Waking up early isn’t about being extreme—it’s about taking control of your life. For decades, I’ve started my days between 4:00 and 4:30 a.m. Early risers are finally having their moment. A good article from the WSJ talks about this. I have a strong morning routine. I tell myself, getting up early is a superpower—it’s about discipline, clarity, and getting a head start on the world. Those quiet hours set the tone for EVERYTHING that follows.
Here’s what I believe:
— Win the Morning, Win the Day: I get up early, I do my morning routine, exercise and by 8 am, I have really won my day. Full stop.
— Discipline Over Comfort: Getting up when it’s dark is never fun. But doing it anyway? That’s the point. Discipline builds confidence. And confidence builds success.
— Start With You: When you invest in yourself before the day starts pulling at you, everything changes. I win my day first. Then I can go out and win the day for my family, team, and friends.
You don’t need a viral routine or fancy hacks. Just get up early. Take control. Stack the wins. The results will speak for themselves.
The Fantastic Life Rule #5:
Get a Win
Starting your day with a win builds tremendous momentum. Get a win early, and keep building throughout the day.
The 4 a.m. Wake-Up Is Not Just for Superman CEOs Anymore
In the quest to be ever more productive, the morning routines of American men hit new extremes
By Sam Schube
April 29, 2025 4:00 am ET
A wave of productivity-minded writers, thinkers and businesspeople have taken early wake-ups to new extremes. Illustration: Victoria Rosselli/WSJ; iStock
In recent years, the 4 a.m. wake-up has been the domain of world-striding executives and businesspeople. Disney CEO Bob Iger famously begins his day with a predawn workout. Apple CEO Tim Cook famously deals with emails from customers before sunrise. “There’s almost a kind of arms race between different executives and self-styled business leaders over who can claim the highest average workload,” said Erik Baker, author of “Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.”
But in March, the 4 a.m. wake-up achieved new status after a viral video showed a very muscular man named Ashton Hall performing a morning routine that involved mouth tape, an ice bath filled with bottled Saratoga water, and a banana peel rubbed across his face—all beginning at 3:55 a.m.
“Sin lives late at night,” according to a February social-media post by Hall, who could not be reached for comment. “If you’re dealing with a weak mind, bad decisions, or lack of productivity go to sleep early.”
In the days that followed, seemingly half the internet—from Ed Sheeran to Duolingo’s owl mascot—posted clips parodying Hall’s routine.
For Dave de Céspedes, it was no joke. The 40-year-old digital workflow consultant in Miami has been setting the alarm on his Apple Watch for 4:30 a.m. for months. He gets out of bed and pours himself a cup of black coffee. By 4:45 or 5 a.m. he’s at work, taking advantage of a roughly two-hour window before his two kids get out of bed.
Inspired in part by productivity-minded figures like James Clear, the author of a bestselling book about habits, and Sahil Bloom, an optimization-focused content creator, de Céspedes spends his very early mornings knocking out his highest-priority work.
“It’s kind of the only block of time that’s deep-focus time,” he said. “The schedule kind of goes off the rails after that, and you never know what’s going to happen.”
Waking up early is about as American as apple pie. It’s “a timeless productivity hack, and goes as far back, at least in American culture, as Benjamin Franklin,” said Adam Chandler, author of “99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life.”
Early risers include “your service workers, certainly,” said Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island, along with “the factory worker or everyday worker who is working where the employer says that they need to work.” The growth of the suburbs, Loomis noted, created a class of super-commuters whose living preferences meant they had to rise early to make the long trek into work.
More recently, a wave of productivity-minded writers, thinkers and businesspeople have taken the 4 a.m. wake-up to extremes. Adherents of the scientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman follow a series of “protocols” that include exposure to sunlight upon waking. Tech leaders have adopted cold plunges, sauna sessions and intermittent fasting. And now, all sorts of folks are getting in on the action.
For the last 15 years, he estimates, Dirk Gorman, a 57 year old in Long Beach, N.Y., has been waking up between 4:17 and 4:23 a.m. He begins his day by punching out an email to employees of his building-supply companies, and then he heads to his garage for a workout—something cardio-forward, either on the rowing machine or his fan bike. (Weightlifting comes later in the day, once his body’s warmed up.)
“Don’t ask me why,” Gorman said of the specificity of his wake-up time—at this point, it’s become a habit. But why he gets up early in the first place has an easy answer: “I feel like I’m ahead of everybody else in terms of really investing in myself first, before the day requires me to invest in everybody else.”
In the past few years, tech leaders have adopted cold plunges, sauna sessions and intermittent fasting. And now, all sorts of folks are getting in on the action. Photo: Getty Images
Getting out of bed while most folks are still snoozing might have been tough at first, he conceded. But over time, the pain of getting up for an early workout faded. “It became more painful for me mentally if I didn’t get up than if I did,” he said.
“We definitely have a good morning crew,” said Jonathan Fladung, general manager of the 24/7 Powerhouse Gym in Saddle Brook, N.J. It’s the same crew around 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. every day, five or seven days a week—a mix of men and women, young and old. Some are training for intense Hyrox fitness competitions, or bodybuilding shows, he said, while others are simply attracted to the quiet, and not having to wait for machines. The 4 a.m. crew have only so many places to congregate: unlike Powerhouse, most Equinox gyms, for years the status-symbol gym for ambitious go-getters, open at 5:30 a.m.
Doctors and longevity podcasters alike maintain that a good night’s sleep is an essential part of a healthy daily routine—which means many early risers have an equally rigid nighttime schedule, too: de Céspedes, for example, said he’s in bed most nights between 8 and 9 p.m.
Gorman maintains that the benefits of rising early compound over time, like a retirement account for one’s health. “Can you work out 250 times a year, even if it’s not a ‘10’ workout? You do that over decades, you’re gonna be in tiptop shape compared to your peers.” There are surface-level benefits, too. “I do think it has a huge advantage in the business world,” he said. “There’s just something to walking into a meeting and people go, ‘Oh, this guy’s fit.’”
The irony of Hall’s buzzy morning routine video is that a self-employed content creator is perhaps the very last person who needs to be up before 4 a.m. But his posts seem to be having their intended effect.
“I couldn’t really tell if it was meant to be an honest take on the routine,” said de Céspedes. But this much was clear: “It was a great piece of marketing content.”
Write to Sam Schube at sam.schube@wsj.com
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Appeared in the April 30, 2025, print edition as ‘Morning! The 4 a.m. Wake-Up Isn’t Just For CEOs’.