Sunday, 12 January 2014
Sunday, 5 January 2014
10 Ways You Can Be A Successful Early Riser
The average person sleeps about 8-9 hours a day. Now, just imagine for a second how
much more exciting and successful your life could be if you would gain 3 additional
hours of valuable time every single day.
Imagine, getting up at 5AM without being tired and buzzing with energy throughout the entire day.
In only one year, you would gain almost 1100 hours or 45 days.
What would you do with all that extra time?
You could take your business to the next level, you could learn a foreign language, you could spend more time with your family…
But, isn’t it terribly difficult to get up early every day?
Sure, forming a new habit is always somewhat challenging at the beginning. You may be struggling a bit the first few days. After one week it is already much easier and after 3-4 weeks you will have created a new habit and it surely won’t be a big deal any longer.
So, yes, you probably will be tired for about a week. But, your body gets used to the new rhythm and to having less sleep very quickly – much quicker than you may think.
And you know, it is not so much the quantity of sleep you get, but much more the quality of your sleep that really counts.
Several years ago, I was sleeping almost 9 hours a day. And still, several times during the day
I felt very tired. Now, I’m sleeping only 6 hours a day and I’m feeling much fresher and much more energized.
I felt very tired. Now, I’m sleeping only 6 hours a day and I’m feeling much fresher and much more energized.
Here is the simple formula to greatly improve the quality of your sleep and to make getting up
at 5AM really easy:
at 5AM really easy:
1: Change your beliefs about getting up early
Most people believe that they need 8 or 9 hours of sleep a day to “function” properly.
I know from my experience and from the experience of many other people, that 6 hours
is absolutely enough.
I know from my experience and from the experience of many other people, that 6 hours
is absolutely enough.
Re-condition your mind and tell yourself that after a short period of adaptation you will be
feeling absolutely great with only 6 hours of sleep a day and that it is NOT a big deal at all
to get up at 5AM.
feeling absolutely great with only 6 hours of sleep a day and that it is NOT a big deal at all
to get up at 5AM.
2: Don’t eat several hours before going
to sleep
I recommend, you don’t eat anything after 7PM. Also, avoid drinking coffee, black tea or
alcohol 6-7 hours before going to sleep.
alcohol 6-7 hours before going to sleep.
If you eat before going to sleep, additional energy will be required by your digestive system,
the quality of your sleep will suffer and you will wake up tired in the morning.
the quality of your sleep will suffer and you will wake up tired in the morning.
3. You need a good reason to get up early
Think about why you would like to have more time in your life. What drives and motivates you?
This will help you to get up early.
This will help you to get up early.
I also recommend you write a task list for the following day and you define what task(s) you
will tackle first thing in the morning. If you get up early and then you don’t know what to do,
there is a “risk” that you just go back to bed.
will tackle first thing in the morning. If you get up early and then you don’t know what to do,
there is a “risk” that you just go back to bed.
4: Calm your mind before going to bed
Make it a habit to meditate or relax 20-30 minutes before going to bed. Don’t work or watch
TV just before going to bed. If you do that, your mind keeps on running, it will take you longer
to fall asleep, your sleep won’t be as deep and relaxed as it should be and you will be tired the
next day.
TV just before going to bed. If you do that, your mind keeps on running, it will take you longer
to fall asleep, your sleep won’t be as deep and relaxed as it should be and you will be tired the
next day.
5: Make a firm decision to get up at 5AM and turn it into an exciting challenge
Before falling asleep, tell yourself to get up at 5AM – no matter what! Visualize yourself having a
deep, relaxing and energizing good night’s sleep and getting out of bed at 5AM feeling refreshed
and excited to start the day.
deep, relaxing and energizing good night’s sleep and getting out of bed at 5AM feeling refreshed
and excited to start the day.
That way, you condition your subconscious mind and getting up early will be much easier.
Make “getting up at 5AM” an exciting challenge. Most people won’t even try their entire life,
many of those who try give up after only a few days… Yes, getting up early is a habit mostly
used by highly successful people.
many of those who try give up after only a few days… Yes, getting up early is a habit mostly
used by highly successful people.
Will you succeed? Of course you will!
6: Don’t Snooze
I know, it’s tempting to snooze when the alarm clock rings, but it only makes your challenge of
getting up early more difficult. You snooze once, the next day maybe twice, then you stay half an hour longer…
getting up early more difficult. You snooze once, the next day maybe twice, then you stay half an hour longer…
Don’t think, don’t negotiate, don’t try to find any reasons why it would not be a problem to stay a few minutes longer… just get up, just do it!
You can even practice this behavior during the day: Lie down, set your alarm clock to ring in 5 minutes, relax and pretend you are sleeping… and as soon as the alarm goes off, tell yourself:
“Time to get up, I’m looking forward to another exciting day…” – and just get out of bed.
