Ask most successful people about their daily routine, and the common denominator that you’ll find in all their answers is that their day starts with an elaborate and uniquely crafted morning ritual. Successful people wake up early and devote at least the first 90 minutes of their morning time entirely to themselves. Contemplation, meditation, exercising, or journaling, they do whatever it takes to rejuvenate their mind, soul, and body, thus kick-starting their day with full energy.
But why are these first 90 minutes of the day considered so sacred by early risers? The sun is still on the rise at this time and most of the world around you is still under the blanket of sleep. The chaos is minimal at this time of the day giving one the perfect opportunity to focus all their physical and mental faculties on their self, before the rest of the world awakens and starts chipping away on their time and energy. The secret to a great day lies in how it begins in the morning. Your day can be as productive as you want it to be, and the drill starts right in the morning.
Set your morning alarm clock a little early and spend your first 90 minutes of the day doing the following.
Set Goals and Consider Them Done
The early morning time is an excellent period to make commitments to yourself for the rest of the day ahead. When setting goals, instead of thinking along the terms “I will do”, try and think along the lines of “I have done”. The idea here is to tell your mind that you’ve already achieved what you’re setting out to achieve for the day. When you make this kind of unwavering mental commitment, you leave no room for failure. Your mind has already processed the goal as accomplished, thus pushing you to act like it is indeed so.
Create A Conducive Environment for Reflection
Mornings are a superb time to tap into your intuitive and insightful mind and to let the creative juices flowing. If you think about it, the activation of this mind is critical in getting you where you want to be in life and career. Your creativity is what sets you apart from others. You have the ability to think differently and produce new thoughts, ideas, concepts, and works. All you need to do is stimulate your creative mind enough through a conducive environment, an environment that allows for great revelations to come through the depths of the mind to the surface.
So how do you create this divine environment? Here are a couple of ideas:
- Spend some time meditating. Give yourself a few minutes to connect the mind with the rhythm of the breath. Let your mind float in a sea of thoughts, not settling on any one thought though, but rather just accepting anything and everything that comes up in the moment.
- Follow up your meditative practice with some deep reflection about your future, your vision, your anticipations, and your dreams. Fresh out of a meditative state, your mind is ready for some thought-provoking activity.
- Keep a journal nearby to help sort though the mesh of ideas and thoughts. There will come at least one idea that will pique you enough to pursue it further. Use your journal for the exploration of this idea.
- Stay away from the artificial blue light of all your electronic devices like laptops and mobile phones. You shouldn’t overcrowd your mind with extraneous inputs at this time.
Value Each Morning Like It’s The Only One
If you’re trying to make each of your days count, prepare to make each of your mornings count too. Each morning should be treated like it’s the only one you have to produce something unexpected into the world. Having this sense of urgency can drive you to give wonderful results. The notion isn’t to force yourself to generate results. It’s about engaging and immersing yourself fully into the morning ritual, going in with the mindset that this is the only morning that’s going to matter. And it will have only mattered if it has successfully generated a concrete result.
Thinking like this prevents your mind from wandering around into unwanted areas and staying true to the moment. Mornings are a time that you want to use for deep self-awakening, not for deciding your plans over the weekend! To ensure that your morning ritual remains optimal as you intend it to, make it a point that you have a tangible outcome at the end of the ritual. Don’t worry about the size of the outcome, it doesn’t have to be breakthrough in order to be meaningful. Even the morning that fails to produce any output is significant as long as the work was indeed put into it.
You Need To Be Consistent Everyday
Not every morning is going to deliver a path-breaking and life-changing idea, and that’s okay. Because ultimately it’s not about the individual results that you get, but it’s about the collective power of these individual results working together in tandem that matters in the big picture. Think of this as solving a jigsaw puzzle. Each day you get a piece of the puzzle. Now this piece alone wouldn’t make much sense because the other pieces are still missing. But if you give up after this morning, you’ll never find the remaining pieces needed to complete the puzzle.
So what should you do? You keep working every morning, working to produce new pieces. A day will come when all the pieces gathered thus far come together as a whole and the puzzle is solved! This is possible only when you strive to remain consistent in your everyday morning ritual efforts. Get up early everyday and savor the first 90 minutes of your day as they are truly your own to relish. Make this a daily habit, as integral as brushing your teeth or eating your breakfast. You can think of it as a long-term investment in your own self.
Journaling is much like a ritual too. Just how you would devote each of your mornings to intellectual awakening, devote some time everyday to journaling too for your spiritual awakening. Writing bit by bit every day in journal is like building a skyscraper bit by bit every day. Even though you don’t see the skyscraper built in one day, you know that it’s what you are progressing towards.
This article was in part inspired by following article by Benjamin P. Hardy:
https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-to-maximize-the-first-90-minutes-of-your-day-b65158a40222
