 Whenever you read about the morning routines of these millionaires and billionaires and you always see the same thing that they say, I get up by five. Personally, I think this is a load of horseshit and I don't think it's tied to success at all. What I think is more important is actually what you do on a daily basis. And I think sometimes a morning routine can be a very important way to start your day. So in this video, I thought I would share what to me is my million dollar morning routine. Let's have you guys, Alex Hein here over at Modern Health Monk. Now, I've put together a free seven-day self-growth challenge. It's a brand new email series I put together. You'll get an email a day. It's gonna give you a simple little habit you can do every day to live a better life. So it's the first link right below this video. You guys can check it out before we jump in. Look, I'm not the 5 a.m. kind of guy and I don't think you should be either unless you really want to be because I think everybody out here is obsessed with waking up at five because it looks cool or Robin Sharma or Bill Gates or whoever said you should do it. But people will wake up at five a.m. and yet will scroll through Instagram for three hours in the evening. So in my opinion, it's more important what you get done while you're awake versus what time you wake up. But I thought I would share how my day begins which is usually sometime between seven and eight. When I get up, I believe that a morning routine should have three essential parts. And for me, the first part is exercise, getting my blood flowing. So I tend to do qigong which are Chinese, Taoist, Buddhist breathing exercises. So breath work is very trendy these days. I just start with 20 minutes of breathing exercises to get my heart rate elevated, get my limb flowing, get my blood going. After that is done, I move over to my kitchen and I sit down and I literally read through my goals. I have a piece of paper where half of it, the front, literally just says the list and has the list of what I want in my life. And on the back, it literally just has the daily rituals I have to do every day to make that happen. All I do is dedicate two minutes to reading that and reminding myself of what I want and what I have to do right now to make that happen. When I go through my goals and through my rituals, then I spend 10 minutes reading a self-growth book about something that can improve my life, something instructional, something positive that makes me think differently. And after I've read that self-growth book, typically what I'll do is I'll sit down my breakfast and I look at my whiteboard behind me, my whiteboard that's covered with six feet of goals and habits and rituals that I need to do. So the point of this home morning routine is that I wake up with exercise and I saturate my mind with the goals and the dreams and the aspirations and the hopes of the things that I want to have happen. So to me, the first part of a powerful morning routine is what I call deliberate living, which is where this idea of the list comes from. The thing that I see, having coached hundreds and hundreds of people, is that the number one problem I see with people is people don't know what they want. And so it's very difficult to take any kind of daily action towards building a better life if you don't even know what that life looks like. So for me, there's a great book called It Works. And It Works is a little red pamphlet that's maybe 50 pages by an anonymous author. And he says that the greatest goal-setting advice ever devised was simply writing down what you want three times a day and looking at it as much as possible. So what I do is I always have my goals laminated. And on the front, all it says is the list, meaning this is what I want. There's no elaborate shamanic hippie ritual with palo santo and sage. There's no manifesting thing going on. I just remind myself of what I want all the time. So for me, first part of the morning is always about deliberately living, which is what kind of life do you want? Now other rituals that you can do here are morning pages by Julia Cameron, free journaling, just what do I want today? What does my gut say? What's exciting me? Starting with some kind of deliberate focus for the day that helps you think about what do I really want for my life is the best way to start the morning. Because whereas the average person, maybe one day a year that the new year is thinking about what they want, if you do that every day, you have 365 times to get better, where the average person only has one day to get better. The second thing is deliberate thinking. So to me, deliberate thinking is really letting the mud settle. You know, there are all kinds of stories by Buddhists and Taoists and Zen monks where they talk about the value of meditation is letting the mud settle, right? Where you shake up a glass with mud and water, you let it sit, and then after a period of time, the mud settles and the water's clear. And these are analogies or metaphors for the mind and thinking and meditation. So the problem is when every day we just jump into work or we just jump into the nine to five, we start our day on autopilot. And autopilot living is the greatest threat to you becoming the kind of person you wanna be. And it's the greatest threat to reaching the kind of life that you want to have because it's the antithesis of thinking. To me, starting the morning off with Qigong, whether it's physical exercise or it's journaling, allows deliberate thinking to happen because if my mind is clear, I can think, is this really what I wanna be even be doing today? You know, Steve Jobs had this quote that whenever he woke up with too many days where he didn't wanna do what he had to do in the day ahead, he would really sit back and think about what his priorities were, what he wanted from his life, and maybe if he was even on the right track. So whether it is through journaling or goal setting or meditation, getting time to have deliberate thinking and deliberate living, to me is the absolute foundation of my morning routine. Now the final part of my million dollar morning routine that I recommend is deliberate action. So in a perfect world, I think maybe it's Buddhists that say, technically, your thoughts, your words and your actions should be aligned, right? Thoughts, words and actions. What you think, what you say, and what you do. Very often, we say we wanna get fit or we say we wanna build a better business or we say we wanna be a better partner, whatever, and we really do mean it. But when the rubber meets the road, it's a lot harder to do. So deliberate action, the path of deliberate action is these inspired daily rituals I have written here. Okay, I said what I wanted to work on was being a more on time person. So what about my daily rituals do I have to do to be a more on time person? Or I said that my priority this year is I'm gonna write a book or I'm gonna build a business or I'm gonna start freelancing. And I've been saying that for three months and nothing has happened. So there's a mismatch between what I say and what I do and something about my habits is not aligned with the kind of person I wanna be. I said I wanted to be an entrepreneur for years myself and yet it wasn't until 26 or 27 that I ever started anything entrepreneurially and I started truly being aligned on the path of deliberate action where I dedicated three hours every day towards building my business seven days a week for three years till I could quit my job. So very often in life, the morning is a powerful time to have deliberate thoughts, deliberate words and goals and figure out what your deliberate actions will be to become the kind of person that you've always wanted to become. And I think if you do these three things every day, doesn't matter when you do them, but if you do these three things, you'll see that in a year, your life will become so incredible, you won't even recognize where you were a year ago. That's my two cents for today, guys. Follow the path of deliberate thinking, planning, living and action and your life will become amazing. Check out these two other related videos. I'll see you guys soon.