Why does it seem like all sucessful people get up early? - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

ASU2003 · 06-30-2008, 07:15 PM

What is so great about getting up early? I have never understood it. There have been a few weeks where jet lag may my body think noon was 5 AM, and I did go running and watched the morning news before work. I guess that is more productive then drinking, porn and sex.

Is it just that they use the time they have better? Are there fewer distractions in the morning? Has anybody switched from being a night owl to an early riser? Did you have to force it or did it happen naturally as you got older? And do you think you do better work in the morning or the evening? I know I work best from 9pm-2am. It's dark so there's nothing to do outside, I don't need to eat anything, and nothing will distract me (except for porn, which sounds good right now.

)

Willravel · 06-30-2008, 07:24 PM

It's possibly about will power. Two separate outcomes from the same cause. One waking up early to defeat grogginess could also use that same strength of will on many of his or her endeavors.

Bear Cub · 06-30-2008, 07:25 PM

Its not so much that they have more time, but they're more motivated to take advantage of the time they do have.

Not to mention, most people work during normal business hours, so there SHOULD be a MUCH larger percentage of successful people who get up early.

Shauk · 06-30-2008, 07:25 PM

weird, i was just contemplating this a few days ago.

the world is set on this "early bird gets the worm" mentality.

The day belongs to businessmen and such, then all the lazy people who sleep in and are unmotivated to seek out success tend to get up when they feel like it, attend social events (concerts, which you much admit will attract a fair share of deviants) and barflys (whooo lets stay out till 2am and get WASTED!)

Interesting nonetheless

ASU2003 · 06-30-2008, 07:51 PM

http://www.slate.com/id/2193208/?GT1=38001

I found the article that made me question this, although I have thought about it from time to time. Like I think the reason I got this job was that I answered my phone at 6:30 AM (I was on the West coast at the time, but the job was on the East coast and didn't realize where I was).

snowy · 06-30-2008, 08:01 PM

My dad gets up at the asscrack of dawn (and has done so for as long as I can remember, and likely before that) and I consider him to be very successful; so would most other people. I think part of it is that his brain is moving at full speed long before anyone else's is.

blade02 · 06-30-2008, 08:03 PM

I think it has to do with procrastination. When you are motivated to overcome procrastination, you'll probably be successful. There's lots of things that can motivate you such as drive, passion, etc but the point is... if you wake up ready to go instead of hitting your snooze button 5 times, then you're already ahead of the game for the day.

From my own experiance, I have my alarm set for 6am, yet if I sleep in until 6:50 I will still make it to work on time 9 out 10 times. That 1 out 10 times I don't make it there on time, it could probably be avoided if I had got up at 6.

Manic_Skafe · 06-30-2008, 08:12 PM

The usual convention is that the early bird catches the worm but I think it's all a matter of whatever you consider success to be. I left my job a few weeks ago and I'm finally out pursuing my creative passions full-time I find myself doing whatever you might consider my actual "business" during the smaller hours.

As to whether or not anyone would consider me successful is another question entirely. But I'd like to think that as I continually reek of photo chemicals that I'm at least on the right track.

vanblah · 06-30-2008, 08:49 PM

You have to ask "successful at what?"

Lots of successful artists, musicians and writers don't get up until 2PM.

Successful pastry chefs work overnights because they need to have the pastries ready and fresh by 5 or 6 AM.

Business people get up early because that's when the stock market and other businesses are open (in the U.S.).

Construction workers get up even earlier so they don't have to work during the heat of the day.

A successful 3rd shift systems administrator usually doesn't get up until 4PM.

See?

host · 06-30-2008, 09:06 PM

Pardon me, but I think you are asking an irrelevant question. "Seems" to who, and....what is your definition of "successful"?

I am in my mid 50's, and I am not "successful", if the amount of money and possessions I have, is the yardstick you measure success, by. For the past ten years, I've traded stock and options, via the internet, on my own account, and I work as a member of the waitstaff of high end dining establishment in the evening.

Experience tells me that success has more to do with intellectual growth, with curiousity, than it does with material wealth. Currently, I am fascinated with the studies of Muncie, Indiana, which began back in 1924. Back then, the most affluent people awoke later in the morning than the less affluent did.

I think a measure of success is having an awareness of how indoctrinated you are. If you don't have that awareness, a curiousity about it, then who the hell are you, really? How do you know what you know, and why do you think what you think?

