CRUSH your Day With This Early MORNING ROUTINE

How do you make it stick? Your biggest enemy is you. Hey everybody, today's episode is brought to you by Impact Theory University's own business decision-making workshop. If you're a business owner looking to scale your company, I can help. I've created a four-week intensive workshop that's going to give you the decision-making strategies that you need to scale your company. It's the exact things that I used to take Quest to a billion-dollar exit, and it's exactly what I'm using today on Impact Theory that's allowed us to grow by 400% in just the last 2 years. If this sounds like something that would be beneficial to you and your business, I want you to go right now to decision.impacttheory.com to apply. Once again, that's decision.impacttheory.com. You can apply today. All right, I'll see you on the inside. Everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory. Today, we're going to be talking all about morning routines, mine specifically. I'm going to walk you through all of your burning questions about how I do things, why I do them, what's the result that I get out of them, and all that good stuff. I think the way that you start your day is one of the most important things for guaranteeing that you're going to be successful. So, get this right and you get a lot of other things right as well. Get it wrong and you're in real trouble. All right, without further ado, let us jump in. Here we go. Is there a process one can follow to experiment and find out what type of morning routine works best for them? As always, trial and error is going to be a big part of this, but the wonderful news for you is that you live in the age of the internet. So many people have put out material on morning routines that this really becomes one of the more common questions that I get asked about my morning routine. So, go out, take in a bunch of different people who are living a life that is close to what you want to live, see how they do their morning routine, and then experiment. And I've actually seen people do videos about, "Oh, I spent 30 days doing X person's morning routine, and here are the results that I got." Um so, that is a really good way of just trying a lot of different things and seeing which ones work for you. Uh there's a really powerful quote by a guy named Kevin Kelly, and he said, "Don't prematurely optimize." And he was talking specifically about when you're trying to decide what you want to do with your life, said, "Go explore, try a lot of things, find the things that give you more energy than they take." And I think that's good advice here as well. Don't just settle on a morning routine because I say it or because somebody else says it. Think of each part of those routines that you hear as being like Legos, and you're going to try a bunch of different Legos, and then you're going to see which ones create the morning routine that's perfect for you. And that is the key. It needs to be perfect for you. So, there isn't going to be any one-size-fits-all. There going to be different things that work for different people. So, make sure that you get out there, you try a bunch of things, and then see what works for you. So, if you just go to YouTube and type in morning routine, you will get more than enough ideas to get you started. All right, next. Is it proper to have things set in a row, or do you have an allowance of jumping around the same list and using no order? Okay, I don't know what you mean by set in a row, but I will tell you that my to-do list is always in order of importance. And I think that there is an optimal order to do things in. So, important things, 100% using the lead domino strategy. So, what's the biggest bang for my buck? What could I spend the next 15 minutes on that would have the biggest impact in leading me towards my goals, okay? That's how I always think about my official to-do list. Now, when I think about a morning routine and what order I'm going to do things in, then it has to do with what's going on in my life at that point, what's the most important thing to me in that moment, and then ordering things accordingly. So, there have been times in my life where the first thing I do is meditate. There have been times in my life where the first thing I do is go to the gym. And so, those are really the big two things that I oscillate between, but there are also times where I will immediately go to work. So, any one of those three things may be the first thing that I'm doing in my morning routine depending on what's going on in my life. So, how do I decide between those? So, when I'm really focused on getting my physique in order, I'm focused on um the gym as being the the thing that I want to make sure that no matter what else happens during the day, I get that done, then I do that first. And that really is what slot number one is for in any morning routine is what is the most important thing that you know, no matter what else falls by the wayside that I know that I'm going to get that thing. And so, right now I'm going to the gym first. There was a long stretch of time there where I wasn't as focused on the gym, and so it was like, well, I'll I'll work out later. Let me do a little bit of work first and then I'll go to the gym. And I found what was happening was instead of working out 5 days a week or 6 days a week, I was working 3 days a week or sometimes 2 days a week cuz so much would pop up during the day that I wasn't getting to it. Now, that made sense and I didn't change for a long time because there was so many key initiatives at Impact Theory that I was trying to get to that that was truly more important to me. But then I hit a threshold event where I was like, nah, now I really want to get back in and really really focus on the gym. And ironically, it was because my lower back started