Self-Help Daily Digest

I love receiving daily updates from Brian Johnson. He reads self-help books and synthesizes them into brief summaries and videos. A lot of the concepts he covers are things that I grappled with in my twenties--things that now enable me to set ambitious goals and break them down into smaller next steps. 

One of the updates from last week is still something I'm thinking about:

------from Brian Johnson------

“The key to becoming world-class in your endeavors is to build your performance around world-class routines. It can be difficult, even futile, to predict or control what will show up in the middle of your workday. But you can almost always control how your day starts and ends. I have routines for both.”  ~ Darren Hardy from The Compound Effect This. Is. HUGE. (Seriously. Huge. (!!!)) We need to “bookend our days” with awesomeness. I’ve never seen anyone articulate this as well as Darren does in the book where he walks us through what he does in the morning and night. Super inspiring stuff. I call my bookends “AM Rituals” and “PM Rituals.” In reality, the PM Rituals drive the AM so we’ll start there. First, Alexandra and I practice what we call “digital sunset”—all electronics go off when the sun goes down, along with bright lights. We eat an early dinner, go on our family walk (we’ve missed maybe 5 nights in the last 2+ years) and get ready for bed right after putting the little man to bed. As I’ve mentioned, I like to make going to bed early a sport. Why? Because going to bed super early let’s me *easily* get up super early and get more done before the family gets up than I used to do in a pretty good day. That’s the PM Ritual side of things. Again, not checking out ESPN.com (or whatever) at night on my iPhone is one of *the* key reasons I get up feeling so great. AM Rituals: I get up early without an alarm. This AM was a little nutty early: 3:30 am. (But I went to bed at 7:00 pm so it wasn’t a big deal.) I meditated for 20 minutes. Did yoga for 5. And immediately started working on this Note—which I had decided end of day yesterday would be my #1 for today. It’s 5:45, I’ve been cranking on it since 4:23 and making great progress. (Sidenote: I found that it’s UNBELIEVABLY easier to write/think/etc. first thing in the (super early) morning when everything is quiet and I just meditated—I can crank out stuff in a fraction of the time vs. later in the day when my mind is full/distracted. Highly recommend it.)It’s *really* hard to have a bad day with those bookends. And, stated positively, it feels REALLY good to just crush it and get the most important things done first. We’ll have fun going off on this more. For now, how can you bookend your days to create even more awesomeness?! Get on that! Dig that Big Idea? You’ll probably enjoy Brian’s PhilosophersNotes. Imagine the best optimal living books (ever) distilled into fun, inspiring, practical little Notes (6-page PDFs + 20-minute MP3s = more wisdom in less time). Throw in Optimal Living classes that bring the Big Ideas to life and you have Brian’s Optimal Living program--all about helping you optimize your life so you can reach your potential. Learn more here.

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