Morning Rituals to be super productive throughout the day.

Could the secret to your success be as simple as setting the alarm clock an hour earlier every day?

In a five-year study of self-made millionaires, it has been found that almost 50 percent of them woke up at least three hours before their workday began. Interested in putting this to the test? Start by setting your alarm for the same time each day and commit to it.

Here is what you should do

1. Do a morning workout routine

Exercise is good for the body, brain and soul. Oprah Winfrey sets aside one hour every morning to exercise. She’ll go for a run or do some resistance flexibility training. Arianna Huffington begins her day with meditation and yoga. And the good news is that your morning routine doesn’t need to be more than an hour. A study from 2018 found that setting aside just 10 minutes for a light workout significantly improve your memory throughout the day.

What it’s like to walk 5 miles to work like CEO Jack Dorsey

2. Recharge your motivation

Devote time in the morning to relaxing, thinking and feeding your soul. Steve Jobs used to begin each day by asking himself, “If today was the last day of my life, would I be happy with what I’m about to do?” Tony Robbins does a 10-minute form of meditation called “priming,” which he defines as “the act of taking time to adjust your thoughts and emotions, so you can live your life in peak state. ” Meditating, reading and enjoying a podcast are all ways to help reinvigorate your motivation.

3. Spend time with loved ones

Start the day by prioritizing the people you love. Richard Branson makes family time a morning commitment. Our relationships affect all aspects of our lives, and making time to cultivate and care for them will impact your success. A 75-year study led by Harvard Medical School found that life success depends more on warm relationships than anything else, including intelligence. The simple act of sharing coffee with a treasured person can make you feel more grounded and supported.

4. Make a plan

Elon Musk is extremely precise in how he plans his day, and schedules his activities in 5-minute blocks. Making a solid plan for your day can help you prioritize and stick to what you need to accomplish. Determining when during the day is the best time to tackle your toughest jobs can help reduce stress and increase performance.

5. Spread positivity and joy

This can be as simple as saying “good morning.” Sending good vibes to others will not only create a positive start to your day, it will also boost your performance. A combined study published in 2011 by Wharton School and Fisher College found that people’s mood in the morning affects productivity throughout the day. Entrepreneur and investor Gary Vaynerchuk’s morning routine includes making a call to his family in the car on his way to work. “I catch up with them and catch up with them,” he wrote in an article for Business Insider. “I really value those small moments,”

Healthy routines are essential to a successful life

Committing to a healthy morning routine is a step toward a more productive and successful life. Routines are a matter of personal choice; successful people have varied morning routines, but they all commit to following them. Choose activities that will energize and inspire you to become a stronger and better person both personally and professionally. Set your alarm a little earlier tomorrow and see what you can accomplish.

Five piece advice for Cannabis Entrepreneurs

Identify and understand the real problems that are occurring and come up with new ideas to fix them.

Ideas that don’t have merit will not succeed in this business. Now that the cannabis industry is receiving tons of attention, everyone is trying to get something on the market. There’s a lot of repetition in ideas and the best ideas are ones that aren’t duplicated and can change the industry itself. The plus side of this industry being so new is that there’s a lot of room to advance it.

Find the funds.

Solve a problem for a few people first to show investors why your idea is worth investing in. Securing funding in this industry is not easy, which is why I suggest finding an idea that not only sets you aside from competitors but can advance the industry altogether.

Don’t just go to any VC.

I highly recommend going to a cannabis-specific VC. Spend time with VC’s that have already invested in the space or understand the industry’s problems. Otherwise, you risk wasting time pitching to groups who have restrictive LP agreements or who generally will be unable to invest in the space until post federal legalization. You may still want to pitch non-cannabis specific VC’s but it is important to qualify them first and make sure they would be able to write a check at the end of the day.

Don’t get involved unless you’re passionate.

One obstacle about the space is that it’s ever-changing. Cannabis is very different than any other industry you’ll ever work in because of all the rules and regulations constantly changing. The market is very divided, federal legality is restricting, and it’s extremely difficult to secure banking and fundraising. Each country has different laws in place regarding cannabis, making it hard to expand your market and hurdles are constantly thrown at you. Passion is the key to success in this game.

Don’t look at it as a capital opportunity.

Having a product or a company that does not have a moral goal in the works will make it hard to succeed.. As someone working in this field, it’s important that you play your part in helping those on the other side of cannabis.

Extra Background:

A little background in cannabis industry or any of the regulated industry is a boon.

Top 3 Reasons why most businesses don’t make it to 7 figures

Seven figures a year: That’s like winning the Olympics, running a triple marathon or finishing first in a race you weren’t sure you’d even complete back when you launched from the starting block.

