I recently interviewed Gene Autry in his dressing-room at Madison Square Garden,
where he was the star attraction at the world's championship rodeo. I noticed an army
cot in his dressing-room. "I lie down there every afternoon," Gene Autry said, "and get
an hour's nap between performances. When I am making pictures in Hollywood," he
continued, "I often relax in a big easy chair and get two or three ten-minute naps a day.
They buck me up tremendously."
Edison attributed his enormous energy and endurance to his habit of sleeping whenever
he wanted to.
I interviewed Henry Ford shortly before his eightieth birthday. I was surprised to see how
fresh and fine he looked. I asked him the secret. He said: "I never stand up when I can
sit down; and I never sit down when I can lie down."
Horace Mann, "the father of modern education", did the same thing as he grew older.
When he was president of Antioch College, he used to stretch out on a couch while
interviewing students.
I persuaded a motion-picture director in Hollywood to try a similar technique. He
confessed that it worked miracles. I refer to Jack Chertock, who is now one of Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer's top directors. When he came to see me a few years ago, he was then
head of the short-feature department of M-G-M. Worn out and exhausted, he had tried
everything: tonics, vitamins, medicine. Nothing helped much. I suggested that he take a
vacation every day. How? By stretching out in his office and relaxing while holding
conferences with his staff writers.
When I saw him again, two years later, he said: "A miracle has happened. That is what
my own physicians call it. I used to sit up in my chair, tense and taut, while discussing
ideas for our short features. Now I stretch out on the office couch during these
conferences. I feel better than I have felt in twenty years. Work two hours a day longer,
yet I rarely get tired."
How does all this apply to you? If you are a stenographer, you can't take naps in the
office as Edison did, and as Sam Goldwyn does; and if you are an accountant, you can't
stretch out on the couch while discussing a financial statement with the boss. But if you
live in a small city and go home for lunch, you may be able to take a ten-minute nap
after lunch. That is what General George C. Marshall used to do. He felt he was so busy
directing the U.S. Army in wartime that he had to rest at noon. If you are over fifty and
feel you are too rushed to do it, then buy immediately all the life insurance you can get.
Funerals come high-and suddenly-these days; and the little woman may want to take
your insurance money and marry a younger man!
If you can't take a nap at noon, you can at least try to lie down for an hour before the
evening meal. It is cheaper than a highball; and, over a long stretch, it is 5,467 times
more effective. If you can sleep for an hour around five, six, or seven o'clock, you can
add one hour a day to your waking life. Why? How? Because an hour's nap before the
evening meal plus six hours' sleep at night-a total of seven hours-will do you more good
than eight hours of unbroken sleep.
A physical worker can do more work if he takes more time out for rest. Frederick Taylor
demonstrated that while working as a scientific management engineer with the
Bethlehem Steel Company. He observed that labouring men were loading
approximately 12 1/2 tons of pig-iron per man each day on freight cars and that they
were exhausted at noon. He made a scientific study of all the fatigue factors involved,
and declared that these men should be loading not 12 1/2 tons of pig-iron per day, but