Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2015; Vaynerchuk’s companies and the figures it cites about them reflect that time.
Until now, many highly successful entrepreneurs have given us the same advice: get up early, before everyone else, so the day doesn’t chase you. This has gone so far that getting up early has become associated with success. We could go even further: some people have an unfair advantage over the rest of us because they don’t need more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep a day. That advantage can’t be matched, and trying to match it can even be dangerous for anyone who needs more than 6 hours of sleep.
(Read: 5 reasons to get up earlier)
But for some time now, numerous studies have been backing the theory that performance peaks at certain times of day. There are even athletes who set their best marks at five in the afternoon, marks they can’t match at ten in the morning. And this theory of peak performance also seems to apply to people in business.
The latest to speak plainly on this subject, on the website Medium.com, is Gary Vaynerchuk, a highly successful entrepreneur who has been building businesses since he was 20. He took his company from 5 million to 45 million in revenue in 5 years, built WineLibrary.com, the leading wine e-commerce site in the United States, and is co-founder of VaynerMedia, a major agency that helps brands. Those are just a few of his many projects.
Gary is clear about it: in his view, getting up early sucks. He thinks that becoming an early riser in order to succeed is very overrated, at least in his case, since he admits he doesn’t function well in the mornings.
As he explains, some people work best first thing in the morning, others at 5 p.m. and others at 10 p.m. He has never been a morning man: he finds it very hard to get up early because he sleeps like a log, and for him it’s a struggle. It sucks, he says.
When he is working on a project or has to set up a meeting, he makes sure to do it at a time of day when he is at 100%.
For Gary, success doesn’t depend on how much you sleep each day, but on what you do each day while you are awake.
It is certainly another point of view, one that clashes with a very common and well-worn piece of advice, the habit of getting up early. Gary tried to develop that habit without success, and in the end he decided to give up because he couldn’t perform as well.
Could we have idealised the link between success and getting up at 5 or 6 in the morning?
Further reading
- Ray Dalio: I went from poor to rich thanks to these 4 habits
- 25 habits of successful people
- 20 daily habits that will improve your life
Featured image: Andrew Kelly, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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