A big misconception is that you need to feel motivated to get going. You don’t. Motivation often follows action, not the other way around.

I identify as a night owl. The evenings are when I tend to be most relaxed and productive. I enjoy talking to friends, surfing the web, reading, meditating, and watching live sports into the wee hours of the morning. My current circumstances enable this lifestyle. However, I’ve also come to realize that there are powerful psychological benefits to waking up early.

When we wake up at the last possible minute before some obligation, or after we’ve exhausted every minute of sleep, we become passive players in life. Our circumstances and obligations bully us into doing things we would rather not. Waking up earlier than necessary changes the narrative. It communicates an embrace of the challenges and opportunities of life and transforms us from passive to active participants. There is a reason why most successful, high-energy, go-getter personality types tend to wake up early. Human beings have also evolved to be highly competitive and conscious of others. When we are awake in the morning while others are asleep, we often feel at a social advantage, and vice-versa.

Recently, I re-discovered a powerful life hack that started working for me almost instantly: intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting can be a powerful tool for waking up earlier and with better energy. My routine right now consists of me not consuming any calories after 3 or 4 PM. This creates a powerful incentive for me to go to bed earlier and rise earlier to fullfull nature’s most primal instinct. And it tends to have an energetic carry-over effect the rest of the day.

This routine may be difficult to execute, even for people who have extensive experience with intermittent fasting. I, for one, intermittent fasted for more than a year, and my feeding window was always sometime in the afternoon and evening. When I recently stopped eating in the evenings, I realized just how much I enjoy doing it, when all the work for the day is complete and my mind is in entertainment mode. The evening is also when I hang out with friends and family and like to socialize over a meal.

Abstinence requires forethought and discipline, especially when I know I’m going to be around people or engaged in some athletic activity. It means I have to be disciplined to eat enough calories during my feeding window to sustain me for the rest of the day and not to cave to the temptation to eat for pleasure when time, company, and good food are abundant.

Some say the only thing that matters is what you eat, not when you eat it. My experience leads me to believe otherwise.

Note: Fasting is not for everyone and you should do your due diligence and consult your doctor before beginning any fasting regiment.

During the last two years, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with cold showers. I love them because of the myriad benefits I’ve experienced. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t experience the temptation every morning to turn the nozzle a few degrees more counter-clockwise. Cold showers are something I tolerate because I know they make me better. And I have no intention of going back to my old regimen.

There’s one benefit of cold showers that I have yet to address–and it surprisingly has to do with meditation. A few months ago, I published an article on the three important life skills of meditation—concentration, clarity, and equanimity (emotional stability). Nothing will make you concentrate and think clearly faster than a cold shower. And, when you take them regularly, you learn to be less reactive to physical and emotional pain and discomfort. It follows that cold showers are meditation in the same way that exercise is meditation.

Recently I was feeling distracted as my mind wandered from this responsibility, to that chore, to the other commitment. Being my own doctor, I knew that a solid cold shower was just the prescription I needed. The longest cold shower I had ever taken was on January 2, 2019. It lasted 20 minutes–a lot longer than the usual 2-3 minutes. I had just completed a workout that day and the water didn’t even feel that cold. I learned a long time ago that no two cold showers are alike. There’s the subject’s body temperature prior to entering the water (did you just hop out of bed or did you just finish working out or sunbathing?) And then there’s the temperature of the water itself (is it cold, frigid, or downright icy?). I would place my typical cold shower somewhere between cold and frigid (I’ll get back to you when I invest in a water thermometer). I have found that the colder the shower, the easier it is to be mindful — and the more caution and common sense you should exercise.

Back to the cold shower itself. I knew I wanted it to be on the longer side to see what I was capable of and to experience maximum therapeutic effect. I started with the nozzle in the cold range and slowly turned it clockwise. As always, the first few minutes were the most uncomfortable. But in the midst of that discomfort there was a fascinating side effect: supercharged mindfulness. Within seconds of my skin touching the water, I wasn’t thinking about the assignment I had to complete for university. I wasn’t thinking about my car that needed fixed. I wasn’t thinking about the research I’ve been working on. I wasn’t thinking about relationship problems. I wasn’t thinking about what’s for dessert. In fact, I wasn’t thinking about anything–except being there in that shower under that cold water. And it was powerful in the most down-to-earth, die-hard fashion.

