What is so miraculous about the morning? Plenty. If you want to improve your life, your morning is the place to start.

Hal’s secret is that your level of personal development will match your level of success.  He began devoting an hour a day to personal development.  He researched the six most powerful methods of personal development and vowed to do all six each day.

Why Morning?

Mornings get such a bad rap. Everyone seems to want to stay in bed rather than get up and start the day. If this is you, you are giving up the best part of the day. Mornings are the most distraction free time you will get.

If you get up early enough, you are probably the only one in the house who is stirring. No one is asking for breakfast or if you remembered to pay the car payment or where their other sock is. You have the whole house to yourself!

If you go to the gym, it’s almost empty! You don’t have to wait around for the machine you want or get annoyed because some cretin didn’t re-rack their weights. If you drive or take public transit, there is less traffic and less people to crowd and annoy you on the bus or train.

When you get to work, you can get things done without the phone ringing, e-mails coming in, co-workers bugging you. Unless you are staying in bed for sex, there is really no reason to keep laying there hitting the snooze button wasting your miracle morning.

Morning is the best time to get things done because we are at our freshest. We’ve had at least some sleep, even if it was a bad night of sleep, it’s as rested as you are going to feel all day. The day also has a habit of getting away from us.

You don’t work out in the morning and promise to do it after work. But then you remember you have a dentist appointment or agreed to meet a friend for dinner. The day is over and you never worked out. When we don’t do things in the morning, the rest of the day can get away from us and those things just never get done.

In the morning, you don’t have the events of the day weighing you down. Sometimes we do have bad days and we just don’t have the energy or we are just in too bad a mood to care about doing things that will help our personal development.

That is why morning.

The Six Most Powerful Methods of Personal Development

This are the things Hal starts his day with. All it takes is one hour.

Silence

Our world is loud. I lived for a time on 78th Street and Second Avenue. There were a row of bars across the street. Bars close late in New York City, not until 4:00 am. It wasn’t the bar patrons that was the problem, apart from the occasional “Whoooing” bro or drunk chick.

It was when the bars when drag trash bags full of empty glass bottles to the curb. When you managed to fall back to sleep after that, the garbage trucks would pull up and toss them into the back, making another huge sleep destroying clatter. I used to lay in bed almost bawling from anger and frustration.

There is something about certain noises or noise that is interrupting our sleep that triggers some kind of oddly disproportionate anger in us. The World Health Organization declared noise pollution a “modern plague” and there is overwhelming evidence that it is detrimental to physical and mental health.

The antidote to the stress causes by the cacophony of life is to start your day with silence. This could be “formal” silence like meditation or just sitting quietly for a few minutes before turning on the radio or television. Silence reduces blood pressure. Silence can regenerate brain cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain tasked with memory, learning and emotion.