How do you design your optimal morning? Every night as we sleep and dream, we enter a profoundly altered state of consciousness, we process and integrate our experiences of the day. Rather than immediately jumping into tackling tasks for the day, or distracting yourself with social media, build a set of morning rituals that become your transition from being asleep to being awake.
TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] I feel like dreams or our sleep is like a very light version of a psychedelic trip. Right? Every night we go to sleep and we do have hallucinations, right? We see things that are not there. We experience things that are not physically real all in our mind. And in our body, we might feel dramatic feeling.
[00:00:19] Terror grief horniness pain. We might wake up and in shivers, sweated through and nothing happened. It was all these hallucinations that we call dreams. And it’s interesting because we wake up and we don’t want to deal with. What we just went through to most degrees. It’s almost like somebody that goes and does a psychedelic trip and goes to really crazy places and maybe has some very intense experiences.
[00:00:43] And the moment they come out of the experience, they’re like, let’s take a quadruple shot espresso. And let me start working on my emails. And it’s wait. Maybe you want to like talk about what you just went through, or you took a huge amount of a psychedelic substance. You were crying, you were screaming.
[00:00:56] You want to not process this, write this down. Maybe talk about. I think about it [00:01:00] a little bit now, whatever it was, whether it was expensive, but now I need to like go on with real life. I’m awake. Now I need to go. We would think that’s problematic behavior, right? That might not be good for that person to be running that fast away from such a profound experience.
[00:01:13] But that’s what we do every morning. The more we open eyes, we’re running away from what just happened. So of course in one way, dreams are typically not as bombastic and as intense as the rollercoaster ride of a psychedelic experience, they are much Tamer, much smaller, gentler versions. They can be.
[00:01:28] Oftentimes, they might not be as intense, but every time we go to dream and to sleep in our dreams, the collective subconscious, our subconscious God, whatever you want to believe, we are entering a different world, a world that includes metaphors and symbols, a world where we are experiencing our processing experiences or learning things, or trying to figure out different.
[00:01:49] To get an answer or receiving a different kind of answer. And we pretend that it’s almost useless. It’s like we wake up and we’re like, whatever it is, I don’t care. Let’s keep going. I had a [00:02:00] weird dream is probably one of the most spoken things about dreams. Anytime anybody ever says something about dreams.
[00:02:05] Most of the time, you’ll hear somebody say, oh God, we a dream, right? It’s very rare that you hear somebody go last night in my dream, I found an answer last night in my dream, I received a question I need to ponder last night in my dream, I went very close to accessing a pain or something that’s going on, but I can’t quite figure it out.
[00:02:23] I’m still have to go pregnant with what happened in the drink. You don’t hear that people don’t talk about their dreams is like this friend that comes to this wise family member that visits. That it has gifts to share insights, help experiences that are important. We talk about our dreams as these like weird unexplained stuff happens and you can just usually wrap it up and throw it in the bin.
[00:02:44] When you wake up in the morning and to just go on with your day, it’s like a fax machine while you’re sleeping, you’re receiving fax messages. Printing out a bunch of pages and you wake up, you don’t even really look, you just crumble all of it, throw it in the bin and go to the shower to start. Your day is faxing you, [00:03:00] right?
[00:03:00] Maybe it’s important. Whoa. I don’t believe that it’s God or aliens or the collectors of conscious. I just believe it’s my subconscious. Your subconscious is 90% of your computational mind power. When you think that if your super computer was printing out data and analysis, That you want to look at it and just go to your tiny handheld fellow to do the math.
[00:03:19] You’re like, yeah. But the problem is I don’t understand it easily. Like when I look at it, it doesn’t complicate it, it seems weird to me. So I just throw it away. Well, wouldn’t you want to learn how to process that data? Maybe it’s complicated, but it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. How much time did you spend trying to learn how to process that data that you’re receiving as faxes every morning?
