Skip to main content
Ages 13+
Under 13

The Creative Delights of Waking up Early


Starting work early appears to be a constant among people in history who have excelled.

In various traditions, the morning is considered one of the most propitious times to start living, as if our existence could begin at the time the day is born and the sun comes up.

Whether this is true or not is impossible to say. But there is sufficient evidence of outstanding people who had the habit of getting up at dawn to begin their activities: writing, reading the news, having breakfast, going for a walk, drinking coffee, etc. More or less what we know should be done at that hour but with a couple of differences: they carried out such activities with discipline and, in almost all cases, as a kind of prologue to the day, the necessary preparations to seize the immediate future that appears before us each time we wake up.

Every day I look in the mirror and I ask myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am going to do today?” If the answer is no for too many consecutive days, I know I need to change something.

That is just one example of the several that are compiled in the video accompanying this text. These words are from Steve Jobs, but there are also the eccentric routines such as the “air baths” of Benjamin Franklin, who every morning sat naked next to an open window, and others that are more subtle, such as that of H. D. Thoreau, who believed that a morning walk was the best way of preparing to work.

Freud, Lincoln, Swift and Winston Churchill were not exceptional human beings; strictly speaking they were the same as the rest of us. However, we could speculate that if waking up early for them to begin work in no way represented any great effort it was because they enjoyed what they did, and that makes all the difference. What time do you get out of bed to start the day?

Related Articles