Cameron Herold, coauthor of The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs, describes the six-part "Morning Savers" routine (Silence, Affirmation, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, Scribing) and gives short, practical examples for each (e.g., one minute silence, a seven-minute workout, 10–20 minutes of journaling). He shares a cautionary business anecdote from his time at 1-800-GOT-JUNK—where rapid growth nearly bankrupted the company for lack of financial listening—and urges leaders to teach the routine across their teams by distributing the book to employees to accelerate company growth.
A quick seven-minute workout (e.g., burpees, pushups).
About 10–20 minutes.
Over 17 different countries.
Chapters
They've all heard, you know, you've all heard as well, ideas from people on what the perfect morning is. And we read about all these other successful entrepreneurs perfect mornings. In fact, in the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs, I think we covered 10 or 12 different entrepreneurs perfect mornings and they all pretty much tended to include what the morning savers were. So the mere fact of having that acronym, having it laid out for us and showing us that it was simple is what the feedback I'm getting from our readers. Hi, I'm Cameron Herald. I'm the co author of the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs. I've also written five other books as well. I've also been working behind the scenes with second in commands from over 17 different countries with my COO alliance. And one of the things that I've learned from the morning sabers is they're very, very applicable to entrepreneurs and also to their second in commands. So let's review them really quickly. The Sabers, the acronym is Silence, Affirmation, Visualization, Exercise, Reading and Scribing. So for the entrepreneurial world, you can take those six sabers and use them to really supercharge your business. When you wake up first thing in the morning, the silence is just to close your eyes even though you're waking up. Reclose them and just listen to the sounds around you. Just ease into the morning. Listen to the sounds in the neighborhood, the birds chirping, the cars may be driving down the street, maybe someone else in your home that's waking up at 5:30 or 6:00 clock in the morning like you are as well, and just ease into the morning with about one minute of silence. The affirmation is actually sitting and thinking about something that you're working on. That is a positive phrase for you. Maybe it is. I'm very confident and gaining confidence each day. Or our marketing strategy is exactly on point. Or you know, something that is business focused is your affirmation. Your visualization could be you listening to your vivid vision that you've done an audio recording for, or rereading your three or four or five page vivid vision that describes your company three years in the future. Or maybe even just reading a paragraph of your vivid vision. It can also be you visualizing a meeting that you're walking into that day, or a business situation that you're going to have in the middle of today, thinking about that and visualizing it in a really positive outcome. Then it's hopping out of bed and really getting some kind of an exercise going. Now admittedly I'm actually A later in the day kind of business person for workouts because I like to actually separate my day from going home and being with my family. So I love the four out, four o' clock in the afternoon and three o' clock in the afternoon workouts. But first thing in the morning, do a quick seven minute workout, do some burpees, do some pushups, do something just to get you going and get the blood flowing and make you realize that you've done more than most people that are showing up at the office that day. The reading is reading something about your business. So reading some new business book, some chapter from a business book that you're reading, maybe your company has a book club and you have everyone reading it together. Reading something that you're going to be able to bring some ideas into work or bring some momentum and some positive mindset around business that's really powerful as well. And then scribing could be you just sitting down and actually writing. What are the top five things you need to get done today? What are the big projects you're working on? Taking all these, these ideas that are in your mind and just writing them down so that you're showing up at work with a clear mind, a fresh mind and a mind dump that you've been able to write down in writing. That's how I actually use the morning savers in the business world. It'll work for you as well. So one of the things that I've noticed over the years and working with leaders and working with business people and all sorts of companies is they'll have kind of the flavor of the month. They'll read something in a new book that they'll want to put in place and three or four days of doing it, they feel like they're successful. And then a new, a new idea comes along and they drop the first idea. They don't take that one change and put it deep enough into their lives or deep enough into their businesses. One of the big changes that I've been able to actually realize from working with Hal on the miracle morning for entrepreneurs and from the morning savers is the scribe, right? The last S in the morning savers, the act of actually writing it down and spending time every morning just journaling, whether you're using the 5 Minute Journal or just a blank journal, or even just writing lists and getting stuff out of your mind, it's that active daily habit of writing or scribing that makes the