The Morning Myth

by Frank J. Rumbauskas, Jr.

  The reason why? Creativity. A morning-centric, less-creative, and more “by the book” type of person would do what I had tried and failed at: Reading every book and listening to every audio on the topic of getting sales, then trying those methods only to repeatedly fall flat on my face, not realizing that the world was at the onset of the Information Age and that cold calling, if it worked poorly before, wasn’t working much at all anymore.

  Similarly, I forced myself out to lots of networking functions, and my inner extrovert came out. For all of my life I’d been known as an introvert, and assumed I was one myself, but maybe a lifetime of having to get up early in the morning was causing that? Once I found ways to make my hours more flexible, I also found myself being massively more outgoing with people.

  Now it’s a joke amongst friends that I’m “the shy one.” Ha! And to think that I really was shy once upon a time, or perhaps the early rising was making me that way. After all, how extroverted and outgoing can you be when you’re physically and mentally exhausted all the time?

  Now enough about me and back to that drunken yet amazing sales pro. He obviously did well in sales in large part due to his extroversion.

  Having said that, I’d also like to suggest that he excelled in no small part due to his creativity.

  I obviously had to tap large creative stores to find my ultimate lead-generation system, which I first used for myself and later sold to others, and in fact that’s an ongoing process as times change and the number of tools available online and via apps continues to explode exponentially.

  I also know that this top sales pro didn’t cold call. No top sales pros cold call, but that’s not how I knew. I knew by observation. However, like most top sales pros, he wasn’t very keen on sharing his secrets and would jokingly and dismissively tell everyone else to get out there and “bang doors” if they wanted to make it big, something I’d also do only a short time later, after having given up on enlightening them.

  Not knowing what he was actually doing, and knowing that he wasn’t related to the boss or anything like that, looking back I have to assume that his methods were either the same, or very similar, to what I ended up doing. Those methods consisted of a collection of self-marketing activities organized into one master system, which I refer to as the “system of systems.” (Get a copy of Never Cold Call Again for more info if you’re in sales and want to get out of cold calling hell.)

  Thus far, we’ve concluded that our party-happy sales rep excelled because he’s extroverted, and because he’s creative, both of which tie back into being a night owl, for extroversion and creativity are both hallmarks of the night owl personality.

  Author Stereotypes versus Author Truths (or Entrepreneurial Truths)

  I’d known my friend and fellow Internet entrepreneur Mike Filsaime for a few years when I went for a visit to his former offices in New York to meet up and brainstorm.

  Prior to launching his Internet business and making millions in a product launch in 2006 that continues to fuel his existing businesses, Mike was a sales manager at a Toyota dealership.

  On that particular visit, I met Mike’s former boss at the Toyota dealer. He’d come to learn how he could also get out of the car business and into the world of being self-employed and free of a job forever.

  The former boss told me all about how for the longest time, Mike would come into work in the mornings with dark raccoon circles under his eyes, totally exhausted but seemingly exhilarated.

  It turns out that he stayed up all night—every night—working on his Internet business. And once that business took off, he finally quit the job.

  Here’s the thing: Being a sales manager at a Toyota dealership doesn’t take much creativity. It’s more of a nuts-and-bolts, managing the numbers type of job, though the marketing aspect of it requires some creative skill, and that’s a big reason Mike did so well at it.

  However, starting an Internet business—nay, merely coming up with an idea for one—does in fact require creativity. Lots of it. As does deciding how to position the product, how to market it, what the selling points are, which buyer triggers it will hit, and so much more that most people never see behind the scenes.

  And to this day, Mike is one of those guys who can stay up all night, working away at whatever new idea is on his mind.

  Another friend of mine makes more money than anyone I know, as far as I know. His name is Armando Montelongo of Flip This House fame, and according to Forbes, his annual income is approximately $70 million and his net worth is over $200 million. That was a few years ago, so I’m sure it’s even higher now.

  Armando has the unique ability to have an idea flash into his mind, haul ass to his office, say on a Friday afternoon for example, and not come out until Sunday … without any sleep. It very much reminds me of how I created my first online product that went on to cause so many more successes to follow.

  Come to think of it, with few exceptions, nearly all Internet entrepreneurs I know are hardcore night owls. Like me, their primary motivation in starting a business was to break free of a job and the chains of being forced to live on an early morning schedule.

  Meanwhile, you’ve heard me note that nearly all research showing that being a night owl is nonoptional and something we cannot change, along with most studies showing night owls to be smarter, more creative, with more endurance, and so on, coming from overseas. However, there is one exception: Silicon Valley.

  While the rest of the world is enlightened to the strong advantages of flexible, night-owl-friendly work schedules for the benefit of both employer and employee, the United States is still stuck in a very 1950s machismo game of insisting that the world start in the early morning and that all of its citizens must comply or they won’t prosper. (We who have to live our lives as night owls consider it a particularly sick and twisted game.)

