— 4 — Why Did YOU Wake Up This Morning? You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if
you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.
—GEORGE LORIMER
Your first ritual that you do during the day is the highest leveraged ritual, by far, because it
has the effect of setting your mind, and setting the context, for the rest of your day.
—EBEN PAGAN
W hy did you wake up this morning? That’s a question you’ve
probably never been asked, but think about it for a second—why do
you wake up most mornings? Why leave the comfort of your warm,
cozy bed? Do you do it every day because you really want to? Or is
it because, for one reason or another, you have to?
If you’re like most people, you wake up to the incessant beeping
of an alarm clock each morning and reluctantly drag yourself out of
bed because you have to be somewhere, do something, answer to—or
take care of—someone else. Given the choice (do you have a choice?)
most people would continue sleeping.
So naturally, we rebel. We hit the snooze button and resist the
inevitable act of waking up, unaware that our resistance is sending a
message to the universe that we’d rather lie there in our beds—
unconscious—than consciously and actively live and create the lives
we say that we want. Most of us have resigned ourselves to a certain
level of mediocrity and unfulfilled potential. We don’t like it. We
don’t feel good about it. We know that there is absolutely another
level of success, achievement and fulfillment that’s possible for us,
but we feel stuck, and we don’t know what to do to get ourselves
unstuck.