Author: openjargon

• CEOs are often known for having extreme sleep schedules. One even rises at 3:30 a.m. daily.
• Stress management methods can range from strict workouts to long hours of meditation.
• "It's what makes me superhuman," a leader said of his morning routine. 

Running a company is a stressful job, especially if you're running one of the biggest firms in the world.

That high stress can lead to some intense and unconventional daily habits. Here are some of the most unusual routines of CEOs:

1. Waking up at 3:30 a.m. and launching into a 90-minute workout

CEOs are known for waking up early: Tim Cook and Richard Branson both rise around 5 a.m.

But Josh York, the 40-year-old CEO of in-home personal training company Gymguyz, takes it further and starts his mornings at 3:29 a.m., he told Fortune.

After having a cold rinse in the shower, he launches into an hour-and-a-half workout followed by a three-minute ice bath.

"It's what makes me superhuman," he told the outlet.

2. Bob Iger prefers to work out in a dark room with the TV on mute

The CEO of Disney works out first thing in the morning in a darkened room, he says in his MasterClass on 'Using your time effectively.'

He keeps a TV on silent during his workout so he can watch it against the backdrop of his own choice of music.

"It's my most creative time in many ways," Iger said.

3. A teaspoon of Icelandic cod liver oil washed down with black coffee to start the day

Mikael Berner, CEO of email software company Edison Software, starts his day with a dose of cod liver oil, a source of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin A, and vitamin D.

It's meant to have benefits like promoting heart health and benefiting cells. Experts warn against taking more than one tablespoon daily to avoid consuming too much vitamin A.

4. Or, if you're Elon Musk, your morning routine includes eating a doughnut

Tesla CEO Elon Musk opts for a sugary start to the day.

A post on X declared that sugar is poison. Musk replied, "I eat a donut every morning. I'm still alive."

5. Mark Zuckerberg's diet requires eating 4,000 calories a day

The Meta CEO previously said on Threads that he eats roughly 4,000 calories to offset his intensive MMA and jiujitsu training.

Another popular diet with successful CEOs is only eating within specific time windows — intermittent fasting.

6. Taking an afternoon nap in the office

Robin Zeng, whose role as leader of the world's largest EV battery manufacturing firm CATL makes him known as China's "Battery King," takes a daily nap at noon in the office, according to an interview with the FT.

Some experts recommend short naps of between 20 and 30 minutes to improve focus and combat fatigue.

7. Two hours of meditation a day

Jack Dorsey, who runs financial services company Block, adhered to a strict wellness schedule that allowed him "just to stay above water," when he was also CEO of Twitter. Each day involved walking five miles, meditating for two hours, and only eating one meal.

Dorsey is a big proponent of mediation. For his birthday in 2018, he took part in a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat where he meditated for nearly 17 hours daily.

"It's extremely painful and demanding physical and mental work," he said on a thread on Twitter at the time.

8. "Eyes-open" meditation

Another fan of meditation is Gwyneth Paltrow, CEO of wellness brand Goop.

She advocates "eyes-open" meditation, which involves being mindful at any moment in everyday life.

"Once you learn how to do eyes-open meditation — something you can literally incorporate at any time — you can be engaged with the world but still very connected to yourself," said previously told Business Insider. "I rely on it to feel more whole."

9. When faced with a tough problem, Jeff Bezos engages in some mind-wandering

The former Amazon CEO would hold meetings that lasted an undetermined amount of time. He used this time to let his mind wander in order to come up with creative ideas.

"When I sit down at a meeting, I don't know how long the meeting is going to take," Bezos told the Lex Fridman Podcast in December, "the reality is we may have to wander for a long time.

"Real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering," he said.

Letting your mind wander may seem like an inefficient use of time, but some psychologists believe it helps increase creativity and improve working memory.

10. A massage just before midnight

If reading a book and meditating aren't relaxing enough, Steven Barlett, a former CEO and founder famed for his Diary of a CEO podcast, recommends an 11 p.m. massage.

