Written by Matt Zavadil
Updated October 30, 2024
So I’m studying the book of Joshua right now and in those studies, I found something I think is very interesting, which is that Joshua was an early riser. He got up early in the morning to get things done. And what’s also fascinating to me is that the book of Joshua very much is a, uh, has a lot of prophetic elements and is a type that leads us over as well to Jesus.
And when you read about Jesus’s life, he was an early riser. So, you know, most of my audience are online business owners. network marketers, affiliate marketers, high ticket coaches, course creators, all of that. And so as I was reading through this and thinking about things, some thoughts came to my mind that I’d like to, I’d like to share with you.
And one of those thoughts was I started to think about just our, our general society that we live in. And what is glorified overall in our society? Drinking, staying out late, being a rebel rouser, whatever you want to call it, right? That’s glorified in our society. What does that lead to, though? That leads either to waking up early, to go to school, to go to work, feeling awful, feeling hungover, not feeling our best, being sluggish, not being productive.
Or it leads to really going to bed late and just not getting up really at all. I mean, think about a lot of the TV shows and the movies that we all grew up on. Right. Uh, you can tell by my look that, um, I’m an older dude and. I grew up mainly in the 80s as a, uh, as I grew into, you know, being a teenager and all of that.
And when I think back to all the reruns I was watching back then of movies going back as far as stuff that came out in the 60s, all the movies and TV shows that were out when I was a kid, And right up to today’s time, when you watch Netflix and Amazon and all the stuff that’s out there, what do we see all the time?
Drinking. We see people drinking, you know, like a lot of those 60 shows. What did everybody do as soon as they got home? I mean, it was across the board, right? It could be a show like I Dream of Jeannie or any of that stuff, right? What’s the first thing they all did in a lot of those scenes? Think back to the classic movies.
They walk into the room and one of the characters immediately goes where? Over to the bar. Starts pouring. Now, they don’t have a, you know, a soft drink or even a beer. What are they pouring? They’re pouring hard liquor. Hey, you want a drink? Hey, you want a drink? Let’s everybody drink. And it could be, you know, you can tell by the scene or the story that it’s like one o’clock in the afternoon.
The first thing they’re showing everybody, programming us to think like, is that no matter what time of the day, You need to have a drink, you need to start getting sloshed, right? And I’m not preaching, um, I’m guilty of this. I lived a lot of my life drinking, going out late at night and, uh, taking part in all that stuff.
It just got me thinking, uh, as I was thinking about business and being productive, just how we’re all programmed in a lot of anti productive ways. And I think when I started to take the thought process through waking up early, Being as productive as possible early in the morning and getting a lot of things done before, you know, the rest of the world is woken up and is really out there doing things.
It got me thinking, I was like, yeah, like that, that’s really what we’ve been programmed to think like. It’s very interesting to me as I, as I started to really think that through that, you know, it’s all about a lot of what gets glorified is. Not being the opposite of being an early riser. It’s about staying up late.
It’s about going to the bar. It’s going to happy hour, right? What is that saying? Um, it’s five o’clock somewhere or whatever that saying is. Um, and it’s a very accepted thing in our society. And, you know, I started thinking about my grandkids and things of that nature and Thinking about how they’re being programmed in the same way by a lot of the things that they see either family members doing friends of family doing what’s on the internet what’s on a television show what’s in a movie and You know as you get older you start to think about these things just in terms of hey, it’s not only affecting Me and what i’m doing, but how is it affecting our children?
How is it affecting our grandkids and things like that? And I don’t think it’s healthy. I don’t think it’s uh, I don’t think it’s a program because I could go on and on we all could around the programming that we’ve all Received through the years either from government messages school messages You know what we were exposed to in the classroom and especially media entertainment TV movies all that stuff and today with the internet I mean, it’s just rampant But, um, I won’t go into all those tangents right now, maybe I’ll make another video and go into some of those other thoughts that I have around some of that kind of programming and how it’s anti productive to working to beat this economy that we’re all sitting in right now and living inside of.
And there’s a lot of struggle going on right now, there’s a lot of unhappy people, there’s a lot of frustration right now. Um, you know, costs going up, incomes going down, um, you know, there’s just a lot going on right now that we’re all, we’re all dealing with and it’s an interesting time, you know, and I think we all need to, as all of us as a society, but especially those of us working on side businesses and getting income coming from different sources and maybe our regular job income and all of that.
