So, how was your morning?
- On a scale of 1-10, how did your day begin? (10 is “Nothing can stop me. I feel that I could eat the bark off a tree!”)
- If your answer was an 8, 9, or even 10…what do you notice about your behaviors and what created your great start to the morning?
- And on the flip side, if your answer was a 3, 2, or even lower…what did you do to screw things up?
Here’s the thing. If your morning has started off beautifully, you’re in good company. Recently, Merrill Lynch did a study on what contributed to their most successful advisors and what factors led to their effectiveness. The single most common characteristic was this:
The most successful advisors began their morning with a very successful and productive first hour of the day. Every advisor in this study defined a “successful and productive” first hour in his or her own unique way. Yet, however they defined it, they used their productive start to carry their self-generated momentum into the balance of the day. They are living out Newton’s first law to their own purposes: A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion.
Blue light, bad night
OK…I have a personal question for you. Who did you sleep with last night? Actually, scratch that question.
What I meant to ask is, “What did you sleep with last night?” Was it your smartphone perchance? If so, did you know the following facts?
- Some 71% of us sleep with a smartphone. On a nightstand, in bed with us, or even holding it in hand. (Ewwww!)
- Smartphones emit blue light, which our brains interpret as daylight…
- Not only does blue light at night screw up our circadian rhythms, but also it’s linked to several forms of cancer (prostrate and breast) heart disease, and obesity…
And the smartphone is a jealous lover. Not only does it demand our attention throughout the night, it wants us first thing in the morning. Eighty percent of smartphone users jump right into their electronic world…before even brushing their teeth.
Checking email first thing? Bane or blessing?
Full disclosure: I’m a flawed vessel with my own email habits. Therefore I will recuse myself from making any grand pronouncements like, “Never check your email in the morning!” (Julie Morgenstern does though. She wrote a book on it.)
I do two things that are most helpful, however. I don’t have my work email on my phone. And I never check my email before I prioritize my day.
With that mea culpa and caveat out of the way, let’s discuss.
- McKinsey estimates that the typical knowledge worker (That’s us!) spends about 28% of each day managing email.
- Unlike human beings, all email is not created equal. A full 25% of the email we receive…never needs to be opened or read. In contrast, about 10% has an urgency of five minutes or less.
- Numerous studies have shown that checking email less will reduce your stress and improve your emotional well-being.
Your morning can start the night before
What do Thomas Edison, Napoleon Hill and Albert Einstein have in common?
They all believed in the power of their subconscious mind.
Thomas Edison said, “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious mind.”
In Edison’s case, before going to sleep he would ask himself bundles of questions related to the problem that he was working on at that moment. He called them “requests.” He would write his specific questions and thoughts down on paper. Then…he’d go to sleep. (Edison had an interesting relationship to sleep. He prided himself on never sleeping more than three or four hours each night. Yet, Edison’s secret weapon was that he could take power-naps anywhere. (For a laugh, check out these images of Edison taking a snooze in his lab, at a picnic with President Warren Harding, and more unlikely spots.)
What Edison knew about his thinking was that his brain, more specifically the prefrontal cortex, was most active and creative immediately following his sleep. While sleeping, our subconscious mind loosely wanders making contextual and temporal connections in the different parts of our brain. Edison was able to direct his subconscious to ponder on more specific topical areas, e.g. his requests. In fact, this is why he liked to break up his sleeping periods. He was maximizing his subconscious thinking time.
You wonder what Edison would think of the smartphone users of today…who mechanically check their smartphones in the a.m., even before brushing their teeth!
For Edison, the immediate moments following sleep were prime time for creative thinking. With his journal and in a quiet place, he would thought dump the connections and associations that his subconscious had revealed during sleep.
Morning routines of successful people
I’ve recently finished Tribe of Mentors, the Tim Ferriss book. It’s 600 pages of observations and advice from 100 celebrities, athletes, tech founders, and other recognizable thinkers. Their musings reveal a diverse collection of behaviors. For example:
- Matthew Fraser is winner of the 2016 and 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games and has been dubbed the “Fittest Man on Earth:” “I usually make a list every morning while I’m drinking my coffee. I have a terrible habit of forgetting smaller things during the day, so I like to put them on paper before the day gets started and I become distracted. Having the list helps keep me calm and productive during the day.”
- Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. Tim also exercises in the morning, but that’s not what’s most interesting about his routine: “Every morning, on my run, I try to take a picture of a flower and share it on Instagram. I was inspired to do this by a passage I read many years ago in a book by C. S. Lewis (I think it was The Great Divorce), in which a character, after death, only sees the flowers as blobs of color, and his spirit guide tells him, ‘That’s because you never really looked at them when you were alive.’ As the line from Hamilton says, ‘Look around. Look around. How lucky we are to be alive right now!’”
- Ben Stiller has written, starred in, directed, or produced more than 50 films. His morning ritual? “I like to dunk my head in a bucket of ice in the morning to wake me up. I don’t think it actually is therapeutic but it is definitely invigorating and probably absurd looking.”
Interestingly, amid the insights of these 100 people Ferriss interviewed, there were two morning behaviors that came up more often than any others: Meditation and walking.
Prioritize prioritizing
Let’s end this discussion with strategies from David Rock’s invaluable resource, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus and Working Smarter All Day Long.
Rock helps us identify how intentional we must be about our conscious thought:
- The “stage” (the prefrontal cortex) that holds our conscious thinking is quite small, and the less that we hold in our mind at once, the better.
- Conscious thinking is a precious resource.
- Every time the brain works on an idea consciously, it uses up a measureable and finite resource.
- Some mental processes take up a lot more energy than others.
- Save mental energy for prioritizing by avoiding other high-energy consuming activities. (Like email!!!)
- Schedule your tasks that require most attention when you have a fresh and alert mind…like Thomas Edison did.
In other words, recognize when your brain works best. Do not waste these precious moments on mind-numbing tasks like email…when you could be thinking, reasoning, and reflecting.
Here’s the bottom line
Concentrated thought is the primary driver of your value production as a financial advisor. And with the encroaching threat of robo-advisors and other technologies, this reality will only become more apparent, not less so. Therefore, if you continue to succumb to every random distraction and surrender your ability to concentrate your thinking, you will devalue your role and worth as a thinker, advisor, and leader.
I trust that you find this helpful.