"I often get massages in the evening — it sounds crazy, but usually my masseuse comes over at 11 p.m," he told The Telegraph.

11. A more unusual habit among CEOs, Tobias Lutke says he never works later than 5:30 p.m.

While some CEOs brag about their long hours in the office and spending nights sleeping on the office floor, Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke previously said he never works later than 5:30 p.m.

"The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night," he said in a thread on Twitter, now X.

12. Bernard Arnault spends his weekends visiting LVMH-owned stores

The 75-year-old CEO and chairman of retail empire LVMH doesn't sleep in on Saturday mornings.

Instead, Arnault and his entourage take the time to visit the stores of any one of the several brands that LVMH owns. He's not there to shop but to point out any issues that might depart from his vision for the company, according to Bloomberg.

Celine, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, and Tiffany & Co. are just a few of the luxury brands under LVMH's umbrella. His sons told Bloomberg that Arnault's notes can be extremely detailed.

"He made a bunch of comments that were very, very detail-oriented," Alexandre Arnault said. "Things that you wouldn't typically notice, but once you've seen tens of thousands of stores over the years, I think it's what comes to your mind immediately."

• Ex-Meta VP of Product Ami Vora explained how she landed a temp job at Facebook.
• Vora offered to buy fancy coffee for a Facebook employee if they introduced her to the office.
• She said she was offered a temporary PR position and worked her way up to full-time.

Before Ami Vora became a Meta VP, she worked as a temporary employee in Facebook's PR department and slept on couches.

Vora spoke about how she got her first job at Facebook on an episode of "Lenny's Podcast" published Sunday. The ex-Meta exec ended up becoming VP of product at Facebook, and VP of product and design at WhatsApp.

But when she first started, she just wanted a seat at the table — and that meant doing a bit of creative networking.

"I knew that what I wanted to do was like be involved in all the wild stuff happening in Silicon Valley in the mid 2000's," Vora said.

Vora said she quit her job and traveled around the world before moving to New York and living an "extremely blissful lifestyle." Vora worked at Microsoft for three years as a product manager before leaving, according to her LinkedIn.

While her time unemployed was some of the best of her life, she said eventually she needed a job — and she wanted it to be at Facebook.

Vora said that in 2007, people considered Facebook as more important than their car. She described it as a "magical product" and said it was the way many people connected to the world.

Vora wrote in a post on Lean In that none of the jobs on the Facebook career page made sense for her at the time. While she said she looked at other companies and sent some applications, she "couldn't get Facebook's mission and energy" out of her mind.

So she didn't give up. The ex-Meta executive said she knew some people at Facebook and decided to fly out to its Palo Alto headquarters. Vora managed to work out an arrangement with one of the employees she knew: she would buy them "fancy coffee" at a downtown Palo Alto café if they took her around the office and introduced her to people.

"So everyone I met I said, 'Hey I'm Ami I really want to work here. I'll do whatever you need,'" Vora said in the podcast.

The ex-Meta executive admitted in her post on Lean In that she was nervous once she arrived and "paced around outside the Facebook building." She spent the day trying to initiate a conversation with anyone who would speak with her, she wrote in the post.

Vora said she only received one call from the head of PR after the day she spent at Facebook and they gave her several reasons why they couldn't hire her, including her lack of experience and current headcount. But they happened to need someone to review press releases so they offered her a temporary job in the department.

"This wasn't exactly what I'd been hoping for," Vora wrote in her post. "But I knew that I was passionate about the work and the company, so once again I flew from New York to San Francisco."

Vora said she took the offer and moved out to California and slept on couches. She said in her post on Lean In that she was offered a full time job a few months later.

"Eventually, they hired me full time and I didn't look back," Vora said in the interview.

Vora would later become a director at Instagram, VP of product at Facebook, and VP of product and design at Whatsapp, according to her LinkedIn. She left in 2022 after spending over 15 years at the company and became the chief product officer at Faire, an online wholesale marketplace.

