SNM072: My Morning Ritual and the Habit of Success

speaker 0: 0:00 morning rituals and the habit of success of today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by converted the ultimate list building tagging and segmentation tool to find out how Convert Kid can change your business and w profits. Go to serve the master dot com backslash Convert kit today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated?

If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast, where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Lately I've been looking for episode, ideas and inspiration more and more from Cora, which, as I mentioned in the previous episode, is a website that very frequently people asked the same questions. It's where you go to us. Questions about business in life at anything in a lot of businesses make their entire living. Their entire source of traffic is Cora. They just answer questions all the time that lead people back to their website, so it's a very powerful marketing platform.

Yahoo answers used to be the same thing, but core has really taken over the last few years, and what's really great is you can subscribe to the categories or topics you like, and I might feed the same questions pop up, over and over and over again, over and over and over again. I see a couple of questions. I have $1000. How do I start a business online? Very common question over and over and over again.

But when I see even more than that, our questions about habits, success and mourning rituals like how do you start your day for a pattern of success? So as I'm sitting here at five in the morning on the DOT recording this podcast episode, I thought I could help, too, explained to help you develop a morning ritual that's very effective. There are certain things that we do when we start working for ourselves, we no longer work in an office that can very much hinder our success online.

Now you no longer have to get up at the same time every single day. Many entrepreneurs many online markers get up in a random time every single day. I have friends you get up to in the afternoon. I have friends who get up at six. In the morning and everywhere in between. This morning, I woke up at 4 a.m. I've been up for an hour already. Kind of letting some ideas swirl. And the first decision is Are you going to have an alarm?

Are you gonna have a time? You get up every single day. For a long time. I didn't have this. And really, I only started building a little bit of structure in my life as I got to the second kid. Even with the first game, we were pretty fast and loose about bad times and everything. But with two kids, you just can't get away with that a lot. You have to be a lot more strict, a lot more structured because Children really need those sleep cycles.

So for me, I wake up around the same time every day. I usually wake up sometime between four and seven. Very rarely do I wake up all the ways. Latest seven. It's funny. When I was younger, I used to dread the idea of waking up that early. Now I'm wake way before seven all the time. Five. In the morning, just the first hint of that pre sunrise in front of me, and I'm up recording this special episode for you.

I'm not a big believer in the Net necessity of an alarm clock, but it depends how much structure you need You. Baber will need to start with some very specific structure and wake up in a specific time and have everything tied two o'clock. There are certain things about my day that are very, very structured. I wake up a little bit loosely, but I'm always working by six or 6 30 every morning at 7 30 I have breakfast at noon.

I have dinner at five PM at noon. I have lunch at 5 p.m. I have dinner every single day, very structured, so I do have way points that are very specific. Every day. 3 p.m. I stopped working to do something athletic with the family. Go in the water, usually almost always in the water.

Occasionally I ride my exercise bike if it's raining or something else more and mawr in the mornings, I've started to add in a little bit of exercise, changing a little bit of my regime. Lately, I've been doing Cattle Bell or yoga DVDs. I don't really have the patience for an entire, like what? Our yoga session. I wish I did. I used to do that, but I've been having in yoga in so long them rebuilding.

But nice 20 minute session kind of warms up the body and gets things going. I do recommend starting your day with some light exercise. It activates your body, gets the blood flowing. You don't need it. I need to break a sweat, even if you just go for a little bit of walk. It's very tempting to slip in the morning straight from that into the chair. And I'm so tempted to do that because I sometimes just want to jump into work.

I woke up a couple hours I woke up to in the morning at first and I needed to check something on the computer and actually had to send a few Skype messages, and I noticed that one of my Skype was frozen, so that's always a problem in and missed a bunch of messages, which turned out to be true, and I restarted it. I was tempted to jump on email. Then. I don't know if I start emailing now that my day it'll be thrown off.

Some of my work days do started to am. So when you start your morning, you want to have a few things in place. We all have a morning ritual. Even if we deny we've got wake up, we go to the bathroom. We brush our teeth, whatever that rhythm is, so start your day and adding things that you do right when you wake up whenever I wake up, I then go into certain patterns.

