8 People Who Should Never, Ever Start A Business | Hacker News Reader

8 People Who Should Never, Ever Start A Business

untemplater.com

30 pointsalifaziz20 comments

    2. Anyone who believes that it is critically important to get 8 hours of sleep every night.

I can get less than 8 hrs of sleep a day, but I pay for it eventually in fatigue and crankiness. My work quality just diminishes.

If you consistently have a hard time finding 7-8 hrs for sleep then you are either (1) inefficient or (2) working on too many unimportant problems.

Give your tedious tasks to a virtual assistant or something. Don't underestimate the power of sleep.

I think it would be better to advise cutting down on 'screen entertainment' like games and TV rather than cutting down on sleep.

The amount of sleep needed to feel refreshed has a wide variation amongst people. Like skinny people who down 5 burgers a day and don't put on weight, they don't get what all the weight loss fuss is about. People who can survive just fine on 5 hours sleep wonder why those who need 8 or 10 struggle if they don't get it. They think that the sleep deprived just need to 'toughen up'.

It's worthless advice - along the lines of 'make sure your Dad is rich' - something mostly out of our control.

The advice should be : work out what your optimum sleep cycle is (no more, no less), and stick to it so that you are well rested every day and are running at optimum energy levels.

You've not been following your TED.

http://blog.ted.com/2010/09/15/how-to-sleep-jessa-gamble-on-...

Lots of folk live happily on way less that eight hours. Whether the folk who mandate that they must have their eight hours are deluding themselves is unproven. I know it's a very touchy subject for those that believe they do.

Lots of people do and lots of people don't. Saying someone who can't go with less then 8 hours sleep shouldn't start a business is like saying someone who can't survive on one meal a day shouldn't, or people with one leg.

I do quite a bit of physical activity. Anything less than 7 hours would soon burn me into the ground.

I haven't seen this ted talk yet but keep in mind that perceived sleep benefit is mostly subjective, so if a person feels like crap if he has no sleep, no amount of evidence to the contrary really matters.

I don't really understand your comment. I watched the clip you linked to and the sleep schedule she states is ideal is 8pm-midnight and then 2am-Dawn(3-5hrs). This comes out to 7 to 9 hours a night for my area, depending on the time of year.

I think it just depends on the person, I'm sure there are people who do just fine with 6 or 7 hours a sleep on average per night but If I don't get 8 or close to it I do suffer (there probably are people who need 10 hours a night as well). The suffering however isn't instant it may even take a day or two to catch up but it is noticeable.

I thought the video was very uninformative. Plus, she claimed that the test subjects still slept 8 hours. It's just wasn't continuous. What was your point?

Maybe inefficiencies may play a part in getting a lack of sleep, but I think being under-resourced plays an even greater role, and that's not something you can always help. I mean, for all those people who have built a business from scratch and working all nighters to meet deadlines- it's probably not within their means to be paying people that easily, and hiring people is not always an easy task

If you're working all-nighters to meet deadlines, it means that you're poorly organized, not that you're dedicated.

If the deadline can be met by working an extra sixteen hours on the night before it's due, it just means you should have set the deadline two days later.

I've worked all night precisely once in my life, and it's not an experience I plan to ever repeat.

If you can move it, it isn't a deadline.

I would add "without consequence" before the comma. Most deadlines aren't an all-or-nothing affair: schedules slip, costs rise, customers scream... but life goes on. Sure, as a buyer I could choose not to accept any work past a deadline -- but then how am I going to solve the problem? Sometimes the best alternative is still worse moving the deadline.

Yes. Good point.

If you can't move it, and you can't meet it without running all-nighters, you should never have agreed to it in the first place.

That's a bullshit answer. In the real world there are deadlines that arise for many reasons:

- any external event like getting a product out before Christmas

- change in circumstance like a coworker quitting or getting sick

- the problem is harder than anticipated (I know it always is, but sometimes it's much harder)

Does anyone else find this completely hackneyed and uninteresting?

In general, I find these type of posts very interesting if the author is someone I respect or someone who is working on an interesting project. But when "Joe Blogger" writes the millionth article about how founders never sleep I can't help but role my eyes.

The site seems to be down. You can use my cache: http://viewtext.org/?url=http://untemplater.com/business/ent...

Sorry, it's back up.

Most people have at least a few of these qualities and there is nothing bad about that. Having a bad combination is were it gets ugly.

I'm four of the 8! Of course, though, I think he's wrong. For instance, wanting to get rich quick is not necessarily a detriment, as it depends on your definitions or both rich and quick!

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