Transcription
[Music]
What I love to do for you right now is to walk you through four productivity prisons. These are essentially four jails that too many good souls find themselves trapped within. And because of these productivity prisons, something like a world-class morning routine will not work, or they'll find some way to sabotage it, or they'll find some way to bring down their primal productivity. So let's get right into the first one.
The first productivity prison is your terroir and the concept of ecosystem degradation. So if you go to a vineyard and you taste some wine and you like the wine, you ask the winemaker, "Well, what's your secret?" Of course, it's the craft, but also she or he will say, "Well, it's the terroir." The terroir of a vineyard is essentially the entire ecosystem or the entire environment. It's the climate, it's the wind, it's the sun, it's the soil, it's the farming conditions, it's the nature of the vine. And you have a personal terroir. You have a personal ecosystem. And so one of the productivity prisons is we have allowed our terroir or our ecosystem to degrade. So if you're not really careful, what will happen is your entire orbit or your entire terroir starts to degrade, and that causes you not to embrace elite productivity.
What am I really talking about here in terms of your personal terroir? Well, number one, your personal terroir would involve the spaces that you inhabit. The places that you put yourself in profoundly affect your inspiration. They profoundly affect your moods. That's why I love to travel. That's why travel is a primary source of personal mastery. That's why going to foreign places is so good for your creativity. I'm sure you'll agree with me, there's some certain places, whether it's a country or a specific city in your own nation, where you land in that city and your energy just soars. And so spaces or places are profoundly influential to your productivity.
The second part of your personal terroir would be the people you associate with. You can do world-class work and change the world, or hang around with energy vampires. You don't get to do both. So the people that you are around profoundly influence your productivity and your ability to embrace the 5 a.m. club and then to run the 202020 formula, which I'm going to get to very soon, and then to go out in the world after you've calibrated a world-class morning and promote world-class creativity, productivity, elite performance, and exceptional life balance.
Another key element of your personal terroir would be your routines. So this program is very much about The 5 a.m. Club, but after you have your exceptional morning routine, it comes to your work routine, and then your afternoon routine, and then your evening routine, and then your pre-sleep ritual. Towards the end of this program, I'm going to walk you through an extraordinary pre-sleep ritual because, as I mentioned earlier, to get up early, what's incredibly important is deep quality sleep so that you renew yourself while you're sleeping. And to sleep better, you absolutely need to install a calibrated, excellent pre-sleep ritual.
And I'd like to really emphasize this point about people. It's so important to remember that your performance is affected by your influences. And what I see are a lot of very good souls who are limiting their productivity, their performance, their prosperity, their happiness because they've allowed energy vampires in their lives. They've allowed people who are critics in their lives. They've allowed these naysayers and people who bring them down. And I'm sure you have people even in your own life. Maybe they're even in your family. And these are people who, when you talk to them and you say, "Here is my vision, and here's my ethical ambition, and here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to run a marathon. I'm going to launch a new business, or I'm going to find the love of my life, or I'm going to get even more fit, or I'm going to grow a financial fortune." They say, "Well, be practical," or they ridicule you, or they minimize you. And I just want to be absolutely candid, as always, and say to you, you absolutely have to remove those people from your life. And if they're family members, then practice selective influence and selective association and spend less time with them. Maybe you don't talk to them every day. You talk to them once a week, or even once a month. And I think that's really, really important to fill your life with people who support you, fill your life with encouragers, people who understand you. Even friends, someone who might have been a great friend a year ago or five years ago, they might not fit with you right now if you're on a tremendous growth path and you're constantly elevating, optimizing, and prospering, and your friends aren't into growth, they might not fit within your orbit right now. They might not fit within your personal terroir, and that will sabotage your ability to wire in the 5 a.m. Club methodology, as well as live a world-class life. So please remember to fill your life with people who make you feel good, who celebrate you, who make you feel happy. And that is actually a good way to find out who should be in your life. Just trust your joy. After you talk to someone on the phone, after you talk to someone on a video call, after you have a coffee with someone in person, do you feel better after you met them, or do you feel worse? And if you feel worse, ask yourself, why would you fill your life with people who deplete your joy and reduce your creativity and diminish the sparkle in your eye?
