The Perfect Day Begins with a Good Evening

All the morning routines make it easy to overlook that a good morning is impossible without a good evening.

Make Time for leisure

• The opposite of work is not laziness or lounging around, it is leisure.
• We must be indulgent to the mind, and regularly grant it the leisure that serves as its food and strength.

Enjoy a philosophical dinner

• Invite friends over for dinner and have long discussions about philosophy.
• Engage in topics that range from serious to silly, but it’s the activity itself that really matters. Connect with the people you love.

Go for a walk

• Take a stroll after a meal, but before it’s dark. It is a wonderful time to get active.
• We should take wandering outdoor walks, so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing.
• Also, take a moment to look up at the stars to “wash off the mud of life below”.

Review the Day

• Success and happiness require self-awareness and self-reflection. Be unflinching in our assessments.
• Notice what contributed to your happiness and detracted from it. Write down what you’d like to work on or quotes that you like.
• Writing, analyzing, reflecting, interrogating, taking inventory of how you spent the day — this is how you continue improving.
• Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow? These simple questions make an enormous impact.

Count your blessings

• We should wrap up each day as if it were our last. The person who does this, who meditates on their mortality, in the evening, has a super power when they wake up.
• All the trivial concerns and short-term anxieties go away, because for a second, you realize how little they matter.

Go to bed at a set time

• All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have energy and clarity to do them. What time you wake up tomorrow is irrelevant…if you didn’t get enough sleep tonight.

*We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards their sleep carefully. The greats — they protect their sleep because their best work depends on it. The clearer they can think and the better their mental and physical state — the better they perform. In other words, the more sleep the better.

• Sleep is the source of all health and energy.
• If you want to be great at what you do, start going to bed earlier.