Free B00CHVIVMY EBOK by Jon Acuff Page B

daughter asks to go bike riding at 5:15 a.m.
    You can be selfish at 5:00 a.m. Or 11:00 p.m. if your spouse goes to bed early and staying up an extra thirty minutes doesn’t wreck your next day. You can also rescue thirty minutes during lunch. Last I checked, you don’t need a full hour to eat a turkey sandwich, even if the cheese is organic, gluten-free, udder-to-table cheese. The point is that you can carve out time in your day and claim it, if you’re willing to hustle.
    If you’re not married or don’t have kids, this idea still applies. Your time is still shared, especially if you have a full-time job. Your boss may never cry in your arms in the kitchen on the day after Christmas. That would be weird. But if you’re selfish with the wrong hours, your boss may indeed say to you, “Hey, last I checked, we were paying you to do work for us. Am I off base here?”
    We all have commitments we have to keep. In one form or another, we all have spouses with expectations that should be met. We also have dreams that need attention.
    To start, just be selfish at 5:00 a.m.
    And if you don’t like the word selfish, then rewrite that idea. I won’t be offended. Call it your “get furious at five” mandate.
    Whatever words you want to use, rescue thirty minutes to walk down your path to awesome. If you can’t—if the idea of setting your alarm thirty minutes earlier sounds horrible to you—then you may not be ready for awesome.
    If your dream isn’t worth thirty minutes, you’ve either got the wrong dream or you’re just pretending you have one. If the minimum you’re willing to pay in order to be awesome is less than thirty minutes, you’d better go back to average. Nobody gets up early on the road to average. Nobody stays up late on the road to average. You can sleep in to your heart’s content or watch late-night TV until the infomercials begin to make perfect sense. Either way, you’re safe on the average road.
    One reason 5:00 a.m. tends to dominate 11:00 p.m.
    “I’m a night owl!” is often the excuse people give me when I encourage them to get up early and work on their dream.
    I think that’s a fair push back. I think there are probably some people who may be predisposed to going to bed later than others. But after hearing that response from so many of my friends over the years, I decided to see if my belief about the importance of mornings could be backed up by research. Maybe even with science. Here’s what I found:
    Willpower tends to favor the morning.
    In a well-known 1996 research project led by Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University, scientists had two groups of people sit down in a room. One group was told that they could eat the warm chocolate-chip cookies in the bowl in front of them. They just had to ignore the other bowl, which was full of radishes. The next group was told just the opposite. Eat the radishes; resist the cookies. After the experiment, researchers came back in the room and told the participants they needed to tabulate the results. Would they mind waiting around? While they were waiting, they could try to solve this simple puzzle. Only the puzzle wasn’t all that simple. It actually had no solution—the scientists just wanted to see how long each person would attempt to solve it.
    Can you guess what happened? The people who had to eat the radishes and resist the cookies tried an average of about eight minutes before they gave up and quit. The people who ate the cookies tried an average of about nineteen minutes. Why? It appears that willpower is finite. We have a limited supply of it. The people who ate the radishes and fought back the desire to eat the warm cookies were out of willpower. Their supply was depleted. They didn’t want to do the puzzle. The people who ate the cookies? They had a full supply. They were willing to try more than twice as long. In his book The Power of Habit , Charles Duhigg describes how this study helps shed light on things like