My day normally starts with doing a little bit of research for a podcast idea, recording that podcast sometimes every court to podcasts and wrote to make sure that I stay ahead of schedule so that my podcast team has time to edit each episode of Repair the audio four minutes. Time to write show notes for me.

Now they're helping me now with show notes, which I'm excited about having those things taken care of, opens up and provides me with a lot more freedom to do some really cool things. I'm actually really excited. The first show notes came out just They just send them to me in there for the previous episode, and I'm excited by the episode 67 is the 1st 1 where I've shown notes from this team, and I think it's gonna be really, really, really good.

I'm going to use it to do some amazing things, but I don't want to get off track. So the morning ritual, right? I have the things that I need to do if I don't record my podcast episode of five in the morning. If I don't record right now, I don't record later in the day. I know that about myself as much as I seem like a very disciplined person, actually, not very, very, very bad now.

It took a long time to get where I am, and I'm at a point where my sense of self is different than everyone else's. I was talking to one of my friends. Jesse, another big author, runs a big publishing company. We're doing some really amazing stuff together, running Amazing contest starting in January, and we're hosting a big live event in March in America, so If you want to see me in person, that's the next time we'll be speaking.

Live might be the only live event I do in 2017 about sure. Maybe I'll end up doing too. But I very rarely leave my islands. And I was telling him, Oh, this morning was such a waste. I didn't get very much done. I've been working for two or three hours and only doing 50% of my attention, but I edited a new rough draft for my new book, My 20 k Book 20 came today. Book about writing fast added 7000 words in three hours in the re.

Right now I need to go through another pass because this was really taking the total rough transcript, the auto transcript of what I spoke and turning it into usable text. And he was just reminding me that my definition of not getting anything done is what most people would love to get 7000 fresh words done in a day. I just happen to know that it's gonna take me several more days to edit my way through this entire book.

That's okay, but it's just a reminder that I do have good structure. My life, I just always wanted to better having a set system in the order in which you do things. It's very important. I have my morning ritual the way start my day and I know that if I slip in certain ways, I'll fall into bad habits. So I have a specific patterns. I stopped for lunch because otherwise sometimes I'll work through lunch and then I'll start feeling sick.

If I don't specifically stopped at 3 p.m. I'll continue to work through the day and that will throw me off. And I don't want to work 12 14 hour days. I don't need Thio. I work that long not because I have two books. I just get in the zone on my work. These patterns we build our very helpful but the same time we could push ourselves too far. If we get really locked into work.

So you're developing your morning ritual is developing the way you start your day is set up systems as well so that you know when your brakes are coming. I have talked before and I talked about in 20 K again the Pomodoro technique where you can break up your day into different blocks, and there's a lot of different schools of thoughts and Pomodoro. Some people say Do 25 minutes of work, five minute break. Some people say 20 minute, 20 block 20 break.

You can try different time blocks and see if that works. You. That really doesn't work because my tasks aren't that linear. Maybe I should try it because I talked about it so much, and maybe I should actually try it again and see if now that I'm more discipline to be really good. But I start every day, check my email first thing in the morning.

I do all my email and Skype all of my coaching conversation, so I don't really work on my own stuff until I finish talking All of my coaching clients. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and it's two or three hours of talking to coaching clients. It's all about getting them prepared. Answering other questions. 19 Present time is putting them to the right videos. They need to watch that we can discuss and give them lots of guidance. It's reading work, drops all that stuff.

Sometimes it takes three hours of the morning, and sometimes it just takes 20 minutes. I check all my e mails and then it don't check email again for 24 hours. It's very important to control your communication habits. If you let email take over your life, it could become a big distraction. Construct the effectiveness of retired a few. Leave your email account open. We have a more connected to your phone.

You're going Bing, Bing, Bing, bing bing and it really distracts you in it destroyed your morning effectiveness. So having the way you start your day in a specific pattern really creates a path for success. So as Muchas people talk about the habit they do, it's more about the habits we don't d'oh! So develop in the habit of checking Remo once a day is really doing in the habit of not checking your email 24 more times a day. Setting these systems in place is very important.

