The next morning was worse.
Not the waking — that was the same brutal extraction from warmth and unconsciousness that it had been the day before. What was worse was the knowledge that this time they'd have to do something. Yesterday had been a lecture. Today was lab.
Riley met them in the same kitchen at 4:55 AM, but this time he was dressed. Running shoes, a faded Stanford t-shirt, compression shorts that suggested he'd been doing this for decades. He had a whiteboard — an actual whiteboard, the kind you'd find in a conference room — propped against the kitchen island. On it, in black marker, were three words stacked vertically:
MOVE
REFLECT
GROW
Next to each word was a time:
5:00 – 5:20
5:20 – 5:40
5:40 – 6:00
"This is the architecture," Riley said. He wasn't drinking a smoothie today. He was stretching his calves against the kitchen island, one leg extended behind him, with the unselfconscious ease of someone who treated his body like equipment that needed maintenance. "The Victory Hour isn't empty time. It isn't 'wake up early and see what happens.' It has structure, and the structure is neurologically load-bearing. Each pocket primes the next. Rearrange them and the chemistry breaks. Follow them in order and you build a cognitive clarity that most people feel maybe twice a year — on a really good day, after a vacation, when everything briefly clicks."
The entrepreneur was already taking notes on her phone. The artist was staring at the whiteboard with the expression of someone who'd been told he had to follow a recipe.
"I don't do formulas," the artist said.
"You don't do formulas because you've never had one worth following," Riley replied, still stretching. "Picasso painted every morning from 7 to noon. Same hours, every day, for decades. Hemingway wrote standing up every morning from 6 to noon and stopped mid-sentence so he'd know where to start tomorrow. Beethoven counted exactly sixty coffee beans each morning before composing. The greatest creative minds in history were the most routine-obsessed people who ever lived. They just had better routines than you."
The artist didn't have a response to that. Which was, itself, a kind of response.
"Let's go," Riley said. "We start with the body."
The Victory Hour isn't empty time. It has architecture. Robin Sharma's formula divides the hour into three twenty-minute pockets, and the sequence is not arbitrary — it's neurologically load-bearing. Each pocket primes the next. Rearrange them and the chemistry breaks. Follow them in order and you build a cognitive clarity that launches the rest of your day from a fundamentally different altitude.
Before we enter the pockets, understand what makes this formula different from every other morning routine ever published in a business book or pinned on a wellness influencer's Instagram story. Those routines are aesthetic. They're optimized for the feeling of productivity — cold plunge, gratitude list, green juice, affirmation in the mirror. They make you feel like you've accomplished something without requiring you to actually accomplish anything.
The 20/20/20 Formula is mechanistic. It's built on the order in which your brain needs inputs after waking, and it's ruthlessly sequential. You can't skip ahead any more than you can skip the foundation when building a house and start with the roof. This is Sharma's order, and the precision is the point.
"The smallest of implementations is always worth more than the grandest of intentions."
— Robin Sharma
Riley took them outside. Not to the patio from yesterday — today they went down a stone path that switchbacked along the cliff face, lit by small solar lights embedded in the rocks, to a flat area about thirty feet above the waterline. It was a workout pad: rubberized flooring, a pull-up bar bolted into the cliff wall, a set of kettlebells arranged by weight, a jump rope coiled on a hook. All of it weathered by salt air, clearly used daily.
The ocean was louder here. Not the polite, distant breathing from the patio but a full-voiced thing, waves hitting the rocks below with a force you could feel in your sternum. The air was cold and wet and tasted like minerals.
"Pocket One," Riley said. "Move. And I don't mean walk. I don't mean stretch. I don't mean yoga with your eyes half-closed and a podcast in your ears. I mean move your body hard enough that speaking becomes difficult and your shirt gets wet."
He picked up a jump rope and started. Not casually — fast, the rope cutting the air with a whipping sound, his feet barely leaving the ground, the rhythm precise and mechanical. He did this for sixty seconds without stopping, then dropped the rope and turned to them.
