I wake up every morning at 2:30. This may seem a bit overexagerrated, but please hear me out. No success without sacrifice!
The first thing I do is search for the loo. I work in Ukraine and we often sleep in other people’s homes so it’s not that easy.
I try not to make too much noise or any light and not to step on anyone sleeping on the floor (it has happened). Then I go straight back to sleep. Who the F gets up that early?
Me getting hyped for incredible success! Thank God there are no mirrors around.
I try to sleep as long as possible which is till nine or ten. Then I try to find something to eat before I drink as much coffee as possible.
Showers are nice but there’s often no running water. After ten, we are also always in a hurry. There are many places we need to visit.
Except for getting hammered during breakfast, any other morning routine would probably lead to exactly the same outcome.
If you think that your success depends on a certain morning ritual, you’re probably not the brightest candle on the Christmas tree. Nevertheless, I wish you good luck. And success!
Jeff Bezos and I are like brothers.
The similarities are flat out eery.
- We both have engineering degrees.
- We both worked for big companies early in our career.
- We both founded scrappy startups.
- Our combined net worth is roughly $138,100,000,000.
- We both think the “miracle morning” is bullshit.
The Bezos morning is the opposite of the overly ambitious, self-righteous miracle routine that the world seems to embrace as the “secret” to success.
When asked about how he spends his morning, Bezos responded with “I like to putter in the morning.”
The richest man on the planet likes to putter.
I love that word.
Putter:
- Occupy oneself in a desultory but pleasant manner, doing some small tasks or not concentrating on anything particular.
- Move or go in a casual, unhurried way.
“early morning is the best time of the day to putter around in the garden”
“the duck putters on the surface of the pond”
Bezos gets up with the sun, reads, exercises and putters until 9 AM or 10 AM before his first meetings.
He considers a great day one in which he makes three high-quality decisions.
The Morning Loses Its Innocence
I love waking up early. It is the one time of day where I genuinely have time to myself.
The earlier I wake up, the more time I have to be completely selfish. I can do whatever the hell I want at 5 in the morning.
If I wake at 5:00, I have 2.5 hours all to myself before my family wakes up. That is my time. If I need more of that time, I can set the alarm earlier but only if it serves me.
Then, this book came around and suddenly the morning looked more like what I dealt with in the office all day.
Everyone in my office was talking about it. I used to be considered the strange guy who got up so early but suddenly it was becoming popular.
I checked out the book which comes with a handy checklist.
Wait, you want me to follow a checklist for my morning?
I hated it immediately, but I gave it a shot.
Sit In Silence
I did this for a week. It was painful. My monkey mind is always racing and sitting in silence is like solitary confinement to me.
Who thinks I want to sit and listen to my thoughts? They terrify me. Give me my coffee and newspaper, please.
I dropped this part of the miracle checklist early.
Affirmations
This was the only part of the checklist that ended sooner than sitting in silence.
The book tells us that reading aloud our goals “re-energizes you to take the actions necessary to live the life you truly want, deserve, and now know is possible for you.”
It felt corny as hell.
“I’m a baaaaad man. I’m pretty, I’m so pretty. I am going to dominate this staff meeting today. No one rocks PowerPoint like Ian Mathews.”
I did this for three days and swapped it out for listening to the song, “I Wanna Be Rich” by Calloway. I found this to be much more effective and have kept this habit religiously.
Visualization
I am told to “look at my vision board and visualize my day going perfectly.”
What the hell is a vision board? I asked around. People put pictures of vacation spots and sports cars on cork boards. If they look at it enough, those things will appear in their life.
My “vision board” was in my office. Replacing pictures of beaches and Ferrari’s, was a list of my priorities for the month.
Whenever I find myself spending too much time on something not on that whiteboard, I stop doing it.
Visualizing success does not bring success. Deliberate planning, and more importantly, execution will bring success. Execute your priorities often enough, and you can buy a Ferrari, or a Dodge Ram if you like pickup trucks as I do.
I gave this six days, picturing myself kicking major ass on a conference call.
I hated it.
Thinking about work more than necessary just dragged the office into my precious morning, adding unnecessary stress.
Scribing
I am supposed to write down what I am grateful for, what I accomplished yesterday and what I plan to achieve today.
I didn’t hate this part, aside from the frequency.
I have been writing in journals for 20 years, so this wasn’t new for me, except for the morning part.
I thought the frequency was too much. I didn’t have enough to write every morning. When I want to write, I write. When I was forced into writing in a defined period, it felt like work.
I write in my journal about once a week. The journal sits in my office, and when I have enough on my mind, I write and read the last few entries to see if I’m spending time appropriately.
Thumbs up on journaling. Thumbs down on the daily morning journal.
Reading
Now, we’re talking! Finally, something on this checklist I could look forward to.
I love reading.
It is 50% of the reason why I wake up early.
The miracle morning version was odd. It recommended that I read just a page or two of a self-help book.
That isn’t reading. 1–2 minutes of reading is no different than screwing around on a Twitter feed. Nothing sticks and my mind doesn’t get into the kind of flow that can change habits.
