Yeah, it was right after the promotion that I decided to start waking up earlier. My work hours hadn’t changed. At least, not on paper. Not that any of my duties were written down. I didn’t get to my level by filling out a checklist. I drove solutions. I moved the world. Seriously. If I had to grab the whole damn earth and shove it two feet to the left because that’s what my client needs, that’s what I did. And it didn’t matter if it was lunch time, dinner time, or “boss just got out of the club in Tokyo and the deal needs to close while everyone is nice and slippery” time. Out-late, up-early wasn’t new, but after the promotion I developed a routine. I started optimizing.

I had help at first. Maddy, this one girl I was seeing, was super into getting up and doing morning hikes so that she could get these perfect photos at the top of a scenic spot with that sunrise light, you know? She was twenty-six and her feed was full of those “going out/going outside” type of posts. Like, the perfect fit on Saturday night next to the perfect view on Sunday morning. Good content, but cheated: she would actually take the morning photo days earlier and just post it from bed on Sunday. I would do hike-hookups with her on, like, a Thursday when I had been working late the night before. She got to have her beauty sleep or whatever, then tell me to wake up at five a.m. and look as hot as her. 

Well, I was fucking nailing it. Stealing the show even with my shirt on. So I figure, if I can wake up before dawn, flex on her, go back to my penthouse, shower, hit it, shower, have breakfast, and take my first call of the day while most guys are jerking off… maybe I can crush the early morning every day.

I read that to change my wake-up time I should do it in fifteen minute chunks, get used to it for a few days, adjust and repeat. But I had already done some of those five a.m. days, which was like a two hour jump, so I knew I could slam one-hour shifts to see bigger gains. I started waking up at six and immediately I felt great. 

I was like: Yes! This makes so much sense! From my balcony I can see construction workers are already climbing big-ass cranes.  Men are out there working! What had I been doing at that time every day? Being dead, pretty much.

It also felt good to finally use all the self-improvement stuff I had lying around, like this ultraviolet teeth-whitening thing. I hated to use it at night because a weird aluminum taste would stick on my gums while I was trying to fall asleep, so I put it in a drawer and forgot about it. But with a morning routine I could pop it in after brushing and let it sit while I wrote my goals for the day in the wood-bound Spirit Journal that had also been totally neglected. The UV flavor absolutely ruined my single-origin drip coffee the first few days I tried it, but I had been planning to cut caffeine anyway because of a blog I read.

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This was a preview of my story Morning Routine. Contact me for inquiries.
– Sebastian Sangervasi