My Daily Rituals

You have to figure out what are your good hours and what are your bad hours. I call them my golden hours. Well, people want to know what kind of habits I do to improve the overall quality of my life. I'm very much a creature of habits, almost to an absurd degree. I use these habits to kind of give an order and a kind of ritual-like feel to my life that is very pleasant and calming. So, every morning I wake up and the first thing that I do is I get on these pillows and I meditate for approximately 40 minutes. I can't emphasize what a great practice that is. I do Zen meditation, as people know, but I don't care. Whatever form is good. The main thing is what it does is it grounds you for the rest of the day and it makes you go, all right, it's a new day. It makes you focus on the fact that you're alive that particular morning, that it's a day that's about to happen. And it's almost this kind of sacred thing that you're going to fill with various different activities, but you're like greeting the sun. You're greeting, if there is sun, it happens to be I'm in Los Angeles, so I say that every morning, it's usually sun. But you're greeting the clouds. You're greeting whatever it is, right? And it grounds you. It's just so pleasant to have that. And if ever there's a day which never happens anymore where I can't, I'm so miserable. I feel so lost. I feel like, I don't know, I just feel like jumping off a cliff. I just have to have that. So I really, really recommend that every single day of your life. Then I have my work habits. So one thing to know is if you work for yourself, which a lot of people don't have that privilege, but if you do, you have to figure out what are your good hours and what are your bad hours. I call them my golden hours. My golden hours are really about 4 to 7 o'clock, 4 to 7.30. That's when my mind is focusing at its best. So I always try to have the habit of making my work fit into that time. So for instance, 8 in the morning, I am useless. I am a zombie. I have no brain power. No, you can't even talk to me. 9 o'clock, I'm still useless. 10 o'clock, I'm still useless. 11, I start to wake up. So I know don't try and work at 10 in the morning. People try to schedule things for me and I say, no way, man, I can't. So you have to know who you are and know what times are your best times. The other habit that is extremely important is exercise. I like to exercise every single day and it's something I look forward to, although I must say the physical therapy for my stroke, some of the exercises would be so boring. But I still put on interesting music. I make it a kind of game and I find a way to have some fun with it. But it takes my mind off everything. If you don't take care of your body, nothing will work. And so having that hour, I'd say at least an hour every day, if you can, or 45 minutes of exercise. Some days I like to do it in the morning after my meditation. A lot of times I do it at night before dinner. It doesn't matter. You carve out that period of time. And then I like to take a nap. You know, a lot of people don't do that. I take a nap every afternoon at about 2.30, about half an hour. It clears my mind. It relaxes me, makes me not so cranky for the rest of the day. That's a very, very important habit for me. Some people don't like that. It makes them all foggy. It depends on who you are. The other thing is, I build in, as we've talked about in some other videos, about time wasters. I like to get online and read certain things that I know are wasting time, but just kind of get my head off of everything else, usually around sports, etc. So those are the main habits that my day will revolve around. Meditation, exercise, a nap, and looking at certain websites that I like to do that are kind of fun and take my mind off things.