The Miracle Morning is one of those books you will either love or hate. It’s a prescription for a productive start to the day. Whether you take that medicine is up to you.

This book is actually what inspired me to start getting up early. I realized I spent a lot of time after my kids went to bed just watching videos and sometimes playing games. I’d stay up until after midnight and wake up just barely on time to get my kids to school.

Now I wake up at 5 AM on weekends and 4:30 AM on weekdays. Now I have time to read Torah daily, work on real estate investing, journal, and read books and write posts about them (like this one). All of that happens before anyone else in my house is even awake.

Mediocrity

There’s no shortage of motivational quotes you could pull from the book, but as I’m not much for motivational quotes I’ll summarize some of his preface to the main system for Miracle Mornings.

Most people are mediocre. If you read the book, you probably want to be not mediocre. It’s as simple as that.

He also lists a few causes for mediocrity, all of which I agree with:

• Rearview Mirror Syndrome: Constantly reliving the past rather than taking lessons from it and improving. I, like everyone else, relive moments where I made mistakes. This finally gave that internal dialogue a name, and now I know when it happens I should try to analyze it and learn rather than relive bad emotions.
• Lack of Purpose: Without a true purpose, it’s hard to find motivation. For many people, like me, this is family. You may also want to do something to affect the lives of many people, like mentor struggling students or help veterans reintegrate and find jobs.
• Isolating Failures: Pretending all failures are isolated incidents. Ignoring patterns of failure is to your detriment. Consistency and not making excuses is key. One book readers may find useful is Discipline Equals Freedom.
• Lack of Accountability: Going it alone is significantly harder than improving in a group. Most people will fail alone, but with an accountability group the rate of success improves dramatically. Some people would choose a larger community like My TMM Community while others can just form a secret group with friends. Another common recommendation is to publicly post your commitments (this is all getting a little meta…).
• Mediocre Friends: You are the average of your friend group. If your friends are all deadbeats, you will likely be one too. If you want to get better at something, you need new friends that are better than you. This one can be a tough pill to swallow. I haven’t cut anyone from my life, but I also don’t think it’s necessary to drop people on the floor. Instead, incrementally more time in networking can help. Common advice here is to join a mastermind group or a business networking group like GoBundance or BNI.
• No Personal Development: Most people don’t explicitly develop themselves professionally. Physically, people try, but failing diets are more common than air. The problem is consistency. Small increments over a long enough time compound to enormous results, however it can take a while to get noticeable results. This year’s personal challenge is a way to force this development on myself.
• Lack of Urgency: Nothing is handed to you in life, you need to work to get anything of value. If you spend all your time consuming content, you can never spend time creating something of value. I mentioned the time tracker in my intro post to this series. That spreadsheet helped a ton in figuring out where all my time went in the day. Track your time, find the waste, eliminate it.

Mental State

Mental state is critical in starting and continuing work toward long term goals. I have personally found Discipline Equals Freedom to be helpful in preparing mentally to attack personal goals.

The Miracle Morning also focuses on mental state. Hal Elrod mentions that he was able to sleep less simply by altering his mental state before going to sleep. I tried this, and it seems to work, at least somewhat. I doubt I could get by with an hour, but about 6 is just fine. This means I’m asleep by 10:30 PM for my 4:30 AM weekday wakeup.

Part of the psychology behind the Miracle Morning is to create personal success immediately and the move on to success in every other area of life. Speaking of:

S.A.V.E.R.S.

Hal goes into a lot of detail on the 6 components of the Miracle Morning, but briefly they are:

• Silence (or prayer)
• Affirmations
• Visualization
• Exercise
• Reading
• Scribing (journaling)

It also talks about a 6 minute miracle morning instead of an hour one, and the value of customization.

In my case, I have yet to add in affirmations and visualization, and generally I exercise in the afternoons now. I do the Goruck Sandbag and Ruck training and it can be highly variable in length. My current schedule is:

• 30 - 45 min Torah study: This includes the daily reading, commentary, the daily mitzvah, and Hebrew reading practice by reading psalms.
• 5 - 15 min journaling: This is time to just start writing. Whatever comes out is what needed to come out.
• 15 - 60 min reading: So much to read, so little time.
• 15 - 30 min knocking out tasks that need to be done. This might include booking an upcoming trip, filing receipts for reimbursement at work, or responding to critical emails.

See Also

Hal has a lot of extra material at his website. If you want to know more, just read the book, it’s really short.

There’s also a few places online you can find the cheat sheet with all 6 of the S.A.V.E.R.S. items listed. This can help guide you when you get started.

Read Also

• Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink
• Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy (post)