Waking Up Early | #37

Waking up early

No. 37 — read time 2 minutes

Welcome to The Soloist, a weekly newsletter where I share timeless ideas and insights about life, business, and creativity.

Today at a glance

• Waking Up Early

• Tweets You’ll Like

For the past week, a close friend and I have been waking up at 5:30am and meeting at a nearby pool to start swimming laps by 6am.

Every single day, Monday through Friday.

We both want to shed some weight and improve our fitness. We both also love swimming so it was easy to decide on this being our activity of choice.

This new habit-building coincided with me moving to a new state (more on that in the future) and dealing with all of the new local allergies my body is fighting against that I didn’t know existed.

Suffice to say, my sleep quality has gone down the drain.

And I couldn’t care less.

There is ample science at this point that we need 7-8 hours of sleep every night and that neglecting that over a period of time likely reduces lifespan.

But like most research we come across, we must apply context and nuance.

The times in my life when I feel like I am making progress towards a goal always coincide with me waking up earlier.

And as the tail end of the week in the chart showed, I started to make adjustments to recoup my sleep quality. And none had anything to do with skipping a workout.

I went to bed earlier each day.

I bought a different allergy medicine.

I tried nose strips to clear my nasal passage.

I drank more water throughout the day.

And I didn’t stress about my new routine. To build a habit you need to build streaks. That introduction of a new variable into your life will mean certain aspects of your life start to feel chaotic.

The important thing is to not stress and dump the new habit.

Now that my friend and I have Week 1 in the books, uninterrupted, it’s a lot easier to go into Week 2.

And my sleep schedule is starting to recover to accommodate.

The larger lesson here, besides habits and sleep, is how we deal with new variables in our life, intentional or otherwise.

Our response to new variables is fully within our control.

We can choose to lose our compass, freak out, and feel as if the world is closing in on us.

Or we can choose to breathe, to assess the situation, and to make small modifications to re-assert our control over a situation.

The choice is always ours alone.

Till next week,

-Tom

P.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. If you save a lot of bookmarks on X / Twitter (like me), try my SaaS dewey. — it’s the easiest way to backup and organize Twitter bookmarks.

2. If you're looking for coaching on business or audience growth book a free discovery call here. If it makes sense to work together we’ll know, and if not we’ll have a productive 1:1 call regardless and get to know each other. (I’m testing this format and will see if it makes sense to continue, so this may not last).

Tweets You’ll Like:

Michael Dean is a fantastic writer I met doing David Perell’s Write of Passage course. This piece of advice on writing is wonderful because we tend to skim articles by headline. And if the headlines don’t make sense, it’s much easier to spot. When I was in the corporate world, I would train my employees on the Barbara Minto Pyramid Principle and specifically have them make their presentations by starting with Slide Titles first in order to get the story right. But this approach is probably more in line with how most people work — do the brain dump, then title, then re-arrange and organize.

Skateboarding and deep insights on creativity? Yes, please.

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