In this instructional video, Dan Willis of millennialmotivator.ca outlines a practical morning‑routine framework aimed at entrepreneurs, small‑business owners, and influencers. He begins by emphasizing the importance of a consistent wake‑up time, recommending a fixed alarm (e.g., 4:30 AM) that is maintained even on weekends to program the body’s internal clock and boost early‑day productivity. Willis then introduces a brief cold‑exposure technique—either a 30‑second to one‑minute cold shower or an icy face wash—to quickly raise alertness and counteract the relaxing effect of a warm shower. The third pillar is a minimum of 30 minutes of “me time,” which can include reading, meditation, journaling, yoga, or other physical activity, and serves to set goals, plan the day, and center the mind. He warns that sleep habits heavily influence morning performance, urging viewers to avoid late‑night partying and to adopt the “early to bed, early to rise” principle. Finally, Willis stresses that while a morning routine is essential, its components must be personalized; viewers should adapt practices to their preferences rather than copying the exact habits of famous entrepreneurs. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action for viewers to share their own routines in the comments.
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Looking for a successful way to jumpstart your day, hit that morning routine and just own it? Stick around, I'm gonna give you some tips. Welcome back guys, I am Dan of millennialmotivator.ca, helping you create, engage, and inspire your clients to help you grow your sales and business. If you're new to the channel, I do videos Monday through Saturday, 6 days a week, for entrepreneurs, small businesses, selfpreneurs, influencers, anything to help you guys learn how to market, how to engage one another, how to have productive routines like the one for today. If that sounds like something that's gonna be up your alley, go ahead and click that subscribe button down there and the little bell, and that notification will let you know when my next video goes live. But for today, what we're looking at is morning routines. Now, most books that you're gonna look at, stuff like Tools of the Titans back there, or Tribe of Mentors, they're gonna walk you through this concept that a morning routine, how you get started, is so vital, so vital to how you have success throughout the day. Those who have a slow start, a late start, a no start, often find themselves struggling throughout the day to hit their goals, to achieve success, and I wanna help you guys Avoid that altogether. I want you to rock it every day. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna walk you through some key concepts that are very simple that you can add to your morning routine that's gonna really jumpstart your day. And some of them are ones that I use personally, some of them are ones that I don't use personally, but I do recommend for you to take a look at and see if they fit into your morning routine. And also give you some cautions at the end about things that you should probably try to avoid for many good reasons. Alright, so let's get down to business. Let's find out how you start morning routine to jumpstart your day for success. Okay guys, first thing is first. When you wake up in the morning, you need to have it on a schedule, okay? And this seems so simple, but the reality is there's lots of people that change their schedule throughout the week. So Monday through Friday, they wake up at 6 AM because they've got to be at work for 9, and then Saturday they wake up at 11 because they were out all night Friday. And then Sunday they wake up, who knows, maybe they wake up early, go to church, 9 AM, they head off, or maybe they sleep in late again because they were out on Saturday night till late. The reality is this, guys, your body and your mind are gonna function better, more effectively when you are on a consistent schedule. It just, you program your body one way, it doesn't get confused, you don't feel drained. Monday is often one of the hardest days of the week for people to get engaged and get pumped and ready to go. And the reason for this is they change their schedule up over the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, and it throws their whole body out of whack. They're not alert, they don't feel like they've got a lot of energy. It hurts them, it really, really hurts them. So, my recommendation is this. Set a time every morning, the same time. Set a weekly alarm. Okay Google, set an alarm, 4:30 AM every day. Now, 4:30 may be early for you guys, that's when I set it. But every morning, 4:30 AM, I am up and ready to go. I'm ready to roll. And what's amazing about this is because I do it Monday through Sunday, I find on days where I'm working Monday through Saturday, I work 6 days a week and it just makes me so productive because I'm ready to roll. But then Sunday when I have my day off, I'm still up at 4:30, but I'm able to just relax at 4:30 in the morning. Nobody else is up. I can sit back with a book. I can I can watch a show, I can— the time is all mine. But I'm still up at 4:30, so I'm ready to go and it doesn't break my routine pattern. Okay, guys? I highly recommend, set a time. It doesn't need to be 4:30, but something that's feasible for during the week, but also feasible on your off days. You're gonna find that this really helps you guys out, okay? Knowing that you have a set time to get up every morning is gonna help you, because you're not gonna stay out late doing ridiculous things till 3 in the morning. If you know you've got to be up for 4:30 or 5:30 or 6:30 the next day, really make an effort to set this time in stone and get your body programmed on it. It's going to take some time, it's going to take some effort, but when you nail it down, when you get it in place and your body is used to that routine, you're going to see a lot more productivity out of those early hours because your body is accustomed to being up at that time. All right, let's get to the next point. Okay guys, the next part is all about getting the brain up and active and ready to roll. A lot of people really hate the advice that I'm going to give here, but I see a lot of successful people doing it. I've included it in my day, and it's either the cold face scrub or the cold shower. The reason why I recommend it is this. If you have a warm shower, most of you guys can think of a nice hot shower that you have. What is the feeling that comes with that? Immediately, you guys are going to say, oh, it feels relaxing. I feel comforted. I feel at ease. Great, that's exactly right. If you wake up first thing in the morning and hop into a nice warm shower, all it's gonna do is relax you, kinda mellow you out. And the reality is, in the morning, what you wanna be doing is getting pumped up, right? You want that energy, you wanna get moving, you wanna get rolling. And the best way to achieve this, believe it or not, is a little bit of discomfort. And I'm not talking like massive painful discomfort, I'm