Bill Gates got a lot done in his 20s: After taking a leave of absence from Harvard, he formed a computer software company with his high school friend Paul Allen. That company became Microsoft, one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.
He also sacrificed a lot of sleep in those early Microsoft days. “I routinely pulled all-nighters when we had to deliver a piece of software,” the self-made billionaire wrote on his blog. “Once or twice, I stayed up two nights in a row.”
Gates sensed that he wasn’t as sharp when he operated mostly on caffeine and adrenaline, and had little to no sleep, “but I was obsessed with my work, and I felt that sleeping a lot was lazy,” he said.
But the effects of skimping on sleep — sleepiness, inability to concentrate, fatigue and poor decision-making — eventually caught up to Gates.
Now Gates think very differently about sleep, “I realize that my all-nighters, combined with almost never getting eight hours of sleep, took a big toll… Now I need to sleep a full seven hours to feel creative and happy the next day.”
Gates wrote that people “almost certainly” need seven to eight hours a night, “even if you’ve convinced yourself otherwise.”
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