Morning Rituals of an Entrepreneur

I believe your day as an entrepreneur is a pure reflection of your morning rituals. How you start your day will determine the type of a day you're going to end up having. So one of the most common questions people ask is, Pat, I want to know how your day starts. What do you do in the morning? What time do you wake up? What time do you do this? What time do you do that? So instead of just telling you what I do, I'll share with you exactly what I do in the morning when I wake up. I also went and got a list of people that I like how they start their day to give you some value and give them some love on their morning rituals. By the way, I'm going to tell you something here for you to keep in mind. You can't wing this area. This is not an area for you to wing. It's very simple. This is not an area for you to wing. Because think about it this way. Everything is about momentum throughout the day. It's all about momentum. So every day is a mountain. Every single day is a mountain. This is a mountain here, so meaning you wake up in the morning, and the higher the mountain goes, the more excited your day starts, the more the snowball gets thicker and thicker the bigger it gets, right? So you sleep. You're ready. Boom. Your day starts. Boom, boom, boom. Great day. If you don't have a good start, it's a small mountain, so you don't have a lot of time to create momentum. It is very important on how you start your days in the morning. So not everybody does the same. A lot of people have different types of things they do. Some are single. Some are married. Some have kids. Some don't have kids. But you've got to figure out something that works for you regardless, regardless. One of the most common things I hear from a lot of people is, you know, for me, I have to wake up at 10 o'clock in the morning because I need to do this, this, this, this, that. If you don't get your morning ritual down, and you have any desire to compete as an entrepreneur, you are toast, if you think you're going to be able to compete with the rest of the guys in the world of business. So let's go through a few of them here. First one I'm going to give some love to Gary V. Here's what I like about what Gary V. says on his morning ritual. He wakes up at 6 a.m., reads the news in the bathroom, something I do as well, and before leaving the house, he hugs his kids for five minutes and calls a family member while driving. I like that. Hugs his kids for five minutes and calls a family member while driving. Gary, props to you for doing that. Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins has a very good ritual. He doesn't have a specific time, what time he wakes up, because of his traveling that he has. He may be in Europe, he may be here. So he doesn't have, I wake up exactly at 4.45 or 5.50 or whatever, he doesn't have that. So he doesn't have a time for that. He wakes up, he does his cold plunge, submerged for a full minute, underwater, cold, cold water if you've ever done one of these cold dips, is what he does. Then his prime of his days, what he calls his prime of his days, three things. One, he has a breathing exercise that he does. If you see it, it's a very, if you haven't seen the Tony Robbins documentary, I highly recommend you watch the Tony Robbins documentary, I don't even know what it's called, but I do know if you go on Netflix and you type in Tony Robbins documentary, it'll come up. I highly recommend you watch it. It's solid. It shows how some of his events are, it's, I'm not your guru, is what the documentary is called. Phenomenal. And you kind of see a day of his life and what it looks like. But the prime of his day, he has this breathing exercise, you'll see how he does it, you may not do it, but that's his, expressing gratitude and prayer. He's big on prayer, on what he does, which is pretty interesting. His day is probably one of the most energetic people around the world that if you go to his convention and you see what this 5,000, 10,000 people that he has, everybody's fired up because his energy gets everybody else fired up. You have more of a possibility of impacting people's lives if your energy is high. Morning ritual is purely an energy game is what you've got to keep in mind. Zuckerberg. Let's see what Zuckerberg does. This is a guy that's worth 40 some billion, somewhere around there. He wakes up at 8 a.m., interesting. Not a lot of you hear 5 o'clock, he's an 8 a.m.er. When he hasn't been working all night, so he's a guy that works all night until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, but he wakes up at 8 a.m., wears the same exact shirt every single day, because he doesn't want to spend a lot of time thinking about what to wear. And so that's what he does. Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square. He wakes up at 5.30 to meditate, followed by a six mile jog. Pretty intense. Richard Branson, from Virgin Group. He is generally on his island. He swims around the island, or goes kite surfing if it's windy, then plays tennis before sitting up for healthy breakfast. He doesn't have a set time when he wakes up. He leaves his curtains open, and it's where exactly the sun rises. He says, when the sun rises, the light wakes me up. So he doesn't have an alarm clock, because typically the sun rises 5.45, 6 o'clock in the morning. Simon Cowell. We don't know what time he wakes up. No, he may be waking up at 11 o'clock in the morning, but he does say what he does in the morning. He resets the snooze button twice before being served breakfast of hot water with lemon, papaya juice with lime, oatmeal tea, and three smoothies. Pretty specific. And knowing his personality, I can actually see him doing that every single day. Tori Burch, the designer, she's worth around a billion, a little shy of a billion dollars. Wakes up at 5.45, immediately checks her emails, what she does, gets her three boys out of bed, and takes a 45 minute exercise, such as a quick walk. Now that's her routine. Let me tell you what I do when I wake up in the morning. So before I tell you what I do when I wake up in the morning, you've got to keep in mind, I have three kids, all under the age of five. I'm