You'll also discover there are distractions for you. For me, some of my distractions are video games, so my distractions are reading websites, news websites, some. My instructions are a few things like that. Watching movies or television shows these distractions for me have started to fade away as television and movie quality is really diminish. Its not. It's tempting to watch a movie when you know it's not gonna be good. But for each of these things, I use my distractions as part of my reward system.

Okay, I want to watch this movie. I'll watch it during my lunch break. Just putting a little bit of infrastructure in place will help you develop these successful morning habits and develop your morning ritual and again for me, the idea that when rituals more about what you remove from your morning rather than what you add to it, when you strip away all your extractions, you'll find it's very easy. One of the very common distractions.

And this is something that I'm lucky doesn't pull me in too much, and it's not possible to do here. But people will get up in the morning. They turn on their favorite morning news program or their favorite morning show. I used to listen to a very popular radio show in America that was three or four hours long, and you can get hold into these very long radio shows. Those shows are designed for people to listen to whenever they're commuted. Some people because there are net nationwide.

So people in New York or getting up at 7 a.m. But people in L. A are getting up for three more hours. That's why they shows her four hours long. We're trying to catch all three time zones in America, but it's very easy for me. It's very easy for you. Start watching this morning show and you're just one more segment, and it's so long it could eat up your entire morning. Suddenly you look at the clock and it's at 7 a.m.

It's 11 a.m. and it's gonna happen whatever time of day it is. The first thing I recommend the 1st 1st really powerful way to improve your rituals. To cut the cord, I recommend not having cable television big time. If you look at the cost of cable television and how much of that you watch, you can actually buy all the shows you want for far less.

You can subscribe to Lulu and Netflix, get all the shows that from a season ago, and instead of paying $8 a month, you're paying eight save a massive amount of money and really help. She was focused because when you're watching shows that you've downloaded or that Ron and DVD, there's a beginning and an end.

The thing I hate about television the most is that there's no beginning and no one you can turn on the television 25 hours a day I have to do is push up or down and to continue to have stuff. Same with the radio, actually more easily distracted by radio shows and podcasts. Now that can mess up my rhythm. So part of it is noticing. Oh my gosh, this is I enjoy this too much. It's affecting my work.

So as you look at these different habits, you have start to slowly room and say, You know what? I really like this show, but I have to be strict. I give myself 20 minutes every morning or, even better, the next levels to say I'm gonna wait until it's a download that I can watch it later. Now you might be saying, I've got a DVR set up and that's great. That's fine. Probably the DVR set up is you're still have cable right there.

You could easily flip back and with a DVR, we end up just trying to fill it, and we have hundreds of hours of entertainment so we can create the same problem. I'm not totally against the DVR. Definite think it's better than watching live television, but again, they're constantly changing the technology to try and slip in more and more commercials. The good thing about downloading.

Even if you don't love your show from iTunes for a $123 episode, it still ends up being cheaper than if you were to watch television live and pay for your monthly cable bill. Your monthly came a little so inflated with channels he probably don't even watch almost every single person with a cable connection. America. $15 of your capability goes for ESPN. Are you watching $15 worth of ESPN a month? Probably not.

You might be, in which case, it's a great value for you, but for most people, it's actually a really egregious and unnecessary channel. They rarely show sports, but how much talking blood sports do you enjoy? Very few people actually turned to ESPN for the sport stuff anymore because it's become far more political than a sport. See, and you you don't watch very many live games on. It's not like you watch football games or basketball games.

It spend shows very few of those that more and more there on the big channels. So unless you want to watch the lacrosse nationals or the paintball nationals, both of which I have personally watching ESPN in the past, think about what you're actually paying for and if it's giving you value or taking away. Sometimes I think these are the most money are actually terrible for us.