The mass of people are like lemmings, they get up at the same time, go to work at the same time, eat at the same time, etc....etc.., and thus, they perceive that the roads and grocery stores and restaurants are "too crowded", as they idle in traffic, stand in line, or receive shitty service, when in fact, the problem is that they are all so in synch with each other.

If you can adjust your own activities to say..... following just behind the wave, you can spot it at grocery stores and restaurants, or watch it coming the other way on the interstate. Have you ever entered a store when lines are long at the checkouts, but, when you have finished your shopping, there is no line to check out?

People with investment interests get up early, because of the hours the stock market operates, 9:30 to 4:00 in the American eastern time zone. Commuting to work to arrive by 9:00am, in the coastal and central population centers, means dealing with congestion related delays that force a 7:00am or earlier wake up:

Early in the last century. it was a sign of affluence and success to have the luxury of waking up later, not earlier:

Quote:

http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/caplow.htm
New River Media Interview with: Theodore Caplow
Commonwealth Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia Co-Author, The First Measured Century

QUESTION: Explain a bit about the first Middletown study.

THEODORE CAPLOW: Robert and Helen Lynd went to Muncie, Indiana in 1924, with a commission to study grassroots religion. And they came back in 1925 with a marvelous study of social change, having used 1890 as the baseline and gotten all sorts of retrospective information from people who were still alive and from documents. And they constructed the authoritative story of what had happened to a typical American community in that generational period.

It's a wonderful book, Middletown, published in 1929. [It] almost didn't get published, because the sponsors, the Rockefeller Institute for Social and Religious Research were shocked by the fact that the little study of grassroots religion had turned into a comprehensive examination of a whole society. It took the intervention of Clark Wissler, who was chairman of the board of the Museum of Natural History to get the book published.

It then became the first sociological bestseller. It's been in print ever since. The whole 70 years it's never been out of print. It's a great book. ....

.... QUESTION: What were the main findings of the Lynds in the book?

THEODORE CAPLOW: They discovered the scandal of class. Most Americans at the time had been brought up to believe that we live in a democracy, where everybody is essentially equal, though admittedly some people are richer than others. The Lynds discovered in Middletown that there was a business class, as they called it, and a working class, and that they were as different as two different tribes. Their conditions of life were different. Their values were different. Their expectations were different. And there wasn't, they thought, much passage between the two. That was what made the book exciting.

But they did all sorts of other things. They looked at the influence of the automobile on the sex habits on the population. They considered the enormous stability that religion had showed from 1890 to 1924. It's a very comprehensive and careful examination.

It is based on not just one kind of sociological data, but everything they could think of, including some of the earliest good surveys that ever were done. Their attendance at all kinds of civic and private celebrations, a great deal of interviewing, a good deal of examination of documents, careful review of newspapers. There wasn't any phase of life in the community they didn't touch. They had a lot of assistance. It represents some thousands of man hours, and it's a very careful job.

I encountered Robert Lynd as an undergraduate of Columbia and was fascinated. I took to haunting his office, and he gave me more time than I'm afraid I would give to an undergraduate these days, and eventually suggested that I change my major from history to sociology and go to the University of Chicago to study with the people he admired there. And I had very little contact with him until he retired in 1959, I believe, and I came back to Columbia and took not exactly his place, but at least I took his office.

Some years after that, one of my graduate students suggested that the time had come to do another study of Middletown. I should have mentioned that Robert Lynd, not Helen, went back to Muncie in 1935 to trace the influence of the Depression on the community. And they published a book called Middletown in Transition. We call that Middletown II......

.. QUESTION: What kind of criteria were used to select Muncie?

THEODORE CAPLOW: They wanted a place that was as unexceptional as possible, with nothing outstanding about it, and that is true of Middletown to this day; less so perhaps than it was then, because at that time they could say that it had nothing outstanding, no famous historical events that ever occurred there. It had never been the home of a famous character. It had very few foreign-born people and practically no minorities. And that was what they liked about it. They were looking for in a sense the essence of plain Americanism.

The Middletown one study does not really contain a critique of consumerism. It contains a critique of class stratification, and the fact that the business class as they saw it were not only exploiting the working class, but also attempting to control them ideologically. There was a movement called "Magic Middletown." There was boosterism. Lynd devotes a lot of space to how squalid the typical working man's home was. And you have to remember that the great mechanization of the American home had barely started in 1924. Very few working class families would have had either running water or central heat. It's rather hard for us to realize. Since many of them lived in houses that are still occupied today, but the equipment was entirely different. ...

