I spent two years waking up at 5am trying to become more disciplined - and ended up learning that rest is not laziness, and exhaustion is not a badge of honor - Silicon Canals

"I started waking up at 5am because I'd read enough founder essays and listened to enough podcasts to convince myself that the hour you wake up was the line between people who were serious about their life and people who weren't. I stuck with it for two years. I want to write down what I actually learned, because most of what I'd been told turned out to be wrong."

"The business runs on output. So when I started seeing every successful founder on the internet talking about their 4:30am cold plunge, their 5am gym session, their 6am deep work block, it made a kind of sense to me. If I just got there earlier, I'd get more done. If I got more done, the business would grow. If the business grew, my family would be fine. The logic seemed airtight."

"By 2pm I couldn't think. I'd sit down to write something important and my brain would just refuse. I'd read the same paragraph four times. I started leaning on caffeine more, then more, then more again. I was getting irritable with my wife. Small things became big things. I'd snap at her over a plate left in the sink, then feel awful, then blame the work for being too much."

"The business didn't grow faster. The work I did between 5 and 7am was, looking back, often the worst work of my day. Tired work. Forcing-it work. The kind of writing and decisions you have to redo later. But I kept going, because by then it was who I was. I was a 5am person. Telling anyone I'd stopped felt like admitting I'd failed at something."

Waking up at 5am was adopted after absorbing founder advice that early hours separate serious people from others. The routine fit a publishing business focused on output, with the belief that earlier starts would produce more work and drive business growth. The first month felt rewarding due to quiet mornings and fewer distractions. Around month three, deep thinking became difficult, reading required repetition, and caffeine use increased. Irritability rose, small conflicts with a spouse escalated, and runs slowed. The business did not grow faster, and the early work often proved to be tired, forced, and later redo-worthy. The identity of being a 5am person made stopping feel like failure.

Read at Silicon Canals