I Killed My Morning Routine (And Started Making Things I Could Be Proud Of)
The framing that actually moves the needle, and why your elaborate morning ritual might be keeping you stuck
Happy Sunday, champs!
My journey toward self-discovery and self-belief started in early 2020.
COVID had set in, we were asked to stay at home, and I finally had the opportunity to begin building habits that I had been putting off.
I got really good at the habits.
Like, really good!
My morning routine for a solid 2-3 years looked like this:
7am - Alarm goes off, I lie there for a few minutes negotiating with myself and eventually drag myself out of bed and down to the kitchen
715am - Take my time preparing a coffee whilst listening to some pump up music
730am - Journal for 20 minutes, practice gratitude and do some reading (eg. think about who I was and who I wanted to be)
830am - Listen to a podcast while making brekky
9am - Eat slowly, check my phone, then have a shower
945am - Sit at my computer and eventually begin to start doing any real work
It was usually 3 hours before I was doing anything that could be considered actually productive.
I felt productive, I felt like I was doing important work.
What I was doing was something different; in a sense, it was some sort of productive procrastination, aka busy work.
This work was important for where I was at, it was a stepping stone.
But I was using so much of my mental capacity every single day on things that were not (in the long run) going to move the needle.
I understand that this was a phase. A very important phase of transition. From ignoring all of these elements of my identity for so long, to finally acknowledging my shortcomings and getting real with who I was.
But in a way, it quickly became a new form of avoidance.
Because the thing that I actually needed, the thing that was missing, was to actually ship the work.
Letting my creations out—into the real world!
That all changed after watching a video from Alex Hormozi.
In the video, Hormozi talks about his morning routine—or more accurately, his anti-routine.
He starts the video in true Hormozi fashion…
“I’m probably gonna piss a lot of people off with this video”
He then goes on to talk about the importance of making the main thing, the main thing. The man behind $100M+ in business revenue wakes up at 5am, drinks a coffee, and works. That’s it. No cold plunge. No 47-step ritual. No hour of journaling before a single dollar gets made.
His argument was simple, and it hit me like a freight train:
Most “morning routines” are habits millionaires formed after they got rich. Not the reason they got rich.
These habits are a luxury, not the lever-pulling priorities.
The cold plunge, the gratitude practice, the elaborate breakfast—these are rewards that successful people added to their lives once the work was already done. The algorithm of Instagram reverse-engineered them and sold them back to us as the path to success.
At the time, I thought I needed these habits, and I don’t regret them, but I now see that doing the hard work was always the answer.
The Solution: Zero Gap Mornings
Hormozi calls it minimising the gap between waking up and working. I call it the Zero Gap Morning. Here’s how it actually works in practice:
Step 1 — Identify Your Lever Before you go to sleep, know exactly what the single highest-leverage task is for tomorrow. The one thing that, if done, moves everything else. For me, it’s writing. For you, it might be creating content, sending pitches, or building something. If you’re an athlete, it could be training. If you’re a trader, it could be studying tape.
Step 2 — Wake and Engage The moment your alarm goes off, you have a 5-minute window before your brain starts negotiating. Don’t give it a chance. Me personally, I don’t even make the coffee until I have written for an hour, but I’ll leave this up to you. Whatever you go with, have the work in front of you and pull the trigger… zero preamble. You don’t get ready to work; you just work.
Step 3 — Protect the Block These first 2-3 hours of the day mean everything. No phone checks, no socials, no emails. This is your deep work fortress. The world will still be there at 12pm. Your best thinking happens here, when your mental capacity is at its highest—do not trade this time for anything, especially notifications.
Step 4 — Let the Work Earn the Ritual Here’s the reframe. I still journal. I still move my body. I still have slow mornings sometimes. But now they come after the lever has been pulled. The ritual is the reward, not the prerequisite. The work earns my self-respect, the rituals help refine it.
What This Looks Like For Me Now
I’m not going to pretend I nail this every day. I don’t.
But the mornings I do? I look up, and it’s 8am, and I’ve already written 1,000 words, or drafted three carousel concepts, or mapped out a podcast episode, or scheduled a week of threads posts.
That feeling has no comparison.
Before the day has even fully started, I have won. I have beaten down the voices that tell me to avoid the hard stuff. I have taken control.
I originally wrote this newsletter in 2023. On that morning, I was slightly hungover, hadn’t showered, and hadn’t eaten. I just opened the laptop and wrote. It became one of the pieces I’m most proud of.
That one moment told me everything I needed to know about where the magic actually lives.
It doesn’t live in the ritual.
It lives in the act of showing up before you feel ready.
Final Thoughts
Your morning routine isn’t broken. Your relationship with it might be.
Ask yourself honestly: is your morning ritual fuelling your most important work, or replacing it?
If you wake up and the first 90 minutes of your day is simply setting up, you are not preparing for the game. You are delaying it.
The champion version of you doesn’t need a perfect morning to perform.
They just need to show up and make themselves proud!
Until next week, champs!
SAV
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