The Million Dollar Morning Overview
Every January, many people are setting goals for the rest of their year. Some are making “New Year’s Resolutions.” I never cared for those because I don’t believe improvements to your life are easy to make through sheer resolve. Even the firmest resolve will dissolve without the necessary planning, lifestyle design, and effective self-management in place.
In other words, you don’t hit goals just because you wrote a number down on the wall to throw darts at, or put up a picture of a Lambo or yacht. You don’t even hit more concrete goals, like making 100 more sales calls each month this year, by simply “naming and claiming” them.
You have to establish habits to reach goals worth setting. It’s like painting yourself into a corner so that you have to reinforce your new habit with more action each new day instead of any of infinite other ways you could be going, as a matter of circumstances you set up that way in advance.
That’s why some people have said that I don’t believe in goal setting. It’s not having the goal in mind that will manifest it into your living reality. It’s cultivating the process that moves you closer to it, and the habits and routines that secure and fuel that process.
Getting what you want in life is not about having the answer, but finding the way, and moving it further along as effectively as you can.
Here’s how you can make 2023 a really amazing year!
After a tumultuous 2022, the bookend of an even more chaotic 2020 through 2021, this new year is a fresh start for everybody.
I recommend getting organized with some kind of calendar, day planner, an app, a stack of index cards paperclipped together with a pen, anything. Just make it something you can use to track new routines and habits you want to commit to that will move you closer to your goals.
For example, I have what I call my mental operating system.
It’s a handbook I keep that outlines everything about who I am. It lists my three goals for the quarter, professionally and personally.
It’s not that I don’t believe in goal setting. If you set goals and write them down, my hat’s off to you. Most people don’t even get that far along their entire lives!
I also recommend you get this ebook, “The Million Dollar Morning” by Jonathan Maxim, and go down to FedEx with it on a thumbdrive and print it all out. The cardstock makes it nicer than paper so I really feel reverent toward it. I kept it in the folder with my handbook and started carrying it around with me everywhere. When I went on vacation last week, the ebook on cardstock in my mental operating system folder went with me.
So, what is “The Million Dollar Morning?” I’m going to tell you about it in this post, but I highly recommend you get the entire ebook yourself.
“The Million Dollar Morning” Routine
Here’s a brief summary of “The Million Dollar Morning.”
The author was insecure about being a small guy for many years. He says he was timid and nervous weighing just 141 pounds, so he started working out.
In nine years, he packed on 29 pounds of muscle and fat. 25 pounds of it was raw muscle. That took him nearly a decade of hard work. He got up to 170 lbs with 7% body fat by keeping a routine that made him feel like a million dollars every morning.
That is all just in the introduction to the booklet. Then, “The Million Dollar Morning Routine” walks through the exact process, systems, methodology, and mindset the author used to achieve his results.
Maintaining yourself in peak physical health and fitness is the backbone of everything else in life. These foundations help support you moving toward your other goals faster. Besides, without bodily health and strength, achieving your other goals feels hardly as rewarding.
“The Million Dollar Morning” is more than a book about getting into good shape. It provides a mental framework to live by, to establish strong habits, and take control of our lives by seizing the day by our routines.
Deliberately Planning Your Morning Routine
Deliberately planning your morning routine to cultivate the habits that move you closer to your goals is an option. You don’t have to wake up on the defense every day and live a life of habitual reaction if you don’t want to.
You can start putting together a plan and making a definite inroad to building habits you will enjoy continuing and building forward. That is the way to set yourself up for real personal fulfillment and success.
It’s not just the planning. It’s the set up. You have to plan, then set yourself up to keep a habit going and growing in importance to you, so that it moves you closer to your goals.
When I first started in the fitness business running a fitness app, I was spending all my own money on investing in the platform. I was financially broke.
It was before I had had any big wins in business yet. Since I was in limbo, I started questioning why I was working out. Why was I meditating, journaling, and working out?
During those years getting started, I was struggling mentally and doubt crept in, taking the form of: If it doesn’t put money in my pocket why am I doing it? My main problem is I don’t have money right now. Why bother with exercising and journaling?
I ended up just powering through it. I told myself, “No, I’m just going to commit to this. I know the outcome will be positive.” Fast-forward six years, and those habits have cultivated all kinds of financial and personal benefits in my life.
During those early years I would wake up at 5am. I would meditate, do some push-ups or some yoga, and I would write in my journal.
My life was not really looking great on paper at the time. My business was not making money and I didn’t know for sure if it ever would. I was under a ton of pressure from investors and partners I was trying to entice to work with my platform.
Regardless of the stress and low bank balance I felt great every day! I actually felt amazing! My mindset was healthy. I was staying motivated and positive without immediate results to show for all the work I was doing. I could keep crushing each day in the face of immense challenges.
That’s why the morning routine is important. No matter where you’re at in life, if you are struggling financially, or if you’re looking to lose weight, or gain muscle, then you’re going to start setting standards for yourself and expecting improvement to come.
That way, your million dollar morning routine will start to become part of who you are.