That’s OK. Given that I dropped the first four bullet points on my checklist, I had the kind of time to read. I read for at least 90 minutes every morning.
I don’t read because someone told me it was good for me. I read selfishly because I love it.
I love reading the Wall Street Journal. I love non-fiction books, biographies, history. I love fiction books, especially classics.
Reading is a selfish activity for me. If I sit around and read all evening when I get home from the office, it is rude to my wife and kids.
So, I wake up early to be selfish and read what I want.
Exercise
I agree with the miracle morning again.
I lift weights because I love it. I bike because I love it. No other reason aside from exercise is fun for me.
Waking up early is the only way to assure that I get to exercise every day. I might need to work late, and I have the kids sports schedule to scramble to at night or social commitments with my wife and friends.
If I want to do something I love every day, I need to wake up early. Again, it is selfish and worth waking up for.
Cold Shower
Here’s a bonus rant.
I tried a “cold shower challenge” two years ago. I know, it is insufferable.
It was terrible.
There are thousands of “internet MD’s” blogging about the scientific benefits of cold showers.
- Increased willpower
- Losing weight
- Increase immunity
- Faster blood circulation
The shower is another sacred place, and I should have known better than to let popular opinion invade my selfish time. There are only 10 minutes of my day where there is not a screen within eyesight, and that is the shower.
For ten glorious minutes, I am alone with my thoughts to relax.
Getting into a shower knowing that I am going to push the temperature as cold as possible stressed me out. That stress started as soon as I started thinking about showering. Something I used to love became torture.
I did it for 30 days. I showered in cold ass water, shivering my way through what used to be a blissful ritual.
Nothing changed aside from making the quality of my life a little worse every day. Life is short, and I choose to enjoy my shower.
My Morning Habit
The only truly consistent thing about my morning is that I wake up early.
This habit forces me to spend time deliberately. If I’m not doing what I want to do in the morning, why wake up early?
Setting an early alarm forces you to think hard about how you spend the time. No one is making you get up early, so the only person you are accountable to is yourself.
I wouldn’t tell you how to spend your morning any more than I would listen to you tell me how to spend mine.
My morning is personal. I do exactly what I want and so should you. If you want to meditate, visualize and make affirmations, knock yourself out. If you love cold showers and feel like a Spartan for taking one, good for you.
If you want to wake up early and bake cupcakes, go nuts.
I know many successful people. They all have different morning routines. Some get up early, others with the sun. Some exercise early, others at night. Some read in the morning; others rush into the office.
The folks I see who brag about “winning the morning” are usually not winning at anything else.
I get up early and putter. It works for me and Jeff.
I will Share some of the good morning habits from great people around the world.
From the Source 21 successful people who wake up incredibly early, I am able to find some of the best morning stories, which I have summed in the last. Here are few stories before that:-
Sundar Pichai He might be one of the most powerful people in tech, but Google CEO Sundar Pichai likes to keep things simple when he gets up in the morning. Pichai opened up about his early morning schedule in an interview with Recode.
- he’s an early riser, and typically gets up between 6:30 and 7 am.
- Then he does something that seems a bit odd for the CEO of a tech company. “Believe it or not I, read a physical paper every morning. I read the Wall Street Journal every day, and I also catch up with the New York Times online later in the day.”
- Pichai likes to have a light breakfast of omelettes, toast and, unsurprisingly, chai. “I like to have a cup of tea in the morning. “I’m very particular about having my tea, that’s very English, (but) I grew up in India.”.
Tim Cook (Apple CEO) Cook wakes up 3:45 a.m. and gets a head start on email.
The tech titan is known for getting up early.
According to a Time profile, “He wakes up at 3:45 every morning (‘Yes, every morning’), does email for an hour, stealing a march on those lazy East Coasters three time zones ahead of him, then goes to the gym, then Starbucks (for more e-mail), then work. ‘The thing about it is, when you love what you do, you don’t really think of it as work. It’s what you do. And that’s the good fortune of where I find myself.'”
Michelle Obama is working out by 4:30 a.m.
While the president is known for getting very little sleep, he’s got nothing on the first lady, who tells Oprah she starts her days with a 4:30 a.m. workout before her kids wake up.
“If I don’t exercise, I won’t feel good. I’ll get depressed,” she says, noting that it’s easier to pull that off at the White House, where she has “much more support” than the average person.
Jeff Immelt CEO GE rises at 5:30 a.m. to work out.
Immelt tells Fortune that he gets up at 5:30 in the morning every day for a cardio workout, during which he reads the papers and watches CNBC. He claims to have worked 100-hour weeks for 24 straight years.
Jack Dorsey (Twitter and Square CEO ) wakes up before dawn for a 6-mile run.
According to New York Magazine, the Twitter co-founder wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to meditate and go for a six-mile jog.
After understanding the morning habits of Fortune Companies CEO, Person should be firm with daily morning activities, some of good morning habits are
- Early Wake up.
- Drink Lime Water, that purify your body internally.
- Workout.
- Newspaper/ TV news.
- Schedule the Whole Day.
- Healthy Breakfast.
Mental and physical fitness are important asset for whole Day.
