Stop Telling Me to Have a Morning Routine

Some people don’t need exercise or coffee to get their day started.

My morning starts at 4 a.m. It has been like that since my last year of university. I’d wake up and started writing my dissertation or job applications.

This continues throughout my adult work life, I’d start at 4 a.m. to write my blog, then at some point around 8 a.m., I’d crawl out of my bed and get ready for work in 10 minutes.

I only get hungry around 1 p.m., so that’s when I eat my first meal of the day. If I didn’t sleep well, then I will drink coffee. Even if I drink an espresso at 9 p.m. that night, I can still sleep.

I need a walk or exercise at around 3 p.m., then my energy begins to fade at around 6 p.m, here I have my second and final meal of the day. At night, I usually only manage to relax and chat with my friends before I head to bed at around 10 p.m.

I don’t do weekends, for me it’s the same. I just replace my working-hours with more creative work like filming and posting videos.

Because of that, I got 2,500 followers on my Chinese blog, a book deal, a great job, passed many professional exams and climbed the property ladder at 25 years old.

But don’t follow this routine, it will get you nowhere because there’s no success routine, only a routine that works for you.

We have an obsession with successful people’s routines.

We want to know how Elon Musk manages to have multiple companies and can still find time to get Grimes pregnant. We want to know how Bill Gates find time to read books. Turn out both of them like to split their diaries into 5-minute segments.

Some say that successful people wake up very early so they get more things done before people start annoying them with meetings and emails.

There are also many Medium articles about how they manage a full-time job and to write an article a day and make 4-figures on the side per month.

Stop being a copycat, it’s a disrespect to your body and the universe.

We are following all these people’s routines because we feel inadequate. Why aren’t we the billionaire yet? How come we don’t have the same level of discipline? We want to find the answer to our failure, and how to get better, from people who are already the best.

It’s logical, but not quite.

The key is to be available.

Although these people have these routines that work for them clearly, it’s still pretty much an arbitrary summary, a “generally speaking”.

What really successful people have in common, is they don’t really give up on things they got passionate about. Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book “Outliers” debunked how genius is not the key to success but many other factors, including spending around 10,000 hours on something. But even that is a simplification.

The key to a sustainable routine that will lead to discipline and success, is to become available to your passion, body and mind. Here’s what you should do instead of copying others.

1. Make time for the genius.

Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer of best-seller Eat, Pray, Love talk about how genius is not from within, but like a breeze that comes at unexpected times in her Ted Talk (really recommend watching). If you are a poet and the muse comes but you don’t have the headspace, or simply the pen and paper to write it down, the muse will fly away and perhaps, hit the next more prepared person.

So the key, is that you have to be ready for any form of genius.

For me, it’s pretty mad. I confess writing is more important than anything else, and there are times I bail on friends’ gatherings and appointments to write because my muse has arrived. So when I tell you above that I write at 4 a.m., that’s true and not true. I write on other times as well, whatever it takes.

It’s this availability, plus diligence, that create the so-call 10,000 hours in perfecting a craft.

2. Become aware of your small habits.

The key book for habit building is of course James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I recommend reading this book on Blinkist because the idea is not that complicated once you understand the importance of consciousness.

We must become conscious of what we do every minute, cut out auto-piloted bad habits, and recreate auto-piloting of good habits. That’s it.

Say we want to lose weight but we somehow auto-pilot to have breakfast every day. Numerous research has confirmed that the importance of breakfast was overrated and in fact, it’s merely a marketing stunt by cereal companies. Once we become conscious of this fact, we start listening to our bodies. When are we actually hungry? When do we actually need an energy boost? Combine that with research, then we might realise intermittent fasting could potentially be much better.

My dad, 60 years old, lost 10kg in a year (slow but steady and healthy), through intermittent fasting. All he did was to switch from his newspaper and dim sum breakfast routine to “newspaper and a pot of tea” routine. No food until lunch.

So start becoming aware of our energy. When are we most active, creative, horny, excited, tired, angry? Then work your day around it. I will never exercise in the morning because all I want to do is write. I don’t want my time on the treadmill to prevent me from reaching my pen and paper, I can jog later.

3. Become available to people and yourself.

No one can achieve everything on their own, not even fearless Jeff Bezos. Being available to others is important to your routine. We can’t be all entitled and expected to create a herd of followers that will bend their lives for our needs without first being available to them. To sell an idea successfully, we first have to be there for our target audience and users. Even Jesus listened before he preached.

It might be true that Bill Gates and Elon Musk have secretaries to plan their days on five-minute slots. But for that 45 minutes Bill Gates gives to say, this Ted Talk, he gives them his full attention. It’s obvious, he’s listening and he’s prepared. The duration is not important, how much energy and how much you extract from that limited time is.

4. Become available to solitude.

A successful routine is to become aware of the effectiveness of time, to become alert to opportunities, and become available to people. In order to do that, the opposite end of the balance is equally important. This is why many people stressed the solitude of a morning routine.

I incline to agree, no matter how extroverted a person is, without solitude, one can’t get stuff done, achieve clarity and really know themselves. The ideas of no emails first thing in the morning, etc. are good tips too. This all go back to the second point, becoming aware of what you need and your small habits.

A bonus question: Why do you want an effective morning routine?

Productivity is like money-saving: If you don’t have a goal, your motivation to save more money will succumb to current pleasures. If you want to travel to Japan, then you are more inclined to cut out on dining at an overpriced, inauthentic Japanese restaurant down-town.

If you don’t know what to do with life, I suggest you can start by carving out the morning to think and research what really is meaningful to you. Let ideas flow. Once you know, you will form the routine/lifestyle/timeslots for making your goal happens.

It’s now 8 a.m., I better get up and get ready for my job.

Do you like my words? Follow me on Instagram for weekly wise words. I update every Sunday to encourage we take the time out the evening before the work week starts again to rethink about our lives and to do something nourishing to our souls.