The Tim Ferriss Show - #105: 5 Morning Rituals That Help Me Win the Day

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it

Starting point is 00:01:06 out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and

Starting point is 00:01:50 book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun.

Starting point is 00:02:27 Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again,

Starting point is 00:02:57 that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Pretty bird. Hello. This is Tim Ferriss. Sorry for that bit of inspiration from the animal realm. I'm reading a book by Joseph Campbell. It's actually a collection of volumes, The Way of the Animal Powers. Historical Atlas of World Mythology is the first. It's massive, but really amazing. And nobody besides Joseph Campbell really could have written this book, I don't think. But I digress. This episode of The Tim Ferris Show is a bit of an experiment. Typically, I interview people who are world-class at what they do, and I ask them many, many questions to try to pull out, to tease out the tactics, tools,

Starting point is 00:03:41 habits, routines, et cetera, that make them very good at what they do. And you have, as listeners asked me many times, why don't you answer your own questions? And I wanted to answer one of them that I get asked a lot. And that is, what does your morning routine look like? What are the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day look like? So I'm going to answer that. And you can let me know if you like this type of short episode. So hit me up on Twitter or Facebook, Twitter at T Ferris, T F E R R I S S or on Facebook, facebook.com forward slash Tim Ferris with two R's and two S's. And let me know if you like this, want more of them, hate them, never want me to do one again, whatever. So I am going to describe the five things that I do

Starting point is 00:04:26 every morning. Now, the five things I do every morning would be on an ideal day. The reality is if I hit three out of these five, I've won the morning. And if you win the morning, you win the day. And I'm not the first person to say that, but I think it is a good encapsulation of how to think about morning routines. It is setting up your entire day for positive momentum and fewer distractions. Number one, let's get started. Meow. Number one is you make your bed. And I had not done this for my entire life and then chanced upon meeting a gentleman,

Starting point is 00:05:00 a monk from India named Dandapani. And his website is dandapani.org. I met him at Mastermind Talks in Toronto in 2011 and he convinced me to start making my bed. And I was going through a very scattered period in my life at that point. I felt like my energy was traveling sort of a millimeter in a million directions and wasn't being harnessed properly. And he convinced me to start making my bed. And if a monk is too much for you, if that's too woo-woo, number one, I would say, open your mind, you savage. But number two, I would say this is a common belief among many very high-achieving military tacticians and folks who've been deployed. For instance,

Starting point is 00:05:40 Naval Admiral William McRaven, he has spoken about this in commencement speeches, and I'll just read his explanation first. This is from a University of Texas at Austin commencement speech. Quote, if you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter now i would add to this i would say that in my life as a solopreneur in effect i haven't built a large organization to support me it's a very lean team of just a few people there's a lot of uncertainty there are

Starting point is 00:06:23 many unpredictable problems that will always pop up. And there are a few things that help me in that type of life. Number one is reading, for instance, Marcus Aurelius and meditations, where he prompts himself in the morning by effectively reading or writing out, I'm going to encounter many ungrateful, rude people today, and I need to prepare myself for that inevitability. So not expecting the best, preparing for the worst, hoping for the best, but prompting yourself and preparing yourself mentally to address all this uncertainty and so on. The second is to control what you can control. No matter how shitty your day is, no matter how catastrophic it might become,

Starting point is 00:07:05 you can make your bed. And that gives you the feeling, at least gives me the feeling, even in a disastrous day that I've held on by a fingernail off the cliff and I haven't fallen, there's something I've controlled. There's something that is maintained one hand on the driver's wheel of life. And making your bed. It's a very small thing. It doesn't have to be complicated. All I do is I have a, say a blanket or a duvet. I don't tuck in the sheets and whatever. I kind of just hide it. I think that's a guy, typical dude move, hide it under the blanket, pull up the blanket so that the pillows are either kind of symmetrically under or on top of the blanket and you're done. That's it. It's

