Stop waiting for motivation or inspiration to strike you and set a schedule for your habits. This is the difference between professionals and amateurs. Professionals set a schedule and stick to it. Amateurs wait until they feel inspired or motivated. P.S. For more ideas on how to set schedules and stick to habits for the long-term, read my free 45-page guide: Transform Your Habits.
1. Be a morning person
Georgia O'Keeffe: one of a majority of very early morning risers. Photograph: AP
It's not that there aren't successful night owls: Marcel Proust,
for one, rose sometime between 3pm and 6pm, immediately smoked opium
powders to relieve his asthma, then rang for his coffee and croissant.
But very early risers form a clear majority, including everyone from Mozart to Georgia O'Keeffe to Frank Lloyd Wright. (The 18th-century theologian Jonathan Edwards,
Currey tells us, went so far as to argue that Jesus had endorsed early
rising "by his rising from the grave very early".) For some, waking at
5am or 6am is a necessity, the only way to combine their writing or
painting with the demands of a job, raising children, or both. For
others, it's a way to avoid interruption: at that hour, as Hemingway
wrote, "There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you
come to your work and warm as you write." There's another, surprising
argument in favour of rising early, which might persuade sceptics: that
early-morning drowsiness might actually be helpful. At one point in his
career, the novelist Nicholson Baker took
to getting up at 4.30am, and he liked what it did to his brain:
"The mind is newly cleansed, but it's also befuddled… I found that
I wrote differently then."
Psychologists categorise people by what they call, rather charmingly,
"morningness" and "eveningness", but it's not clear that either is
objectively superior. There is evidence that morning people are happier
and more conscientious, but also that night owls might be more
intelligent. If you're determined to join the ranks of the early risers,
the crucial trick is to start getting up at the same time daily, but to
go to bed only when you're truly tired. You might sacrifice a day or
two to exhaustion, but you'll adjust to your new schedule more rapidly.
No comments:
Post a Comment