Ode to Sleepy

Thanks everyone … for consistency’s sake I’ll keep this here 1 or 2 more days … but please know that I very much appreciate everyone who has upgraded to a premium subscription over the last week or so. It really makes a difference! If you’ve been getting something out of Understandably and are in a position to support it, becoming a premium subscriber helps more than you might think. It’s been six years of work I care deeply about, and your support keeps it going. If it’s not the right time, I understand completely. We’re still friends! But if you’re in a position to help out, I’m grateful. Thanks! When I was an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice long ago, we had some real characters working with us. One of them was a lawyer who kept a pillow and a comforter under his desk. Every afternoon, he’d quietly close his door, lay down on the floor, and take a nap. He’d get annoyed if anyone woke him up. The rest of us thought it was somewhere between eccentric and genius, but he was a good guy and very generous in sharing the briefs he wrote and filed in court. I’ll admit it — I was mostly jealous. The idea of stretching out and actually sleeping in the middle of the day, in a federal building seemed like a win. I’m not going to use his real name here, but let’s just call him Sleepy. Anyone who worked with me back then might know who I mean. It turns out Sleepy was ahead of his time. Scott Kirby is the CEO of United Airlines, which by available seat miles is the largest airline in the world. He runs an organization of roughly 100,000 people and is responsible for an operation that doesn’t stop, sleep, or really forgive mistakes. He also takes a 20-minute nap on the floor of his office almost every day. In a recent interview with McKinsey Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels, Kirby described the habit plainly. “Throughout my whole career, when I’m in the office, I’ll close the door and take a 20-minute nap. When I first got to United, people were, like, ‘Oh my God, where do you take a nap?’ I said, ‘I lay on the floor.’” His team promptly offered to get him a couch. He declined to make a big deal of it. “When you’re tired, your brain is not 100%. If you’re not 100%, you shouldn’t be making decisions.” Kirby’s company goes back a long way (meaning the company he keeps, not United Airlines): Winston Churchill kept a bed in the Houses of Parliament so he’d never miss his afternoon nap. He even napped through the Blitz: “Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.” Lyndon Johnson ran what he called a two-shift day. He’d work through the morning, exercise after lunch, change into his pajamas, nap for 30 minutes, then change back and work a second shift that sometimes ran until 1 or 2 in the morning. Thomas Edison publicly dismissed sleep as a waste of time, claimed he only needed three or four hours a night, and apparently considered napping a character flaw. He also napped constantly, and there are photographs of him asleep in labs, on workbenches, in libraries. Perhaps my favorite all-time napper however was Salvador Dalí, who approached everything with a certain theatrical commitment. He’d sit in a chair holding a bundle of keys over a silver plate. When he fell asleep and dropped them, the crash woke him, which he believed translated to a micro-nap deep enough to access his subconscious without letting him slide into REM. At the risk of prompting you to take a nap right now, let’s just say that there is science on this that’s been piling up for years, and it keeps pointing in the same direction: A European study of 90 adults found that even a 20-minute nap improved the odds of a creative breakthrough — with deeper naps producing results in 85.7% of participants, compared to 55.5% of those who stayed awake. Harvard Medical School research showed that sleep spindles — brief bursts of brain activity during light non-REM sleep — actually target the specific regions you used during learning. The stronger those spindles, the better performance afterward. And, a Rice University and Weill Cornell study found that even 30 minutes of light sleep improved performance on cognitive tasks and produced measurable changes in how neurons fire and synchronize. Our napping brains are apparently consolidating, refining, and reorganizing — doing work that waking thought can’t replicate. So what’s stopping you? Probably the same thing that was stopping us back at DOJ — the feeling that lying down in the middle of the day is somehow an admission of weakness — or else, at least the kind of thing that gets you a goofy nickname and leads to someone else writing about you in an email newsletter two decades later. But then again: Churchill pushed through some fairly serious things, as did LBJ. Kirby is running the largest airline in the world, and Dalí somehow managed to nap while not crushing that bizarre, trademark moustache. Here’s to you, Sleepy, for figuring it out while the rest of us were muddling on. The comforter under the desk is starting to look like the obvious move. The Bulwark: The White House unveiled a radical redesign of new U.S. passports to include a prominent picture of President Trump. The passports, apparently a limited edition to celebrate America 250, will feature a scowling image of Trump superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, along with Trump’s signature in gold. Associated Press: King Charles visits Washington with hopes of restoring the US-UK relationship. Reuters: Republicans in Congress are pushing for legislation to fund Trump’s White House ballroom project at taxpayer expense. Trump previously had said that private donations would cover the estimated $400 million cost. Axios: The share of Americans who say their financial situation is getting worse is now 55%, the highest point in 25 years (including during the pandemic and the financial crisis) according to new Gallup data. Last year, the percentage was 53%; in 2024 it was 47%. Yahoo Finance: Backers of a proposed tax on California billionaires say they have collected enough signatures to bring the measure to a statewide vote. Unions say the tax would prevent hospital closures and fund public education; opponents say the tax would simply fuel an exodus of wealthy company founders. CNBC: The United Arab Emirates is leaving OPEC on May 1. The shock announcement Tuesday comes after the UAE was the target of missile and drone attacks for weeks by Iran (which is also a member of OPEC). The UAE It was the group’s third-largest oil producer in February behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The National: Speaking of the UAE, its flag carrier Emirates has shared plans to introduce private en-suite bathrooms on board its aircraft - the first in the world to do so. Associated Press: How 2 men claimed an absurd record by driving an old 3-wheel car the length of Africa: They had help from sponsors and crowd funding, and documented the journey on an Instagram page that pulled in nearly 100,000 followers under the title: “14,000 miles, 3 wheels, 0 common sense.” Thanks for reading. Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.