http://www.fastcompany.com/3013856/how-t...nely-early
I stumbled on this magazine, and found some interesting articles there. This one caught my eye. I pasted some of the article below...
Why Productive People Get Up Insanely Early
If you want to do your best work, distraction is your enemy. So wake before it rises.
I am not a successful entrepreneur. I do not know the secret to life. I know that I love what I do but struggle with feeling content and balanced.
I'd ask other entrepreneurs about their advice and they would say within seconds you need to unplug or take a vacation, but applying that is difficult for me--I don't want to figure out the right way to take a break, I want to figure out how to appreciate the present moment.
I'm not an aspiring buddhist or a zen master either. I want to win, I want to be the best, I want to make some people feel stupid for not believing in us, and I love being at the front of the eternal fight that is a startup. But the counterbalance of the fight was difficult to find.
For me, 4 a.m. yielded reprieve.
Why?
From all the research done about suicide and depression, the greatest predictor may be one simple thing: weather. There are higher suicide rates in places that have the least sunlight. So getting the most sunlight possible seemed like an optimal step for increasing my daily happiness....
And when I asked our Philosophy PhD-turned-VC why I felt most productive on a plane, he opened his Moleskine to the opening cover where he had this quote from Pascal pasted: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” In other words, not being able to go anywhere cuts away the need to think about new stimuli--and finally allows us to focus.
I stumbled on this magazine, and found some interesting articles there. This one caught my eye. I pasted some of the article below...
Why Productive People Get Up Insanely Early
If you want to do your best work, distraction is your enemy. So wake before it rises.
I am not a successful entrepreneur. I do not know the secret to life. I know that I love what I do but struggle with feeling content and balanced.
I'd ask other entrepreneurs about their advice and they would say within seconds you need to unplug or take a vacation, but applying that is difficult for me--I don't want to figure out the right way to take a break, I want to figure out how to appreciate the present moment.
I'm not an aspiring buddhist or a zen master either. I want to win, I want to be the best, I want to make some people feel stupid for not believing in us, and I love being at the front of the eternal fight that is a startup. But the counterbalance of the fight was difficult to find.
For me, 4 a.m. yielded reprieve.
Why?
From all the research done about suicide and depression, the greatest predictor may be one simple thing: weather. There are higher suicide rates in places that have the least sunlight. So getting the most sunlight possible seemed like an optimal step for increasing my daily happiness....
And when I asked our Philosophy PhD-turned-VC why I felt most productive on a plane, he opened his Moleskine to the opening cover where he had this quote from Pascal pasted: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” In other words, not being able to go anywhere cuts away the need to think about new stimuli--and finally allows us to focus.
"The best kind of pride is that which compels a man to do his best when no one is watching."