The Miracle Morning

The Crash That Started Everything

On December 3, 1999, a twenty-year-old kid named Hal Elrod was driving home from giving the best speech of his life. He had just received his first standing ovation. He was behind the wheel of a brand new white Ford Mustang, doing seventy miles an hour southbound on Highway 99, when a full-size Chevy pickup truck doing roughly eighty crossed the center line and hit him head-on.

What happened next reads like something from a paramedic's nightmare. His skull split open. His left ear nearly came off. His eye socket was crushed. His arm broke so badly that the bone pierced through the skin, and the radial nerve was severed. His pelvis fractured in three places. His femur, the largest bone in the human body, snapped clean in half and tore through his thigh. He went into a coma. His blood pressure dropped, and somewhere in the wreckage they called him dead. For six full minutes he had no heartbeat. The paramedics restarted his heart, kept his body alive, and six days later he woke up to a doctor explaining that he would probably never walk again.

He walked. He went back to selling kitchen knives for Cutco and finished number six in a company of sixty thousand reps. He set the all-time annual sales record. He wrote a book. And then, almost a decade later, he lost everything in the 2008 financial crash, found himself four hundred twenty-five thousand dollars in debt with a fiancée and a baby on the way, and discovered that bankruptcy is worse than a coma. In a coma you have people taking care of you. In bankruptcy you sit alone in the dark.

This is the story of how he climbed out the second time, and the surprisingly simple ritual he built in the process. He called it the Miracle Morning, and over the past decade it has been adopted in more than a hundred countries, translated into thirty-seven languages, and sold more than three million copies. The premise is almost embarrassingly straightforward. Spend the first hour of your day on six specific practices, in a specific order, and watch what happens to the other fifteen.