"Your turn. I don't care what you do. Run the stairs. Do burpees. Swing a kettlebell. But for twenty minutes, your heart rate does not drop below 140. Go."
The entrepreneur took to it immediately. She grabbed the 16kg kettlebell — not the lightest, not the heaviest, the optimal one, because even her exercise was metrics-optimized — and began a circuit she'd clearly done before. Swings, goblet squats, rows. Her Garmin was tracking. She glanced at it every two minutes.
The artist stood there.
"I don't exercise," he said.
"Today you do," Riley said.
"You can't force creative people into —"
"Run the stairs."
The artist looked at the stone staircase they'd just descended. It was steep, maybe seventy steps, winding up through sea grass and ice plant. He looked at Riley. Riley's expression had changed — still friendly, but underneath it was the immovable quality of someone who'd built and lost and rebuilt enough to know that resistance is just fear wearing a philosophical costume.
The artist ran the stairs. He made it up once, walked back down gasping, and Riley sent him up again. By the third time, he'd stopped arguing. By the fifth, something had shifted in his face — the irritation had burned off, replaced by something raw and alert, the way a dog looks after running full-speed across a field.
Twelve minutes in, both of them were sweating. The entrepreneur's kettlebell circuits had become less precise, more animal. The artist was doing a kind of shuffling jog up the stairs that had no technique but plenty of effort. Riley watched from the pull-up bar, doing slow, controlled reps, offering no encouragement because encouragement wasn't the point. The movement was the point.
POCKET ONE: MOVE
5:00 – 5:20 AM
Not a walk. Not a stretch. Not yoga with your eyes half-closed and an intention set to "receive abundance." Intense physical exercise that makes you sweat — the kind where your heart rate climbs high enough that conversation becomes impossible and the only thought you can sustain is the thought of not stopping.
Here's why this is first, and why it's non-negotiable.
When you exercise intensely, your brain releases Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor — BDNF — a protein that neuroscientist John Ratey calls "Miracle-Gro for the brain" in his landmark book Spark. BDNF doesn't just "help" with cognition the way a supplement company might claim. It literally stimulates the growth of new neural connections in the hippocampus — the brain region responsible for learning and memory. It strengthens existing synaptic pathways. It dramatically improves the brain's capacity to form new associations for hours afterward. Everything you do for the rest of the morning — every idea, every page, every line of code, every strategic insight — rides on the neural infrastructure that twenty minutes of sweat just built.
But BDNF is only part of the cascade. Intense movement triggers a flood of endorphins that doesn't just "improve mood" — that's the wellness blog version. What endorphins actually do is recalibrate your emotional baseline. They raise the floor. The anxieties that felt urgent at 4:55 AM — the unfinished project, the unreturned email, the low-grade dread that lives in the background of every ambitious person's consciousness — don't disappear. They get contextualized. They shrink to their actual size, which turns out to be much smaller than they appeared in the dark of your bedroom.
Simultaneously, the cortisol that spiked naturally at waking — the Cortisol Awakening Response from the previous chapter — gets metabolized through physical effort. This is crucial and underreported: morning cortisol is fuel, but fuel that isn't burned becomes debris. If you wake up and go straight to your phone, that cortisol pulse doesn't sharpen you — it oxidizes into anxiety. You feel alert but edgy, wired but unfocused. Exercise converts it. Burns the fuel for its intended purpose. What remains is focused calm — not the drowsy calm of someone who hasn't woken up yet, but the earned calm of someone whose body has been used.
Norepinephrine sharpens attention. Dopamine rewards the effort, creating a positive feedback loop that makes tomorrow's 5 AM slightly easier than today's. The entire cocktail — BDNF, endorphins, metabolized cortisol, norepinephrine, dopamine — creates a neurological state that is, frankly, better than any pharmaceutical on the market. And it's free. And it lasts for hours. And the only cost is twenty minutes of discomfort.
The body was not designed to go from horizontal to cognitive. It was designed to move first and think second. Every hunter-gatherer who survived long enough to become your ancestor understood this without a textbook. They woke with the sun and ran — from something, toward something, it didn't matter. The running came first. The planning came after.