to hurt from underutilization. Just a quick shout-out to anybody suffering from lower back pain, can basically tell you what it is, poor diet, high inflammation, and not deadlifting enough. Now, that doesn't mean high weight deadlifts. In fact, I used to do that. Now, I just do low rate low weight high rep, but I find that my back hurts when I don't work it out. So, again, everything's individual. Try it out for yourself, but that's important. So, that's how I judge what to do first. Um my typical modus operandi would be that lifting is the first thing I do. Then, I would meditate. And the meditation I use what I call thinkitation to get into then the work. So, working out, meditating, work is typically my path. Again, mileage may vary. Try your own. But, if you're not sure what to do, you can try that one. It's pretty damn effective for waking up the brain. Then, practicing lowering your heart rate, your breathing rate by going straight into the meditation. And then, when your brain has all that clarity that comes from working out, then you can leverage that as you meditate to get the ideas you're going to need to actually be effective at work. That's why I do it. All right. I wake up at 3:00 a.m. in the morning and work hard. And also, I'm feeling physically healthy to do the work, but after 8:00 a.m. I feel sleepy and not able to give my 100% after then. Please suggest something I can do to overcome this. Okay. So, I want to make sure that you're getting all the sleep that you actually need. So, if you're waking up at 3:00 a.m., but you're going to bed at 8:00 p.m., then it's fine. That's 7 hours of sleep, and I would say the average person probably does fine between 7 and 8 hours. But, if you need eight and you're only getting seven, that's already a problem. And if you're going to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 and getting up at 3:00, then odds are you just aren't getting enough sleep. Whenever you're feeling tired, one of two things is true. You are not getting enough sleep or high-quality enough sleep, or your diet is off. Those two things are going to be the things that contribute most to whether you feel fatigue or not. There's a third one which I'll throw in which is exercise which does a great job of addressing your mitochondria, which are the actual energy cells, uh energy organelles, I guess, within your cells, and it is critically important to keep those guys in shape as well just to make sure that they can generate the cellular energy. Uh but when you say you wake up at 3:00 a.m. without giving me any indication, I'm checking it again. Yeah, there's no indication what time you go to bed. So, my gut instinct is that you're waking up too early. Now, if that's just naturally what time you wake up, trust me, I get it. Um I spent a very long time just getting between 5 and 6 hours a night. And if I got 6, everything was great. If I got 5 one night in a row, I was fine. But if I got 5 multiple nights in a row, then I started to get really tired. To the point where I was once getting my haircut and I did one of those head bobs. Thankfully, it was timed well and I didn't end up getting a huge chunk of my hair taken out. Um but that was when I realized, if I can't sit still for more than 5 minutes without falling asleep, I don't think I'm getting enough sleep. Now, it's outside the scope of this video for me to get into what I did to improve my sleep, but there are a lot of things you can do to improve your sleep. And now I'm actually sleeping more than I've ever slept in my life. So, I've really got that dialed in and I have to admit, it's been awesome to just never feel Not never feel tired cuz of course towards the end of the night I start to get tired. But during sort of peak productivity hours, I don't get that anymore. So, get all the sleep you need. I don't sleep with an alarm, okay? I've run a billion-dollar company. I didn't set an alarm then. Running a company now, grew by 400% over the last 2 years, I don't use an alarm now. So, I work 93 hours a week without using an alarm. So, I don't want to hear excuses that people can't set an alarm. You just need to go to bed earlier. Now, if you have kids, go to bed when your kids go to bed, even if it's 7:00 p.m. Do whatever it takes to get the sleep that you need. Need to be a fiend for your sleep. It impacts everything else. Hugely important. I hope you guys are enjoying this episode, which is brought to you by Impact Theory University's Business Decision Making Workshop. With nine full-length classes and weekly live case studies with me, the Business Decision Making Workshop is a hands-on approach to honing your abilities to scale your business. I'm going to be in there with you working through your hardest problems so that you'll be able to master how to overcome any impediment by getting the most foundational way to think through novel problems. And that, my friends, is exactly what you need to do if you want to scale your company and have the kind of crazy success you've always dreamed. I promise it is possible. This is teachable. This is something that you can learn. It is a process that you can deploy against your business and be able to move confidently forward. Just go right now to decision.impacttheory.com to apply. Do not delay, my friends. Spots are limited. Again, go to decision.impacttheory.com and apply today. I'll see you guys on the inside. What should go first, meditation or workout? Hey, I'm glad you asked. We addressed that earlier. That's ultimately going to come down to what's going on in your life, what is the highest priority for you. Figure out what is the thing you just absolutely cannot miss for that day and do that thing. Now, all things being equal, I will say meditation before workout is less effective than workout than meditation. So, this comes down to