If you want success, if you want to be an entrepreneur or if you want to be rich, happy and successful, you must be intentional about how you spend your time so that you can create the results that you want. Most people are always reacting to the world around them. We call this a ‘victim mentality’ or ‘blaming’. There’s no time to do what you want and to build what you want if you’re constantly responding to the demands of other people. If you factor this first thing in the morning, you are in stress response from the minute that you wake up. The minute you wake up this sends us cortisol spike which is going to put you in stress response, which will have you looking for short term wins rather than building the life that you want. When you’re in that stress response, no good decisions come out of that. Making decisions out of fear and stress rarely lead to success. So if nothing else, don’t check the phone. That’s rule number one.

So what do you do instead of checking the phone? It’s really hard to stop a habit unless we replace the habit so what do you do instead? When you first reach for the phone in the morning, ask yourself self a question, “Do I want to ruin my day today?” If not, what do you do? The answer is “Anything else”. Play a video game, call a friend if you have to, or get up and do 25 Pushups, anything to break the habit. Anytime you want to check the phone, you can do 25 Pushups. If we do that, we capture back some of our attention and our time and that gives us the focus to do what we want to do.

A really good replacement for checking the phone in the morning is to go sit where there’s quiet and you can be alone even if it is for five minutes and journal. If there’s one specific thing that you could be journaling, it should be about what the vision is for your life and what you’re going to do about it today, that one thing will shift all the decisions that you make throughout the rest of the day. And your decisions will carve the path of life that you live. It will create the opportunities that show up for you. It is all about the consistent decisions that you are making. You can create a strategy from the book “The One Thing “written by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. The book is about writing out what the five year vision is. You don’t need to write or update this every day. It’s just a matter of looking back and saying, “These are the goals that I have set and therefore I just need to adjust what I’m doing today or this week”. That little two to five minute practice of reviewing, “This is what I’m building, this is where I’m going for, and this is what I need to do about it today” gives you the intent to make good decisions for the rest of the day

With this one little shift in our morning, we have captured some of our attention back. We’re no longer reacting to the demands of social media and the fires that happened throughout the night and we caught it with a little two to five minute practice of now setting the intent of what our most important thing is for the day or for the week. If you do only this, you’ll have a vastly different life 90 days from now. You will be miles ahead of where you are now and where everybody else is trending because everyone else is operating from behind and they’re responding to other people. They have no vision for what it is that they’re building.

If you want to accelerate results, having a perfect daily routine can create the system which you can follow to get those results. If you want to be successful, there’s five areas of life that you need to focus on five areas and the acronym for this is TRIBE. It is about becoming the person that you need to be in order to be successful.

TRIBE breaks down into Time, Relationships, Income, Body and Expansion.

What we can do on a monthly or quarterly basis is to set targets or visions for each one of these (Time, Relationships, Income, Body and Expansion) and they don’t need to be anything complicated. It can just be something that gives us a structure for us to make decisions.

Time: If one thing that’s really important for you is your time, the habit that you need to practice is ‘blocking out time that is reserved for doing something that’s important to you’. If you are starting in your journey for the day and you’ve got a really tough schedule, the only thing that you should do for ‘time blocking’, is not checking the phone in the morning and deciding what your intent is going to be for the day. If you don’t do that, you have no control over the rest of your day It can also be doing meditation. It can be anything that gives you back control of your time and where your focus should be.

Relationships: People undervalue the return on investment in relationships. All the opportunities that you will ever have will come from other people. Every dollar that you ever make will come from another person. Everything is relationships and we are ‘relational beings’. We are made to be connected to one another. Nowadays we are more disconnected than ever and it’s getting worse. The idea of being alone is a new idea. We’re made to be in groups of about 120 people and that’s what biology suggests. You’re made to have a very unique role in the tribe in order to help the tribe grow; but in today’s world, we’re all living in houses all by ourselves. We are creating our own personal brands and following everybody else’s roadmap. We’re all trying to be like each other. There’s very little real connection and it’s hard to maintain.

To maintain your relationships, pick two people a day and connect with those two people. You can connect them with a video text message, an audio message, text message, a phone call or sending them something. We need to be present with those two people even if it’s for five minutes. We can express appreciation for them and water the plant of that relationship. Reach out to those two people each day that are ultimately going to drive your success and your happiness.

Income: Ask yourself “What is that one thing that I can do that takes me closer to my goals and did I get it done?” It’s a “Yes or No” question you need to ask yourself. If not, you need to work on that one thing that move your life forward.

Body: Workout. Make a habit to have some workout in accordance with the goals that you have, whether it’s building muscle or losing fat or just being active. It could be going for a walk or getting your 10,000 steps in for the day. Your body will deteriorate over time if you don’t take care of it. If you give your body the food and the habits that it needs, it will take care of you.

Expansion: Are you feeding your mind? Are you putting new thoughts into here that take you closer to where you want to go?

As these questions to yourself – “Am I thinking about something new?” or “Am I growing?” “Am I being challenged?” It all comes down to the thoughts we put in our brain and the people that we hang out with, so the habit you can put here is reading or listening to a podcast or connecting with a mentor. It should be doing that stretches you and expands your knowledge.

So in formula form for a daily routine,

When you wake up, don’t check the phone and decide what your intent is for the day. Workout or get a sweat in.

During the course of the day, reach out to two people, read and expand your knowledge

And at the end of the day, ask yourself, “Did I get that one thing done that you decided to do in the morning?”

Also at the end of the day, give yourself a score 1 out of 5. Did you get it all done that you set out to do in the morning? Score yourself one out of five. If you’re going through a hard time, you will find that you’re getting lots of 1s and 2s. It’s really hard to have a bad quarter if you’re focusing on what you need to be focusing on e.g., you’re connecting with people around you, you’re in shape and you are feeding your mind. It’s hard to sustain bad results when you’re following this formula. If you’re getting 4s and 5s, you’re doing well.

The minute you start going 3s, 2s, 1s for any length of time and things aren’t going the way that you want, you will find it’s because you’re not doing the things that produce the results that you want.

When you’re not happy with your level of success or with your life, it can be really easy to fall into the trap of trying to change everything about your life, like trying way too many things without building up a habit of sustainability. It’s really easy to fall out of habits but rather than judging it and make it worse for yourself, the only thing that you should do is try to get back into good habits. We can’t decide the results that we get, we can only decide the habits that we practice and the decisions that we make on a regular basis. Our lives are built by the micro decisions that we make every single day. To get the results that you want, always be in practice of the habits that create those results. It is the only you have a shot of being fit, happy, rich or whatever it is that you want.

Give yourself a non judgmental score of how you did throughout the day. If you’re going through a particularly hard time or you are starting over in life, it is encouraged to do only one of those things. Do that one thing that will create some sort of momentum in your life. Momentum creates more momentum and in turn creates more success and more ability for you to do the other things.