married, I have three kids, all under the age of five. I run a company with a ton of employees and thousands of agents around the country selling insurance and investment products, companies called PHP Agency. Now that's what I do as a business, right? So one of the things for me, just a couple months back, three, four, five months back, my dad, if there's one thing my dad will not hesitate to do, my dad will pull me aside and he'll say, hey, Mr. Bodybuilder, what happened to your six pack? Now you have a one pack. He has no filters. If you're out of shape, he'll tell you. He's good with the ladies, he won't tell that to the ladies, but he will tell me if I'm out of shape. And I love that because I'd rather have the truth than you trying to make me feel good as a father, as a mentor. So I get on the scale, I weigh 256, I've never weighed 256 before. The moment I notice myself weighing 256, my energy goes high. My energy goes low. Sometimes, and this was right when the baby was born, right around when the baby was born. So when the baby is born, you're doing two hours sleep, you're waking up, you're doing all this other stuff. No matter what happens, the moment I feel the energy dropping, the moment I feel it, I know because I can't hang until 10, 11 o'clock if I'm starting early. I know that. And my business requires me to hang for a long time because it requires a lot of energy. So there is a formula for every single person. This isn't something you need to ask yourself. How is your energy in the morning and how is your energy in the afternoon? Can you hang longer by five, six o'clock? You're already tired. Keep in mind, your competitors wake up typically earlier than you and they're able to last longer than you. That's the only reason they're growing faster than you and having a bigger business than you, whatever the type of a business that you have in place. That is if you're competitive. Here's my morning. I wake up generally at 430, 445 when I have training sessions at five. If I have a training session with my trainers at six, I'm up 515, this morning I had a training session at six, I can no longer help myself. It's a 445 wake up. I'll have 445, I'll wake up, I'll check my email, I'll go through all the information that I have on my email. I'll typically listen to an audio book while I'm driving or walking around. I will do my daily affirmations on what I tell myself. It's been one of my rituals for a long, long time. I'll have my affirmations laminated all over the wall. It'll be all over my shower wall, everywhere, on what I tell myself. Then I go to the gym. I do my routine. I do my workout in the morning, weights. Right after that, one of the things that I've been doing recently that I love, let me tell you, this is a very fascinating thing. If you have the luxury of doing this, I'm 6'5", 240, so my back and my knees feel it a lot, especially when I was in the Army, we used to ruck march with 50-pound backpacks is what we used to do, right? So cryotherapy, Paul, why don't we put the video up so they can see what it looks like. Cryotherapy is something I've started doing recently. You literally stand there with no shirt on, no clothes on, and you stand there and this thing starts and it goes all the way down to minus 240, and the system I use, there's many different ones, these machines are around $100,000, it goes to minus 240 for three minutes. By the time you're done, what happens to the blood, the entire body, flexible, it feels like a million bucks and your body gets shocked is what it does. Now I do this at 6 o'clock in the morning, so it works very, very effectively. If you can do that at your gym, it's great. Even if you do it once a week, I highly recommend it for you to try cryotherapy. Good breakfast, you've got to have breakfast because that's your gas tank. So remember, if you go and do 10 miles, 20 miles, 100 miles, 200 miles in your car, you need to go to a gas station. Breakfast, meals are your gas stations. You need to go fill up the tank. Then I do my thinking. These are the times that I do my thinking, I do my strategy sessions, I do my ideation, I think about what I'm working on, my next project, what needs help, what needs to be improved, who do I need to call, what are my conversations going to sound like, what am I going to do with this, what am I going to do with that, so it's thinking. A lot of thinking and strategy and definitely praying and meditating, catching up on news. If my kids wake up early, they'll typically wake up at 6.45ish. I'm typically gone by then, but I'll play with them when I get home. And so that's typically what my days look like in the morning. Now one thing I'm going to tell you to give you some feedback on, this is Monday through Saturday on what my schedule looks like. Sundays, play day, family day, fun day. There is nothing on Sunday going on but me doing whatever I can to have fun with my kids. I look forward to Sundays because we have a great time together. We play together. We enjoy each other's companies. My wife and I have a great time together. We either swim in the pool or go and do all these other things that we'll do on a Sunday. There is no set thing on what to do on Sundays. Sunday is refueling, re-energizing, re-firing yourself up. Then at night, there's a lot of preparation for the week, typically a couple hours of preparation for the week, and then we start the day back up again the next day. I typically will do Facebook mentions on Sunday night at 10 o'clock, 9 o'clock recently to do some Q&A with other entrepreneurs from all around the world. And that's what my week looks like. Every week, there's one thing I want to tell you guys. If you can't do it every week, I do recommend it every other week, especially if your body is in action, get a massage every other week, minimum. Even if it's $60 a dollar a minute, I highly recommend it. Get a massage every other week, minimum. This body that you have, you and I live in it. We live in this body. Let me explain. We are not the body. We are the spirit. We're the mind. We live in this body. We need to take care of this body. And then it gives us a lot of miles. It's like a car. You buy a car, you