This past week, a friend sent me a link to a video talking about how Roger Federer sleeps 12 hours per day. Turns out he is not the only athlete at all who does this. Lebron James, Usain Bolt, Steve Nash, Venus William are in the same boat. I know some entrepreneurs would say that “sleep is for the weak”.

Well, I have been on both sides of this debate and I would just like to comment about this a bit now. For athletes, it is clear that sleep allows the body to rejuvenate itself and keeps athletes at peak performance, which is their livelihood but does this apply to entrepreneurs as well? My experience as I have gotten older is that this is definitely true (but don’t jump to a full conclusion until you have read this full blog post).

I find unquestionably that a good night’s sleep (9-10 hours) makes me unquestionably more productive the next day when I have to write or do heavy thinking. If I do not have at least 8 hours of sleep, I see my productivity go way down. As the great basketball coach John Wooden said, never confuse activity with achievement. I can see this very directly as the amount of output (i.e. quality pages written) is not just related to the amount of time I spend necessarily. I have to be of a clear mind and well-rested to get good throughput.

People ask how long it took me to write the Disciplined Entrepreneurship books all the time. First, it took years to accumulate the knowledge necessary but then when it came down to writing the books, which to me is the real question, an interesting situation happened. When I tried to write the books at MIT or close to MIT, it took me much longer. In part, because I was not well-rested and also because there were lots of interruptions. When I came up to our escape house in New Hampshire, I noticed I was productive after I had gotten some exercise and a good night’s sleep. The pages then flowed. In fact, it only took me a summer to get the first book written and it was the same for the second book. But in both cases, I learned that I needed to make sure to get a good night’s sleep, and then even a little extra, to be successful. I am sure I am not the only one who has experienced this but I have directly and I am now a big believer.

Even when I am in back at MIT, I know work to get more sleep and also sometimes lie in bed when I first wake up visualizing the day ahead. Once I spring into action, it is hard to have that clarity of mind and I am frankly less creative in my solutions.

Now all of this would have sounded so weak when I was younger but I am wiser now. It is clear that the unhealthy culture of non-stop working with a minimal amount of sleep has led to what many have talked about with regard to depression in entrepreneurship. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey are known for their 18 hours days, which does not leave enough time for sleep, but what is the real lesson from this? At least two of these people are known for wildly irrational behavior.

In our MIT delta v program this year, Trish Cotter had included for the first time a wellness component run by former student Kathleen Stetson. Kathleen was a full-on entrepreneur experiencing the pressure to “Do More, Faster, All the Time”. This ultimately did not work for her and she spoke out against it. She found that many others were in the same boat. You can’t be productive if you are not feeling healthy. Entrepreneurship is a long journey and not just a sprint.

That being said, in entrepreneurship, it is necessary sometimes to sprint. This need for sleep overall is certainly true in the long term but in the short term, there will be windows of opportunities that you need to capitalize on. One of the huge competitive advantages of startups is their ability to react quickly to new market conditions and information. The clock speed of an entrepreneurial organization is what makes it able to compete so surprisingly effectively with Goliaths like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. So the answer is not so simple. There should be some stress in an entrepreneurial organization, just like on a high performing sports team. It is all about balance, like so much in entrepreneurship and life.

So understand the benefits of sleep and don’t get mindless sucked into an unhealthy culture, but there will be times in a high performing entrepreneurial organization where you will have to sprint. Those sprints may well define whether your organization succeeds or not, whether it has the full impact it could or not. You should do everything possible to be ready for those situations and identify them, and be all in when they arrive. In between them, you should build up your fuel tank so you are well-rested and ready to sprint. If you are well-rested and productive in between, you will surely be able to be proactive to win as many of these battles as possible before they even start with smart, creative and already implement plans.

In the great book on leadership The Art of War, Sun Tzu said: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” That is our goal and the way to do that is to be clear of mind and productive before the battle starts. Sometimes, however, no matter how smartly you try, you can’t avoid a battle—especially an unanticipated one—and then you better be ready to go all-in and win the battle. Once done, you can and should go back and rest up but you can’t be fighting battles all the time. Be smart but be prepared to sprint when needed.

As I run workshops for entrepreneurs, a key part of our training is that they have to focus. Entrepreneurs have to select a beachhead market and then actively deselect other markets. It is very common that students have resistance to this step from mild to actively and emotionally rejecting this concept as wrong.  The selecting a market is not so hard but it is the deselecting that causes the problems. As we do in our example, an entrepreneur can’t claim to be disciplined when they are a Lamborghini dealership while they are also taking in the Volvo to service it, as we do in one of the first exercises of the workshop.

But in the eyes of resistors even after they are told they have to deselect, you can still see, they really DON’T want to deselect. They want to do it all. If this is you, don’t feel abnormal. It is perfectly normal for humans to NOT want to close doors. A renowned behavioral economist, Daniel Ariely, has shown how deeply ingrained in our psyche this is in his experiments. “Decision-makers overvalue their options and are willing to overinvest to keep these options from disappearing,” because they have a fear of missing out (FOMO).

