Action Maketh Man
My thoughts on waking up early
5 am, my alarm goes off. I roll over, get out of bed, cross my room, and turn it off. A quick flick of my finger instantly turns the lights on, blinding me momentarily. It’s go time.
This has been my morning experience for the last two weeks. When it began, I knew 3 things:
- I wanted to get more done.
- I wanted to be proactive with how I approached my day.
- What I was currently doing wasn’t working.
Needless to say, simply getting up early does not ensure that you get more done. No, it only means you are up early. So, to get more done, I began planning out my morning the night before and creating a morning routine.
This was fueled by my desire to be more proactive, more conscious, with my day — with my life.
I broke down my priorities and created a morning routine where I move the needle within each of these realms every single day. Here's what it looks like:
- 5:00 — Alarm goes off.
- 6:15 — Workout is done.
- 6:30 — Cleaned up and Coffee’d up in front of my computer.
- 6:30–8:30 — German, Reading, and Content consumption.
- 8:30 on — Work
At first, I thought 2 hours to do all my reading and language lessons was a bit much. Tasks behave like gasses; after all — they expand to fill the time they are allotted.
No matter — I knew I wanted to get up early and that my time was better spent reading than it would have been in bed.
What I didn’t realize — what I had forgotten — was the compounding effects of momentum.
Every day we wake up, we have the opportunity to live better than the day before.
What most of us forget is the effect that our choices, our habits, have on our inclination to make the right choice.
Life is an uphill battle. It’s not supposed to be easy or soft, and we have to fight, every day, to even maintain our place.
This is to say that if we are not ACTIVELY improving, then we are passively declining. You are either taking a step forward or sliding backward. There is no in-between.
Through the mere act of getting up early and working out, starting with a rough structure of a better, happier, healthier life, what I had finally done was created positive momentum.
I began taking steps forward, as opposed to sliding backward. I began improving.
Each day I wake up, I have more productive ideas, tasks, and insights into how I want to spend my time. I stopped questioning whether 2 hours to work on some German, read 5 chapters of the Bible, and 1 or 2 chapters of another book, is too much. Because in that meantime, I’m writing this.
In the meantime, due to inertia, I am finding ways to become more and more like the person I aspire to be.
Action Maketh the Man
I’m not sure where I have heard this, or even if I have heard it.
Regardless, I know it to be true. Just as I know Aristotle’s words, “Action will delineate and define you,” to be true, as they are echoing the very same principle.
In the end, this is a good thing because every day, we wake up and are given the opportunity to be better than we were the day before. Every day, with every action, we have the ability to move in the right direction. And if we “aren’t good enough,” then every day we can fake it until we make it. Because through consistent action, we will slowly become that person.
My simple question… Who are you becoming?
