Task D: How to succeed? Get more sleep!

Gap-fill paraphrase exercise

Words:

efficient / revolution / virility / success / bragging / fainted / Washington / sleep / before / better / hyper-connected / prevent / I.Q. / fainted / audience

Fill in the blanks with a word that best completes the sentence. If you have problems, click on the [?] button or the 'hint' button at the bottom of the page.


Speaking to a room full of Type-A women, Arianna Huffington states that in order for people to achieve they need to sleep more. She states that she learned the importance of getting a good sleep ‘the hard way’, after accidentally breaking her cheek bone and needing stitches when she from over-exhaustion.

Arianna humorously calls her idea of getting more sleep a ‘’ and a ‘new feminist issue’, and generated much laughter from members when she joked that women were going to sleep their way to the top, an expression which usually has a very different meaning!

Arianna feels that for too many powerful men these days, lack of sleep is a sign of male , and she tells a story of having a date with a man who was that he had slept only 4 hours the previous night. Arianna made audience members laugh again by telling them that he would have been a much better date and dinner partner if he had slept five.

Ms Huffington also thinks that, especially in , too many men compete to see who can sleep less and work more, calling this phenomenon ‘sleep deprivation one-upmanship’. She says that having breakfast at 8:00 am is considered by them to be too late in the day, as they like to wake much earlier to show how busy and they are. She feels that although these men may believe they are , they usually are not, especially nowadays with so many talented financial and political leaders making such dreadful policies. Arianna feels that a high is therefore not an indicator of great leadership because true leaders need to see and prevent problems before they occur, (‘to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic’), which she jokingly states a woman with more sleep could do than powerful men are doing currently. Arianna jokes that if Lehman Brothers financial group was called ‘Lehman Brothers and Sisters’, one of the sisters would have had enough to see the major financial problems they occurred, and would have found better ways to solve or even them from occurring.

Ms. Huffington concludes by saying that if people get more sleep, they would be happier, more and more thankful. She finishes by stating that they would also be better able to find the great ideas that already exist inside them, which is not only good for people as individuals, but also for the world as a whole.