It opened too many stores. This was all written about many times during the company’s public disintegration in 2014.
But one cause of its failure—a major reason why more than ten thousand people lost their jobs and a company with $700 million in annual sales simply disappeared—was overlooked by most outside observers.*
When Dov Charney founded American Apparel, he had the notion that he would be a completely accessible boss. As the company grew from a dorm room operation to a global retailer and one of the largest garment manufacturers in the world, he stuck to that. In fact, his ego swelled at the idea of being at the center of every part of the business.
It was a true open-door policy. Not just open-door but phone and email too. Any employee, at any level of the company, from sleeve sewer to sales associate to photographer, could reach out whenever they had a problem. For good measure, during one of the company’s many public relations crises, Charney posted his phone number online for any journalist or customer who had an issue as well.
Early on, this policy had advantages. Charney was constantly in tune with what was happening in the company, and it prevented bureaucracy from establishing itself and bogging people down. But not only did the advantage not scale well, but the costs began to take their toll as well.
You can imagine what happened when the company suddenly had 250 stores in 20 countries. By 2012, Charney was sleeping only a few hours a night. By 2014, he wasn’t sleeping at all. How could he? There was always someone with a problem and someone somewhere in some distant time zone taking him up on the open-door policy. The human reality of getting older didn’t help either.
It was this extreme, cumulative sleep deprivation that was the root of so much of the company’s catastrophic failure. How could it not be? Research has shown that as we approach twenty or so hours without sleep, we are as cognitively impaired
as a drunk person. Our brains respond more slowly and our judgment is significantly impaired.
In 2014, during a difficult transition between distribution facilities, Charney moved into the shipping and fulfillment warehouse, installing a shower and cot in a small office. To him and some diehard loyalists, this was proof of his heroic dedication to the company. In truth, bad judgment had bungled the transition in the first place, and then his constant presence and micromanaging on site—which became increasingly erratic the longer it went on and the longer he went without sleep—only compounded the difficulties.
Charney descended into madness in front of his employees. Unshaven. Bleary-eyed. At the mercy of his temper, unmoored from even the most basic judgment or propriety. Issuing orders that contradicted orders he had issued just minutes before, he seemed almost hell-bent on destruction. But he was the boss. What could people do?
Eventually, his mother was called in to bring him home, to coax him into taking care of himself before it was too late. But he was well past saving. Even back in the normal office, he would call employees late, late into the night and sweetly talk about work until he drifted off, finding that collapsing from exhaustion was the only way he could put himself to bed.
Within a few months of the warehouse episode, Dov Charney was on the verge of losing control of the company. Terms of desperate rounds of financing had made him vulnerable to a takeover, but he agreed to them without thinking through the implications. Sitting before his handpicked board of directors, he mixed package after package of pure Nescafé powder in cold water—essentially mainlining caffeine to stay awake. By the time he left the meeting, he no longer had a job.
Within a few months, his shares of the company were worthless. Investors and debt collectors would find little left to salvage when they sorted through the wreckage. He now owes a hedge fund twenty million dollars and cannot even afford a lawyer.
It was an epic implosion along relatively common lines. The overworked person creates a crisis that they try to solve by working harder. Mistakes are piled upon mistakes by the exhausted, delirious mind. The more they try, the worse it gets and the angrier they get that no one appreciates their sacrifice.
People say, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” as they hasten that very death, both literally and figuratively. They trade their health for a few more working hours. They trade the long-term viability of their business or their career before the urgency of some temporal crisis.
If we treat sleep as a luxury, it is the first to go when we get busy. If sleep is what happens only when everything is done, work and others will constantly be impinging on your personal space. You will feel frazzled and put upon, like a machine that people don’t take care of and assume will always function.
The philosopher and writer Arthur Schopenhauer used to say that “sleep is the source of all health and energy.” He said it better still on a separate occasion: “Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death. The higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.”
Arianna Huffington woke up on the floor of her bathroom a few years ago, covered in blood, her head searing with pain. She had passed out from fatigue and broken her cheekbone. Her sister, who was in the apartment at the time, recalls the sickening sound of hearing the body hit the tile. It was a literal wake-up call for both of them. This was no way to live. There was no glamour in working oneself to the bone, trading sleep for an extra conference call or a few minutes on television or a meeting with an important person.
That’s not success. It’s torture. And no human can endure it for long. Indeed, your mind and soul are incapable of peace when your body is battling for survival, when it is drawing on its reserves for even basic functioning. Happiness? Stillness? Milking the solitude or beauty out of your surroundings? Out of the question for the exhausted, overworked fool.
