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For me, there is really only one big choice to make in life: Are you willing to fight to find out what’s true? Do you deeply believe that finding out what is true is essential to your well-being? Do you have a genuine need to find out if you or others are doing something wrong that is standing in the way of achieving your goals? If your answer to any of these questions is no, accept that you will never live up to your potential. If, on the other hand, you are up for the challenge of becoming radically open-minded, the first step in doing so is to look at yourself objectively.
Now we can appreciate what I believe to be a classic, self-fulfilling positive cycle of evolution. Our shift from tree to ground sleeping instigated an ever more bountiful amount of relative REM sleep compared with other primates, and from this bounty emerged a steep increase in cognitive creativity, emotional intelligence, and thus social complexity. This, alongside our increasingly dense, interconnected brains, led to improved daily (and nightly) survival strategies. In turn, the harder we worked those increasingly developed emotional and creative circuits of the brain during the day, the greater was our need to service and recalibrate these ever-demanding neural systems at night with more REM sleep. As this positive feedback loop took hold in exponential fashion, we formed, organized, maintained, and deliberatively shaped ever larger social groups. The rapidly increasing creative abilities could thus be spread more efficiently and rapidly, and even improved by that ever-increasing amount of hominid REM-sleep that enhances emotional and social sophistication. REM-sleep dreaming therefore represents a tenable new contributing factor, among others, that led to our astonishingly rapid evolutionary rise to power, for better and worse—a new (sleep-fueled), globally dominant social superclass.
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
Everyone must decide for himself what is professional and appropriate here. A test might be to imagine yourself delivering a tough performance review to your friend. Do you cringe at the thought? If so, don’t make friends at work. If your stomach remains unaffected, you are likely to be someone whose personal relationships will strengthen work relationships.
High Output Management
Andrew S. Grove
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