action experiments

Here’s SPIRE part 1 if you missed it.

My Morning Routine Solution:

I don’t want to take away from what I’ve gotten from the Miracle Morning, Morning Pages, the Daily Practice, or anything else. I have benefited tremendously from my exposure to these practices. But this concept that Reinhard Engels discusses on his Everyday Systems site began to resonate with me:

14 minutes a weekday for the rest of your life will keep you fit. There will be progress, slow and maybe even imperceptible.

This is the 1% that James Altucher discusses. It’s also what Mark Forster calls “little and often”, and it’s the key to his time management systems.

So how do we get slow, consistent, even imperceptible progress in these five areas? I wanted to take out the stuff that didn’t work for me, or I thought wasn’t backed by solid science. I wanted to take all of these influences and boil them down into something I could take care of in…well, 14 minutes. Preferably 90 minutes in total.

“If it’s important, do it every day. If it’s not, don’t do it at all.” – Dan Gable

I hated my job. I hated my commute. I hated my boss. I hated my life. My recycle bin at work was filled with empty energy drink cans. People would tell me that I looked tired. I would literally drag myself out of bed, go to work, come home, eat dinner, and go back to bed. I was putting weight back on.

Not that I think my life is all that unique. I bet you’ve gone through something similar. Maybe it’s happening right now?

When all of this was coming to a head over the last three months, I started doing something called the “Miracle Morning”. Hal Elrod has written something that I think is of tremendous value: this is a series of six daily habits to do immediately upon awakening. At the same time, I kept reading about a technique called “Morning Pages” from Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way  series. People in different fields–people whom I admire–were doing these morning pages. So I started doing them, too. Then I ran into James Altucher’s concepts of “Choosing Yourself” and what he calls the “daily practice” – taking the PIES (Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, Spiritual) and making sure you are working on them, improving them by a tiny amount each day (1%).

I haven’t pulled myself all the way out yet. My life is in transition. But it is working and I want to share what I have learned so far.

The Concept

I took what was working from the PIES. I also believe you have to invest in your resources and relationships, so I’ve renamed the acronym ‘SPIRE’:

• S – Spiritual
• P – Physical
• I – Intellectual
• R – Relationships and Resources
• E – Emotional

The good:

Spiritually, I found a deep re-connection with my intuition. It’s hard to spontaneously write in your daily pages that you need to quit your job over and over again and not believe it. I started listening to my intuition and I quit my job.

On the physical front, I found myself getting into better and better shape. I started having more energy. When I tried to shift gears to a more infrequent style of training I found that I started missing workouts and motivation. With a daily physical practice, there is nowhere to hide. You can’t move your workouts back without having to reschedule your day.

Intellectually, I found myself learning French and computer programming much faster when they became a daily practice, keeping me both fresh and in the groove. Because you are only doing a little bit a day, your mind really has the chance to integrate what you are doing. Knowledge compounds daily. Instead of cramming for a test and only getting a surface-level understanding, it becomes deeply embedded into your long term memory, like drops of water etching a pattern into rock over time.

From a resources standpoint, I find myself with a deeper relationship with my significant other because I practice appreciation and gratitude every day. She says I have more energy and I look much less tired.  At the same time, I’ve reinforced many positive things about my personality by reinvesting in my internal resources.

Finally, emotionally, I find myself being happier on a daily basis–instead of feeling life is an unbearable grind. I find it easier to see what I can learn from things I used to complain about. I wake up excited to get out of bed.

The Challenges:

Ultimately, it took several hours a day to complete my practice: way too long. This was supposed to be a supplement to the rest of my life, not the core of what I was doing everyday. It started to unbalance me. Instead of strengthening myself to better live my life, I was strengthening myself at the expense of my life.

Some other practices seemed misguided and not backed by science: Affirmations can make you feel worse, and Visualizing having achieved your final goal is actually demotivating. I had to change some things.

I knew that a minority of the effort typically resulted in a majority of the results, so I started going through each part of my morning routine to try to discover what was working for me and what needed to change. I’ll share my results tomorrow. (Update – here’s part 2)