The five-minute rule: How to start anything

When I was working at Lehman Brothers on Wall Street, working often 80 to 100-hour weeks
— never less than 60-hour weeks — I was also writing a book. While pursuing a robust romantic life.

I finished that book, in the most time-scarce period of my life.

How? With my five-minute rule.

The rule is simple. I had to write five minutes a day, no matter what. If I arrived home well after midnight, sloppy and beyond exhaustion, I had to fire up the computer and sit there for at least five minutes before I could call it quits.

Sometimes I fell asleep on the keyboard, waking up to this:
qarudfea iaejdALllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

Sometimes I sat there in a brain-numb fog, synapses misfiring, for five minutes of nothing, logged off, and then fell from my chair onto the couch because I couldn’t muster the energy to get to bed. Thank God the chair rolled that far.

Sometimes I idly edited what I’d written before.

Sometimes ideas came to me and I pursued them, like a weary mongrel roused by sighting a squirrel.

Sometimes I wrote for half an hour, an hour.

Sometimes I wrote for hours!

That’s how it happened. All because I created this idea that I couldn’t call myself a writer unless I’d written the day before . . . for at least five minutes.

I lived in Manhattan at the time, an island brimming with individuals who called themselves something creative
— be it actor or artist or writer or dancer or singer or musician or puppet maker or doctoral dissertationist
— yet many (most) didn’t actually routinely do the thing they claimed was the passion of their life.

By goading myself with the five-minute rule, so that a day could not pass in which I wasn’t involved in my soul work somehow, I inadvertently created a system for starting and continuing any creative endeavor.

Since then I’ve used it to launch other projects and to embark on new life commitments. I keep to that same simple rule today for writing. And for meditation. And a couple of other private things.

I’ve learned that if you skip a day of what you say is important, it’s easy to skip two. Then you wake up months, years later still a proofreader or a waitress. Or you wake up an executive in the side job you put more energy into than your soul work. 

Or you’re still not a meditator, or still not healthy, or still not more accomplished in that area you wished to be . . . .

Once you commit to the five-minute rule you show the Universe you want it and you mean it. 

Momentum accrues.