Burning the Midnight Owl

Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. If you’re here for the first time, I’m glad you’re here. I hope you decide to stick around. To my returning listeners, it’s great to have you here with me again. In your country, what is a normal time to wake up and get ready for the day?

As most of you already know, I teach conversational English online. It has been one of the great pleasures of my life to interact with people from so many different countries, cultures, and backgrounds. When I first meet with a student, we will usually engage in a bit of small talk. During this portion of the conversation, it is not uncommon for my students to ask me what time it is where I am. Working across time zones means that there is often a significant time difference between me and my students. This morning, in one of my first classes of the day, I was talking with a newer student when he asked me that question. My answer seemed to surprise him.

Which brings me to today’s phrase: the early bird gets the worm. You have probably heard this one before. It means that people who start earlier, or prepare sooner, tend to have an advantage. The early bird is out looking for food before anyone else, and so it finds the worm first. As an expression, it is less about literally waking up early and more about the idea that being proactive, meaning taking action before you are required to, leads to better outcomes.

Now, there are a few related expressions worth knowing.

An early bird is a person who naturally wakes up early and feels most alert in the morning. You can also call this person an early riser or a morning person. These all mean the same thing. Someone who is up at dawn, cheerful about it, and probably already finished their coffee before you’ve opened your eyes.

And then there is the opposite. A night owl is a person who naturally stays up late and does their best work in the evening or at night. The owl is a creature of the night, awake and alert when most others are sleeping.

Finally, there is one more expression worth knowing: waking up at the crack of dawn. The crack of dawn refers to the very first moment of daylight, when the darkness breaks and the sun begins to appear. To wake up at the crack of dawn means to wake up extremely early, usually with the implication that it is earlier than most people would choose.

Early bird. Morning person. Early riser. Night owl. The crack of dawn. Keep those in mind. The story I’m about to tell you involves most of them, and will clarify why my student was so surprised at my answer to his question.

Every morning, Monday through Saturday, I wake up a good bit before the crack of dawn, at 4:30 so that I can prepare to teach at 5:00. In my case, the early bird doesn’t get the worm so much as it gets access to the Asian market. 5:00 in the morning for me is just around dinnertime in Japan, Korea, and China, and there are many people in those countries looking to practice their English after finishing up work.

Five years ago, when I first got started teaching on iTalki, I assumed that my demographic would be in Japan, because of my fluency in Japanese. That, however, was not initially the case. In the last year or so, I have had a significant increase in the number of Japanese students that I consistently teach. This is most likely due to a brief video appearance I had on a popular YouTube channel in Japan. But for the first few years, the largest segment of my students were from China and Russia. I had made a specific choice about what time to wake up, and the students I could reach reflected that choice.

So for the last five years, I have been waking up nearly every day at 4:30. Many people would assume that I am naturally an early bird, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Waking up that early didn’t come naturally to me. In fact, through most of high school and college, you’d be hard-pressed to catch me on a day when I didn’t stay up until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I was a bit of an insomniac. Insomnia is a condition where people have difficulty falling asleep, and an insomniac is a person who has insomnia. If you had told me that I was going to choose a career where waking up early was essentially a requirement, I would have thought you were crazy. Why would I ever willingly wake up early? I can almost hear my younger self asking. Which is actually a fair question. Why would I, someone who was essentially the anti-morning person, go through the long and difficult process of becoming an early bird?

I love language learning. I have a deep passion for it, and in 2021 I saw an opportunity to begin building up my online teaching experience on iTalki. My wife and I had bills to pay. Food, rent, gas, and tuition for university. I had already finished up my time at BYU, but my wife was still a student there. I looked at my resume and tried to identify what I had going for me that might attract students to give me a try.

Starting out on iTalki can be a bit slow because a new profile has no teaching statistics. No lessons taught, no student reviews, nothing. I had two years of in-person teaching experience, but what I felt would be my most attractive quality to prospective students was my foreign language skills. That meant the best time to reach students who might value my Japanese fluency was early in the morning. I knew it would take time to build up my online credentials, so I opened up my teaching schedule from 5:00 to 9:30 every day. Then I got a job working on the grill at a fast-food restaurant to pay the bills. After a few months, my profile began to pick up enough steam that I could begin working on iTalki full-time, and I eventually quit my fast food job.

It was a difficult transition. In the last episode I talked about building habits. Waking up at 4:30 every day for five years is not one of my natural skills. It is a habit, built one miserable morning at a time. In order to regularly wake up early, you need to get to bed early. This was a full lifestyle shift. I had to change my ideas around socialization, restructure my meal times, and find new times throughout the day to accomplish my goals. It took about a year before that early morning schedule stopped being a daily battle.

So again, if it was such a difficult experience, why did I do it? The simplest answer is because I had a goal. I wanted to create an opportunity for work where I could pursue my passion, work remotely, and have some control over my working hours. I think those benefits were worth every miserable morning.

As we’ve now learned, the early bird gets the worm. But what does the night owl get?

A night owl, as we mentioned in the warm-up, is a person who is most active and productive in the late hours of the evening. While the early bird is up before the sun, the night owl is still going long after most people have gone to bed. Neither one is better than the other. They are simply different rhythms, and different people thrive at different times of day.

There is an expression specifically for the kind of work that night owls often do: burning the midnight oil. To burn the midnight oil means to work late into the night, past the point when most people have stopped. The phrase comes from a time before electricity, when people worked by the light of an oil lamp. If you were still working at midnight, your oil lamp was still burning. You were burning the midnight oil.

Today, we use it to describe any situation where someone is putting in extra effort beyond normal hours. A student studying late for an exam is burning the midnight oil. An entrepreneur working on their business after everyone else has gone to sleep is burning the midnight oil. It carries a sense of dedication and sacrifice, similar to what the early bird expression conveys, but at the other end of the day.

And here is what I find interesting about both expressions. Neither one is really about the time of day. The early bird gets the worm is about being proactive. Burning the midnight oil is about being dedicated. Both are about being willing to do more than the minimum, at whatever hour works for you.

Which leads me to something worth thinking about. There are students who study English at 5:00 in the morning, and students who study at midnight. The ones who make the most progress are not necessarily the early risers or the night owls. They are the ones who show up consistently, at whatever time is theirs.

And that brings me back to where we started.

I am not a morning person. I never was. But for the last five years, I have been waking up at 4:30 nearly every morning. Not because I love it. Not because it comes naturally. Because I found something worth getting up for.

For me, it was this. Teaching English. Learning languages. Building something I could be proud of. The early mornings were the cost. The work was the reward.

The early bird gets the worm. The night owl burns the midnight oil. Neither the bird nor the owl is the point. The point is having something worth sacrificing for.

You are studying English right now. That takes time. It takes effort. It definitely takes sacrifice of some kind, whether that is waking up early to study, or staying up late, or giving up time you could have spent doing something easier. Whatever that sacrifice looks like for you, I want you to know that I see it. And I think it matters.

Find your worm. Everything else is just figuring out what time to wake up.

And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.