[00:03:39] Like not just, not every day. 10 pages, facts with data and important information analysis. I just throw it away and then I go, why am I so tired? Why can’t I find the answers to my problems? Should I fly to Peru and take Iowasca and take three months off work sheds traveled to India. How much you look at those 10 pages that every morning with [00:04:00] facts and print it out through your body and mind and soul, right?
[00:04:03] Maybe there’s something really profound in there. Think most people. Not even say that all this is 10 pages of super information that it’s just difficult to decode that like random brain electric signals and the brakes closeup. Yeah. So white noise, all this is like a bunch of white noise, print it out.
[00:04:21] We know for a fact, no matter what model you believe in, we know for a fact, just purely scientific that sleeping and greens are incredibly important. Brain functions, body functions, one of the most important things that happen to reject. Repair and process the trillions of pieces of data and expenses that go through a whole day of living.
[00:04:42] That’s why we have to collapse into sleeping because we have to process all that fucking living and all that data in our greens. Our subconscious is processing and also messaging and communicating back to the conscious. And when we wake up the first hour of waking up and being awake, it’s a [00:05:00] huge window of opportunity for us.
[00:05:02] To start internalizing all that processing. If you just take the first hour of the day and you sit down and you make yourself a tea, no laptop, no phone, no TV, no instantly going to the gym, no music. You just sit there and you take like the first hour in silence, right? Maybe you go on a walk or something.
[00:05:19] You will start getting emotions, feelings, thoughts, and insights. That will be. Very much of the receiving sort, like all of a sudden, you’re like, I need to do this about my dad or shit. I need to figure this of this out. Or goddammit. I’m really depressed lately. Like I have noticed it, but I feel like shit, like I’m not in a good place.
[00:05:41] Something has to change. You’ll be able to now take all that magic that was happening while you. I sleep and unfolded in something that in the wake state of your life, you can now use and utilize and understand. And so let’s talk about, I laugh about like the morning pages, which for me is like [00:06:00] the ideal way of doing that.
[00:06:01] Just start writing, even if you don’t know what you want, I’m a writer. So you wake up in the morning and you do the 10 minutes of writing. I do morning pages. So right now I’m like 23 minutes off hall, just writing on paper. Whatever comes to mind. And oftentimes it’s, stuff’s like, oh, I don’t even know what to write right now.
[00:06:18] I already wrote about this yesterday, but then sometimes things come, right. That’s the interesting point. Yeah. Hour of being awake is really powerful and magical. So thing in bed for extra 10 minutes and doing a body scan. It can be really powerful. Sometimes you just go through, how do my toes feel? How does my feet feel?
[00:06:38] How does my knees feel like you just go through different body parts, take deep breaths, just check in how does my body feel? And oftentimes for me, even before I get to the end, there’s some sort of, oh, my neck is super tense. And then it’s like, I’m really stressed about X. And then I’m like, today I need to do this.
[00:06:53] And then I can get rid of this spike already. My mind then goes to places, but it’s like a super simple thing that a couple of minutes of [00:07:00] not jumping out of the. Immediately just staying there a little longer before you get up, then getting up. I don’t do the one in picture. I also stopped doing the 10 minutes of writing.
[00:07:08] Unfortunately, I want to get back to it. But what I do every morning is that I do write down my dreams when I remember them, which is, I would say maybe four days out of the week. I’ll remember my dreams and write them down. And then. Usually I write down how I feel. It’s the sort of thing that oftentimes starts very uneventful.
[00:07:25] Like it’s just, I don’t know, I’m tired or I don’t know, a little stressed or a little this, a little that, and sometimes it doesn’t lead to anything and sometimes it starts then I’m going to, because then I started writing a lot more. Maybe I do 10 minutes of writing all in like green and feelings and whatever.
[00:07:39] But that alone is like really significant, like really important. The thing that I’m not yet good at doing. Funny sometimes like design makes such a big difference. Just like where you lived your room, like little details, change behavior. Right? Sometimes we overestimate our own power and we underestimate how much our environment is [00:08:00] actually pushing us into the laptop.
