Nikola Tesla: “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything”

11 Bizarre Sleeping Habits Of Highly Successful People

VIVIAN GIANG NOV. 19, 2013, 11:24 AM 219,099 6

One of a professional’s most important daily rituals is how and when they sleep, since this affects how well they perform on the job. For people at the top, who often face intense pressure and packed schedules, sometimes these sleeping habits can be quite strange. Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps, for instance, sleeps in a high altitude chamber which forces his body to work even while resting. Meanwhile, famed writer Charles Dickens always slept facing north, and inventor Nikola Tesla never slept for more than two hours a night. Here’s a look at the most bizarre sleeping habits of highly successful people.

Inventor Nikola Tesla never slept for more than two hours a day.Tesla got more out of the day with his limited sleep schedule. Like Da Vinci, Telsa also followed the Uberman sleep cycle and claimed to never sleep for more than two hours a day and reportedly once worked for 84 hours in a lab without any rest or sleep. “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success … Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything,” he said. Read more of this post

Malcolm Walker, Iceland’s frozen food evangelist; “A lot of my friends who’ve had businesses have sold them and suddenly got old very quickly.” “Some of my friends have done well in business . . . their 17-year-old gets a BMW, they all turn out brats. My three children are amazing. They know the value of money.”

November 10, 2013 1:40 pm

Malcolm Walker, Iceland’s frozen food evangelist

By Emma Jacobs

There is a great deal of snobbery surrounding Iceland, the frozen food emporium started by Malcolm Walker more than four decades ago. People like to mock its doner kebab pizzas and its party packets of “bubble bobble” prawns. He has heard it all before. There has always been, he observes, a distinct class difference between the City of London and its metropolitan media, and northern entrepreneurs, like him. Read more of this post

Disruption and loss can foster growth; Adversity often provides the stimulus that drives a determination to success in business

November 19, 2013 4:10 pm

Disruption and loss can foster new growth

By Luke Johnson

Adversity often provides the stimulus that drives a determination to success in business

E xperiencing adversity is almost a necessary precondition for those destined for the top. As Henry David Thoreau said: “You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.” If it all comes too easy, if your life is too comfortable, then you are unlikely to stretch yourself, or know how to handle hard knocks. Nothing creates adversity like war. It is almost always a tragic waste of lives and resources. But from all the terrible dislocation of armed conflict a number of businesses have emerged. Read more of this post

Hemingway’s Secret to Maintaining Productive Momentum: Always Leave a Little Water in the Well

HEMINGWAY’S SECRET TO MAINTAINING PRODUCTIVE MOMENTUM

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING LIKE ERNEST? TREAT YOUR PRODUCTIVITY AS IF IT’S A RENEWABLE RESOURCE: ALWAYS LEAVE A LITTLE WATER IN THE WELL.

BY DRAKE BAER

To Ernest Hemingway, writers are like wells: “The important thing is to have good water in the well,” he told the Paris Review, “and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.” In this way, Hemingway coined the phrase leaving water in the well: instead of spending all your creative juices all at once, you leave a little bit of inspiration so that you can return to the same momentum that you left it with. Hemingway, whose habits of badass productivity we’ve talked about before, said to never stop writing without knowing how you are going to start again, to, in other words, never end a day’s work without knowing how you are going to start the next day. Read more of this post

U.S. marks 150th anniversary of Gettysburg Address

U.S. marks 150th anniversary of Gettysburg Address

AFP-JIJI

NOV 20, 2013

Oration for the ages: An actor portraying Abraham Lincoln poses for photos Tuesday in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, after a ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 16th president’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address. | AP

GETTYSBURG PENNSYLVANIA – The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln’s undying call for a “new birth of freedom” at the bloody turning point of the U.S. Civil War, turned 150 years old Tuesday, even as the union he fought to preserve quarrels bitterly over the role of government. Thousands of people bundled up against the autumn chill — some in Civil War-era uniform — crowded into the Soldiers’ National Cemetery where Lincoln delivered the 272 words that became one of the most revered speeches in U.S. history. Read more of this post

End of the imperial corporate leader; CEOs have to trust staff to get on with the job

