The stupid simplicity of "just doing it"
On waking up early, and why "just do it" is both the hardest and the easiest answer to "how do I do this"
I’ve never been a morning person. My partner recently expressed some frustration at the fact that I take so long to get up in the morning, because it means that we sometimes miss having coffee together before going off to our days. He’s one of those crazy people who gets out of the bed the instant the alarm rings, is somehow 100% awake, and proceeds to make coffee and read math papers at 6 in the morning. (Freak.)
I, on the other hand, do that stupid thing where I hit snooze on the alarm…4 times. I guiltily listen to the sound of the kettle and the coffee grinder, yet can’t seem to budge from my soft, blobby nest of pillows and warmth. (It would be quite easy to blame depression, and sometimes I do; being unconscious is a fantastic way to mute unpleasant emotions.) I’ll then drift in and out of low-quality sleep for an hour, at which point I kick myself for not just setting my alarm an hour later in the first place.
The problem is that cognitively, I do want to wake up early. (I and everyone else in the world, of course. There are no shortages of Lululemon-wearing hustle-fetishizing YouTubers who sing its praises.1) On the days where I manage to do it, I reap all the reported benefits: I go on a run, I have uninterrupted focus time for work, and more productivity before 7am than I manage to achieve in the rest of the day. On the days where I want to do this but fail to, I end up feeling like garbage.
This is a vicious cycle that many people are familiar with, though the specific task might differ from person to person. For some people it’s exercise, or meditation. A healthier diet. A daily writing habit. Whatever the goal may be, many of us are woefully familiar with the gap between intent and execution.
So as I thought about possible solutions to my morning coffee dilemma, I found myself in a pickle. I can’t ask him to delay his day, because that’s not fair, and probably not even feasible. But I also can’t promise to haul myself out of bed at 6am, because I’ve had a pretty shit history of being able to do that with any consistency. I also don’t want to just give up on coffee.2 What to do?
I then thought about something that I heard on the Jocko podcast3. For those who aren’t familiar, Jocko Willink is a cylindrical protein bar of a man and ex-Navy SEAL who now runs a rather successful self-improvement podcast and coaching company. Much to the delight of self-help bros worldwide, he does things like posting a daily black-and-white photo of his watch at 4:30am to his Twitter feed. (Followed by a photo of his sweat stains on the gym floor, captioned “aftermath”). He also says things like the following:
What you should do if you want to start waking up early is start waking up early.
On the one hand, this is textbook Master Yoda. “Do or do not. There is no try.” On the other hand, you wouldn’t say “if you want to be rich, just be rich” to a poor person. There’s a reason that self-help is a 40 billion dollar industry: if we could all just do the things we wanted to do, then achievements wouldn’t mean very much.
Anyway, we landed on the following: for one week, I’m just going to try Jocko-ing the shit out of this. He’s going to tell me to get up when he starts making coffee. And I’m just going to do it.
Today was day 1 - so far so good. This will either turn out to be a January-gym-membership kind of thing, or my life will become flawless and perfect and I will never struggle with motivation ever again. We’ll see.
#122
Here is THE canon example:
Due to this very logical slippery slope: once you stop giving a damn about one thing, you’ll slowly let other things go, and then ??? , and then ??? , and then you’ll fail at life and everything will be awful.
The trope of “my advice for you if you want to do a thing, is to do the thing” appears so many times on the Jocko podcast that I don’t need to point to any specific episode as an example. But here’s a particularly good one: