The morning routine mindset has come to dominate the self-development and self-improvement industries. Men like Tim Ferris have made it their life’s work to understand the habits of high-performance achievers. They condense it and offer it back to the public with the message that you can achieve it too.
Nonetheless, most people will not go on to write the next great novel or make a future-defining medical discovery. Most people, want to live their lives with a sense of achievement, satisfaction, and impact.
They want to know they lived their best possible life and left a legacy. As a result, they dive into the world of people who are already doing that and doing it publicly, trying to tease out any amount of ingenuity from these examples that can be mimicked.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with this. In fact, learning from others (provided you use a critical mindset) is a surefire way to grow and develop into the person you want to become.
What about it?
A morning routine, however, is not the place for carbon copy. In the hype around what Michael Phelps eats for breakfast or what Neil Gaiman does each morning to support his writing career, we mesh together a bunch of stuff because a lot of people do it and we hope it will give us results too.
Here’s the problem with that: the whole point of a morning routine is to set you up for the life you want to lead, not the life someone else leads. This means that your morning routine cannot be a carbon copy of someone else’s. You must put the work in to decide who you want to be, build the routine that will get you there, and then you have to stick to it. It will only work if you are committed.
As Aristotle reminds us: “We are what we routinely do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.”
Here is a three-step process to building YOUR morning routine, with a little extra inspiration from high-achievers who break the mold of what we typically hear.
Know what you want to achieve
If a morning routine helps you achieve excellence and sets you up for the life you want to lead, then you must know what that life looks like. This holds true for what kind of person you want to be as well as what you want to do.
In other words, you might want to achieve some external metric of success like a promotion or an innovation, but it’s also important to know what kind of person you want to be when you get there. Human qualities or characteristics are also things to be developed and worked on.
In fact, they should probably be a higher priority than that promotion or innovation. Only when you know what you want to achieve and what kind of person you want to be when you get there, will you be set up for designing your morning or daily routines.
Make it Enjoyable
Humans are awful at committing to anything that brings them any measure of discomfort. In general, unless the immediate pay-off of the activity is higher than the levels of discomfort, humans don’t want to do it. (Anyone who has tried and failed and tried again to build any habit knows exactly what this is like).
Rather than building a habit, everyone else says you ‘should,’ get a sense of what an enjoyable morning routine would feel like for you. This goes back to knowing what you want. If you know what you want to achieve, start looking for those things that can help you get there and you’ll enjoy doing at the same time.
Start small, build up
Quality will almost always trump quantity. Developing a morning routine isn’t about chasing the sun. It’s about building a life that isn’t entrenched in the longing for the snooze button. It’s about becoming an active creator of your own life.
A sure-fire way to fail at this is to go too big too fast. Pick one or two things that you really enjoy and will help you achieve your goals, and start there. Only once these things are an ingrained part of your day, add more.
Developing a morning routine should be simple. It should be easy. It’s the first part of your day. No one wants to begin their day in misery.
Here is your challenge now: take out a pen and commit to paper what you want your morning routine to do. Next, figure out what enjoyable things you could do in the mornings to achieve that thing. Brainstorm. Go crazy. Finally, simplify it. Start with one or two things and just do that.
