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Tim Ferriss explains how he starts every day with a 60-minute routine

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Tim Ferriss, the author of "The 4-Hour Workweek" and "Tribe of Mentors," uses a specific routine to start his day. Following is a full transcript of the video. 

Tim Ferris: The first 60 minutes or so are very clearly defined. And that’s the recipe that I use to set up the rest of the day.

My name is Tim Ferriss, angel investor and author of books including "The 4-Hour Workweek" and the latest, "Tribe of Mentors."

Step No. 1: I wake up, and I meditate for 20 minutes, typically 22 minutes. That's 20 minutes of seated transcendental meditation — it could be Vipassana, it could be Headspace — and then two-minute decompression period where I sit there and let my mind do whatever it wants to do.

I get up, brew tea — very frequently oolong tea or some combination of, say, turmeric, ginger, and pu-erh. That’s another favorite.

And then I sit down to journal. And there are two different types of journaling I do, depending on the day, for different purposes. One would be morning pages, where I’m effectively vomiting my brain onto the page to trap my monkey mind in print so that it doesn’t bother me for the rest of the day. The other type of journaling I do is best encapsulated in a journal called "The Five-Minute Journal." There are different ways to do this, but I’m writing down three or four bullets of items or people or relationships, anything I’m grateful for, which is a very, very nice way to set the rest of the day so that you're viewing life through a lens of positivity. Then there are a few questions related — or prompts, I should say — related to focal points for the day.

Ideally, after that I'm having a small amount to eat. And then I would go into exercise of some type. That exercise could be  — riding on a Peloton bike and doing a 20-minute HIIT workout (high-intensity interval training), or it could be acroyoga, or it could be weight training or working on a Concept 2 rower. And that would be generally no more than 60 to 90 minutes in length, sometimes as short as 20 minutes. And then shower.  Off to the day.

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