There’s some thing strange about waking up at 5am every day. It’s an hour where you’re truly alone. A daily opportunity to not speak and allow the routine turbulence of thoughts to clear out.
A long time ago, I started waking up at 5am out of necessity. I was in the Pacific timezone and I’d recently signed up on a project that required interaction with a team back in New Delhi, India. Due to time zone differences, I’d wake up early work on the project and then go on to my day job at 9am. I did this for about three months. The morning project would go on to become bookeazy.com, a venture that changed my life forever.
Back then, it was easy getting up early. I was single and was absolutely electrified by the idea of creating a service that would go on to change how movie-goers would buy movie tickets.
Now I get up early in the morning because I believe it’s a great way to work on things that have the promise to be transformational. If you don’t have a side project, you get to choose if you want to work on your health, wealth or anything else that you have in mind. I like to think of this as the ‘abnormal gear’, a mode that you can rely on to break out of routine quickly.
It’s also an opportunity to plan and prepare. I find my world to have many activities that beg for time with the promise of no return. Spotting them isn’t easy if you don’t plan. It’s easier to decide what you want from your day and then spotting distractions and side-stepping them is easy.
It’s difficult, but trust me on this one – 5am is where you have a say in what change begins and sticks.