Starting point is 00:07:45 very, very simple. And if you work from home, this serves double duty, especially if you work in or near your bedroom. If you see distraction externally, again, speaking personally, you end up creating an internally distracted state. At least that's very true for me. I'm highly visual. If I sit at a restaurant, for instance, I have to position my chair so that I'm not facing some type of TV with sports on it. I will not be able to talk to anyone. It's like taking a puppy out and having squirrels running around. I can't concentrate. So similarly, the more organized, not necessarily clean, but organize your external environment or environments that you visit repeatedly,

Starting point is 00:08:23 the less stressed you will be. And that is particularly important in this case with the bookends of the day. So you make your bed, you've accomplished that one tiny task, you've controlled something that you can absolutely control. And then at the end of the day, the last experience you have is coming back to something that you've accomplished. It's hard for me to overstate how important this ritual has become. But number one, I make my bed. Number two, I meditate. And this took me a long time to start. Those of you who have listened to this podcast for some time have noticed, I'm sure, and this was not through any attempt at planning on my part, but 80%, I would say, or so of all

Starting point is 00:09:03 of the world-class performers across all of the disciplines that we've covered have some type of meditative practice, whether that is in the gym or transcendental meditation. Arnold Schwarzenegger even did it for a year and then found those benefits to persist past that year. So he felt like he had sort of locked in a phase shift. Transcendental meditation is one option, tm.org. You can check it out. There are things I dislike about it. I think that the amount they charge for the four-day initial course is too high. I think that there is some guru worship that you can steer clear of, as I did. I'm pretty secular, but it is very well tested and the teaching method is standardized. So I found this very helpful. And TM is, is focused on a mantra and I hate that word. It's

Starting point is 00:09:51 too loaded, but you basically have a sound that you repeat for a period of time with your eyes closed. You can sit comfortably or lay down. You don't have to get into the full Lotus or anything like that. And that acts effectively as white noise to block out other thoughts. And they would probably describe this in a different way. But I will just say the practice is bringing your attention back to the mantra. So if you have a session that is a 20-minute session, I typically meditate for 21 minutes, about a minute to get settled, and then 20 minutes of meditation. And if you think about that kid who punched you in sixth grade and the dick you have to have a conference call with at

Starting point is 00:10:33 4 p.m. that day, if you think about those types of things for 19 minutes or 19 and a half minutes, but you notice it and bring your attention back to the mantra, that is a successful session. Because the muscle you're working is bringing your attention back to something. You are developing your powers of concentration. And it is definitely like a muscle that needs continual conditioning and reinforcement. So I use TM. There are other options. Vipassana meditation, I do use some sessions where I focus on my breath. But quite frankly, I think the easiest place to start is either, and it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, you could do both of these, Headspace app or Calm. Start using guided

Starting point is 00:11:17 meditations. Other good guided meditations you could check out include Tara Brock, B-R-A-C-H, who's been on this podcast. Great episode talking about a lot of these issues and topics. And Sam Harris. Sam Harris has a PhD in neuroscience. I think it's just samharris.org, H-A-R-R-I-S. And he has a fantastic lecture on video about all of the neuroscience and philosophy behind a lot of these practices. And that is waking up. So you could check out waking up if you like. And the easiest way to find that is just to go to fourhourworkweek.com forward slash Vimeo, all spelled out. But suffice to say, I meditate first thing in the morning, start small, rig the game so you can win it, get in five sessions before you

Starting point is 00:12:02 get too ambitious with length. So start, for instance, if you don't want to use any of that stuff, you could just start with a song that puts you in a good mood, sitting with your back supported somehow and listening to that song as you focus on your breathing. It could be that simple, but do five days. In other words, five daily sessions before you get too ambitious. You have to win those early sessions to establish it as a habit. So you don't have the sort of cognitive fatigue of that particular practice in any case. So number two, transnational meditation or some type of meditative practice. And if you take that 10 or 20 minutes, for instance, and I find with my practice, 15 minutes is just letting the mud

