Elf Morning

By Michael Kinnavy

This book is about getting the most out of each day, working on healthy habits, day in and day out, just improving yourself each day without knowing it. It’s like brushing teeth – we do it twice a day; if we didn’t, we’d lose an average of 12 teeth by age 50 or have 37% fewer teeth*(newsmileatlanta-blog). And yet, 2% of Americans (or 7 million) don’t brush their teeth at all!  

Building healthy daily habits is all about starting small, just 17-minute increments, and focusing on those 17 minutes daily. Getting up early is a part of this process since almost everyone is asleep and so you can do your habits without interruption. Getting up at 3 or 4 am seems like an impossible feat, but after a few months of daily work, you can do almost anything, like write a new book, learn a new language, and get into shape. All this just by taking 15-minute blocks of time; it’s that easy to do your daily habits. Over time, you can sharpen your mind and build solid strength with no harsh drugs, no matter your age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BooxAi
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9789655781038

Book preview

Chapter 1

The surprising power of early morning habits; silence of solitude

When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love…

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Frack your morning

Fracking for oil and how it improved the US oil economy, the US oil industry, and compare morning frack to improving one’s lifestyle.

Sparta morning:

Mental toughness is spartanism with qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication. It is fearlessness, and it is love. – Vince Lombardi

Hunter-Gatherer people (healthy active lives)

Take the Tanzanian hunter-gatherer people, while Americans walk half as much in their seventies as they do in their forties, the Hadza’s activity levels go through a much more moderate decline as they age. One result of that is that they stay fit and strong much longer than people living in the industrialized world. In fact, hunter-gatherers also live quite long lives, despite the fact they’re unfamiliar with modern medicine; those who survive infancy typically live to be between sixty-eight and seventy-eight years old. That’s not far off the life expectancy in the US, which is currently somewhere between seventy-six and eighty-one. So, what can we learn from them? The key message is this: we need to stay active as we age. One thing we can learn from older hunter-gatherers is that many so-called diseases of aging aren’t actually inevitable as we grow older. Heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s rarely appear in hunter-gatherers at all. So why is that? In short, it’s down to a phenomenon that scientists call compression of morbidity. Whereas in the industrialized world, many of us are plagued by ill health or morbidity for decades before we die, hunter-gatherers’ physical decline is compressed toward the end of their lives. Their secret? You probably guessed it – sustained activity into old age.

We can see this play out closer to home too – as James Fries, a celebrated medical professor, showed in the Stanford Runners Study. Observing five hundred amateur runners and four hundred inactive but healthy participants, Fries and his team tracked this group of over-fifties year after year.  What they found was that non-runners died at accelerating rates compared to their active counterparts. By the end of the study, members of the inactive group were about three times more likely to pass away each year than the runners were. What’s more, the runners didn’t just live longer: they lived better, too. The researchers kept track of participants’ ability to carry out basic tasks like walking, dressing, and other routine activities – and they found that non-runners lost these capacities at double the rate of the running group.

The bottom line, whether you live in rural Tanzania or downtown Concord, California, is that keeping active as you age can help you live longer, stave off illness, and maintain your physical abilities with early morning consistent exercise habits.

The key is this: We need to stay active as we age.

About life as we age

Wouldn’t it be nice if, when we are born, there is a book or a life manual that shows us how to live and become productive? As if we could have access to a series of advanced learning coaches, videos, and articles, giving us a broad understanding of what we might want to do in life and try to get better at it.

Very few individuals are great at starting something new. Everyone sucks when first trying to build habits, but if you’re consistent, proactive, and keep working on your habits daily, after some time, you could become really great at something. Most people go after the quick fixes like seeing a famous movie star go from being overweight to extremely fit in just 6 months, working out 2 times a day and eating chicken and broccoli. These quick fixes are mostly a fad to get the individual in top shape for the movie they are working in and the use of steroids. These quick fixes don’t last unless they keep using steroids. Believe me, most of the crap on the Hollywood news is just that crap and anyone that has even seen the Kardashians or Real Housewives tv shows, know really, it’s all fake news to keep you watching. No better than the Google algorithms used to keep you watching your iPhone.

This book is to help individuals accomplish goals outside of school or the workplace. It is here to let you know that you do have time to become or do the impossible with a few minor adjustments in your consistent daily schedule. You can master anything with a little time and learning new things and ideas on YouTube, but plan ahead and have hyperlinks in your iPhone notes to bypass the rift raft videos.

A set of rules to control and stay consistent will help you out in so many ways. Track all your habits and understand that every day will be a challenge for you to keep up with your daily habits. Like a child prodigy trying to get into the Olympics, there is no reason why you as an adult can’t do the same thing.

I found that the important thing to do is to track your time using timers each day, working out how long each morning task takes for you to complete. I had to stop using Facebook and focus on what I needed to get done. I wasted so many hours just reading articles or viewing videos that I found interesting and will never recover the time I lost, around 2–4 hours daily.

Timers & Discipline

With timers and a little discipline, you can go a long way with health and focus. I added a 30-minute increment for communication (I need to communicate better) and 30 minutes for reading so that I could do what all the greats do every day, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. They did this after their success, so it doesn’t show how they became rich and famous. I have three cool timers that are easy to set and use. A lot of the time, I will not use them and will lose a lot of time in the morning by viewing stupid things on my iPhone, like Facebook, Google, Quora, and so on. Those companies always know what you want to view. If you include videos… well, dang, there goes half your life on what? Not much. Yes, you’ll be the champion of some video game, but what then? Go after another video game and do the same crap?

Military early morning experience

I signed up for the Navy right after I graduated from high school. At the end of June, my flight from the Midwest to sunny San Diego’s US Navy boot camp was about to begin. My first experience of San Diego was when I visited in the summer before I started my sophomore year in high school, and I loved it. It didn’t rain like it did in the Midwest; the beaches were amazing, and there were so many things to do in San Diego, like Sea World, Wild Animal Park, tennis, and visiting Lake Tahoe. My mother would visit from Michigan and would wake both me and my brother (who went to UCSD at the time) at 6 am wanting to do something, like playing tennis or going to the park or beach, as it was so sunny and warm. Although my brother and I were used to Southern California weather, my mother never did.

My first real experience with discipline was getting off the flight, and our US Navy boot camp master chief officer (Vietnam vet patrolling gunboats on rivers – and he had some very scary stories about Vietnam) was in charge of us and had us all line up in front of the airport, standing at attention. We felt kinda silly as civilians (99% at the airport at that time) were looking at us as some kind of Hare Krishnas.

This was new to me but it was cool to be with a bunch of