...QUESTION: What happened between Middletown II in the 1930s, and when the next study, Middletown III, took place in the 1970s?

THEODORE CAPLOW: We are still using the distinction between business class and working class, but two things have happened in the interim, had already happened by 1977, when we did Middletown III, and are even more salient today after Middletown IV [the current study].

The two things that happened were that the relative number of white collar occupations increased greatly between 1924 and 1977, not only in Middletown but in the United States, and not only in the United States but in the whole Western world. The other thing that happened is that many of the differences between the business class and the working class eroded rapidly. For example, in 1924 very few working class parents aspired or expected to send their children to college, whereas practically all business class parents did. In 1977 there was virtually no difference between the two groups in that respect, and the rates of college attendance were not all that different.

To some extent, certainly not identical, but to some - there was some convergence, a good deal of convergence. For example, no working class person would have dreamed of playing golf in 1924. In 1977 it was commonplace. But on the other hand, the incidence of golfers and membership in the country clubs still gave you a pretty sharp division between the two groups.

There is still, for example, a conspicuous difference in exposure to unemployment. It's not as conspicuous as it was. In 1924 it was pretty nearly absolute. That is, Lynd couldn't find anybody in the business class who had been unemployed, whereas it was a normal and routine occurrence in the working class. .....

....QUESTION: Why do you suppose the Lynds noted class differentiation in the way they did? And does the observation still hold?

THEODORE CAPLOW: It was forced upon them by the fact that they looked attentively at the community. You couldn't help seeing it. It was perfectly obvious that the community was bifurcated in that way. Middletown is only the first of a dozen important studies...

... Then there's another set of studies by Hollingshead that was a Midwestern community that he called Elmstown. And that too I doubt very much you could have looked at any American community in the 1920s and 1930s and been struck by the enormous gaps between the people on top and the people at the bottom.

[Since then] it's changed in an uneven fashion. With respect to the stratification of income and wealth, in the quality of income and wealth, we made considerable progress from the 1920s to the 1950s. We're now about back where we were in the 1920s with a great deal of dis-equalization going on, particularly in the last decade or so. If you look at the Gini coefficient, which as you know measures the inequality of a distribution, then the United States has now the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any developed country by a very wide margin. ....

QUESTION: What about time spent with children?

THEODORE CAPLOW:...When you look at the details that becomes fairly explicable. Both men and women worked longer hours, longer weeks and longer years in 1924 than they do now. By wide margins. Remember, the work day in 1924 was anywhere from ten to twelve hours and typically five and a half or six days.......

....Consequently, both men and women were overstressed by comparison with their successors today; much more so in the working class than the business class because their hours were longer, their resources were less, they had no household help. Their hours, by the way, were spectacularly longer. People who worked in offices worked perhaps a third fewer hours than people who worked in factories at the time. And that's one of the things that's equalized.

So we found in the 1977 survey that working class people were getting up later in the morning than they had in 1924, when most of them were getting up in the dark for most of the year. Strangely enough in 1999 we find the women again moving in the other direction; they're getting up earlier. A surprising proportion get up before 5:00 A.M. ....

QUESTION: Can we tell anything about political attitudes?

THEODORE CAPLOW: I think what we conclude, looking at the 1999 data, is that it doesn't really make sense to talk about general attitudes of conservatism or liberalism, because the trends run opposite on very specific items. We have a question taken literally from the 1924 questionnaire that was asked in 1977 and 1999 about what is popularly called the Protestant ethic. I think it reads something like, "It's the fault of the man himself if he does not succeed." - and we didn't change the wording out of political correctness, because as far as possible we try never to change wordings. And more young people accept that proposition as true now than in 1977 or even 1924. That's really quite startling.

On the other hand, we have another question about "The fact that some people have so much more money than others, so there's something wrong with this country." And there we get more people taking the liberal point of view in 1999 than in either 1977 or 1924. So you really have to look at each item by itself and realize that the mosaic of attitudes that are current at any given time don't necessarily or normally represent a drift in one direction or another, but the reaction to specific ideas.

QUESTION: What about economic change?