You've never been an athlete, SJ, and you've never pretended to be. Your body exists to carry your brain to a keyboard — that's the deal you've made, and at twenty-six the deal still holds. The body works. The back doesn't hurt yet. The wrists are fine. You can sit for twelve hours and stand up and walk away and do it again tomorrow.
But deals expire. And they expire quietly. The back starts hurting at twenty-nine. The wrists at thirty-one. The sustained focus that feels like your birthright at twenty-six — that ability to sit down and code for eight hours without your concentration fragmenting — that's not a skill. It's youth. And youth is a non-renewable resource that depletes so gradually you don't notice until it's gone, and then you spend the next decade trying to buy back with supplements and standing desks and ergonomic keyboards what you could have maintained for free with twenty minutes of movement a day.
I'm not trying to scare you. I'm trying to tell you that the investment window is now. Not when the back starts hurting. Now. Because BDNF at twenty-six builds neural architecture that protects you at thirty-six. Because cardiovascular fitness at twenty-six gives you the sustained focus at thirty-six that everyone else is losing. Because the habit of moving your body at 5 AM, established now, becomes automatic later — and the version of you at thirty-six who doesn't have to think about whether to exercise is the version who actually does it.
What does this look like in San Francisco? Lake Merced is 4.5 miles around. You don't need to run it — not yet. You jog half of it, walk the rest, and you're sweating in ten minutes because it's all hills and cold wind. Or you do push-ups and burpees on the floor of The Landing apartment, which costs nothing and requires nothing except the willingness to be uncomfortable before the sun comes up. Or you find the gym that's closest to wherever you're living and you show up with headphones and twenty minutes and no plan except to move hard enough that you can't think about code.
The specific movement doesn't matter. The sweat does.
At 5:20, Riley said "Time" and both of them stopped. The entrepreneur's Garmin showed an average heart rate of 156 over twenty minutes. The artist didn't have a tracker and didn't want one, but he was bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, his face flushed in the dim pre-dawn light.
Riley led them back up the stairs — slowly this time — to the patio. The fire pit had been re-lit by someone (Riley's staff, invisible and omnipresent like the help in a well-run hotel). Three cushions had been placed on the deck, arranged in a triangle facing the ocean. Next to each cushion was a glass of water and a notebook with a pen.
"Sit," Riley said.
They sat. The contrast was immediate and physical — from the jarring intensity of movement to the sudden, almost shocking stillness of the patio. The ocean sound was different here, muted, rhythmic, hypnotic. The air was still cold but their bodies were warm from exercise, and the combination created a strange, pleasant dissonance, like being wrapped in a blanket of your own heat while the world around you stays cool.
"Pocket Two," Riley said. "Reflect. This is the pocket most people skip, which is why most people's morning routines don't work."
He sat cross-legged on his cushion with the ease of someone who'd been sitting cross-legged for longer than either of them had been alive.
"Here's what just happened biochemically. You moved hard for twenty minutes. Your body released endorphins, which softened your emotional defenses. It metabolized the cortisol surplus, which means the anxiety you carried to bed last night — yes, both of you, I can see it — has been chemically neutralized. BDNF is flooding your hippocampus, building the neural pathways that will make the next forty minutes exponentially more productive. And your mind — your actual mind, not the anxious narrator that usually runs it — is clearer than it will be at any other point today."
He picked up his notebook.
"So now you sit with yourself. And you find out what's actually in there."
POCKET TWO: REFLECT
5:20 – 5:40 AM
You've moved. Your blood is circulating, your neurochemistry is lit up like a city seen from orbit, BDNF is flooding your hippocampus. Now: sit down and be quiet.
The second pocket is meditation and journaling — in whatever ratio feels right, but both matter. And the order within the pocket is flexible: five minutes of meditation followed by fifteen of journaling, or ten and ten, or whatever configuration lets you first quiet the mind and then interrogate it.
