Let me tell you my own personal story of the living hell of being a night owl in a society that seems to begin the workday at the crack of dawn, while I would have preferred getting up at the crack of noon all the while.

A Very Annoyed Five-Year-Old

No matter how far back I think in my lifetime, I can always remember being forced out of bed earlier than I should have been.

The memories go all the way back to elementary school. Maybe it was kindergarten, maybe it was first grade. All I remember is my mom coming into my bedroom, turning on the lights, setting out clothes for me to wear for the day, and haranguing me to get moving.

She didn’t mean anything negative by it. (I love you, Mom!) She only wanted me to do well in school, having been raised in a generation when school actually mattered. After all, school is school and we couldn’t control what time the school day started.

Even now, despite our kids naturally waking around 7:00 a.m. on most days, we sometimes have to gently wake them, particularly our youngest who tends to take after me rather than my wife. Oh, and if anyone doesn’t like being woken too early, it’s my younger daughter, Maeve! (Well, besides myself, that is, although, ironically, she does go to bed on her own when she’s tired. If we’re visiting family or vice versa, she’ll even fight to go to bed! Thankfully she’s easily guilt-tripped. “But everyone is here just to see you!” She eats that one up.)

I remember those boring school days as if I were still there. The experience of spending all day in school watching the clock, trying to pay attention, watching the clock, sitting in a hard wooden desk that I can still smell, watching the clock, sweating my ass off both early and late in the school year (public schools in Linden, New Jersey, didn’t have air conditioning back then), and dreading the day’s homework assignments. Did I mention watching the clock? In fact, it was the boredom and rigidity of traditional schooling that compelled my wife and me to send our kids to private school—or at least to the type of school where learning is made to be fun and kids learn by doing, not by drudgery and rote memorization. (The school’s motto is that a child is a lamp to be lighted, not a vessel to be filled with useless information. I couldn’t agree more, though they don’t actually use the words “useless information.” I added that.)

Perhaps more accurately, school was boring and rigid for me. That’s most likely because I would have rather slept in for a couple of extra hours and actually been ready for the day, but I neither had a choice in the matter, nor did I have any idea I was a night owl. However, not all kids are natural night owls to begin with, and not all teenagers tend to be extreme night owls. (If you’re in doubt, and you have teenage kids, think of the fun of getting them to bed on time! Although if their grades suck, now you know why. Hopefully.) Other kids enjoyed school. Some even loved it. I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong; my grades were stellar and I almost always brought home straight A’s, at least before I checked my brain out of school entirely. I just hated being dragged out of bed to sit in a classroom to learn boring subjects that I’d never use in real life, especially when they were taught primarily by people who never left school in the first place!

Like any good kid, I told my parents I liked school. After all, I had good grades and didn’t want to disappoint them. But I hated it. And I never fully understood why.

At least not until about 10 years later.

High School Hell

High school was hell. No, not the kind of high school that you see in 1980s movies, with the jocks throwing the nerds in lockers and giving them wedgies and all that, though that certainly went on. (And high school for me really was in the 1980s.) Granted, I was a nerd, but got along well with most anyone, just like I still do today. The only difference is that I was a major introvert as a kid and I’m an extrovert as an adult, the result of a very successful sales career followed by lots and lots of public speaking as a best-selling author. Or at least I think that’s why. I met my wife in 2004 and she still refuses to believe that I was ever an introvert, while my family back in New Jersey cannot fathom the concept that I’m now extroverted and love to show up at networking mixers and business roundtables and the Rotary Club (which is full of younger people now—it’s not your grandpa’s Rotary Club anymore), Dad’s nights put on by both the school and by us on our own time, and other venues where I could meet and mingle with new people.

After all, what I primarily do for a living—high-level sales process consulting with VPs and C-Suite executives—isn’t exactly conducive to networking. CEOs don’t go to networking mixers, nor do VPs; they’re simply too busy. Nor would they benefit from them, either. Indeed, they’d find themselves surrounded by people who cannot help them, and you don’t reach the C-Suite by wasting time. So when I go to an event, it’s to enjoy good conversation and the company of others.

Compare that to when I was 10 years old or so and would go hide in my room when relatives came to visit. I’m being totally serious.

(If you’re wondering how I can talk and work with CEOs on their level without an education, the Harvard Business Review “Essentials” series is beyond valuable. You’ll learn everything you need to know and save a hundred grand on that MBA!)

It was in middle school that I stopped bringing home straight A grades. Okay, I wasn’t bringing home D’s and F’s either, but in my house, all hell broke loose without all A’s on the report card. (Thank God my kids don’t have to deal with report cards, for their sakes!)

Natural Law stated that, as a nerd, I must hate gym class, which I did. In middle school I used to just cut gym and instead do some extra credit work in a science class, which always helped me to avoid getting busted for skipping gym. Besides, the locker room smelled something awful.

