Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

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