Another part of your personal terroir, and this is something we often don't really think about, but your words. You can either use victim speak, or you can use lead or talk. But words are incredibly powerful. Words have molecules of energy within them. You can talk like a victim and talk about hate and talk about, "Oh, this is sick, and I can't stand this, and I don't like this." It's essentially the vocabulary of "can't." And if all you do is talk about "can't," if that is your personal terroir, again, you are going to degrade your self-image, you're going to degrade your joy, you're going to degrade your energy, you're going to actually reduce your magic. Or you can start to use the vocabulary of leadership, the vocabulary of possibility. To use the term of Ellen Langer, one of the preeminent social psychologists, the language of "can" is the words of hope. You talk about possibility, you talk about what you can do. You don't talk about problems, you talk about opportunities. If there's someone, a client, who is bothering you, you ask yourself, you speak about gratitude and you speak about what you can learn from this. If there is a change in the marketplace or a change in your life, you ask yourself, "How can I grow from this? How can you leverage this? How can you positively exploit this scenario to grow as a leader, to grow as a human being, to grow as an extraordinary producer?" So your words have magic to them. If you look at the great heroes who have emerged through history, they freed nations and they electrified their followers through their words. So a key part of your terroir are the words that you use every single day. If you use excellent words, your energy and your productivity will absolutely soar.
Another key part of your personal terroir is the media that you consume, especially in the world we're in right now. Are you following influencers who speak to the worst of human behavior? Are you reading magazines that are all about gossip and toxicity and just leave you with a bad feeling after you've looked at them? What kind of books are in your home or in your apartment or in your even in your car or when you commute? What kind of audiobooks do you listen to? What kind of podcasts do you listen to? All of that is the media that you consume, and that has a profound effect either on imprisoning your productivity and your magic, or liberating it, so that that primal genius within you is freed. Please think deeply about the media that surrounds you, the books around you, the magazines around you, the podcasts, the people that you follow on social media. All of that media profoundly affects your mindset, which is your psychology, your heart set, the second interior empire, which is your emotionality, your emotions. All of the media you consume affects your physicality, your energy, and it affects your fourth interior empire, your soul set, your spirituality, your purity, your energy, your connection with your most heroic self. So you really want to think. That's why the tight bubble of total focus concept I've been teaching for so many years is so powerful. Essentially, you want to create an ecosystem or personal terroir around you that you live in, that is separated from the reality of the majority. I hope that makes sense to you. Most people live in the real world. I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in the real world. The real world is negative. The real world is full of victims. The real world is full of impossibility arrians. The real world doesn't have a lot of dreamers in it. The real world doesn't have as much virtue as I'd love to see. The real world has a lot of people in it that are not creative. The real world has a lot of people who want to bring you down versus lift you up. The real world has too much difficulty, too much misery, too much suffering in it. I want to create my own personal terroir of my own choice, my own making, and I want to live in that. And you can do that. You have the power to shape your ecosystem, and your ecosystem will affect your ability to get up early, run the 5 a.m. Club method, install a world-class morning routine, so you set the tone for world-class days.
And I really want to emphasize that what you do in that first hour, from 5:00 to 6:00, that victory hour, has an outsized effect on the way the remainder of your day unfolds. What you do in that first 60 minutes sets up your psychology. It creates that pharmacy of mastery that I'm going to get into in a coming module. It sets you up emotionally, so you replace worry and fear and scarcity and disappointment and regret with higher-order emotions of joy, wonder, festivity, aliveness. What you do in that victory hour can increase your energy dramatically. And I've always believed that your energy is so much more important than even your intellect. You can have a great vision, you can have a heroic mission, but if you don't have the execution energy to get that ambition done, nothing is going to happen. And that's why when I mentor the billionaires and the sports superstars and the world-class entrepreneurs and even people who are members of royal families, we always work on their energy levels. And one of the key ways to do that is the 202020 formula that I'm going to walk you through in much greater detail than I talked about in the 5 a.m. Club book. So fasten your seatbelts, you're going to love what's coming. But for now, again, the productivity prison that I'm walking you through, number one, is really your personal terroir, and you want to calibrate it and lift it up to world-class.