the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system. So, sympathetic is fight or flight. You're in the gym, you're struggling, you're out of breath, you're pushing hard, you're putting yourself into that stressful fight or flight mode. Boom, that wakes you up. Okay? You need that cortisol to get you springing out of bed. So, for me, one of the reasons that I like to work out first is I am slow to wake up. Really slow. So, for me to not spend an hour sort of dragging ass around the house, if I go straight to the gym and I start working out, let me tell you, one set I'm breathing heavy, my blood is pumping, and boom, all of a sudden I'm wide awake. There are few things that will wake you up faster than exercise. In fact, back when I used to get tired in the middle of the day, what I would do, as I was getting tired, I would go do sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks, anything to get the blood flowing. So, it's a great way to wake up. Then, because we want to go from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic, and seeing how quickly we can do it, and getting really good at that, by the way, if you suffer from anxiety or stress, this is a great way to practice how rapidly can I go from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system. By I'm there in the gym, I'm out of breath, I'm now going to sit, I'm going to relax, I'm going to focus on slowing my breathing down, slowing my heart rate down, which you actually can do. And by practicing that over and over and over, then you get better at rapidly transitioning from heavy breathing, pulse racing, you know, all the signs of anxiety, and bringing them back to normal, bringing them back to baseline. And the faster that you can do that, so actually, if I'm not mistaken, the more in shape you are, the faster you will go from high exertion, out of breath, rapid heart rate to normal heart rate, and that's one of the things that they can test as a a test of being in shape and being healthy is how quickly you can normalize your heart rate. So, anyway, good thing to practice. So, that's why, when all things are equal, that's the order that I do them in. How do you reset into a new routine? Any considerations, principles, how to escape late nights and succeed? Any mantras? Okay, so whenever you're trying to get a new routine, what you're really trying to do is change your behavior. If you're trying to change your behavior, you must understand that behavior follows your beliefs. So now you need to get your beliefs in line. Now, one of the ways, one of the beliefs you have to get in line is that it's worth getting out of bed, that you want to do this new thing, that you want to stop doing thing A and start doing thing B. So getting uh a mantra that you're repeating around this exciting new thing, that you want to do it to make sure that you're building excitement, building desire around that thing. So attaching to the why, right? I believe this thing is important. I'm excited about this thing. I want to do this thing. Once you get that in the right place, you have a sufficient why, you have a sufficient level of excitement, now all of the sudden the behavior of getting up and doing that thing takes care of itself. So one of the most important things you can do in your life is to realize that it's critically important to be excited about the things you're trying to wrap these routines around. I see so many people fighting this ridiculously uphill battle to do a really hard thing that they don't care about. I have a really hard time doing things that I don't care about. So I'm always focusing first on getting myself to the point where I care. Now, that may mean that you have to change your life. If you hate your job, hate the things that you're doing with your time, step one is to start doing things that actually give you more energy than they take, that are exciting to you, that you're amped about, that seem worth pursuing, that you look out into your future 3 to 5 years, you know where you want to be, and you're taking meaningful steps to get there. Having a dream that is exciting and honorable, and you know that if I do this thing today, and tomorrow, and the day after, and I can make it a habit, and this becomes my routine, now I'm really making meaningful strides towards my goal. All of the sudden, when you don't feel like doing it, you just remind yourself what you're chasing. You remind yourself what that goal is. And most importantly, you remind yourself why you're pursuing that goal. It's a great Nietzsche quote. A person with a strong enough why can survive almost anyhow. When you know why you're doing something, because it is so thrilling to you, the thought of having that thing is so rad, the process of getting it, you've invested in, and you're even enjoying that process, that's when it's easy to get that new routine. Because you have to let the old routine atrophy. But the only way to atrophy it is to replace it with something else. Just not doing anything isn't necessarily going to atrophy those sort of old habits, those old desires. You've got to give something new that you can lean into, that you can be excited about, that you can pour yourself into, that you can fantasize about. I'm going to have that future, that's going to be mine, and I'm doing XYZ thing, and it's actually moving me towards my goals. When you have that, when you have that sense of progress, and you know, "Yo, if I keep doing this and pouring myself into this, look, I am getting better." And if you take the rate at which I'm improving and stretch it out over three or five years, or if you're willing, 10 years, it is crazy. It is absolutely, utterly life-changing. When you're pouring yourself into getting better at something, it is life-changing what you can do in three, five, 10 years. So now when