You Should Be Building Your Own Thing for the First 2 Hours of Every Day
Listen to your curiosity. Pay attention to your true desires.
Quitting your job for your dream is reckless.
This idea needs to die. It’s unrealistic to go from a regular salary to $0 and build some business, movement, or not-for-profit based on hope.
The way I built my own thing was using the first 2 hours of the day in a different way to most people. Change how you use the first 2 hours of the day, transform your life.
Building out of desperation leads to disaster
When I say build your own thing, I’m talking about building something online.
A social media audience, online business, movement, paid community, newsletter, blog, network, etc – the options are endless.
To master this goal you first need to ensure you don’t make the #1 mistake: building out of desperation. A guy I met, James, illustrates this perfectly. He wanted to build an empire online around mindfulness.
“I have $1000 left to my name & need to have this make money in the next 30 days.”
As a result he was looking for shortcuts, tricks, and to buy followers. He even considered spamming people with his mindfulness course. The week after I met him he was putting links to his programs all over other writers’ Substack post comments.
This is what desperation does. It makes you weak. It makes you look cheap. And that’ll repel people the way bug spray murders spiders.
What works better is to make sure you have your main income locked down first, then you build your online empire.
The day is won or lost in the morning
It’s common to leave building your own thing until the end of the day. This is when your energy is the lowest and you’re least disciplined.
The temptation to trade the 2 hours you have to build your freedom machine for some Netflix or drinks with friends is too high, even for a David Goggins navy seal-type.
What’s worse is those who plan to build their own thing on weekends or holidays. And the ultimate failure is to build your own thing when you’re retired (may as well set the dream on fire right now).
What you can control is today.
The first 2 hours of every day are an opportunity most will piss all over. I famously remember one guy my friend Ayo spoke to who said they had no time to build anything. They handed over their daily schedule. It included an hour for eating breakfast and 2 hours of housework in the morning.
If you bullsh*t yourself, no one can help you.We can find 2 hours to build if we understand how important it is. The way I do that is to consider the alternative…
Defy what the system told you
Parents, university, bosses, employers, friends and/or cultural norms in your country likely all told you to follow a predictable path.
These predictable paths create the societal system that enslaves most people without them realizing it.
My friend Niha is a woman from India. She quit her consulting career to work 3 hours a day as an online writer. Her family thinks she’s nuts. Her former colleagues barely speak to her. Not even her husband gets it.
She said to me:
“Women aren’t this bold in my culture. They have a place. They go to university, get a job their parents approve of, then get married to someone who’s chosen for them and start popping out kids.”
She wanted more out of life so she said no.
If you don’t build for the first 2 hours, what you have is the nightmare of the predictable path that a lot of people are trying to escape and don’t know how.
You don’t escape prison in a moment’s notice. Watch the TV show Prison Break. You build an escape plan then slowly test it until you make your calculated escape.
The way we deal with the downsides of a conventional life society wants to have is to eat sugar, drink alcohol, drown in distractions, and to endlessly entertain ourselves to death with Netflix and superhero movies.
There’s a better way of life.
Go all in like a mofo
Ideas are like a**holes, everyone has them.
The only way this first 2 hours of every day plan works is if you commit. Scrap that. It only works if you go all in like a mofo.
Lukewarm plans are easy to override. Full-on commitment is harder to back out of, especially if you tell others who will hold you accountable.
I always built my own thing while working a job. It’s only when the 2020 layoffs were in full swing that I ramped up my efforts. I went from working on my thing when I could to blocking off whole mornings.
I had no expectations. The mornings I did it were lonely. Complete solitude. It was just me and the sound of birds outside my apartment window.
It’s hard to describe it. They were some of the best days of my life. Some of my clearest writing came out of me.
People close to me knew I wasn’t f*cking around. In a way, it made them quietly proud of me. They saw I was growing from a child living in an adult’s body into a man who lived up to his values and couldn’t be controlled by anyone or anything.
The 2 hours a day were hard to get in.
My work email was always overflowing. I got so ruthless toward the end of this journey that I started to show up for my day job later and later. It used to be 8 AM, then 9, then 10, then right at the end I was clocking in at 11 AM.
Checking out of a job so I could check into my real goal felt incredible.
It starts with releasing your ideas
Ideas stay trapped in our heads.
