The modern male self-improvement leaders have been pushing their recruits to wage war on sleep for a long time. A while ago Arnold told us that we need to “sleep faster” if we want success.
Unsurprisingly, other manosphere influencers exercising the role of global leaders such as the Tate brothers agree. In a video, Tristan recommends around 6 hours of sleep…if you want success. The number matches Arnold’s orders.
I also remember that Victor Pride used to say that “sleep gets in the way of damn good business.” So, the work-induced insomnia isn’t new in the sector.
To those who like to activate their brains, the idea that sleep deprivation is important and even necessary for success will quickly reveal its pointlessness.
Here are the problems with that plan:
- Junk Volume
By sleeping less, one adds 2-3 hours of extra time to their day for work. In other words, you create an opportunity to increase your volume/workload.
But in many cases, we’re talking about junk volume.
In the world of lifting, junk volume refers to sets and reps done with a weight that can’t trigger a meaningful adaptation. For example, if you can do curls with 10kg for 15 reps, doing curls with 4kg won’t do much other than tire you.
A lot of sleepless work is the same way too. It’s unorganized, pointless junk that drives no adaptation/progress.
- It’s about what you do, not how long you do it.
As I’ve said before, many people focus on the peripheral habits of the rich and successful. But those habits have ZERO impact on the actual outcome.
It’s the equivalent of eating McDonald’s and drinking Coca-Cola because Warren Buffet does it and expect to be successful like him…
None of this matters.
Do you really think that Zuckerberg was running Facebook on 4 hours of sleep? Оr that Steve Jobs was perpetually sleeping 4 hours so that Apple could be successful?
What matters is gaining leverage in the right direction. This is the “secret” or the heart of real progress.
If you’re not moving in the right direction, it doesn’t matter how long or hard you work. Even if you find a way to never sleep, it still won’t matter.
Because, ultimately, it’s about doing the right thing rather than more of anything.
And finding that “right thing” doesn’t require you to play the role of a sleepless zombie.
It’s even detrimental because sleep is essential to the proper functioning of the brain a.k.a. the organ responsible for all the blueprints that you follow in life consciously or not.
- Clouded judgment
During the day, the brain is overloaded with all kinds of stimulations resulting in the accumulation of “mental waste”. At one point, you simply can’t think straight. There are two remedies – take a break from mental work or sleep.
If it’s early during the day, the first method works well, but if the end is already approaching, nothing beats sleep.
- Your sleeplessness can’t compensate for the lack of manpower.
Here’s the deal. Two employees operating at average capacity will still outwork one person working full-throttle.
As I’ve said in other posts, the secret to the productivity of the rich is hiring professionals to work for them. For instance, you will be hard-pressed to find a big YouTube channel that doesn’t have a big-time editor working on the clips.
- Lack of sleep shows a lack of optimization
In many cases, the sacrifice of sleep shows a blatant lack of optimization. If two hours make or break your business, what are we even talking about here?
Seriously. Think about that. The whole point of being successful is to be free. And if your “business” doesn’t allow you to get a good night of sleep at least somewhat consistently, can you even call yourself successful? Do you have it any better than the wage slaves that you so often criticize?
Why Are The Gurus Anti-sleep?
Simple.
They need to sell you something. And since they can’t sell an actual pathway to making money, they sell a system of peripheral habits that is allegedly needed for success, but it’s not.
What matters a lot more is having the right idea at the right time and acting on it. Work is, of course, involved, but so are timing, luck, and intelligence. You don’t get those from less sleep.
Ultimately, the role of the gurus is to make you feel inadequate and incomplete so that you become open to their suggestions. They also count on making you feel guilty for not working like a robot.
Consciously or not, most manosphere gurus follow the schema below:
- Define the problems of the potential audience (this move is meant to gain attention and trust).
- Show the audience that you don’t have those problems (even if you do). Don’t show an actual solution (at least not the full one). Instead, push vague ideas and non-related peripheral habits as the core engine.
- Make your pupils feel guilty and ashamed when they fail. Make them question their manliness. Reinforce the need to follow the outlined peripheral habits. Silence the failures, and amplify the successes (if there aren’t enough of those, invent them).