you're thinking about it, you're talking to yourself about it, you're talking to other people about it, all you have to do is change your routine and you get that thing? That's very easy. And then when you get that feed loop of actually progressing, it becomes really easy to cement it. But you need excitement. On the last part of that, how to escape late nights and succeed. So I have rules in my life because I'm so excited about my goal. And I know that my goals will only become real if my behaviors back them up. So I'm doing the things I need to do in order to achieve my goal. So then I build rules in my life to ensure that I do the things that excite me, that push me towards the goal that I want to achieve. That's exciting. So I've done the work there. And then so for instance in my life, Monday through Friday, I go to bed, it's actually technically when it comes to sleeping, Sunday through Thursday night, I go to bed at 9:00 p.m. like it's a religion. I stay up a little bit later on Friday, a little bit later on Saturday, but it's not too crazy. And I do that because I so know the value and benefit of sleep. I so love feeling well rested and I so understand the realities of circadian rhythms and sleep timing and all of that stuff that because I'm so obsessed with the goals that I'm chasing and I see the reality of how these things impact it, it's very easy for me to put in a rule says I got to bed by 9:00. Simple as. And then stick to it because it gives me an outcome that I want. This goes back to don't chase things you don't want. Chase things that you want. Invest in that and all this stuff gets a lot easier. Hate your job? Find a new one. Pursuing dreams that your parents think you should be pursuing? Find your own dreams. Have the guts to stand up to your parents and say no, that's not the life you want to live. Trying to impress your neighbors or your friends or whatever, stop. They don't give a and you should neither. The whole punchline of life is joy. Now, once you have that, and those are the things you're actually pursuing, it gets real easy to go to bed on time. And then make sure that you're carving yourself out time to do the things you love. So, if you're like, "Yeah, but if I go to bed at night, I won't have time to read, play video games, hang out with my spouse, whatever." Do those things. Put them on your calendar. Make sure that you have time for them. Don't try to sneak in things like that at night because you think that's what you're supposed to do or you're supposed to be, you know, a good hustler busting your ass or whatever. Look, nobody's more hardcore than me. I work 93 hours a week every week and have for years. I still make time for just outright fun Even at 93 hours a week, there's a lot of extra hours. So, do things that you love. What time do you sleep and what time do you wake up? Would you start with reading or showering? How long do you take to do your first work-related task? All right, this is really interesting. Okay. We've covered what time to go to bed. Go to bed at 9:00 like it's a religion. Now, what time do I wake up? I don't set an alarm. So, I wake up when I wake up. I wake up whatever time my body says, "Hey, I've gotten enough sleep." Which, by the way, if that's less than 6 hours, I will force myself to lay in bed and try to fall back asleep, which I've come up with some ridiculously useful things that help me fall back asleep that have been absolutely transformational to my life. Um and I will share those in a second. But, what would I rather do, read or shower? What would I do first, reading or showering? So, quite literally, the second I get out of bed, okay, I I will walk you through the actual step-by-step things I do. I get out of bed nice and quietly cuz 99% of the time I wake up before my wife. I put on my socks, put on my pants, and I leave the same shirt that I've been sleeping on in the morning, and leave that on, and I immediately put in headphones, and I turn on a book or a YouTube video. Literally, right there. I'm standing at the edge of the bed, still being quiet so I don't wake up my wife, and I've got something queued up, a book or a YouTube video. Boom, I'm right into learning mode. Then I go, I'm brushing my teeth while I'm learning, feed the dogs while I'm learning, and then boom, it's at least right now, it's straight into the gym, and I keep listening to whatever that thing is that I'm learning. So, for me, I subscribe to ABL, always be learning. That is critically important to me. I think everybody should do it, so you should always have things that are coming into your mind. Uh when do I take my first work-related task? My first work-related task is as soon as I finish the gym, and then my meditation, which is really meant to serve uh the business anyway, because I do brief meditation followed by thinkitation. The thinkitation is strictly related to the business. So, then I start working. So, I typically wake up around 4:30. So, go to bed at 9:00, wake up at 4:30, it's about 7 and 1/2 hours sleep. Then, uh I work out, usually work out 45 minutes to an hour, so now you're at roughly 5:30, um and then I start working out immediately at that point. So, I'm, you know, maybe 5:40, 5:45 by the time I finish doing the sort of non-work-related part of the meditation. Uh and then I'm off to work, and I'll work until I go to bed at 9:00. Now, going back to what are the sort of magic things that I do to stay asleep? Um so, I do two things, and the first one is that I have realized that if I keep headphones next to my bed, um I keep two pairs just in case I'm really having a bad night's sleep. Uh I'll keep a pair of headphones next to my bed, and I have a book queued up that is not a book with like um yelling and screaming. Tried that, doesn't work, ends up waking you back up. But a nice sort of easy read