[00:08:02] But I noticed this so strongly. I was living in a different Airbnb for the first two weeks when I was back in Austin, that Airbnb was on the ground floor and right next to it is a hippie hipster coffee shop. That is a cool vibe in the morning. And so I would wake up and after writing down my thoughts and dreams, first thing I would do is just walk out, open the door and go across the street and order coffee.
[00:08:23] And then I would sit down at one of those tables and the people that were. Good vibes. Like there were usually like a bunch of people that were there every morning, having coffee together, and then all kinds of people that work there or something there was sit there, listen to music or listen to the inner work podcast and write down some notes and just take the first half an hour.
[00:08:40] Just chilling at that coffee shop. Now I moved to a penthouse apartment of the 36th floor that has. Incredible views, but like the thought of having to go down the elevator, walk out this building, and I’m more downtown. The coffee shops that are here are just they’re cooling hipster, but not the kind of place I want to hang out and sit there.
[00:08:59] [00:09:00] So I walk in, get a coffee, but then I come back to the apartment and that alone is. 30%, less quality of life. And I’m in a much nicer place. I’m in a place that is like very Instagram, very like impressive use. But in the morning, I was so much happier over there in that tiny little apartment in the ground floor, because the magic of opening the door, it’s sunshine and a walk across the street.
[00:09:20] And this is like a cool vibe, open air coffee shop. I grabbed my coffee, I sit down and I think, and I ride it. It was so much, and now I’m like in this downtown area, No place that would be like comfortable to sit and to hang out and much more like skyscrapers in city, busy sturdy streets is like a totally different vibe.
[00:09:37] Since I’ve moved here. I’ve struggled in my morning routine because I would like to instantly after writing do my yoga, but these days I actually do my hour of yoga. Typically around 11 after I’ve done my morning calls 11 or 12 and at 7:00 AM, for whatever reason, I don’t have it in me to do the hour of yoga.
[00:09:56] I’m just not feeling like I want to do this right now. And I’m not feeling [00:10:00] I going out or when I go out to go out and pick up a coffee and then I come back and then I’m just here. And then I either go to the laptop a little too earlier to my phone, a little too early. 20 minutes of my morning are pretty solid, but the next 40 minutes of the first hour, I feel like these a lot to be desired, but I love the idea of writing in the morning.
[00:10:18] I love the idea of doing a body scan in the morning. I love the idea of do yoga in the morning. Like I’ve done yoga. For months now, first thing in the morning. And it’s amazing when I do it these days, I can’t, for whatever reason, I’m just not emotionally ready to do that. But I’ve also started, I don’t have my phone in the bedroom that I go to sleep, but in the mornings, oftentimes I would, after writing down my dream and some thoughts, I would go to the phone and pick up and quickly check my messages.
[00:10:44] I will go through four apps and I will give each app a minute, but I will go through them like Twitter, slack, email messenger, and. And even that it might take me years or months a week. So maybe I’ll never get there on me. Maybe I’ll get there tomorrow, but I like the idea of the first [00:11:00] hour, not having any phone interaction, not having any laptop interaction, first hour, be busy with something else.
[00:11:06] Process. Also the waking up process is so fucked up. Now, if you think about, again, like you’re in a deep sleep, right? You need a transition period to go from being awake, to going to sleep. And you should have a transition period from being asleep to waking up to being in fully awake mode. Like you need, those transitions are really crucial.
[00:11:26] Most people are awake, awake, awake, and then. Flip the switch and be instantly asleep. So they’re like on their laptop checking email on their phone, texting, watching TV, and then they want to walk into the bed, fall in and sleep. It’s a very activating, awake, stimulating state and then instantly go to sleep and then they people have trouble with their sleep and how they sleep.
[00:11:46] Or then they’re like, I haven’t dreamed in 10, 20, 30 years. Like I don’t dream because probably the transition period is also missing to some degree to get the kind of sleep, to be able to access the information that happens in the sleep. And I’ve done this a million times where. I wake up [00:12:00] and literally I would jump out of bed, but not jump out of bed in a enthusiastic that another day in paradise, but jump out of bed as if I’m like mother fucker.