things stick for me. It reinforces the positive results that I'm having from my efforts it reinforces some of the work that I still have left to do. It reinforces the fact that I need to work with coaches or mentors. But that morning, scribing that 10, 15, 20 minutes in the morning where I just allow myself to free flow journal really has the positive contributions in all aspects of my life. Foreign is absolutely natural for every single one of us. We've always failed, right? I want you to think back to when you were 4 or 5 years old and you were trying to ride a bicycle for the first time. Remember, you probably got three or four pedals and then you fell. That's a failure. But you didn't stop riding a bicycle. You got up, you dusted yourself off, you got a little hug from mom or dad, you hop back on the bicycle and you did 20 or 30 more pedals and then you fell. Failure is part of life and in business we need to remember that we're going to fail as well. One of the things that I actually wrote about in the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs was that I struggle with my morning savers. I struggle at times with having my miracle morning. If I wake up in the morning and I wake up a little bit too late and I didn't get my exercise, I didn't do my reading or maybe my visualization was a little bit off, I don't beat myself up and stop. I just realized, well, today wasn't so great. Tomorrow I'm going to do a little bit better. And I try to learn from those mistakes, I try to learn from those failures. And then tomorrow I'm going to make it a little bit better. Or maybe I'll actually continue with my miracle morning. But it might be 11 o' clock in the morning because I'm not going to wait and delay for the next day. So failure is something to grow from. Failure is something to learn from. Remember as well that as entrepreneurs and leaders, we're often very good at telling people that work for us areas for them to improve. We have to accept that feedback and search for that feedback for ourselves and not beat ourselves up when we have areas to improve. Feedback is the breakfast of champions. So one of the biggest business failures that I ever had was in the time that I was the second in command at 1-800-got junk. So I was the COO of this company. It was a full 10 years before we co authored the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs together. The failure was we almost bankrupted the company. Myself as CEO and Brian as CEO were very fast driving, hard hitting Go now and Plan later. Almost kind of people. We just were trusting our gut and driving really, really hard. And we had someone working for us in finance, our head of finance, that was very quiet, very amiable, very analytical, and he would approach us with a problem. But he, he was very quiet in his approach. So he came to us a couple times in the fifth or sixth year of me being there and he said, are you sure we're not growing too quickly? I'm a little worried we're growing too quickly. We're like, no, no, we've got it. No, no, we're fine. Well, we almost bankrupted the business because we were growing way too quickly and we didn't understand the cash components of how to actually leverage our balance sheet and grow around that 100 million mark. The big lesson that I learned from this was if you're not going to listen to the people that work for you, hire people that you're willing to listen to. What we needed to do more is use our two ears and our one mouth in the same ratio that God gave them to us. We needed to start listening twice as often as we spoke. And Hendra was a very smart head of finance that had we listened to him and actually tried to understand him a little bit more, our business would have even been more successful than it actually was, I think. Impactful comments I got back from one of our readers of the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs was they loved how easy it was to actually work through the Morning Savers. They've all heard, you know, you've all heard as well, ideas from people on what the Perfect Morning is. And we read about all these other successful entrepreneurs Perfect Mornings. In fact, in the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs, I think we covered 10 or 12 different entrepreneurs perfect Mornings and they all pretty much tended to include what the morning savers were. So the mere fact of having that acronym, having it laid out for us and showing us that it was simple is what the feedback I'm getting from our readers. One of the things that entrepreneurs have to do is not only grow themselves, but they have to grow their second in command or their CEO. You also need to grow all of the skills of all of your other employees as well. And I urge you, why don't you buy a copy of the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs and give it to every single one of your employees. The reality is they're in a business environment and they can use the same Morning Savers in their personal lives. For you as an entrepreneur to grow yourself, that's great. But what really is going to grow your company is when you grow the skills and the confidence of all of your employees and all of your managers. So buy them all a copy of the book. This isn't just to sell books. This is to help you grow your company. When you grow the confidence and the skills of your employees, your company will really rapidly scale. That's how I grew 1-800-got junk when I was the CEO there, I focused on growing the skills of my employees, caring about my employees, and that's where the growth came from. So keep going. There's another video for you right here filled with insights. So click and keep growing.
