What my daily 4AM alarm has taught me

New years are like a save point in an early 2000s RPG game. You stop for a while, save your progress, and you get yourself mentally ready for the next phase of the campaign or a possible boss fight. You’d also check your inventory and your items to see if you’re ready to take on that boss fight or perhaps you’d need to make adjustments to set yourself up to succeed. 

In real life, we call these adjustments “New Year’s resolutions”. What they are, really – if you hold yourself to them – are contracts. They are contracts that you make with your future ideal self. You want to be this person, someone who’s ready for the next stage, for the big boss fight. Becoming that person is what you get in exchange for complying with your contractual obligation. You need to keep your resolution. 

So if that’s what you really want, there’s no further discussion.

There’s no more negotiation.

That New Year’s resolution for me is the daily 4AM alarm, where I HAVE to get up. And here’s what keeping to that resolution has taught me.

1) It starts with motivation, but it’s all about discipline.

When you start the year, you have this intense desire to make changes in your life to become a better version of yourself. That’s why people have always said “New Year New Me”. Keeping such a rigid schedule of waking up at 4AM, however, tests how badly you want to become that better version at the beginning. At first, you get up purely off of this desire. By the 2nd week, you open your eyes and see it’s pitch black so you debate with yourself if you still want to get up. Do yourself a favor and get your ass up. It’s especially at this point when the desire and motivation is not as intense, when the discomfort is so apparent that you should. It builds that habit, and habits pay no regard to your mood. So get up and do the work.

2) Starting the day in complete solitude in the dark allows you to reflect and stretch your mind.

When you get up and start working at 4AM, before anyone else is awake, there’s no one and nothing to really take up the space in your mind. During this period, there’s no idle chatter or social interaction. You either grind out your work or you let your mind stretch out. You build scenarios and model out your ideas by letting your imagination run wild, and then there’s silence. With all these thoughts out of the way, you can begin your day less clouded and more focused.

3) You have to anchor your willpower on love.

If you don’t love what you do, then waking up at 4AM is a struggle. At best, it’s a chore. At worst, it feels like torture. You don’t want to do this so the desire to succeed comes from a place that stimulates or seeks to avoid pain. So you’ll never be able to sustain this habit because it only makes you more miserable. It makes you question whether the path you’ve chosen is the right one for you, and answering it can only be good for you.

4) You feel like an exceptional person.

If you make a contract with yourself that you have to wake up at 4am, long before everyone else has opened their eyes, you are part of a small percentage of the world. Very few people will want to carve out the grind to work the extra 5 hours a day, 20 hours a week, 80 hours a month. Within half a year, assuming you don’t work weekends, that’s 480 hours of work you’ve done just becoming better. From a competition standpoint, they will never be able to catch up to you. You may not have achieved exceptional status in your field yet, but in waking up at 4am and outworking your competition, it sure as shit makes you feel like you have. And feeling exceptional makes becoming exceptional all the more realistic.

And those are some of the things my daily 4AM alarm taught me. It’s also been quite the adjustment for my dog that won’t sleep unless I’m also soundly asleep in my bed so he spends the start of the day yawning until he passes out in my office. Now you need to ask yourself, what contract are you willing to sign with yourself to become a better version of you?