Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex. Aubrey Marcus

13 More, Better Sex

       14 Turn Off, Tune In

       15 Sleep

       Emergency Sleep Cocktail

       16 Bring It Home

       NOTES: HERE COMES THE SCIENCE!

       LIST OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

       ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

       ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

      Nothing is worth more than this day.

      JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

      Nutrition, mind-set, productivity, performance, fitness, sex, sleep—when we look through a keyhole at these areas of focus, we forget that they are interconnected and interdependent. They are spokes on the wheel of the day, every one of them necessary to ride the twenty-four-hour cycle into a life worth living. Because a day isn’t just about what you put into your body, how you look in the mirror, or how much production you can squeeze from eight hours of work. It’s about how you feel, whose lives you connect with, and how much fun you have along the way.

      We have to transcend the tendency to place all of our effort on one thing at a time, instead of one day at a time. Just look at the flood of transformational programs out there: twelve days to detox, twenty-eight days to skinny, forty days to enlightenment, ninety days to astronaut. What do they give you? A diet that statistically fails 95 percent of all people or some email batching tips that are magically supposed to make you more productive. If you’re lucky you’ll leave with one or two takeaways that you actually implement in your life for a week or two. But real transformation? Unlikely. What is more likely is that everything else falls out of balance while you doggedly pursue your eight-pack abs.

      So we are going to flip the script and recalibrate. We are going to focus on that single indivisible unit. That twenty-four hours. Just one day. You gotta walk before you run, and a day is the first step. To own your life, you gotta own the day. You’re going to read this book, and then prepare to live one single day completely optimally.

      Mark it on your calendar, get your head right, get your food right, and do it. You won’t live every day like this right away. You may never live another day exactly like this again. But owning just one of them will be the catalyst to meaningful, demonstrable change. Maybe it’s your morning routine, maybe it’s how you prepare for sleep, or how you spend your drive to work. Maybe it’s how you work out, or how you eat. Maybe it’s everything! But one of those things is going to click first, and when it does, every day after that will be different. I dare you to read this book and not find things that substantially change how you live, and how you look at life. Maybe that will seem small at first. But small things, when compounded over time, tend to have big consequences. That, after all, is the essence of evolution.

      Tipping Points and the Process

      How many choices in your daily life are essentially toss-ups? Pizza or home cooking? Soda or sparkling water? Netflix or a night out? Should I go to the gym or not? Every day, nearly all of these choices are a fifty-fifty call. You could just as easily land in one place as the other. If you changed one thing you do within the first twenty minutes of waking up (I am going to give you three), however, or you had just a little bit more energy from a high-fat, low-sugar breakfast, maybe you’d choose differently. Maybe it would cease to be a question at all. Of course you’re going to the gym. Then, because you went to the gym, you find yourself less stressed that night. So you have sex. Then you sleep better. Then you wake up more vibrant and with more energy. And you have set in motion a positive cascade of choices. The tipping point was one small change in breakfast. You exchanged your Apple Jacks for an avocado, and all of a sudden your day was different, your week was different, maybe your whole month was different.

      Nick Saban, possibly the greatest coach in the history of college football, tells his players to follow what he calls “the Process.” He tells them that the average down in football lasts about seven seconds. If they want to win an SEC championship, or a national title, they should focus on that smallest unit of measurement. Seven seconds. Don’t get lost in the big picture, he says, and risk taking your eye off the prize. Focus on what’s in front of you, focus on something you can chew and swallow. Focus on the micro, in other words, and the macro takes care of itself.

      That’s the approach we’re going to take: The way to own your life is to own your day. Today. Because that’s all you have.

      The samurai master Miyamoto Musashi told students in his Book of Five Rings, “When you freely beat one man, you beat any man in the world. The spirit of defeating a man is the same for ten million men. The strategist makes small things into big things, like building a great Buddha from a one-foot model. The principle of strategy is having one thing, to know ten thousand things.”

      To live one day well is the same as to live ten thousand days well. To master twenty-four hours is to master your life.

      Everyone Has Room to Improve

      All human beings, every single one of us, have in some way taken a detour off the blueprint of optimal living. We can’t help it, it’s the world we live in. So we have to take measures as strong as the forces opposing us, or else we struggle.

      I know from experience. Before I built Onnit into a movement that touches the lives of millions of people, I was stressed, depressed, and suffering as a consequence. Wild blood sugar swings from poor diet choices were exhausting me. I hurt my body with all sorts of toxic substances. I was sick … a lot. Then one day near my thirtieth birthday I made a commitment to be better. It was so significant that I decided to adopt my middle name as my first name, Aubrey, and to strike out from that moment as a better human being. I didn’t have a perfect plan yet, like the one contained in this book. I wish I did. But I had choices, and I started making them. Good ones. I chose to take responsibility for my life. To own it. I chose to accept that whatever happened was on me. I would not hide behind the cozy blankets of relinquished responsibility any longer. I researched furiously, talked to everyone I could, and experimented tirelessly until I found the tools and practices that could bring me total human optimization. These hard-won understandings formed the nexus of a company with the mission to help bring these tools and techniques to the world.

      This company, Onnit, has been as great a success as I dared to dream. Based in Austin, Texas, we’ve been honored to be of assistance to some of the most impressive people in the world: my partner from the word go, quintuple threat Joe Rogan; drummer Travis Barker; platinum rapper and actor Ludacris; Olympic gold medal downhill skier Bode Miller; three-time NHL Stanley Cup winners Duncan Keith and Jonathan Toews; US women’s soccer team member Lori “Lightning” Lindsey; Allison Holker of Dancing with the Stars; and mixed martial arts champions Cody Garbrandt, Tyron Woodley, and Michelle Waterson, among many others. You’ll meet some of them in the book.

      You know what we find when we sit down with them? They’re not perfect either. They have the same struggles as you and I do. Maybe it’s not getting enough sleep. Maybe their nutrition is off. Maybe they’ve got a bad habit, or they feel foggy all morning. Maybe they have some nagging injury that bothers them through the day. They are almost always dealing with stress, and they too sometimes doubt themselves.

      The first thing we do with them is the first thing I’m going