So when high school came around, I enrolled in the school’s Navy JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps). I had zero interest in the military, which would later change, thanks to JROTC, even though I never served. The reason I joined is because it replaced gym class. In other words, for four years of high school, I never had to attend gym class once. And that was okay because the physical training in JROTC was far superior to playing sports in gym class anyway! (Although that became a lot more fun as a senior when I was able to order the freshmen to do push-ups.)

There was a problem, though …

You see, for my first two years of high school, homeroom started at 8:05 a.m. After homeroom, instead of heading to gym class, I went across the street to Navy JROTC class every day.

It worked out great until I reached my junior year. Because both were able to hold officer ranks in our company, juniors and seniors were combined into one JROTC class, which was held at … [drum roll please] … 7:15 a.m.!

Don’t get me wrong—I loved JROTC. Loved it. I loved everything I learned, I loved hearing our instructors’ war stories (literally), I loved putting on a Navy uniform once a week, I loved learning how to shoot well on rifle team … I just didn’t love the early hour. About the only thing worse was being awakened by flying trashcans at 5:00 a.m. when they sent us to boot camp at the U.S. Coast Guard’s recruit training facility in Cape May, New Jersey, known as “Camp Snoopy” to the drill instructors.

Can you seriously imagine me getting up so freaking early so I could get to school by 7:15 a.m.? Keep in mind that I frequently walked the mile from home to class. (Okay, fine, 0.9 miles.) Double the annoyance for having to salute some higher-ranking kids I didn’t like, or the many times I slipped and fell on ice walking in the winter.

At least I was a step ahead of my best friend Tom from back in those days, who would often show up as late as 7:45 a.m., thanks to one shared bathroom in his house.

Just like now, if I have to get up super early, I do fine for a while, at least until the crash hits in the early to mid afternoon. (This happens to so-called morning people, too, though they’ll deny it all the way to the grave. You’ll learn the scientific and medical reasons why further on in this book.)

Having said all that, I actually looked forward to the class every day. In fact, for a nerd who initially had no interest in anything military, I came to love JROTC and it was not only my favorite class in high school, but the discipline learned there became a valuable lifetime skill and it still benefits me even today, nearly three decades after graduating from high school. My instructors have passed on and I only wish I could tell them how much they contributed to my success.

Obviously, the class wasn’t the problem. The problem was later on. I did fine until lunchtime. Then I ate and the slump hit … but for me, the quintessential night owl, it never went away.

That’s when my grades began to go to hell. (Which is why I didn’t get into any of the military academies I applied to, nor did I get a college ROTC scholarship.) Indeed, it wasn’t until I began outlining this book that I put two and two together and realized that my grades crashed exactly when I had to start getting up an hour earlier!

After dragging my way through the school day, struggling to understand subjects like mathematics and chemistry that I’d always aced without even trying, I came home each and every day and went straight to my bedroom for a nap.

Seriously, without exception, I needed to nap every single day after school once the start time changed to 7:15 a.m. Even today if I have to get up early—for example, I belonged to a weekly 7:30 a.m. business roundtable group until it disbanded—I still have to get that nap in sometime during the afternoon. If I don’t, I get a much, much stronger “second wind” later on and then I cannot go to bed. (The “second wind” is another cortisol rush and, once it hits, good luck falling asleep.)

From High School to College Dropout

I never really wanted to go to college, but like I said, my parents grew up in the days when a degree wasn’t yet a commodity and having one was worth a fortune. I bought into the same myth because I didn’t know any better. I did beg and plead to take a year off before starting college, but that wasn’t going to happen.

Off I went to college. After several years of being an amateur radio operator, something I started when I was 13 years old and continued through adulthood, particularly the public service aspect of it, I just knew I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I loved tinkering with electronics, and even had my first profitable business underway at 14 years old, buying antique radios for next to nothing at local swap meets (rarely more than five dollars), refurbishing them, then selling them via classified ads for over a hundred dollars each. That’s big money for a teenager. On top of that I used to go to work with my dad at AT&T Technologies pretty frequently during the summer, and was fascinated by everything I saw there; I even got to witness the very first prototype of a surface-mount circuit board being robot-assembled. (I have a feeling that only my fellow nerds will know what that is without looking it up, although I know they’re all drooling right now.)

My very first class as a college student blindsided me. It seemed too good to be true. (And it was.) We all showed up in the lecture hall at 8:00 a.m., the professor came in, announced that it was way too early in the morning to have a class, and moved it to a later hour. Wow! “This place was made for me,” I thought. Wrong! All that meant was having 8:00 a.m. classes only four days a week instead of five. To add insult to injury, that professor turned out to be downright sadistic.

The big problem was that my final two years of high school—when I had to be there at 7:15 a.m. and was brain-fried by early afternoon—left me ill prepared for one of the world’s toughest engineering schools.