[00:12:09] Let’s go. I need to go with that kind of aggressive. Western attitude, mother fucker let’s go. It was just like wake up out of bed, opening laptop, putting on music, making coffee, tipping a like crazy. The thing it’s about that. Fucking what are you doing? You were hallucinating. And then half comatose states, like two minutes ago, maybe on a jump with both feet into hyperactive action.
[00:12:34] Take some time to transition, to really awake to the day, to awake to yourself, to get. Base to feel, to have insight, to process things, to make plans, or have a vision for the day or think through, and then go in attack the fucking day, kick its ass, do stuff, be awake, be active, but like this, you wake up and ask yourself 10 minutes after you wake up or 15 minutes after you get out of bed.
[00:12:57] Like how indistinguishable [00:13:00] does that state of view look like from five hours after being awake? Are you just like. Shower brush teeth coffin, judge electric, starting to work or starting to do that’s too harsh and too hasty of a kickstart into the day. And it will, it won’t lead to optimal basis. It won’t lead to great insights and you’re cutting out this massive source of power, of insight of regeneration, which is your sleep.
[00:13:22] You’re cutting it out. Or you’re diminishing the returns you could be getting on every minute of sleep and think about how many hours we sleep. Right. Like most people that say I sleep eight hours a day, but let’s say even if you just sleep six or seven hours, what do you do? Six or seven hours in one uninterrupted block of time.
[00:13:40] Almost nothing. Not even work. Like you do take a million breaks from work or chit chat or message or go to the bathroom. We’ll go grab a coffee or a daydream. I’m with my kids at home. Yeah. For six hours. That mean present uninterrupted, never thinking about work. Nothing. We do nothing for six, seven hours of uninterrupted time, but we sleep.
[00:13:59] Let’s get the [00:14:00] biggest return out of that investment of time. That’s the really regenerates, rejuvenates, refreshes processes us. And you can only do that if you give them. Morning time, a special place to really awaken to the day, awakened to yourself, process how you feel process your sleep before you get into action Jackson mode.
[00:14:20] Um, like last time when we talked about ownership dreams, who was also somebody coming and visiting you and you weren’t exactly super happy about it. Parts of me that I’m ashamed of, that I’m not comfortable with that I’m judgmental about. And they’re represented in these people, friends, whatever. And it’s, I didn’t invite this to come.
[00:14:41] I didn’t want this to show up here. Now I have other plans. This is inconveniencing me. I don’t want others to see that. There’s also oftentimes a, I don’t want others to see. I didn’t have that with a dream of that friend, but I often have that. I don’t want others to see that person, these like unexpected uninvited visitors that are creating things.[00:15:00]
[00:15:00] Stress that creates for me, that is unnecessary, unless you are ashamed, afraid, and worried, versus when you are loving, accepting, and relaxed. Also having that attitude that they’re fine. Like they’re going to be fine. Even if I’m hurting them, they’re getting hurt through me, but it’s like, they’re gonna recover.
[00:15:18] Like I don’t have to worry about these parts and I don’t have to be ashamed of them. It’s all good. It all comes from this place of feeling a shit. For certain sides of meal, parts of me for sure. Oh, what else is funny about dreams and also similar to psychedelic experiences like this. Sometimes you experienced something that, that you can’t bring back to here, but there’s just some kind of like a shadow or an echo of it, but you really can’t.
[00:15:43] He tried to describe it or even clearly remember it, this just traces left. Yeah. Sometimes when I get into like lucid dreaming during the day, this happens very rarely. But once in a while I’ll be feeling very not awake. And then I’ll lay down and instantly being like a lucid dream [00:16:00] state. And I had this today, actually I laid down and I instantly realized that my body needs to shut down a little bit.
