Season 1 – Supermorning

The first season of Supermorning featured shorter daily posts. Well over 200 of these posts combined to describe a happy, healthy, wealthy, productive, and sustainable life.

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Health Tracker

Health has long been one of my top priorities. Ever since a couple of health scares many years ago, I’ve been on a real mission to optimize this area of my life (the full story is available here).

As a result, I’ve not been sick for over a decade 🙂

But despite my good health, I never managed to get down to my ideal weight. It was not until I finally cracked the consistency code nine months ago that the weight came off (see below). 

The graph also shows the narrow corridor of my ideal weight, which I define as a smart BMI of 34/70. 

Aside from my weight, I also track two less straightforward metrics: metabolic age and biological age (see below).

My body composition monitor tells me my metabolic age (mainly from measuring my body-fat percentage).  Things like heart rate and waist measurement are used to calculate my biological age with this calculator. 

All I can say about that is that it’s fun to have an (almost) 35-year-old’s experience in a 20-year-old body!

Finally, I have a funny little animation composed from four fortnightly pictures of me flexing. I hope it will provide a good laugh and a little inspiration 😀

The aim of this is not to show off my annoyingly asymmetric sixpack, but rather to visualize how my body changes over the years. Indeed, I plan to take such a picture once every two weeks for the rest of my life! 

It’s also a nice illustration of what consistency can do. No gym membership, no weight-loss diet, no drugs. Just consistently sticking to my healthy eating habits combined with moderate daily exercise. 

See you tomorrow!

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Recap: Accountability Buddy

Awakening your own superpower of consistency demands that you master your mornings.

Early morning is the only period of the day when you have full control over your time. And this control can be leveraged to proactively steer your life in the right direction. 

Those who don’t take proactive control are simply blown where the winds of life take them. As they inevitably crash into life’s many obstacles, a primitive “fight or flight” mode kicks in, sapping tons of energy for little or no reward. 

Breaking free of this mold requires a strong catalyst to push you to take action and claim your mornings. An accountability buddy could be that catalyst (it was for me). 

The checklist

So, here’s a simple guide to finding and maintaining a good accountability buddy:

  1. Select someone who can fulfill this role. If someone doesn’t come to mind right away, maybe some options listed in Monday’s post can help. 
  2. Ask this person to try this experiment with you. If they hesitate, suggest a week-long trial period to give an easy out if it’s not working. 
  3. During the conversations, focus on the following:
    • Keep it short. Be conscious of your accountability buddy’s time and end the conversation while both parties are still enjoying it. 
    • Keep it positive. See it as your mission to give your accountability buddy a more positive outlook on life. 
    • Show genuine interest. Keep track of important developments in your accountability buddy’s life. Ask for their opinion on important subjects and think carefully about the insights they share. 

Alternatively, you could simply leave a short comment on this blog every morning. I’m very interested to hear more about any practical challenges you face with these suggestions. You could also just say “hi” 🙂

In time, I hope that we can get several people commenting each morning. This could turn into a nice little community of accountability buddies making sure that everyone’s up bright and early!

I really hope you give this a go! In my experience, it sure is worth it 🙂

See you tomorrow!

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How I Stumbled Into My Accountability Buddy

I\’m a research scientist. Part of being a good scientist is the ability to focus intensely on your work. This is something I was so good at that many other areas of life just kind-of faded away.

My relationship with my parents was one of those areas. I live in Norway and they still live in my home country, South Africa. When I\’m there to visit every couple of years, I\’m generally warm and friendly. But when I\’m back in Norway, I just disappear into my work. 

After many years (and after my brother also moved to Norway), this started to really affect my mom. Her nest was now well and truly empty, with both children having permanently migrated 14000 km North. 

As a writer, part of the problem was her struggles to get going in the morning after my dad left for work.  Meanwhile, up North, I was also struggling to establish a fully consistent morning routine.

I recognized that my missing link was something to force me into complete consistency. Could this be an opportunity? To find out, I arranged a daily 6:30 Skype chat. 

My initial expectations were rather low. My mom writes romance novels and I write research papers, so I had no idea what we would talk about every day. I also wasn\’t sure if either of us would stick to the commitment. 

But my concerns were misplaced 🙂

Today, 18 months of daily Skype sessions later, this morning habit is as deeply ingrained as brushing my teeth. My mom is much happier, my relationship with my parents is much improved, and my mornings are well and truly mastered. 

If you are still doubting the power of the accountability buddy, I really hope this little real life story provides some inspiration. Just give it a try!

Do you have a friend or family member you know deep down you should spend some more time with? This is the ideal opportunity. In my experience, it can easily turn into a lovely win-win scenario 🙂 

Please give it a go and let me know of your experiences. 