That night owl professor happened to be my calculus professor. The problem was that I flunked calculus in high school; it was in the postcrash hours of the afternoon, and then I flunked it again in college. The extreme fatigue I experienced from having to get up too early, in both venues, essentially took my brain offline as soon as it set in. And I, for one, cannot remember a damned thing when I’m that tired.

After a lousy first semester, I went to intersession over Christmas break, which is a glorified two-week version of summer school that everyone passes, regardless of actual performance. It was around then that I realized that many private universities are for-profit businesses, not wonderful institutions of higher education. I later learned the reason everyone passed intersession was so that the school could keep the tuition dollars rolling in.

My second semester was a complete disaster. Friends would even come to my dorm room to try to wake me up for class. They knew that I was intelligent and could make it; however, they didn’t understand the concept that I simply don’t function well early in the morning.

To make matters worse, this was all during the recession of 1991–1992. I had pledged a fraternity, only to find 30- something-year-old men—with electrical engineering degrees—living in the frat house due to unemployment. That was my first clue that maybe school wasn’t worth it. My suspicions were confirmed when one of those electrical engineers couldn’t wire a lamp plug and I had to do it for him! I thought I’d walk out of there after four years able to build radios and other electronics, and this joker couldn’t do something that electricians learn on day one. This is why I continued to suspect that college is a scam.

It wasn’t long before I fell so far behind from all those missed classes that there was no hope of catching up, so I spent the rest of the year partying and having fun. (Maybe that’s when my introversion started to fade?) It all culminated in getting kicked out of the dorms for shooting off fireworks on campus and having to live “at home,” as they say. (I guess I never understood that saying, since living with your parents means living with your parents, not living at your home.)

Then came the big decision: Go deeper into debt by spending another year in a school I hated, and, to add insult to injury, have to wake up at an insane hour in order to commute there?

No thanks. It was time to call it quits.

The College Dropout Enters the Workforce

With all the pro-college brainwashing I endured from parents, teachers, principals, and guidance counselors—you name it—only my burning desire to someday become wealthy overcame the inferiority complex I gained from being a high school graduate in a college-educated world.

Assuming I had no marketable skills other than my love of working on cars, I got a job as an auto mechanic. Some days were good; others were bad. It all depended on what kind of work came in each day. Having said that, going home every day all greasy and with transmission fluid in my hair flat-out sucked.

The bigger issue, however, was getting to work. Just like with everything else, the day started at 8:00 a.m. (Seriously, what is it about 8:00 a.m. that they are all addicted to?) For several months I was there on time, and then I began to fade. The early days started catching up with me and before long I was sleeping in every few weeks and not getting to work.

Finally, I decided enough was enough and I quit. I got a lecture from the owner on how I needed to go to mechanic school to learn “the computer,” which was about the stupidest thing I’d ever heard, since using “the computer” is a matter of plugging in a cable, seeing what code comes up, looking it up in a book, then replacing the faulty part. Nowadays, that’s all mechanics really do. I remember one time when the Land Rover dealership had my wife’s car for a total of four weeks in separate visits. The thing is, I instantly knew what was wrong with it, but since there were no codes, the dealer’s mechanics couldn’t figure it out. Finally I got them on the phone, explained that when a car is stalling randomly and there are no codes being generated, it’s an early fuel pump problem. (They called back two hours later to confirm that it was the fuel pump regulator. But I digress. Now I’m just bragging.)

Next up was my first sales job. Okay, not really my first, considering my amateur radio fixer-upper business, and a part-time telemarketing job I did at night during high school for a while.

This was a real job—the kind where you had to wear a tie, at a minimum. So tie shopping we all went. It was still telemarketing, but it was business-to-business, and I was very good at it. Great, in fact. Until I got tired of showing up by 8:00 a.m. to an office that was a solid 40-minute commute away on a good day.

I won’t go into the details, because you already know enough to guess how it turned out.

Success Found—At Last!

Over the next few years I moved around a bit and held a variety of jobs, some in sales, others not.

Finally, I landed in Las Vegas, Nevada, which was the biggest growth city at the time; that’s why I’d moved there. Common sense told me that where there is massive growth, there is massive opportunity in B2B sales, so I jumped all over it.

And that’s when it happened.

Soon I found myself employed not just in sales, but in outside sales. For the first time ever, I could excel at a job—even be #1 in the office—and not have to be at work at 8:00 a.m.!

There was some culture shock involved, though. My wife, also from the New York City metro area, but whom I met in Phoenix, Arizona, had a similar experience upon moving to Phoenix.

The thing is, these cowboys and cowgirls from the Old West would brag about being up at 5:30 a.m.! Or 5:00 a.m.! Or 4:30 a.m.! It was like a big pissing contest to see who got up the earliest.

