Jeff Lerner: Hey, Jeff Lerner here and welcome to this newest video about how
to craft your perfect morning routine. I just want to say one of the greatest
fallacies in like coaching and wisdom and teaching is that it's not how you
start, it's how you finish. I think that's total hogwash, right? Because we
all know that it's a lot harder to play from behind. We do our best work when we
have time, we have flexibility, we have freedom, we have the creativity of
thought that comes from not feeling too under the gun. You don't go out and
lollygag for three quarters and get down by 30 points and think that's okay
because it's not how you start, it's how you finish. We'll make it all up in the
fourth quarter. That's a disastrous strategy. And the reality is the best
predictor, this is from psychology. This isn't just my opinion.
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If you're at halftime,
the best predictor of how you're going to play the second half is how you
played the first half. The best predictor of how you're going to finish
your day is how you start your day. In fact, how you start usually predicts how
you finish. So this idea that it's not how you start, it's how you finish, I'm
throwing it out. I'm saying it's total nonsense and that in fact, if we want to
achieve everything we have coming to us in life, we need to focus on getting a
really, really strong starts. That's why this video is going to be how to craft
the perfect morning routine to maximize your start to the day so that you can
maximize the value of every day.
Your morning routine. You know, I've studied success. I've studied successful
people for years now. And I can say if there's one common thread that comes up
in conversations and interviews, whether you're talking Tony Robbins, Tim
Ferriss, Oprah Winfrey, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. These
are people who I've actually watched interviews with and listened and taken
notes about how they do what they do, how they achieve what they have in this
world. There's one common thread and it's a specific intentionally crafted
morning routine. This I believe is the most common, consistent attribute across
all really, really successful people. I actually think that a failure to have a
structured morning routine is essentially throwing your life out to
chance and saying, well, I hope things work out. And if you know anything about
me or anything about my company, anything about our values, you know,
that we live by choice, not by chance.
I think that the choice to craft an intentional morning routine is a choice
to resist and reject chance as determinant of the outcome of our lives
and in fact, to choose our own outcome. So let's start with the word routine.
You know, where the word routine comes from? Routine, the root, route comes
from the word for road. It literally means the road or the path. It's simply
the road that you're on. Will Durant writing about Aristotle, it's a quote
that usually gets attributed directly to Aristotle. But he said, we are what we
repeatedly do. Excellence then is not a virtue, but a habit. We are what we
repeatedly do. And what we repeatedly do is walk down the road that we're on. So
if we want to be excellent, if we want to be successful, if we want to be
productive, we need to have a routine i.e. a road of success or production or
effectiveness that we walk down every single day.
That's all a morning routine is, is it's deciding what you want to pave your road
with, the road that ultimately determines the path you're on for your
life. Now, I mentioned all these successful people and how once I learned
that a morning routine is a pretty darn important part of being really
successful, I had a problem. When I did this study, I was in my late 20s and I
was tired of being broke. I was tired of being kind of a dejected loser and felt
like I was floundering in life. I was a musician. You know, let's be clear being
a really good musician is a lot of hard work. But it doesn't always mean having
the most rigorous and disciplined approach to our whole life. A lot of
musicians, at least my friends and I, we would go into our cave or what we called
the woodshed and we would shed on our instruments.
But like, I was not a highly effective balanced person at that point in my
life. So I was like, okay, what are all these highly effective and balanced
people doing that I'm not doing? I did my study, I took my notes and I
realized, well, they all have morning routines. Not only do I not have a
morning routine, I don't even hardly have a morning because I'd sleep the
whole thing away. Right? Like I'm staying up late, I'm at the gig. And you
know, and it's not that you can't adjust, you know, based on your
schedule. You can start your morning routine at 10:00 AM. But the problem is
I was waking up with no structure, no direction. In fact, for me, because my
gigs tended to be at night, I was dividing my day into like the time from
when I wake up to when I actually have to kind of start getting ready for work
and going into professional mode.
