Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The Early Years
Andrew Huberman worked 80 and even 100 hour weeks in graduate school, and it served him well, eventually leading to tenure at Stanford. For roughly the first four years of starting a company, or through medical school, the priority is to get as much done as possible without impairing yourself. Nobody defines optimization at that stage.
Adding Rest
After that, the question becomes how to insert rest along the way, during the day or across the week or the month, so the best levels of focus and creativity are within reach. Telling someone starting an AI company in the Bay Area to get eight hours of sleep, lift, and do breathwork would be naive. What they should determine is how much energy they actually have.
What Mastery Looks Like
Mastery shows how accurately a schedule matched a person's physiology. Some people look 10 years older than they should or carry a chronic illness, and others seem to have found an extra gear.
Where did the 80-hour week in medicine come from?
In 1984, Libby Zion, an 18-year-old, died in a New York hospital, and the case drew attention to exhausted trainee doctors. A state commission led by Bertrand Bell recommended limits on resident work hours, and New York adopted rules in 1989 capping the week at 80 hours. In 2003, the national accrediting body for residency programs, the ACGME, set the same limit across the United States. Before that, residents commonly worked more than 100 hours a week.
How does sleep affect creative problem solving?
In a 2004 study in Nature, Ullrich Wagner and colleagues in Lübeck gave people a number-transformation task with a hidden shortcut. After a night of sleep, 59 percent of participants discovered the shortcut. Among those who stayed awake for the same period, 23 percent did. The result suggested that sleep can restructure newly learned information into new insights.
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