The Productive Freelancer reviews The Miracle Morning book by Hal Elrod
I’ve talked in depth about my miracle morning routine and getting up at 5am and the tremendous value these habits might bring to your life.
But today I wanted to offer up a more comprehensive review of The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and share my thoughts about things I struggled with with the book along with the things that really made this book work for me.
I’m always hesitant to write reviews of books, especially self-development books, because over the years I’ve come to recognize that a book can be spot-on meaningful to an individual at one point in time and complete drivel to the same (or another) person at another stage in their life.
Books are very circumstantial and very personal.
I don’t want to say anything that might deter someone from reading a particular book because even though something didn’t land for me, it might be the perfect message for them.
For this same reason, I’ve been actively trying not to read reviews on GoodReads because I find that if I read someone’s negative review of a book, even amongst dozens of positive reviews, it either sours me on reading the book to begin with or else I end up looking for (and very often finding) the thing that person found distasteful in the book and not enjoying or getting as much out of it as I otherwise might have.
All that said, at the time of this writing, I’m at day 217 of practicing my miracle morning routine, so clearly, I highly recommend The Miracle Morning as it has had a tremendous impact on my life, more so than almost any other personal-development book I’ve ever read. And I freely acknowledge that it found me at the perfect moment in my life — when I was ready to hear its message and actually do something with it.
The basic premise of the book centers around creating a morning routine that encompasses what Hal calls SAVERS — Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, and Scribing (aka Journaling). These are all things we’ve heard time and time again about how powerful they can be in helping us improve our lives, but Hal proposes that instead of doing them piecemeal here and there, do them all together, every single morning to really get your day started off with a bang and propel your life forward.
It’s turned out to be something that has resonated with a whole ton of people. (The book came out in 2012, so I’m, as usual, a little behind the curve, but I’m grateful to at least have found my way onto the curve with this one.) There are currently more than 142K people in their Facebook community from all over the world, so clearly it’s had an impact.
But…it is far from a perfect book, and I’d like to air some of the issues I had with the book along with how I dealt with them because I think it makes for a more authentic review and might help inform and improve your own experience if you choose to read it, too.
5 things that I don’t love about The Miracle Morning:
1) Hal comes across very hype-y in the book.
Everything is “level 10 this” and “extraordinary” that. To me (and possibly not to everyone else), it reads as over-the-top insincere. I doubt that’s the way he means it to sound at all. He’s just very enthusiastic. You really have to read past that.
One of the things that helped me get beyond it is I listened to one of his earlier audio recordings where he wasn’t as polished and not quite as zealous. Actually hearing him helped the voice I heard in my head as I was reading seem more real and relatable which in turn made it easier to hear and internalize the ideas he shares in The Miracle Morning.
2) One of the core premises of the book centers around the fact that there must be an elite 5% of the population who are actually living this level 10 life, and therefore, the other 95% are just mediocre and can’t possibly be happy (or healthy or financially secure or in solid, supportive relationships).
Aside from the fact that the math he lays out for how he arrived at this statistic is pretty sketchy and makes some incredibly broad-stroke assumptions, I find it really hard to believe that 95% of the world is sad and miserable and doomed for mediocrity and that if you’re not living at a level 10 of everything, you’re one of those sad sacks. I get that he uses this tactic of the elite vs. average, us vs. them (and you, of course, must be one of the ‘us’) to try and motivate folks, but this just really rubbed me the wrong way. And again — it was something I had to read past because the rest of the ideas in the book are worth it.
3) The Miracle Morning is not a cure-all.
Or at least it hasn’t been for me. It has not really solved all my procrastination and productivity issues.
I’m definitely in a much better place than I was before starting it, but I still have a lot of hit and miss days. I have days where I’m super-on and feel unstoppable but I also still have days where I languish or only accomplish about a third of what I wanted to get done. Some days, what I end up working on is not what I planned to work on at all that day and so even though it might have been a relatively productive day, I still feel behind. I’ve got lots of work to do in this arena still, and The Miracle Morning in and of itself doesn’t seem to be the be-all-to-end-all solution for me like the book makes you think it will.
