Some of the best work, the most entrepreneurial work may be done in the middle of the night, but this is not necessarily true. My brother-in-law helped build up a start-up company from scratch into a company that went public and is now traded on the exchanges.

He has never really been fueled though by coffee, pizza or sleepless nights.

He rarely drinks coffee and hardly ever did so when he was working through all the problems that start-ups encounter.

He eats pizza but only because his kids love it and want it all the time. He doesn't necessarily believe it's good fro them or him but how often can you say no to your kids?

He never really had any sleepless nights. He always knew what had to be done and he did it. When problems came along he solved them. He rarely stayed up at nights worrying about them. He was sensible about them.

Drinking coffee, eating pizza and brainstorming through sleepless nights might work for some entrepreneurs, but it was not how my brother-in-law took nothing and built it into a publicly traded company today. (In typical entrepreneurial mode, my brother-in-law has moved on from that company. When he first got involved he owned 20% of the company. Today he owns 2.5%. All the founders were forced to trade ownership for seed money in order to survive.)

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