Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex

by Aubrey Marcus

As I see it, you have two supplement choices: you can take multivitamins, which traditionally are notoriously hard to absorb, or you can reach for a multinutrient “green food” mix, which will cover a lot of your nutrient bases. A good greens blend is going to be nutrient-dense and should have a good mixture of freeze-dried foods containing small amounts of many vitamins and minerals, as well as enzymes, antioxidants, and other beneficial stuff you’d probably never put in a salad—herbs, fruits, grasses, leaves, and maybe even a flower or two. When at all possible, I always recommend going with a quality greens mix because you can be sure the vitamins are being delivered into your system in a way similar to how they arrive in your normal food.

MAGNESIUM Just like calcium, magnesium supplementation has been shown in clinical research to assist with facilitating healthy bone mass, the performance of athletes, supporting men and women during exercise, even improving blood sugar regulation through diminishing insulin resistance.

KRILL OIL: SUPPLEMENT OMEGA-3

supplement your diet with fish oil or, even better, krill oil. I remember the first time I tried a higher dose of krill oil, somewhere in the 5-gram range. I took it at night, and it felt like the oil’s essential omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA), along with its intrinsic antioxidant astaxanthin and its brain-healthy nutrient phosphatidylcholine, were running through my bloodstream like a fire hose, just blasting out all the inflammation in my body.

SUPPLEMENT VITAMIN D

SUPPLEMENT PROBIOTICS I take a lot of different probiotics for a lot of different reasons, but the one that saved my ass—literally—is a yeast-based strain called Saccharomyces boulardii.

ACTIVE B VITAMINS

Not everyone handles the absorption of B vitamins well, however. A good portion of people, for instance, struggle to uptake the essential B vitamin folate, or folic acid, and supplementation with a methylated version, like 5-methyltetrahydrofolate, can make a huge difference.

I personally take products from several other places besides Onnit, including Sunwarrior, Healthforce Superfoods, NuMedica, and LivOn.

First of all, every ingredient needs to have something called GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status. If it’s not on the GRAS list, it shouldn’t be in the formula. Second, there are strict laws concerning how the food/supplement is produced. This is called good manufacturing practice (GMP). Every supplement needs to be produced in a GMP-compliant facility until it is fully packaged and sealed, preventing contamination.

Finally, every supplement is tested for microbial and metal contamination twice before it is released to the public:

Avoid companies that don’t perform randomized clinical trials on their own products.

Watch out for supplements filled with caffeine.

The key things to consider supplementing are greens, probiotics, B vitamins, krill oil, vitamin D, and additional minerals.

Robert Greene has a useful, simple way of thinking about all time: it’s either alive or dead.

Bringing this time to life is a two-step process. It requires preparing and opening your mind, then flexing and filling it. Or, as I like to call it: mindfulness and mindfillness.

To me, the perfect shot was the one that hit the bull’s-eye. Bam, suck it! But for the Zen masters the result didn’t matter. At least not immediately. The only thing that mattered was my total and complete mindfulness on nocking the arrow, pulling the string, aiming, breathing, and releasing. Eventually this would lead to not just one lucky bull’s-eye, but a lot of purposeful ones. Yet even that wasn’t the point! The point was about life. Instead of rushing from one thing to another, always focused on the past and the future, why not just be here now

The leaves are from the coca plant. They have been used for millennia by the indigenous cultures and shown in clinical research to prevent altitude sickness and boost aerobic energy,

When used the natural way—put in your mouth like chewing tobacco so the many alkaloids can enter your bloodstream through your gums—coca leaves have numerous health benefits and very few side effects.

the king of all the teas is unequivocally matcha.

MoMatchajito Juice of 1/2 lime 3 sprigs mint 1 teaspoon matcha 3 drops liquid stevia 8 ounces sparkling water

Why fat with caffeine? Fat is one of the slowest foods to digest (metabolize) in the human system. When you mix caffeine with fat, the body can only effectively metabolize the caffeine as fast as it can metabolize fat.

In a pinch, full-fat dairy like whole cream will do, but better than that is to whip out a blender and add a serving of grass-fed butter, coconut oil, or cacao butter to make a frothy fatty latte, and get those fat macronutrients into your life! Perhaps the best fat source for your caffeine, though, is MCT oil.

Only fats that are emulsified, like cream, will mix with a simple stir. Otherwise you have to blend them in,

emulsified MCT is hands down the best, simplest way to mix fat with caffeine.

the absence of significant smoke inhalation drops your risk for a lot of the cancers associated with cigarette smoking to virtually nil, especially, in the case of cigars, if you are only smoking one or two per day.

Huperzia serrata is a tool in your arsenal, a screwdriver in your set, and while you don’t need to take it every day, on the days you need to be at your best, on days you want to own, you should have it available.

at least it’s better in the West than in Japan, where 10,000 workers per year drop dead at their desks as a result of sixty-to-seventy-hour workweeks. The phenomenon is so prevalent that it even has a name—karoshi—proving

studies show that the peak income correlated to happiness is $83,000—surely

guys like Gary Vaynerchuk admit that they were willing to “eat shit” for twenty years to be where they are today.

While the meaning of life might be complicated, your mission in life should not be complicated. What are you, in this lifetime, on this planet, in this body, here to do? What do you want more than anything else?

I’m a firm believer that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who need to find purpose and meaning in what they do for a living, and those who find purpose and meaning elsewhere and use work as a means to those ends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

if you do all those things—be useful, honorable, compassionate—happiness tends to be the result.

Knowing your mission will help to turn your work from drudgery to a victory.

research indicates that it is lemon (the same thing you use to disguise fishy taste) that might increase productivity the most.

Suppose that every time you know you are going to (try to) enter a flow state, you have a certain essential oil that you smell. After a while your brain will link that flow state to the scent.

turn off every kind of notification you can. Notifications are the sticker burr in the sock of effectiveness.

There are three things to focus on when it comes to owning your workday: 1. Know your mission. When I get in to work, I know my mission because I have it on a journal I keep in my man purse with me at all times.

2. Own your space.

3. Work effectively. When it is time to grind

It is never pain that is the problem; it is the suffering caused by the resistance to that pain.

The best way to eat carbs, then, is to eat things that already have the fiber in them—things like yams, sweet potatoes, quinoa, sprouted or fermented grains, and some fruits.

there may be a way to keep potatoes on the lunch menu in a useful, prebiotic fashion: potato salad! When you heat and cool potatoes (or rice), you turn some of the digestible starches into resistant starch via a process called retrogradation.

A large twelve-week study found that garlic supplementation reduced the number of colds by 63 percent versus placebo. That is awesome by itself, but even better when you consider the average length of cold symptoms for those who were sick was also reduced, from 5 days to just 1.5 days in the group taking garlic. Another study backed up those results and found that a high dose of garlic extract can reduce the number of days someone feels sick with cold or flu by 61 percent. To get the maximum benefit, load up on garlic in the winter or if anyone in your house is getting the sniffles.

IDEAL SOURCES: Dark chocolate, red wine, green tea, berries, black rice, turmeric and black pepper, garlic, broccoli sprouts

Organ meat (liver, heart, kidneys) sourced from pasture-raised animals is one of the world’s most nutrient-dense superfoods.

Even if it says “0 g trans fats” on the packaging, double-check that the ingredients don’t include anything listed as “partially hydrogenated _____ oil,”

keep your bacon bendy. When you burn it or fry it on high heat, the sodium nitrite that naturally occurs in bacon, as well as the nitrates that are often added for preservation, can turn into a nasty carcinogen called nitrosamines.

part and parcel with not burning your bacon is not charring your meats.