School
It all began when I was in primary school. I was only 8 years old at the time, but I remember it quite clearly, sat in my teachers class, I leaned back in my chair until the front two feet tilted off the ground and I threw my arms back and let out the loudest and most satisfying yawn. The kind of yawn that had you looking like you were superman about to take off vertically. “How dare you Simon!” my teacher bellowed. All of a sudden, it dawned on me how rude I had just been as my teacher was talking at the time. I was simply tired, but nonetheless, I could see how hurt she was. I apologised but I don’t quite think she ever forgave me for that.
That moment was when it all started. Over the next few years I would notice that I was yawning a lot or tired all the time and I frequently had to go for naps. But what I didn’t realise was that this was not normal. I simply thought to myself, this is what life is. You get tired and then you sleep. It was difficult to pay attention in class as well, I was often bored. I enjoyed my classes and the information my teachers had to teach me. However, it was just really difficult for me to keep listening because as they explained concepts to me it would inspire my mind to go off on a train of thought and build new ideas on top of that information I had just consumed.
Back then I never thought that I was day dreaming because in my mind, day dreaming should have no purpose and to me it looked a lot like night dreaming and that wasn’t really what was happening. What was happening was that the teacher would provide some information and that information acted like a seed that grew into an information tree in my mind. But, when I look back at it now, I can say that I was absolutely day dreaming all the time.
College & University
College was no different, I gradually progressed into the more creative subjects for it was difficult for me to stay focused in maths and physics. The odd thing about my academic ability was that I could handle the challenges if I applied myself but I lacked both the studying techniques and focus required to really excel at those subjects. Photography was where I started to make my mark. Then finally I made it to University. I studied a BA Honours in Graphic Design.
The beginning
It wasn’t really until I was 28 that my symptoms bothered me so much that I decided to do something about it. At the time I has just began my career as a Frontend Software Engineer in Manchester and I would wake up at 8:45am, brush my teeth, put on some clothes and walk to my office for 9am sharp. Then it would take another 3 hours before I stopped being groggy and my mind would start working. I started to feel frustrated that I couldn’t quite perform on the level that I had wanted to. Why was I so tired in the mornings? Then by late afternoon I would feel tired again and I would experience sleep attacks and it was at around that time that I wanted to experiment with achieving absolute will power in order to combat my lackadaisical approach to life.
Suddenly, a radically interesting and simple solution popped into my mind. I was thinking about what would be the hardest thing for me to force myself to do and what came to mind was going to the gym at 6am in the morning and I thought to myself that since I usually feel great around noon, then why don’t I kill two birds with one stone by trying to go to the gym at 6am in the morning? On the one hand I could train my self discipline and on the other I should feel great by 9 am.
So I set myself a goal which was that I would religiously go every day to the gym at 6am for at least 21 times. If I reached the end of the 21 attempts I could consider it a success and that I had at least proven to myself that I could obtain absolute will power and self discipline. The reason I choose the number 21 was because at the time I had read somewhere that doing anything for 21 times is how you form habits. I just had to prove it to myself that I could excel at something.
The Turning Point
What I find interesting about this experiment was that I only counted the first 8 workouts, by the 9th work out I had already long forgotten what the purpose of going to the gym at 6am in the morning was. It wasn’t until a year or so later that I found myself on the running machine at 6am in the morning wondering to myself, wait, why did I start going to the gym again? Then it hit me and I remembered that it was to feel better at work and to train my self discipline. I was literally over the moon.
Now almost 9 years later I still wake up in the morning and go to the gym, although now I wake up at 6:30am as my gym opens at 7:00am instead of my previous gym in Manchester which was open 24 hours. This gave me not only the ability to exercise absolute will power but also it taught me the hidden power of routine. If you implement something into your lifestyle as a routine, even if you only spend 5 minutes a day on it, you are still making progress every day. That progress accumulates and will leave you feeling fulfilled in the long run rather than feeling burnt out from working 16 hours a day in order to get from a to b in the shortest amount of time.
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