You can read Daniel’s books, which I recommend the first one in the recommended books section of this web site under the tab “Resources” or you can just read a summary of this specific behavior in this article from the New York Times to get the essence of this point: https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/dear-irrational-reader-close-the-door/

From my vantage point, the takeaway is twofold. First, focus is extremely important even if it does not feel right in your gut. It will significantly improve your odds of success. Closing off options so you can give full focus to the one you do choose will increase your odds and speed of success or failure. Both of these are good. You can more easily recover from failure if it happens quickly.

The second point is that entrepreneurship is not just intuitive despite what conventional wisdom might lead you to believe. This but one example where if you know the research, you know important first principles based in research that will give you a more systematic knowledge of the decision you are making and hence increase your odds of success. It is another proof point that entrepreneurship is a learned craft that practitioners who studied what they are doing will get better over time. If you are willing to take entrepreneurship seriously as a body of field of study and a body of knowledge, then the more you intelligently practice it, the better you will get.

Last month, from May 20-23, I had the honor of leading an intense four day workshop on Disciplined Entrepreneurship for about 80 participants who were either entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship amplifiers (i.e., educators, people running incubators/accelerators, government agencies supporting entrepreneurship). This is my third year doing it and I really enjoy it for many reasons.

This year, the program was hosted at the University of Stavanger and specifically Professor Jan Frick and Egil Svela in collaboration with the Southwest Norway REAP Team. The first year I did a similar mini-course in Alesund and last summer it was in Kristiansand. Each year the host city has essentially doubled in population size. Next summer, Bergen is the planned host, which will be yet another doubling in size. I feel like I am really getting to know Norway and Norwegians.

Each year brings new insights and this year was no different. Here are my top takeaways the Stavanger workshop and associated discussions:

1. Viking Spirit Lives On: Despite an economy that is booming in large part from the oil industry off its shores, Norwegians still possess the historical Viking spirit. Some participants indicated that they preferred I use a Viking reference as opposed to our common “pirate” references. While clearly selection bias was in play with the people I was meeting, it was impressive how many of the participants wanted more than the comfortable life, which is so prevalent in Norway. They were seeking a challenge. For many of them the challenge was climate change but there were many other as well. Innovation-driven Enterprise (IDE) entrepreneurship was welcomed with open arms.
2. Well Educated and Collaborative Talent Pool: The human talent pool for entrepreneurship is quite strong in two important dimensions. They are very well educated and they are very collaborative.
3. Stable Government and Society: Another factor that helps support entrepreneurship that Norway takes for granted is a stable government and society. As we see in so many other places, disruption at either of these levels makes long term planning and investment more risky, and Norway is at an advantage here.
4. Multi-Stakeholder Model to Support Entrepreneurship: Through the MIT REAP program, Norway has gotten the coordinated involvement of universities, government, risk capital, corporations and the entrepreneurial community to support the development of a more robust innovation-driven entrepreneurial ecosystem. This makes for a much more efficient execution of any program and integration across the portfolio of implemented programs.
5. Bottoms Up Law Still Rules: Even with such models, it is incredibly important to not get de-focused. In Western societies, entrepreneurship is driven “bottoms up”. That means that the engine that will propel advancement is the entrepreneurs themselves. I have not yet seen a successful model to drive entrepreneurship from “tops down” as all the four other stakeholders can do is help facilitate.
6. The Single Necessary and Sufficient Condition for an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: For a business, the single necessary and sufficient condition for a business is a paying customer. I start all of my classes with this so that students never lose the focus on the ultimate goal. Likewise, to have an entrepreneurial ecosystem, the single necessary and sufficient condition is entrepreneurs. The more entrepreneurs the better but you can also improve and ecosystem by making them higher quality and connecting them together to increase their productivity. That should be the unambiguous goal of any program to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Often efforts lose this focus.
7. Kudos to Norway In this Regard: Learning from others, most specifically their Scottish friends, the Norwegians have implemented a plan to allocate resources and focus on the entrepreneurs. The Summer Scale School brings aspiring entrepreneurs together and invests in their training in a “hands-on” manner. It also builds a common language that will foster community that gives each entrepreneur a force-multiplier support structure. They are also doing this with a sustained (as opposed to a one time) investment. In basketball there is a saying “good things take a long time and mostly bad things happen quickly.” Much like Scotland, I am highly confident that with the other assets mentioned above, Norway will see success in the long term. I really believe in this multi-year grass roots programs as the fundamental component of creating sustainable innovation-driven entrepreneurial ecosystem. Regions often become mesmerized by recent events, new unicorns or the entrepreneurial hot topic du jour and undervalue a disciplined systematic longer-term approach when it is clear the latter works much, much better.

Random final comment on Norway trip … thanks to good friend Bjørn-Tore Flåten who so graciously took me to the fitness room on the next to last day where they had a basketball court. I was able to find my way into a basketball game with some of the locals (picture courtesy of another good friend Peter Klemsdal) and enjoyed mixing it up with the locals. Little did they know that the person playing with them was three times their age. This however was not relevant on the basketball court. All that matters that court of pure meritocracy is whether you win or not. (Note: we won.)