[00:16:05] And I instantly went into lucid dream state. And I know I knew important things were happening. I was at a significant place hearing something, seeing something, but then the moment I opened my. I just had the feeling where I just was really important in something, but I could not access it at all. Like I could not see the pictures clearly.
[00:16:23] I could not hear anything clearly. And you have to just make peace with that and be like, it was what it was. I was there even if I don’t remember, but yeah, I do have that too, for sure. So interesting to me now, when I talk to people and at this recently, when I was in Utah and I talked to people and people go.
[00:16:40] You have dreams? I don’t have dreams. I never have dreams. It’s like a, it’s interesting because yeah, lots of people say that. And it’s interesting because purely scientifically, it’s not true. Everybody has dreams. Like you not have dreams. You just don’t remember your dreams. But it’s so interesting because I went through it wise were periods of my life, where I remembered my dreams every [00:17:00] day.
[00:17:00] And I had decades before and decades in between where didn’t remember a single fucking dream. So no, both things into, to me. Clearly in my personal experience, the difference between the two is how connected you are to your subconscious. Are you meditating? Are you journaling? Are you having quiet time?
[00:17:17] How do you go to sleep? Do you go to in a peaceful transition Tori way or you falling asleep on the couch while watching television? That is what then, at least for me, I think played a part in, did I have dreams or not? Did I remember my dreams or not? Because at times we very mindful, I started remembering all my dreams and at times where I wasn’t, I just don’t access any of my dreams.
[00:17:39] And so that’s also a crazy effect that there’s many people out there that would say they never have dreams. They just never remember anything. I don’t think I have a hat lecture period. So it’s interesting in Thailand it’s different culture. They have a very different relationship to dreams and they actually can get very excited in this grownups about their dreams and they attach a lot of meaning to it.
[00:17:59] And [00:18:00] some of it is kind of silly, right. And it’s like fetal dream about something. And then they go and pick a lottery number. So there’s that. But I do like this paying attention to you. Yeah. I think one of the reasons why you’ve always had it is because you’ve also always been pretty mindful in some ways.
[00:18:15] Like you don’t have a lot of mind, but you’re full of it. You know what I mean? Even as a child where you may be smoking a lot of weed, you’re smoking a lot of weed and going to the library and reading fucking by doing the same period was on the couch, watching television from 1:00 PM to 11:00 PM, eating chocolate and snacks, not moving and going to sleep, you know, right after.
[00:18:38] I didn’t dream. I didn’t remember my dreams. You were always reading a lot, which is, I think is a sort of meditation, a sort of have dream, have vision state, a sort of mindfulness practice, because even if you’re in a fantasy land and in dislike whatever state and you’re in the story of these people is such a quiet environment.
[00:18:58] It’s such a [00:19:00] focused environment and it’s so different from any other kind of stimulation in terms of reading on your phone, watching TV. Playing video games. It’s a very different reading versus all that kind of shit. And I remember back in the day when we were really young and we first became friends and then you moved in with me, I remember like I would wake up with my friends, hung over from the night before starting to television music on.
[00:19:22] Top stirring shit like instantly that like junk world. And you were like a monkey you’re waking up going out for war, coming back, making your ginger tea, sitting down, reading a book. You’re just like a fucking we’re like what? A kind of a weirdo sitting there in the corner, on the floor with a handmade ginger tea.
[00:19:42] Piece of fucking broccoli and reading a book and journaling. I was like drinking at red bull as the first thing within the first minute of opening my eyes and watching television. And to start my day, of course you’ve had dreams. And remember that for me. Fucking break. I do think though, you just [00:20:00] made the strongest argument for everybody should spend more time on the couch, listening to you because look how we turned out.
[00:20:05] Yeah. I think that you took that very little potential. You had a group. I think I probably could have been at Elon Musk and minimized for what I am today. Ken’s really, you don’t know what the starting point was that they got us started. I mean, thinking about where I’ve come from. It’s also nice because when you come from such a shitty place, like everything you do is like magical improvement.
