​This Is The Secret To Sanity And Success

People fail for a lot of reasons.

People do crazy things for a lot of reasons.

But one reason we don’t talk about enough is sleep.

I watched this at American Apparel.

There were a lot of problems at that company.

It borrowed too much money. It had a toxic workplace culture. It was besieged by lawsuits. It opened too many stores. This was all written about many times during the company’s public disintegration in 2014.

As I talked about in Ego Is The Enemy and in Stillness Is The Key, Dov Charney, the founder, was a remarkably accessible boss. A lot of leaders talk about being reachable, having an open-door policy, but he really did.

Not just open-door but phone and email too. Any employee, at any level of the company, from garment sewer to sales associate to photographer, could reach out whenever they had a problem. For good measure, during one of the company’s many public relations crises, Charney posted his phone number online for any journalist or customer who had an issue as well. The upside of this was that he was constantly in tune with what was happening in the company. He could solve problems as they happened, sometimes even before they happened. He had eyes and ears everywhere. He could notice and respond to…