Dan Bova: Giving up on millionaire morning routine
They say that sleep is the most important meal of the day. Actually, they don’t say that at all. Sorry, I’m not typing on a lot of sleep here.
If your household is anything like ours, your weekday mornings are a nuclear bomb of madness, a whirlwind of crazy that makes you feel like the Tasmanian Devil with a sparkler stuck up his nose. You are in a daily, desperate fight to get everyone out the door fully dressed, shoes on the right feet, with minimal tears. And that’s just the adults.
Working at Entrepreneur.com, I cover a lot of successful people who swear by super-early morning routines that put them on the path to making more money than God and Mr. Monopoly combined.
Waking up in the pre-dawn gives extra hours to their day — time to find peace and clarity and focus. So this past week, I set my phone alarm for 5 a.m. I can’t say that reaching over to hit the snooze button and knocking over a full glass of water on the nightstand was the most tranquil way to start the day, but it did get me out of bed.
Many billionaires say the first thing they do is meditate and seek answers to the big questions in life.
I tried this and the biggest question that popped into my mind was, “Why the hell am I awake right now?” Then came peace, as I instantly fell back asleep.
Sir Richard Branson leaves the blinds in his bedroom up, so that the rising sun can serve as his alarm clock. (That’s how rich this guy is, he uses a medium-sized star instead of an iPhone ringtone.)
Next Sir Richard hits the beach of his private island for some pre-breakfast kiteboarding. I wanted to try this, but had one problem: my kiteboard was in the shop. Broken left turn signal. Also? No private island. And the nearest body of water is in my basement if it rains a lot the previous night.
Then there's Mark Zuckerberg, who makes a big deal about having a closet stocked with multiple sets of the same exact outfit. He says he does this to avoid cluttering his mind with decisions about what he’ll wear that day.
He finds this freeing. I find it ridiculous. How much brainpower does a male person expend picking out his outfit for the day? “Today I will wear a shirt and pants.” Not only is this easy, it is probably the only good decision I will make all day. Why should I take that tiny victory away from myself?
My wife and I used to pray that our children would let us sleep in the morning, but now as they get older, most mornings find us gently whispering in their ears, “IT’S 7:15! GET UP! I CAN’T MISS MY TRAIN!”
When they do flop out of bed, it is an unrelenting race to get them fed, into whatever color shirt the school decided would be “fun” for them to wear that day, pack their lunches, print out the homework they forgot to print the night before, call our neighbor Mary to ask if we can use her printer because ours is out of toner.
Most mornings, Lisa and I somehow manage to tag team this eye-crusted wrestling match successfully. And then some mornings, not so much.
Like when Henry was in third grade and my wife got a call from the school principal. Henry was OK, she was assured, but the principal wanted us to know that there was an incident at lunch and they were investigating. While eating his snack bag of grated mozzarella cheese (yes, that’s weird, but that’s not the weird part) Henry found metal screws mixed in with his food.
The principal let Lisa know they were questioning the students about who would have done such a horrible thing. Lisa called me, told me the story, and like some movie where the hero cop has all these flashbacks and realizes he actually murdered all of those people, my brain snapped everything together.
The night before, I took the air conditioner out of the dining room window, put some small screws in a baggie and left the baggie on the counter. That morning, Lisa was cleaning and—missing the fact that it had screws in it—put the seemingly empty baggie back in the baggie box. Minutes later, while making Henry’s lunch, I took the very same baggie out of the box, also missing the fact that it had screws in it, and filled it with shredded cheese…Imagine us trying to explain that to the principal on a follow-up call.
The kids in the interrogation room were released, and we were somehow still allowed to be parents.
Despite my best efforts to wake with enough time to not accidentally feed my children hardware supplies, I’ve given up on the millionaire morning routine. Turns out getting up crazy early makes me crazy tired. Don’t get me wrong; I love falling so deeply asleep on the train that I wake up in Grand Central screaming, “Where am I?”
But the problem is, if I’m in a meeting and someone’s phone goes off with the same ringtone as my alarm, I roll over in my chair and beg to sleep for 5 more minutes.
Larchmont's Dan Bova is a married father of two. He’s been the editor-in-chief of Maxim, a producer at “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and currently is editorial director of Entrepreneur. He insists you follow him on twitter: @DanBova1