[00:20:28] Some of the things that I had to work very hard to make part of my life, or to let go in my past, I think that people will never have like other people just like they grow up with that. They’d never had to think even about this as a thing it’s like me bragging about having learned to take a shower and brushing my teeth, basically.
[00:20:43] Like I had to learn to do these things mentally, emotionally, I didn’t know how to do any of this, but I should have come a long way. There’s magic in the morning. The morning is a really powerful, beautiful time. I remember we had talked about this when I was going through the miracle morning. There’s some book and online community around it.
[00:20:59] The basic [00:21:00] thesis is wake up a lot earlier, wake up before the sun goes up and I used that time to do all the things you never have time for. And it’s not that you should sleep less. You should just go to sleep earlier and wake up earlier because at night you’re most likely a wasting your life away.
[00:21:13] You’re not doing anything useful at 11:00 PM at night, anything valuable in, in the morning, you’re probably going to be able to do some really important, powerful stuff before the stress and the noise of the day starts. And that premise is perfectly it’s timeless wisdom. It’s been around forever. He packages it up nicely in that book, but I had two children.
[00:21:32] And I was responsible for the morning hours of taking care of the kids. And my kids did not wake up in a synchronized way. One was a newborn baby and the other one was like two years old. And so they wouldn’t wake up in the range between six 40 and seven 30. One of them. It was a different time every day.
[00:21:47] And every time I wouldn’t be awakened by a crying child, it’s not a very pleasant. To start your day, very stressful. You instantly a jumping up and running to the child, so it doesn’t wake up the other child and the mom, and then you have to like change diapers [00:22:00] and feed. And I’m still like, I haven’t showered or brush my teeth.
[00:22:03] I was just awakened 30 seconds ago. Like I’m not ready to be a fully functioning parent in the kitchen doing all these things. So I was just hating my mother. Then eventually I read that book. I thought, fuck it. I’ll try it out. I really like when I would come home after work, I was so toasted, so exhausted that I would just sit there and watch fights to like midnight.
[00:22:20] This is not doing anything useful anyways. So I started going to sleep at nine or 10 and wake up at five 30 and it was magic five 30. Everybody’s still asleep. Put on my stuff, clothes that are pre-prepared in the living room and I would walk out and there was a Starbucks 10 minutes away that was open.
[00:22:36] So just walk in the darkness to the Starbucks. I would grab my breakfast, sit down and then it would read for 10 minutes. I would journal. I would make my plan for the day. I would do a little bit email. I would do this and do that. And then I would walk back home and would try to be at home at 6 45. And it was sit down on the couch and I would meditate until the first shot wakes up and my meditation, which has stopped when the first child cried.
[00:22:55] But then anytime the child cried, I was actually excited. Fuck. Yeah, let’s [00:23:00] go. I was ready. I had brushed my teeth. I had my breakfast. I’d worked. I felt productive. I plant, my dad said some report emails. I came back, I meditated and now I would walk into that room with a big smile and be like, all right, buddy, let’s go.
[00:23:11] And it was just feed and do all this stuff and have real pleasure spending that time with my kid. And then I would come to work and I’d feel ahead of everybody. And I felt amazing. That was such a game changer. Waking up ahead of my children and really getting in the morning hours. There’s something powerful.
[00:23:26] Beautiful, because it’s so quiet. It’s also terrifying if you’re not in the right state of mind, right? If you are living the kind of live right now, where constantly have to overshadow all your thoughts and emotions with noise, with distraction, with stimulation, you will overstimulate all the time. Seven things, seven sources of simulation has to happen.
[00:23:43] You wake up at 5:00 AM. It’s going to be a terrifying and scary. Right. It’s not going to be pleasant. You’re not going to want to do it again because it’s quiet in the morning. It’s actually the only time that it’s ever quiet. It’s not quiet at night. 11:00 PM. Midnight 1:00 AM. It’s not quiet. There’s cars is drunk.
