The CEO Habit Challenge

Early last year, I established a solid plan for my daily routines, tasks, and goals. I read, watched, and learned about high performing CEO such as Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Tony Robbins, Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington, Benjamin Franklin, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Barack Obama, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Ma. If you analyze their routines, you can come up with a common theme: wake up early, exercise regularly, eat healthy breakfast, read plenty of books, and work long hours. Robbins and Winfrey advocate meditation and express gratitude. Obama avoids watching news in the morning which is suprising. Mark Zuckerberg wears same clothes everyday to avoid making decision on trivial matters. I took all of these advices and implement them. It worked pretty well for 6 months straight. Today, I intend to revisit the plan and evaluate my progress. The conclusion of my overall progress is embarrassing.

The Benjamin Franklin said, “I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.” Well, I say, “I wasn’t surprised that I will find myself so much fuller of faults, and there is no satisfaction of seeing them increase.” I knew that when I started this routine project, I wouldn’t implement the plan perfectly. However, I planned to improve everyday to be better than I was. I can’t say things get worse but definitely are not improving. The reason is that lack of objective evaluations, and this is the biggest fault.

Therefore, I want to re-propose the project and add evaluation section to it. Herein, I call it the CEO Habit Challenge.

1. The amount of sleep

Your day actually begins the night before. The amount of sleep will affect your productivity thoughout the day. The average amound of sleep of CEOs is about 7 hours, except for President Donald Trump (3 hours). For some reason, I don’t believe in this guy. Perhaps, he is blessed with this kind of power. Good for him, though! But, I want to get at most get the 7 hours of sleep everyday.

2. Waking up early

All of the mentioned CEO wake up at 5AM on average. Fortunately, I find myself to be very productive during the day if I wake up at around 5AM. By waking up early, it gives you a sense of accomplishment: staying ahead of most of the people. This sense of accomplishment also supplies you confidence performing more challenging tasks. Therefore, I have to go to bed at around 10PM to wake up at around 5AM. Plus, don’t forget to drink a lot of water right after you wake up!

3. Workout

Believe it or not, Barack Obama takes care of himself first before dealing with the U.S. political issues. He alternates between cardio and strength workout for 45 minutes. There are many important benefits working out in the morning. Here is a list of benefits:

1. Improve metabolism. You will be burning more calories all day long.
2. Burn more fat. Working out hungry utilizes fat as source of energy; you may gain that six packs sooner.
3. Second type of accomplishment in the day. Damn, you’re on a roll today!

4. Breakfast

Reward yourself with healthy breakfast. See, I’m not a nutritionist, so I can’t recommend anything in this section. However, you can find this website helpful. Personally, I eat 6 white boiled eggs and a slice of bread with a spoon of peanut butter. Sometimes, I will make an avocado toast with egg instead of peanut butter since avocado provides good fat for your body. Remember, never eat too much!

5. Read

Bill Gates reads 50 books a year according to the Business Insider. Last year, I read 15 books, roughly one book per month. This year, I’m on track reading 1 book for every 2 weeks. I often pick up books recommended by in Gates books club. In addition, I also read scientific papers. So far this year, I have read 26 papers in STEM journals. In our physics department, we have a journal club where we read a scientific paper every week and discuss about it. Perhaps, I will start blogging about this journal club as well. By the end of the year, I will post a summary for books that I read this year. In this area of my life, I can say that I’m really surprised by the progress I have made. As much as my infallibility, I’m really happy seeing my reading ability climbing up. This is also called expressing gratitude. Do you see what I’m doing here? The richest man for many consecutive years never stops learning, and why should you?

6. Working long hours

Elon Musk works 100 hours a week between SpaceX, Tesla, the Boring Company, OpenAI, and, sometimes, SolarCity. Juggling between multiple companies, he must be the busiest man alive now. More importantly, how does he stay productive and establish multiple successful companies in the 100 hours a week? Musk uses the time blocking method. Google Calendar is the best time blocking

At the end of the day, people still procrastinate.

Many times, people procrastinate because they are too focus on the procrastination. They will say something like, “I’m procrastinating too much. I can’t get anything done.” Does this sound familiar? Instead of just acknowledging procrastination, it is better to ask, “What can I do right now?” and do it for 1 minutes. You can do 10 push ups, 10 sit ups, or washing dishes in 1 minutes. This technique helps you to get the ball rolling. As the matter of fact, I just come up with an idea on the fly. I will print out, “What can I do right now?” and stick it to a visible place near my work area.

7. Evaluation

Before going to bed, evaluate your day. Try this method:

1. Summarize things that went well and wrong.
2. Comprehensively critize the things that went wrong and brainstorm on how to improve upon them.
3. Finally, think about how you can do better on things that went well.

Do this for an hour everyday before going to sleep!

P.s. updated on 1/1/2019