The pressure to release those ideas builds up like a toilet with a turd clogging it up. To get some relief, we start to get fantasies of writing a book.
We tell ourselves we’ll put our ideas in there. We may take some notes over time. We may even write some chapters of the book.
But the book never comes out.
Finally, we retire at 65 and write the book. Then we publish it on Amazon and nobody reads it. Now we think our ideas weren’t that good and it ends in what I call last-leg-of-life depression. Feelings we could have been more, as well as deep regrets.
We continue to grow old, then join the long queue for the cemetery and wait our turn. All that potential then turns to dirt and the worms munch on your remains.
The simple solution isn’t to let ideas clog up our minds.
Part of building your own thing is to release your ideas into the online world through social media.
These ideas become the foundation for whatever you want to build.
They also help you attract the people who can help you build, and for whom you’re building something for.
This daily release of ideas stops fantasies of writing books from destroying your life.
Listen to your curiosity. Pay attention to your true desires.
Humans are great at settling.
We hide our true desires and convince ourselves an office job or by-the-hour manual labor work is our calling. It’s not. To build something of your own you have to dare to follow your curiosity.
My 1 year old daughter is growing up fast. I can’t wait to tell her that her dad is Alice from the book “Alice In Wonderland.” I spend entire days falling down rabbit holes and not coming up for air. I let my curiosity go absolutely wild.
It’s fun as hell.
Some days that leads me to become the mad hatter from the story, too. But inside madness and chaos is our ability to transcend ourselves. Our curiosity is the map to our true desires that we so eloquently bury and let die when we become adults.
Curiosity is the path back to happiness.
How to win the first 2 hours of every day
Let’s get practical.
1. Wake up earlier
If you have a job or kids, then some parts of the day aren’t flexible. I had the same problem. The only solution is to wake up earlier.
It sounds crazy the first time you think of it. But if you can wake up earlier for a week you’ll realize it’s 100% possible. You either find the time or let excuses like “I have kids dontcha know” hold you back.
I don’t give a sh*t if you think your life is special. It’s not. Make it happen or watch others make it happen. Own or be owned. Choice is yours.
2. Try removing the warm-up routine
The song and dance with morning routines is ridiculous.
One way to build in the first 2 hours of the day is to remove the warm-up. No morning routine. No “I’ll start after my coffee.” No “I’ll read my emails first.” Nope. Just do the hardest step and start. Get straight into it and watch how fast you get momentum.
3. Start the night before
Every night I used to write down what I wanted to do in my 2 hours of power the following morning. I still do this today.
Looking at a blank screen is a nightmare. We have things we want to build and there are steps to take to make it happen. Some pre-planning works wonders so you can just wake up and start.
Start your morning the night before.
4. Leave this devil device out of sight
The devil doesn’t wear Prada. The devil is your phone.
This distraction machine will guarantee you don’t have 2 hours in the morning. Easy solution is to leave your phone out of sight. No Whatsapp/Telegram. No emails. No phone calls or checking the weather or seeing what meetings you have.
That last one is key. When I used to be foolish enough to sometimes look at what meetings I had for the day first thing, the anxiety would start to build. I’d get so anxious I couldn’t build anything in the first 2 hours of the day.
It was 10x worse for me because I used to suffer from anxiety. It used to make my hands shake all day, give me runny poos, and exclude me from social events. It ultimately ended in the collapse of my successful eCommerce business.
The best work is done in a calm, relaxed state. Remove the phone and anxiety from the early morning, and you’ll build better.
5. Giggle like Pamela Anderson and have fun
The joker in Batman was right: “Why so serious?”
That’s why I hate modern adult life and working for corporations. It’s all too serious. The point of building your own thing for 2 hours every day is to come alive and have fun. It’s to experience the pure joy of creation. It’s to make up your own rules.
Make sure what you’re building is fun.
Closing Thought
The good life starts with one small step.
Building your own thing for the first 2 hours of every day is the best logical step you can take right now. I freaking dare you to give it a go and see what happens.
Tell me what you want to build (or are building) and why in the comments.
P.S. I'm hosting a free masterclass in just a few hours.
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Yes 👏👏👏 I would even say start with the first 30 minutes if 2 hours still feels overwhelming. 30 minutes can create a lot of momentum and you'll often find yourself still going long past the 30 minutes.
Spot on! Also, creativity is at its peak in the morning.