THEODORE CAPLOW: Well, let's take the overall picture. In 1924 you had prosperity, but it was prosperity 1924 style with very frequent unemployment for working class people, and a large part of the population living in what we would now consider the subsistence level. And the 1930s saw about a third of the labor force unemployed and the failure of many local enterprises, and the first signs of federal intervention in local affairs. The 1940s brought prosperity; the war brought a wave of prosperity to Muncie that lasted for pretty nearly the next generation.

When we did the 1977 study, it was sort of taken for granted that the community was well off. Then in the 1980s it was hit by a kind of local depression that was chronicled in a brief documentary film by Ben Wattenberg. Unemployment got up to 18 percent at one point in the early 1980s. And what was happening was that the heavy industry, sort of basic manufacturing industry on which Middletown had always depended, was being phased out. A number of the local plants never recovered. Some of them staggered on for some years. But the Ball Glass Jar company moved away, Indiana Wire and Steel, and the packing houses shut down. The Delco reduced its workforce and eventually shut down. The local glass plants beside Ball began to work half shifts.

By 1999 this process was complete. Middletown is no longer a manufacturing city. It has no major manufacturing plant, none at all. It's still structured in such a way that the whole south side is sort of designed to be the residential area for a factory workforce, but there are no factories to speak of. Nonetheless, it is prosperous. And that represents a shift to service industry that on the whole has been successful by being piecemeal. Nobody completely understands the reasons for Muncie's or Middletown's current prosperity, but nobody's complaining about it either. ....

If anyone is curious this May 2008 article updates us about Middletown's and America's....decline:

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...050502738.html
Middletown, Teetering On the Divide
An Indiana City With an Average Past Anxiously Faces an Uncertain Future

By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 6, 2008; C01....

So, again, is there a balance of a desire to know the key ingredients for success and a curious nature in the question asked in the thread title, because I think it is easier to be successful, if wealth is the yardstick success is measured by, by being incurious.

I've met and talked with many people who have made a lot of money, but I've met and talked with only a few people who seem curious about how and why things are the way they are in the political-socio-economic pool they are swimming in.

genuinegirly · 06-30-2008, 09:43 PM

My body wakes up the minute natural light hits my eyelids. I tend to sleep in if I haven't set my alarm on a cloudy morning. Growing up, I always slept in a room with an East-facing window. No matter what, I was up with the sun. Early habits made it easier for me later on. I find I accomplish much more in the mornings, mainly because there is no one awake enough to distract me. Outdoor air feels crisper and cleaner in the early mornings. I love being an early riser. I don't know if rising early has anything to do with success, but it sure goes a long way toward making me happier overall if I wake up early.

Something I learned from a lecture on sleep (from a random neuroscience survey course):
The human sleep cycle naturally shifts during teen and early adult years to a noon wake-up, awake until 2am schedule (age 6 to ~12, it's a 7am wake-up, noonish nap, bed at 10pm schedule). Recommendations for overcoming the habit of sleeping in: Tell yourself before you go to bed what time you will wake up. Set your alarm. When your alarm goes off, get immediately out of bed and do something active. Morning exercise such as a walk around the block is a healthy habit that will leave you less inclined to doze back to sleep.

ShaniFaye · 07-01-2008, 03:15 AM

I dont know how successful I am lol but I'm up at 430 M-F and IF Im lucky I can sleep as late as 6 on saturday and sunday. I MUCH prefer getting up in the mornings, my brain works better. I've always been that way...even in highschool, my brain tends to want to stop "thinking" around 2 pm, so getting to work at 6 am gives me the opportunity to take advantage of that

I was just talking to my dad the other day about this, he is the same way as was his father....there is just something about getting up that early and being awake and productive before most peoples alarm clocks are going off

PonyPotato · 07-01-2008, 03:21 AM

The people I work with (who are VERY successful) are all up very early. I'm talking sending emails to start the day between 4 am and 6 pm, and they all seem to stay up pretty late at night too. My landlord/boss checks on the barn cats around 10-11 pm and she's up and gone for the day before 6 am. It's crazy.

I prefer to wake up early because that's when I'm most productive. I think because Crompsin gets to go back to bed (or used to.. now he has to be gone for class before I leave for work, hahahaha), he's more awake at night and tends to keep me up later than I should be. It makes getting up in the morning a bit more difficult than I'd like it to be.

The_Jazz · 07-01-2008, 04:16 AM

host touched on part of it for me. I think that by most measures, I'm a "successful businessman", although I have nothing to do with stock markets.

