#100DaysofHealth

The idea of a morning routine is having a moment right now. This concept has been espoused by motivational speakers like Tony Robbins (who has, over the past few years, shrunk his to a 10 minute session he calls “priming”), and had entire books like “ What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast ” devoted to it.   There are guided meditations built around it. It's more popular than Kale . In case you’ve somehow missed it, a morning routine (also called hour of power, miracle morning , and surely other names that I, too have missed), is a series of actions one takes first thing in the morning for the purpose of:  1. Setting your personal and/or business day off to a positive, intentional start and 2. Getting all of those things that, done daily, have a positive and lasting effect on your health and wellness, out of the way first thing. Most suggested morning routines include things like :   Gratitude   Journaling   Prayer and/...

God bless Ben Franklin. Yeah, he was serial philanderer who never actually married his “wife”, had a kid out of wedlock and a dame in every port. But he also invented practically everything (including the idea of America), wrote that great essay about why older women make the best lovers, and was the first of the modern self-development gurus. In his autobiography, Franklin describes a self-improvement project where he listed 13 “virtues” (including moderation, temperance, order, and frugality) and determined that he would create a chart to track his daily adherence to those virtues. In his estimation, if he really focused on one of these every week for 13 weeks, them went back to the top and started again, he’d eventually get really good at being virtuous and become the perfect man. Of course, he quickly found a problem that more recent studies on willpower have better explained: it seemed like he could never get a grip on all 13 at once. When he was really “on” silen...