The Secret To Success Is An Uncomfortable Bed!

No one ever got rich laying around in bed all day....

I've been getting up early in the last few days, which is not like me at all.  Historically, I was always late to work, which is probably why I decided to become a lawyer - and later on, self-employed - as getting up early in the morning never suited me well.  We lawyers like to get up when the sun is warm.....

We replaced the mattress in the camper as the original one had steel springs in it, and was really uncomfortable.  Someone gave us a fairly new Sealey Temperpedic-type mattress to replace our old one which was 20 years old.  Here's a pro tip:  Trying to dispose of an old box spring?  Cut it up!  You can throw away the fabric cover and the innards of it are usually 1x2 pine which is great for small projects or for kindling.

Anyway, we cut the old Temperpedic using a bread knife (it is a thing, google it!) to fit the camper, and it is quite comfortable to sleep in.  But it is not comfortable to get in an out of.  The bed is in the corner, which means you either have to roll over and get up on all fours and walk backwards out of bed, or try to flip and flop like a land-locked eel, to work your way to the end of the bed.  It literally can be painful, if you have a bad back.  No wonder RV makers hype having a "walk around" bed as a feature!

So, once I am out of bed, early in the morning, I have no desire to go back, as it is uncomfortable to lay there, unless I am sleeping, and getting in and out is a pain-in-the-ass.

But it got me to thinking:  Maybe this is what makes some people successful and others not.  Laying around in bed is seen as the ultimate luxury by the working masses.  Hitting that "snooze" button for another ten minutes' sleep is pure heaven - until the damn alarm goes off again.  Of course, the reason why people "have trouble waking up" is that they stayed up to watch the late show, the late, late show, and the late, late, late show.

And it does make a difference.  If you get up at 7AM or earlier, you can be at work by 8, and have a full four hours of work to do - often undisturbed as your brain-dead office-mates are still asleep, and you don't have to waste countless hours on social grooming in the office.  The guy who gets up at 9, races to the office, half-dressed (and skipping breakfast) gets nothing of merit done before he is thinking of lunch.  And after an hour-and-a-half lunch, he's nearly asleep again and before long, it's 3PM and he's thinking of going home.

Sounds ridiculous, but that was what I saw at law firms.  Not that doing all that work will earn you the eternal gratitude of the partnership, particularly when one of the partner's sons is next in line for promotion.  But I digress.

Laying about in bed is one of those ten irrational ideas: Irrational Idea #10, you can achieve maximum human happiness by inertia and inaction or by passively and uncommittedly "enjoying yourself." It sounds appealing in the abstract, but laying about in bed all day long makes you feel lethargic and sickly. Kicking back ain't all it's hopped up to be!

How successful you will be in life depends on a number of factors. And yea, being the boss's son is one of those unfair factors - although I have seen more than one golden boy crash and burn hard when undeserved power and wealth are just handed to them. They don't appreciate how hard it is to accumulate in the first place - like a teenager wrecking the brand-new car that weekend Dad bought them. But I digress.

For us ordinary Joe's, well, we have to work for it. And how hard you work often is proportional to your overall success - as corny as that sounds. I hear a lot of young voices (or bots or trolls, who knows?) on the Internet decrying success as unobtainable, as their "advanced degree" (in what?) only qualifies them to be a troublemaker at Starbucks. Yea, in that situation, showing up early for a shift isn't going to advance your life much. Then again, getting up early and applying for a better job might actually go somewhere.

But no one ever got ahead by laying about - and no one actually enjoys laying about as much as they claim to do.  It gets back to an earlier posting I made about things we think are comfortable, but actually are not - overstuffed and oversized chairs, recliners, puffy bike seat covers on tractor-style seats, ultra-soft bed toppers and gooshy pillows.  We think these things are comfortable, but they are not.  You look at what the Tour De France rider uses for a bicycle seat, or what a race car  driver uses for a car seat, and you won't find plush cushy pillow-like softness, but rather firm support, which is actually more comfortable over time.

Maybe that is a metaphor for life itself.  We seek comfort in a number of ways - to anesthetize ourselves from the harsh realities of the world.  It is why people drink or do drugs, why people go into debt for luxury goods - they seek pleasure and avoid pain.  And that is a survival instinct to be sure.  But on the other hand, avoiding work and avoiding risk is never the way to success.

I look back on my own life as evidence of this, both good and bad.