The John Tesh Blog

To be successful in life, we need to take advantage of our mornings. That’s the gist of a new book called What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, by Laura Vanderkam. And it's a book I am reading right now - mostly in the morning. Laura recently surveyed some of North America’s top executives, and she found that what separates highly successful people from the rest of the pack is what they do in the first few hours of every day. Why? First, a new University of Toronto study found that morning people tend to be happier, healthier, and generally more satisfied with life than “night owls.” Plus, Vanderkam says if you always wait until the end of the day to do meaningful things - like exercise, or spend quality time with your family – then it probably won’t happen. And that's so true for me. If I don't put in an exercise DVD and bang out 45 minutes of a workout, I end up filling my day with everything but the workout.

As you can probably tell from listening to me on the air and my reading posts online, I'm a pretty distracted person. They used to call that - and me - ADD. But now because of smartphones and social networks, I believe we all have ADD, or as I like to call it ADD-HD (Hi-Def!). The great thing about mornings is that, for the most part, everything is pretty darn sleepy. The birds, the spouse, the kids and the dog. So, if you can drag your butt out of bed early, you are way ahead of everyone's game. I like to sneak out of bed about 5am and immediately make a list of the top 10 things I want to accomplish for the day. I make 3 copies of the list and also email it to myself and then I post it everywhere - on the fridge, in the car, on the bathroom mirror, etc. There are many times when I only get through 5 of the things on the list, but at least I have a roadmap for what I want to take a shot at. And - don't miss this - there's always one thing that's at the top of my list each day: read! At the beginning of every day I read at least 10 pages from 3 of my favorite spiritual/self-help books.

So, that's 30 pages, every day, before I do anything else. Right now, those books are The Purpose Driven Life, Differentiate or Die and The Slight Edge. It's so easy today because you can bring them up on your smartphone instantly. It's not a huge commitment - 30 pages - but after a month or so, it becomes profound and you begin to take bold steps, in the very early morning hours, to TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE. So, give it a month. Try it. And reach me here with your progress and thoughts.