November 18, 2013 4:26 pm

End of the imperial corporate leader

By Andrew Hill

CEOs have to trust staff to get on with the job

Not much unites Franz-Joseph I of Austria-Hungary and a flock of starlings. But when Don Tapscott, the business thinker, used film of murmurations of flocking starlings  to conclude a presentation about managing complexity in Vienna last week, the mesmerising images unfolded alongside the forbidding presence of the old emperor, staring down from a gilt-framed portrait. The coincidence underlined Prof Tapscott’s point. Starlings, somehow organising themselves en masse to see off predators, are at the opposite end of the leadership spectrum from the all-powerful arch-bureaucrat, imposing his system on a highly complex empire. Read more of this post

Rich make same investment errors as rest; Study shows only super rich are ahead of the game

November 20, 2013 8:36 am

Rich make same investment errors as rest

By John Authers

When investing, it often hurts to think of what might be possible if only you started with even more money. Those already wealthy have far more opportunities to use investment to make themselves wealthier. They can afford to take more risk, they can tie up money in more illiquid products, they can afford the high minimum investments for alternative asset classes, and they can even afford to pay for the best advisers. Read more of this post

Richard Branson: make the dream of running your own business a reality

Richard Branson Contributor

Richard Branson: make the dream of running your own business a reality

Published 20 November 2013 10:12, Updated 20 November 2013 10:13

Richard Branson: “If you have confidence in your business, sooner or later you’ll have to give it a go full-time.” Photo: Josh Robenstone

Almost everyone has some entrepreneurial spirit and, with it, the potential to run their own business. But an entrepreneur’s life isn’t for everyone. Many people decide instead to put their talents to work at somebody else’s company, innovating as “intrapreneurs”. For others, working for someone else is never an option, and so they start launching their own ventures early on. If you have confidence in your business, sooner or later you’ll have to give it a go full-time. If you don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what might have been. Read more of this post

As our lawyers increasingly suffer from financial hardships due to the economic slowdown, corruption is becoming more rampant among that socially respected class

More shady lawyers

Nov 20,2013

As our lawyers increasingly suffer from financial hardships due to the economic slowdown, corruption is becoming more rampant among that socially respected class. In sharp contrast with the past, lawyers are actively committing fraudulent practices rather than being passively engaged in them as enablers. It is time for the government to come up with measures to help preserve the integrity of that exclusive club and avert potential damage for their clients.  Read more of this post

Julian Richer started selling hi-fi equipment as a schoolboy with something to prove

November 19, 2013 4:02 pm

Good vibrations on the high street

By Jonathan Moules

Julian Richer is fretting about catching a train. “I have to be in a taxi at 10,” says his email, explaining that he has an economy ticket for the journey home to York, which means he can travel only on the 10.30am from Kings Cross. He will have to leave our meeting at The George, his Mayfair club, prompt­ly. He usually forswears taxis too, he later adds. He is making an ex­ception today because he is squeezing the meeting in between a visit to one of his shops and hosting a Bible study group at his Georgian mansion in the Yorkshire countryside. Mr Richer is one of the UK’s most successful retailers, although a lack of overseas outlets makes him little known beyond the Channel. Read more of this post

Shiller vs. Fama vs. the Skeptics

NOVEMBER 19, 2013, 7:32 PM

Shiller vs. Fama vs. the Skeptics

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Robert Shiller and Eugene Fama, sharing a stage for the first time since it was announced last month that they would share the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, sparred with languorous familiarity Tuesday about the efficiency of financial markets. The electricity, somewhat surprisingly, came from some of the chemists and biologists who joined the two men on a stage at the House of Sweden in Washington for a discussion featuring all nine of the nation’s 2013 crop of Nobel laureates. Read more of this post

Harvard’s top entrepreneurship professor reveals MBA’s biggest misconceptions and why bad ideas and fantastical thinking can be an asset

Why entrepreneurs need to be a little delusional

November 19, 2013: 1:36 PM ET

Harvard’s top entrepreneurship professor reveals MBA’s biggest misconceptions and why bad ideas and fantastical thinking can be an asset.

Interview by Taylor Ellis

(Poets&Quants) — Ask any of the founders behind Harvard Business School’s most successful startup — from clothing swap service thredUP to website optimizer CloudFlare — and they’ll all point to a single key to getting a business off the ground: Tom Eisenmann, Harvard’s veteran entrepreneurship professor, whose legendary Launching Technology Ventures course has helped legions of budding entrepreneurs find their focus and bring their ideas to fruition. Eisenmann co-chairs HBS’ Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the campus’ nucleus for new ventures, and leads trips to Silicon Valley and New York for students eager to experience America’s innovation epicenters firsthand. Read more of this post

The Co-operative Group said that its chairman had resigned after the former head of its banking arm – which prides itself on ethical investments – was filmed allegedly planning to buy illegal drugs

