Free · seven mornings
The First Hour
Seven letters, one each morning. The phone, the water, the light, the coffee. Each one is something to do before eight, not something to think about.
Everything
Eleven things, from free to a hundred thousand. Find the line that describes you and start there.
None of these needs an application, and the first one is free. If seven mornings do nothing for you, nothing further down this page will either, and you will have found that out for nothing.
Seven letters, one each morning. The phone, the water, the light, the coffee. Each one is something to do before eight, not something to think about.
Six years in a basement, the crisis that put me there, and which of it was actually necessary. No exercises in it. One chapter is free.
The first hour, for ninety days, run alone. A bound logbook posted to you and one instruction every morning. No application, nothing read by me.
Six places a person gets stuck. They are numbered because that is the order things usually come apart in — usually, not always, and possibly not yours.
This is not a queue. None is a prerequisite for another, and four of the six can be entered directly with nothing before them. The Maze and Independence are the exception: those two I place people in rather than let them choose.
You wake rested. Your energy stops arriving in spikes and crashes and starts arriving flat, all day, at a level you can plan around.
Something is not working
Or nothing is wrong at all
It makes no difference whether you run a company, a clinic, a classroom or a household. Everything you do is paid for out of one account, and nobody ever taught you how to fill it.
You catch it while it is running instead of a day later. Not always. Enough.
Something is not working
Or nothing is wrong at all
It does not matter what your pattern is about. They all run the same way and they are all caught the same way.
The noise drops. Not because you silenced it, but because you stopped being inside every sentence of it.
Something is not working
Or nothing is wrong at all
A trading floor, a hospital, a studio, a house with three children in it — the noise is different and being inside every sentence of it is identical.
You stop performing in the rooms where you always performed.
Something is not working
Or nothing is wrong at all
This one changes what is around you rather than what is inside you, and it does not care whether that is a boardroom, a marriage or a family table.
The stories you carry about yourself stop being facts and become sentences — with an author, a date and a reason.
Something is not working
Or nothing is wrong at all
Everyone has a story about who they are. Very few people have ever read it.
You stop looking for the next person to explain your life to you. Including me.
Something is not working
Or nothing is wrong at all
This is the only one that is genuinely last. Everything else can be entered wherever you are; this one cannot, because there has to be something built before it can be handed over.
Almost everyone who writes to me chooses one of the first four. Fair enough — those are the ones you can feel.
If you read the Maze and Independence and think you need neither, one of two things is true. Either you do not need me, which is fine and I will say so plainly. Or you are too certain to be worked with, and I will say that too.
That is not a sales line. It is the most useful thing I know about who this works for.
Three ways to own this, and one rule underneath them: whatever you have already paid me comes off whatever you buy next.
The one place you are stuck. You name where you think you are; I decide. Thirty to ninety days, no calls.
All six across 365 days. One box, an instruction every morning, and one live hour with me each month. The same six bought singly come to $19,000.
Nothing printed in advance. It starts where you actually are, is rewritten as you change, and two of the twelve months have no plan at all until we reach them. By application, and I answer every one myself.
Whatever you have already paid me comes off whatever you buy next.
Take one of the six for $3,000, decide you want the whole year, and the year costs you $9,000 rather than $12,000. Do the year alone and then apply for the year with me, and $12,000 comes off the hundred thousand.
You hold one thing at a time. So if you want a second, you do not buy it — you move up to the year, and the first one comes off. That is not a rule to trap you. It is so that starting small never costs you anything, and so that neither of us has to do arithmetic.
You have twelve months from the day you paid to use it. Within that window, nothing you have spent with me is lost when you move up.
| You have paid | The year alone then costs | The year with me then costs |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing | $12,000 | $100,000 |
| Independence, $2,000 | $10,000 | $98,000 |
| Capacity or Choice, $3,000 | $9,000 | $97,000 |
| Clarity or Honesty, $3,500 | $8,500 | $96,500 |
| The Maze, $4,000 | $8,000 | $96,000 |
| The year alone, $12,000 | — | $88,000 |
$100,000 · twelve months · by application
Nothing here is printed in advance. It is written from where you actually are and rewritten as you change, and two of the twelve months have no plan at all until we reach them.
It starts wherever you are, not at month one. It ends at month twelve, and you will not need me. There is no second year.
The six are what I can write down. The Year is what I cannot.
A printed protocol cannot look at you. Everything in the six was decided before I knew your name, and that is honest — the order is right and most of what goes wrong goes wrong for the same reasons in most people. It will take you a long way, and it costs a fraction of the year because it is a fraction of the year: the part that fits on paper.
The rest does not fit. Half of the year cannot be written in advance, because it depends on who you have become by month eight and I do not know that yet. The tests only work if you have not read about them. Two of the months have no plan at all until we reach them. The maze goes wherever it goes, and I will not sell that to someone with nobody on the phone.
So they are not two sizes of one thing. The six are a road, printed. The Year is someone who has walked it, standing next to you, throwing the printed version away every time your ground does not match it.
Write one paragraph saying where you think you are. It costs nothing and I answer myself.