I think we need to be thinking about how is our programming that we’ve been programmed. I mean, I’m over 50, that’s five decades of programming. And I feel like I’m pretty all my life. I’ve been pretty aware of a lot of the programming. I’ve mentally fought back against a lot of the programming. I’ve noticed it even when I was younger, but then when I really think about how I lived my life, when I was younger, I fell victim.
We all do too. acting in ways and doing things and gaining habits that are destructive that are not geared towards Getting us further ahead than just showing up at a job Work in eight hours or nine hours or nowadays I mean you hear people work in 10 12 hours to make what they used to make work in eight hours, right?
That’s what’s going on out there but beyond just being able to show up and kind of being Doing what we’re told to do at a job situation when you’re trying to get beyond that And run a side business get that business to full time and then really get it to grow and scale and all of that You know, there’s a lot of programming, this destructive things we have to overcome and I just, I guess my message here is just, I’d love to have you think about how have you been programmed?
In a non productive, in non productive ways that are hampering your ability right now to get your income to the place that you want it to be inside your business. Have you fallen victim to having a drink late at night or several drinks late at night and then not being able to get up early so that you can be productive in the morning?
You know, I find that If you get up early, you know, you can get a lot done between the hours of say four or five in the morning to 9 a. m um, you know because there’s you wake up and if you Wake up with intention that this is what I want to get done before as I always say The entire world is awake and starts humming and bustling and all that kind of stuff if you wake up earlier You can absolutely Get up early Get quite a bit done in those first few hours of the day, and I think that’s a lesson to take from our biblical folks, right?
Someone like Joshua, someone like Jesus himself. Now they were early risers. They got up early. They, they weren’t, um, um, you know, staying up all night like we as a society do. I mean, think about another kind of programming that we all have fallen victim to. Not all of us, but you know, most people have. I’m even, I watch people in my family do this.
Where what’s how late does the news go each night? It goes to what? 1130 PM. So that when people get used to watching a TV show, um, you know, I’m kind of dating myself here a little bit before we had Netflix and where you could just watch a show whenever you wanted to. But remember the old schedule and it still is there now if you have regular TV, but there’s those time slots, right?
Of 8 a. m. Uh, 8 p. m. show, 9 p. m. shows, 10 p. m. shows, then the news comes on, and it’s like 11. 30, and now you’re starting to get ready for bed, and you might be in bed and falling asleep past midnight. It’s very difficult to get up at three or four o’clock in the morning if you’re going to bed at midnight I know I can’t do that.
I need a good I need some good rest So that’s another piece of the programming that i’m talking about and then once you add alcohol to the mix and you’re drinking During that process of just staying awake all that time
It’s destructive to being productive. It really is And I just find it fascinating just the way all of us have had this programming going on inside our minds You Because before the television, before, um, entertainment, you know, a hundred plus years ago, that just wasn’t a part of society.
There wasn’t this almost like, um, Pavlovian thing where, you know, you just sit and watch a screen for hours on end when you come home from work. I mean, you didn’t even have the structure of work going back even farther back in time, right? It wasn’t like that. People really had to, I mean, go back before there was electricity, right?
People had to dictate their daytime activities based on when the sun comes up, when it goes down, right? It just made sense. But now with electricity and lights, and we can be up all night, and we can add alcohol to the mix, and we can watch TV and movies endlessly now, um, it’s something to think about, at least.
So I hope this got you thinking. Like, Hey, how do I, how have I been programmed? Are there some programming things that I need to, you know, uh, uh, break some habits, some patterns in my life that are not allowing me to really build the business that I say I want to build. I just want to get you thinking about that and maybe I can inspire you to become an earlier riser than maybe you rise now.
That’s my goal here. You know, if you get up at six in the morning, can I inspire you to instead get up at five in the morning? If you’re used to getting up at eight in the morning, can I inspire you to get up at seven in the morning and just see how that works for you? If you’re already a pretty early riser and you get up at, you know, four in the morning, can I inspire you to get up at three 30 or three o’clock in the morning some days, you know, because, because you’re going to have to backtrack that to when do I go to bed now, how do I change my bedtime habits so that I’m getting enough sleep.
So that I get seven or eight hours of sleep before the alarm goes off at four or five or six. So food for thought, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about this in the comments and, uh, see if there’s any agreement here, any disagreement here on my thoughts. I’d love to hear that as well. Get some other perspectives, but, um, uh, go build your business, go be productive and, uh, think about these, these patterns, these, these, these programming habits that maybe you don’t need to be doing anymore.