[00:23:58] People talking this [00:24:00] thing’s happening. This chat going on in slack. This people texting you, this tweets going on this noise stimulation, but at 5:00 AM you wake up, the streets are empty. You don’t hear cars. You don’t hear people. Everybody who knows. Nobody’s texting you. Nobody’s calling. You nobody’s want anything from you.
[00:24:15] And you tried the environment because it’s like bird style waking up and you get these, everything is coming. It’s like a flower blossom, but you have to be to some degree connected with yourself. You have to have some level of Zen in your life. Some level of God, the universe spirituality balance quietness.
[00:24:33] If two quiet minutes where there’s nothing going on. Terrifying you so morning will be your health, your special version of health. 5:00 AM you wake up? You will be drowning in that darkness and quiet. Like it’s not going to be a good place, but when you don’t, you wake up and it’s the most beautiful hours in the morning.
[00:24:51] I think this quietness, as you can start slow because nothing is moving. Everything is slow and you can take the time to think, to train, to [00:25:00] meditate, to read, to journal, to go on a walk, to brainstorm, to do art, to write work on your side business, to work on your creative project, to do the things that take energy and attention.
[00:25:13] Space and time and quietness. And then you jump into emails and calls and the hustle and bustle and the daily hustle of life doing the daily hustle of life and all that like shit. And then coming home late at night, exhausted and thinking now I’m going to meditate, go to the gym, read and work on my site.
[00:25:31] Till midnight, good luck doing that. It’s going to be infinitely harder to make the late hours of the day valuable and counting useful than the early hours of the day. Many wise men, many sages in history have been telling us this forever. This wisdom has been around when. Earlier the early hours of the day are the most powerful ones.
[00:25:53] It takes a little bit of discipline and it then takes a little bit of handling that quietness. That’s not always, as I said, that can be, that [00:26:00] can feel very lonely to people or depressing, right. If they don’t have good routines, maybe if you start by going to sleep in some kind of a good routine way, and then you wake up and you try, maybe not instantly.
[00:26:11] 5:00 AM plan, but you do the 6:30 AM planning. You have half an hour of quiet this or whatever before your day goes crazy. But to me, that was one of the biggest changes that I made when I had young children. And I was a startup founder with tremendous officers. That was the one change that I made that at the biggest.
[00:26:27] On my enjoyment and my quality of life was that waking up much earlier and then loving it. When my children would wake up enjoying the hour in the morning with my children and then showing up at work, feeling good, not feeling guilty, not feeling like I’m behind feeling good. That makes such a tremendous difference, whatever it takes, basically to make sure that you fall asleep in a good state and you.
[00:26:48] You start the day in ways that puts you in a good state. That’s it? That’s the game changer because in the right state of mind, everything is easy in the right state of mind. The most difficult problems will become easy [00:27:00] and things that would become problems will never become any. And you will just be able to accept.
[00:27:04] And execute at your maximum potential, where you in a terrible state, the easiest and smallest things will become dramatic tragedies for you over whelming problems. You’re going to want to scream. You are going to cry. Everything’s going to be overwhelming. Everything is going to be. Right. So it’s almost like in the morning hours and in the evening hours, you could go out at sea and throw some seeds in it and make sure that tomorrow, when you want to go fishing, the sea will be quiet when you let going at night and early in the day to the sea and throwing those.
[00:27:38] It’s going to be a guaranteed storm where you’re going to go out to fish. What would you do? Which you go? I don’t have time to throw some seeds in the water. I rather almost die everyday out in stormy sea, trying to fish struggle. When we get a little bit fish every day, curse my destiny and my life, my bad luck.
[00:27:56] Now that you would hopefully learn to just go in the evening and the morning to the [00:28:00] sea, throw the seats so that tomorrow we’re going to have smooth sailing. It’s going to be easy peasy to catch. All the fish of the day. And that’s the biggest levers you have is the evening of the early morning. What do you do there?