- Sell products related to those peripheral habits. The products should be more emotional than real so that their price can’t be measured.
- Repeat.
Finding An Engine
To get a breakthrough in whatever industry you want to succeed in, you need to find an engine that will push you forward. And that rarely has anything to do with sleeplessness apart from a few occasions here and there.
What was the engine behind Arnold’s success in bodybuilding?
In no particular order:
- Risk-taking
- Perfect bodybuilding genetics
- Being at the right places at the right time
- Work (training, roids…etc.)
- Luck
And that’s about it. None of it requires constant self-induced insomnia. There are many videos and pictures of Arnold (especially for the smartphone-less era) showing that he was living life to the fullest. It’s seriously doubtful that he had the sleep schedule of the Machinist.
When Is It Appropriate To Avoid Sleep?
Only two instances come to mind:
a. You have no other choice (baby, exam…etc.)
b. You need to act fast on an idea and a few hours could be the difference between making it and losing it.
Other than that sleeplessness is not needed and is even harmful. On a long enough scale, it severely reduces your body’s healing abilities and thus increases the chances of getting sick.
– Natty
Like you said:”One talented and full-power person cannot defeat a company of 100 idiotic slaves working for one guy!” His profits would always be higher than yours no matter what! Capitalism is solely based on the idea of using others to increase your profit and it works!
Yes. Human capital is a huge lever in this world. Maybe the biggest.
Great rebuttal of one of the most brain-dead and detrimental ideas of online hustle culture (not only Red Pill gurus promote this).
Science and common sense (which in these times is more reliable than the often biased papers/studies) clearly show that turning sleep deprivation into an habit is shooting yourself in the foot in a lot of ways. It’s sad that many young men needlessly harm themselves in their best years by following this kind of bad/fake advice. Unfortunately, most simply lack a positive father figure or male role model in their inner circle, so they look for a replacement in the wrong kind of “winners”.
Yes. A consistent lack of sleep is not needed for success.
Exactly!
When girls and boys are raised in a fatherless home, or the father was weak, the children grow up to be BETAS, and start to look up to other broken people / scammers like – Tate, fitness gurus, etc. Unfortunately i am broken too. Being in the labyrinth for my whole life, searching for something that does not exist.
When i’m worried i can’t sleep, the next day i can’t concentrate on training or everyday things.
I train on an empty stomach by the way.
I don’t know if i expressed myself well use the traductor…i’m from argentina…thanks teacher.
I meant train in ayuno
Thank you for the support.
good article as always. An argument i find fascinating is the difference between strength obtained in a heavy and physical job and gim strength and if possible a way to use the gim to obtain maximal strength actually useful at work. An article on this topic would be very interesting.
That’s an interesting topic. It should be a future post.
This topic is definitely worth exploring.
Despite not being particularly imposing (average/slightly above average height, regular build, etc), my late paternal grandfather was insanely strong. He worked most of his life in farming related jobs, so I suspect that the habits this kind of lifestyle involved made people of older generations much stronger on average than the current average Joe (and even stronger too than some athletes).
Yes, this would be a great topic. My friend has been living in his house with quite a big property / land for over a decade. Basically, he lives as close to a countryside setting as he can in our country, without living in the countryside. He is in his forties, and he’s always been exercising and fit. I think that if you’d put him against random twenty-year old dudes in some fitness challenge or competition, he would beat them nine times out of ten. But although fit and active, he isn’t really living the romanticized and idolized country lifestyle (at least romanticized in our country). He doesn’t plant stuff, maintain a perfect yard etc. in all his free time. He only does the mandatory stuff when needed.
His neighbor on the other hand is different. He has lived there all his life. I think he’s closing sixty years now and he goes to a regular 9-5 job and to my understanding the work isn’t anything too physical. But all his free time he is outside doing something, shoveling stuff, taking care of the trees, building things etc. Even a dark rainy day during fall is not a problem. On a Saturday he might start at 7 am and continue until 11 pm. At some point he just goes to eat something and takes his headlamp with him if it’s too dark when he gets back to work.
