Thomas Frey from the Davinci Institute sent me a link to a public toilet in Houston that is guaranteed to create at least a little bit of performance anxiety. In my quest for experiencing the magnificent bathrooms of the world, I’ll definitely be checking it out the next time I’m in Houston, which hopefully will be never.
One of my favorite entrepreneurial lines is “man – that was worse than going to the proctologist.” It you need to understand this concept more graphically, my good friend Renee Berberian has a solid explanation.
I got a note from an entrepreneur (Steven Livingstone) who is pondering polyphasic sleep and asked the question: I’ve just blogged something looking for advice from successful people on sleeping patterns as an entrepreneur. I haven’t read much (if anything) on this and wondered whether you have an opinion on it.
Being clueless on what polyphasic sleep meant, I was fortunately that Wikipedia exists. Stephen’s post pointed me to Steve Pavlina’s site where he’s 80+ days into a polyphasic sleep experiment. I was immediately intrigued because I’ve always been fascinated by sleep. Pavlina has a bunch of great writing on this – start on his Day 60 post and go to the older diary posts. Wacky.
I have no idea if there are sleeping patterns for successful entrepreneurs, but I do know that many successful entrepreneurs like to brag about how little they have to sleep. As someone who loves to sleep, I usually think this is bullshit and – while I can go for three or four days on relatively little sleep, I eventually crater and need 10+ hours. Given my fascination with sleep, I’ve ready plenty (online and offline) and my personal conclusion is that everyone has to figure out their own patterns for themselves.
Now that I’m running marathons regularly, I accept the importance of sleep as part of my overall routine and make sure I get enough. I love to get up early, so I’m usually up between 5 and 6 in the morning, which gives me plenty of time to catch up on email, writing, and get a run in (if I want) before the “normal day starts.” On normal days, I’m toast by 10 pm and try hard not to operate any heavy machinery after 8 pm. I sleep until I wake up (often 10 or 11 am) on one of the weekend days; the other is my long run day and I usually get up at 6 to have an hour or two in order to wake up, eat something, and take a crap before the run.
After pondering it, I know that polyphasic sleep is not for me – I enjoy lying in bed with Amy too much. It’d be interesting to find out if there are any real patterns among successful entrepreneurs, although I suspect there will be too much “ego-bias” in any actual study (e.g. “I don’t need sleep”) to generate anything that’s statistically correct.
I heard there was a performance by a legendary band called Full Ratchet in Atherton last week. Can you identify the members of the band?
They were joined (or maybe they joined) Thomas Dolby who has been practicing ferociously for his upcoming tour. Have you been Blinded by Science lately?
I bet you can guess what I’m doing tonight.
Terry Gold – CEO of Gold Systems – has a great post up about his experience with speech recognition on the Palm 700W (and yes – he finds some documentation errors on the Microsoft website.) Terry has been working with the application of speech recognition to computing – both at a business and consumer level – for as long as I’ve known him and – if you are interested in this area – he’s a guy you should know and keep track of.
Tom Evslin’s fantastic blook hackoff.com: An Historic Murder Mystery set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble – soon to be available in traditional book form – is now available as a podcast. Subscribing to the podcast is easy and Tom’s done a nice job of providing options via RSS (for the blook and the podcast.) Look for some of your friends (me, Fred Wilson, several others) to guest star as some of your favorite characters (yes – Fred and I will play VCs) in upcoming podcasts.
From the guys who brought us Candy Bar Sex (Chris Wand and his dad Martin) comes the best Google search I’ll do today.
Entertainingly, when I do an “I’m Feeling Lucky” on my name, my blog comes up. Maybe I should write a Greasemonkey script that changes the button to “I’m Feeling Ego-Self-Referential.”
Jack Bauer does the voice over for the new Mac / Intel ads. It just dawned on me that The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is simply the reverse of the digits of 24 – that helps me understand my obsession a little better.