Why I Stopped Getting Up At 5am.

There's nothing free in life. Whenever you want something, you have to give something in return. You pay with money, time, or health. It all depends on what we have most of it at our disposal at that particular moment.

After I graduated, I worked in an office for fourteen years. I didn't hate that job, but I knew I couldn't do it forever. The only life I was given I didn't want to spend as an employee.

I wanted to do what I was best at and make a living doing it.

My problem was that what I was best at and loved doing the most was writing. So my stated goal was to be able to make a living from writing.

I had studied history but had not learned a profession. My job was, therefore, a stroke of luck. Also, the earnings were ok. But should I ever lose this job, there was no chance to find equivalent employment elsewhere.

My only chance was to become self-employed as a writer.

To achieve this, I had to write books alongside my job, build up a fan base, and get better and better. I knew I would have to write more than ten books before I could earn any serious money from writing.

My goal was clear. And I also knew that I would have to pay the price. Since I had neither money nor time in abundance, there was only one resource I could use - my health.

I could trade my health for time. Time was the currency I really needed, so I had to pay for it.

From then on, I got up at five o'clock every morning to have some time to write before work. Unfortunately, I was not able to go to bed early in the evening for that. If you come home from work at five or six in the evening and then have dinner, you don't go to bed at ten.

I would have felt like I was living for work. I needed time when I was awake and didn't have to work to not feel like a damn robot.

As a result, I often only got five hours of sleep a night. The only thing that got me through the week was a ton of coffee. Most of the time, I felt like a zombie. Only in the mornings, in the short time frame, I was writing, I was still reasonably sane. After that, I went downhill all day long until the evening.

But I knew what I was doing it for. Without the firm belief that all this effort would one day pay off, I would not have lasted a single month.

Of the fourteen years I worked in the office, nine years were as I just described.

In the first three or four years, my body was able to cope well with the strain. As a teenager and a young man, I had always been very athletic and had unflappable health. But that changed around my mid-thirties.

From year to year, it became harder to keep up my rhythm without giving up and dropping everything.

By the end of 2018, when I was finally ready to quit my job, I was suffering from unexplainable heart rhythm disturbances, I had become fat, and my hair turned grey.

I might not have survived another year without any damage.

At home, I had to get used to the new freedom. It took two weeks until I realized that I didn't have to get up as early as before. Instead of five, I got up at half-past five for the next few weeks.

My wife declared me crazy and urged me to sleep at least until six o'clock. Since I still had these heart problems that no doctor could explain, I tried. And slowly all my health problems got a little bit better from week to week.

Fast forward to 2021

Getting up at five o'clock in the morning wouldn't bother me anymore. This morning I got up at 7:00. I can hardly remember what it's like to be tired all day. My heart works without a problem. I weigh about ten kilos less than on my last day at the office. Even my hair hasn't grayed any further.

Today I am free. I reached this state because I was ready to pay the price. I'm sure I was lucky that I could stop paying that price just in time, but in retrospect, I would do it again and again.

Getting up at five o'clock was a necessary evil. I had to accept to get what I wanted. Many self-help gurus give the impression that everyone automatically becomes successful if they get up at five. This is bullshit.

Unless you have a perfect reason, please don't do it. Your problem is not that you don't have time. Your problem is that you don't have a goal worth fighting for.