Calibrate an excellent morning routine. Rise before the Sun. Join The 5AM Club. Win the battle of the bed. Become an early riser like so many of the greatest women and men of the world because the way you start your day sets up the way your day unfolds. It creates the tone of your day. So by getting up early, building out what I call a victory hour, 60 minutes from 5:00 to 6:00 where you can exercise and electrify that pharmacy of mastering in your brain through dopamine-reducing cortisol, provoking serotonin and norepinephrine, which builds your focus. Maybe in that victory hour, you pray and you meditate. Every prayer is heard by the way, or you write in a journal about the person you want to be during the day ahead, or you write about your hopes and your dreams. Or if you’re one of the valleys of darkness that we all experience in life, maybe you write about your trials and your feelings and the pain you’re going through. So you use the journaling process to purify you and burn off the dross that covers your gold. What else can you do during your victory hour? You can paint. You can read the heroic books, so the stardust of the great artists, and the great warriors, and the great industry titans rubs off on you and suddenly affects you in the most positive way. We live in what I call the age of dramatic distraction. There are so many people busy being busy, but what’s the point of being busy around the wrong things? That’s like spending the best hours of your best days climbing these mountains only to realize at the end of the next quarter, at the end of the next year, at the end of the next decade, or perhaps even at the end of your lifetime, you climbed the wrong mountains. Peter Drucker said it beautifully. He said, “There’s nothing so useless as doing efficiently, that which should not be done at all.” Confucius may have said it even more elegantly when he said, “Person who chases two rabbits catches neither.” And in this age we live in right now, there are so many people addicted to their devices and chasing trivial things. You want to develop a monomaniacal focus on the few things that count. With your learning, master a few books versus skimming 50 books. Socially have 3 great, loyal, fantastic friends versus 10,000 digital acquaintances. Go deep in love versus really, really wide. And definitely do not confuse being busy with genuine productivity. There really is a difference between fake work, checking your phone, being available for every conversation, and skimming the surface versus doing heroic work. I guess what I’m encouraging you to do is to refuse to be a Maximalist and to begin to be a minimalist.At work, do a few things at masterwork level. I honor your creativity and your productivity. Please remember, there are no extra people on the planet today. You matter. You have genius inside of you. It does take daily work, but small, daily, seemingly insignificant improvements when done consistently over time lead to stunning results. It’s not what you do once a year that makes a difference. It’s what you do every single day. It’s all about those tiny triumphs and those micro wins that steadily and consistently cause you to remember who you truly are and bring your brightness to our entire world