Meditation — and here I mean even the most rudimentary form, eyes closed, attention on breath, no apps required — activates the Reticular Activating System, the brain's filtering mechanism that decides which of the eleven million bits of sensory data hitting you each second actually reach conscious awareness. Eleven million. You consciously process roughly fifty. The RAS decides which fifty. An untrained RAS is a drunk bouncer at a nightclub, letting in whoever pushes hardest. A trained RAS is a curator — selective, intentional, aligned with what you've decided actually matters.
You know the experience of suddenly noticing a car model everywhere after you decide to buy it? That's your RAS being temporarily recalibrated by a decision. Meditation does the same thing, but deliberately and persistently. It trains the RAS to filter for what aligns with your goals instead of what's merely urgent. Over time — weeks, not days — this changes the texture of your entire conscious experience. You stop drowning in noise and start hearing signal.
But the meditation is prologue. The main event is the journaling.
Journaling does something subtler and arguably more powerful than meditation: it forces the subconscious into language. The anxieties, half-formed ideas, unresolved conflicts, and quiet ambitions that circulate below the surface all day — the background processes running on your mental CPU, consuming resources you don't realize you're spending — journaling drags them into syntax. Into sentences. Into something that has a beginning and an end, which means it has edges, which means it has a shape, which means you can look at it.
And once a thought has been written, it stops consuming background processing power. Your brain releases it the way a computer releases RAM when you close a tab. Not because the thought is resolved — it might not be — but because the brain no longer needs to hold it in working memory to make sure it doesn't get lost. It's on paper now. It's safe. The cognitive thread can be terminated.
This is why people who journal consistently report feeling "lighter" without being able to explain why. It's not emotional catharsis. It's computational efficiency. They've offloaded background processes to an external storage medium, and their CPU is running faster because of it.
The sequence matters. You reflect after movement because a body that has just exercised is biochemically incapable of the same anxiety it carried to bed. The sweat burned off the cortisol surplus. The endorphins softened the emotional armor. You sit down to journal not as the person who went to sleep with seventeen tabs of worry open, but as someone whose operating system just got a hard restart.
What you write doesn't matter, at least not at first. Write what's on your mind. Write what's bothering you. Write the thing you've been avoiding thinking about — the conversation you need to have, the decision you need to make, the fear you've been decorating with rationalizations. Write badly. Write in fragments. Write "I don't know what to write" until something real comes out, because it always does, usually by the fourth or fifth sentence.
The entrepreneur will be tempted to make her journal a productivity tool — goals, KPIs, action items, things measurable and trackable. That's fine for Tuesday. On day one, just write what's true.
The artist will be tempted to make his journal art — beautiful sentences, poetic observations, sketches in the margins. That's also fine for Tuesday. On day one, just write what's true.
The truth is the only thing that clears the cache.
When did you last sit with yourself long enough to know what you actually want, SJ?
Not what you're building. Not what you're optimizing. Not the next line on the resume or the next credential for the O-1 petition. What you actually want — the thing underneath the ambition, the thing the ambition is trying to get you to but keeps getting in the way of.
You're very good at building. AI Roasters, THE SIBLINGS, Panshul Tits, the portfolio, the prank call system, the parliament. You build things the way some people run — compulsively, beautifully, as a way of not stopping long enough to ask where they're going. And now you're about to build at Greenlite, and the building will intensify because startups have a way of turning every waking hour into a construction site, and the question of what you actually want will get even quieter under the noise of what you're actually doing.
Twenty minutes. Journal in Apple Notes if you want — you don't need a leather-bound Moleskine. Open a note. Title it with the date. And write.
Start with the obvious things: How do I feel about leaving Amazon? What am I afraid of at Greenlite? What does the O-1 visa actually mean to me — is it a credential or a lifeline? Do I want to stay in the US permanently or is this a chapter? What do I want to build that I haven't started yet?
And then go deeper: What would I do if the visa wasn't a factor? What would I build if no one would ever see it? What's the version of my life where I'm not optimizing for anything — where I'm just living — and does that version appeal to me or terrify me?