“Time to get up, I’m looking forward to another exciting day…” – and just get out of bed.
7: Put your alarm clock out of reach
If the temptation to snooze is too strong, put the alarm clock further away from your bed
so that you have no other choice than getting out of bed to switch off the alarm.
so that you have no other choice than getting out of bed to switch off the alarm.
8: Time to fully wake up
Ok, you just got out of your bed, but probably you are not fully awake yet. Open the window and take 5-10 deep breaths of fresh air. I also recommend some light physical exercises for at least 10-15 minutes to fully oxygenate your body and to get ready for the day.
9: Be proud of your achievement
Less than 1% of the population gets up at 5AM and typically it’s only the high achievers and the super successful people. So, take a minute, enjoy your achievement and be proud of yourself.
This may sound a bit childish, but it’s really important. Having this feeling of accomplishment will provide you with additional motivation and it will make getting up early easier for you the following days.
10: Make sure your nutrition is healthy and balanced
The quality of your nutrition has a huge influence on your energy level. The higher the quality of your nutrition, the more energy you will have and the less sleep you will need.
I recommend you buy a good book on healthy nutrition. Here are some basic tips to give you some ideas: Eat more fruits and vegetables (ideally organic), drink enough water. Avoid alcohol, fast food, junk food, too much coffee or black tea… Reduce your consumption of sugar, unsaturated fatty acids, meat… as much as possible
The Conclusion:
Once again, getting up early will probably be somewhat challenging at the beginning, but it gets easier every day. You just have to push through the first 7-10 days. This takes some discipline and will power, but it is well worth it.
Yes, you will be tired at the beginning, but after a week or so you will realize having more and more energy during the day and feeling less and less tired.
Our goal here is to be buzzing with energy throughout the entire day while sleeping less. There is no point in getting up at 5AM if afterwards you are tired for the rest of the day.
Some people recommend to make getting up early a slow and incremental process, where you get up 15 minutes earlier every 1-2 weeks.
When I decided to get up earlier, I immediately went from about 8AM to 6AM and about a year later I decided to give 5AM a try and it worked quite well for me.
But, you can experiment with both approaches.
Are you an early riser? What was the most difficult part for you in developing the habit of getting up early?
Do you know about any other great tips to make getting up early easier?
Top 100 Inspirational Quotes
Inspirational quotes and motivational quotes have the power to get us through a bad week, and can even give us the courage to pursue our life’s dreams. In my book, 4 Keys to Happiness and Fulfillment at Work, I share surprising research into the true triggers of workplace motivation. So in the spirit of self motivation, here are 100 inspirational quotes.
- Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. –Napoleon Hill
- Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. –Albert Einstein
- Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. –Robert Frost
- I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse. –Florence Nightingale
- You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. –Wayne Gretzky
- I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. –Michael Jordan
- The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. –Emelia Earhart
- Every strike brings me closer to the next home run. –Babe Ruth
- Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. –W. Clement Stone
- The past is a ghost, the future a dream. All we ever have is now. –Bill Cosby
- Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. –John Lennon
- We become what we think about. –Earl Nightingale
- Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover. –Mark Twain
- Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. –Charles Swindoll
- The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. –Alice Walker
- The mind is everything. What you think you become. –Buddha
- The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. –Chinese Proverb
- An unexamined life is not worth living. –Socrates
- Eighty percent of success is showing up. –Woody Allen
- Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. –Steve Jobs
- Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is. –Vince Lombardi
- I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. –Stephen Covey
- Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. –Pablo Picasso
- You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. –Christopher Columbus
- I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. –Maya Angelou
- Either you run the day, or the day runs you. –Jim Rohn
- Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right. –Henry Ford
- The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. –Mark Twain
- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- The best revenge is massive success. –Frank Sinatra
- People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily. –Zig Ziglar
- Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. –Anais Nin
- If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. –Vincent Van Gogh
- There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. –Aristotle
- Ask and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you. –Jesus
- The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. –Henry David Thoreau
- When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me. –Erma Bombeck
- Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him. –Booker T. Washington
- Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture the heart. – Ancient Indian Proverb
- Believe you can and you’re halfway there. –Theodore Roosevelt
- Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear. –George Addair
- We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. –Plato
- Teach thy tongue to say, “I do not know,” and thous shalt progress. –Maimonides
- Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. –Arthur Ashe
- When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. –John Lennon
- Fall seven times and stand up eight. –Japanese Proverb
- When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. –Helen Keller
- Everything has beauty, but not everyone can see. –Confucius
- How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. –Anne Frank
- When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. –Lao Tzu
- Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. –Maya Angelou
- Happiness is not something readymade. It comes from your own actions. –Dalai Lama
- If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on. –Sheryl Sandberg
- First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end. –Aristotle
- If the wind will not serve, take to the oars. –Latin Proverb
- You can’t fall if you don’t climb. But there’s no joy in living your whole life on the ground. –Unknown
- We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. –Marie Curie
- Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown
- Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. –Joshua J. Marine
- If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. –Booker T. Washington
- I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. –Leonardo da Vinci
- Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless. –Jamie Paolinetti
- You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing, no one to blame. –Erica Jong
- What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. –Bob Dylan
- I didn’t fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong. –Benjamin Franklin
- In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. –Bill Cosby
- A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein
- The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. –Chinese Proverb
- There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. –Roger Staubach
- It is never too late to be what you might have been. –George Eliot
- You become what you believe. –Oprah Winfrey
- I would rather die of passion than of boredom. –Vincent van Gogh
- A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. –Unknown
- It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. –Ann Landers
- If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money. –Abigail Van Buren
- Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs. –Farrah Gray
- The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself–the invisible battles inside all of us–that’s where it’s at. –Jesse Owens
- Education costs money. But then so does ignorance. –Sir Claus Moser
- I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear. –Rosa Parks
- It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. –Confucius
- If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough. –Oprah Winfrey
- Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. –Dalai Lama
- You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. –Maya Angelou
- Dream big and dare to fail. –Norman Vaughan
- Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. –Martin Luther King Jr.
- Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. –Teddy Roosevelt
- If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. –Tony Robbins
- Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. –Gloria Steinem
- It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison
- You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try. –Beverly Sills
- Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. –Eleanor Roosevelt
- Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. –Grandma Moses
- The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. –Ayn Rand
- When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. –Henry Ford
- It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. –Abraham Lincoln
- Change your thoughts and you change your world. –Norman Vincent Peale
- Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. –Benjamin Franklin
- Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!” –Audrey Hepburn
- The only way to do great work is to love what you do. –Steve Jobs
- If you can dream it, you can achieve it. –Zig Ziglar
Inspirational Life Quotes
“Just know, when you truly want success, you’ll never give up on it. No matter how bad the situation may get.” - Unknown
“Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else.” – Les Brown
“I don’t regret the things I’ve done, I regret the things I didn’t do when I had the chance.” –Unknown
“Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.” - Joshua J. Marine
“Its hard to wait around for something you know might never happen; but its harder to give up when you know its everything you want.” – Unknown
“One of the most important keys to Success is having the discipline to do what you know you should do, even when you dont feel like doing it.” - Unknown
“Good things come to those who wait… greater things come to those who get off their ass and do anything to make it happen.” - Unknown
“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, or worn. It is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace & gratitude.” - Denis Waitley
“In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.” – Bill Cosby
“Go where you are celebrated – not tolerated. If they can’t see the real value of you, it’s time for a new start.” – Unknown
Dont be afraid to stand for what you believe in, even if that means standing alone.. - Unknown
“The best revenge is massive success.” – Frank Sinatra
“Forget all the reasons it won’t work and believe the one reason that it will.” - Unknown
“I am thankful for all of those who said NO to me. Its because of them I’m doing it myself.” – Albert Einstein
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” – Steve Jobs
“Life is short, live it. Love is rare, grab it. Anger is bad, dump it. Fear is awful, face it. Memories are sweet, cherish it.” – Unknown
“When you say “It’s hard”, it actually means “I’m not strong enough to fight for it”. Stop saying its hard. Think positive!” - Unknown
“Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop.” - Unknown
“Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.” – Jack Canfield
“The pain you feel today is the strength you feel tomorrow. For every challenge encountered there is opportunity for growth.” - Unknown
“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” – Farrah Gray
“The only thing that stands between you and your dream is the will to try and the belief that it is actually possible.” – Joel Brown
“Self confidence is the most attractive quality a person can have. how can anyone see how awesome you are if you can’t see it yourself?” – Unknown
“We learn something from everyone who passes through our lives.. Some lessons are painful, some are painless.. but, all are priceless.” - Unknown
“Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. it means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.” - Unknown
“Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be broke, fat, lazy, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don’t have a plan.” – Larry Winget
“Three things you cannot recover in life: the WORD after it’s said, the MOMENT after it’s missed and the TIME after it’s gone. Be Careful!” – Unknown
“Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” – Carl Bard
“When the past calls, let it go to voicemail, believe me, it has nothing new to say.” - Unknown
“Rule #1 of life. Do what makes YOU happy.” - Unknown
“Walk away from anything or anyone who takes away from your joy. Life is too short to put up with fools.” – Unknown
“Love what you have. Need what you want. Accept what you receive. Give what you can. Always remember, what goes around, comes around…” – Unknwon
“Just remember there is someone out there that is more than happy with less than what you have.” – Unknown
“The biggest failure you can have in life is making the mistake of never trying at all.” – Unknown
“Life has two rules: #1 Never quit #2 Always remember rule # 1.” - Unknown
“No one is going to hand me success. I must go out & get it myself. That’s why I’m here. To dominate. To conquer. Both the world, and myself.” - Unknown
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