Fast-forward several minutes and I felt like I had got what I came there to get. I could have stayed in the water longer and pushed the envelope on my previous record, but at that point it would have been more about ego than therapy and I wasn’t feeling particularly ego-driven that day. The mindfulness effect of my cold shower carried over into the rest of my evening. My brain knew that I had accomplished something and generously rewarded me with endorphines. And the experience sharpened my conviction just a little bit more that mindfulness was possible in every moment.

Stress has more to do with perspective than it does circumstances. The human mind has the power to make a mountain out of a molehill and a molehill out of a mountain–and it does it all the time. Sometimes life experiences empower us to see this crystal-clear. People who have near-death experiences commonly come away with a whole new outlook on life. Suddenly the worries that consumed their mind don’t mean as much in the conscious light that death is imminent. Cold showers similarly minimize the important ascribed to the petty disturbances of life. But the most beautiful thing is the fact that anyone can change their perspective right where they are with no outside help.

If a single cold shower can contain so much insight, imagine taking one every day for an entire year.

The Fire Must Never Go Out

David Goggins may be the least lazy human being on the planet. As a former Navy SEAL, world-recorder for most pull-ups in a 24-hour period, and guy who runs super marathons in his free time (100+ miles!), Goggins is uniquely qualified to feature in this article. To be sure, this is not his first feature, nor will it be his last. In another article, I shared my summary reading notes from his best-selling autobiography Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds. David Goggins is a beast of an athlete and as old school as they come. Today I’ve transcribed a YouTube clip in which he eschews all excuses and spurs on people to get after it — especially useful if we find ourselves today in need of motivation.

The most important conversation you will ever have in your life is the one you have with yourself. You wake up with it. You walk around with it. You go to bed with it. Eventually, you’re going to act on it, whether good or bad.

David Goggins

Transcript:

If you’re not wiling to go in there and face yourself, you’re not going to find anything. You’re going to live right here on surface, man, right here on surface. So if there is an ending to this world and there is somewhere to go, and there is a judgment. You’re going to get there and you might see a chart, and that chart may tell you who the f**k you should have been. And now you get the rest of your life to think about that. Man, I could have lived a much better life if I just would have suffered a little bit more. If I just would have realized that I had so much more but fear and the 40% and living here [lower level] versus living here [higher level]–being afraid–stopped me.

Your biggest enemy–the most important conversation you will ever have in your life is the one you have with yourself. You wake up with it. You walk around with it. You go to bed with it. Eventually, you’re going to act on it, whether good or bad. That’s why the whole thing about this book I have is about you. It is about you. It is strictly about you finding who you are. So many people die, live 100 years, never f**king know who they are. Never know who they are. You have to look in that mirror and know there’s so much more in here man. Because I can literally right now be a 300-pound guy spraying for cockroaches still to this day if I did not look in this mirror and say there has to be more to this. This can’t be it. And then be willing to go into it, dive deep into it, and give all I have to find it. So that’s what all that is about.

Let’s say there’s 10 people in this room. And we’re all mediocre. But I’m the best of the mediocre people. I now think I’m great. I’m great. We surround ourselves with people that make us feel great, that tell us what we want to hear. The second we put ourselves among the uncommon people, we don’t like that feeling. That challenge and feeling of that person that’s waking up at 3:30 in the morning saying,”Hey, put your s**t on, we’re going for a run.” We don’t like that challenge. We like that person who says “Hey, I don’t feel good today.” And they say “It’s OK, brother, take the day off. We’ll get a pizza and watch the game.”

We like that. We love that feeling. Why? Because you understand, man, we’re good bro. We don’t want motherf**kers like this who say “No, get your f**king s**t on, stop being a punk.” We don’t want that person constantly challenging our weaknesses. We want that person who’s constantly making us feel nice and good and secure in ourselves. That’s the mediocrity of life. We want to be the best among the average people.

