I thought that’s what I had to do to be successful: Wake up at 4 a.m., get after it, hustle before the world wakes up, and join the club of high performers who swear by their pre-dawn routines. So I tried it. And I was miserable. I’m talking dragging-myself-out-of-bed, foggy-brain, counting-down-the-hours-until-I-could-go-back-to-sleep kind of miserable.

As a brand-new full-time entrepreneur, I was forcing myself into a routine that felt like punishment, all because I believed it was the price of success. That misery made me ask myself a question I’d been avoiding: How am I defining success? If chasing this version of “success” is making me miserable, then is it actually worth it? What’s the point of achieving goals if I’m exhausted, resentful, and disconnected from why I started in the first place?

The whole point of me building my business and working for myself is to create a life that works for me. Not for some productivity guru with a morning routine plastered across Instagram. Not for the highlight reel I see on social media where everyone seems to have their life together by sunrise. For me.

But I had to face an uncomfortable truth: Just because somebody says something works for them, and they insist it should work for me too, doesn’t mean that’s true. We’re all different. We have different energy patterns, different bodies, different brains, and different lives. What lights one person up might drain another person completely.

And yet, I found myself judging myself anyway. Why isn’t it working for me? What’s wrong with me? I kept telling myself that everybody else (all the “cool kids”) seems to make it work. All these successful entrepreneurs are waking up at 4 a.m., so clearly that’s the secret. So I must be the problem, right? I must be lazy, undisciplined, or not committed enough.

I was judging myself, beating myself up, and creating this narrative where I was failing at something that apparently everyone else had figured out. And then I realized something important: That isn’t helping either. The self-judgment, the comparison, the constant feeling of falling short, none of it was making me more successful. It was just making me more miserable.

So I asked myself another question: What would it be like to just drop that thought? To release that belief that I have to be productive at 4 a.m. in order to live a successful life? What would actually happen if I gave myself permission to work in a way that felt natural to me? Would my business collapse? Would I suddenly become less capable? Or would something else happen?

I started being kinder to myself. I stopped forcing my body and mind into a schedule that didn’t fit. I started paying attention to when I actually felt most creative, most energized, and most alive. I started defining success on my own terms, not based on what someone else’s morning routine looked like, but based on what actually mattered to me: purpose, connection, empowerment, and joy.

And you know what happened? I found it. Not the Instagram version of success. Not the 4 a.m. club version. My version. The one where I’m building something meaningful without sacrificing my well-being in the process. The one where I’m productive and present. Where I’m ambitious and at peace.

Turns out, success doesn’t have a wake-up time. It has a feeling. And I finally found mine.

Laura Suttin is a physician, former health care executive, certified coach, speaker, organizational consultant, and author of The Purposeful MD–Creating the Life You Love Without Guilt. With decades of leadership experience, Laura partners with health care organizations to realign leadership and culture around her proprietary Compass Framework: Purpose, Connection, Empowerment, and Joy. Her work addresses burnout at its root, by transforming misaligned, fragmented cultures into high-performing environments where people thrive, outcomes rise, and the business bottom line improves. Laura’s clients stop chasing short-term burnout fixes and instead build resilient, sustainable health care systems, where engagement grows and both people and performance flourish. She shares insights and resources through her website, as well as on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.