5 Morning Habits of Successful People
'Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others.
Unsuccessful people are always asking, 'What's in it for me?'
– Brian Tracy
It doesn't matter who we are or where we're from, we all strive for some manner of success. It turns out the key to this might start before breakfast. In his article "The Morning Routine of Successful People" Eugene Eaton tells us that part of the secret to how successful people achieve lies in how they begin their day.
1. They Plan:
Successful people take time to plan their day. Benjamin Franklin is famously known to say that "failing to plan is planning to fail". Franklin supposedly woke up at 4:00 in the morning simply to set his schedule for the day. Planning gives your day a purpose.
2. They give priority to the most important task:
Self-development author Brian Tracy is known to encourage people to ‘eat the ugliest frog first,’ which is a much more colourful way of saying, start your day with the hardest and most important tasks.
3. Practice meditation:
The Orange team takes 20 minutes, twice daily to meditate. We believe that regular meditation lowers stress levels, helps focus, and stimulates creativity.
4. Bring energy and optimism to the forefront with exercise:
Studies have shown that people who have a routine of daily exercise tend to be more productive, optimistic, and energetic overall. Busy people find time first thing in the morning to exercise because they know they're likely not to do it if they put it off until later.
5. Get up early enough to have time to do all of the above
You don't necessarily have to wake up before the rooster as Ben Franklin did. Mark Zuckerberg is pretty successful and he gets up at 8:15. The exact hour you wake up actually isn’t what's most important. Allowing yourself enough time to take care of the most important tasks of the day, while your brain is still fresh and productive is what's at stake.
Gary Vaynerchuk's Approach to Content
How to maximize your brand's social content
According to GaryVee, mastering content strategy, creation, and distribution for a brand is a difficult process. But in true Vaynerchuk style, he offers a way to speed up that process, and describes in detail his method for deluging his audience with content on a seemingly daily basis.
Vaynerchuk starts with what he calls the "reverse pyramid" model. At the bottom is a piece of "pillar content" that is then broken down into several pieces of "micro content". Think of your pillar content as a single video for YouTube. From there this can be cut down into several pieces of "micro-content" to be posted to social. You can extract the audio to use in a podcast format. You can pull quotes from the pillar-content to create meme-style graphics or GIF content. And best of all you can garner insights from viewership data to help you know exactly which parts of your pillar content will have the most impact as micro-content.
Below is a link to a presentation of Vaynerchuk's content model in action. It illustrates how his team turned a single keynote into 30+ pieces of content, and then distributed it, resulting in over 35,000,000 total views. Definitely worth a look.