drive in the car, but you're not the car. I don't know if I'm making any sense. You're in the car, you're driving the car, but you're not the car. The driver dictates how long that car can last. You, the body is the car, but your mind, the heart, we the spirit, are the driver. The way you take care of this, this is going to last a long time. Now obviously we cannot unfortunately do anything at this point with some of the health things that happen, cancer, all these other things that you don't have control of, but you can definitely control energy, weight, being able to last, being able to do whatever you can for your body to have more endurance, more stamina, all of that is within your control. And the better you get at doing that, the longer you can compete. You know, Warren Buffett is worth $70 billion, and one of the things he believes in is buy and hold. One of the things about success is for you to be able to buy and hold on to your energy. The longer your energy lasts, the longer your competitors are not going to last. Because your competitors are going to get tired. They're eventually going to make so much money that their stomach's going to get big. They're going to have the nice cars, nice house, everything, then they're done. They're done. But you, if you truly want to play at the highest level, you want to go 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 year play, this is not a three year I'm going to be a millionaire and everyone's going to say you're such a rock star. That is boring. If that's your play, and if you think that's going to feel like a million bucks, it's not. The play is constantly creating. The play is constantly having the energy to come up with new ideas, engaging, sitting in boardrooms knowing you've got the fire, you're in charge, you're doing all the right things. Not all the right decisions all the time, but you're making the right decisions 51% of the time and your other guys, your competitors, are getting tired. And they're thinking about it. And they eventually will say phrases like this. Let me tell you what it is. This is when you win. When they start saying, life is not all about success and money. Oh, that's an alibi. They're justified. They've given up. You win. Of course life is not all about money. That's if they were saying life is all about money. It's not. But life is. You've got 80 years. What you do in this 80 years, 80 to 100 years, whatever your timeline's going to be, that's the impact you're going to make with the next generation. I don't think we're here just for ourselves. See, it's the people that say, life is not all about money. You think life is only about you. I don't think life is all about myself. I think life is all about what I do for the next generation. My example, my value, what I do with my kids, how I raise my boys, how I raise my daughter, the type of way I treat my wife, my family, that dictates the example everyone's going to watch for the next one. That's what this means. So we need to know that our capacity, the purpose you have, the impact you can make in the world is massive, but you need a lot of energy to do that. So going back to the morning ritual, you can do research. There's plenty of research you can do on different people on what they do. But one of the most common things everyone has is movement of the body to create a lot of energy, proper food, proper nutrition, to be able to last a long time, more than their competitors, just like in sports, just like in basketball, just like in boxing. What do they say? Let's see if he can last 12 rounds. Let's see how they'll play in the fourth quarter. Let's see how they're going to do in the third period when their legs are gone in hockey. Let's see how they're going to do in stoppage time in soccer, when they're so tired. Everyone's tired. Ronaldo recently won the championship. It's in the stoppage time, one of his teammates scores a goal, he's hurt. That's the moment you win in business. The moment you win in business, when everybody's gone, when everyone's tired, you're still at the office, coming up with ideas. Everybody's disappeared. You're left. You're the last man standing. The last woman standing. That's what it's going to take. And you better have lots of energy and stamina and endurance to be able to compete in this world. The world of capitalism. The world of capitalism favors those people that have high energy, high intensity, who are willing to sustain that energy for long periods of time. And you can do that because there's a formula for it. With that being said, Paul, throw me my favorite pillow. Hey, 100,000 subs by August 31st. 100,000 subs by August 31st. We're getting a lot of love. We're getting a lot of people that are helping us out. We're growing with more subs right now than ever. We're averaging on 600, 700 subs a day. We need to get to about 1,000, 1,500 subs a day to hit our goal. So if you haven't subscribed to this channel yet, we believe firmly, pound for pound you can go against anybody on subjects of entrepreneurship on this YouTube channel and we firmly believe that. Very soon we're going to have contributors from other people that we're going to bring entrepreneurs or experts in specific fields to also be contributing for this channel. But this is the number one channel for entrepreneurs on YouTube. How to. Not just motivation, how to. All aspects of it. So if you haven't subscribed, please do so and help us get to 100,000 subs. Good catch, Paul. He played football before. I'm not going to tell you about the league, but he did play football before. And he's done many, many great things for himself with the world of football. So you've got questions, comment on the bottom, I typically get back to people with questions that they have. And if you watch this video all over the internet, somewhere else, you can always come back to PatrickBetDavid.com. Illy, phone. And you can find many, many more videos on our website, especially a new video that we have on PatrickBetDavid.com that is a real cool video for you to see. It's a short film we produced. You can see it there as well. Thanks so much everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.