• Did Apple and Meta discuss an AI deal? Or is there no AI deal happening between Apple and Meta?
• Yes! Probably. Maybe.
• You can get at the real answer by parsing two contradictory reports from The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

News: Apple has talked to Meta, its fierce rival, about an AI deal.

Also news: Apple is not talking to Meta about an AI deal, because Meta is a fierce rival.

Which one of these stories is true? Technically, it's possible for both of them to be correct.

My hunch, though, is that the second one is truthier: Apple and Meta aren't doing anything together on AI — or anything else — anytime soon.

Some background: On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal published a report that said Meta and Apple have "held discussions" about connecting Apple's devices to Meta's AI engine, similar to a deal it has already struck with OpenAI.

The key here is the tense: The WSJ said the two companies had talked, which is pretty noteworthy, given that they've been fighting for years. But the paper didn't give any sense of whether those talks were ongoing or headed anywhere.

Then on Monday, Bloomberg reported its own version of the story: Yes, the two companies had talked — but that was months ago, and nothing's happening or going to happen.

Not only that, but people at Tim Cook's company wanted to be clear about their stance re: Mark Zuckerberg's operation, telling Bloomberg (anonymously) that Apple won't work with Meta "in part because it doesn't see that company's privacy practices as stringent enough." Zing!

It's not impossible to walk back that messaging. Apple's clear strategy here is to act as a gatekeeper between its users and various AI companies. And it's possible that at some point Meta will be one of those companies, in the same way that Apple customers use iPhones to access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Apple reps haven't responded to a request for comment, and Meta declined to comment. But Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, reposted the Bloomberg story to Threads Tuesday and quipped, "Their loss."

So that's the what-does-it-all mean angle satisfied: There's probably not a lot there.

But if you're a person who gets a kick out of feuds (raises hand), then this story has some bonus pettiness: Not only do we get to watch Apple people (anonymously) dump on Meta people, we get to watch the normally civil tech press dump on each other's reporting. Fun!

• Celine Dion opens up about her struggle with Stiff Person Syndrome in her new Amazon Prime documentary.
• Dion says she tried to perform through pain by increasing her medication dosages, especially Valium.
• "I don't want dramatic, but I could've died," Dion reveals. "Too many pills. The show must go on."

Celine Dion breaks down in tears in her new Amazon Prime documentary, "I Am: Celine Dion," while reflecting on her final concerts before she was diagnosed with Stiff Person Syndrome.

Stiff Person Syndrome, also known as SPS, is a rare, progressive neurological disorder that affects about one in a million people, according to the National Institute of Health. Dion revealed her diagnosis in 2022, although she says in the doc that she began experiencing symptoms 17 years ago.

Dion tells the camera how SPS has tightened her muscles and caused her vocal cords to spasm, causing her voice to crack and sound thin or strained.

The documentary includes footage from performances in 2018 and 2019, including clips when Dion was struggling to hit certain notes.

"I need my instrument. And my instrument was not working. So we started to elevate the medicine," she explains.

Dion recounts one particular moment at a concert, just as she was about to take the stage, when she felt the effects of her medication wear off.

"From my dressing room, getting backstage, saying good luck to everybody, the crowd insane, my adrenaline, my heartbeat, my pressure, I'm like, 'The dream is about to come true again for me tonight. I love it so much,'" she recalls. "But then I feel a spasm, and my voice goes up. The medicine was burned out. It was gone."

At one point on tour, she says she was taking up to 80 or 90 milligrams of Valium every day.

"That's just one medicine," she says. "I don't want dramatic, but I could've died."

"I was taking those medicines because I needed to walk, I needed to be able to swallow. I needed medicine to function," Dion continues. "One more pill, two more pills, five more pills. Too many pills. The show must go on."

