As someone who works 18-hour days, a bunch of you ask if I’m a morning person or look for advice on how to make your mornings more productive. Here’s the thing: I think being a “morning person” is such an overrated phrase. Just because you’re up early doesn’t make you more productive than anybody else. Even the idea that the morning is valued more than any other part of the day is insane. Yeah, you might do your best work in the morning, that’s great. But guess what? Some people work best at 3 a.m., 5 p.m., or 11:58 p.m. It’s just another one of those things you need to be self-aware about.
I’ll be honest; I’m not a morning person. I sleep like a brick and it takes a lot to get me up. And I mean a lot. So, it’s hard for me to wake up from a deep, deep sleep. It sucks and I get why many of you find it hard to become a “morning person.”
Recently though, I have been waking up a lot better because I’ve been working out and eating better (thank you, Mike). I usually wake up around between 5-6 a.m. to work out for an hour. But even then it’s hard because it doesn’t always happen—I travel a lot and my calendar gets chaotic and sometimes I just have to get sleep. Outside of taking my phone into the bathroom to poop every morning, there’s no regular routine to my morning schedule.
But, there are two consistent things that help motivate me to get out of bed in the morning. One is very noble and one is very selfish. The noble one is that I’m very aware that people—my loved ones, my business partners, my employees—depend on me to get up and do what I do. For example, I love that I get to create content that serves as your blueprint to your success. The selfish one is that I want to accomplish things. I want to build the biggest agency of all time. I want to buy the New York Jets. I want to hustle. I want to win.
“Hustling” doesn’t mean waking up at the crack of dawn and exhausting yourself until you collapse. The truth is, it’s not about how much you sleep or don’t sleep. It’s what you do while you’re awake that matters. If you work hard and smart while you’re awake and give it all you’ve got in those hours, then you’re hustling. If I am working on a project or in a meeting or on a phone call in the car, I’m 100 percent full-throttle on. And, don’t get me wrong: I’m the same way when it comes to my downtime. Rest time is for rest.
The reality is that there’s no benefit to being a “morning person” and there’s no right or wrong time to deploy your energy against the things that matter the most. Far too many people focus and waste their time and energy on the things that don’t map to what they (or their business) want to accomplish. I implore my community to stop worrying about the small things—the minutia that aren’t part of your clouds and dirt. You can hack your morning routine every damn day till you get it right, but in the end, it’s all about how much you can get done while you have the right energy to do it. Morning or night, hustle is putting it all on the line, and that, my friends, is available to all of us at any damn time of day.
Image credit: CC by Johan Larsson