Updated February 4, 2020 4k votes 843 voters 42.9k views
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Vote up the strangest things these business leaders do.
People spend their entire lives trying to get inside the heads of prosperous CEOs. What is it that makes them tick, and how did they get to be so successful? It turns out that most CEOs have a bunch of weird habits, which may account for their out of the box thinking. Weird CEO quirks can be almost anything: building a gold room, creating the perfect food, you name it and there’s a CEO who needs to do it.
Some famous CEO quirks belong to business leaders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but there are lesser known strange habits of CEOs that make wearing the same turtleneck every day seem tame in comparison. Whatever the quirk, the weirdest CEOs still manage to take care of business, likely because of the extra brain power freed up by their obsession. After learning about the weirdest CEOs on the planet, you should try and develop some funny CEO habits of your own and see if it helps improve your business life.
Food. We all have to eat it, including CEOs. Steve Jobs famously tried to control his health and diet by only eating very specific kinds of food for weeks at a time. Technically he was a fruitatarian (someone who only eats fruit), but according to former CEO Mike Scott, Jobs changed up what kind of fruit he ate weekly. He believed his diet allowed him to only need to bathe once weekly.
Scott said, "Steve was adamant that he bathed once a week, and that was adequate as long he was eating a fruitarian diet." He continued, "He would spend weeks eating the same thing—carrot salad with lemon, or just apples—and then suddenly spurn that food and declare that he had stopped eating it."
Who Does This: Yoshiro Nakamatsu, hugely successful inventor
When you're busy thinking of world changing inventions like the floppy desk, you need a room where you can collect your thoughts without any interruptions. Yoshiro Nakamatsu, the patent king of Japan, has built such a room. Nakamatsu's "Calm Room" is covered entirely in 24-carat gold, which he believes prevents radio waves from entering and interfering with his thoughts.
The "Calm Room" was constructed without nails because he believes "nails reflect thinking." You can't argue with that logic.
Who Does This: Craig Cooper, co-founder of Boost Mobile
Food seems to be the one thing many CEOs feel they can control outside of their company. Steve Jobs only ate fruit, Marissa Mayer keeps spreadsheets on cupcakes, and Chris Cooper starts off every morning with five cans of sardines. He explained to CNBC, "Sardines are the No. 1 superfood for guys. They're a powerhouse of nutrition, so I'm kind of an evangelist for sardines amongst everyone I meet."
According to the head nutritionist for Red Bull, Cooper had the best omega-3 profile of anyone he'd ever tested.
Who Does This: Shigeru Miyamoto, Creative Fellow and former Representative Director of Nintendo
Are you able to look at a table and know exactly how tall it is? Shigeru Miyamoto can. Or at least he likes to see if he can. One of his favorite things to do is to size something up and then pull out his measuring stick to see how close he was to hitting the mark.
Of his measuring habit he said:
I might guess that the table in front of us is about 1.2 meters long. Then I'd actually measure it with the measuring tape to check. If I got it right, I'd think: 'I'm on form today!' But if I missed the mark by a long way, I'd think: 'I've been slipping a bit recently!'
Getting A Hair Cut In The Office (And Holding Meetings During The Trim)
Who Does This: Clark Benson, CEO and founder of Ranker
Unless you're some kind of Sasquatch, you have to get your haircut. But what if you're a super busy CEO who doesn't have time to take a trip to a barber? Easy, you get someone to come into the office and cut your hair. But if you truly want to be efficient, you don't stop there: you also schedule meetings during your cut to maximize that all too precious resource, time.
Aside from just cutting Benson's hair, his on-call stylist also trims his eyebrows, which isn't easy because they move around a little while he talks.
You've probably heard about parents who have their children study incessantly as soon as they get out of school, but PepsiCo's first female CEO, Indra Nooyi, grew up in a household where she had to write a speech every day.
Nooyi explained to Business Insider:
Every night at the dinner table, my mother would ask us to write a speech about what we would do if we were president, chief minister, or prime minister — every day would be a different world leader she'd ask us to play. At the end of dinner, we had to give the speech, and she had to decide who she was going to vote for.