See you tomorrow!

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More Praise for the Early-Morning Chat

Having an accountability buddy waiting for you is a great way to consistently get yourself out of bed bright and early. 

But the benefits don’t end there…

First off, meaningful early-morning communication kick-starts your mental machinery. 

Yes indeed, when you call or meet your accountability buddy, you’ll actually need to talk about stuff. This blows away the morning brain fog and activates your legendary human interaction skills. 

Talking to someone else for 10 minutes every day is simple. All you really need to do is to ask about their day and their yesterday. If it’s someone you care about, this conversation will surely jump-start your brain. 

As you gradually master your mornings, you’ll also find it easier to be positive and energetic during these calls. This will energize your accountability buddy. And their increasing energy levels will inevitably spill back to you. 

Lastly, a short daily chat with your accountability buddy is guaranteed to deepen your relationship. 10 minutes per day is just enough to build deeper trust, but also short enough to avoid seeing too much of each other 😉 

Thus, your 10-minute chat with your accountability buddy will do much more than get you out of bed every day. You’ll get a running start, a positive mindset and, over time, a good friend 🙂 

So, if you have not taken yesterday’s one-minute action yet, resolve to do it today!   

Tomorrow, I’ll share how I accidentally got started on this great habit. See you then!

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Accountability Buddies

Last week was all about establishing a consistent sleep pattern, not only when we feel strong and motivated, but every day, like clockwork.  

As we’ve all found out for ourselves multiple times, pure willpower can’t get this job done. We need more ammunition – a lot more actually. 

So, get ready: the next couple of weeks will present an entire arsenal of weapons to help you win this daily little battle. By the time we’re done, it will no longer be a battle, it’ll be a walkover 🙂  

The best place to start is with this week’s action step:

Monday 1-minute action Set up a recurring early-morning meeting

 

The person you decide to meet with will become your accountability buddy: someone who will be expecting you to show up in decent shape every morning. 

Finding this person can be tricky in some cases. If no-one comes to mind right away, here are some good candidates:

  • A loved one who would genuinely enjoy seeing you succeed
  • Any person in your life you know deep down you should be spending more time with
  • Anyone you know who is into personal or professional development
  • That friend who just seems to be a natural morning person

An accountability buddy should not be a major time commitment. It can start with a 5 minute Skype chat. If it naturally grows longer over time, so be it. If not, it’s fine to just check in every morning. 

I really hope you make the effort to find your accountability buddy. As we’ll discuss tomorrow, the added motivation to get up bright and early each morning is just one of the great benefits 🙂

I wish you an awesome day!

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Week 1 of Getting 1% Better

A 1% improvement sounds like nothing, right? Anyone could become 1% better in a week if they tried. 

However, when you unleash the superpower of consistency on this simple idea, it takes on a whole new form. The numbers tell the story:

  • Improve by 1% every week for a year and you’ll be 66% better. Not bad.
  • 2 years? 179%.
  • 5 years? Thanks to the power of compounding, 5 years of 1% weekly improvements will make you a whopping 13 times better!
  • After 15 years (only a third of a standard career), it gets pretty ridiculous: 2325 times better! Now we are getting to the realm of billionaires, presidents and great inventors. 

These numbers told me to end each Supermorning week with a 1% improvement post. So, here are my top 3 improvements over the past week:

  1. Started this blog and kept to my daily post commitment
  2. Totally clean eating habits and 10 hours of light-to-moderate exercise
  3. Published an article in the largest publication on Medium

In fact, this week was much more than 1% improvement 🙂 You can see the sharp upwards spike in my daily consistency data below (the little red bit). I really hope I can maintain this performance!

Did you grow your 1% this week? Any plans for how you can grow 1% next week? Feel free to share – a little commitment here could make a big difference!

The graph shows my cumulative performance against a target of 35 points daily. Up to now, I have only been averaging a bit more than 33 points per day, hence the slow downwards trend. 33 points per day is still good, but I really want to get back above the 35 point target!

 

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Amateur Creativity Counts

I plan to publish something creative each Saturday. It certainly won’t be high art, but I hope it will bring a smile to your face 🙂

Aside from providing some light entertainment to start your weekend, it will also be an interesting experiment:

  1. Will it be easy to do something creative every week?
  2. Will my mind become more open to the opportunities for creativity all around us?
  3. Will people enjoy my distinctly amateur little creative projects?

I hope to find positive answers to all these questions. This first week was certainly positive for the first two. Indeed, the time-lapse video below took just a little bit of awareness and a single minute to set up the phone. 

It came out a bit uneven, but I still think it’s a fine summary of the Norwegian summer: 30 minutes with two showers and even a couple of rare sun sightings! 