So controlling your TV habit, controlling your morning habit, removing the things that are too distracting if you need to do something in the morning. If you need music or a talk show while you're in the bathroom doing your morning ritual, go into the bathroom taking your shower. All of that stuff. Replace the radio show you listen to in the past with a podcast. The reason I say that is not because I have a podcast that I'm not actually recommending.

Listen to me, even though that's obviously flattering, but a podcast will have a fixed time. Most podcasts are 20 minutes long now. There are something like 123 hours. I don't listen very much because it's a big commitment again or you have chopped up into pieces, but you find one you like. That kind of fits the rhythm, and it's the length that works for you. That way the episode ends after 2030 minutes, and it's time for you to start your day.

This will prevent you from going down the path of listening to long going. Oh, wait, let me just see how this ends. We always want to see the ending if the opening loops. If the nested loops are too strong, we feel this huge urge that we have to finish the show. We have to finish the story to see how it completes. So wanna be sure we don't get pulled in anything that has strong open loops?

My current favorite show right now as faras, non reality TV and when I say reality TV, I only watch business shows where people invest money in companies and then something happens. So when I say reality TV, I don't mean watching people live in their house or that type of show or even I don't even watch those shows where you have to survive on a desert island. Why watches business? Reality shows, you know, which are definitely There's definitely scripted element because they pretend it's life.

But then they watch the guy walked up to the front door. The house. There's already camera inside the house, the live elements obviously not totally rial because the camera and got in the house first. So I watch those shows knowing they're slightly scripted, but they're a little bit reality based. But then for dramas, I like the show. Hopefully, if you watch us in the future will still be on. Also, likening it called up Does needed Survivor, but it's an intense drama show. It's very intense.

It's a very intense premise course. It's same guy that was the main star of 24. So they're great at hooking you with these really intense cliffhangers at the end of each episode, which is probably the best thing to watch for because being able to write cliffhangers is very important in this business. But I watched the show, but I've only watched three episodes, and by now they're private. 78 10 I don't know, there's been a bunch and I have.

Ah, but I have to be ready to watch you like this is gonna be an emotional journey for me. If I watch this episode, it's gonna take all of my engagement. I know it's not something I can watch on the side while working on something else. I mostly watch television while I'm doing graphics. That's the other habit. It's very important if you needs secondary entertainment and because of my I don't want to say a T D, because I think that's a little bit.

You know, that's a diagnosis, which I don't have. But when I went to the doctor and I did ask about it one time, and I'm very much a person who mult, gets multitasking or likes to be unattainable to replace ways at once. I'm the kind of person that likes to play a video game while watching a movie and then have a magazine in my lap to read while I'm in between levels. So that's the level of engagement I require.

I very rarely play video game without at least having a radio show on, so I'm getting at least two levels of input. I know what I can and can't do if I'm listening to anything with talking, there's a certain level of work that I can't accomplish. I can't write a book while the movies on Impossible About a 1,000,000 Years could ever accomplish that. And so learning your balance, learning the things you can and can't do is very important.

So for me, I can watch some TV shows while I'm doing graphics because it's not word intensive. It's just moving things around and stuff like that. But if the show's to engaging, I know that shows that have a certain level of engagement that are too high and I'll keep looking at it, then I can't do it. So learning the shows and learning how you interact with your entertainment is very important. For example, playing a video game. Most games you're playing PlayStation or Xbox something like that.

It's very heavily engagement. You can't do two things at the same time. I can't use my hands for something else. I can't write a book and play a video game. I can't dictate and play the game. I would love to do this podcast while playing a video game, but that would never be effective. My tension isn't able to spread that wide. And I know that people talk about multitasking, how they do five or six things at once.

But there have been extensive studies that show that people who multitasker actually far less effective than people who do one task at a time. So I don't try to go into full multitask boat instead of trying to do things in a linear fashion. Do this one, this one, this one. So I know the level of background entertainment I could have because you're giving home alone by yourself all day working 68 10 hours. Whatever phase you are in your business can be very boring.

You need a little bit extraction. So you might say I could listen to this radio show under and graphics. I have to listen to music while I'm doing this. And for this task, I can listen music, but it can't have any words. There's certain tasks I could d'oh! But the music has to have no words because even having words of the music will throw me off knowing your limits.

