Rituals

Athletes, especially baseball players, have a myriad of rituals.

Hall of Fame third baseman Wade Boggs would take exactly 150 ground balls during practice. Joe DiMaggio would always touch second base before going into the dugout. Others refuse to wash their socks.

From actors to athletes, many highly successful people practice rituals. Obviously, some stem from superstitions, but others are based on cultivating healthy, productive habits that lead to success over time.

That’s the kind I’m interested in.

The Power of Rituals

I urge you to utilize the power of rituals to Replace Retirement and create Daily Alignment. As long as a ritual is a healthy habit, success is immortalized.

In prior blogs, I’ve written about my morning ritual of prayer, exercise, reading, journaling, and handwritten notes of gratitude. These are non-negotiable. And they’re the first thing I do each morning before I shower and begin my business day.

I also bookend my day with an evening ritual. I send out an email reviewing what matters most, what I’m grateful for, and my top 3 priorities for the next day. Then, just before going to sleep, I recite my “Exponential Moonshot” out loud to my wife (when I’m home) or in my head (when I’m traveling alone).

My Exponential Moonshot is an envisioned future with a specific date when I intend to achieve a catalytic inflection point on my thinking and achieve exponential results.

An Intentional Routine

Most people already have a morning routine—get dressed, make breakfast, drive to work, etc. These rituals help in two ways. First, they give us a sense of certainty about how the day will unfold, and second, they minimize unnecessary thinking about trivial things (shaving, brushing teeth, bathing).

Rituals can work for us in regard to creating certainty and efficiency. But they can also work against us if they lead to a lack of intentionality about what matters most and diffuse innovative thinking.

For example, my wife has a morning ritual of turning on the TV as background noise while she typically reads her smartphone news, Facebook posts, and emails. I question if the low-level disruption and unending bombardment of negative news doesn’t have a pessimistic effect on how she sees the world.

My routine is intentionally designed to reinforce what is most important in my life before reacting to the world and its challenges. In contrast, my wife’s ritual is essentially shaking off the cobwebs and warming up her mind to engage in the day’s activities. I empathize in that it helps her reflect on world events and catch up on important relationships. It’s a very common practice, and it works for her.

Practice Self-Mastery

The rituals I perform are more closely tied to the findings of Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. His work, popularized in Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, suggests it takes about 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" to become world-class in any field, including self-mastery.

He’s right. Random activity never advances us to our goals. Only by investing time in daily rituals that require concerted effort and discipline can we achieve specific results.

The bottom line? We all have rituals and we all have the same amount of time in which to complete those rituals. It’s simply a matter of how we structure our lives.

Do your rituals move you closer to Living Your Legacy, or are they moving you away from it?

The decision is yours.