My 10-Step Morning Personal Success Routine (What’s Yours?)
November 11th, 2009
Subscribe To PebbleStorm Updates via email
One my essential entrepreneurial practices is a morning Personal Success Routine (“PSR”), that is my foundation for the day. If you don’t have one or you never consciously designed it – you need one. If you have one, I’d love to hear about yours in the comments. I’ve found that when I don’t follow some kind of morning Personal Success Routine that includes some or all of various meditation, writing, exercise or happiness activities, I feel less healthy, less happy and less productive – both in the ways I have fun and in work.
Why I had to figure this out
When I left salesforce.com in late 2006, “my plan was to have no plan” - I was “committed to being uncommitted”! I wanted to have a bunch of different work and life adventures, for at least six months, before settling into a long-term direction. In work terms, that meant doing consulting projects for awhile rather than trying to start my own company right away. I’ve seen that when I or others jump from one job/career to another, it’s impossible to get the mental space and clarity that helps you actually consciously know “is this really the right path/step for me, or am I doing it just because it’s the next rung on the ladder or it’s convenient?” (Not unlike relationships.)
Whenever I was in a 9-to-5 job, it automatically forced me to create a morning routine – wakeup at 7a, eat oatmeal, shower, get dressed in a collared shirt, get coffee, read the paper, take the bus to work…etc. (As I’m writing this, I’m noticing how much my morning consumptions changed – no coffee, oatmeal or newspapers. I’m a little allergic/sensitive to coffee and oats, and I don’t read news anymore – online or offline.)
No daily structure can be as bad as too much structure
After I left the 9-to-5 world, I had to figure out a whole new morning routine for myself. I mean sure, it’s fun waking up to nothing for awhile…but it gets old. When you have no morning or daily structure, it can be as irritating as having too much structure. And even though I’d been an entrepreneur before, it was different because I was the CEO of a company…and thus had another 9-to-5 job.
- Side note for everyone who thinks being a CEO is automatically fun, enlivening and easy – it’s not. It can be the loneliest, most stressed role in a company, if you aren’t conscious in your design of your company or role. It’s why I’m also doing CEOFlow: “Turn Your Employees Into Mini-CEOs”.
So now in my PebbleStormy (yes, that’s a word) world of “work on what I want, when I want, with whom I want, from where I want…” I’ve been experimenting for a long time on how to start my days off on the right foot. Trust me, either lying in bed or doing nothing in the morning gets old fast – well, if I do it more than 1-2 days per week…
My routine that helps me feel healthier, happier and more focused and productive each day
- Get enough sleep. I’m actually working on getting more sleep. I’m only getting about 6 hours per night (last night I got 5). I want 7 – 7.5 hours per night, which is perfect for me. The whole “sleep when I’m dead” mentality is bullshizz. What good is not sleeping if you don’t enjoy your days as much? I feel like crap when I don’t get enough sleep after a few days, and am much less clear and productive. Right now I set my alarm for 7am.
- Drink water. 1-2 cups. I get dehydrated at night. It’s the best thing to have before anything else in the morning.
- Get moving, I do either some jumping jacks, push ups and/or sit ups. This is both for the exercise and to wake up and get my blood moving.
- Meditation. I do 10-30 minutes almost every morning. It would be nice if I was more regular about meditating for 5 minutes before bed, too. I did a blog post about my practice: A lifetime happiness and focus enhancer: Vipassana meditation. If you’ve never meditated before, you can start with 1-2 minutes: Meditation 101: How To Start.
- The Artist Way “Morning Pages”. The essence of this: just write three pages of anything, even gibberish, every morning, and it will help you unlock your creativity. I really like these as a way to do a brain chatter dump, and get some advice from myself. Sometimes I just do half a page, sometimes the full three pages.
- 1-2 happiness/centering exercises. These days I’ll do some exercises from either the Hoffman Institute retreat I did or from the Abraham-Hicks book “Ask And It Is Given” (I love their Focus Wheel Process). I HIGHLY recommend that book for both the content and all the great tools in the back!
- A “3 goals” process. I ask myself the question, “if I can only get 3-5 things done today, what should they be?” What are my top priorities?
- Exercise: 4-5 days a week I do either running (20-45 min down to the Santa Monica beach) or yoga in the morning (I love Rudy at 9am at Power Yoga in Santa Monica). If I run, I do it early – after I drink water, but before all the other stuff (before meditation, etc). When I do yoga, it comes after my writing/meditation.
- Skin brushing: I had a couple of trusted experts tell me about this, and now I do it most days before showering. There are plenty of articles about skin brushing and why it’s good for you, but I’ll tell you the main reason I like it – it stimulates my skin and nerves and body like I’m getting a caffeine charge. Very cool.
- Good food: Almost every morning, I have a green smoothie (picture on Facebook). I have a Vita-Mix blender, and dump in spinach (a lot!), an apple, berries, and all kinds of superfoods and goodies like ginger, lemon, mesquite, rice protein, flaxseed, hempseed, maca, goji berries and spirulina. You can google “green smoothie” online for all kinds of suggestions. I became religious about this after taking an amazing ‘uncooking’ class from June Louks in Malibu, who wrote a great book called “Rawumptious Recipes: A Family’s Adventure to Healthy, Happy, Harmonious Living”. I’m not a raw foodie, but can appreciate all the information and recipes.
I’m always experimenting with these steps, adding, subtracting, playing. The order of steps often changes depending on the day and whether I’m running, doing yoga, am time-limited, etc. I’m not too anal about it.
