First thing in the morning, you’re in bed, and you feel the weight of the world is upon you. How do you get out of bed? You can try convincing yourself of higher-level goals, such as Discipline, Consistency, The need to make money, Maximize your throughput and make every minute count. However, there are clashing beliefs, where each time you force yourself to get up, you feel like you’re violating some fundamental principle. The one veto is what happens if I don’t want to. Those things don’t matter to me in this very moment. Greatness, ambition, achievement don’t matter to me at this instant.
In my mind, I’ve seen in the past few weeks where I’ve been forcing myself to get up, run, or do some sort of physical activity and follow a rigid prescribed path in the name of discipline, consistency. Keyword is forcing, where I must mentally override despite my body feeling a sense of resistance in revolt. I believe a long-term, sustainable approach is aligning energy flow rather than forced from scarcity.
Similar to learning a forehand with incorrect technique, forcing an early wake up is painful and unintuitive. When your body is opposing, your natural rhythm is resisting is not sustainable long term. I believe in rest, and recovery as active processes. This year I resolved to train for an Ironman, Learn robotics, Develop my technical skills intensely, Work a demanding travel job at ThermoFisher as a field engineer.
But when I wake up in the morning, there’s a slurry of bombarding thoughts. I’m not making enough money to sustain the lifestyle. There’s a conflict between investing in friendships and also saving personally. Seeing friends like B.W. solely focused on his mission, but still having money to spend and go on fun excursions, comma. And RS where the narrative is he’s grinding or he’s hustling to make money for software in his new hedge fund startup comma and also the delta force operators the legend being they will execute no matter what, period. And my dad, whose sole focus is executing a routine automatically, like an autonomous system, period.
This makes me feel like I’m falling behind. I’m not meeting up to standard. The irony behind discipline and consistency is when forced rigidly, they become a sort of prescription that conflicts against your natural way of being. You’re forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on a deeper biological operating system that it’s almost a fingerprint and unique to each person.
In the Zen tradition and inspired by my energizing past experiences, I encourage the contrarian approach. Don’t force the 5am wake-up if it’s coming from a place of fear or scarcity. Don’t force the pursuit of money-making ventures if it comes from the point of fear.
If your training plan says to run at 6:00 AM for 5 miles, and you have to do that at 6:00 PM, so be it. But you will still get the fundamental task done. You will still arrive at the same endpoint, albeit a different path than anticipated. The predicted path is usually not that which is actually taken.
But I am not advocating for laziness. It’s having the right mindset and focus, but realizing compatibility with physical reality. Finishing and closing the loop is a must. Finish what you started, but not constrained to time or other variables. But that intention is still there. Each iteration, each practice swing, each session compounds in the long-term.
Discover your own way and own personal routine that is so unique to you, which you can execute without compromising long-term sustainability. This is something that energizes you in the morning rather than wearing you down. Others can’t determine this because they’re operating in their own world. Conventional wisdom is only a starting point, but not where the real fine-tuning and nuance is found.
The most important outcomes are realized in the small details, this period of fine-tuning your system.
I must remind myself to zoom out and see the higher goal. Don’t force a path if it’s not allowing you. See the bigger picture - zoom out and adopt a different mental perspective in the mornings, and releasing from prior priorities can actually get you further than expected.
Keep the momentum going, and I’m proud of you for taking a different route this morning.
~ Jerry