And after the media that you surround in your personal terroir, I want you to think about your professional tools, your pro tools. So many people want to work at maestro level, they want to be the virtuoso, they want to achieve domain dominance, and then they go cheap on their tools. They go cheap on their work resources. They don't invest in learning. They don't invest in, let's say, a Moleskine to work through their ideas. They don't have a great, they don't have great digital devices. They don't have mentors. They don't have inspiring workspaces. They're not willing to fly to a city that inspires them and rent a hotel room and lock the door for two days and do their masterwork. I've always remembered what Salvatore Ferragamo said: "Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten." Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten. I also learned from Warren Buffett, "World-class financiers focus on ROI, the return on investment, not the expense of something." You see members of the majority, it's, "Oh, that cost too much." The way the A-players think about things is, "Well, if I make this investment, what will be the return on the investment?" And so I really want you to think about your tools. The tools of your trade are absolutely important. They affect your personal terroir, they affect your creativity, they affect your productivity, they affect your self-image. You always want to be around excellence. And what I've also found is cheap costs 10 times more. You want to brain tattoo that: cheap costs 10 times more.
And then, I'm going to give you a very quick example of that. There's someone I remember talking to, and he was always talking about how cheap his car was, how cheap his watches were, how cheap the food he would eat would be, how he would go to these places on a family vacation, and everything was, you know, the cheapest, cheapest, cheapest place. But he ended up having to pay more. Even for example, his watch. His watch kept on breaking. So he wore a cheap watch. He didn't feel the excellence of a lovely watch. He didn't have the beauty of a nice watch, and he didn't even have the efficiency of a good watch. And he actually had to keep on replacing his watch every six months. Cheap actually ended up costing him more. So get the best possible tools that you can possibly get.
And then the final part of your personal terroir are the goods in your life. What kind of a car do you drive? I remember talking to someone, and he said, "Oh, he wanted to be the best in his field." And I said, "Well, why don't you start with getting a better car?" And he looked at me and he said, "What are you talking about?" And I said, "Well, we were having coffee together, and I said, look at your car. It's always a mess. It's always dirty. It's always rusty. It's always in the shop. Your environment, your terroir, your ecosystem affects the way you see yourself. If you want to play it world-class, why don't you upgrade your car?" So he upgraded his car within a week. He did it. Good for him. He executed on the suggestion. He had the single best year he'd had in business that year, simply because he invested in a better car. And so again, what are the goods in your life? The things that you have. It maybe it's the clothes, maybe it's your handbag, maybe it's the shoes that you wear, maybe it's the quality of how you travel.
One of my favorite books is a book called "The Magic of Thinking Big" by David Schwartz. And there was a chapter in there that I read decades ago that influenced me. And he wrote, "Go through life world-class." "Go through life." I think the chapter was actually "Go through life first-class." But that's powerful because when you go through life first-class, you start to see yourself as a heroic producer. You start to see yourself as one of those rare-air producers who get up at 5:00 a.m. You know, Tim Cook of Apple, 5:00 a.m. Michelle Obama, 5:00 a.m. Stephen King, 5:00 a.m. Some of the greatest poets and creators in the world, 5:00 a.m. As I mentioned, Nelson Mandela, 5:00 a.m. If you look at many of the greatest women and men of the world, the most successful people in the world, many of the most soulful people in the world, they had that through-line in their lives of rising before the sun.
Just to emphasize it, getting up at 5:00 a.m. is the quietest time of the day. And you might say, "Well, what about night owls?" 5:00 a.m. is even quieter. It's even more still. There's even more magic in the air between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. You just have to feel that magic and experience it. And then what's going to happen is you'll not only feel better about yourself by 6:00 o'clock, you are on fire. By 6:00 o'clock, you have so much energy, so much joy. By 8:00, you've probably got more done than most people get done in a few days.
The second productivity prison I really want you to think about is self-betrayal and conditioned cynicism. Self-betrayal and conditioned cynicism. I really do believe that when we're first born, we are most connected to our native wonder. It was Picasso who said, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael. It took me a lifetime to remember how to paint like a child." It's a very powerful point. So when we are kids, we speak truthfully. When we are kids, we're not worried about failure. When we are kids, we don't care about rejection. When we are kids, we talk the way we want to talk. When we are kids, we are intimate with our dreams and intimate with our gifts and intimate with our talents. When we are kids, we don't see people as people of different colors or different religions or different backgrounds. You see a bunch of kids who don't even know each other in the playground. Five minutes, they say, "Look, Mommy, here's my new best friend."
