"Early to bed, early to rise..."

There's an old proverb that I learned when I was a child, "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."  The proverb is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who first wrote it in his Poor Richard's Almanack.  I like this version a lot better than another similar proverb, "The early bird gets the worm."  The assertion is that if you get enough sleep at night (by going to bed early) and start your day off early, there is a greater chance that you will be successful in life.  Apparently there are several studies to back this up (see the post, "7 Ways Science Proves Early to Bed and Early to Rise Really Works").

I wasn't always a morning person.  When I was in high school, my father had to wake me up every morning to go to swim practice.  I suppose that I should have set my alarm, but he was waking up anyway (he woke up and went to work early!).  For the last several years, I have always made a point of getting to work early.  It's probably my most productive time of day, as there are fewer distractions in the early morning hours.  Of course, getting up early in the morning means that I have to go to bed fairly early too.

Retired U.S. Navy SEAL, entrepreneur, leadership consultant, and author Jocko Willink recommends getting up early and "getting after it."  Willink believes that getting up early provides him a jump-start to the day.  Waking up early, when nobody else is awake, gives him the chance to get the things he needs to get done.  He wakes up at the same time every morning, 4:30 AM (if you don't believe me, follow him on X or Instagram, as he sends out a photo of his watch at his wake-up time every morning) and heads straight to the gym for his morning work-out.  Willink says that there isn't any secret to establishing a morning routine.  He says, "What you need to do is, when the alarm goes off, you get up and you go get some.  That's what you do.  Impose discipline on your life."

The late Kobe Bryant, certainly one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the National Basketball Association, also believed in getting up early.  During his acceptance speech for the Icon Award at the 2016 Espys, Bryant famously said:

"We're not on this stage just because of talent or ability.  We're up here because of 4 AM.  We're up here because of two-a-days or five-a-days.  We're up here because we had a dream and let nothing stand in our way.  If anything tried to bring us down, we used it to make us stronger.  We were never satisfied, never finished.  We will never be retired."

Bryant was certainly talented, but he wasn't a great basketball player because of talent alone.  The secret to his success?  He became great because he worked hard, maybe even harder than anyone else.  There's a great video online of him talking about getting up early every morning to practice at 4 AM.  He called it his "4 AM Rule".  He started getting up early to begin practice in high school and kept doing it for the rest of his career.  Waking up early gave him extra training and practice.  When it all adds up over the years, Kobe Bryant's work-out routine - his "4 AM Rule" - gave him years of extra training and practice, over and above what his peers were doing!

Kobe said, ""If your job is to try to be the best basketball player you can be. To do that you have to practice, you have to train. You wanna train as much as you can, as often as you can. So if you get up at 10 in the morning, train at 12. Train for 2 hours, 12-2, you have to let your body recover. You get back out, you train. You start training at 6, train from 6-8 and now you go home, you shower, you eat dinner, you go to bed, you wake up and you do it again.  Those are two sessions. Now imagine, you wake up at 3 and you train at 4, go 4-6, come home breakfast, relax. Now you back at it again, 9-11, you relax and now all of a sudden you back at it again, 2-4. Now you back at it again, 7-9.  Look how much more training I have done by simply starting at 4. So now you do that as the years go on the separation that you have with your competitors and your peers, just grows larger and larger and larger and larger and larger. By year 5 or 6, it doesn't matter what kind of work they're doing in summer, they're never gonna catchup. So it makes sense to get up and start your day early because you can get more work in."

Here are the five pillars of Kobe Bryant's "Mamba Mentality":

1. Passion.  "Passion is the fuel for success."

2. Obsession.  "You want to train as much as you can, as often as you can."

3. Relentless.  "Rest at the end, not in the middle."

4. Resiliency.  "The proposition of losing to these guys in these finals again and knowing what that means as a Laker fan. I don’t think so."

5. Fearlessness.  "If you’re afraid to fail, then you’re probably going to fail."

As Darren Hardy, former publisher of Success Magazine said, "What do successful people and unsuccessful people have in common?  They both hate to do what it takes to be successful.  Successful people just do them anyway."