  However, in Silicon Valley, flexible work schedules are all the rage. Extreme morning types are allowed to come in at five o’clock if they so wish, and night owls are permitted to start at noon if they so wish.

  The result? The area has produced, and continues to produce, some of the most cutting-edge technological breakthroughs the world has ever seen. In fact I’m using one right now.

  So why isn’t the rest of America following suit?

  One of the main reasons I feel qualified to answer this question is due to my years-long befuddlement at why people get so furious and downright angry for advocating against cold calling in my work as a sales author and consultant.

  I’ve come to realize and understand that these people are not arguing in favor of cold calling because of experiential reasons, or actual results, or some other proof that it works.

  No, they’re so passionate about it because they have a strong emotional attachment to cold calling.

  Just as followers of any certain religion will naturally want to argue why it’s the one true religion and why others should join them, it’s the emotional connection that compels them to do so.

  It’s the words the cold callers use to argue their point that gives away their emotional connection, things like, “You have to get out there in the trenches,” and “You have to fight the good fight,” and “There are no shortcuts” are evidence that they are emotionally attached, and that they have no logical or rational explanation, let alone results or numbers.

  Likewise, those who have lived their lives being forced to be up before dawn to sit in traffic for an hour and be at work by 8:00 a.m. (or earlier) seem to believe it’s somehow “unfair” that we move to flexible work hours and they will have to see a younger generation being “lazy” and coming into work at—gasp!—10:00 a.m.!

  CEOs and the Perpetual Myth of the Early Riser

  Before going any further, I want to make sure you don’t get me wrong politically. When I complain about the way people think in America, I’m strictly referring to the uniquely American attachment to early rising, and it’s probably no coincidence that the morning myth was created by one o
f our nation’s Founding Fathers. The same is true if I seem critical of CEOs. The truth is that I have the utmost respect for the horrifically long hours and extreme levels of stress they are forced to endure, and while many will disagree, I believe their eight-figure annual incomes are fully justified in light of that.

  Think about it: While the company’s employees are at church or their kids’ games or at a barbecue with friends on a Sunday, the CEO is being interrogated on some television news show as to why the stock dropped one-tenth of one point in the previous week. When a product is found to be defective or even dangerous, it’s the CEO who is the public face of the company, taking all of the arrows while the employees are enjoying a typical 8-to-5 workday or a relaxing weekend or vacation.

  Considering all of that, in the best interests of both the shareholders and the employees, CEOs should probably be paid more, not less!

  In any case, in my years of reading about this topic of morning people versus night owls, which has always greatly interested me, and in my research for this book, I kept coming across article after article that all seemed to be written for no other purpose than to remind us that America’s CEOs get up and get to work at extremely early hours.

  On one hand, some probably believe they may have to, given their heavy workloads. However, since we all get the same 24 hours in a day, that idea is easily disproven.

  The more likely probability is that they’re early risers because they’ve always been early risers. And as you now know, the only reason the early bird gets the worm is because the system is rigged in favor of the early bird. That’s why they perform better, on paper at least, in school and at work. It’s because those particular activities happen to start in the morning, usually at eight o’clock to be specific, when a night owl’s brain is still mush but the early bird’s brain is already “on.”

  Before moving forward, let’s get one thing straight: CEOs are not entrepreneurs.

  Sure, some started out that way—for example, Mark Zuckerberg, who doesn’t go to bed until six in the morning many days. He’s an extreme night owl to be sure.

  Then there’s Jeff Bezos, who now gets up at insanely early hours, but Mark Cuban recalls seeing him post in forums at all hours of the night, back when he was forming Amazon, asking for all sorts of advice, from starting an affiliate program to building an e-commerce backend to you name it. It would seem that he may have been a night owl as an entrepreneur but must now stick to a morning-centric schedule as a CEO.

  And of course there’s my favorite, Apple CEO Tim Cook. He’s not my favorite CEO, mind you, just my favorite one to pick on. This is the guy who sends out tweets bragging that he was up at 3:45 a.m. or whatever insane hour his advanced sleep phase syndrome (ASPS) had him up at. I still can’t figure out if this guy is trying to sleep-shame everyone else, or if he saw the science showing that such extreme early rising is trashing his adrenals and shortening his lifespan and he’s just acting out.

  The fact of the matter is that CEOs are early risers because most happen to be older and members of a generation in which people live and die by early rising. “Never let the sun catch you in bed,” was the mantra they grew up with.

  Fast-forward to today and you have the management ranks of virtually all companies populated by early risers, particularly upper management and the C-suite. These people know they had to get up early to climb the corporate ladder—the ladder that’s rigged for early risers—and expect the same of everyone else. You can almost hear them sounding like whiny children, with a big fat, “But it’s just not fair that those younger guys can sleep later than I did!”

  And the emotional, rather than logical or rational, attachment to early rising unfortunately continues to persist.

  Bezos, Explained

  As a fitting conclusion to this chapter—and perhaps thanks to good luck, because this particular interview occurred only a few weeks prior to writing this—I’d like to share some details of an interview with Jeff Bezos conducted by the Economic Club of Washington, DC.