And that was usually like 6:00 PM. And then, so I didn't even really think of
my day starting until 6:00 PM. And I realized if I'm going to be successful,
if I want to have a life more like these other people, excellence, achievement,
respect, pride, confidence. If I want to have that life, I probably should maybe
try to make my life look more like theirs. And so I flipped it. I said, I'm
going to start, instead of feeling like I'm getting ready for the gig at 6:00 AM
or 6:00 PM, I started going, I'm going to start getting ready for the gig of
life at 6:00 AM. And man, it was hard. It was like pulling teeth to take a
musician who's been sleeping until 10:00 AM and who stays out until three in the
morning and who doesn't have to be anywhere first thing in the morning and
actually really reform that person, me, reform me into being an early riser and
a go getter and a disciplined action taker. Oh, it was the hardest year of my
life. But finally I did it. That was over 10 years ago when I finally dialed
into 6:00 AM. I can say that now I get up at 3:30 AM every morning.
I have a very specific morning routine that involves intention setting,
gratitude reflection and then it involves piano practice because once a
musician, always a musician. Then it involves going to the gym. Then it
involves time with family. In fact, I can reasonably say that I get more done
by 8:00 AM when my actual work day starts than a lot of people get done in
their entire day, especially when they're talking about things they do
that create value in their life other than their job or their business. With
that in mind, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about exactly what I
believe constitutes an effective routine and ultimately how to help you craft an
effective routine so that you can start your day and thus predict an effective
finish for your day most productively.
So in my company, ENTRE, which ENTRE Institute, we teach entrepreneurial-ism,
we teach, you know, success and how to achieve everything this world has to
offer in the modern economy. We have something that we call the Entre Way and
the Entre Way involves living what we call the Entre Day. And it's really,
really simple and everybody can kind of create their own flow within this
framework. And it basically is this, you want to start today with a morning
routine that includes very specific intention setting. And this is key. The
review of a plan that's already set. In other words, you don't wake up in the
morning and plan your day. You wake up in the morning and review the plan that
you've already created for your day which I'm going to explain in a moment
how you do that. So that's the morning intention. And then you try to check off
the highest value activities that you can within the flexibility of your
schedule.
For me, that's music time, that's gym time and that's family time. And then
throughout the course of your day, and this can be included in your morning
routine, we teach that you want to make very specific and meaningful deposits
into the three key accounts of life. So just like a bank account, you make
deposits into a bank account so that there's capital and there's cushion and
there's security that you can draw from when you need it. I think of the three
main accounts of life as your physical account, your personal account and your
professional account and that the more deposits you can make into those
accounts, the more there's going to be available when you need to make a
withdrawal. In other words, think of the gym, right? Those are, you're making
deposits into the physical account of your life. So then in that one moment,
when you're on a canoe trip and the canoe flips over and your kid is pinned
under the canoe and you're afraid they're going to drown and you have to
go lift the canoe off of them, you have the strength to do it.
In other words, you can withdraw from that account because you've been
depositing strength into that account every day by going to the gym, right?
That's just kind of a casual example of making deposits and then the money's
there or the resources are there when you need to make a withdrawal. So every
day you're making deposits in your physical account, your personal account
and your professional account. Personal, that means building a great marriage,
building great relationships, building good friendships, building connection
with your kids every day so that when your kid's doing something that you are
concerned about and you need to sit down and say, hey, listen, son or daughter,
we need, let's talk about this. And essentially what you're trying to do is
cash in on the credit that you've been building by making deposits in that
account every day. It's like the number one thing I see parents screw up is by
the time it's time to sit down and talk to their kids, there's no credit built
up.
They haven't been talking to their kids every day and becoming friends with
their kids and building relationships with their kids. So there's no capital
to cash in when they need to have a corrective conversation with their kids,
right? This applies physically, personally and professionally. So the
Entre Way, the Entre Day is a morning routine with setting intention,
reviewing the plan and then it's a physical deposit, a personal deposit,
and a professional deposit every single day, something meaningful, something
that accrues value, something that means that you're going to be richer in that
account when you wake up the next day. And then the fifth and final element of
the Entre Day is a nightly reflection assessment and planning session. So
every night, and you can literally do this in five minutes by the way, you sit
down, you reflect on your day.
You say, did I set my morning intention? Did I execute on my morning intention?
Did I follow the morning plan? Did I make a deposit meaningfully in my
physical account, my personal account, my professional account? If yes, great.
