The Mind of a Workaholic

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on an island France had owned for barely a year. Poor, small, mocked for his accent. By thirty-five, he was Emperor of the French. So the question isn't whether Napoleon worked hard. The question is what was happening inside that mind, why some people seem to run on a different engine, whether you can build one yourself, and what it costs to run it. This film takes that mind apart: the hunger that started it, the long hours of preparation behind what looked like genius, the "cabinet of drawers" he used to focus and to rest, the truth about his famous four hours of sleep, his obsession with time and detail, and the cost that ended in Russia and on Saint Helena. Take from it what builds, and leave behind what burns. SOURCES Napoleon's correspondence (letter to General Lemarois, 1813) · Emmanuel de Las Cases, Memorial of Saint Helena · Pierre-Louis Roederer, Journal · Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte · Claude-François de Méneval, Memoirs · Blaise Pascal, Pensées · Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life ARTWORK Public-domain paintings, prints and objects from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Wikimedia Commons. Image credit: Code civil des Français (1804), photo by Yale Law Library, CC BY 2.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons. #napoleon #philosophy #discipline