A cult of extreme physical endurance among executives
economist.com
economist.com
The slightly more honest ones might be conflating a weeks of effort to a single day. This is the kind of "white lie" I could almost see myself doing (but not to this extreme). So perhaps one day this week they got up at 4:30. Or perhaps twice this week they did a navy seal workout. But in their reporting this is all a "normal day".
Or, since appearence is everything these days maybe they are just saying what they think they need to say. Results don't matter, it's how much effort you appear to be putting in. This is what is valued. CEOs need to appear like they are valuable. Imagine the CEO that was honest and said "I get up at 9:00am and relax with coffee and a newspaper while I get ready for the day." People would deride them. So like all people who make it to the top they play the part, and lie.
Probably a lie. The article mentions "pre-dawn sex" as a way of connecting with their spouse, but a lot of these high performers are either divorced or single. Elon Musk is a good example.
This isn't a value judgment, by the way. It's just that the types of high performers described in the article rarely have time for family.
It would make sense that a "day in the life" story would be assembled from activities actually occurring over the span of a week.
This is truly sagacious statement. Modern CEOs represent almost none of the value generation for the companies described except for the part where things are sold or money is solicited. Perhaps that is a cruel and thoughtless quantification of corporate leadership, but I've worked for some truly bad and even gross leaders. People who offered me hard drugs for performance. People who revealed company secrets to sound good in interviews. People who proudly posted about their underage sex tourism on facebook. Bad people. So I don't put much stock in it.
So, I suspect that this is a compensation for the other fact: CEOs are hiring and then selling that team. CEOs claim to recruit, lead and inspire their talent. They're all too aware of what's actually critical to the functioning of a company. They're all too aware of who they can't lose.
So maybe they're actually doing this for themselves? To say, "See? Maybe I am not as smart or creative or talented in a way that directly benefits our business, but I work as hard as everyone else put together because I care more."
But all the same I should start trying to wake up early to exercise. It's not like there is any other time I could do it. ;)
These guys probably aren't really working all that hard. If you have time to read emails and surf the web then you should exercise harder.
A lot of adventure sports mostly require money eg sky-diving - cost of fuel, mountaineering - paying for the expedition. I know people who mostly spend their money on adventures. Anyone can do this if that's your thing. Otherwise get into some cheaper adventures like rock climbing or canyoning.
The triathlons and mountain-biking might be impressive if we knew their times. Lots of people have jobs and families and commitments and regularly compete in and train for endurance sports or any sport for that matter. Who do you think enters these competitions?
However strenuous the workout, it is often combined with other tasks.
I think many of these stories are akin to Pat Robertson, televangelist, bragging that he could leg press 2000 pounds. http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/pat_robertson_can_leg_pres... For those of you who don't spend much time in a gym, Ronnie Coleman brags about leg pressing 2300 lbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vWgSTdkc2A One of those two men is a noted bodybuilder who got his start powerlifting, weighed probably 350 lbs in that video, and is on a teeny little bit of celltech =P.
True if you’re doing cardio exercise. If you’re doing some kind of weight program for strength / muscle building then you get best results in terms of results achieved / time expended (according to r/bodyweightfitness & r/fitness FAQs) by resting for 5 minutes or so in between each set of an exercise so that your muscles can replenish their stored energy reserves. You can use some of that time to do a different exercise, but you probably still have some downtime left: The r/bodyweightfitness program leaves 90s inbetween each set of paired exercises. That’s time to read a few emails, surf the web etc.
1min/90s should be just fine.
That was when I had a systems engineering job with very consistent, predictable hours. It's a lot harder to maintain that kind of schedule when there are crunches and other factors that interfere with a routine.
It's certainly possible that some or all of the CEOs in question are distorting the facts, but it's not out of the question that they're accurately describing their day.
But besides that, it has to be your thing. There's morning and evening people; these are apparently mostly morning people. I know there's a significant amount of people that rolls up at work at 10 or even later, and those that prefer to work in the evening / night as well. To each their own.
As someone else said, if you're checking email while exercising it's probably not all that difficult of a workout.
Write your novel for an hour, or paint, and you're out the door by 6am. Work until 5ish, rinse, repeat.
I'm actually glad that I went back to government work; set schedules with very little need for overtime or staying late, and taking a vacation is pushed to the point of nearly being mandatory. I have more free time and family time, and that's important for mental health.