Starting point is 00:12:46 settle. And then the last five minutes are really where I get the benefit. It's much like training to failure in the gym. For me, you will still get benefits out of shorter sessions. But if I put in those 20 minutes, I will get 30 to 50% more done in that day with less stress. Why? Because I have already done the warmup to avoid distraction. And if I do get distracted or interrupted, I can return to my primary task more effectively. That is number two. Number three, I hang. What does this mean? I actually hang multiple times throughout the day and at night. And this is primarily to decompress my spine and also to improve grip strength. But there are a number of people you can look to for more developed thoughts on all of this. Ido Portal is one. I-D-O-P-O-R-T-A-L. I think I

Starting point is 00:13:43 just spelled that in English. And I don't have much exposure to him, but many of the listeners of this podcast have recommended him. So I did check out one of his short articles. It might've been a video on hanging throughout the day. And so I have a rig that I built in my backyard, which is one and a quarter inch. I would probably recommend most people start with one inch diameter galvanized pipe. And I bought this from plumbing supply and I built a pull-up rig outside in the span of about 10 minutes. And it costs, I would say less than $150. And it is not intended for kipping, not good for kipping. But if you want to see how I put it together, I also have some rings. And then I used a kayak dry bags instead of sandbags, which you can put water inside of, in fact, and use as kettlebells and so on when you're traveling instead of using them to keep

Starting point is 00:14:36 things dry. So there's a photo, you can check it out on my Instagram, just go to instagram.com forward slash Tim Ferris with two R and two S's and you can check out that rig. But I will hang by my hands throughout the day for perhaps one minute at a time, just as a, as a way of breaking up work sessions or writing sessions or fill in the blank at the end of the day. Uh, particularly if I do any type of weight training that loads the spine, I will hang upside down. And I hang upside down using teeter hang up gravity boots. These teeter hang up gravity boots cost around $99. I actually have multiple pairs around the country so that I don't have to travel with them because they're a hassle to travel with. So I have one pair in New York,

Starting point is 00:15:23 one pair in SF, one pair in LA that just lives at a gym. Actually, it lives at a gym that I go to because I don't have a home in LA. The purpose here again is to decompress and you can work up to a point where you're even holding weights for short, short periods of time, say five seconds. The gravity boots can be dangerous. So talk to your doctor. I must say this. I'm not an MD. Don't play one on the internet before doing anything like this, particularly if you have pre-existing back conditions. Other options. So there are times when I don't want to hang upside down.

Starting point is 00:15:55 Maybe I just had a big dinner. Maybe I just had a bunch to drink. Don't really feel like hanging upside down by myself and perhaps getting the most miserable acid reflux of all time. In those cases, or if I just don't have a place to hang upside down, I will use something called the Lynx back stretcher, L-Y-N-X. And you're basically laying on the ground, locking your feet in place, and then doing a dipping motion, the top range to decompress your spine. Again, for very short periods of time, five to seven seconds, let's say. That is another option. And people do love inversion tables. They are used widely for PT and other things. They just take up a ton of room. So I don't want

Starting point is 00:16:39 half of my living room taken up with an inversion table. I don't have a garage. So I prefer to either use the boots and you don't have to have your own pull-up rig. Of course, you can go to any CrossFit gym across the country and find a bar to hang from, or you can use this links device. And I use both every day, unless I have some type of injury that precludes it. So that's number three, hang. Number four is tea. So just to do a quick recap, make my bed, sit down, meditate for 21 minutes, get up, go jump up on the bar, hang for a couple of minutes, maybe go from one hand to the other, maybe do a couple of sort of a toes to bar with straight legs, which is a CrossFit move, and then drop. Then I go in, I throw on the tea, the kettle,

