On Habits
“The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.”
Much ink has been spilled on this topic — habits and how to live a good life — and so I will share just the highlights of what has made a massive impact for me over the last five years.
Here is my lifelong habit timeline.
In 2009 I graduated college and moved to Manhattan, and the next ten years looked something like this:
7:00 AM: wake up hungover or half-stoned, shower, brush teeth, eat something, ingest mass quantities of Adderall/nicotine/caffeine
8:00 AM - 6:00 PM: work
6:30 PM - midnight: watch sports, drink, smoke a bowl, fantasy football, waste time doing nothing
From 2019 to 2021, trying to launch and scale a fund, my days looked something like this:
6:00 AM - 2:00 AM: work, stimulants, occasionally commit fraud, destroy self with booze and drugs, torch as many of your personal relationships as possible.
In 2021 it all came to a head and I went to clean my act up. From Blind Spots:
“Over the next month, my new life started to take shape. Bed by 8:00 p.m. and then up at 4:00 a.m. to work out, usually while blasting out positivity, optimism, and gratitude, texting people that I love them and appreciate them being in my life. I used to save my I love yous because I wanted to make them count. Fuck that. Life changes way too fast and tomorrow ain’t guaranteed.
I’d force myself to start reaching out to people in the mornings regardless of whether I felt good or horrible. It was rare that I felt good. Most mornings were horrible. It took a monumental effort to make it out of bed, waking up to the ice-cold embrace of guilt and shame, weighed down by a wet blanket of embarrassment, humiliation, and disgrace. But once I finally got up and moving, love took the wheel, and there are fewer things surer in life than the best way to cheer yourself up being cheering other people up.
After working out and eating breakfast, I’d jog two miles to the beach and swim into the ocean around 6:00 a.m. to watch the sunrise, usually stark naked. The sunrise isn’t until 7:00 a.m. but the best part of the show, all the beautiful radiant colors, the glimmers through the clouds and the traces of Hyperborea, those start at least a half hour in advance. Some mornings I’d get there even earlier, watching the stars fade out of the heavens as night turned to day. All of this helped keep my problems in perspective. There’s nothing like getting demolished by a wave each morning as the sun rises to remind you that you ain’t shit. Finally, each new morning brings with it a rotating assortment of beach doggos. It’s very, very hard not to be having a decent morning by that point, ocean-pilled and dogmaxxing, no matter how bad your life is. By 7:30 a.m. I’d be back at home, refreshed, clear, serene, and ready for the long dick of the law.”
It’s 2025, I’m on the other end of this mess and my habits haven’t changed much. The morning is for sun, steel, saltwater and solitude. Out of all the changes I’ve made in my entire life, none have been more impactful than this same combination seven days a week:
Wake up early (4:30 alarm)
Work out from 5:00 to 6:00
Swim in ocean at sunrise and meditate on God
Go home, shower, start work around 8:00.
I am always in a good mood at that point and full of positive energy, no matter how shitty my life is. I still have bad things happen and plenty of incoming stressors, but the morning routine has a way of coating you in armor and putting you in the best possible frame of mind to deal with life.
In the words of Lao Tzu, “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
That part about your habits becoming your character is absolutely true. To the extent that I am a different man today than I used to be, I would attribute most of it to changing my habits and being disciplined on them for years on end. You just have to want it bad enough; as the quote goes, your reasons to change have to be greater than your reasons for staying the same.
I feel like people tend to take “I wake up early” as some kind of flex, but it’s not. The key is that every single day, you are prioritizing your physical health, mental health, emotional health, and spiritual health. Life has a way of interfering during the day and throwing your plans off-course; waking up early is the only way to ensure you don’t neglect your own well-being. The excuses people give are work and family, and it’s not that you’re putting those things second — you have to let them know that this maintenance is non-negotiable and without it, you won’t be able to do your duties at 100%. People understand as long as you communicate it correctly.
How do you wake up that early? Go to bed early. That’s it. Ben Franklin wrote that “Early to bed and early to rise makes and man healthy, wealthy and wise,” and I would trust his judgment.
As someone who used to loaf around until midnight, I promise, you are not doing anything so important that you can’t start going to bed between 8:00 and 9:00 PM. When you aren’t drinking and smoking weed, you will rise naturally after seven or eight hours of sleep, which puts you in the 5:00 AM range.
On working out seven days a week: “it’s for sanity, not vanity.” View it as something you have to do to keep your head straight. The positive body changes are a side-effect but they’re not the main goal. Another truism: it’s easier to work out seven days a week than it is three or four. Once you have the time slot blocked off, you don’t miss days. Plus, the morning workout puts you in the right frame of mind all day for eating healthy (you don’t want to waste a good workout) and it tires you out so you get good rest that night.
For the rest of the routine, you don’t have to live near the ocean. The point is to put yourself outside, in whatever nature you have available to you, when the sun is rising. A river, a lake, walk up a hill, walk through the woods, just go somewhere by yourself and think about the majesty of the world around us.
The only other bulletpoints I would add:
Recently I’ve tried to put in a habit of scheduling 30 minutes every afternoon to walk around in the sun and talk on the phone with an old friend, which kills three birds with one stone (sun, exercise, friendship). If you have to schedule a work call, do it in the afternoon while walking around outside in the sun. But mostly, don’t neglect your friendships — you never know when you’ll need them.
On diet, discipline is everything. Get used to eating the same things over and over. If you want excitement, get it somewhere else besides food. It’s fuel — that’s it. Most of my fridge is two concoctions. The first is greek yogurt with almonds, blueberries, bananas and honey. The second is canned salmon, lentils, curry powder and olive oil. The greek yogurt mix I call Glop, the salmon and lentil mix I call Slop. Most of my diet is glop, slop, eggs, canned fish, meat, fruit, nuts and vegetables. Nature has blessed us in that the healthiest and the cheapest way to eat are one and the same. If it’s processed, don’t buy it, and if it has a commercial for it, don’t buy it.
As far as what to do with the rest of your habits outside work, I wrote about this already in On Asceticism; remove, simplify, get back to the basics as much as possible (reading and writing).
Last, I’ve found it’s helpful to think of life in two acts. As long as you’re between the ages of 30 and 50, you can draw a neat line — this is the end of act one — and start a new act as a new man, new habits, new routine. Below 30, you haven’t finished act one yet, and as you move north of 50 it becomes harder to start fresh from an energy standpoint. Most literature on the seasons of a man’s life breaks it into four acts: 0-20 Childhood, 20-40 Youth, 40-60 Adult, 60-80 Old Age. The guys I met in jail define it similarly: if you look 0-20 you are a Y.N. or “Young N____,” ages 20-40 is “Big Bruh,” ages 40-60 is “Unc” and 60-80 is O.G. (Original Gangster). I’m fortunate enough to have the looks of a Big Bruh with the wisdom of an Unc, and with good habits I hope to keep it that way.
Put yourself first,
GB
