Dr. Gary S. Goodman - Sleep and Grow Rich

Sleep & Grow Rich

TITLES BY GARY S. GOODMAN

77 Best Practices in Negotiation

Crystal Clear Communication

How to Create Your Own High-Paying Job

How to Get Paid Far More Than Youre Worth

Inch by Inch Its a Cinch

The Law of Large Numbers

The 40+ Entrepreneur

Stiff Them!

Meta Selling

Stinkin Thinkin

Selling is So Easy Its Hard

Sleep & Grow Rich

Published 2020 by Gildan Media LLC

aka G&D Media

www.GandDmedia.com

Copyright 2020 by Gary S. Goodman

No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. No liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained within. Although every precaution has been taken, the author and publisher assume no liability for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

First Edition: 2020

Front cover design by David Rheinhardt of Pyrographx

Interior design by Meghan Day Healey of Story Horse, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

eISBN: 978-1-7225-2430-2

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction

How to Become the Richest Person in the World

W hat does it take to become the richest person in the world? What would you say? Most people would say hard work, cleverness, persistence, a dose of good luck, and possibly choosing the right parents.

If we ask the actual person occupying that top spot, the one who currently is capitalisms biggest winner, the richest man in the world today, what does he say? Jeff Bezos, founder and guiding light behind the trillion-dollar Amazon, says one of his key practices is sleeping.

Heres how he explained it recently, to the Wall Street Journal:

I go to bed early, I get up early, I like to putter in the morning reading the newspaper, drinking a cup of coffee and eating breakfast with his children, he said. Mr. Bezos schedules high IQ meetings before lunch, and tries to finish making his tough decisions by 5 PM.

Mr. Bezos said his primary job each day as a senior executive is to make a small number of high-quality decisions. That means getting eight hours of sleep, too. I think better, I have more energy, my moods better, he said.

If he slept less, he could make more decisions. But it wouldnt be worth it.

Sleeping Habits of Geniuses

A s she does every morning, my wife asks, How did you sleep? Her next question is, Did you have dreams? I dreamed she was driving a vintage Bentley convertible, top down, and I was reaching from the passenger seat to help her to steer into a left turn in an upscale residential neighborhood. A beautiful day in a dreamy ride with top down and happy riders: What could be better?

Later, after dropping one of my ballerinas off to her class, I was reading at the library and it hit me. The true way to wealth and a signature of having arrived at real luxury is the ability to sleep through the night, and to nap-at-will. If Norman Rockwell could re-title his suite of iconic paintings, hed call them the Five Freedoms. In addition to freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear, there would be the freedom to sleep.

But wait a second. As I researched these paintings, I noticed something tremendously important. The third, freedom from fear, depicts parents tucking their children into bed, memorializing the centrality of sleep in our pantheon of freedoms.

In America, we celebrate those that have the backbone to toil long hours and to limit their shut-eye. Indeed, this all-work-no-sleep ethic permeates our self-help literature. Stories are told about Thomas Edison, who purportedly never slept at length. It was his ongoing, relentless focus that led to an extraordinary number of patents. To this day I pay a company called Southern California Edison for my electric bill.

You might gather from how the sleepless-Edison tale is told that his lack of sleep caused or at least facilitated his inventiveness. I am here to say this folklore is wrong. Edison was a magnificent sleeper! He slept many times a day, in what we call naps. He was able to refresh himself this way because, according to some scientists, it isnt how long we sleep that matters, but how deeply we sleep when we shove off into that nether world. If Edison was able to reach the deepest level of sleep consciousness multiple times a day, he was a far more accomplished sleeper than those sleeping longer but more superficially.

The idea that Edison never slept! is an utter fiction. Im very fond of Edison-prevarications. In one of my most-viewed online articles, Exactly, HowMany Times Did Edison Fail? I share my research into the inventor and especially this myth about his failures.

Estimates vary wildly, yet unlike numerous inventors, Edison died rich, leaving an estate of $12 million in 1931. This is worth more than $187 million today.

Literally, Edison slept and grew rich.

You could say he slept his way to a great fortune. I realize this is punctuating his work style in an unusual manner, but it is more plausible an explanation than asserting he never slept. Sleeping, or napping if you like, was central to his capacity to invent numerous devices that changed the world. Yet we imagine him and other moguls as insomniacs.

My argument is that the poorest people on the planet are the most sleep deprived. They are also among the nuttiest, the least stable, and the least healthy.

If you want to be happy, productive and rich, or at least feel like it most of the time, get a good nights sleep. And if that doesnt do it, sleep some more! If someone brings you a wonderful sounding business proposition, or a magnificent offer of any kind, what is the best advice you can hear? Sleep on it. We are told this is sage advice because letting a sizzling offer cool off for 24 hours is a good way of not getting hustled. We show down the transaction, and if were being conned, the miscreant might slip into the night. And we might realize things that sound too good to be true are often just that. People have saved, which is to say they have made, billions of dollars, by following this advice.

Sleeping on something engages our unconscious, and this is why it is so valuable to permit a cooling off period. If we have nightmares or just a fitful reaction to the offer that prevents us from sleeping, this could be an authentic danger message from our inner self. We could be tapping a source inside ourselves that is alert to tiny nuances that our conscious being wasnt aware of when we were awake.