At the core of these habits are important avenues for self fulfillment: exercise, healthy relationships, and non-work pursuits. We should certainly aspire to include some of them in our lives.
The issue for me isn't how exaggerated or true these claims are, but how they are being used by C-suite executives to justify their pay scale, power, and prestige.
The goal of these image obsessed executives is to build a myth of superiority both inside and outside of their organization that they are fundamentally different and better (and willing to sacrifice more) than the lowly ones who don't make it to the top. Further reinforcing this is the difficulty us mere mortals have in achieving a good paying job, financial solvency, healthy lifestyles, and strong relationships, but these people do it breathlessly easily. What choice do us mere mortals have but emulate these super-people with ever increasing amounts of our time in working to keep up?
Is it that much different than the Pharaohs and Emperors who fed the myths of their own super human or divine heritage to justify their privilege and power? The truth is that these CEO's retain an ever larger piece of the organization's surplus to spend on nannies, maids, and every other service imaginable while we in the middle class must work longer and longer hours to retain our salaried positions, leaving little if any time left to pursue a balanced and healthy lifestyle.
When will we realize these CEO's don't deserve these sky high salaries, CEO's need us for these organizations to function, and force them to return some of the surplus to their employees? They have no monopoly on aspirations or working hard to achieve them.
That and automate the CEO role in the company as much as possible.
The models for such organizations exist. We have the tools to build them. Why don't we see more of them around these days?
Honest questions: So why does it matter? Whether the part of money goes to a CEO or another rich shareholder? How does it change anything? To be honest pretty much in every company major shareholders make way more money than CEOs.
Is it the idea that "middle class" can be a CEO so in theory it's attainable yet being a major shareholder is not even within the reach of "middle class" therefore it's almost being jealous of fellow man (CEO), because it's human yet major shareholders are more like "Pharaohs and Emperors" ?
"We CEOs are actually ubermenschen, and as such, we have more than you do justly, and, in fact, deserve an even larger share than we currently have because of how inherently superior our habits and dispositions are."
The CEO at my last company made 160x (!) the median employee compensation, and happened to be an ultramarathoner. I'm not sure which was more frustrating: the implied looking-down on the employees couched in faux politician-style chummy relatability, or the times when he said that "it's going to be a stressful company because that's who we are" before taking a three week vacation to run a marathon somewhere tropical.
http://www.transitioning.org/2009/11/20/what-killed-ranjan-d...
Err... no, what I meant to say is that I (super successful CEO) also enjoy a 5-mile run before 6am. I've answered all my underlings emails before they've hit the snooze bar. I cook my children a nutritious breakfast before my VPs have taken off their slouchy pajamas. By the time I roll into the office at 7:30 sharp, the entire company --as well as adjacent buildings-- tremble beneath my superior stamina and efficiency.
There is a inverse correlation between CEO pay and corporate performance http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1572085
Take out the alarmist language, the "SuperBoss" title and the fact that this article talks about CEOs, and what this article is saying is that some people get up early and exercise. Is that so horrible and unhealthy? Exercising in the morning sounds like a good thing, even something most doctors would recommend!
But the article phrases everything to sound so ominous:
- CEOs don't get up early to exercise, they get up early to "exercise furiously". Every day that the gym I see dozens of people with me, are they all exercising "furiously"?
- They mention a CEO who, while exercising, "looks at e-mail, surfs the web, watches tv" [paraphrase, not direct quote]. No kidding, everyone does that! There's music playing in the gym, there are TVs in the gym, and who the hell doesn't glance at their phones to check emails once in a while? This literally describes the behavior of 90% of the people at the gym.
- The article keeps harping about the time CEOs get up, but they never even mention when they go to sleep. What if all these crazy CEOs that get up at 5am, also go to sleep at 10pm? Changes the picture somewhat, no? You'd expect a decent article to at least mention this.
Seriously, most of the behaviors in the article describe me and half the people I know who try to live a healthy lifestyle by exercising in the morning, and all these prescriptions at the end of the article of how business will fail if the CEOs are always exhausted are just flat out ridiculous. Getting up early to exercise gives me and most people an energy boost, and we're definitely healthier for it.
I'm not sure how to measure this, but I feel that I dealt with the substance of a large percentage of the article (as shown in its title), and that I did it very fairly with how the article was written. But if you think otherwise, please - tell me what I've missed!
