7 Things Successful People Do Before 8am

Burn Fat & Build Muscle Like A Machine

What’s the secret to setting up your day for success?

Success leaves clues. One of the easiest ways to hack success is to follow those tips. Each day is a test. The best way to conquer it is to get prepared and started right. Check out these morning routines and habits of the most successful coaches, bodybuilders, and business leaders, and carve out your own so you can crush your goals every day.

1. Get Up!

You can’t win the day if you are still sleeping. Hyper-successful people get up early. It gives them more time to work out, beat the competition to the punch, eat right, and feed their minds. We all have the same number of hours in the day. If you need more, you need to get up earlier. In his book Extreme Ownership, former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink describes the morning alarm as the first test of each day. If you get up you pass. Make it your mission. It gets easier with time. If you’ve ever been in basic training, you know that all it takes is 2-4 weeks to get in the routine. So, get up, and keep winning all day.

2. Gratitude

One of the lessor known morning routines of the successful is taking time to practice gratitude. Make a mental list of 10 things you are grateful for on rising in the morning. They can be incredibly simple, for example; just being grateful for another day of opportunity, fresh air, water, and the ability to workout. It changes your entire brain pattern, and will put you in a winning mindset for the rest of the day.

You can also combine this with mediation. An increasingly popular morning ritual with business leaders like multi-billion dollar selling real estate broker Kaya Wittenburg, and fund manager Fuquan Bilal.

3. Get Focused

One of the most important parts of any morning routine is getting focused on your goals. Hone in on what you are going to accomplish for the day. Some do this by reading their list of goals. Others journal and re-write them, or practice visualization like champion athletes. Some right down a short to-do list the night before so they can just roll into action. Gary Keller, of the world’s largest and fastest growing real estate firm, suggests focusing on just one thing. Every morning Steve Jobs would ask himself “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

4. Wake Up Your Mind

Just physically being out of bed in the morning doesn’t always mean you are awake, or ready to do your best work. Caffeine, drinking water, a healthy breakfast, and cranking up the music can all help get you in go-mode. Tony Robbins says he now uses a cryo-therapy chamber for intense cold to wake himself up in the mornings. If you don’t have one of those, take a run in the snow, or jump in a cold shower.

5. Read

Leaders read. Many spend time reading and getting more mental input in the morning. It can give you both the inspiration and tactics to succeed. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is known for having a precise military style workout regimen reveals a part of his morning routine is reading the newspaper. Grab a book, a magazine, or tune into a fitness blog like this to keep pushing to the next level.

6. Workout

It’s hard to find a winner in any career, industry, or sport who doesn’t get up and exercise in the morning. It has so many benefits. Shark Tank investors Kevin O’Leary and Barbara Corcoran workout in the morning. Tai Lopez hits the gym and fires of Snapchat updates. Others get to rucking or workout with weights or kettlebells in their own home gyms.

7. Family Time

This is one of the least well-known, but the second most popular morning habit of the successful according to Forbes. British Prime Minister David Cameron, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Padmasree Warrior, as well as the CEO of LinkedIn all say they spend time with family in the morning. That could be a phone call to parents or siblings, having breakfast or coffee with kids or a spouse, reading and playing with younger children, going on a breakfast date.