“Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why.” states the first line in of the article, “The Evolution of Night Owls”  in Psychology Today magazine, December 2009, by Matthew Hutson, staff news editor. Seems they have now found a correlation between staying up late and high IQs. The “very bright” stay up later and rise later than the “very dull” (their labels, not mine). The article sites Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who argues,

“he has data showing that people with higher IQs are more likely to have values and preferences that just didn’t make sense for our ancestors to embrace. One of those is staying up late.”

Well, I have always thought that people who called 8:00 a.m. Monday morning staff meetings were, well, dumb and now I have proof!  All snarking aside, I did my own personal study around this when I was in college. I have never being an early morning person. My father was a night owl too. So was my mother’s mother. It’s genetic. So having to make early morning classes was always a struggle. My worst was history of art and architecture, 8 a.m., and then they turned the lights off for the slides to boot. Lots of head bobbing in that class.

  One year I did an experiment. My hypothesis was that it wasn’t about the amount of sleep, but rather the hours on the clock I slept. So I set up a schedule and parameters – six hours of sleep a night (hey, it was college). The first week 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m.; the second, midnight to 6 a.m.; the last week. 1:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. Needless to say I woke more refreshed, alert and was more productive during the day with the latest schedule. Another indicator, with the 5a.m. rising I usually woke up feeling slightly nauseous. The 7a.m. wake up, no problem.

 I have since experimented further. Left to my own devices, no boundaries on bedtime and no alarm upon waking, I will naturally gravitate to the later hours. Also, if I truly allow myself to do this for an extended period of time, I will start to wake up with the seasonal sunrise. This means in the summer I do get up at the crack of dawn without an alarm clock, happy to greet the early summer days. Doesn’t that just seem smarter?!

The other day I caught a piece of an Oprah episode held at the Texas State Fair. She and her best friend Gayle were judging a cooking contest. I came in at the end and they were down to the last two contestants. Oprah liked one dish and Gayle the other and they couldn’t decide who the winner was to be. Oprah was saying “I’m not backing down” and Gayle was saying the same. This went on several times and each time neither was giving in.

In the end they declared a tie. Each contestant won and the sponsor supposedly wonderfully donated a second big and expensive prize. The solution wound up essentially a best of class rather than one top overall winner. An approach I concur with, making this a competition of excellence rather than perfection, as there was no defined criteria for the win.

A couple of days later another option was presented to me. I was having coffee with a business associate and we were discussing his company, how all of his employees were working at a distance, some of whom he had employed for several years and he had never met. Talking about the pros and cons of conducting business in this manner, he expressed some difficulty with managing remotely but, as I listened further, there were no complaints about communication. I surmised that having been a VP of Global Real Estate for many years he had learned the skill of engaging people at a distance.

He agreed, said he had been negotiating leases for years around the world and he was very adept at negotiation over the phone. He had a recent example of his skill. He had just completed the sale of his company to a larger one in another state. During the final phases of the sale price determination he was in an on-the-phone negotiation and they were down to the wire, but still $2500 apart. With the sale being somewhere nicely in six figures and months of talking behind them, one would think a difference of $2500 was insignificant, but each party refused to back down.

It was partly a matter of saving face and, perhaps a bigger part, a definer of their future relationship as he, the old owner, would now be an employee to the new owners. If either backed down now, one or the other would be considered a push-over and probably wind up being taken advantage of or repeating this scenario throughout their business relationship. Also, to this gentleman’s mind, if they were going to quibble about this insignificant a point, he really didn’t want to do business with them and the deal would be off. So, what to do?

Here is his idea for brinkmanship and remember, he has been through this hundreds of times. Toss a coin. Yes, you are reading this right. Just toss a coin. This way both save face. It is up to the whim of the universe, to chance. Neither has to back down, the conflict is resolved and they can move on, without enmity or animosity, neither feeling slighted, nor the loser – all with a simple win-win tactic.

So Oprah and Gayle, the next time you find yourselves in a similar position, just toss a coin. Oh, by the way, he indicated that he tossed the coin, it came up heads and he won. Either way, since it was over the phone, the other person had to trust that was what really happened, and they did – another relationship exercise. Try it gals.