You don't have to answer these. You just have to write them down. The act of writing is the act of thinking, and the act of thinking — real thinking, not the caffeinated strategizing that passes for thinking in tech — is the thing you've been avoiding by building so much.
I say this with love and precision: you build to avoid sitting still. The Reflect pocket is where you sit still.
The artist surprised everyone, including himself.
He sat on the cushion, closed his eyes for maybe three minutes — Riley didn't enforce meditation technique, just silence — and then opened the notebook and started writing. Not carefully. Not artistically. Fast, messy, the pen moving like it was chasing something across the page. He filled two pages in eight minutes, then stopped, read what he'd written, and tore out the pages.
"You don't have to keep it," Riley said. "Some people burn their journals. The writing is the point, not the archive."
The entrepreneur wrote precisely. Small, neat handwriting, headers and bullet points, because that was how her brain organized itself and fighting that would be fighting the wrong battle. She wrote three questions at the top of the page, then answered each one underneath. The questions were private, but the way she wrote them — slowly, then faster, then slowly again — suggested that at least one of them was harder to answer than she'd expected.
Riley wrote too. Whatever he wrote, he'd been writing for years — his notebook was thick with filled pages, the kind of notebook that has a gravity to it, a weight that comes from accumulated honesty.
At 5:40, Riley looked up.
"One more pocket," he said. "This one's my favorite."
POCKET THREE: GROW
5:40 – 6:00 AM
The final twenty minutes are for deliberate learning. Not scrolling Twitter threads. Not watching YouTube at 2x speed with one eye on your phone. Not listening to a podcast while you make breakfast, which is not learning — it's ambiance. Reading. Deeply, slowly, with a pen in your hand, in a domain that is not your own.
The math alone should embarrass you into compliance: twenty minutes a day, six days a week, fifty weeks a year. That's one hundred hours of deliberate learning annually. Over five years, five hundred hours. The generally accepted threshold for meaningful expertise in a new domain — not mastery, but the kind of functional fluency that lets you hold your own in a conversation with specialists — is roughly two hundred hours. Which means that in two years of twenty-minute mornings, you can develop functional fluency in an entirely new discipline. In five years, you can develop it in two or three.
The engineer who reads behavioral economics. The product manager who reads evolutionary biology. The designer who reads military strategy. The founder who reads the history of failed civilizations. These aren't dilettantes — they're cross-pollinators, and cross-pollination is the single most reliable source of breakthrough thinking in every field that has ever been studied.
Charlie Munger — Buffett's partner, the man who arguably deserves half the credit for Berkshire Hathaway — built his entire investment philosophy on what he called "a latticework of mental models" drawn from biology, psychology, physics, history, and mathematics. He didn't study finance deeply. He studied everything broadly and then applied it to finance, and the results outperformed every specialist who stayed in their lane.
But the real power isn't volume. It's timing. Your brain is primed for this. BDNF from Pocket One built new neural pathways — literal physical structures in your hippocampus that didn't exist twenty minutes ago. Meditation from Pocket Two cleared the cognitive workspace — closed the tabs, freed the RAM, focused the attention. Now you pour in new material, and it doesn't just sit there inertly waiting to be recalled on a trivia night. It integrates. It connects to existing knowledge in ways that feel like insight but are really just well-timed neuroplasticity — the right information arriving at the moment when the brain is maximally prepared to weave it into what it already knows.
This is why people who read in the morning report having more "aha moments" than people who read at night. It's not the content. It's the neurological context. The same book, read at 10 PM after a full day of cognitive depletion, deposits information into a tired brain that stores it linearly and retrieves it flatly. The same book, read at 5:40 AM after movement and reflection, deposits information into a brain that is actively building connections, and the information arrives pre-integrated.
What to read? Anything that is not your field. If you're an engineer, don't read about engineering — you'll learn engineering on the job, in code reviews, in production incidents, in the daily practice of building things. Use these twenty minutes for the knowledge that your job will never teach you. Philosophy. History. Behavioral economics. Narrative theory. Biomechanics. The history of typography. Anything that gives you a mental model that no one else on your team possesses, because that model is the thing that will let you see what they can't.