Co-op says chairman quits over bank scandal

Tuesday, November 19, 2013 – 20:16

AFP

LONDON – The Co-operative Group said on Tuesday that its chairman had resigned after the former head of its banking arm – which prides itself on ethical investments – was filmed allegedly planning to buy illegal drugs. Len Wardle, chairman of the supermarket-to-banking business, said he was standing aside after former Co-operative Bank chairman Paul Flowers – a 63-year-old church minister – was linked to allegations involving crack cocaine, crystal meth and ketamine. Read more of this post

Start-Up Founders Look Beyond the Usual Options of Selling or Going Public

NOVEMBER 19, 2013, 1:01 PM

Start-Up Founders Look Beyond the Usual Options of Selling or Going Public

By THE NEW YORK TIMES STAFF

Successful tech entrepreneurs eventually face a choice, known in Silicon Valley as an exit: either sell their start-ups to bigger companies or take them public. As we wrote on Monday, that decision can be painful and personal. And like Snapchat’s rejection  of Facebook’s billion-dollar offer, it is often a high-stakes bet. But some entrepreneurs are seeking other options beyond the traditional two, inspired partly by the stories of start-ups that rebuffed buyout offers or regretted taking them. Below are entrepreneurs’ experiences, in their own words, as told to Nick Wingfield, Jenna Wortham, Brian X. Chen, Nick Bilton and Claire Cain Miller. Read more of this post

Step Inside Africa’s First Underwater Hotel Room

Step Inside Africa’s First Underwater Hotel Room

PAIGE COOPERSTEIN NOV. 19, 2013, 4:43 PM 8,693

Sleeping with the fishes just became a good thing. Africa opened its first underwater hotel room this month, making it the second in the world.  The room, at the Manta Resort on the Zanzibari island of Pemba, was designed by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg, who also built the first underwater hotel room in a lake in Sweden. The Manta Resort room sits 4 meters beneath the surface (that’s just over 13 feet, three feet deeper than the room in the Swedish lake). The three-tiered suite includes a roof deck, a landing deck at sea level with a lounge and bathroom, and of course the underwater bedroom surrounded by windows that afford a nearly 360-degree view of a nearby coral reef and dozens of species of fish. Anchor wires tether the structure to the sea floor. A stay in the underwater hotel room goes for $900 a night as a single or $1,500 a night as a couple. The room sits just over thirteen feet deep in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania. Here’s the view from inside the underwater bedroom. The windows are under-lit to offer a good view of the ocean at all times.

The worst practice in advertising is far too common (and expensive)

The worst practice in advertising is far too common (and expensive)

BY JEFF ZWELLING 
ON NOVEMBER 19, 2013

Brands have become increasingly persistent about the ways in which they follow individual consumers around the Web. When I look at a pair of shoes online on a Saturday but don’t buy them, chances are good that I will see those very same shoes pop up in ad banners on unrelated websites by Monday. On Tuesday, they’ll be in the ad feed of my favorite social networking site and Wednesday I might find a discount coupon in my email inbox to buy the shoes at a reduced price. By Thursday, I could feel like cornered prey, with those shoes popping up everywhere I turn online. Read more of this post

Mao-era art fetching high prices at auction

Mao-era art fetching high prices at auction

2013-11-18 01:24:13 GMT2013-11-18 09:24:13(Beijing Time)  SINA.com

A screen grab from chinanews.com shows the photo of Lushan Mountain taken by Jiang Qing. A calligraphic album of 37 poems by Mao Zedong with sound provenance fetched 14.26 million yuan ($2.34 million) at an auction in Beijing on Saturday night. The calligraphic works were painted in running script (xing shu) by Guo Moruo (1892-1978), a government official and leading author and scholar of 20th-century China. Read more of this post

G. Moffett Cochran, Silvercrest Asset Management CEO, Dies at 63

G. Moffett Cochran, Silvercrest Asset Management CEO, Dies at 63

G. Moffett Cochran, co-founder and chief executive officer of Silvercrest Asset Management Group Inc., a New York-based firm catering to wealthy families, which went public in June, has died. He was 63. He died yesterday at Stamford Hospital in Connecticut, near his home in New Canaan, said his daughter, Lee Cochran. She said he survived 10 years with a neuroendocrine tumor on his pancreas, then his liver, because of experimental treatments with Robert L. Fine, a doctor at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia University Medical Center. Read more of this post