The key ideas

The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM)

Hal Elrod, 2012

The author survived a car crash, after which his heart stopped for six minutes, and a few years later he survived a financial collapse. What helped him climb out, he says, was not a grand plan but the first hour of the day. We look at what his morning system is made of, what in it is genuinely useful, and why losing sleep is not part of it.

Who it is for

For anyone who wants to start the day calmer and with more purpose, and who has tried getting up earlier many times, only to hit “snooze” again.

Always remember that where you are is a result of who you were, but where you go depends entirely on who you choose to be, from this moment on.

What the book is about

Twenty-year-old Hal Elrod, a successful young salesman, is driving his Mustang at night. A drunk driver hits him head-on. By Elrod’s account, his heart stopped for six minutes, he broke eleven bones and spent six days in a coma. The doctors said he might never walk again.

He did not just walk again: he later ran an ultramarathon. And yet the book does not really start with the crash. The main turning point, the author says, came a few years later, and it had to do with something ordinary: an alarm clock.

The Miracle Morning is Elrod’s personal system for spending the first hour of the day. It rests on the author’s experience and his readers’ stories, not on scientific research. The word “Guaranteed” in the subtitle is the author’s promise, not a tested result.

Idea 1. Rock bottom, again

The crash was not his last ordeal. In the crisis of the late 2000s, by Elrod’s account, his income fell by more than half, he ran up large credit card debts, lost his house and sank into despair.

A friend, Jon Berghoff, gave him a simple piece of advice: go for a run. Elrod tried it. Running in the morning while listening to recorded motivational talks helped him, he writes, think more clearly. Then he began looking into what the people he admired did in the morning, and built his own ritual out of it.

Within a couple of months, he says, his income more than doubled. This is his personal story, and it does not prove that the morning was the cause.

During a hard month, someone drops the big plans and simply goes out for a twenty-minute walk every morning. It does not solve the problems, but it gives them one thing that definitely went right.

In Elrod’s model, change starts with a small action you can repeat every day. One story does not prove it works for everyone, but it shows where the author suggests starting.

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About the author

Hal Elrod is an American author and motivational speaker. At twenty he survived a serious crash caused by a drunk driver, and later ran an ultramarathon. The Miracle Morning became the basis of a whole series of his books.

All books by this author: Hal Elrod

The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM) Quiz

Terms from the book

  • Affirmation
  • Visualization
  • S.A.V.E.R.S.: Elrod’s own scheme of six morning practices: silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading and scribing. A collection of well-known practices, not a scientific method.
  • Wake-Up Motivation Level: An image from the book, not a scientific term: how much you want to get up at the moment the alarm goes off.
  • 30-Day Challenge: The author’s invitation to do the morning practices every day for a month. Splitting it into three stages is his model, not data on how long a habit takes to form.

All terms

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