This might seem like a lot – and it is. I set aside a couple of hours for all of this, not including the exercise. That’s how important it is to me. I didn’t start here, I evolved this over the past three years, building on it step-by-step, then starting from scratch and trying other things. My travel still plays havoc with my PSR!
Take babysteps rather than jumping in too fast
You don’t need a lot of steps in the morning, or some complex routine. Start with something simple, such as a green smoothie. Or 1-2 minutes of meditation. Create a plan to have a more exensive PSR over time, including good food, exercise, meditation, happiness awareness/practice and goal-setting. If you try to do too much too quickly, you’ll be more likely to fall off track at some point and get discouraged. Start with one thing at a time – take babysteps, and keep at them. Keep it simple and add one new practice per month. If you fall off track, just get back on when you can.
[Updated] Being kind to myself
I woke up Monday morning feeling run-down (it started Sunday night), and I needed a rest day. So my PSR for Monday was staying in bed sleeping and/or reading a fiction book until 11am 
Being successful includes being kind/easy to myself in addition to pushing myself. Too much of one or the other unbalances me.
What’s your PSR? Please share in the comments!
5 Questions with Aaron Ross: How to Make $ and the Most Out of Life! (Genius.com post)
May 1st, 2009
I just did a blog post for Genius.com touching on making money through enjoyment, leadgen and “Seeds, Nets & Spears”, ColdCalling2.com, and more…
Today I ask five questions of Aaron Ross. Aaron is an original and was one of the original sales guys at salesforce.com. While at salesforce.com, he invented
Cold Calling 2.0 for his inside sales team that sourced $100 million in recurring revenue. Aaron Ross founded PebbleStorm to help people and CEOs “make money through enjoyment.” Prior to founding PebbleStorm, Aaron Ross was an EIR (Entrepreneur-in-Residence) at Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm with over $1 billion under management. He is an Ironman triathlete, graduate of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, and volunteer mentor at SCORE, “Counselors 
to America’s Small Business.”
As usual, Aaron has his hands in a lot of things.
PT: Aaron, you’re a busy guy with a lot of eclectic interests. What’s holding your attention these days?
AR: Great question! I can see how it appears to be an eclectic mix of projects and interests: sketching/art, CEO flow, having fun with work, travel, sales consulting / creating predictable revenue, self-managing teams, the 4-hour work week… However, everything I do and even how I live is ALL a part of PebbleStorm and helping people “make money through enjoyment”.
Work doesn’t have to be hard – we just make it hard on ourselves for no good reason. My mission is to help people and organizations unlock their “Unique Genius” and help them make work fun, more profitable and deeply gratifying (an example note I received when I launched said “Thanks for making the world more of the place I want to live”.)
With the economic turmoil, you’re seeing people finally waking up after being asleep in their careers for years or decades. Many have been plodding along making money and, meanwhile, forgetting their dreams. You can stand it while you thought it’d bring security…but that ended up being illusory. I recently wrote a blog post (“Using the Economic Trouble to Your Advantage”) on how the recession will be good for us in the long-term, because it’s forcing our economy to detox of bad habits and is getting people, many of whom have been asleep at the wheel of their work lives, to finally take a hard look at what they want to do with their lives.
So what the heck does all this have to do with my work in sales and creating predictable revenue? Well, “Make money through enjoyment” includes the phrase ‘make money’, and it’s hard to enjoy what you do if your revenue or income isn’t very predictable!
PT: You have an interesting way of categorizing types of leads: “Seeds”, “Nets” and “Spears”. Can you tell us more about these differences and why these are important?
…continue on for the full post on Genius.com: 5 Questions with Aaron Ross: How to Make $ and the Most Out of Life!
==========
In a post in May, The Power of “Why Not?”, I outlined some reasoning for “why not do some work from kauai?” A half dozen people agreed, and here we are now 
It’s my first time here, and Kauai is amazingly beautiful!
For the first part of the trip, Will Jessup (founder, www.CitrusByte.com), Tony Wong (founder) www.DigitialOnionInc.com, and Patty Yun (CitrusBuyte/MBA, USC) came out. We quickly discovered that the Grand Hyatt Kauai, on the south shore, has an excellent office area:
The view from our office (with one of my favorite books, and a key inspiration of www.CEOFlow.com):
Initial thoughts on this kind of trip
To any of you skeptics – we really are working here in Kauai in addition to enjoying ourselves at the beach The most valuable part of this trip isn’t the amount of work we crank out with our analytical left brains. The value is giving ourselves some mental space to breathe, getting clear, and letting our creative right brains make those “aha!” and “why didn’t I see that sooner?” leaps of intuition. Sometimes this happens while we’re writing, hiking, driving, sometimes while sketching… but it’s the kind of thinking that happens rarely when we’re overloaded from work back home.
Great Place to Stay in Princeville
Ever want to stay at a townhouse in Princeville? I’d recommend where we are: http://www.kauaitownhouse.com/
More Trip Pictures
“The 4-Hour Workweek” and PebbleStorm
May 5th, 2008
Have you heard of “The 4-Hour Workweek”, by Tim Ferriss? His premise: people don’t want to be millionaires, they want to be able to live like millionaires. So – start a business that creates passive income (income you earn while you sleep), that only requires a few hours a week to maintain, and you can live like one:
www.fourhourworkweek.com
I really recommend that you read the book:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780307353139&itm=1
OK – so the 4-Hour Workweek sounds great, but how do you achieve it? How do you get to the point where you have a business that you love creating passive income for you?
If the 4-Hour Workweek is you want, PebbleStorm is the roadmap and system to get you there.