The Morning Myth

Morning people are not always successful people. Successful people are not always morning people.

If you intend to be successful, getting up early is not required. You might find that you are forced by our culture to get up early, but doing so is an act of compliance, not any signifier of your ability to accomplish something. The farmer is not required to milk the cows at 6 AM and 6 PM, it’s just a leftover cultural norm from another time when daylight was necessary for the farmer to go about his job. Today, the farmer could just as well milk the cows at noon and midnight. The morning myth is created by the proletariat factory to make you think that you must get up early to be successful. Because the proletariat factory is creating and defining the rules.

“The early bird gets the worm.” — Pervasive Proverb

But what is early? Early is just getting the worm before some other bird, if that’s your measure of success. If it rains in the afternoon and the worms come out, the bird that got up at 4 AM most likely is not the first bird to the worm. By this time, the bird is tired and thinking about a nice nap. Or maybe the bird is already napping, hidden under cover during the rainstorm and thinking, “I shall stay here while it is still raining since I already got the 4 AM worm.” There might even be a bird that thinks up a strategy for getting all the worms that come out when it rains and collecting them up to sell to the other birds. That bird is working smarter and it has nothing to do with what time it woke up.

Now, some people who are naturally morning people may disagree (this would be my ex-husband). Let’s say there’s a morning person who is a bus driver. The ideal time slot for this person to drive the bus is 5 AM to 1 PM. Let’s say there’s another bus driver who is a night owl. The ideal time for this person to drive the bus is 4 PM to midnight. Morning people have been cultured to think their way of timing their day is the right way, the successful way. But that is because over the last 100+ years the industrial age required people to show up at a specific time to the factory to get the job done. The factory required all the cogs to be there at the same time so that the machine would run. The schools start at the same time to train the children about the right way to go about the day so that in the future they can be…

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