  I’ll give away the best part right up front: In the interview, Bezos admitted that he avoids afternoon meetings like the plague because he simply doesn’t have the brainpower in the afternoon that he does in the morning.

  That goes to show something I’ve already shared with you, the fact that while early birds start, well, early, they simply cannot go the distance. They hit a wall and crash while the night owls keep going and going like the Energizer Bunny. To add insult to early bird injury, night owls can perform just as well cognitively in the mornings if forced to do so.

  To quote Bezos, “I like to do my high IQ meetings before lunch. Anything that’s going to be really mentally challenging—that’s a 10 o’clock meeting. Because by 5:00 p.m., I’m like, ‘I can’t think about that today. Let’s try this again tomorrow at 10 o’clock.’ ”

  Or, in other words, like all early risers, Bezos has fewer truly useful hours available in each day compared with night owls. This is especially confirmed by the fact that he gets a full eight hours’ sleep every night.

  “I think better, I have more energy, my mood is better—all these things,” he explains, regarding the eight hours of sleep. He continues, “And think about it: As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day. Is that really worth it if the quality of these decisions might be lower because you’re tired or grouchy or any number of things?”

  Hmm. That last question he posed goes right back to the fact that the system is rigged in favor of early risers. He assumes that it’s okay for him to get eight hours of sleep so he’s not tired or grouchy, but what about those who are tired and grouchy in those 10 o’clock meetings because they’re night owls who couldn’t fall asleep until two in the morning?

  Sadly, one of the many articles reporting on this interview with Bezos declares his early rising and 10 o’clock meetings as absolute requirements for success, and so the morning myth continues.

  Morning Madness

  The connections science has made between night owl tendencies and increased creativity, intelligence, productivity, and so much more have been proven, yet our morning-centric society continues to insist on defying them and continues to perpetuate the morning myth. And despite all that, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world at the time of this writing, admits that he crashes in the afternoon and can’t think at all past five … and he’s an early riser.

  CHAPTER 11

  Night Owls Are More Relaxed: Getting Up Early Is Stressful (but You Already Knew That)

  In the example of 24 circadian rhythms discussed in a previous chapter, you learned that it’s a rush of cortisol—the body’s stress hormone that is produced by the adrenal glands, two walnut-sized glands that sit atop each kidney—that naturally wakes us each day.

  The key word here is “naturally”—I personally suffer from a strong sense of anxiety when I have to get up unusually early, and it’s that rush of cortisol, that comes at my body’s natural waking time, that causes it.

  I used to belong to a group called the Dallas Business Alliance, and it was so good that I was a member despite the weekly 7:30 a.m. meetings. (Thankfully the meetings were really close to home.) It was also good for Dubya encounters, meaning George W. Bush; his office is in the same building where we met and he showed up at 7:30 a.m. every day. That’s part of how I managed to snag so many selfies with him. I also had Rotary Club of Dallas meetings on Wednesdays, at noon.

  However, I was a quivering mess of anxiety on Wednesdays, and I crashed early and crashed hard.

  The cause of the anxiety was getting up at 6:15 a.m. in order to get ready and get dressed for my weekly “suit day”; Dallas Business Alliance was held at one of those private social clubs in the Park Cities area of Dallas (read: wealthy) where wearing jeans would cause the entire time-space continuum to collapse while people whose age had to be in the triple-digits would ra
ise all hell about it.

  Remember the many times I’ve said my natural rising time, notwithstanding variables such as a night of insomnia, is typically around 8:30 a.m.?

  Well, one hour into our meeting every Wednesday, that rush of cortisol would hit me like a ton of bricks (or rather like a ton of caffeine and ephedrine, combined), and that, combined with the amount of coffee I drank to get going that early, would literally have my hands shaking.

  On top of that I was always sweating profusely under my suit. For that reason I invested in talc and undershirts, and they worked; however, an undershirt in the already brutal Dallas summer heat isn’t particularly amusing later in the day.

  We adjourned at nine, I went to my office, and eventually found that I had to listen to an anti-anxiety self-hypnosis audio, or attempt to meditate. After about two and a half hours at the office, it was time to go back to the car to get to my Rotary meeting. There I’d have even more coffee to get through at least the next few hours.

  Then, by mid-afternoon, like Amazon’s esteemed CEO and the richest man in the world, I crashed. And I crashed hard.

  Relaxed? I was anything but relaxed!

  I was stressed, and to explain why, I’m going to describe how coffee works to give you “energy”—or does it?

  Coffee and Getting Up Too Early: Both Are Major Stressors

  My decision to get off caffeine came after reading the excellent book Caffeine Blues: Wake Up to the Hidden Dangers of America’s #1 Drug by Stephen Cherniske (Grand Central Publishing, 2008).

  As Cherniske explains in great detail in the book, there’s a common misperception that caffeine gives one energy, but in reality what it does is give one stress. The perceived “energy” is merely how we perceive that stress.