The Hidden Power of Working on Your Goal in the Early Morning or Late Night

The intensity determines the outcome

Image Credit: Unsplash/Getty Images

You can’t build your dream whenever you have free time. Sorry.

Your existing obligations rule your calendar. You can’t suddenly stop paying the mortgage while you build some pipe dream. The world doesn’t work like that yet we’re deluded into believing it does.

So the mistake we all make is we wait for the right time.

“When there’s sunshine and I feel great, then I’ll do it,” we say. But it never happens. And bullsh*ting yourself is the worst way to cheat yourself out of freedom and wealth.

There’s a simpler solution to find time to work on your goal.

If you’re a night person, work on your goal after 10 PM. If you’re a morning person like me, wake up early and work on your goal first thing – no morning routine, just wake up and straight into flow state.

The myth that’s lied to us

Nothing I said above should be new to you.

I’m sure you’re aware you can work late or work first thing. One reason we don’t do it is because the myth of hustle culture has shamed us to believe working hard is bad.

So, every time we work at odd hours, society tells us we aren’t normal or we should feel guilty. But the people who created the hustle culture myth were a group of woke radicals who weaponized everything for a bunch of social justice ideologies they can’t even explain. F*ck these people.

They’re destroyers, not builders.

They tell us to align with their version of normal, but their normal forces us to trade our dreams in for social security checks and victimhood. Don’t be normal. Be weird.

If we let losers run the world, we become losers. Read that again.

Hustle culture doesn’t exist. When you build your dream after hours it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like a calling. Like a meaning for your life. Like helping people. Like building an empowering movement.

The unlikely destroyer of dreams that sounds like it comes from a woo-woo self-help book

To be radical enough to work on your dream after hours, you need a #why.

Yep, I said it, and now I need to go have a shower and listen to Tony Robbins tapes from the 1990s.

If you don’t know your why, there’s no chance in hell you will wake up early or stay up late to build your dream. Life will get in the way. Your calendar will fill up. Taking the kids to basketball or doing another home renovation will take over your life.

You’ll have no boundaries (which is how most people live).

Let me tell you about my why. I had an insanely successful eCommerce business with 100+ employees. I walked away from it. My life fell to pieces. I had to sell my fancy BMW. Money ran out, fast. So I took a minimum wage job in a bank call center.

The job was hell. They timed my pee breaks, no joke.

So I figured out that unless I wanted to live like a pleb for the rest of my life and kiss the ass of some fat cat General Manager who didn’t care about me, I better find another way.

My why was nothing more than “I cannot live like this or I would rather die.”

I saw a bunch of people making money online. They had some wealth, no one told them what to do, they built stuff they cared about, and they worked as few hours as they liked. This was a massive source of motivation.

Here’s where people get it wrong. If I said you could make at least $1M a year, work 4 a hours a day and never get told what to do again, what would you be willing to do to achieve that goal? Probably quite a bit.

That’s the power of a why. Building something online after hours can create a life most people can only dream of. But of course, it takes work and so the only option is to do it in the early morning or late at night.

I did both because I’m a psychopath.

I woke up at 6 AM to write. I wrote again from 8 PM at night until late.

But I’m even crazier. I also worked on my dream during work hours at the cubicle where everyone could see. Why? I didn’t give a fudge.

It was all or nothing. My bosses never cared because they loved how relentless I was. In fact, they often asked me to coach them on how they could do the same.

Cheating on my job was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Bottom line: what are you willing to give up to live a life most will never live? (Because they take their dreams to the grave.)

When the world is asleep, magic happens

I used to wake up at 4 AM before I had a 2 year old daughter.

The peace was incredible. I’d look out my window and there wasn’t a car on the road. During winter there’d be this spectacular fog. Even the birds were sleeping. I’d go outside and feel nothing. The air tasted different.

I’d sit at my computer to work. There were no personal or work emails. My work phone was turned off. My housemates were still asleep. I had no notifications because businesses that wanted to sell me stuff weren’t open.

So I got 3x as much done.

One hour before 6 AM was worth 3 hours after 9 AM.