Doing your rhythms will help you to establish your patterns for the day, and you can turn those elements that require a lot of your engagement into rewards. That's why I don't work on graphics every single day for hours and hours. I'm constantly restructure my website, and recently I have been redoing a lot of the images.

You may have noticed that on added text to all of the images to make them a little more Facebook friendly, resize them to the official Facebook recommended size as well to try and increase my social because I am working on that. It's one of my pushes for the end of this year and next year to put all those things in place and do more and more Facebook advertising. And part of that is getting the graphics ready. So the website's already the formatting is ready.

As you know, I already did a massive change in the technology and a massive change in the background. So now that the structure is very strong, that the websites running faster, I want to do more and more things to increase the efficiency and increase the social share ability, increase traffic, all these things important, and it's just one piece of the time. So what I'm working on, adding all those banners, I could watch a little bit of television on the side on my second murder.

Now I can't watch a highly engaging television show. I certainly can't watch designated Survivor any show that's like that engaging while doing these graphics. That's something that I have to watch, what I'm doing, nothing else and learning that about yourself. It's very valuable, So learn the things that distract you in the morning. For some of us, it's not television, it's people. My kids can be very distracting. I love having my kids. Okay, I know it's a cliche and a narrow thought.

I'd be one of those guys, but everything I do with my kids is fun. Whether it's playing with Plato, which I like anyways watching movies, My daughter right now is very into the Pink Panther, which I think is a great cartoon. I'm very much trying to raise my kids on classic cartoons rather than modern cartoons, is loose with classic cartoons. You know you're gonna get you know what's gonna happen cause you've seen the mobile for with modern cartoons.

I just don't like to show my kids stuff that I haven't seen. First, I'm not watching with them to make sure there's nothing that I disagree with being taught to them. Certain shows these days, like tea, you know, teach adult themes to Children. I'm not into that now. The Pink Panther does smoke, so I forgot that I forgot that in cartoons a long time ago, characters smoked, so that's a little bit of the trade off. But he doesn't smoke except in like the intro part.

Not during the main episode isn't smoke very often. And when's the last time you saw someone smoking with those long cigarette holders anyways? So I noticed these things because I'm watching with her. But to be very easy for me to in the morning, fire some cartoons with my daughter and watch him all day. So now we have a rule in the House because she loves to watch movies, that she can't watch movies unless it's dark outside. That's how she knows it's okay to watch movies.

Now It's okay. Watch television with Daddy. We create that structure because very much I know she could turn into me. I don't want an indoor kid. I was an indoor kid. I don't want a videogame daughter. I don't want a video game, son. We live on a Paradise island. I want him outside as much as possible. Two days ago, I was with my daughter, my girlfriend. We're standing paddling and my daughter was screaming. She was so afraid of the waves. Now there weren't waves.

The water was ebbing and flowing. But where we live is a major surf island. So if there's no break, if there's no noise, it's not a real wave. The waves were like two in just three engines, like the water was just rippling and she was afraid. And I realized that we had been paying enough attention or nanny, and the people have been taking her outside and she has been swimming enough. She's a very strong swimmer.

If this fears coming up, it's a sign that one of our structures is weakened. So just as much as we set up structures for our Children, we should set of structures for ourselves, and that's the same thing I do. I have rules for myself and have similar rules for my Children to circle back, setting up rules for good and bad things. It's very important, setting up times when you can enjoy yourself and relax and setting up systems for staying motivated. Important.

What I really want you to focus on as you're developing your morning ritual is not adding in a specific order of things to you. Morning. It's very hard to work that way. Instead, we want to replace our bad habits with better ones. If I told you, stop watching TV in the morning and offered No replace, it will be very hard because your habits systems you're quitting. Habit System ISn't strong Is your starting a habit system?

It's replacing a four hour TV show with the 20 or 30 minute podcast. Replacing those long morning shows with something short, sweet and with a fixed end is a great way to replace the habit. It's much more effective than stopping. Have it replacing your bad habits with effective ones, replacing your morning. You know, talking to your neighbor for an hour, getting distracted with yoga for 20 minutes. And again, I don't like doing a thing.