Dion completed a 22-show greatest hits tour in 2018 before launching The Courage World Tour in 2019. She postponed the first four shows in Montreal, telling fans she had a throat virus. Later concerts were rescheduled due to a "common cold" before the entire tour was shut down due to COVID-19.

After the tour resumed in 2022, Dion continued canceling and rescheduling shows. When she announced her diagnosis, she decided to cancel all remaining dates.

Dion has said the demands of performing through her pain, as well as the "burden" of lying to her fans, became too much to bear.

"I can't lie anymore," Dion says in the doc. "From a sinus infection to an ear infection to whatever. Sometimes I would point my microphone toward the audience, and I would make them sing it. There's moments where I cheated and I tapped on the microphone like it was the microphone's fault."

The documentary also shows more recent footage of Dion in the recording studio, fighting to project her voice and reach her famous falsetto.

While the producers in the studio with Dion say they're pleased with her vocal progress, Dion says she's not satisfied — especially because she doesn't want to disappoint her fans.

"I'm not quite sure if I'm going to be capable of singing. But I can't live in doubt," Dion explains to the camera. "Maybe I can sing another kind of repertoire. But then it's going to be their choice to still like me or not."

• Fruits and vegetables are loaded with vitamins and key nutrients like fiber.
• But they can also be expensive, and spoil fast. 
• A longevity expert says if you're looking to get healthy on the cheap, start with two other protein-rich foods. 

We've all heard it: fruits and veggies. The key to better health, longevity, and a balanced diet.

"Five a day" is the recommendation in the UK. In the US, federal experts recommend filling half of your daily plate with nutrient-packed whole fruits and a colorful variety of veggies.

But most people aren't even getting close to that. Roughly 1 in 10 Americans manage to meet these guidelines, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cost seems to be at least part of the issue. According to the CDC, low-income people struggle the most to get their veggie prescriptions filled, with only about 6.8% managing to meet the daily dose.

But there are already plenty of people around the world eating in a healthy, sustainable, longevity-forward way without really thinking about it. These people don't spend a fortune on fresh organic produce, or worry about counting up their veggies at the end of a long day. In fact, the cornerstone of many of their meals isn't really fruits and vegetables at all. It's a few cheap, basic staples that will not spoil, even if left in the cupboard for months.

"You hear all the time 'We've got to get more fresh fruits and vegetables into the inner city.' No! That's the wrong thing to do," Blue Zones expert Dan Buettner, who's been studying the diet and lifestyle habits of long-lived people around the world for two decades, said during a recent webinar for the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

Instead, Buettner encourages Americans to start with two simple, healthy pantry staples that just about everyone, everywhere knows how to cook well.

A complete protein

"Start with beans and a grain," Buettner said.

This is a simple, cheap, and efficient way to deliver a complete protein — providing all nine of the essential amino acids our bodies can't make for themselves — to fuel the body for a day of thinking, moving, and functioning.

Plus, beans and whole grains come with tons of fiber, which is great for both your gut and your waistline.

Buettner says the beautiful thing about this simple bean + grain equation is that we all probably know how to do it already. Unlike figuring out how to incorporate new types of produce into our diet, we don't need to learn the best way to slice zucchini or discover how to dress bib lettuce to get going with this strategy.

"Whether it's beans and corn tortillas, or beans and pasta, or beans and rice," he said, "They're shelf stable, and almost any ethnicity in America knows exactly how to make a bean and a grain taste delicious."

Start with these recipes

A couple of Buettner's own favorite bean and whole grain-forward meals from the Blue Zones include:

Italian minestrone soup

The bean: garbanzo, white, and pinto

The grain: whole grain pasta, or sourdough bread on the side

Costa Rican gallo pinto

The bean: black beans

The grain: brown rice

But it could just as easily be your own favorite twist on the basic equation. You could swap garbanzo for butter beans or fava. Or use bulgur or corn instead of brown rice. What's your favorite bean and whole grain combo and how long does it take you to make it?