For your business, seven figures is a massive milestone, one you dream about achieving, but also fear (let’s be honest) is out of reach for you and your business.

After all, only about half of small businesses make it to the five-year mark and only a third make it to 10 years, according to U.S. Small Business Administration data. Evidently, keeping your business afloat for half a decade is a feat all its own — and reaching seven figures? That’s even more challenging.

Still, you can do it. Other entrepreneurs have; you can, too. And that’s all the proof you need. But sometimes the best way to learn how to do something is to learn how not to do it — how and why those who have tried before haven’t succeeded. With that in mind, here are three typical reasons that most startups never reach seven figures, and how you might avoid those same mistakes.

1. They run too few experiments.

Author Eric Ries said it best when he penned these words in The Lean Startup: “The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” The more that you learn about your customers, your market, your competitors, your product — its strengths and weaknesses, your marketing campaigns’ successes and shortcomings, even your internal processes — the better equipped you are to create business-building iterations.

Not all product iterations or marketing changes are equal, after all. Some shifts will contribute to a bigger, healthier business (taking you closer to seven figures per year) by increasing your website conversion rate or lifetime customer value. Other shifts will fall flat, leaving your metrics static, or even worse off. The only way to know which changes you should keep is to consistently employ A/B tests, split tests and surveys, and then to learn from the changes you’ve made. Next move? Keep what works and throw out what doesn’t.

That takes innovation: The CTO of Amazon, Werner Vogals,believes so strongly that his company’s success depends on an innovative spirit that he said, according to BBVA, “If we stop innovating, we’ll be dead in 10 years.” If those words don’t illustrate the importance of testing, innovating and learning in your own business, I don’t know what does.

Related: A/B Testing Is Maybe the Easiest Way to Boost Conversions on Shopify

Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs take that advice lightly — they launch their business and cross their fingers, and that’s it. Businesses that reach seven figures, however, keep learning, iterating and running experiments, which propels them into a more informed, and therefore profitable, future.

2. They don’t focus on little wins with compounding results.

Big wins are great. What business owners wouldn’t enjoy a spontaneous, massive boost in conversion rate, website traffic, product performance or bottom-line profitability? Heck, with seven figures as your objective, it’d be easy to depend on a few large month-to-month boosts in revenue.

But the truth is, most businesses don’t launch today and hit seven figures tomorrow. That takes time. And more often than not, it takes a lot of time. The Atlas reported that Jeff Bezos didn’t turn a profit for Amazon until 2003, nine years after launching the company.

Frederick W. Smith, the founder of FedEx, only made his first profits for the company in 1975, four years after its launch. And Tesla didn’t experience its first profitable quarter until over a decade after it launched, Wired reported.

In other words, if you’re finding that it’s taking time for your business to find its footing, you’re in good company.

The best thing you can do is focus on little wins and the positive payoffs from small product iterations and marketing changes. You could, for example, change the sales copy on your website to increase your conversion rate by 5 percent. And maybe you could also build a more persuasive sales funnel, which could further ncrease your conversion rate by 6 percent.

Imagine, too, that you fix your Facebook ad-targeting to find your ideal market, which could raise your final conversion rate by 3 percent. In the end, you’ll have increased your overall conversion rate by 14 percent, with just a few small, try-and-test sort of changes. When running a six-figure business, that could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue every year. So, don’t undervalue the little wins with the compounding results — those are just the changes that will get your business to seven figures… over time, of course.

3. They don’t remain agile and flexible.

At the core of most startups which succeed in reaching sevenfigures per year is a remarkable ability to learn, adapt and remain flexible … even as the company grows. Adjusting to a changing market is relatively simple when you’re a solopreneur with a few freelancers in tow, but when you’re managing 30 or more employees, three other C-level officers and brand new internal processes, shifting with market changes becomes more laborious.

In fact, it’s often easier to stubbornly believe that the market will adjust to your business given time — that’s a whole lot easier than making big but necessary changes within your growing company.

As The Motley Fool reported, Jim Keyes, the past CEO of Blockbuster, said in 2008, “Neither RedBox nor Netflix is even on the radar screen in terms of competition.” One has to wonder… did he really believe that? Or was he just too unsure of how Blockbuster could possibly change from its then-business model into something else that he stubbornly believed in?

Whatever the case, the truth is the same: Businesses that adjust quickly and remain flexible survive longer than their stony counterparts. So, if you want to reach seven figures per year, you need to keep internal processes as simple as possible. You need to continue to pay attention to your market, even when things are lucrative for your business. And you definitely need to be willing to make changes when the times demand it.