Starting point is 00:17:26 and I will boil water. And a lot of you tea nerds will take issue with this, but that's okay. I use a very cheap kettle here. At home, I have some fancier stuff from Breville. It makes a very good tea preparer, for instance. Well, it makes a great kettle, and they make a very good tea infuser. So if you want to get fancy, Breville, B-R-E-V-I-L-L-E has some great stuff. But for expedience, if that's a real word, and simplicity, right here, I have one that is called Utility, Utility, T-E-A. And I believe that's from Adagio, A-D-A-G-I-O. And I think it costs 20 to 40 bucks on Amazon. Very easy to find. So I'll throw

Starting point is 00:18:07 that on, boil water. While the water is warming up, I'll prepare my tea. And the tea I typically brew in a small glass container. It's a Rishi tea brewer, R-I-S-H-I, and that'll come up again. And I use loose leaf and it looks like a simple French press. You could in fact use a French press if you wanted. And I will put in aged Puerh tea, P U hyphen E R H. This is a black tea from China. It's very peaty, smells kind of like a wet horse's ass. Uh, why I know that is another story. And, uh, it's, it's very earthy and it's an acquired taste, but I will break off a piece of this Frisbee of aged, dried puer tea, drop it in there. I will also add turmeric and ginger tea. I usually get mine from Reishi, but you could also just shave fresh turmeric and ginger

Starting point is 00:19:00 very easily. And I've done that before. If I'm sick, I will, I will shave fresh ginger. If I'm sick, I will also add minced garlic, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So we have the puer tea. We have turmeric and ginger tea. I will also add in some green tea. Now this is where the connoisseurs of tea leaves will be like blasphemy, blasphemy. That doesn't, that doesn't make any fucking sense. Blasphemy. I need some more caffeine. Anyway, blasphemy, blasphemer. That's where I was trying to get fancy. That's what I was going to say. And they'll get very upset because they'll say, you know, Tim Ferriss, you should really do your homework because the steeping temperatures for those teas are all different. And if you're using this blunt instrument of boiling water, you're just an idiot and giving bad advice. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm glad to be the idiot if I give people advice that's easy to follow and is the gateway drug

Starting point is 00:19:49 into then exploring the complexity of tea. So let's just call it truce and keep it simple. 185 degrees is fine. So I will not pour boiling water into leaves because I can't drink boiling water and it takes too long to cool down. So I will boil it or you can set it to not boil, but I'll usually boil it and then just let it kind of sit there for, let's say three to five minutes after three to five minutes. It's fine. It's a little too hot for me to stick my finger in for more than like a half a second, but it's plenty hot to do what I want to do. I will then let it steep for say the first infusion I'll keep short. And some people will say, ah, 10 to 20 seconds. Look, I mean, let's keep life simple. I'll usually do it for say a minute and then I will pour it into my mug and my mug will have any number of different oils in it. Uh, my favorite is coconut

Starting point is 00:20:39 oil. So virgin coconut oil, I will put in my cup. It's about 70% by weight, medium chain triglycerides. I've written a blog post called, I think it's a, it's a joke people called titanium tea. The name is just a tongue in cheek joke, but very similar to what you might consider bulletproof coffee. So if I have some Kerrygold butter or something like that, I might put in a little of both, but my preference is coconut oil. I just like it and it seems to get all of my cylinders firing. So that is what I do with the tea, right? So flip it on, make it hot. I'll usually prepare my puppy's food while I'm doing that. Feed the dog and I'll do that right now by hand. Training the dog is a whole separate episode. And then I'll come back. The tea has boiled and

Starting point is 00:21:25 has already cooled off. Then I'll make my own tea while the dog chills in a crate and works on a Kong. If you want to look that up, that has been frozen the night before, but the tea again has puer tea. You can get all this stuff on Amazon, uh, puer tea. And I have links in the titanium tea blog post. If you want to check that out. So pu-erh tea, the reishi, ginger, and turmeric tea, and then a bit of green tea. And you can choose whatever green tea you like. Dragon well is quite tasty. If somebody wants to try that out, it's longjincha is what it is in Chinese. L-O-N-G is dragon.