People wonder how do you stay hungry all the time? Because after I accomplish something, I don’t sit back like a lot of guys who graduate BUDS [Navy SEAL training], who graduate this, graduate that. They get comfortable. They wonder why I’m getting weak, man. I lost my edge. What’s going on? Because once you hit the top of the f**king mountain, guess what happens? “I’m good!” So you wonder why you’re falling down now because once you reach the top of the mountain, you got to build a f**king ‘nother one. That’s mediocrity. There’s a lot of people in mediocrity who have a nice resume, but they’re one-timers man. They hit a one-time deal. They busted it open, got a lot of money, but they’re good. You’re mediocre now man. What are you f**king doing today, tomorrow, the next f**king day.

That’s why I don’t listen to theorists. I don’t listen to all that bulls**t. I listen to a motherf**ker who’s like this, man: “What’s wrong man?” “I’m f**king tired, dude.” “Why are you tired?” “Because tomorrow, I get to do the f**king s**t again, man. Whatever the s**t is that made me f**king nauseous and sick to my stomach, that made me hurt. There’s no ending!” And that’s the person I listen to. That’s the person who’s gained knowledge. You gain knowledge through suffering. And on the other end of suffering is a world that very few have ever seen. It’s a beautiful world because that’s where you find yourself.

You don’t find yourself in over here. You find yourself on the other end. Like the 100-mile race I was on where I ran it for 24-hours. I found myself on the other end of that f**king race. That 19-hours, I found “Wow, this is a whole ‘nother f**king world out here that I’ve never even [seen].” The world is in your mind! And that’s what all that mediocrity is about. The mind has the tactical advantage over you at all times. At all times of your life, the mind has the tactical advantage over you. It knows what you’re afraid of. It knows your insecurities. It knows your deep, dark lies. And it starts to push you away from that. It pushes you in the direction that is comfortable. The mind controls everything.

So what I realized was that when I was growing up and I was 300 pounds and I got all fat, and I got all insecure, I realized that my mind kept taking me in this direction. When things got uncomfortable to me, when I was facing my fears, my mind says “Oh, no. We have the tactical advantage. We need to get you, separate you, from this feeling.” Your life’s all about feelings. We want the happy feeling. We don’t want the feeling of this sucks. If, in that moment, you can answer those f**ked up questions, and you are now in charge of your brain versus your brain ruling you, that’s where all that stuff comes from. So the 40% rule is all of that. You get to 40%, your brain says “We’re done. Let’s roll.” This is starting to get painful. This is uncomfortable.

So you sit down. You have to figure out ways, and every body is different. We all have these things about, you know, five steps to this, and four steps to this. There’s a lot more than that. That’s all bulls**t. It’s a practice–it’s a habit. So if you know that at 40% I’m feeling pain. At 40% I’m feeling pain, that’s where the 40% rule kicks in. Now it starts. OK, I’m feeling pain. My mind is saying all this s**t to me. It’s saying get out of here. “Run. Flee.” The fight or flight kicks in. “OK, we’re done, we’re not good enough.” It starts telling you all these things. You start to believe it because the mind controls all.

This is the time where you have to gain control back of your mind and say OK, let me see if I can go 45%. Once you start giving yourself more and more and more hope and start realizing “[This is] OK.” The mind starts to think what are you doing? We’re supposed to be going right, and we’re going left. You start then controlling your mind. You start finding more in yourself. Then it goes from 40% to a lot further than that. That’s the start of it though. Get to the spot where your mind is saying stop. Wherever that is, you got to get there first. And that’s when that s**t starts to work for you. You got to control yourself in that moment.

Will Smith generates hit movies at a more prolific rate than any other actor in Hollywood. His most recent success was his role as the genie in Disney’s blockbuster remake of Aladdin. Will Smith rose to fame in the 90s playing the goofy teenager that couldn’t stay out of trouble in the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Since then, his on-screen character and real-life person have evolved. If you best remember Will Smith from his teenage years, you may be taken aback by the amount of wisdom he has acquired over the years. I know I was when I first heard him speak. Today I’ve transcribed a YouTube compilation of Will Smith’s best motivational life advice. It spoke to me, and I’m confident it will speak to you, as well.

