If you haven’t seen Limitless starring Bradley Cooper, it’s about a man who takes a drug that makes him…you guessed it…limitless.

He starts the movie as a talentless writer who can’t make basic writing deadlines. After taking the “limitless” pill, he becomes superhuman and skyrockets to the top of the financial world.

The film is obviously fiction, but imagine a world with a “limitless” version of yourself. A version that never needed help excelling at habits like:

• Making more time to work or study
• Eating healthy
• Working out
• Saving money

My name is Maneesh Sethi, the founder CEO of Pavlok and habit expert.

My friends think that because I’m decently successful as an entrepreneur, CEO, and best-selling author, I’ve always had good habits and done well since childhood.

The truth is that I was a very average child with very average grades. “Maneesh, if only you would just apply yourself…” was something I heard countless times. My parents blamed a “lack of discipline and willpower.” After all, what else could the problem be?

Thankfully something changed the trajectory of my fate. One fall while I was in middle school, my brother went off to college and left a hefty pile of books behind.

Summer just finished and I wanted to entertain myself, so I decided to explore them. I soon began reading a little every single day.

Before I knew it, my life began to improve, and it wasn’t just my grades. I began exercising and started pushing myself to be more outgoing. I found myself slowly becoming the person I wanted to be.

There’s a myth that anything can be done if someone just exerts enough willpower. Research has shown that willpower is a finite resource.

Actions like waking up early or saying no to that cookie, require you to draw from your finite pool of willpower.

There is one exception, however. When an action is repeated often and frequently enough, a “habit” is formed. At a biological level, this occurs in the the basal ganglia, sometimes called the “lizard brain,” because evolutionarily, it’s one of the oldest and most primitive parts.

Obviously lizards can operate without willpower (can u imagin a lizard with willpower? like decidin’ if he should eat another jucy fly? silly lizard LOL).

That’s because habits don’t require decision making. Therefore the key to making good decisions is, ironically, not making them “decisions” at all. Instead, turn them into habits.

It’s impossible to focus on acquiring all good habits at once. The secret lies in focusing on one special kind of habit–a keystone habit–starting with the most important and powerful one.

The Keystone Habit and Waking Up Early

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg presents the idea of Keystone Habits: habits that, once implemented, naturally improve the quality of life in a variety of other habits. One habit, like exercising, might improve another good habit, such as eating healthy.

For you geeks out there, they’re similar to getting a “Tetris” and getting four lines in a row rather than getting one at a time.

From countless feedback and user data, we found that the act of waking up early is the most powerful Keystone Habit to start out with.

Like getting a “Tetris” Keystone Habits allow you make more progress all at once.

It’s no a coincidence that the most powerful CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook (and his predecessor Steve Jobs), JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey are all early risers.

The fact is, our mornings are our most productive hours of our day. Multiple studies show that, willpower is highest in the morning; it slowly drains throughout the day from “decision fatigue.”

During your a few extra hours in the morning, before most people wake up, you could:

• Do a full workout
• Tackle your day’s toughest task
• Practice a language or study something new
• Meditate
• Floss

The importance of this keystone habit is why we invented the Pavlok Shock Clock 2, a device engineered to make anyone a morning person.