The same happened late at night. When I was a struggling DJ and producer I’d work on tracks after midnight with my headphones on inside a dark studio with no other lighting other than a green lava lamp for some hippie vibes.

My best tracks happened late at night. No one opened my studio door. The mailman didn’t ring the doorbell. Amazon had no parcels to deliver. My dog was asleep.

It was just me against the world.

When the world is sleeping, you can think clearly. You can dream bigger. You can dare to believe that maybe you’ll win a Grammy or become a New York Times Bestseller. I had a lot of dreams at that time, and now most of them have come true.

Because I kept working after hours even when it felt like madness to do so.

I’d sometimes work through the night, then roll up to work with only an hour’s sleep. Or I’d work through the night while battling the flu or dealing with the death of my grandma.

None of it felt like work or hustle culture. It felt like a mission and I was willing to die for it. Staying in the rat race wasn’t an option.

The intensity determines the outcome

This essay may sound like chaos. Good.

What you should be hearing is intensity. You should be hearing someone who has such a strong why, that they’ll do whatever it takes because that’s what it takes.

Nice-to-haves don’t happen. Read that 10 times.

Without intensity attached to your goal it will become a nice to have. So you won’t make time for it, and you’ll drown yourself in a lake full of excuses. Then every time the new year rolls around, you’ll try and get back on the horse and “should” all over yourself again with I should do this, and I should do that.

We do what we must do, not what we should.

Operating after hours makes you a doer. Your actions sell your mind on the fact this isn’t a dream, it’s a must. So you do what is necessary.

Add intensity and you’ll become an unstoppable maniac.

We don’t have time. We make time.

That’s the point of working at odd hours.

It’s a demonstration to yourself that your goal matters and you’re serious. Once you unlock the magic of building something after hours, you see firsthand that you can make time for anything if you want it badly enough.

All of us are busy. You’re not special.

Modern life is designed for us to be busy and distracted. The phone in your pocket has helped make this nightmare true. It’s why gyms all over the world are full of people looking at phone screens instead of actually working out.

Building after hours is a challenge

It’s hard.

But paradoxically it’s why so many of us are drawn to this way of life. We don’t want to become a viral writer or celebrity Instagramer/Youtuber.

What we’re secretly craving is a worthy challenge. Something to help us escape the painfully boring modern life most of us accidentally stumble into.

Whatever you’re trying to build after hours will be hard. It’ll be frustrating.

Some days you’ll feel overwhelmed and the thought of waking up at 6 AM to do it may not seem as motivating as, say, staying up late and watching another Netflix tv series about nothing that’s never gonna move the god damn needle in your life.

Overwhelm and frustration are the path of growth. I’m scared sh*tless of people who never get overwhelmed and instead drown in self-care.

That’s no way to live, man.

Evolution has designed humans to do hard stuff, struggle, and thrive because of it.

Anything less is a waste of a life and a slap in the face to your parents who gave up everything for you to be alive today and have the massive opportunities technology has gifted us through the internet (and now, AI).

In the time you subconsciously waste is the life you could be living

Before I started working on my dream after hours, I wasted a lot of time.

I’d watch Ted Talks on my iPad or hang out with friends every night. Or go wash the car that was gifted to me by my aunty. Or do housework because it felt necessary. At my lowest point, I’d watch back-to-back Star Wars movies on repeat to drown out my depression.

It made everything worse.

I worked out I wasted at least 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening doing pointless dumb stuff. That’s 4 hours a day or 1460 hours a year I wasted. It’s embarrassing to admit to you… but it's true.

Those 1460 hours a year could have given me time to create:

• A business

• A community

• A newsletter

• A book

• A blog

• A Youtube channel

• My first product

But instead I wasted those hours. The same opportunity is available to you. The hours you subconsciously waste hold the time you need to help you escape the hell of being busy.

Will you use it?

Final Thought

If you don’t know what to build after hours then just start. Create one social media account and commit to it every day. That’s where the magic happens.

Build distribution then build whatever you want.

If you’re a morning person, it’s time to use the early hours to work on your dream. If you’re an evening person, it’s time to build after 10 PM.

The dream life you could be living is created after hours. Unlock the power.

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