and I put it on slow speed for me. This is an audiobook obviously. I put it on a slow speed. So I'll put it on 1.3. And then I put the volume of the book right to the level where if I put a tiny bit of pressure on my ear, I can hear it clearly. But if I were to take that pressure off, you can still hear that there's sound but you can't you can no longer hear what they're saying. That is so perfect. I will fall back asleep in like 3 minutes. Now, what I used to do is I would put them in and I would turn them up to a volume where I could hear it normally and then if the narrator got loud for a second it would wake me up or I tried using the timer and as the timer would run down, then I would wake up because I could hear it going down. So I found that what happens is because I have to keep a little bit of pressure on my ear that as soon as I sleep that pressure lets off and it just naturally shuts off the exactly perfect moment. And so I will just finally wake up and usually the book just keeps playing but it's in my ear and it's so faint that I don't even notice it. Works like a charm. Now, this the reason I wanted to put this at the end is because there's one thing that I do that I am I'm on the advisory board for this company. So full disclosure, if the company does well, that's financially beneficial to me. So I will say that because of that I'm actually way more scrutinize of these guys than I think I might otherwise be. But it's a company called Modius. I'm not even sure if they sell in the US yet but they have a device that is in FDA approvals for a sleep aid. And it stimulates the vestibular system. Long story about why that works and once a day for 30 minutes a day, it sends a slight little electrical zap into uh the nerve behind my ear that stimulates the um that sort that system in the brain. And for whatever weird reason, it makes you sleep better. And I used to tell people that it falls into the placebo zone, which is like where I think it's helping, but I'm not entirely sure. And so recently, I was like, "Man, I've really been sleeping well. Maybe I don't need this anymore. Or maybe it was just a placebo." So, let me just stop. You know, maybe the headphone trick, maybe that's good. And so I stopped doing it for about a week, and then all of a sudden now, I'm waking up four or five times a night again. And I'm like, "What the Is it really possible that this thing has that much impact?" So, I've now gotten back on it religiously. I'll I'll report back if it goes back to me sleeping again to where I'm only waking up once a night and I'm able to fall And that's the other thing. I'm not falling back asleep as fast as I was before. Um so the headphone trick still works, but it'll take, you know, say 15 minutes or 20 minutes to fall back asleep. And man, if that ends up working, I'm going to be pretty bullish on this thing. But again, full disclosure, um I am involved with the company, but whew, it is very interesting. And I do things around blue uh light blocking 3 hours before bed. Um so all of that stuff, I do everything I can to help myself make sure that I get a a good night's sleep. And it's a perfect place to end cuz I consider the night's sleep to actually be the beginning of your morning routine. Because if you mess up your sleep, everything else downstream falls apart from there. So, make sure you're getting good sleep. All right, experiment a lot, guys. Try a lot of different things. Get that morning routine down to a science to optimize your cognition, your performance, your enjoy. You don't want to go through life tired. Going through life tired all the time is a unique form of hell in my opinion. So, avoid that at all costs. It will help you think clearer, move faster, everything is better. And then, the only thing we didn't cover on here is food. So, I postpone my morning meal. So, I normally wake up, like I said, about 4:30, normally eat my first meal between 8:30 and 9:30, sometimes a little bit later. Uh and then I eat my final meal of the day at 1:30. So, I've got that, you know, whatever, roughly 18 to 19-hour window. Um for the week, even including weekends, my average is about 17 and 1/2 hours for the whole week. Every night that I go without food. Um so, I work out, I meditate, I do a couple of hours of work before I eat anything. Um and I don't even have black coffee until I've been awake usually for about 2 hours, and even that I dilute dramatically with water. Um so, that's my routine. That's how I do it. All right. I hope that serves you guys well, because when you get your morning right, you get your day right. All right, everybody. Till next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Thank you for watching this episode, which again was brought to you by Impact Theory's very own business decision-making workshop. If you guys are ready to take your business to the next level by investing in yourself and learning the first principles of business, then I want you to take action right now and go to decision.impacttheory.com to apply. I promise you I am giving you every piece of information that you will need to overcome any obstacle that your company is facing to stare down problems that will arrive a year, 5 years after you take the course. This is the strategies of business decision-making that every successful entrepreneur has to learn to deploy against their company if they want to grow. All right, guys. I promise it will deliver 10x the value of what you paid for it, and if it doesn't, I'll give you your money back, no questions asked. You know me. I live in the public eye. There's nowhere for me to hide. This is me trying to give as much value as humanly possible. I really think this class would be transformative and I hope you will sign up. Now, we'll see you in the next live class. All right, guys. Take care and be legendary.