What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast

Al Sharpton steps onto a stationary bike at six in the morning, in the little gym tucked inside his Upper West Side building, while most of Manhattan is still asleep. Ten minutes on the bike, thirty on the treadmill, then crunches on a stability ball. He does it at this hour for a reason that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with dignity: "It's so early no one sees me." Over time, paired with changes to how he eats, that quiet pre-dawn ritual helped him lose more than a hundred pounds. Nobody watched. Nobody cheered. He just kept showing up before the world woke up and started making demands.

That is the strange and stubborn truth at the heart of Laura Vanderkam's little book. The most important things we want for ourselves almost never get done in the loud middle of the day: the exercise, the writing, the slow breakfast with a kid, the prayer, the side project that might one day become the main project. They get done in the dark, early, before the inbox opens its mouth. Vanderkam's argument started as a single blog post in 2011 that drew six-figure traffic in a day. It grew into an e-book that briefly outsold Fifty Shades of Grey on iTunes and eventually became a three-part guide about mornings, weekends, and the workday. The thesis underneath all of it is simple enough to fit on a sticky note. You do not find time for what matters. You take it, early, before anyone can take it from you.

The hours nobody is fighting you for

Here is a number worth sitting with. According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average American between thirty and forty-five wakes up at 5:59 in the morning on a weekday. The forty-six to sixty-four crowd wakes at 5:57. And yet most of these people do not start their actual jobs until eight or nine. That gap, two or three hours, often more, is the most autonomous stretch of the entire day. It is also the stretch most of us pour down the drain. We refresh the same three apps. We let the morning dissolve into a frantic search for a missing shoe and a travel mug of coffee gulped in the car.