Wake up whenever you want.
Motivational speeches, self-help advice, and life coach gurus are a hot topic right now. They all lift us up from our chest with bright shining light and gently carry us into the sky of possibilities.
One of my favorite pieces of repetitive advice is the early rise mantra. Rise early and start your day with gusto.
“Yes!” I tell myself. “Tomorrow I will awake with the sun and get more done before 9am than the President of the United States.”
The night before I set my alarm for a ridiculous time, which for me is 6am, and drift off into dreams full of hope. And every night I do this, I fail to wake up. Sometimes I fail so miserably, I wake up even later than my normal time. Then I’ve become the girl who’s taken the advice and made things worse by sleeping in instead of getting up early. Maybe it’s my addiction to the snooze button. Maybe I’m just too lazy or not disciplined enough. Maybe if I never wake up early, I’m not the kind of person who will succeed in life.
Recently though, I decided not to care.
I’ve followed the blueprint to a happy, healthy, meaningful and successful life. I did everything I was supposed to do: I listened to my parents, got good grades and recycled. These were never decisions I made on my own, rather a do-gooder list I checked off with hopes of sweet rewards in the near future. As I got older the promise of rewards got sweeter but the list got . . . well . . . boring. One hour of chores turned into rearranging my life in a way that just didn’t fit who I was. The most dangerous part about it was this success list gave me a big crutch to lean on when my inner most desires didn’t materialize. It was easy, albeit self-destructive, to tell myself I’m not rich because I don’t wake up early enough or I’m not smart because I don’t read 10 books a day. With this logic the world made sense to me so I was content for a while, but something was missing. I was so focused on checking my list for my well manicured happiness path I lost my step
That all changed in one single moment, when I found something I cared about and decided to dedicate my life to it. That something was getting in shape. I realized that I had the motivational speeches all wrong because it was only after caring about something that I understood them. My motivation didn’t come from the list, it came from me. I began to do most of the things the gurus told me to do by default, except waking up early of course because exercising simply didn’t require it. Besides, I like sleeping; being a well rested human in a society that praises the overworked, highly stressed, and perpetually tired felt like a win to me.
Toward the end of my body goals, I did wake up early for a few months. It was an unwelcome yet necessary nuisance and as soon as my goal no longer required early morning hours, I stopped. The accomplishment in this brief time period was not in the hour I woke up, but in what I was willing to do to accomplish a goal that required me to be up before the sun.
If that same goal demanded I slept until noon, I would have done that too.
And maybe I will start waking up early, but not until I truly desire it. The magic trick is in discovering what it is I truly desire. The outlined path will come when I find something to care about and only after I give myself permission to pursue it. No set of rules can unveil my life for me.
The rules of success are the steps to creating a life especially designed for you, by you; they are your rules and you can have any rule you want. And the sweet reward is all the freedom you experience along the way. There’s no need to get tangled stiff with minor details because if we follow our hearts, it will tell us where to go.