Up and At ‘Em
Being an early riser has done as much to define my life as anything else about me. I expect that it goes hand in hand with some of my flaws like overthinking things and being in my head more than I should be. But if those are the prices I have to pay for being an early riser, I accept that. I feel so incredibly much more productive first thing in the morning when I am fresh than I do at any other time of the day. By contrast, I am my worst version of myself late at night. That is when I get cranky and emotional and generally have to apologize in the morning about whatever I may have said or done. I guess it all goes to the degree of suppleness of one’s mind at different times of the day. In the morning, even if I haven’t had as much sleep as I wish I had had, I am simply more able to grapple with things and be more open-minded about finding solutions. That leads to a sense of well-being since I am wired to be happier when I am productive and being productive is really more relative and judgmental than not, since we never really know how what we do will turn out until much later. Productivity is more a state of mind than a measurable thing in the moment and it turns into something measurable as things unfold. At least that is the clarity I see this morning as I write this with my fresh and supple thought process. I should probably wonder whether I have a mild (and presumably helpful) version of bipolar syndrome wherein I am slightly manic in the morning and slightly depressive in the late part of the day. That actually makes some sense if you can disconnect the negativity of the syndrome from what I am describing. The way I just stated it does not seem like a disability, but rather an advantage to me.
Hmmm. That’s an interesting twist on things. One of my best friends in life was a guy who was, rest his soul, a college and business school buddy named Paul. Paul was much smarter than me in a purely academic sense since he always seemed to get at least a half grade better than me in any of the courses that we took. Latter in life I came to understand that I had a far better grasp of economics than he did, but that would never have been reflected if you looked at each and every one of our economics course scores. I suspect that what Paul lacked most relative to me was emotional intelligence, but he also had what turned out to be a rather severe version of bipolar syndrome (despite having two Ivy League degrees) and it took him to a degree of dysfunctionality that was simply unproductive. It was the depressive side of the equation that looked the most difficult to manage since it kept him in bed for long stretches of what should have been his most productive times in life. I think few people saw his manic side like I did and he would often say that he was NOT bipolar, but merely suffered from depression, but I knew better. For some reason, being bipolar took too much of the credit for the genius he did possess away from him (at least in his opinion), so he would deny it at all costs.
I came to accept that bipolar diagnosis of him one night in 1990 when he called me at 3am when I was in Toronto running our company’s bank in Canada. He called to tell me that he had finally “cracked the code” of what needed to happen at Xerox (his long-time employer). He said it needed to merge with DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and it needed to do it ASAP. If this had come up in a normal corporate development strategic review process, it might not have sounded crazy, but having it come up with breathlessness at 3am put it solidly into the realm of a manic episode. Paul’s biorhythms were simply different from mine in that I believe the next morning he sounded much more reasonable and calm about it all. It’s funny, because in the morning I was probably more inclined to discuss it seriously, but he was on to another more mundane issue like getting the kids off to school or something.
So, while I have always had Paul and his mental chemistry imbalance in the back of my mind, I have soldiered on through life, getting up early and doing as much as I could in the early part of the day. During the first fifteen years of my career on Wall Street, I was in the habit of catching a 5:14am train into the City that got me into Penn Station at 5:50am and at my office on Park Avenue (48th/49th Streets) at 6:00am. My first wife thought I was crazy and specifically asked that I NOT tell people we met with socially about my weird rising habits. I guess she thought it made me seem far stranger than the other people in our suburban town. The truth was that while I might have, indeed, been stranger than average, the morning ritual was to serve two purposes. The first was that it bought me a much easier and more comfortable commute in that I got better parking spots at the train station and I always got a seat on the train. The trains are rarely off-schedule at those early hours and catching a and even sharing a cab to the office from Penn Station was also a breeze (I shared a cab every day with a guy named Jerry, who I didn’t know otherwise). Tee second purpose this served was to allow me to get a great deal of work done before anyone else came in…and it was my most productive time of the day by a factor of 10X.
The early rising had two unintended positive consequences as well. First of all, I wrote a story about a strange guy named Herman that I saw every day on the train. I eventually submitted that story to HBO for a contest I saw advertised in The New Yorker. I actually won the competition about true stories about riding the train (technically it was about the subway, but I took a little poetic license in using a Long Island Railroad story and pawning it off as a subway story). I like to say that gave me 14 minutes of my allotment of fame since it was a 14 minute segment on HBO’s Subway Stories special that got rated by the New York Times and the Daily News as the best of the ten vignettes featured. The other consequence was far more important to me. I think it is fair to say that the early morning habit made my career.
I do not say that lightly. One of the senior guys in the bank (rest his soul too) was a runner and would come in early to run each morning. He (Joe) was a very popular senior guy who had done many different things at the bank and done them quite successfully. It was at a senior management gathering when he was asked what he had left to accomplish in his career when he said that all that he aspired to was to beat Rich Marin into work just once in the morning. You simply cannot buy that kind of positive publicity and I quickly became known as the hardest working guy in the bank, whether it was true or not. It all gave me more and more incentive to get up and at’em from then on forward.