Today I awoke at 3:00 a.m. and could not fall asleep again. I remembered a tip for such a situation: get up and busy yourself with some useful activity for 30-40 minutes; your brain will protest and force you to sleep.
I got up and opened a textbook on English grammar. I studied for half an hour and went back to bed. Then I quickly fell asleep! The tip works!
The problem is that in the morning when I studied the sleep activity on my watch, I noticed I was awake for two hours. 30 minutes studying, 15 minutes falling asleep afterwards. That means I spent more than an hour just lying in bed, trying to convert drowsiness into normal sleep before deciding to study. It took a lot of time to acknowledge defeat and change my approach.
The ability to understand that something is not working on time—not too early, not too late—is amazingly important. I thought about it in this minor case, but actually it is very important in business.
I think people tend to change inefficient behavior too late. Why? Because we perceive change exactly as I wrote two paragraphs before: as acknowledging defeat. We do not like defeat, of course. We dislike it so much that we conjure it up out of nothing.