Often while doing yard work, he waves his hand and shouts to us that “this is my gym; I don’t have to pay to use it”. And then he smiles. We used to laugh about it, because he doesn’t look like he has ever done anything physical at all. To be honest, he looks pretty much the same as most of the fifty something year-old men look in our country. Like a fat guy who sits on his ass all day long. His body type probably makes it ever worse for him, he is short, a bit stocky build. So yeah, to our eyes, all the real work didn’t really seem to have much carryover to his physique.
But a few months ago, my friend came to another conclusion. He and his neighbor made a deal to do one needed thing together and that both would pay half of it. In the end they shook hands for the first time ever. My friend told me that it was the strongest handshake he had ever felt in his life. He said that it was like shaking hands with the Terminator. His grip strength was insane, like a machine. It seems that his gym actually does work very well.
Man, you’re on a roll Truth Seeker. I’ve been trying to be active here in the comments and in the forum (I was just a lazy reader fan in the past). But you’re putting stuff out at such a pace that I don’t even get to comment quickly enough 😀 You would probably write a novel as quickly as I write a comment. But I’m not complaining 😊
Once again, a great article and a great topic! Got to give it to old Arnie though. I think he’s often full of shit but if I remember right, he corrected himself about that 6-hour sleep / sleep faster thing at some point because he got a lot of shit about it in his self-help / guru / hero whatever lectures. He said that he meant that one should sleep as long as he / she needs to function properly. He also said that when he was younger, he used to sleep a lot more, and he felt he needed that but later he didn’t feel that he needed as many hours. But I bet he still tells the same “sleep faster”-joke in his seminars etc.
The last thing and the only worthy thing that I have to say is about the importance of sleep. If you want to know why you need sleep, you should check anything from the “Chuck Norris of Sleep”, Matthew Walker. He is also known as the “Sleep diplomat”. He’s been driving the importance of sleep for quite a long time, and although I don’t remember all his credits and titles, he surely is a guy who backs up what he says with science. As a warning, some of the things he says about sleep deprivation may not be very easy to hear, but he only means good.
As a wise man once said about sleep and strength / bodybuilding training, rest and recovery are much bigger pieces of the puzzle than the training. And sleep can always give you the same benefits that rest does, but rest alone can never give you all the benefits that sleep can.
Yes, they often backpedal when they’re pressed.
Damn, you managed to post a new article while I was writing that earlier comment 😀 And a good follow up (about the energy drink addiction) for this sleep article.
By the way, I rarely care to request anything, but now that I have a few in my mind I’m going to put them up here:
1, Would be nice to read your thoughts on balance in life. You may have already written about the subject before. But yeah, I think it would be a nice subject and would blend in perfectly amongst the other things. I have lots of problems to find balance in my own life. I’m a bit of a man of extremes. So first I may be very much into career development, putting all my energy there. And suddenly I may put everything in strength training. Then when all the other things go to hell in the background and I don’t even succeed in the thing I happen to be interested at the given time, then I easily stop and nothing for a long time. So kind of all or nothing thing, difficult to find the balance.
2, I would really like you to write an article about the “baddest and toughest motherfucking fucker” in the planet , David Goggins 😀 Would be very interesting to see your thoughts about him. He would probably tells us that he hasn’t slept at all during the last 20 years.
sleep is just another fake metric the “self-improvement” grifters use to explain the failure of their expensive but useless programs. You failed because you slept too much, not because my $1500 seminar did not teach you how to succeed (and now you need my $4500 Executive Level Retreat to make up for your excess sleep).
Believe it or not, 1500$ and 4500$ is actually cheap compared to some seminars marketed by self-improvement grifters I’ve found online lol.
For instance, around two years ago I came accross a PUA one that costed a mind-blowing amount of… 4950£ (it was in UK)!
Honestly, back then I was in a low point emotionally, and I almost enrolled myself into that crap. Thank God I snapped out of it in time and avoided falling for such a blatant ripoff. If you are inquisitive and make enough questions, the grifters show their true colors sooner than later.