Bzzzt
That’s my alarm. It’s an old phone that ended up in a street fight in Mongolia, and now acts as my alarm clock. I stir, search for that phone and surgically stop the timer. I have enough energy at this point, but I sink back to bed.
For the next 2–3 hours, I am in a battle with myself. I tell myself I won’t have time to work out or eat before I start business. But, it’ll be okay I tell myself. I get more an more anxious, until I end up getting up.
Great. Just enough time to go to the gym fast, eat bad food, and be 20 minutes late.
How do you act, when you wake up like that all the time? How do other people react to you?
Well, I for one, felt stressed. I felt like I had no time in the day, that time was passing me by. That I didn’t have any control over my life.
I blamed it at a lot of things. My sleep schedule is screwed up. I have more commitments than I could have coneived of before. Business is growing, and it’s causing me stress.
I’ve met a lot of people this year, and I think if you’re a startup founder, or an artist, or an extremely ambitious student, you get this type of feeling. You work to no end, You get lost in creating. Eventually, you reach a level of stress that starts to nag at you. It tries to break you down. You realize what you’re missing. Maybe you haven’t seen your family, maybe your other goals have started to fall through, you see yourself become unhealthy.
At least, that’s how it has been for me.
But I realized something. The latter has nothing to do with my business.
What if I had waken up earlier? What if I had a healthy diet? What if all of the small bad descisions I make on a regular basis were small good descisions?
I’ve realized that habit constructs your day. It constructed my day previously. I just had enough lax in my schedule that I could have dealt with sloppy habits.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
If you believe in that quote, the answer isn’t to scale back on what you believe will create change. The answer is to build a better life for yourself.
Do it little by little.
I’m going to start by fixing my sleeping schedule.
Then, no more sugar.
After that, maybe no hackernews