 If you're like me, you probably start your day off by brushing your teeth, washing your face, maybe having a cup of coffee or a cup of tea, and then scrolling through your phone feed infinitely on Instagram. Now it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have a bad or unproductive day if you do that, but there is one key practice or ritual I can guarantee is going to ruin your day. Now in this video, I want to share what that really, really important thing is and how you can fix it. Hey guys, Alex Hyne, author of the book Master the Day. So I've included a free goal setting worksheet right below this video. If you are interested in learning how to plan out your best year ever and figure out what rituals and what actions are actually going to make that happen, you can check out the first link down there below. You'll also get an email every couple of days on how to use goal setting to change your life. Now let's talk about what I think is one of the key habits behind the best in the world. There's a Hungarian, I think positive psychologist named Mihai Csikszentmihalyi, and he's the predominant researcher on flow. And his research is really, really fascinating to me because he studied people all over the world and he wanted to study their peak life experiences. And he found that they universally described it the same way, whether they were Korean housewives, people who are summoning the tallest mountains in the world, violinists or people working menial jobs, they all described the peak experience like being in the flow of life. Now what was really, really interesting was one main concept. One thing that he found, especially when you're trying to train yourself to stay in flow or to have those peak experiences, one thing that he said caught me off guard. He said that there's a point that amateurs stop at that experts continue through. You know like let's say for example, you are learning to play tennis and at first even just returning the ball is really difficult. But then after a little while you could hit the ball and maybe you can even hit it over the net, but you can't hit it tightly over the net. She practiced that after another couple of weeks and then eventually most people will get good enough where they just stop getting better because it's not necessary. Here's the difference between pros and the amateurs. Pros avoid letting their actions become automatic. So Mihai Csikszentmihalyi calls it the avoidance of automaticity because there's a point at which you type fast enough and you don't have to learn how to type any quicker. You cook well enough, you don't have to learn to cook any better, or you play tennis decently enough that unless you want to reach the upper echelons, you don't really have to be any better at it. But what he said the crucial distinction was was that whereas most people as soon as they reach the level of automaticity where they don't have to think about driving or how to write in cursive or how to think in another language, the pros and the people in the highest amounts of flow, they actually continue to invest effort to stay in that zone where it's a little bit difficult. So I want to pose this question to you. Where are you allowing your life to become automatic? Maybe for you in the morning, you go to the same coffee shop, you say hi to Kyle, you get your penne au chocolat, I don't know what you call that in English, a chocolate croissant, and then that's your morning routine. Or maybe it's something in your relationship where every morning you're like bye honey and then you just like run off. And that's not how the relationship started. You used to do these sweet things for the person you're dating or married to. Maybe it's just something regarding your happiness or your daily work. Like you show up to your job and you work nine to five and clock in and clock out, then you just go home. Not much effort, not much thought, like life's humdrum. But the real secret to keeping an amazing, not only internally filling, but a high performance life where you're executing at the highest level for everything, every quadrant is the avoidance of just doing the easy, the automatic thing you do without thinking. Now you know I like to give like a tiny deal of your ritual in each of my videos. With this one, I'm actually not really giving any solution for you or any sample habit. I'm just leaving you with a question. Because the mediocre or average life usually is an automatic life. One without thinking where we just do the same thing we usually do and we don't really try to double check our actions. But today or tonight or tomorrow, is there something you can do to prevent that automatic level from being reached? Maybe you just think twice about what you're having for breakfast. Or maybe you're gonna take 30 seconds longer to do something sweet for a friend or the person you're dating. Or maybe you're gonna show up to work tomorrow with new ideas and bringing up projects like you were at the beginning where you had to earn your keep and you were really trying to blow it up. So with this video, I just want to leave you with one thing. Today or tomorrow morning, if you didn't live your life automatically, just by default without thinking, what would you do differently? It's all I got for today, guys. I hope that helps. I think it's something incredibly important. But in any case, avoid the automatic autopilot life. If you can avoid that, you'll always be improving over time forever. All right, so again, if it interests you, I've got a free goal setting worksheet, first link below. It's gonna help you figure out how to have and plan the best year ever of your life and the exact rituals to do that. With an email every couple days to help you get started. So check it out down there below and I'll catch you in these related videos that are on this exact topic here.