But what happens is, as we go through life, we experience self-betrayal. I call it the self-betrayal continuum. As we get older, we get knocked down, and as we get knocked down, we get hurt, and we start to close. We start to contract. We don't get invited to the right birthday party. A teacher says that we're not that smart. A friend says we don't look very good, or we walk in a different way. We get a little older, we fall in love, we get our heartbroken. We get a little older, our best friend betrays us. We get a little older, we get disappointed on a lost business deal. We get a little even older, and someone attacks us because they're jealous of our success. And the very nature of life is we have these times on the mountaintop, and we have these valleys, times in the valley of darkness. And what that starts to do is it causes us to forget who we truly are. And I think this is a profound insight for you. It sets up this field of hurt. As we go through life, we get disappointed, and pain starts to occur. And society tells us, "Well, don't feel the pain." So what we do, and this is a key point as well, we start to repress and swallow the pain and the disappointment. And that builds this field of hurt, which is really energy of fear. And most people carry it.
And so what we start to do is, rather than working through the fear and releasing it, and that's why mindset work is so important, working through your emotions. So many people talk about mindset as the gateway into exponential productivity. I believe mindset without heartset is an empty victory. I think you absolutely have to work through your mindset so you install the beliefs of excellence and mastery and extraordinary. But I think it's also very, very important to do that heartset work so you release the lower-grade emotions of resentment, disappointment, fear, scarcity, self-loathing. So the second productivity prison that will cause people not to embrace the 5 a.m. Club methodology and then not to live a world-class day and then a world-class week is we have this self-betrayal unfolding in our lives, which causes this repressed and suppressed energy field of pain. And so we have these great dreams, and we learn these great methodologies, and we have these amazing intentions, and then we, when we start to apply them, when we start to get up at 5:00 a.m., we're at war with ourselves.
Which brings me to the third productivity prison, which is self-sabotage. Most people are at war. It's not that they can't live wonderful lives, ultra-successful lives, productive lives, soulful lives, lives of immense service. Every human being has incredible agency, incredible power. But what has happened is we've disowned that power, and we've repressed that power, and we've lost a sense of daily intimacy with that power. And so the third productivity prison is self-sabotage. We have great intentions, great ambitions, and yet when we start to execute around them, our that reptilian brain is activated. That lower-grade part of us, let's call it limbic hijack, is triggered, and we go into fight, flight, freeze mode. We lose that connection with our neocortex, the crown jewel of human reasoning, and we go into the lower, animalistic way of thinking and way of operating.
I want to be really clear here because I think it's incredibly important. The third productivity prison that really traps people is they want to do amazing things. They read the books, they do a premium course like this, they have all these great goals, they feel very inspired. And then when they start to execute, they enter self-sabotage, and they don't know it. They're not aware of it. They don't know the three-step success formula I'm going to teach you after this module. So they don't have the self-awareness to go, "Oh, here's why I'm not getting up at 5:00 a.m. consistently. It's because I'm scared. It's because of myself. It's because I am my own worst enemy here. It's because of that self-loathing. It's because of that field of hurt. It's because of all that pain I've repressed from the past hurts that I haven't worked through. Oh, I see now. I should work through that in my morning routine through prayer, meditation, and all the things, all the tactics I'll teach you about in an upcoming module." But just be clear right now about the power of self-sabotage and how essentially we go to war with ourselves.
And then what we do, because we don't have the self-awareness about what's going on within us, about the limbic hijack, we blame it on external reasons. We say, "Well, I'm not an early riser." We say, "Oh, it's a busy time in my life." We say, "Oh, it's because of my family, they're making noise." Or we say, "Oh, it's because I have too much at work right now." Or it's because I'm going through a difficulty, or because the economy is fragile right now." When we come up with these whole host of, let me call it, a litany of excuses to remove us from self-accountability, which actually makes us feel worse about ourselves and increases self-loathing.