[00:28:11] Tremendous impact on your day? And oftentimes when we are in that state where everything seems so overwhelming, we are not sleeping well. And all of this is what I see at least the second, most commonly also the time when we think, oh, this I don’t have time for that, or this is not it I’m dealing with much more important things.
[00:28:27] I just have to get this done for this self perpetuating illusion of difficulty of struggle, rather than taking a step. It’s when we most struggle that we most resist doing the simple thing that would alleviate our struggle because we are in a struggling state. We’re in a state of mind, that things struggle.
[00:28:47] So when you tell me ease, I cannot do this. My radio channel is struggle. I cannot receive ease right now. If you throw some seats on the water’s going to be smooth tomorrow, when you want to go fishing, I go, how are you? Fucking [00:29:00] nuts? Drought today, I’m exhausted. I need food. I don’t have to go back to the fucking sea right now and throw some fucking seeds in there.
[00:29:08] I don’t have the time for the shit. It’s that sort of thing. It’s the person that’s trying to solve the tree in his. I don’t have time to sharpen the saw when we’re in that state of mind. It’s not that we lack the knowledge is that we lack the state to accept the easiest solution to do the easy thing we go.
[00:29:24] No, I cannot. It’s not possible for human right now. You don’t understand how I feel. If you feel like me, you could not. The thing, that’s the solution. That’s so simple to you. And so we extend and expand our struggle, right? It’s us struggle is not optional. We’ll all going to have to do it, but it’s within us to make that struggle short or extended and expanded to become something that for some people is their whole life.
[00:29:46] That is within our power. To me, what has helped over the years is to realize that when I’m in a bad state, the things that I know I need to do. I will not want to do and to be okay with it. And then to be okay with having [00:30:00] mastered learning, to sometimes do the thing you don’t want to do, like actually being able to do something you don’t want to do in that moment is a superpower.
[00:30:07] Most people, we all dance around it and we all just want to wait till we feel. To go and do it. Once I learned to do things exactly at the moment where I feel least like them, that’s a pretty powerful thing to learn. And oftentimes I apply it when I’m in a terrible mood, because there’s a part of me that goes, oh, it’s Bob, Bob is always grumpy and we cannot ask grumpy.
[00:30:29] For his approval before we do this thing, we’re going to go, Hey, grumpy, Bob, do you want to go out and get some fresh air and walk and then meditate? He’s never going to say no, we’re not asking anymore. We’re just like, just get him out of here. Just push myself outside. I will think to myself, just put on your shoes.
[00:30:43] It doesn’t matter that you don’t want it. Just put on the fucking shoes and they’ll put on the shoes and let’s just walk out the door and I’ll walk out the door. And then I’m like, all right, I’m doing it. I know I don’t want to, I don’t feel like, but I’m just fucking doing it. And knowing that when I feel bad, I want to do bad things.
[00:30:56] I want to make all the wrong decisions I want to eat. I want to watch [00:31:00] all the wrong TV shows. I want to not do the thing I need to not do I want to do all the avoidance strategies? That’s what I want to do is I want to do all the wrong things. When I’m in a wrong state, I don’t want to do the right things, but if I can’t find some way to trick myself to do a tiny little right thing, then I will just be stuck in this place for weeks.
[00:31:17] But it’s true when you’re in that kind of a place, you don’t want to do the right things. Last couple of days where I was having a difficult time going to sleep and struggling more with it, my phone or my alarm to wake me up at 6:00 AM. But when I would wake up at six, I didn’t want to wake up. And I, every morning I had this, my first indomitable.
[00:31:33] Today. I cannot wake up right now today. No, I’m going to sleep another one or two hours. I tried to go back to sleep and I just turn and turn and then I go, ah, fuck it. It doesn’t matter. Now you’re awake already. Let’s just do this thing, but there’s my first impulse in the morning would be now like, just go back to sleep.
[00:31:49] Fuck this shit. Now I want to wake up anyways. All right, dude. I wish you a beautiful day. A good day. Bye bye.[00:32:00]