You already know this one, even if you don't practice it systematically. The best engineers you worked with at Amazon — the ones whose opinions reshaped your thinking, the ones you watched in design reviews and thought how does she see that — they weren't just better at code. They understood systems beyond code. They'd reference something from a book on logistics, or an analogy from jazz improvisation, or a failure mode from aerospace engineering, and suddenly the architecture decision that felt ambiguous became obvious. Not because they were smarter. Because they had more lenses.
At Amazon, you could get away with being a specialist. The machine is big enough to reward depth without breadth. You had a team of two hundred people around you, and the collective breadth was handled by the collective. Your job was to go deep. And you did.
At Greenlite, you can't. Twelve people. A compliance AI startup where the product has to understand regulations, human behavior, workflow failure modes, legal liability, and user psychology — simultaneously. A twelve-person company doesn't need another engineer who's great at engineering. It needs someone who connects engineering to product intuition, to user psychology, to market timing, to the specific way a compliance workflow breaks when a human is tired and rushing at 4 PM on a Friday.
Twenty minutes a day. Read something that has nothing to do with code.
Read about how financial regulations evolved after the 2008 crash — that's literally the industry your product serves. Read Thinking, Fast and Slow to understand how humans make decisions under cognitive load — that's literally the user your product is designed for. Read about the history of automation failures — Therac-25, the 737 MAX, the Knight Capital glitch — because every one of those failures was an engineer who understood the system but not the human operating it.
Read a novel. Read a biography. Read about how cities are designed, because understanding how systems shape human behavior at the urban scale will teach you things about software design that no engineering blog ever will.
This is the difference between being a contributor who ships features and a shaper who sees the whole board. The contributor has one lens. The shaper has twelve. And the shaper's lenses were built twenty minutes at a time, in the dark, before anyone else was awake.
On the sequence: you cannot effectively rearrange these pockets. This isn't a suggestion — it's a constraint, and the constraint is biochemical.
Growth before movement means a foggy brain absorbing nothing. You're asking a cold engine to run at highway speed. The BDNF hasn't been released. The hippocampal pathways haven't been primed. You'll read the words and retain nothing, and you'll conclude that morning reading doesn't work for you, when the truth is that morning reading before movement doesn't work for anyone.
Reflection before movement means journaling through anxiety instead of after it's been metabolized. You'll sit down to write and the first thing that comes out will be the worry you went to bed with, unprocessed, undiminished, and the journaling will feel like rumination instead of insight. Movement converts cortisol. Journaling before movement journals in cortisol.
Movement last means you're sweating right before you need to shower and start your day — logistically broken, and also psychologically broken, because the endorphin lift comes too late to benefit the reflective and learning pockets.
Sharma's order isn't aesthetic. It's the only order that works with the neurochemistry instead of against it. Trust the sequence, even when — especially when — you're tempted to customize it.
Riley's library was on the second floor of the main house, accessible through a spiral staircase made of welded steel and salvaged ship timber. It was the kind of room that made people stop talking when they entered — not because it demanded silence, but because it earned it. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls, the fourth wall entirely glass, facing the ocean. The books were not arranged decoratively. They were arranged by use — dog-eared, spine-cracked, Post-it flags bristling from them like the feathers of agitated birds. A reading chair sat in the corner with a lamp and a side table worn smooth by decades of morning coffee cups.
"This is Pocket Three," Riley said. "Grow."
He pulled three books from the shelf and set them on the table:
A biography of Nikola Tesla.
A book on the psychology of habit formation.
A collection of essays about urban design.
"None of these are about your work," he said to both of them. "That's the point. If you're a painter" — he looked at the artist — "don't read about painting. You'll learn painting by painting. Read about something that will change how you see, not how you brush. And if you're a founder" — he looked at the entrepreneur — "don't read another business book. You've read enough business books. Read about something that will give you a mental model that your competitors don't have."
