While in Silicon Valley they brag about hugging the culture of “996” with eternal days With no time to rest, Pavel Durov, co-founder and CEO of Telegram, has built a routine that clashes head-on with that model.
Instead of living glued to your cell phone, opt for long hours of rest and phone use reduced to its minimum essential expression. All this taking into account that he runs an app with hundreds of millions of users around the world.
Sleep as a tool for creativity
Durov does not forgive time to go to sleep. The millionaire explained in an interview on Lex Friedman’s podcast that books every night between 11 and 12 hours to be in bed. That It doesn’t always mean you sleep. all those hours, but the founder of Telegram, instead of getting nervous and getting up when he can’t fall asleep, simply limits himself to staying in bed thinking.
“Some people hate it. They tell me ‘Take a sleeping pill’ but I never take pills. I love those moments because I have so many brilliant ideas, or at least they seem that way to me in those moments, while I’m lying in bed,” said the stoic millionaire.
In fact, the scientific literature corroborates what Durov says and associates it with a moment in which inactivity causes the brain to wandera moment in which the brain’s abstraction mechanisms are activated that are responsible for assimilating knowledge and relating concepts.
This process is closely related to creativity as it fosters new connections by helping to find solutions to complex problems. It is the same process that explains why the best ideas or solutions they occur to you in the shower or when you wash the dishes.
The mobile phone is not the center of life
Another curious habit of the founder of Telegram is that he avoids picking up his cell phone at all costs. just get upand delay as much as possible entering the torrent of notificationsnetworks and messages, as a deliberate way of protect your concentration.
Friedman himself confirmed this point, ensuring that in the previous two weeks that he had shared with the millionaire I hadn’t seen him use his cell phone. to share content on social networks or respond to messages.
Durov considers that the telephone is, above all, a constant source of distractions that prevents people from developing their own ideas and decide for themselves what they pay attention to. “If you open your phone first thing in the morning, what you end up being is someone who is told what to think about for the rest of the day,” Durov said.
The millionaire summarizes his position with a very clear phrase: “My philosophy is quite simple. I want to define what is important in my life. I don’t want other people, companies or organizations of all kinds to tell me what is important today and what I should think about.”
Durov’s case is even more striking if his career is taken into account: before Telegram, he had already founded one of the largest social networks in Russia, and now he is in charge of one of the most used messaging services in the world.
He himself recognizes that it may seem contradictory to promote products that encourage constant connection and, at the same time, opt for the minimum possible exposure to mobile phones in their personal life.
Image | Flickr (TechCrunch)
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings