I only review books that have blown my mind, helped me grow and taught me things I couldn’t possibly have figured out for myself.
My reviews are bulleted for easy consumption.
7 things you need to know about The Miracle Morning
1. In a nutshell: The Miracle Morning (TMM) is the process of rising up to an hour (or less; it can be done in 6 minutes!!) before you need to, to devote time to and invest in yourself. The idea behind it is that you are unlikely to achieve your big dreams if you do the same things every day and don’t devote time to your growth. The 6 activities of TMM are SAVERS:
S = Silence (Meditation, prayer or breathwork)
A = Affirmations
V = Visualisation
E = Exercise
R = Reading
S = Scribing (a fancy word for journaling as it fit the acronym better!)
2. You should know that this book has changed my actual, real-life behaviour every single day. It’s completely transformed how I start my days and therefore how I live my days. TMM has bought me a ‘25th hour in the day’ which I spend on MYSELF and it’s truly life-changing. In the 10 weeks that I’ve been using it it’s changed my body too (because I’m doing 20-30 mins of power vinyasa yoga every morning). There aren’t many books that you can call truly life-changing but TMM is just that.
3. At the core of TMM process is a wonderful lesson – it’s not what you do but who you become that really matters.
4. Hal Elrod insists you take full responsibility for everything that happens in your life. Be grateful for everything you have, accept what you don’t have, and be accountable for creating everything that you want. He calls it ‘taking life head-on’. He also has one of the best definitions I’ve read of what taking responsibility means – it does not mean blaming yourself for things that have been done or happened to you, but it means owning the steps that you will take to improve the situation.
5. This was my lightbulb moment: You don’t have to settle for mediocrity in life just because most people do. However, before you can achieve all you desire and deserve, you have to commit time to becoming the person you need to be to be to do so. None of us really spends time on this and instead we spend our days reactively and on autopilot, so where is this success going to come from? Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development.
Another lightbulb moment was the danger of hitting snooze on the alarm: it’s not a harmless one-off but instead programmes our subconscious that it’s ok not to follow through with what we intended to do.
6. The first hour of your day really sets your direction for the rest of the day. If it’s frantic / lazy / haphazard then your day is likely to follow suit. However, if your first hour is peaceful, focused, purposeful, invigorating and organised then you are setting yourself up to win your day.
7. What you tell yourself before you go to bed can really influence how you feel when you wake up. If you go to sleep convinced that you will be exhausted at 5am, you’ll be exhausted at 5am. If you tell yourself how excited and grateful you are to be waking up early to invest in yourself, then you’ll wake up much more energised and ready for your Miracle Morning.
My 10 favourite quotes:
“The degree to which you accept responsibility for everything in your life is precisely the degree of personal power you have to change or create anything in your life.”
“Never forget that who you are becoming is the single most important determining factor in your quality of life, now and for your future.”
“When I heard Jim [Rohn] proclaim with certainty, ‘Your level of success, will rarely exceed your level of personal development, because success is something you attract by the person you become,’ I stopped in my tracks.”
“We all want Level 10 success, in every area of our lives –health, happiness, finances, relationships, career, spirituality, you name it –but if our levels of personal development (knowledge, experience, mindset, beliefs, etc.) in any given area are not at a Level 10, then life is always going to be a struggle.”
“Every day you and I wake up, we face the same universal challenge: to overcome mediocrity and live to our full potential. It’s the greatest challenge in human history –to rise above our excuses, do what’s right, give our best and create the Level 10 life we truly want –the one with no limits, the one so few people ever get to live.”
“If you are to move beyond your past and transcend your limitations, you must stop living out of your rear-view mirror and start imagining a life of limitless possibilities. Accept the paradigm: my past does not equal my future.”
“Harv Eker said in his best-selling book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: ‘How you do anything is how you do everything.’ Every time you choose to do the easy thing, instead of the right thing, you are shaping your identity, becoming the type of person who does what’s easy, rather than what’s right … We must stop isolating incidents and start seeing the bigger picture. Realize that everything that we do affects who we’re becoming, which is determining the life that we will ultimately create and live.”
“The possibility of mediocrity exists for everyone, because being mediocre simply means choosing –whether consciously or unconsciously –to be the same as you’ve always been. Mediocrity has nothing to do with how you compare to other people; it’s simply a result of not making the commitment to continuously learn, grow, and improve yourself. Whereas being extraordinary –which leads to extraordinary levels of success –is a result of choosing to learn, grow, and be a little bit better each day than you’ve been in the past.”
“Have you ever felt like the life you want to live and the person you know you can be are just beyond your grasp? Do you ever feel like you’re chasing your potential –you know it’s there, you can see it –but you can never quite catch it?”
You can purchase The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod here
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