In many ways, this architecture of self-sabotage is about fear. And I just want to quickly touch on some of the most common human fears. The first is a fear of unworthiness. A lot of us have been suffocated and put down and have been denied and have faced so much adversity in our past that we believe we are unworthy of success, and we're unworthy of happiness. We feel we're unworthy of great fitness, and we feel we're unworthy of prosperity and high spirituality. And I just want to remind you that as a human being with a beating heart, you are completely worthy of your heart's highest desires. And if you don't feel worthy right now, that fear will sabotage you. And so with the techniques I'm going to talk about as part of the 202020 formula and a world-class morning routine, you're going to be able to work through that unworthiness. But that fear really imprisons so many people.
The second fear that a lot of people suffer from, and I emphasize the word "suffer," is the fear of rejection. And so I want you to think about that. Where in your life are you limiting yourself because you really have a huge fear of being rejected? And related to that fear is a fear of not fitting in with the crowd. Yet, you can change the world, or you can fit in the crowd, but you can't do both. I'll repeat that again. It's a key brain tattoo: You can change the world and live your best life, or fit in the crowd. You can't do both.
Another fear that's really important is a fear of feeling not good enough. It's a big fear. A lot of people will not launch the 5 a.m. Club method, come up with reasons not to do it, come up with reasons not to stay with it, because essentially they feel not good enough to get the remarkable benefits of rising at 5 a.m., like more positivity, like more physical energy, like greater self-discipline, like exponential productivity because you're up so early, it's so quiet, there's no distraction. You can actually think benefits like feeling stronger about yourself because you're reading and meditating and praying and doing affirmations and writing in a journal or working out on a spin bike.
Another big fear that the majority faces is the fear of failure. So we don't embrace a world-class habit like the 5 a.m. Club because we don't like the feeling of failing. But failure is the highway to success. I mean, how do you achieve great things? You open yourself to the process of failure. You can't be a great chef unless you fail at so many meals. Failure is necessary on the path to mastery. And when I see the best of the best, and when I mentor many of the best leaders in the world, they have just hardwired a native default so that they really don't see failure as failure. They see it as part of the process. They say, "Oh, this is necessary for my growth. This is an opportunity to optimize." They don't even call it failure. They call it an opportunity to optimize. They see it as a necessary part of practice. Too many people, they hit the first roadblock. Maybe it's that second morning where they start to feel a little tired at 5:00 a.m., or they start to feel a little self-doubt whether they can stay with the program for 66 days until they wire it in to the point of automaticity. And so they give up. Please remember that failure is part of the process. Don't even see it as failure. See it as the journey towards installing a habit. And like I mentioned, what makes us human is our ability to adapt. What makes us human is our ability to make a commitment to install a new habit and then to stay with the habit. Remember, all change is hard at first, messy in the middle, beautiful at the end. And what makes us human is to stay with the process of letting go of an old habit, letting that old habit atrophy, and installing the new habit over it until that new habit becomes automatic. And that's why I want to remind you that whether you think you're an early riser or not, your fundamental human gift is the ability to stay with the process of this morning routine until you reach a point where it's automatic. And that's what people who install new habits, millions of people, that's what they do. Millions of people for across history have said, "I can't get up early," but I'm going to make the commitment. Whether it's the great poets, the great business builders, the great sages, the monks, they might not have got up early initially, but they said they reached a choice point where they said, "I'm going to get up early. I know it's the most magical time of the day." And they stayed with the process until it became automatic, until it became easier to get up at 5:00 a.m. than not to get up at 5:00 a.m., until it just became part of their lifestyle. So think about that fear of failure. And by building some self-awareness around it, you will be able to catch yourself and witness it and say, "Well, I am not my fear. I am the power that's watching the fear. I am braver than my fear, and I will continue."