The bloodshot engineer six Red Bulls deep has no chance of stillness. Nor does the recent grad—or not-so-recent grad—who still parties like she’s in college. Nor does the writer who plans poorly and promises himself he’ll finish his book in a sleepless three-day sprint. A 2017 study actually found that lack of sleep increases negative repetitive thinking. Abusing the body leads the mind to abuse itself.
Sleep is the other side of the work we’re doing—sleep is the recharging of the internal batteries whose energy stores we recruit in order to do our work. It is a meditative practice. It is stillness. It’s the time when we turn off. It’s built into our biology for a reason.
We have only so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards it carefully. The greats—they protect their sleep because it’s where the best state of mind comes from. They say no to things. They turn in when they hit their limits. They don’t let the creep of sleep deprivation undermine their judgment. They know there are some people who can function without sleep, but they are also smart and self-aware enough to know that everyone functions better when well-rested.
Anders Ericsson, of the classic ten-thousand-hours study, found that master violinists slept eight and a half hours a night on average and took a nap most days. (A friend said of Churchill, “He made in Cuba one discovery which was to prove far more important to his future life than any gain in military experience, the life-giving powers of the siesta.”) According to Ericsson, great players nap more than lesser ones.
How did the Zen master Hakuin prepare for his epic lecture, The Records of Old Sokko? He slept. A lot. He slept so much and so soundly that one of his students said that “his snores reverberated through the house like rumblings of thunder.” It went on for more than a month, with Hakuin waking only to see the occasional visitor. But every other minute was spent facedown, passed out in blissful, restful slumber.
His attendants, who had not yet learned to appreciate the power of sleep, began to worry. The day the talks would be given was rapidly approaching. Was the master ever going to get serious about it? Or was he just going to waste his days asleep? They begged him to start working while there was still time. He simply rolled over and slept some more. Finally, as the deadline loomed large, but without a hint of urgency, Hakuin got up. Sitting, he called to his attendants, and began with perfect clarity to dictate the talk.
It was all there. It was brilliant.
It was the product of a rested mind that took care of its body. A healthy soul that could sleep soundly. And it has echoed down through the ages.
If you want peace, there is just one thing to do. If you want to be your best, there is just one thing to do.
Go to sleep.
FIND A HOBBY
This is the main question, with what activity one’s leisure is filled.
—ARISTOTLE
William Gladstone, the four-time prime minister of England, in the generation before Winston Churchill, had an unusual hobby. He loved going out into the woods near his home and chopping down trees.
Huge trees. By hand.
In January 1876, he spent two full days working on an elm tree with a girth of some sixteen feet. From Gladstone’s diary, we note that on more than one thousand occasions he went to the forest with his axe, often bringing his family along and making an outing of it. It was said that he found the process so consuming, he had no time to think of anything but where the next stroke of his axe would fall.
Many critics, one of whom happened to be Churchill’s father, criticized Gladstone’s hobby as destructive. It really wasn’t. Gladstone planted many trees in his life, pruned hundreds more, and aggressively protected the health of the forests near his home, believing that removing dead or decaying trees was a minor but important service. In response to some critics who questioned why he had taken down a particular oak, he explained that removing the rotten members from the forest allowed more light and air to get to the good trees—just as in politics (a
joke for which he was promptly cheered). His daughters also sold slivers of wood from the trees their father had cut down as souvenirs to raise money for charity.
But above all, Gladstone’s arboreal activity was a way to rest a mind that was often wearied by politics and the stresses of life. During his final three terms as prime minister, from 1880 to the early 1890s, Gladstone was out in the woods inspecting or chopping more than three hundred times. Nor was an axe the only tool he used to relax or be present. Gladstone was also said to enjoy vigorous hikes, and mountain climbing well into old age, and the only thing that appears in his diary more than tree felling is reading. (He collected and read some twenty-five thousand books during his life.) These activities were a relief from the pressures of politics, a challenge for which effort was always rewarded and with which his opponents could not interfere.
Without these release valves, who knows if he could have been as good a leader? Without the lessons he learned in those woods—about persistence, about patience, about doing your best, about the importance of momentum and gravity—could he have fought the long and good fight for the causes he believed in?
Nope.
When most of us hear the word “leisure,” we think of lounging around and doing nothing. In fact, this is a perversion of a sacred notion. In Greek, “leisure” is rendered as scholé—that is, school. Leisure historically meant simply freedom from the work needed to survive, freedom for intellectual or creative pursuits. It was learning and study and the pursuit of higher things.