MBA1048 Must Read: The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod

Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that brings you the best of business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's episode is a Must Read Episode on our Must Read Episodes I share with you a book that has greatly influenced me, has impacted me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways and why you should read it too. Today's must read is the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. If you want a fulfilling and happy life, your morning routine is a good place to start. A lot of successful people, millionaires, accomplished entrepreneurs have a solid morning routine. This is why I was so attracted to reading this book. I actually know Hal Elrod personally. I got to know him a few years back and I've been wanting to read his book for so long. It's been recommended to me by so many different people, but for some reason I just never got around to reading this particular book. Read a lot of other books as you know. But finally I rolled up my sleeves and got into this book and I want to share with you some of the great, great takeaways you can get from this. Some of the conversations it forced me to have with myself and how you gotta take the information and apply it to your life the best way possible. I can't wait to share with you all that stuff and more in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is supported by Podia. Podia helps thousands of creators earn money from their passion. It's an all in one digital storefront that you can sell courses, memberships and digital downloads in one place. It's the most creator friendly platform on the market with zero transaction fees and a super friendly 24.7life support team no matter what plane you're on. So they're going to take care of you even if you're just getting started. What's great about Podia is that it eliminates all the technical headaches. It takes care of every aspect of selling your course or membership or digital download. If you've got video courses, they do the video hosting for you. If you want an easy way to charge your members on a reoccurring basis for a membership, Podia takes care of it. You want a secure way for people to download your products. When they pay for them, they take care of that too. They also offer free migrations on their shaker plan. Best of all, Podia puts their money where their mouth is. They have a 30 day free trial with no credit card required. So if you don't love it, you don't pay a penny. If you're looking to start a online course, sell any kind of digital product, or start a membership site, check them out and support the show by going to podia.com mba that's P O-I a.com mba I want to start by saying the author of the Miracle Morning, Hal Elrod, is actually a really amazing person, good guy, but has been through some serious adversity in his life several times and has bounced back and is someone who really has a lot of gratitude for life. You'll read in the book that he went through a major, major tragic event in his life that made him reevaluate things. What you won't read in the book because this actually happened after the book was published about 18 months ago, Hal was diagnosed with cancer. So this is a guy that gets hit with challenges left and right, but is able to overcome and come back stronger, come out of it stronger. Now that doesn't happen by accident. That happens when somebody has cultivated a life, a routine, a discipline to allow them to be strong. And one of those routine or routines he mentions in this book or really focuses on is your morning routine. What do you do when you first get up in the morning? Morning? What time do you get up in the morning? How do you get up in the morning? All that stuff. He starts off this book by emphasizing you don't need to have a mediocre life. You don't have to settle for this. You can have a fulfilling life, a life that you're excited about, a life that you're excited to wake up to every morning. And that's really important. Are you excited to get up in the morning? Think of the times you couldn't wait to get up the next day. It was probably something like you're going on vacation the next day. Maybe you were going to travel or maybe it was Christmas morning or whatever it was, you were pumped. You couldn't wait to get up in the morning. In fact, you probably had trouble falling asleep. That needs to be every day, or at least most of your days, more days than not. And he talks about that in the book. Now the problem is, is that a lot of us, we don't perceive our future to be exciting. Why because we equate the past being the same as the future. Like we tell ourselves, what do I have to be excited about? This is what has happened in my life in the past. I'm probably going to get more of the same. No. Things change and you can change your life. The past does not equal the future. He calls this rear view mirror syndrome. It's when you take isolated incidences in your past and you magnify them and think that this defines your whole life. This is how it is for the rest of your life. Not true. And you should not have that kind of mentality. Every day is a new chance, a new opportunity to fulfill your dreams, to live your dream. I know this sounds very woo woo and very like self helpy, but you can't deny that's true. People change their lives all the time. Look at the people that you admire. Look at the people you look up to, whether they be famous or not. They all went through adversity. They all had a point in their life where they said, I don't want this to be my life anymore. I'm going to change. Even if it's just in your head before it actually happens in real life, this is essential for you to be able to feel motivated to get up every morning. Speaking of getting up, he hates the concept of the snooze button. The snooze button trains you to say, hey, this is not time to get up or it's not worth getting up and hey, I am victim to this all the time. I love sleep. I'm going to say right now, I love sleep. When I'm on vacation, I love to take naps, I love to just wake up naturally. But on normal days and when I'm not on vacation, when I'm on break, I can't do that. I have to get up a certain time so I can make my appointments, so I can get my work done throughout the day. And his point is, when you hit snooze, you're just kind of saying to yourself, hey, waking up is not fun. And I have nothing really interesting to wake up to reinforcing this idea. So he's encouraging you not to hit the snooze button. Wake up when the alarm hits. He has this great routine that he tells you to do, which is, number one, make sure your alarm or your phone, wherever you set your alarm, is not an arm's length of you from the bed. So you have to actually get up from the bed to shut off the alarm. And as soon as you shut off