It's like an hour long out of the patients for now along yoga DVD like I used to. One of the things that I very much avoid is talking to my neighbors too much because everyone here is on vacation. So if I start talking to a neighbour, it often turned into a very long conversation, and it becomes too much time that I'm wasting. I'm like, Oh my gosh, Time's person, 40 minutes. How do I eject from this conversation? I'll get back to work, not working.

I want to be doing something that I really like. Either hey on my kids or surfing or doing something, the water, something like that. So I have these hierarchy of what I want to be doing in the two charts. Really, things I really enjoy. This one chart entertainment charge things I need to do for my business is the business chart. When I go off script, it's not an effective use of my time.

As much as I enjoy chatting to people that did that for a very long time, I think about the effectiveness. Is this conversation gonna take too long? Sometimes it's anything you call family member, get stuck a little, and for four hours we want Thio avoid and break through these things that slow us down. If you have someone your life when you talk to. It's a long conversation. Move it from every day to once a week.

The conversation will be more fishing, more effective, and you'll get more of your life back. It's hard to say these things. I don't want to tell you to stop being friends with people because that's insanity. That's too much. And it's too hard to do. And there's a ton of negative reasons about it, even if there might be a long term positive. But I don't really like recommended that, but instead start to control and structure your conversations.

This will allow you to free up more time instead of worrying so much about the perfect morning ritual. Just focus on the task that you do in order when you wake up. So when you wake up, you go to the bathroom, you brush your teeth. You have breakfast. After certain about the time I, as I said, I always record my podcast first thing because I know if I'm trying to it later, I will do it.

I always do my email first, not because I think it's the best time to check my email. It's probably not. I'm checking my email like six PM American Time Zone are applied to people. Most people think I didn't email for day or day and 1/2 but it's the best time for me because the rest of the day is the worst time. If I try to check my email lunch time, it will be a distraction. I don't want it to mess up my other flows.

I like to do it and get it out of the way. I often don't even one of my email in the morning, to be honest with you. Some mornings ago, I don't wanna open. And what if I have a long email? Or what if there's a customer complaint? I've got a customer in a really long time, but I still have that fear. What if it's like a big problem?

I got an email yesterday from someone who was asked if I was ignoring her, and I wasn't it just I check my E mail once a day, and I tried to let everyone know that, and I thought I'd reply to her last email. Maybe I hadn't and just thought I had. Sometimes you know, there's a little bit of a miscommunication, but I never want that to happen. Anyone so you know. But it's a calm and it's a negative email a little bit.

I had to, like, say, no, that's what happened. I'm sorry if I apply your last team. I thought it did. Sometimes I just don't always have the right solution for everyone. In this case, it was simply, you know, she wanted something and I said, Oh, if you want to do that instead of trying to do with me Actually, I recommended a place we will be more profitable for. She wanted to be a book editor, and she's a very high price point. I said, They're people here.

Here's where you can find customers and clients at a good price point, there'll be a really good fit for what you d'oh! And it wasn't me. Trying to say I don't want to work with you is more me saying I think that you could make more money working in this way and try to give that up by someone was trying to help people make this much money as they can.

And so there was a little miscommunication and these things happen, but I don't want that movie in the middle of my day. So I get I do e mail in the morning to get it done with not because I look forward to it. Not because I enjoyed actually dread it. Even though I really have bad emails. I don't I don't know why I drive it so much. I just d'oh so sometimes have to sit there and say No, Jonathan, just push the button.

Just open up Thunderbird. Read that email. So these are the beginnings of my morning ritual. This is how I designed my morning and you should design your morning the same way. Remove the things that don't work. Replace those bad habits with things that are a little bit better, Turn them into rewards. Control how you spend your time. And this is how you could develop a morning ritual and the habit of success. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master.

Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts. Now, for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller. Serve No Master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the serve. No master podcast. Email your questions to podcast at serve.

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