Write down a 10 and be satisfied and wake up the next day and go, sweet,
yesterday I got a 10. Today I'm going to get another 10. If you didn't do those
things, grade yourself. Write down a four, write down a six. And then the
next morning you wake up, you're going to see that little piece of paper. And
you're like, ugh, yesterday I finished with a six. I don't want to do that
again. I don't like the way it felt and you'll be encouraged to do better. So
like I said, reflection, assessment, that's the grading system, and then
pre-planning which means actually based on the results of the day and all the
other things going on, going ahead and setting the plan for the subsequent day
the night before. This is one of the greatest hacks.
And I actually got this from a book called The Mormon Way of Doing Business.
I'm not a Mormon. But statistically, there is a disproportionate percentage
of Mormons in key executive positions throughout the Forbes 500, 500 biggest
companies in the United States. And they did a study and they did a survey and
they started interviewing them. And they said, what are the common behaviors that
not only have allowed this group of people to achieve massive business
success but they also tend to have good relationships with their families and
kind of a set of practices that are consistent with this full fulfillment?
Again, I'm not Mormon, but I'll learn from anywhere, right? And in this book,
they said one of the most common themes throughout this book is that for
whatever reason, the people they interviewed would actually plan their
day the night before. And I was like, ah-ha, light bulb.
Man, that makes so much sense. The Navy Seals say, by the time you need to get
ready, it's too late to get ready. So get ready now. And for me, when I wake
up in the morning and you know, maybe there's emails, maybe there's phone
calls, maybe there's all this stuff to do. I have all, it's almost too late for
me to effectively create a plan for the day. It's helped me so much to have done
that the night before. So again, just to recap the Entre Day, morning, intention
setting and review of the plan and the routine, whatever that is. And we can
talk a little bit more about how to construct that. And then every day you
want physical deposits, personal deposits and professional deposits. And
then every night, you do the nightly review, assessment and pre-planning for
the next day.
Okay. So I hope that's been helpful for you and hopefully encouraged you that,
you know, a) here's a process for creating this routine and structure in
your life. But also, you know, and I could run down the list of names.
Hopefully, an insurmountable body of evidence that says all those really,
really successful people, they have these types of routines. Like Mark
Zuckerberg wakes up at the same time every day, puts on the same outfit every
day, does the same workout every day. Richard Branson wakes up every day at
sunrise, goes swimming or kite surfing around his island. Must be nice. Tony
Robbins wakes up at the same time every day, jumps in an ice cold bath, does his
breathing exercises, does his gratitude journaling. Elon Musk wakes up. I can't
remember what time Elon Musk works out or wakes up every day. Sees his kids off
to school, eats, skips breakfast.
Elon Musk doesn't do breakfast and he actually chunks his day into five-minute
increments. That's pretty intense. Works Mondays and Fridays at SpaceX, Tuesdays,
Wednesdays and Thursdays at Tesla. Works between 85 and a hundred hours a week.
Oprah Winfrey, Mark Wahlberg, the Hollywood actor, you know, Marky Mark.
He gets up at 2:30 every morning and has a routine that's all fitness and health
based from 2:30 to 10:00, goes to bed at 7:30. So again, you can adjust this.
Like I can go on and on around the list. In fact, one book recommendation I'll
give you is a book by Hal Elrod called Miracle Morning. Or if you want to skip
the book, I'll just tell you what it says. He has an acronym called SAVERS.
And it is a really good book. I listened to a whole thing on audio book and it
really inspires you as to the power of the morning routine.
But I can tell you briefly what SAVERS stands for. It stands for silence,
moment of silence; affirmations, saying positive things to yourself; V,
visualization, seeing the picture of your day well-executed; E is exercise,
not surprisingly; and then R is reading. He likes to read something every
morning. And S is scribing. He likes to journal every morning, very often in
documenting his gratitude. Like these are very consistent principles that you
find from high achievers over and over and over. Anyway, like I said, I hope
that I've inspired you to create your perfect morning routine as the footer
for your perfect day so that you can ultimately use it as the routine, the
route, the pathway to your perfect life. If you've enjoyed this video, please
give it a like. Feel free to leave any comments or questions below this video.
And I would invite you to subscribe to my channel. I put out new videos several
times a week, almost daily. I'm just committed to bringing you value and
trying to help you live as awesome a life as possible by sharing what's
worked for me. Thanks again for your time. I look forward to seeing you on
the next video. Take care.