Transcript:

I’m motivated by fear. Fear of fear. I hate being scared to do something. It’s very simple. This is what I believe, and I’m willing to die for it. Period. You can’t be scared to die for the truth. The truth is the only thing that’s ever going to be constant. And you can’t fear what might happen to you if you were to tell the truth because what happens to you if you don’t tell the truth is worse than telling the truth will ever be. . .

The first step before anybody else in the world believes is you have to believe it. There’s no reason to have a plan B because it distracts from plan A. . .

And I think, psychologically, the advantage that that gives me over a lot of people that I have been in competition with in different situations is it’s difficult to take the first step when you look how big the task is. The task is never huge to me. It’s always one brick. I believe, and I learned very young that you don’t try to build a wall. You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say I’m going to big the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built. You don’t start there. You say I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. There will not be one brick on the face of the earth that’s going to be laid better than this brick that I’m going to lay in this next ten minutes. And you do that every single day, and soon you have a wall. . .

I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic. You know, while the other guy is sleeping, I’m working. While the other guy is eating, I’m working. . .

The separation of talent and skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams and want to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours of beating on your craft. . .

I always knew that I could work hard enough. There wasn’t an issue with discipline. There wasn’t an issue with the ability to sacrifice or the willingness to sacrifice. There’s no easy way around it. No matter how talented you are, your talent is going to fail you if you’re not skilled. If you don’t study, if you don’t work really hard and dedicate yourself to being better every single day.

This one year my father had his shop and he decided for whatever reason that he wanted a new wall on the front of his shop. So he tore it down, probably about 16 feet high and 30 feet long. He just completely tore the wall down, and my brother and I had to dig a six feet hole for the foundation. We were mixing the concrete by hand. A year and a half. We were building this wall for a year and a half. Every day after school we were coming, mixing concrete, putting it in the hole, doing it, and it was just myself and my little brother.

And I remember standing back looking at that wall saying there’s going to be a hole here forever. A year and a half later we laid the final brick. And my father stood back with my brother and I, and I know he planned this. He says he didn’t, but I know he had been planning this and writing this for the past two years. We stood back and looked at the wall, and he looked at me and my brother and he said “Now don’t yall ever tell me that you can’t do something,” and walked into the shop. . .

As a child, my parents always told me you could be whatever you want to be, you can do whatever you want to do. And that office, that position, the highest office on the face of the earth. It was something I heard my parents saying it but I didn’t totally believe it. Yet I went out in the world and I carried myself and I held myself high and I stood there and I looked people in their eyes and I talked to people as if I was deserving of everything that this planet has to offer. I really want to say to children out there and to people who are watching. Confucius said one time, “He who says he can and he who says he can are both usually right” . . .

Having the opportunity to study greatness. Any time you have that opportunity, there are certain intricacies that will make clear who you are. It becomes that much more clear who you are. The definition of who I am is very clear to me, and it also redefines who I want to be in that I know for a fact that I’m stronger than I thought I was. You can’t help but ask yourself the question what would I do if I was in Muhammad Ali’s shoes. I’m not the best at anything. Eddie Murphy is funnier than I’ll ever be. Denzel is more powerful than I’ll ever be. I think that my strength is I can do everything well. I can do a little bit of everything and that’s what I concentrate on to be my strength. I’ll never be able to compete with Denzel. . .

Enjoy connecting with people and ideas. I have a mission statement. Every year for probably the past 10 years I’ve worked out a mission statement for myself. And for the last few years the mission statement has stayed the same, and it’s been improve lives. When I go into something I’m looking for how the quality of this piece could potentially improve lives, but it’s all along the way. It’s when you make the movie and how you’re interacting with people in the process, the concept of improving lives runs through the center of everything I do. And then I realize that the way to improve lives is to continually improve yourself. So with that every morning when I get out of the bed, I haven’t fixed everything in the world yet, so there’s always something to do. . .

I want my life, I want my work, my family, I want it to mean something. If you’re not making someone else’s life better, then you’re wasting your time. Your life will become better by making other lives better. . .

A few months ago I said that I believed that if I chose to I could be the president of the United States. And I think as I’ve had the chance to intellectualize why I said that I think that there’s a certain delusional quality that all successful people have to have. You have to believe that something different than what has happened for the last 50 million years of history–you have to believe that something different can happen. The one thing that I truly try to communicate in the interpretation of Ali is the complex simplicity of greatness. How greatness is not this wonderful, esoteric, illusive, God-like feature that only the special among us will ever taste. It’s something that truly exists in all of us. . .