I am up at 5 every morning, out the door by 6 and at my desk between 6:20 and 6:30. My phone starts ringing around then, and I generally have 7 to 10 emails to deal with, along with all the stuff I left undone at the end of the day before. I generally have lots of paperwork to sign as well, and that's when I usually wade through it all. I have clients on the East and West Coasts, and I manipulate time zones for their and my benefit - for instance this morning I am finalizing a deal with an Atlanta underwriter for a Las Vegas client. I try to leave as close to 5 as I can every day so that I get to see my kids.

I think that monetarily successful people (I hope you appreciate that nod to you, host) work the hours they do because they feel pressed to accomplish goals. I certainly do. I habitually work 11 hour days every day I'm in the office. I post here in between phone calls and emails, although I've certainly been guilty of putting my phone on mute and posting here when the greater conversation ranges away from my areas of expertise.

abaya · 07-01-2008, 04:53 AM

I am not a morning person, never have been and never aspire to be, whatever the consequences of that may be. My brain does not work properly before 10am, and it functions best after 10pm. I work best when it's dark outside (which makes working in an Icelandic summer difficult--how can you pull an all-nighter when there's no night?!) and everyone else is asleep... I feel very charged and productive around midnight.

That said, if I have to wake up early, then I will, no question. Four years of college rowing had me up at 4:30am, 6 days a week, all year long, and working as a high school teacher for a couple of years had be me up by 5:30am at the latest to shower every day and prepare myself for teaching by 7:30am. Same thing happened last year when I worked at the fish factory starting at 7:30am... popped out of bed with the alarm at 6:30am and never looked back, never hit snooze. All of these activities were extremely high-energy, so there was no time to think about being tired... it was go-go-go, and that is probably the only way I was able to function (especially since I went to bed after midnight, if not 1am, most nights). That, and plenty of naps in the afternoon/evening. I crashed regularly to keep my sanity.

Since being with ktspktsp, I get up at 8am so we can both prepare for "work," because otherwise I will just sleep in and be totally unproductive.
But I still hate getting up before 10am, no matter what.

roachboy · 07-01-2008, 05:22 AM

i've gradually shifted from being awake at night to being up in the morning, but mostly because i felt like doing it. over time, i figured out that i like writing in the morning more than at other times of day. there's nothing moral about it.

obviously, it all depends on what you do with your days.

i don't do the "being productive" thing because i think it's limiting---if you are doing stuff of any complexity, you need to not do it as much as you need to do it--time away is often more important than time spent at a task--so long as you get to it sooner or later. at the same time, i'm very disciplined about my work---and most artists that stay artists past their early 20s are disciplined---and being disciplined entails letting yourself sit around, be idle, think about stuff, tinker, etc.

in general, idleness is radically undervalued in america. it's infested with the protestant compulsion to appear busy. there really should be a 12=step program folk can attend to break them of this compulsion. it's not good.

anyway, i don't think when you get outta bed has any meaning.
it's a preference.
my step father was one of these people who sprung out of bed at like 4:30 in the morning.
he liked to extol his virtue by extolling the virtue of not being able to sleep past 4:30 in the morning.
he liked to talk about how productive it made him.
i never really saw what production he was talking about---so i think he liked it because he could space out, do other things, sit around without being bothered by any demands to be busy.
so maybe we were talking about the same thing and it just bothered him aesthetically that i would get out of bed at 2 pm.

in terms of net productivity at the time, i'd say it was about a wash between us.

Cynthetiq · 07-01-2008, 05:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Jazz

host touched on part of it for me. I think that by most measures, I'm a "successful businessman", although I have nothing to do with stock markets.

I am up at 5 every morning, out the door by 6 and at my desk between 6:20 and 6:30. My phone starts ringing around then, and I generally have 7 to 10 emails to deal with, along with all the stuff I left undone at the end of the day before. I generally have lots of paperwork to sign as well, and that's when I usually wade through it all. I have clients on the East and West Coasts, and I manipulate time zones for their and my benefit - for instance this morning I am finalizing a deal with an Atlanta underwriter for a Las Vegas client. I try to leave as close to 5 as I can every day so that I get to see my kids.

