Scroll through LinkedIn or Facebook, and you’ll see no shortage of “rise and grind” posts. Someone is at the gym before 5 a.m., someone else has read a book, sent fifteen emails, meditated, cooked breakfast for their family, and outlined their daily goals – all before you’ve finished your first coffee. The message is clear: if you’re not doing as much as they are, as early as they are, you’re not successful.
But here’s a question I keep coming back to: how many people can really keep that pace up for years? My guess is very few.
Indeed, anyone can push through several months or a year of intense effort. I’ve done it. We’ve all had those bursts of adrenaline with big goals, the critical project, the “I’ll sleep later” phase. However, building a life around constant pre-dawn productivity requires more than just willpower. It requires sacrificing rest, relationships, and sometimes even one’s health. And even when people can sustain it for a while, the long-term cost usually shows up eventually.
What I suspect is that many of those “look at everything I do before 7 a.m.” every day posts are more about image than reality. Social media thrives on performance. You don’t post the mornings you say the hell with it, or the days when the weights feel too heavy, or the times your kids need you more than your planner does. You post the highlight reel. And after a while, even the people posting it start to confuse the performance with the truth.
That’s where the danger lies for the rest of us. We scroll, compare, and can feel behind. If they can do it, why can’t we? And the cycle of “more, more, more” spins up again. We forget that real productivity isn’t about squeezing more into the day – it’s about doing the right things with focus and energy.
The older I get, the less impressed I am with constant hustle and the more I respect sustainability and pacing.
Anyone can sprint, but few can run a marathon. And life is closer to a marathon. You can burn yourself out with two-hour 5 a.m. workouts and nonstop tasks, or you can find a rhythm that allows you to keep showing up day after day, year after year.
That’s why I keep circling back to the idea of enough. Enough doesn’t mean lazy. It doesn’t mean lacking ambition. It means you’ve chosen a pace you can live with, a standard that doesn’t eat you alive. It means you measure success not by how early your alarm clock goes off, but by whether your work and your life actually move in the direction you want them to.
So the next time you see a start at 5 a.m. “grind” post, take it with a grain of salt. Ask yourself not, “Why am I not doing all that?” and feel like a failure, but “Do I even want to live like that? Is it sustainable? Is it necessary?”
For me, the answer is no. My do-everything, all-the-time days are behind me. Now, progress looks like steady effort, healthy boundaries, and knowing when to take a break. Maybe that doesn’t make for a flashy social media post. But it does make for a life I can actually live.
John Berkovich Talks 