The skill of communication in the era of social media, leading without a title and brand awareness has never been more important. Steve Jobs knew how important a speech can be. He practised for days before presentations. More recently, Elon Musk has delivered presentations for Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity initiatives. These talks have led to the exponential growth of his companies and, possibly, a different future for humanity.

John is former lead solo pilot for the US Navy’s Blue Angels. Now a Sloan Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, John is an internationally-renowned keynote speaker on high performance for individuals and teams. He is also a gratitude guru who inspires audiences through his “glad to be here” mantra and foundation of the same name.

During his remarks, Eisenhower referred to a university president he knew who was fond of saying, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This phrase went on to become the basis for what is known as The Eisenhower Decision Principle – a decision-making process for prioritizing tasks and projects.

Building better brains: An overview of Dr. Brynn Winegard’s expertise and current interests.

Dr. Greg Wells: Dr. Brynn, before I clicked record, you and I were talking about how you did an audit of what you love to do versus what you don’t, and that you landed on what you do, which is speaking and teaching. Can you tell us about that?

BW: I focus on business and brain science and merging the two. In the olden days, it used to be called things like “neural management,” “neuro leadership,” “neural marketing,” and those kinds of things. I consider those to be relevant, though I would say my focus is a lot broader than that. And I spend my days much like yourself, running a business, so there’s a lot of delivering that has to happen, organizing, and chasing, marketing, and some administration.

A good night’s sleep is the foundation of physical health and mental energy.

I’m a science geek. I like to know why a particular approach to life or technique for success works. Otherwise, I tend to glaze over when faced with another “X Ways to Achieve Y Results” article. In the absence of research or evidence, I’m less likely to pay attention and less motivated to make a change in my life.

Maybe that’s just me. But I’ll assume you’re also a “but how do we know that really matters?” person and lay it out for you — on the subject of sleep.

I hear what you’re thinking. It’s easy to talk about getting more rest while you’re lying in a hospital bed for weeks. In the real world there just isn’t enough time to get everything done and sleep well. Work, family and exercise is sometimes more than many people can handle at once. But the research clearly shows that if we take a bit more time to sleep, so many things that people want to achieve in life become possible.