The Brain of an Entrepreneur

The sun rises as you leave work and head for an early breakfast. You smile cheerfully at the server and decline coffee. While waiting for your food, you glance through a business magazine and mentally file several items for further thought later on. You and your sales and marketing vice presidents have just pulled an all-nighter preparing a presentation, and the client meeting is in two hours. It's a new prospect and a new market, and none of you had heard of either before yesterday. But you feel relaxed, alert and confident that if the business can be won, you and your team will win it.

Can this story be true? After staying up for 24 hours, you should be sleepy, jittery, irritable and anxious for more caffeine to add to the buckets you've already gulped. You should have trouble reading, much less memorizing pages of text. Your employees should feel the same. And you should never count on any marketing effort to work, especially one with less than a day's worth of preparation behind it.