Starting point is 00:22:02 Longjin is well. Cha is tea. C- T C H a second term. So Bruce Lee, for instance, for those people interested, I'm glad you asked is, uh, Lee Xiaolong. Lee Xiaolong is Lee. That's his last name. Xiaolong is little dragon. Uh, that was his, his nickname. There are many, many other names and action stars who have that dragon in their name. All right, I digress. So let's go through the roll call. Make the bed, meditate, hang, make the tea, sit down with the tea. And the next thing I do is journal. And there are a number of different options for journaling. I usually do one and not both. There is the five minute journal. You should check it out. It's a great

Starting point is 00:22:45 little journal and it allows you to establish not only achievement for the day or expectations of achievement because you're identifying your top priorities. You're identifying your top behaviors or attributes. So there is that component. And then you're also establishing gratitude for what you already have or have done or the people around you. This is that component. And then you're also establishing gratitude for what you already have or have done or the people around you. This is very important. And it's easy to become obsessed with pushing the ball forward as a type A personality. And you end up a perfectionist who is always future focused. The five minute journal is a therapeutic intervention for me, at least because I am that person,

Starting point is 00:23:30 that allows me to not only get more done during the day, but to also feel better throughout the entire day, to be a happier person, to be a more content person, which is not something that comes naturally to me. I think a lot of my drive comes from constant dissatisfaction. So this is very helpful medicine. The five-minute journal, you can look it up. Funny side note, or maybe I think very cool side note is that that journal was created as a muse by people who read the four hour work week. So that's a very full circle, fun anecdote. The other type of journaling that I also do is morning pages. And I won't spend a lot of time on this, but if you simply Google Tim Ferriss morning journal, I have actually scanned examples of my own morning journals

Starting point is 00:24:11 and what those look like with the morning pages specifically. And I talk about why I journal, the different reasons. And one of them is in the case of morning pages is to take whatever anxiety and monkey mind self-talk could interfere with the rest of the day and to trap it on the page so that I can get the fuck on with my day. And that is it folks. So again, these are five things, but let's be realistic. I don't always hit these five because if you add them all up, it's probably anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes. Nah, that's bullshit. It's maybe 60 minutes. I would say all said and done. You know what? Why do I keep on making such large numbers? It's not true. It's like 30 to 60 minutes. And there are days when life intervenes and you have emergencies you have to deal with, but you can

Starting point is 00:24:59 always do at least one of these. And if you just tick off three, I find for me personally, that the likelihood of that day being a home run is infinitely greater. So again, you have make your bed, you have meditate, and that can be very, very short, just a few minutes with an app like Headspace or Calm. Then you have hang, so you can figure out a way to hang or decompress using something like the links, then T and then journal, whether that's five minute journal, morning pages or something else. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. That's all I have for you now. And let me know if you'd like more or less or what you would like, please let me know, uh, on Twitter at T Ferris. And so that's T F E R R I S S on Facebook.

Starting point is 00:25:43 It is facebook.com forward slash Tim Feriss with two R's and two S's. And if you like this kind of advice or these types of findings, these types of discoveries, every Friday I send out a very short email. It's called five bullet Fridays. It has five bullets and it contains the coolest, most useful things that I have found or been pondering that week. It's very small and it's just a dose of really useful, in some cases, really hilarious stuff before you go on to the weekend. So if you're interested in that, just go to fourhourworkweek.com forward slash Friday,

Starting point is 00:26:20 all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com forward slash Friday, put in your email, it's free, and you can check it out. And if you don't like it, unsubscribe, that's it. All right, folks, let me know what you think. And as always, thank you for listening.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #105: 5 Morning Rituals That Help Me Win the Day

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.

Your Ad Here

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #105: 5 Morning Rituals That Help Me Win the Day

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.