Our Dadly Daily Declaration series continues today with readings from Robin Sharma‘s newest book, The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning, Elevate Your Life.
The readings will now start to delve into the breakdown of your morning, or Victory Hour, and the mechanisms of that hour. Here are a few insightful items from my reading today, which deal with how to ensure you wake at 5 am and get started and to codify willpower:
- Your starting point is to create some kind of a trigger. To embed the early-rising ritual into your mornings, this could be as simple as having an old-school alarm clock next to your bed that goes off at 5 AM.
- Once you’ve got the trigger of your alarm clock in place, the next step is to run the routine you want to encode.
- Jump straight out of bed before your reasoning mind—the prefrontal cortex—can give you a bunch of excuses about why you should go back to sleep. It’s in this very moment that, by getting out of bed, you build the early-rising neural circuit in your brain through the power of neuroplasticity. And remember: brain pathways that fire together wire together into a potent neural highway, over time. It’s in the very instant when you’re faced with staying on the mattress or standing up and starting your morning in a great way that you have the chance to make your willpower stronger.
- The next step is to make sure you have a preset reward in place. The reward is what kickstarts and then grows your drive to get the new habit done. Always use the power of rewards for the advancement of your triumphs.
- Third step: You need to set up a reward. That’s what the eminent researchers on willpower tell us is essential to create behaviors that stick. Your reward for rising with the sun could be a nice piece of dark chocolate for dessert at lunch. It could be taking a nap later in the day. It could be treating yourself to the book you’ve been wanting to buy for your library. Figure out what feels right for you.
- Willpower weakens once it gets tired.
- Ego Depletion is a real thing. See, you wake up each morning with a full battery of self-control. That’s why you should do the activities that are most important to the rise of your inner empires at the time when your capacity is strongest—at 5 AM. Here’s the thing: as you go through your day, going to meetings, checking messages and performing tasks, your ability to self-regulate decreases—and so does your capability to handle temptations and manage weak impulses. The fact that human discipline muscles get tired from all the decision fatigue explains why so many massively successful people end up doing something foolish that destroys their careers. They gave in to the urge that causes their downfall because all day long they were making important decisions. By the time it was evening, they had no willpower left in their battery to manage the craving.
- The key is rest and recovery of the self-control muscle. Never allow it to get too tired. Your willpower really is weakest when you are most tired. We make our worst decisions and our lowest choices when we’re exhausted. So, don’t allow yourself to get exhausted.
- External order increases your discipline.
- Mess lowers your self-control as well as steals your cognitive bandwidth.
Those quotes lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
The way to annihilate the weakest impulses of your lower self and to free yourself of the cravings and temptations that are blocking your best is through ceaseless repetition of the new behavior you’re working hard to install. The word that comes to mind here is steadfast. Be steadfast in your commitment. Be absolutely dedicated and excuseless in following through on this life-altering self-promise. Each time you follow through, you’ll deepen the relationship with your sovereign self. Each time you rise at dawn, you’ll purify your character, fortify your willpower and magnify the fires of your soul. The real measure of your majesty is shown not in your outer moments before an audience, but in the soft and early light of lonely practice. You become undefeatable in the world by what you do when no one’s watching.