Loss is bound to joy. Pain and suffering are bound to joy. Being able to survive something is actually a big part of being able to find that next wave of joy. You appreciate smaller things. . . I hated being scared. That I didn’t want to even take the meaning. I just hated being scared to do something. And I think what developed in my early days was the attitude that I started attacking things that I was scared of.

We quickly get offended when people criticize us or gossip about us behind our backs—and understandably so. But what if we took a moment to remember all the wrong things we’ve said and done in our lives (or thought) that nobody knows about. The truth is we are a lot worse than people think. Remember this when you feel tempted to get offended, even if people are not being truthful or giving you a fair shake. What should offend us is the garbage we allow our minds to be polluted with—the same bad energy we recycle back into the world. It’s more important to have a pure heart than a pure reputation. And, at the end of the day, it’s the only thing we have control over.

I am not a morning person. I get most of my work done at night and feel increasingly energized as the day moves along. Like many people, I still get up early because I have responsibilities scheduled during those hours. Not being a morning person may not be an issue for you if you aren’t a student and don’t work a traditional job. But for most of us getting up in the morning is a routine part of our lives. There are good reasons for getting up early other than social obligation. Many of the world’s most successful people swear by waking up early (link). Exercising during the day, limiting caffeine intake to the morning, and eliminating blue light exposure before bed are all sensible strategies to sleep better and feel more energized in the morning. But there’s another strategy I want to address that tackles the root issue of having low energy early in the day.

The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.

Thomas Jefferson

Our minds have an internal clock called a circadian rhythm that tells us when to be alert and when to be tired. It operates on a 24-hour cycle and is based on internal factors like our thoughts and environmental factors like sunlight. A big factor governing how much energy we have at any given moment are past memories and future expectations. On Christmas morning, I rarely have a problem getting up early. In fact, my energy Christmas morning is better than my energy in the evening on any other day. The same basic observation holds up on vacations and weekends.

Contrarily, when I was in college I used to hate getting up early to go to class. If I had a dollar for every time I hit the snooze button, I would be a rich man. I used to feel much better in the evening when I had fewer obligations and could go to the gym or watch a live sports match. These examples clearly and powerfully demonstrate the psychological factor at work. People who love the morning tend to look forward to the opportunities presented by a new day. Others loathe the morning because they see only challenges. If we repeatedly refuse to get up early, even at risk of being late for an obligation, this may be evidence that we are resisting our lives. And that is an anti-progressive attitude.

The fastest way to become a morning person is to practice controlled visualization. Rather than subconsciously linger over all the challenges that await, a better use of the imagination entails visualizing the morning as a breeding ground of opportunity. Opportunity to create the life we desire rather than to mindlessly go through motions, like a pig on a leash. In the process, we may discover that being a morning person has less to do with who we are and more to do with how we think.

For more on visualization, see my article entitled the key to successful visualization.

1-) The street performer mesmerized audiences with his powerful vocals.

2-) The fine-tuning of the universe for life is a mesmerizing fact.

3-) The small child’s interest in astronomy was as curious as it was mesmerizing.

Word of the Day is a fun idea I came up with to help my friends advance their English proficiency. It’s perfect for students of English as a foreign language and native English speakers who want to sharpen up their vocabulary. All words and sample sentences are my own. The phonetic pronunciation can be found after the word in parenthesis with the bold-face indicating which syllable to stress. If you are looking for the audio pronunciation, visit www.dictionary.com and click on the speaker icon next to the word. Feel free to share the entries with your friends and make your own contextual sentences in the comment section below. Remember, you can access all past Words of the Day using the header menu (Education –> Word of the Day). In order to get automatic updates of all new blog posts, including Word of the Day, you can sign up via email using the form below, or subscribe to the blog by clicking the blue “Follow Creator Villa” icon.

Biological behavior can be controlled by invisible forces, including thought, as well as it can be controlled by physical molecules like penicillin, a fact that provides the scientific underpinning for pharmaceutical-free energy medicine.