It’s Monday morning, 6:30am. Your alarm clock begins squawking.
You grunt, roll over, and hit snooze, and close your eyes. Five more minutes.
Your alarm buzzes again, interjecting itself into whatever blissful alternate universe your brain created to distract you from reality. You finally get up, somehow more tired than if you woke up when you were supposed to. So you make an extra strong pot of coffee while thumbing through your social media accounts and urgent work emails, and almost robotically make your way through traffic and into the office.
Sound familiar?
In the United States, people view Monday as the most critical day of the week because it’s when we start the workweek. How we begin our Monday morning can make all the difference in the world in positively or negatively affecting our mindset throughout the rest of the week.
Now, I’m sure at this point, you think you’re reading an article that will tell you a laundry list of things you can do to increase your energy, productivity, and output to make the most of your workweek like:
- Choose your outfit the night before;
- Wake up early;
- Exercise;
- Eat a healthy breakfast; and
- Don’t forget to put in that extra effort to smile!
After that, you think I’ll say something along the lines of: “By doing these things, you’ll feel more fulfilled, have more control over your week, and you’ll have more time to do the things you really want to do outside of work.”
Then you’ll nod in agreement thinking: “Yes, yes. Next Monday morning, I will be this person, and this will be my life.”
If I have to read one more article like that,
I might actually lose my damn mind.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that isn’t the kind of article you’re reading right now. Because next Monday morning will come and go, and you’ll find yourself hitting snooze again, exhausted, and returning to the vicious, never-ending routine that is your life.
Somewhere along the way, somebody told us to trade in our childhood dreams for to-do lists and convinced us we have to go through the motions to achieve what resembles a successful, happy life. We get the college degree, hopefully with a job lined up that covers the minimum payment of the debt we just accumulated. And hopefully that job has perks like great vacation time, health benefits, and a pension plan for when (or if) we make it to retirement, even though we’ll probably be too fucking old to enjoy it at that point.
Woo, the American dream!
I call bullshit. That isn’t living – that’s surviving.
A few years back, a palliative nurse in Australia compiled the top five regrets of patients she counseled during their final days into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. She found some common themes among how they would’ve chosen to live differently, if they could go back and do it again:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Talk about a rude awakening that you don’t need an alarm clock for.
We basically live on borrowed time. We live for the weekends, or our next vacation, when we can mentally check out. It’s no wonder that we get blackout drunk or binge Netflix any chance we get. Those things are actually better than the sheer emptiness and unfulfillment we live in 40+ hours a week. And we convince ourselves that, if we just work hard enough or for a few more hours, we can eventually buy ourselves the time or freedom to do the things we want later in life.
A while back, I read an article about someone who quit his six-figure job to pursue his passions. He made a fantastic point:
“50% of my life during the week was dedicated to growing someone else’s business. 33% of my life during the week was sleep; replenishing my energy to grow someone else’s business. That left me with 17% of my life… I sold 83% of me so I could try and “live on my own terms” 17% of the time.”
The number one thing successful people do on Monday morning
is wake up and choose to do the thing they fucking love. If you did the same, I guarantee you there would be no such thing as “Sunday blues” or “a case of the Mondays.” You would look forward to Monday morning just as much as you craved Fridays and Saturdays.
For some people, that may look like sitting behind a desk all day. For others, it could be volunteering, raising a family, creating art, owning a business, or traveling the world. The possibilities are endless. But every Monday morning, it’s up to you. And I promise you that you won’t arrive at your deathbed one day wishing you worked a few more hours.
So let me ask you: What’s your passion?
What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning? If you woke up tomorrow morning and had $100 million in the bank, or only one year left to live, how would you live differently?
If you can answer these questions, you’ve found the thing that sparks a fire in your heart. Go live that truth, because this life is yours, and it’s the only one you get. Make it count.
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