Enjoy and don’t hesitate to share some links to your own creative projects 🙂 

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Streak Tracker

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better measure of consistency than the streak (the act of racking up consecutive achievements, not the act of running naked before of a bunch of strangers 😉 ). 

Keeping a streak alive demands complete consistency. One screw-up and you have to start all over again. 

I currently track four streaks:

  • Good days. Researchers love data. I love it so much that I score the quality of my previous day every morning. A good day scores 25 points or more, something I have achieved for the past 277 days straight. You can check out a Medium article I wrote about this for more details. 
  • Morning routine. I’ve been maintaining this one for a long time, but only started properly tracking it 64 days ago.
  • Music practice. Even though I’m no Mozart, I’ve managed to play some piano or guitar every day for the past 36 days.  
  • Supermorning. Yep, you’re reading day 6 of my latest streak 🙂 Publishing an original post every day is a great test of consistency. 

Does anyone remember the Tamagotchi craze from a couple of decades ago? Well, a streak is just like a Tamagotchi – only useful. 

Its usefulness lies in the motivation it gives you to keep going. I have to admit that my “good day” streak has saved me from a self-destructive ice cream binge many-a-time over a recent trying period at work. 

So, get yourself a couple and do your best to keep them alive!

Do you have some already? I’d be very interested to know what you track.

I’ll be here with another streak update in one month’s time. I hope you will too 🙂 

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Recap: Consistent Sleep Pattern

The more I write this, the more I believe it: consistency is a true superpower!

This superpower gives you control over what Einstein called “the most powerful force in the universe”: compounding.

Compounding is best known in investment circles (see the video below this post). But the same principle applies to all facets of life, be it health, wealth, skills, creativity, relationships, confidence, or career.

Like the Force in Star Wars, compounding holds tremendous power, but it also has a dark side…

Yes, we’ve all been in those slow death spirals where we blindly stumble from one self-destructive choice to the next. That’s the dark side of compounding in action. 

Wielding the power of compounding for good demands only one thing: consistency. 

And the most fundamental building block to master consistency is a consistent sleep pattern. Gaining full control over your morning is the key to unlocking all the compounding wonders of our world! 

The checklist

OK, now that I got that off my chest, here’s a simple checklist for building this launching pad for your life:

  1. Define your sleeping window.
    • The window should end one hour before you must go to work.
    • The window should be at least 8 hours wide (preferably 9).
  2. Set recurring reminders on your phone both for the start and the end of your sleeping window.  
    • Set the sleep time reminder 30 minutes early so that you have time to wind down before bed. 
    • Gradually reshape your social obligations so that you never miss your sleeping window two days in a row. 
    • For optimum results, don’t skip the weekends 🙂

Going to bed this early feels weird at the start, but you’ll get used to it faster than you might think. Meanwhile, we’ll keep building an inspiring morning routine that will help you through this transition. 

If you still have not set that alarm, please take a moment to tell me why. I need to learn more about all the practical challenges to ensure that Supermorning can create maximum value. Maybe we can work something out that will also benefit others who face similar challenges. 

If I hear nothing, I’ll assume you’re in 🙂

See you tomorrow!

 

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Rise and Shine Ain’t Easy

It’s 5:12 a.m. as I’m editing this post. And as you’ll hopefully see from the lack of typos, I’m wide awake 🙂

A younger version of me would be dumbfounded by this post. Like most, getting out of bed was always a drag. And it often got postponed well beyond the point where it messed up the rest of my day.  

It’s not like I wasn’t trying. I even had an extended stint of experimentation with a brutal polyphasic sleeping pattern. But no matter what I tried, I always ended up in the same old pattern: get into bed too late and struggle to get up the next morning. 

Then, about a year ago, the importance of consistently strong mornings finally sunk in. I understood on a deep level that early morning is the only time when I really have complete control over my life.

And as discussed yesterday, this control can be very effectively leveraged to turn the coming day into a winner. The great benefits of becoming an early riser suddenly looked far too enticing to ignore.  

Thus, I resolved right then and there to give myself a 9 hour sleeping window every night. I spent one minute setting up the bedtime app on my phone and never looked back. 

My sleeping window is from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. But most of the time I’m up and running between 4 and 5, getting a nice head-start on life. I honestly can’t even remember what my alarm sounds like 🙂

Amazingly, my mornings have transformed from a struggle to drag myself out of bed to a creative design session for shaping the coming day. Believe it or not, my brain actually wants to get up before 5 a.m. every day (including weekends!). 

If you still feel that getting up early is impossible, don’t despair. It gets much easier when you start doing something cool with the quiet time you give yourself while the rest of the world is still asleep.

More on that soon…

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