PNTV - The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, the Miracle Morning. The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. Good guy, philosopher's note, handful of my favorite big ideas. Actually a bunch of my favorite big ideas. We're going to look at five of them right now. Hal Elrod is a fascinating guy. We'll just jump into big idea number one. Head on. He was hit head on by a drunk driver when he was 20 years old. He was dead at the scene for six minutes. He came back, he was in a coma for six days. He woke up, he was told, you have permanent brain damage. We don't know if you're going to be able to walk again. 20 years old and he was just on fire with life at that point. Wow. Right? And what he did was he took 100% responsibility, said, Look, I'm going to come back from this, I'm going to be stronger than ever. And that's exactly what he did. And he tells us we need to take life head on. We need to meet life head on. We need to take total responsibility for our lives. If we take responsibility for everything, then we have the opportunity to do anything. If anyone else has done something that we admire, we have the opportunity to do that with some obvious restrictions. But we want to be inspired by what's possible. Move toward life with power and vigor and enthusiasm rather than cower back into helplessness, etc. So again, this guy gets hit head on, dead for six minutes, in a coma for six days or so, comes back strong, chose to make the most of this opportunity, this obstacle, this challenge, and become a stronger human being. Super inspiring guy. And then he, years later, got into an emotional funk and then he cured himself through a miracle morning, which is where this book comes from, is how do you create magic before 8am? It's the basic idea of the book. Right? We're going to look at a couple more big ideas here and then some of the core practices that he recommends. I highly recommend the book. It's super fun, really good. Next big idea. Good stories, he tells us. Have you read any good stories lately? Have you watched any movies that really inspired you? Well, in those stories, the best stories have the biggest challenges. The hero or heroine in the best stories face and overcome the biggest obstacles and challenges. And he says it's the same thing with our lives. A good life, a hero's journey is one in which we're facing obstacles we're not hoping they're not there. We're simply wishing and practicing and becoming that which allows us to overcome them. We wish for the strength to overcome challenges, not for a life without challenges. That's how we want to hit life head on. And so remember, good stories have big challenges. You don't go to the gym to lift Styrofoam weights. As Steve Chandler says, be grateful for life's challenges. They're making you stronger, and they make for a really good story. We want a life filled with those good stories. All right, that's kind of the high level. He's got a bunch of other general stuff in there. That's great. But why mornings? Why do we want to create miracle mornings? Why not miracle lunchtimes, miracle evenings? Well, it's somewhat obvious, but how you start your day often dictates the rest of your day. If you start off chaotic and kind of sleeping in or hitting snooze five times and then trying to catch up with everything and the kids are running around or whatever, and you're behind, your day tends to be like that. And if your day tends to be like that, your weeks tend to be like that, and your months tend to be like that, and your years tend to be like that, and your life tends to be like that. By taking control of our mornings, which we have a lot more control over than we give ourselves credit for or see, we want to take advantage of that. We want to look at it. We have a lot more control over our mornings than we do our midday. I was going to say. So mornings are a great place to create the intentionality and the momentum and the velocity and the presence for the rest of our day. It's huge. We talked about this in the compound effect, the idea of bookending your day with a great AM and a great pm, you have control over your AM and your PM more so than you do your midday. Make your AM awesome. Make your PM awesome. This book is obviously all about making your AM fantastic. Now, how do we do that? He has a bunch of practices and encourages us to do certain things every morning. He calls them HAL Does. Life Savers, lifesavers little acronym S. A, V, E, R S. Let's walk through those really quickly. S is for silence. A is for affirmations. V Visualization. Getting a small little piece of chalk there. Visualizations. They're getting another small piece of chalk there. E is for exercise. Whittling away. R is for reading. And S is for scribing. A playful take on journaling or writing. So there we go. Savers S Silence A Affirmations V Visualizations E Exercise R Reading S Scrib this is how we want to start our day. He unpacks it all in the book. The very quick overview. Silence. Huge meditation. I talk about this all the time. Whatever form of silence you want to practice, whether