I think that monetarily successful people (I hope you appreciate that nod to you, host) work the hours they do because they feel pressed to accomplish goals. I certainly do. I habitually work 11 hour days every day I'm in the office. I post here in between phone calls and emails, although I've certainly been guilty of putting my phone on mute and posting here when the greater conversation ranges away from my areas of expertise.

I'm going to tack onto this since it's basically what I was going to say including the mute on the phone.

MTV taught me some very valuable lessons. "Someone is willing to sit in the same seat for less money and put in the same effort and same hours, all to say that they work at MTV Networks," is what the Vice President of Technology told me on my third interview. He was the reality check after 2 very fun out of the box interviews which were to determine if I fit the culture. No one at that company came in before 10AM, except those that climbed the ladder. People wondered all the time, "How come they promoted so and so, and they overlooked him and her?" Well, most often it was because the person was in early and stayed late. They produced. They got shit done. That's the important part, at the end of the day, I'm trying to get more done than the guy who is willing to sit in my seat for less money.

I don't have that same spirit any longer. I'm much more complacent. But I'm still willing to when the project or company needs it, I will put in more hours. Not because I want to, but because I need to in order to get things done, and hopefully be rewarded accordingly.

My goal is to eventually wake up when I'm done sleeping, no alarm clocks, no early morning meetings.

ASU2003 · 07-01-2008, 02:59 PM

If you get there before everyone else, but still stay later than everyone else (and you are working and getting lots done), it does show that you have dedication and people will notice. But I bet the person that is on the 6am-2pm work schedule will get promoted faster over the person who is on the Noon-8pm work schedule. I would take the Noon-8pm schedule everytime, it is just how my body works

Being really successful to me is not having to work anymore, and never having to worry about getting up for anything before 11am (unless you are on vacation and the place opens early, like DisneyWorld or a ski resort)

06-30-2008, 07:15 PM	#1 (permalink)
ASU2003 immoral minority Location: Back in Ohio	Why does it seem like all sucessful people get up early? What is so great about getting up early? I have never understood it. There have been a few weeks where jet lag may my body think noon was 5 AM, and I did go running and watched the morning news before work. I guess that is more productive then drinking, porn and sex. Is it just that they use the time they have better? Are there fewer distractions in the morning? Has anybody switched from being a night owl to an early riser? Did you have to force it or did it happen naturally as you got older? And do you think you do better work in the morning or the evening? I know I work best from 9pm-2am. It's dark so there's nothing to do outside, I don't need to eat anything, and nothing will distract me (except for porn, which sounds good right now. )

06-30-2008, 07:25 PM	#3 (permalink)
Bear Cub The Reverend Side Boob Location: Nofe Curolina	Its not so much that they have more time, but they're more motivated to take advantage of the time they do have. Not to mention, most people work during normal business hours, so there SHOULD be a MUCH larger percentage of successful people who get up early. __________________ Living in the United Socialist States of America.

06-30-2008, 08:01 PM	#6 (permalink)
snowy Kick Ass Kunoichi Location: Oregon	My dad gets up at the asscrack of dawn (and has done so for as long as I can remember, and likely before that) and I consider him to be very successful; so would most other people. I think part of it is that his brain is moving at full speed long before anyone else's is. __________________ If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

06-30-2008, 08:12 PM	#8 (permalink)
Manic_Skafe More Than You Expect Location: Queens	The usual convention is that the early bird catches the worm but I think it's all a matter of whatever you consider success to be. I left my job a few weeks ago and I'm finally out pursuing my creative passions full-time I find myself doing whatever you might consider my actual "business" during the smaller hours. As to whether or not anyone would consider me successful is another question entirely. But I'd like to think that as I continually reek of photo chemicals that I'm at least on the right track. __________________ "Porn is a zoo of exotic animals that becomes boring upon ownership." -Nersesian Last edited by Manic_Skafe; 06-30-2008 at 08:14 PM..

