Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy

Success is a Career of High Emotional Energy.

All highly successful people throughout history have in common that they were extremely energetic.

Where does their energy come from? Eventually most people get tired. How do these historically successful people keep it up, day after day, night after night, year after year? Call it “passion” if you like, but putting a word on it doesn’t really explain it. Why don’t big winners in the game of success get burned out, like most other people?

The top leaders energized other people around them, and got energy from them in return. They were experts at the art of social interaction. They generated emotional energy in their encounters, whether in full-scale meetings or brief conversations.

Caesar and Napoleon were good at conveying calm confidence, keeping people from losing their head under stress. Steve Jobs often riveted the attention of his work groups by insulting them about the quality of their work, but this was just the initiating emotion that got everyone focused.

The book is organized in three parts. Each dissects the life-story of a hugely successful career: Jobs, Napoleon, Alexander the Great. They are interspersed with sidebars on key events in the lives of other historically successful persons. We see how Caesar put down a mutiny of his troops by speaking with just the right tone and timing; and how Caesar by careful observation of what happens in the first phase of a battle was able to create a second-phase strategy that made his army invincible. We examine how Jesus disperses a lynch mob.

We will crack the mystique about genius, and see how some persons get this reputation by micro-techniques that outsiders have no awareness of.

Different personality types can all be successful. By dissecting the key features of how super-successful people interact, and how they built their networks, we will lay out what made them successful. It can be learned: the micro-sociology of success.