4) His “research” about not needing a certain amount of sleep is bunk.
I just don’t believe long term, that you can think your way to only needing a handful of hours of sleep on a consistent basis. A solid 7–8 hours of good-quality sleep is absolutely critical to my health and mental well-being, and so while I do get up at 5am in the mornings, I typically also get to bed early enough to make sure I’m getting enough rest. You really have to listen to your body for this one.
5) The theory he puts forth about the phases of habit change looked nothing like my experience.
And the book doesn’t talk about long term maintenance hardly at all which was frustrating.
Hal posits that habit change goes something like this:
Days 1–10 are Unbearable — The first few days may be novel and easy but once that shiny wears off, a new habit can feel painful and your mind starts to reject it and so you give in and give up. He promises that this pain is temporary and that knowing that it’s temporary, you’ll be able to push through it to reach…
Days 11–20 which are only Uncomfortable which is considerably easier. You still need to be disciplined and committed, but you’ve developed some confidence with your habit at this point, so it should be getting quite a lot easier. And then you hit your stride with…
Days 21–30 when you are Unstoppable where the actual transformation occurs (a good bit beyond the popular 21 days myth). Your new habit becomes ingrained in your personality. He warns that you have to be super careful not to let your foot off the gas pedal here so as not to backtrack.
My first two months of practicing the miracle morning were almost like a high. Except for the couple of days I unexpectedly ended up in the hospital with appendicitis, my habit tracker was awash with purple checkmarks.
Where I started to wobble with the new routine was nearly 60 days in, and I couldn’t find anything (anywhere, really — not even just in The Miracle Morning book) about what to do at that stage to stay on top of things.
Things that helped me get through this wobbly phase:
- I made sure that I always had an interesting personal-development book to be reading in the mornings. And if I wasn’t enjoying the book, I gave myself permission to not finish it and move on because life is too short to read stuff that sucks.
- If I was going to miss a few days of miracle morning practice — like we were going to be out of town or something — I told myself ahead of time that I knew I would be able to get right back on track with it when we returned. So basically, I gave myself permission to take a short break from it and then reinforced that I had faith in myself to pick it right back up. And every time that worked, it strengthened that belief in my capability to make this a permanent change.
- I use a habit tracker (more on this below) where I count the number of days that I’ve been doing the miracle morning (that’s how I know it’s been 217 days now). And I’m nice to myself when it comes to tracking. I don’t count days that I miss, but I also don’t start over at zero if I miss a day or two either. Plus I’m generous with ‘partial credit’ which means if I manage to read in the morning, even if I don’t do the rest of it, I still count it towards my total days. I think human nature (or at least perfectionist human nature) is to do the opposite — be inclined to not give partial credit and force yourself to start over from the beginning on your count if you flub. But I’ve been working hard for many years to get past my perfectionist tendencies, and I like myself quite a lot more (and thus am more productive) when I’m nicer to myself. You ought to try it.
5 things that made The Miracle Morning a game changer:
1) The concept of a morning routine is a pretty straightforward concept
I was able to dive into doing it pretty much immediately, even without having read the whole book. Between other people explaining it in their own reviews and the Miracle Morning Crash Course I mention below, I was able to hit the ground running (despite fretting over having not read the book) and then adjust as I got deeper into the material.
The key here is to get started while your motivation is high and just go.
Here are some of the reviews I found most helpful in grasping the initial premise and gathering my own ideas around what could work best for me:
- Boho Berry — My Morning Routine — and Why You Need One Too and her original review blog post
- Brian Johnson’s video review
- Chelsea Dinen’s What Happened When I Stopped My Morning Routine video
2) Somehow, the book made waking up at 5am in the morning feel doable.
I’m still a little baffled as to how this one happened so easily for me because I know in the past I would never have thought 5am was possible, and I know this is a HUGE stumbling block for a lot of folks.