06-30-2008, 09:43 PM	#11 (permalink)
genuinegirly Eat your vegetables Super Moderator Location: Arabidopsis-ville	My body wakes up the minute natural light hits my eyelids. I tend to sleep in if I haven't set my alarm on a cloudy morning. Growing up, I always slept in a room with an East-facing window. No matter what, I was up with the sun. Early habits made it easier for me later on. I find I accomplish much more in the mornings, mainly because there is no one awake enough to distract me. Outdoor air feels crisper and cleaner in the early mornings. I love being an early riser. I don't know if rising early has anything to do with success, but it sure goes a long way toward making me happier overall if I wake up early. Something I learned from a lecture on sleep (from a random neuroscience survey course): The human sleep cycle naturally shifts during teen and early adult years to a noon wake-up, awake until 2am schedule (age 6 to ~12, it's a 7am wake-up, noonish nap, bed at 10pm schedule). Recommendations for overcoming the habit of sleeping in: Tell yourself before you go to bed what time you will wake up. Set your alarm. When your alarm goes off, get immediately out of bed and do something active. Morning exercise such as a walk around the block is a healthy habit that will leave you less inclined to doze back to sleep. __________________ "Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq "violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy Last edited by genuinegirly; 06-30-2008 at 09:49 PM..

06-30-2008, 07:24 PM	#2 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	It's possibly about will power. Two separate outcomes from the same cause. One waking up early to defeat grogginess could also use that same strength of will on many of his or her endeavors.

06-30-2008, 07:25 PM	#4 (permalink)
Shauk Confused Adult Location: Spokane, WA	weird, i was just contemplating this a few days ago. the world is set on this "early bird gets the worm" mentality. The day belongs to businessmen and such, then all the lazy people who sleep in and are unmotivated to seek out success tend to get up when they feel like it, attend social events (concerts, which you much admit will attract a fair share of deviants) and barflys (whooo lets stay out till 2am and get WASTED!) Interesting nonetheless

06-30-2008, 07:51 PM	#5 (permalink)
ASU2003 immoral minority Location: Back in Ohio	http://www.slate.com/id/2193208/?GT1=38001 I found the article that made me question this, although I have thought about it from time to time. Like I think the reason I got this job was that I answered my phone at 6:30 AM (I was on the West coast at the time, but the job was on the East coast and didn't realize where I was).

06-30-2008, 08:03 PM	#7 (permalink)
blade02 Insane	I think it has to do with procrastination. When you are motivated to overcome procrastination, you'll probably be successful. There's lots of things that can motivate you such as drive, passion, etc but the point is... if you wake up ready to go instead of hitting your snooze button 5 times, then you're already ahead of the game for the day. From my own experiance, I have my alarm set for 6am, yet if I sleep in until 6:50 I will still make it to work on time 9 out 10 times. That 1 out 10 times I don't make it there on time, it could probably be avoided if I had got up at 6.

06-30-2008, 08:49 PM	#9 (permalink)
vanblah Junkie	You have to ask "successful at what?" Lots of successful artists, musicians and writers don't get up until 2PM. Successful pastry chefs work overnights because they need to have the pastries ready and fresh by 5 or 6 AM. Business people get up early because that's when the stock market and other businesses are open (in the U.S.). Construction workers get up even earlier so they don't have to work during the heat of the day. A successful 3rd shift systems administrator usually doesn't get up until 4PM. See?

07-01-2008, 03:15 AM	#12 (permalink)
ShaniFaye Submit to me, you know you want to Location: Lilburn, Ga	I dont know how successful I am lol but I'm up at 430 M-F and IF Im lucky I can sleep as late as 6 on saturday and sunday. I MUCH prefer getting up in the mornings, my brain works better. I've always been that way...even in highschool, my brain tends to want to stop "thinking" around 2 pm, so getting to work at 6 am gives me the opportunity to take advantage of that I was just talking to my dad the other day about this, he is the same way as was his father....there is just something about getting up that early and being awake and productive before most peoples alarm clocks are going off __________________ *I want the diabetic plan that comes with rollover carbs. I dont like the unused one expiring at midnite!!*

07-01-2008, 03:21 AM	#13 (permalink)
PonyPotato Soaring Location: Ohio!	The people I work with (who are VERY successful) are all up very early. I'm talking sending emails to start the day between 4 am and 6 pm, and they all seem to stay up pretty late at night too. My landlord/boss checks on the barn cats around 10-11 pm and she's up and gone for the day before 6 am. It's crazy. I prefer to wake up early because that's when I'm most productive. I think because Crompsin gets to go back to bed (or used to.. now he has to be gone for class before I leave for work, hahahaha), he's more awake at night and tends to keep me up later than I should be. It makes getting up in the morning a bit more difficult than I'd like it to be. __________________ "Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark." — Henri-Frédéric Amiel