I can’t remember how many times I’d set up an appointment with a prospect only to hear the words, and of course they said this braggingly, “I’m up every day at 5:00 a.m. How about you come by at 6:30?”

“How about 10:00? That’s when I’m open. My morning is already booked.” Yeah, with sleep, that is! They always bought it though and I got my deals done at times that worked for me.

Soon I was kicking ass and taking names in the sales game. Sure, I struggled for a long time while I took the idiotic advice to make cold calls all day, every day, but eventually I was hired by a sales manager with a brain who showed me the path to lightness and away from that ineffective, dark-side stuff known as cold calling.

The real reason I became a star at selling wasn’t entirely because I learned how to get sales without the misery of cold calling, though that was huge. The primary reason was because I could largely set my own work schedule—no more mandatory 8:00 a.m. nonsense!

Before long I was in high demand and could name my price to competitors, though I stayed at that job until I relocated again to Phoenix in 2000. I was earning five figures a month and had a fantastic sales manager who was not only remote, but when he came to our office for a week each month, he left me alone. At most I’d get a voicemail on Thursday saying, “Hey Frank, it’s John, just seeing how things are going and if you need to get together for any reason before I head back tomorrow.” Of course he left those messages in the morning; I didn’t get the message until I woke up.

Freedom Found

With the relative freedom my success in sales had brought me, I was finally happy.

And it was all because I didn’t have to drag myself out of bed at an ungodly hour and then spend the rest of the day dragging ass and wondering what was wrong with me. It turns out there’s nothing wrong with me; the problem is a world where everyone just falls in line and starts each day at eight o’clock in the morning. There’s no rhyme or reason for this, other than the weak excuse of, “It’s always been done that way!” Yeah, sure … that’s the same weak excuse I was given whenever I questioned cold calling.

When I moved to Phoenix in 2000, the city’s businesses were starved for broadband Internet service. I accepted a job offer from a wireless Internet startup, but they had no idea what they were doing (ironically, they’re based in Dallas, where I later lived). I soon left and went to a small, local, self-funded competitor. It seemed like amateur night compared to the corporate world of the previous employer; however, their product simply worked! To me, that’s the difference between a company that gets venture capital and is suddenly worried about what kind of handmade Italian desks to buy and a company that just bootstraps it and gets the job done.

Within about two months I was one of six sales reps, yet I was producing 50% of all of the company’s sales volume. I soon became good friends with the one honest owner, and we remained friends. (The other two ripped off investors and got dragged through lawsuit after lawsuit. They also tanked the company, for which I’m grateful, since this was not long after 9/11, no one was hiring, and I was forced to start a business. Thanks, guys!)

Imagine that … a sudden quantum shift from a lifetime of struggle, unhappiness, and especially fatigue, to a life filled with abundance and success. All because I could sleep a couple of hours later!

Part of why I’m writing this book is because we’re in the Internet-based Information Age and the days of forcing people to show up at an office at 8:00 a.m. are starting to wane. Sure, it’s happening very slowly, but then again, that’s why I’m writing this.

When employers come to realize that anywhere from a third to a half of their employees are night owls, and will perform better and reduce company turnover if they’re allowed to work during their most productive hours, employers will make those changes and fewer people will experience the level of misery that I did.

When corporate wellness programs begin to customize employee profiles based on sleep habits, they’ll be better able to customize the wellness program to each individual versus trying to force the same program on everyone. Wellness will improve and the employer’s health insurance costs will drop. So will sick days.

When universities, for whom the all-important graduation rate is king (remember, they’re all about money today and operate like businesses), come to understand and accept this knowledge, students will be able to create schedules that work for them. I fully believe that I’d have graduated college with honors had I been able to start the day at 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. Indeed, more and more private virtual universities—the ones that don’t pretend that they’re not businesses—are popping up. These are real university degrees that you can complete virtually on your own schedule. Southern New Hampshire University is perhaps the best known thanks to their heavy advertising, along with the many schools now offering online MBAs. Heck, even schools like Harvard offer virtual MBAs today.

Billionaire Mark Cuban, who lives nearby and whose neighborhood I drive through several times a week for inspiration, has been extremely vocal about the fact that higher education in America has turned into a scam, and predicts that traditional universities will be largely replaced by online universities as more and more people wise up and see what’s happening. I mean seriously, outside of doctors and lawyers, I really can’t think of many people who work in a field that’s even remotely related to their college major. Talk about a giant waste of money. Granted, I wish I hadn’t missed out on the social aspect of college, but for what it costs, I could put on the party to end all parties!

From the perspective of morning larks versus night owls, if Mr. Cuban is correct, that one change will totally transform higher education as we know it. Never mind the fact that costs will be slashed; the larger benefit is that the one-third to one-half of society who happen to be naturally born night owls will be able to participate and study on their own schedules, and that will make them happy, successful, and even healthier than being forced to conform to a morning-centric world.