The best advice I can offer is to…
- One — Find ways to be gentle with yourself so that getting up that early is an enjoyable experience.
- And two — just start doing it — rather than waiting until you have all your ducks lined up — and then respond accordingly. If you need to nap because you find you’re tired later in the day, then nap. If you need to get to bed earlier so you can more easily get up earlier, you’ll find pretty quick that you’re getting tired in the evening, and so get your butt to bed earlier. The TV watching or internet surfing you’re doing instead of going to bed is not going to make your life any better or make you any more productive than getting enough sleep will.
3) Some of the real gold was in the supplemental material.
I highly recommend signing up for the Miracle Morning Crash Course. Hal gives you the first two chapters of the book along with an invaluable audio and video. Be sure you actually listen to/watch the audio and video because there are gems in here that he doesn’t cover in the book.
One of my favorite bits of advice from the audio was about 4 dangerous words:
“I already know this”.
Basically, Hal advises that whether you’re attending a seminar or reading a book and you hear something you’ve already heard before, instead of tuning out because you think you already know all about it, get over yourself and listen to the message with fresh ears. Open yourself up to learning something new about the subject or hearing it in a new way to help motivate yourself to do what you know you should be doing.
This had a tremendous impact on me. I would venture to guess that next to nothing in The Miracle Morning is new information to most folks. Exercise and meditation and journaling, etc. are hardly novel concepts. But I found that by being open, even with these well-known concepts, I learned an entirely new way to approach them with this book, and it stuck like nothing has before.
4) A Habit Tracker helps tremendously
I’ve been using a habit tracker in my digital bullet journal for quite some time now, but I’ve always approached it as just tracking for the week. I keep track of things like how many days each week I get to bed before 10pm or how many cups of coffee I drink in a day.
But in The Miracle Morning, Hal issues a 30 day challenge to get you kicked off strong with establishing the habit, and the habit tracker (that you can partially see below which came as part of the Crash Course download) accounted for all 30 days, not just 7. So it forced me to rework how I was using my own habit tracker.
For my miracle morning tracker, I check off (with a little purple square as opposed to Hal’s “X”) when I’ve finished a particular activity for that morning, and then I give myself a solid purple box and increment my total day count to the far right. If I plan to miss a day — like we’ll be out of town or something — I give myself a little circle. If I miss a day or an activity, I leave it blank. But like I said, I really like giving myself partial credit, so even if I just get one or two of my SAVERS done, I still count it towards my miracle morning total.
Habit trackers are surprisingly motivating. There is a little rush that you get when you can fill in that box or check off that item from your to do list. It’s not a primary motivator for staying on track for me, but it is utterly gratifying to complete my tracking for the day.
5) Even though The Miracle Morning wasn’t a cure-all for me, I do consistently feel worlds better than I used to before I started it.
I had a fairly severe bout of depression back before I left the corporate world which was one of the main catalysts for me finding a way to get myself out of a toxic work situation. And once you have depression, you are more prone to getting it again. Plus, being a freelancer and working from home, by yourself most days, makes you particularly susceptible to it as well.
So I really pay attention when I start feeling bummed. (And days you feel bummed pretty quickly spiral into being highly unproductive which is OK sometimes but not some place you want to hang out too often.)
What I’ve noticed most about myself and improvement since starting the miracle morning habit is that I am much less inclined to fall into a woe-is-me spiral than before. When I do encounter something that gets me down, I bounce back from it so much easier.
I have a sense of resiliency now that I haven’t felt for a very long time.
And that, perhaps, has been the best thing about The Miracle Morning for me.
Even the things I didn’t love about the book ended up being powerful because they forced me to really examine them in ways I normally wouldn’t have, so I found that I dove deeper and uncovered ideas and solutions to them that I, otherwise, would have glossed over.
If you’re ready to kick your mornings up a notch, feel like you’ve really accomplished something before most people are even wake up, and set yourself up for success throughout your day, I highly recommend spending some time with this book and putting some effort into designing your own miracle morning.