The artist picked up the Tesla biography. The entrepreneur reached for the habit book, hesitated, then took the urban design essays instead. Riley noticed the hesitation and smiled — it was the right choice, and the hesitation before making it was the old reflex of reaching for what was comfortable.
They read. For twenty minutes, the only sounds were pages turning, the ocean through the glass, and the occasional scratch of the entrepreneur's pen as she underlined something. The artist read the way artists read — slowly, stopping to look at the ceiling when something connected, then diving back in.
At 6:00 AM, Riley closed his book.
"Done," he said.
The entrepreneur looked at her Garmin. One hour. Heart rate had gone from resting to 156 to resting again. HRV was climbing. She'd moved, she'd written things she hadn't planned to write, she'd read twelve pages of a book about how the street grid of Barcelona was designed to maximize sunlight and social interaction. And the day hadn't started yet.
The artist looked out the window. The sun was fully up now, the ocean was blue and gold, and the world looked different than it had an hour ago — not because the light had changed, although it had, but because something inside him had shifted. He couldn't name it. He didn't try.
"The day hasn't started yet," the entrepreneur said, echoing her own thought.
"Correct," Riley said. "Everything from here is a bonus. But it's a bonus built on a foundation that 99% of people will never have, because they spent this hour unconscious. You didn't. And by the time you do this for twenty-one days, you won't be the same person who walked down to that workout pad this morning. You'll be someone who has given themselves three hundred hours a year that nobody else has. And what you do with those hours — that's between you and whatever you're building."
Picture it. It's March in San Francisco. 5 AM. The fog hasn't burned off yet and the city feels like it belongs to you and the joggers and the bakery trucks making their rounds on Sloat Boulevard. The streetlights are still on but the sky is beginning to think about changing — not changing yet, just considering it, the way the ocean considers the tide before committing.
You've been awake for ten minutes. You didn't check your phone. It's in the other room, plugged in, face down, where you put it last night because the version of you that puts the phone in the other room is the version that wakes up at 5 AM, and you're learning that these versions are the same person.
You're at the floor of The Landing apartment — no gym yet, you just moved in, but the floor works because the floor is where the workout happens when there are no excuses left. Push-ups. Burpees. Mountain climbers. The jump rope you bought for $12 on Amazon (ironies abound). Your heart rate is climbing and your brain is quietly flooding with BDNF and endorphins and the cortisol that woke you is being burned into something useful. Through the window, the fog is turning pink at the edges. You can hear the N-Judah starting its first run. The city is waking up, but slowly, and you're ahead of it.
By 5:20, you're sitting on the floor with your back against the wall, Apple Notes open, a new note titled with today's date. You write the things that are actually on your mind — not the polished, LinkedIn-ready version. The real version. How the first week at Greenlite went. Whether the O-1 petition is going to work. What you're afraid of that you haven't told anyone. Whether Mrinal is going to be a real thing or a chapter. What you want to build that has nothing to do with anyone else's expectations. It takes four minutes to get through the noise. By minute eight, you've written something honest.
By 5:40, you're reading. Something about how Stripe built their developer experience — not because you're building a payments company, but because the principles of developer-first design apply to compliance AI in ways your competitors haven't figured out yet. Or a chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow, because understanding System 1 and System 2 decision-making is literally understanding your end user. Or an essay about how cities shape the people who live in them, because you just moved to a new one and you're curious about what it's going to do to you.
It's twenty minutes. It doesn't feel like enough. It's more than almost anyone else will do today.
By 6:00, you're done. The day hasn't started. No Slack message has redirected your attention, no standup has reshuffled your priorities, no pull request has triggered the defensive loop of explaining your design decisions. And you've already exercised, processed your own mind, and learned something new.
The rest of the day is a bonus.
But a bonus built on what foundation? The formula gives you the hour. What it doesn't give you — not yet — is the architecture underneath. The interior empires that determine whether anything you build in that hour actually holds. The twin thrones. The one you sit on when you're creating, and the one you sit on when you're afraid.
"What you focus on grows, what you think about expands, and what you dwell upon determines your destiny."
— Robin Sharma