talking a cold shower. So hop into a cold shower for 30 seconds to a minute. Don't go in it for 30 minutes. That's going to be unfortunate. But 30 seconds to a minute, hop into a cold shower. I promise you, think about a cold shower. Hop out of a cold shower and you are going to be alert. That was cold, right? Same thing if you're not— you're in a rush during the morning, you just didn't have time for a cold shower to get the ball rolling, or you do a hot shower the night before so you're ready to go, you can sleep in a little bit more, not a problem. Big sink of ice-cold water, right in the face. It's gonna do the same thing. It'll perk you up, it'll get you alert, it'll get you ready to go. Okay, so give yourself that head shake first thing in the morning, liven up the body, get everything alert and ready to go. And a nice cold face wash or shower is gonna go a long way to getting you there. Okay, it's not, it's not pleasurable. I'm not saying it is, but it's very, very practical and I highly recommend it. Okay, next up is a half hour of me time. Minimum. Half hour of me time. So include this when you're planning out your daily wake up and grind time, okay? If you know that you've gotta be out of the house at 7, don't wake up at 6:30, wake up at 6. That 6 to 6:30 gives you time to get ready, 6:30 to 7 is your time. What do I mean by your time? I mean time to get your mind in line. So, what are your targets? What are your goals? What are you heading into? What books are you reading? Take that time to read those books. Meditate. If you meditate, this is that time for that. Okay? Um, or you can switch around. Say it's yoga. Wake up right away, do your morning yoga, do your morning exercise for that half hour. Go for a jog, go for a run, do some weightlifting, whatever it may be for that first half hour, and then get ready for your day. Get dressed and ready to go, and then you're out the door. Right? Um, for me, I know I start at 4:30 every day. I'm up, I get ready to roll. I do my morning routine, which is often meditation, reading a book, watching some YouTube videos and learning some stuff. And then I'm off and running. Now for me, I wake up extra early so that I've got time to do a bunch of those things, including some physical activity, cold face wash, shower, that kind of thing, making sure I'm reading books, making sure I'm doing my journaling, right? Gotta do the journaling. And then last but not least, it gives me the opportunity to actually scan my day and plan it out. What do I need to achieve? What do I need to do? And then in turn, That helps me help others around me be prepared for their day. When I meet them first thing in the morning, whether it's coffee with my wife or whether it's talking to my clients, it's making sure that I have my mind focused and centered and ready to go, and I'm able to help them do the same. What's your plan for day? What are you going to knock out? What are we looking to achieve? Where are we headed? What are we doing? So make sure that you dedicate that me time. It's super crucial. It's very important, and a lot of the time it's something that we neglect. We refuse to realize the potential. potential that comes from us just taking a half hour to read, meditate, focus, set goals, achieve those goals, make sure that we're journaling how we're going about that. These are all simple practices, guys. You can fill that me time with a lot. I could do a whole other video on the stuff that you can fill into your me time, but you have to take it. You absolutely have to take the time to focus and be there in the moment. Dedicate that time for yourself. Don't allow for any distractions. Okay guys, now I want to give you some cautions as well. And this is going to affect your morning routine, but it's not always the same thing. Okay, there are a lot of people that have a lot of different practices when it comes to when they're going to go to sleep at night. And I know this is a video about how you're going to start your day, but here's the reality of this. Okay, the reality of it is this: when you go to sleep is going to largely affect how Productive you are first thing in the morning, okay? And I'm saying this, it's the age-old adage of early to bed, early to rise, healthy, wealthy, wise, right? You guys know this one? Everybody knows this one. So often though, we're willing to sacrifice our time at the end of the night rather than— splurge on our time at the end of the night so that we can have payback in the morning. Oh, I'll stay up till 3 in the morning partying And then I'll sacrifice my wake-up time. Don't do this, guys. Let's be honest. How productive are you being at 3 o'clock in the morning? You're not. You're either doing something that's completely useless and recreational, or you're just making excuses to stay awake. You're not being productive that late at night, especially if you've been up all day. So, just don't do it, guys. Dedicate the time, dedicate the energy to being committed at night as well as in the morning. The other caution that I want to give on this, guys, is your rules are your own. Don't look to I mean, I love books like Tribe of Mentors. I really, really do. And I'm going to leave a link down in the comments below to the book because it is an exceptional book. But allow your morning practices to be your own, okay? That's why I gave you some hints at several things and pieces that you can put into it, but I'm not giving you the specifics of it. Oh, you must meditate. Oh, you must do this. The only one that I highly recommend that everybody should do is that cold— just to wake up your mind and get ready to go, okay? But the reality is, The specifics of how you do your morning routine need to be your own. You need to make them your own. If running and doing cardio first thing in the morning isn't for you, don't do it. Don't do it. If reading a book isn't for you first thing in the morning, maybe an Audible book is a better way to go, or maybe journaling isn't your thing. Whatever is your thing, dedicate it to that. Don't just adopt somebody else's practices. Oh well, Richard Branson or Elon Musk do this every morning, so I should do the exact same thing. No. What's important to note is that Warren Buffett and Elon Musk and Richard Branson, all these big guys, they all have a morning routine. What's crucial to notice is that not one of them does it exactly the same as everyone else, okay? Make it your own, make it your own time, make it your own focus, but it is important to have one, okay? So if you don't currently have a morning routine, take the time, sit down, figure it out. How am I gonna do it? What's it gonna look like? What time am I gonna be up? What is it gonna look like? How do I progress into my day with it? And is it gonna help me succeed and go where I want to go? That is it for today though, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Question of the day is, what does your morning routine look like? Leave it down in the comments below there, and I'll catch you tomorrow with another video. See you then. See you then.
