Taking full responsibility for a business can keep you up at night. The brilliant CEO and VC Ben Horowitz once said: “As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. Every two hours I would wake up and cry.”

Here is what you can do so that you are able to work hard and sleep well. When you wake up in the morning, push yourself to be dissatisfied and highly ambitious. In the evening take the opposite tack. Forgive yourself all your failures and weaknesses. Accept who you are and be kind to yourself and others. This helps to get reach the peace of mind a good nights sleep requires.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

If you are a start-up CEO, how do you make sure you can sleep well at night, because it’s not easy. Ben Horowitz said it in a fantastic way when he stated, “As a start-up CEO, I slept like a baby. Every two hours, I would wake up and cry.”

It’s said as a joke but it is true that when you take full responsibility for your business, you may wake up in the middle of the night worrying about something, planning something. Your brain is at work and it causes you to wake up in the middle of the night and the next day you are tired and then you get more tired and more tired.

I don’t have the ultimate solution for how to sleep well at night, but I do have a simple rule I follow myself. Whereas when I wake up in the morning, I allow myself to be dissatisfied, highly ambitious, being tough on myself, setting goals and pushing myself as far as I can go.

Then, in the evening when the day is ending, I take the opposite tact and forgive myself all the failures of the day. All the things I didn’t know, all my own weaknesses, and I accept who I am and I am very kind to myself.

So that when I go to bed, I can feel that at least somebody’s appreciating me, meaning myself. Then I sleep the whole night and I can let my brain relax or work on whatever it’s working on. In the morning when I wake up again, I can set the bar high and be ambitious and go fast and have a goal of accomplishing big things.

Then when the day is over, again back to just accepting and being kind to yourself. And to others as well!