Craig Kulyk, A Good Morning Routine Improves Your Whole Day

Craig Kulyk is creator of CreateGoodMornings.com, a website focused on helping people get the most out of their days by starting with a good morning. We talk about the importance of mornings, strategies for creating a great morning routine, and two powerful exercises that can help you gain clarity and expand your future. I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation

You can find Craig and his work at creategoodmornings.com where you can also sign up for his newsletter and get his complete list of strategies for creating good mornings.

Topics Discussed:

  • Appearing on other podcasts, podcast networks, swaps as ways to build an audience
  • Mornings are really like a training ground for the day. You can become more productive, thoughtful, even creative throughout the day depending on how you spend the very first part.
  • How he chose to create a blog centered on mornings, which initially started on productivity, mindfulness
  • Why he started his own blog, he knew he didn’t want a normal 9-5 job or work for a big company
  • Working at a big bank, he saved up money to live in Asia for a few years
  • Tried starting own business teaching English through entirely real life experiences, similar to field trips with a lesson attached
  • However, he realized through a start-up incubator experience that the business model didn’t pencil out financially, and besides that, he was tired of teaching English. Thirdly, he wanted the ability to run his business from anywhere
  • With a morning routine, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. It depends entirely on what is important to each individual
  • Craig explains a couple of his rituals and what he gets out of them
  • Reading 20 pages a day: led to reading more books in a single year than he had in the previous 10 combined
  • Recording a video 1-5 minutes in length: leads to getting better at speaking
  • Craig interviews me about my writing routine
  • The main pillars of his mornings: Stretching, meditation, and gratitude
  • Craig’s Guidebook: 5 Simple Strategies to Create Your Morning Routine, developed from studying thousands of other morning routines
  1. Doing something you love (great for people who don’t like routine, or who just want to start their day with more happiness and joy)
  2. Priming ritual (physical, mental, emotional): sets you up for success in the rest of the day. Could be stretching (you’re less physically uncomfortable), meditation (calm your mind and improve focus for the day), gratitude (cultivating a positive emotional state).
  3. Small wins: building momentum to start your day. Takes only a minute or so per item but creates a sense of accomplishment that propels you on to the next thing.
  4. Doing something now that sets you up for what you want in the future. Being very intentional about doing something now that will let you succeed in the future
  5. Planning: almost more of a “nightly routine.” On the proactive side, it is often best to plan your day the night before, rather than the morning of. On a “damage-prevention” side, try to shut off Netflix by a certain time, stop checking social media by a certain time, avoid sugars and snacks by a certain time, be in bed by a certain time… All of these things feed into your mornings and how you start the day.
  • Life events and experiences that really accelerated his personal growth and mindfulness
  • Two exercises to clarify and expand your vision for the future, I found through his site.
  • One, imagine your best possible life in 10 years in great detail, and write it down. Courtesy of Debbie Millman on the Tim Ferris Show, episode 214
  • The other is to imagine how you would live your life if you knew you would die in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, and 40 years.  
  • My own takeaways from knowing I would die in 1 year, 5 year, 10 years, and 40 years.
  • What he learned about from his dad about what matters in life


Book Recommendations:

The compound effect by Darren Hardy

Deep Work by Cal Newport   (the importance of focusing for long periods of time)

Shantaram by Gregory David (a semi-fictional book about a man who fled Australia to create a new life in India)

The Power of Now (by Eckhart Tolle)

 

You can find Craig and his work at creategoodmornings.com where you can also sign up for his newsletter and get his complete list of strategies for creating good mornings.

If you like this conversation and want to hear more like it, make sure you are subscribed to Why Try in your podcast app. I’d also like to ask for your help in leaving a review which will help others discover why try. You can leave a review in your app by clicking library, shows, Why Try, and then scrolling down until you see the option to leave a review. After leaving a review, send me an email and I’ll send you 2 book recommendations as a thank you.

Music for this podcast comes from Cambrian Explosion, who once raced atop the shells of giant snails on the coast of Madagascar. It was a grand adventure, until tragedy occured when their bassist tried to take a shortcut across the salt flats. You can find their sizzling songs on Apple iTunes, Spotify, and cepdx.bandcamp.com.