It's madness, I wouldn't do it, nor would any of my peers I regard as either sane or competent (check the or).
You will be present and awake but not really function.
Find me a doctor that will recommend you sleep fewer than 7 hours with a straight face. Because to get up at 4 they have to be getting to bed at 21.00 at the most and I very much doubt that, even for people without a social life.
> They mention a CEO who, while exercising, "looks at e-mail, surfs the web, watches tv" [paraphrase, not direct quote]. No kidding, everyone does that! There's music playing in the gym, there are TVs in the gym, and who the hell doesn't glance at their phones to check emails once in a while? This literally describes the behavior of 90% of the people at the gym.
If you're able to read, talk or otherwise focus on other tasks you're not exercising anywhere near hard enough to make it worthwhile.
Also, not everyone in the article said they get up at 4am. 5:30am also worked. And I know plenty of people who get up at 6 - most people who work and have children tend to get up early.
I'm just saying, this article put a negative spin on things that could easily be positive, or at least normal sounding. And it gave me no reason to think the positive spin isn't the correct one.
The cargo cult of success is especially insidious for leaders, who tend to be extra impressionable; running a marathon is not a measurement of success in unrelated fields.
Of course to truly broaden yourself, to grow in the deepest, meaningful ways, you won't have time to do it if you're a CEO.
In some of the cases described in this article, it sounds like these execs are addicted to the exercise that they wake up so early for (granted not a bad habit). But addiction by its nature tends to invent a narrative for its existence and the promise of greater productivity is gold.
The term implies mimicking behaviors in vain hope of achieving the same results as those being mimicked. In this case, that'd be less sleep more multitasking more conspicuous effort.
They first came into prominence during WW2, when native tribes would observe food and other goods literally dropping from the sky for no apparent reason. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Pacific_cults_of_Wo...
Anything far beyond the basics of value, product market fit, making something that costs less than you can sell it for, etc. is a bit suspect, especially if it starts to wax hyperbolic about ephemeral character traits and other wooey things.
Anyone following those CEOs would probably be in a cult, though :P
Woah. One in six use these drugs?
In my experience (at a pretty intense school), 1 in 6 wouldn't be surprising if they mean "at least once this semester" or something similar.
A single class can easily cost over a thousand dollars in per-credit tuition, never mind the compounding losses from being behind schedule to finish your curriculum.
$5 for the last 8 hour burst of productivity needed to avoid that? Any sane person would make that trade, especially if it's taken rarely enough that it won't damage your brain too much.
Honestly the kids who do have scripts are more concerning than the ones who take it once or twice a semester.
There is data aplenty that suggests an over abundance of psychological diagnosis, and we can infer medicating for these potentially bad diagnosis.
Problem is, the diagnostic criteria are things that everyone has in some degree, and that frankly, for most people stimulants improve function - whether that function was a baseline negative or zero before.
http://www.kaleo.org/adhd-medication-used-as-study-drug/arti...
Even painkillers are being abused by executives.
Julie Hamp, Toyota's global communications chief, was arrested in Japan and forced to resign after authorities discovered oxycodone pills in a package she shipped to herself. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/07/01/top-toyo...
From this article:
> Oxycodone is a widely prescribed painkiller in the United States. But possession is illegal in Japan without a prescription and special permission is required to bring it into the country.
I wonder though how it compares CEO job vs. business owner CEO. With owning the company I imagine there is less politics and therefore less pressure to appear superhuman and more pressure to achieve genuinely good outcomes for the business.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2392251?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont... (with registration, read for no payment)
One of the key organisational stories is "Is the Big Boss Human" part of the "inequality/equality" duality identified by the authors. Sooooo... what message are Bosses sending to everyone?
I always used to marvel at ex-military personnel that had this level of discipline. They accomplished more than most, all before everyone else arrived in the office.
BTW: The extreme sports isn't anything new either. For example, Robert Noyce was an avid hang glider.
The biggest strengths that "elite" over-achievers typically have are a complete lack of existential pause and a rejection of non-practical introspection.
Wake, shower, exercise vigorously for 30mins whilst listening to podcasts / checking mail, then start working.
At the end of the day I exercise vigorously for 90 minutes then eat and put my kids to bed.
In 2 weeks time I'll be doing this whilst sleeping 2-6 hours a night.
Of course most of my exercise is cycling to work, with three-five visits to the gym during the week.
Baby :)