A winning morning routine, that you can stick to, will take you from hurrying and being frantic and stressed to start your every day— to being calm, powerful, happy, and ready to rock.
How to Establish A Simple Morning Routine for Success
Here’s the strategy to establish a simple morning routine for success that you will actually follow through with.
Start small and build one or two habits at a time into your morning routine. What you don’t want to do is start out with all this enthusiasm for a stack of resolutions.
If you pile on five or six new habits at once and resolve to wake up two hours earlier and go for it all at once, you are likely to set yourself up for failure that way. It’s too much to bite off all at once. You might start out excited at first, but can easily find yourself deflated.
Most anyone can white-knuckle it for some days, or even a couple weeks, but the problem is it’s not sustainable. Instead, make each change small enough that you will actually follow through with it, until it becomes embedded into your routine automatically.
What I want you to do is start small. Don’t try to up-end your whole life. Try adding one thing or subtracting one thing at a time. (I actually liked removing habits from my morning routine to perfect it, more than adding new habits.)
When it comes to diet and nutrition, I recommend adding certain habits. When it comes to lifestyle stuff, I recommend subtracting certain habits.
Let’s say for example, you want to eat more vegetables to have a healthier diet – If you make sure you start your day with healthy food, in a good breakfast, you won’t find cravings for candy bars or other vices as compelling throughout the day.
Let’s say you want to have more energy during the day. It might help to subtract an hour of being a vegetable in front of YouTube or Netflix before bed each night.
That extra hour of sleep could leave you with an outsized boost in your daily life. If you find yourself tired all the time, or frequently too tired to live your best life, it’s at least worth trying.
But whatever you do, make these changes one or two at a time. Notice the results each day, and week by week you can gradually add or subtract more until you are following your own perfect million dollar morning routine.
Your life and outcomes are the results of your habits.
Much of the inspiration for “The Million Dollar Morning Routine” came from the book, “The Power of Habit.” It’s a New York Times bestseller worth digging into. That’s definitely a book worth grabbing if you want to go deeper into this subject.
The bottom line is, as tempting as it may be to believe there is one somewhere, there is no such thing as an ON / OFF switch for establishing a new habit or making a new routine a consistent part of your day.
You will simply hit that switch right back OFF again as easily as people hit the snooze button without three things:
- Whole-hearted dedication
- A definite plan of action
- Small steps of commitment
Whole-hearted dedication means you have no other lagging commitments in your heart that are contradictory to your new habit and no negative self-talk or doubts about really wanting it.
Your definite plan of action is something you can and must adjust to adapt and optimize. That’s a matter of being realistic, paying attention to yourself and your progress, approaching it all with the attitude of a problem solver, and continually refining your routines to move you toward your goals more.
A small act of commitment is something like getting a book or day planner, writing down goals and then tracking progress next to them in writing in a text document, or taking the first step in something you want to do the night before to get it prepared for an easy start the next day.
Otherwise, you will forget, meander, and then notice your resolve failed, which can easily knock the wind out of your sails with self-doubt and compromises to preserve your self concept against cognitive dissonance. This will kill a new habit before it’s even had a chance to take root!
A million dollar morning starts each night before!
The biggest step in every amazing morning routine actually happens the night before. You can ask any successful person whether they consciously plan that way or have just always been conscientious and organized to plan each day the night before. They will tell you it’s true!
A big part of that is the nighttime routine to support your mornings. Equally important is setting and keeping a bedtime based on waking up energized. How much energy you have when you wake up is greatly dependent on when you go to bed. People who don’t have that whole-hearted dedication to living their best lives will make excuses like, “Oh, I can’t fall asleep before midnight,” or “My body just won’t wake up that early!,” and so on.
A simple way to take control of your mornings, if you feel like they are already out of hand, is to just give yourself an additional hour each morning.
Wake up one hour sooner than you’ve been waking up. Say you usually wake up at 7AM and then get ready for your day in a stressful rush. Target 6AM for your new wake up time. That way it gives yourself an hour to perform the new morning routines that will improve your life.
If you are used to going to bed at midnight, don’t bother the first night trying to go to sleep an hour earlier. That could just lead to tossing and turning for an hour and frustration that disturbs your sleep the rest of the night.
It’s actually easier to just wake up an hour sooner consistently. Your body is apt to learn your new schedule and then you will naturally start winding down an hour earlier in the evenings.
You are at your strongest in the morning after waking up. Your cortisol and adrenaline levels are higher than the rest of the day. Your blood pressure and pulse are higher. You’re more well rested, so your mind is fresh to get work done that actually moves the needle.
Using your morning for personal and business development is an age-old “secret” to success. We all know that’s what it takes. Sometimes it takes studying exactly how from someone who’s done it, so that you can make this change in your life this year.
Hopefully this article got you re-energized about forming your new habits and reinventing your lifestyle in 2023 with a million dollar morning routine.
It’s also my hope that you take some specific advice from this article about how to go about establishing new habits and a winning morning routine. By putting some of these detailed suggestions into practice, you might find that it catalyzes a reaction in your life that gives you momentum toward your goals.