07-01-2008, 04:16 AM	#14 (permalink)
The_Jazz Asshole Administrator Location: Chicago	host touched on part of it for me. I think that by most measures, I'm a "successful businessman", although I have nothing to do with stock markets. I am up at 5 every morning, out the door by 6 and at my desk between 6:20 and 6:30. My phone starts ringing around then, and I generally have 7 to 10 emails to deal with, along with all the stuff I left undone at the end of the day before. I generally have lots of paperwork to sign as well, and that's when I usually wade through it all. I have clients on the East and West Coasts, and I manipulate time zones for their and my benefit - for instance this morning I am finalizing a deal with an Atlanta underwriter for a Las Vegas client. I try to leave as close to 5 as I can every day so that I get to see my kids. I think that monetarily successful people (I hope you appreciate that nod to you, host) work the hours they do because they feel pressed to accomplish goals. I certainly do. I habitually work 11 hour days every day I'm in the office. I post here in between phone calls and emails, although I've certainly been guilty of putting my phone on mute and posting here when the greater conversation ranges away from my areas of expertise. __________________ "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin "There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush "We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

07-01-2008, 04:53 AM	#15 (permalink)
abaya Location: Iceland	I am not a morning person, never have been and never aspire to be, whatever the consequences of that may be. My brain does not work properly before 10am, and it functions best after 10pm. I work best when it's dark outside (which makes working in an Icelandic summer difficult--how can you pull an all-nighter when there's no night?!) and everyone else is asleep... I feel very charged and productive around midnight. That said, if I have to wake up early, then I will, no question. Four years of college rowing had me up at 4:30am, 6 days a week, all year long, and working as a high school teacher for a couple of years had be me up by 5:30am at the latest to shower every day and prepare myself for teaching by 7:30am. Same thing happened last year when I worked at the fish factory starting at 7:30am... popped out of bed with the alarm at 6:30am and never looked back, never hit snooze. All of these activities were extremely high-energy, so there was no time to think about being tired... it was go-go-go, and that is probably the only way I was able to function (especially since I went to bed after midnight, if not 1am, most nights). That, and plenty of naps in the afternoon/evening. I crashed regularly to keep my sanity. Since being with ktspktsp, I get up at 8am so we can both prepare for "work," because otherwise I will just sleep in and be totally unproductive. But I still hate getting up before 10am, no matter what. __________________ And think not you can direct the course of Love; for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. --Khalil Gibran Last edited by abaya; 07-01-2008 at 04:56 AM..

07-01-2008, 05:22 AM	#16 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i've gradually shifted from being awake at night to being up in the morning, but mostly because i felt like doing it. over time, i figured out that i like writing in the morning more than at other times of day. there's nothing moral about it. obviously, it all depends on what you do with your days. i don't do the "being productive" thing because i think it's limiting---if you are doing stuff of any complexity, you need to not do it as much as you need to do it--time away is often more important than time spent at a task--so long as you get to it sooner or later. at the same time, i'm very disciplined about my work---and most artists that stay artists past their early 20s are disciplined---and being disciplined entails letting yourself sit around, be idle, think about stuff, tinker, etc. in general, idleness is radically undervalued in america. it's infested with the protestant compulsion to appear busy. there really should be a 12=step program folk can attend to break them of this compulsion. it's not good. anyway, i don't think when you get outta bed has any meaning. it's a preference. my step father was one of these people who sprung out of bed at like 4:30 in the morning. he liked to extol his virtue by extolling the virtue of not being able to sleep past 4:30 in the morning. he liked to talk about how productive it made him. i never really saw what production he was talking about---so i think he liked it because he could space out, do other things, sit around without being bothered by any demands to be busy. so maybe we were talking about the same thing and it just bothered him aesthetically that i would get out of bed at 2 pm. in terms of net productivity at the time, i'd say it was about a wash between us. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 07-01-2008 at 05:25 AM..

07-01-2008, 02:59 PM	#18 (permalink)
ASU2003 immoral minority Location: Back in Ohio	If you get there before everyone else, but still stay later than everyone else (and you are working and getting lots done), it does show that you have dedication and people will notice. But I bet the person that is on the 6am-2pm work schedule will get promoted faster over the person who is on the Noon-8pm work schedule. I would take the Noon-8pm schedule everytime, it is just how my body works Being really successful to me is not having to work anymore, and never having to worry about getting up for anything before 11am (unless you are on vacation and the place opens early, like DisneyWorld or a ski resort)