Tag: life

The Geography of a Sunrise?

By Victor Kuarsingh

I woke up early in San Francisco this week with the blinds open, the sky still dark, cold, and night. Looking out at Coit Tower from my hotel window, I couldn’t help but ask myself — “what is a sunrise to others on a given day?” Waking up early or late certainly has a significant bearing on this, but I also realized that even without traveling, where you live may impact one’s experience. Those of us who have lived in very northern or southern latitudes know there’s a large difference between summer and winter, with a gradual increase and decrease in daylight hours.

I also realized that, outside of this, where one lives impacts when the sun comes up and what the start of a day means. So again — “what is a sunrise to you?” It turns out that’s not a trivial question, and the answer isn’t just about discipline or being a “morning person.” It also has a lot to do with longitude.

Time zones are political. The sun is not. Each zone is a roughly fifteen-degree wedge of the earth, and one clock is asked to govern all of it — sunrise and sunset drift by as much as an hour across that wedge, even though every watch inside it says the same time. In a given time zone, one person can be waking up to a 6 AM sunrise slowly slipping into the day, while someone else wakes up to pitch black, fighting their body’s interpretation that “it’s still night.” By 9 AM, our eastern-biased friend is “ready to go,” and our western-biased friend is “still grappling with their start.”

Chronobiologists have a name for what happens next: social jetlag. It’s usually used to describe the gap between when your body wants to sleep and when your calendar makes you — most familiarly, the whiplash between a Friday-night bedtime and a Monday alarm. But a 2019 study in the Journal of Health Economics (Giuntella & Mazzonna) found the same mismatch happening geographically, quietly, every single day, to people who never cross a time zone at all. They just live on the wrong side of one.

The mechanism is almost absurdly simple. An extra hour of evening light delays the body’s release of melatonin. Bedtime drifts later while one’s alarm clock remains steadfast. Across US time-zone borders, that’s worth about 19 minutes of sleep a night, on average — not dramatic on any one night, but compounding, year after year, into measurably higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, and into a subtle but real drag on regional income.

I have spent a lot of time between Toronto and Miami, both several degrees of longitude into the “late” side of Eastern time — later sunrise and sunset on the clock than cities like Montreal or New York, though neither is the most extreme case. That distinction goes to Detroit, which is geographically so far west it sits past the traditional Eastern time boundary, yet still runs on Eastern clocks. Its residents get the latest sunsets, and the latest, most reluctant sunrises, of any major Eastern city. But Miami and Toronto are both, in this particular sense, on the same side of the ledger as Detroit — cities where the sun shows up on the clock a little later than it “should,” and where 9 AM asks something of the body that the sky hasn’t quite delivered yet.

None of this is really about sunrise trivia. It’s about the fact that “a standard workday” is a fiction we apply uniformly to a population that does not experience the day uniformly. The same start time that feels natural in one city is a small, silent tax on another — paid in sleep, in health, and apparently in income. We’ve spent a lot of energy optimizing how people work. We’ve spent almost none asking where they’re doing it from, and what the sky outside their window actually looks like at 7 AM.

So: what time do the people you work with actually wake up? And when they do — do they see the sun?

Authentic Leadership

By Victor Kuarsingh

The Job No One Applauds

Senior roles come with a lot of things people assume are glamorous — the title, the room you’re now in, the decisions with your name attached. What they don’t often see is how much of the job is necessary and needfully unglamorous. Budgets, difficult conversations, finding clarity through obscurity – a duty many are not drawn to. Absorbing pressure from above so it doesn’t land unfiltered on your organization is essential. None of that gets a headline, yet all of it is the actual work.

For nearly three decades, across various career levels, I’ve watched this dynamic play out in enough rooms to trust it as a pattern rather than a one-off. When it comes to authenticity, I’ve come to believe that how an executive handles the unglamorous 80% says a lot more about them as a leader than the often-visible keynote and strategy deck does.

The Bridge You Forget You’re Supposed to Be

It’s easy, especially as scope grows, to get pulled almost entirely upward — reading the room above you, anticipating what leadership wants, managing the optics of your own function. That instinct isn’t wrong on its own; every executive has to do some of it. The problem is when it becomes the whole job, and you stop being the bridge your organization actually needs: the connective structure that translates strategy downward and reality upward, in both directions, honestly.

An org can feel the difference immediately. A leader spending most of their energy managing up starts to feel, from below, like a relay point instead of a person — present in meetings, absent in practice. The team ends up managing themselves, left to form, sort, and operate without real connection to the person meant to be leading them.

You Can’t Fake the Real Thing

Here’s the part I think gets underestimated: people know. Not eventually — pretty quickly. Teams can tell, often before an executive can admit it to themselves, who’s actually invested in the mission versus who’s here for the ride. To be clear, this isn’t a rare failure mode — most leaders I’ve worked with, at most companies, genuinely are what they present themselves to be. But every organization, without exception, has a handful who aren’t: people whose real orientation is their own trajectory, and whose teams figure that out long before leadership above them does. You can manage a narrative upward for a while. You can’t manage one downward for long, because the evidence is daily and specific — who shows up when it’s inconvenient, who takes the harder conversation instead of the easier one, who’s consistent when nobody senior is watching.

That’s really what authenticity is in a leadership context. Not a communication style. A track record that either holds up under close, repeated observation or doesn’t.

The Actual Job

Which brings me to what I think the real job is, underneath the title: making the organization stronger and better, and specifically making the people downstream of you more capable than they were before you got there. Not as a nice-to-have alongside the “real” work — as the real work. Everything else, the strategy, the roadmap, the board updates, is in service of that or it isn’t worth much.

I wrote about a version of this a few years ago in Everyone Deserves a Mentor — the idea that a leader only has 24 hours in a day, and the only real way to multiply your impact is by building other leaders who extend it. Authenticity is what makes that possible in practice. Mentorship that’s really just performance doesn’t hold up once things get hard — a bad quarter, a reorg, a crunch. Mentorship rooted in genuinely wanting someone to grow does. The bridge-building, the unglamorous work, the resistance to managing purely upward — it’s all the same discipline, just applied at different altitudes. Show up as who you actually are, consistently, and the org will trust you with more. Perform it, and eventually the org stops believing anything else you say.