Here’s What Five Insanely Successful People Do With Their Mornings

Even if their moral superiority is more grating than Ryan Gosling’s abs or the steep incline of Chris Pratt’s career, morning people get more done.

If your routine revolves around rolling out of bed and mentally calculating whether you have enough time to make toast and not arrive late again, take a look at how the other side live. Here’s a round-up of what five insanely successful people do in the morning and spoilers: lots of meditation, people!

RuPaul

While you’d expect The Supermodel Of The World to love her beauty sleep, RuPaul swears by just four-or-so hours of rest a night. On her What’s The T? podcast with Michelle Visage, RuPaul talks about how she wakes up at about 4-4.30am almost every morning, often to meditate and clear her head.

She’s never had any complaints.

Ru also tackles chores, using the dead quiet of Los Angeles to drive to pharmacists and the like before the cars clog the highways.

Having said this, being too zen might not be the best strategy. Ru once told an anecdote to BuzzFeed about how one early morning she saw a man drowning on the Hudson River and decided that rather than calling an ambulance or for help, she would “send them loving energy”. Ru did not comment on whether that energy kept the drowning man alive.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, the man whose knees definitely bend like normal human knees. (Image credit: Reddit.com/Splash News)

The definitely human founder of Facebook has a strenuous morning routine. Zuckerberg has gone on the record to say he has erased “small choices” from his daily life, which is why he wears the same make of grey t-shirt every day of his God-damn life.

“I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” he told an audience in a Q&A back in 2014.

Most people advise against picking up your phone first thing, but Mark – the man almost directly responsible for our current Black Mirror-esque obsession with our phones – disagrees. He checks Facey straight away, but I guess that’s kind of his job and he’s probably not watching animal videos or talking trash in a group chat. Then he usually goes running with his mop of a Hungarian Sheepdog, Beast.

Beast may be the dog equivalent of a white man with dreadlocks, but we love him anyway. (Image credit: Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook)

Gwenyth Paltrow

To be completely honest, I was hoping this would be more insane. Talking to Women’s Wear Daily, the queen of celebrity lifestyle websites detailed a pretty boring morning:

Only two hours of exercise? No mentions of green smoothies, testing out Goop-branded supplements or meditation? I will note that the splitting of a croissant with her son is a flaky morsel of colour in this otherwise drab recount, but frankly, I’m feeling a little uninspired by this.

Looks like we’ll have to turn to Goop for handy hints, which may have been her plan all along.

Anna Wintour

Vogue’s Editor-In-Chief says she plays tennis each morning at 5.45am, usually at Midtown Tennis Centre in Manhattan, if you’re looking for a early riser doubles-partner. In an interview with the New York Times, Tennis instructor Byron Spence described her game as pretty strong:

“She’s like a retriever,” he said.She’s so fast. She’ll chase down everything. She doesn’t hit with a lot of spin, but she has an amazing cross-court forehand.”

I’m sorry, but if there’s an unearthed The Devil Wears Prada footage of Meryl Streep re-creating these sunrise spar-battles, then we cannot rest until they are found.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah wakes up at 6.02am. Yep, 6.02. Not 6.01. Not 6. And definitely not 6.03, because buddy, that’s just stupid. Oprah has no need for alarms.

Oprah makes sure her first thought of the day is “Oh, I’m alive. Thank you!”, which I would probably think if I was Oprah, too.

At 6.45am, Oprah will drink either a chai tea or skim cappuccino before she goes to the gym, then at 8am she meditates, then at 8.30am she has a breakfast of medium-boiled eggs and multi-grain toast. Then her working day begins.

Oprah’s life sounds nice.

There you have it: an eclectic grouping of five people who wake up really early and therefore are better than you.

Really though, the best routine is just finding what aligns you for the day. If that’s sleeping for four-hours ala Margaret Thatcher, go for it.

Probably the best advice we came across was Mark Twain’s, who wrote that if you “eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day”. 

We’re all guilty of ‘easing’ into our work days, but it’s always best to tackle the hardest task first-thing you’re behind your desk.

The benefit of giving yourself breathing space in the morning makes that easier, otherwise that need to take your time bleeds into your office hours. Which, if you’re like me, means you just end up working through lunch or, worse, staying late.

Truly though, the only answer is to cherry-pick these five celebs’s habits. Tomorrow, wake up at 6.02am for tennis, wear the same thing every day of your life, eat half a croissant and send positive energies to people drowning at sea. I feel more productive already.

Image credit: Getty Images/Julian Finney

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