Last few fears that are common: fear of ridicule. I just want to let you know that as you start getting up at 5:00 a.m. and running the 202020 formula and then experiencing that upward spiral of success, by the way, I want to introduce the term the Keystone Habit. Habit researchers talk about a keystone habit. A keystone habit is one habit that when you install it, it lifts every other habit in your life. The keystone habit, the 5 a.m. Club method, is the mother of all habits. It is a glorious keystone habit. It is the one habit. Forget about every other habit for now. Over the next 66 days, forget about every other habit. I want you to think about doing just one thing every morning: getting up at 5:00 a.m. and running the morning routine I'm coming to. And what you will find is when you install the 5 a.m. Club routine so it becomes easier and fun and enjoyable and energizing and inspiring, and you're up at 5:00 a.m. and you're just feeling alive, and you realize how beautiful it is and majestic it is, you're going to find that habit will start to lift your other habits. You're going to start exercising more. You're going to start reducing digital addiction. You're going to be able to have more discipline to eat even better. You're going to save more money. You're going to release any form of mediocrity in your work. You're going to have the power and the momentum to start releasing the energy vampires and the dream stealers from your life. And everything else in your life will rise because you have the power and the commitment and the choice and the bravery to make the 5 a.m. Club method a part of your lifestyle for the rest of your life. So stick with this process. You absolutely are going to get remarkable benefits as you commit and express conviction to becoming a member of the 5 a.m. Club.
And then the final fear that a lot of people suffer from is the fear of success. That might surprise you, but a lot of people self-sabotage and they don't embrace the 5 a.m. Club method, or they don't embrace other rituals and routines that make them more productive, because they're actually subconsciously afraid of success. Success brings responsibilities with it. Success makes you different. For most people, success means you could be attacked by jealous critics. Success means you're going to have to work very hard. Success means you're going to have to deal with the parts of success that a lot of people don't want to deal with. And so again, they sabotage it because staying within that safe harbor of the known makes them feel better. But a great way to destroy human life is to spend your remaining years in the safe harbor of the known. It's that old idea, which is a boat that stays in the safe harbor never experiences a storm, but that's not what boats are made for. And I propose to you, the whole purpose of a human life is growth. The whole purpose of human life is building greater intimacy with your potential and your gifts and your talents, and getting to know how great and heroic and brilliant and strong and creative and productive and loving you are. And you will actually, it's such a paradox. We think by remaining in the comfort zone and not growing and doing the things that will make you more successful, we think that's a recipe or a formula to be happy, safe, peaceful, and find freedom. But it's just the opposite. Staying in that safe harbor of the known and not trying anything new and not facing the discomfort of growth is a recipe for misery. And so, yes, as you embrace success, as you grow, as you pursue your Mount Everest, you're going to get knocked down. You'll face difficulty. You'll face danger. That's part of the adventure of living a heroic, colorful, magical life. And I know that you've signed up for that kind of a life.
Which brings me to the fourth and final of the productivity prisons, which is the good enough versus legendary distinction. So what can happen to people on the ascent to world-class is they get to a place where they say, "I'm already more successful than most people I know. I get up early. I'm doing all these great things. I don't need to optimize." And they start to coast. I call this the Titan's Decline. And what I'm suggesting to you is actually success is a vulnerable place because when we become successful, it's very easy to stop doing the very things that made you successful. When you become successful, it's easy to start to coast. When you are successful, it's easy to rest on your laurels.
There was a type of slave in ancient Rome called the Orga, and the Orga's job was to stand behind the emperor, the Dukes, the military commander, and whisper in his ear, "Mori, homo, mori, homo," which is Latin for "Remember, you are only a man." In other words, remember you are only a mortal. Remember, don't think more of yourself. Remember to stay humble. Remember to keep your boots on the ground. Remember to get up early. Remember to train like a Spartan warrior. Remember to serve your people. Remember to always keep learning. And that is the fourth prison. People get successful and they start to coast. They suffer from the Titan's Decline. Their success causes them to stop doing the very things that made them successful. And the moment you start to rest on your laurels, I was doing some research on this idea of resting on your laurels. It comes from ancient Greece, and they would actually take this crown of laurels, it was this plant, this wreath of laurels, and put it on the head as a crown to crown the winning athlete. And so this principle of "don't rest on your laurels" came from that. It was almost a suggestion to the winning athlete, the winning warrior, the winning leader, the winning movement maker: Do not rest on that crown of laurels.
And so I want you to think about this as we end this module. As you become more successful, become more productive, as you become more confident, as you handcraft a world-class life, stay humble. I mean, it makes me think of Steve Jobs. Stay humble. He said, "And stay foolish." Never stop calibrating and refining your morning routine. Never stop learning. Never stop getting up early. Never stop increasing your fitness. Never stop polishing your craft. Never lose the sparkle in your eye. The thing about a master is she never thinks she's a master. She always thinks she's a beginner.
Okay, let's get to the next module.