it's prayer or meditation, start your day connecting to something bigger than yourself. Not jumping into email. It sets the tempo in an extraordinary way. Silence. Affirmations. Mantras are literally tools of the mind. That's what the word mantra means in Sanskrit. Mantra, tools of the mind. Basically, that's what affirmations are. We want to affirm that which we're capable of. Again, we can spend a week on any one of these ideas. We'll move on to visualizations. We want to see that which we want to bring into our lives. If you want to make the unimaginable possible, you have to imagine it. The first step is seeing it right. Your outcome and the process, the steps you're going to take. Visualization exercise is huge. We talk about this all the time. Not exercising is like taking a depressant. Literally. Go down, take your vitamins, take a depressant. If you're not exercising. That's what Tall Ben Shahar tells us. Scientist out of Harvard, John Ratey. I'm going to keep on repeating this because I hope you're exercising. If you aren't, get on it. If you are awesome, dial it in even more. John Ratey, Harvard. Wrote a book called Spark. Exercising is like taking a little bit of Ritalin and a little bit of Prozac. So focuses your attention and boosts your mood. That's good. We want those things. You get it via exercise. And doing it in the morning is huge. I changed my routine. I was doing this more in the afternoon. After reading this book, I instituted this more in the morning. It's awesome. Worked out I don't know how many days in a row now. It's good reading. Fill your mind up with good stuff. We talked about your life is your message with Eknath Eswaran the other day. Turn off your TV or your Internet and give yourself a half an hour to tap into the highest wisdom, whether that's the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or the Dao de Jing or some other form of inspirational material. Read scribing, journaling, writing. Document what you're excited about in your life. Actually take the time to write that down. That's a super quick look at our lifesavers. Silence Affirmations, visualizations, exercise, reading, scribing. You can do that in six minutes, you can do that in 60 minutes. Figure out your ideal, but create some lifesavers and then this is huge. His habits wisdom is awesome. Habits 101. I'm actually going to be teaching a class on Habits 101 next month in a few weeks. At the time I'm recording this, really excited about it because habits drive the whole show. We need to use our willpower to create habits that go into our subconscious autopilot, that dictate the quality of our lives. But he has a great idea. Habits 101. He says that habits say they take about 30 days. Research shows something between 20 days and 100 or 200 days or something crazy like that. But let's just say for the sake of this discussion, it takes 30 days to create a habit. Hal says you can break those into three phases, right? The first 10 days, it is unbearable. The first 10 days are unbearable. It's unpleasant, it's unbearable. The second 10 days are just uncomfortable. It's no longer unbearable, it's just uncomfortable. It's not quite grooved in yet. But then the last 10 days, you hit your stride, you're feeling the benefits of it, and now it's actually pretty easy to do. And you are unstoppable. That progression of unbearable to uncomfortable to unstoppable is genius. Really, really cool. Most people give up in the first 10 days when it's unbearable. Well, of course, trying to engage in a new behavior is going to be unbearably uncomfortable squared. It's just not fun. It's icky, as we talked about the other day. And your life is your message. You got to keep on chewing for it to become sweet, unbearable, uncomfortable, and then unstoppable. It's a really cool sequence. Habits 101. We'll talk about that a lot more. But there you go, the miracle morning. Hal Elrod, super inspiring guy. Head on, six minutes dead, six days coma, comes back strong. Makes a good story, doesn't it? His challenge is makes an extraordinary story. You have challenges in your life. And as we overcome them, that's what a hero's journey is. Make our life one long, good story after another. Why mornings? Because it sets the tempo for the rest of the day. Lifesavers S A V E R s create some silence, affirm what's good, see it, exercise, read and take note. And then we had our habits 101 allow for the discomfort, the extreme discomfort, the unbearableness of starting a new habit, but make a 100% commitment and make it happen. There you go. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson me. Two basic things one our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome and 2 our optimal living Membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. 10 bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes. When you sign up, you'll get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes, which are basically six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s where I capture my favorite big ideas from great books. 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