the alarm, go straight to the bathroom, wash your face, brush your teeth. You'll feel refreshed and you won't feel the need to go back to sleep. From there, just do something to start the day, like have a nice breakfast. And if you're going to a job, maybe you're not super pumped about. Maybe you can just be pumped about the great breakfast you're going to have in the morning. Give yourself reasons to feel excited about the morning. He also says you should incorporate some sort of positive silence in your morning routine. You can call this meditation, you can call this relaxation, you can call this prayer, whatever you want to call it. But he thinks you should have a period of time, even if it's just a few minutes where you just sit quietly and just take in the morning. I love this idea. I'm a slow person in the morning. I take a while to get up. So I like to have a bit of, you know, relaxation, a bit of a slow morning. So it's totally okay for you just to have your breakfast in silence or just sit and meditate for three or four minutes, looking out a window, looking at the birds chirp, see the sun come up, whatever it is. He also gets into affirmations and visualizations. Whether you're a fan of affirmations or visualizations, I really think you should take what he says in this chapter to heart. It's very hard to actually make something a reality if you've never imagined it before. Think about it. Say you want to go on a weekend getaway, take you and your significant other and go away for a few nights in a hotel and relax. Imagine actually doing that without even thinking about it or imagining it in your head. Visualizing in your head, it's impossible. You're going to think about it for a second. At least. You're going to visualize it. You're going to plan it, you're going to imagine it in your head. You're going to say, oh, maybe that's a good idea. You're going to think about it. So visualization is actually important to implementation. He touches on this in the book. I highly recommend you don't skip over that chapter. He also talks about incorporating exercise in your morning routine. This one is a tough one because I know not a lot of people like to exercise in the morning. Even though a lot of the people that I admire when it comes to their, you know, physical routine, whether it's Terry Crews or Dwayne Johnson, these guys get up like at 4 o' clock in the morning and hit the gym for three hours. Yes, their whole livelihood depends on them being in shape. But I'm not the kind of person that likes to exercise in the morning. Again, I'm a slow riser. But Hal thinks you should incorporate some sort of exercise. Even if it's just a few pushups or a brisk walk, get the blood pumping to get your day going. So I can, I can accept that I can go for a brisk walk or do a free push ups and then do my major exercise session later on in the day. So you can take a few things with a grain of salt and incorporate as much as you can. Take as much benefit as you can from a book. Hal also thinks you should read and write in the morning. So reading I totally get taking in great information. I like to read my Kindle sometimes in the morning. And then writing is basically journaling, writing down your thoughts, writing down things you're grateful for, maybe like a gratitude journal. These are things he recommends as well. He also encourages you to stick to your morning routine and he outlines the six things that you should do in your morning routine. And that's silence, affirmations, visualizations, exercise, reading and writing. Stick to that morning routine for 30 days and it'll become a habit, he says. He challenges you and encourages you to take on that challenge. Now this book, the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, is one of the biggest bestsellers in the nonfiction genre. It's a blockbuster success and I'm going to share with you why I think that is. So why is this book so popular and so well received? I get into that in a bit, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Today's sponsor, Mattress Firm is a perfect fit for today's must read episode on the Miracle Morning. 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So go to mattressfirm.com podcast and start sleeping better tonight. So the Miracle Morning is a huge blockbuster success. It's so well received, it's been recommended to me by so many people. If you check it out on Amazon, it's got tons of reviews. We're talking about over 3,000 reviews. That's incredible for a book. Now why is it so successful? Well, personally, I think it's because the book gives you a simple solution to a problem we all have. Getting up in the morning and having a solid routine. It actually gives you so much benefit with a solid plan. There's something about it that makes you feel empowered, like, I can at least control this, I can change this in my life, my morning routine, I have ownership over that. And he gives you specific instructions on how to take control of it and how to improve it. So I think this is why the book is so successful is because it's such applicable knowledge, it's such practical knowledge, knowledge that you can use immediately and it really addresses a pain point we all have. Now, having said that, I've read the book. I've applied a lot of things that he's mentioned in the book, but not all of them. I want to say that don't be so hard on yourself if you don't hit all the things he mentions. If you don't take all the boxes, some progress is better than no progress. And if I can master that and go on for 30 days with these improvements, then I can add on and improve later on as well. I think this is especially important for entrepreneurs who have to be self managed. You have to manage yourself and make sure that you get up every morning excited early, so you can get a lot done at the same time. You know yourself, if you have a hard time getting up at 5am, if that's something that just doesn't go or jive with your body, that's totally fine. Get up at 7. But get up at 7 consistently and make sure you start that day right. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I highly recommend you pick up the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. Great, great book. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Some books you read will change your mindset. Some books you'll read will give you perspective, like a biography. Some books you read will have practical, practical instructions. This book has a lot of practical instructions that you can apply right away. You don't have to actually apply after you read the whole book. You can apply as you read. So it's actually better because you can apply and build upon what you're applying as you're reading the book. So it's not super overwhelming. Love it, love it, love it. I'll check you guys in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.